blog/draft/2012-07-skolelinux-giorgio-pioda.txt

   1 Title: Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda
   2 Tags: english, debian edu, intervju
   3 Date: 2012-06-25 11:30
   4
   5 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
   6
   7
   8
   9 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
  10
  11 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
  12 project?</strong></p>
  13
  14 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  15 Edu?</strong></p>
  16
  17
  18 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  19 Edu?</strong></p>
  20
  21 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
  22
  23 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
  24 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
  25
  26  Giorgio Pioda <gfwp@ticino.com> (May 27) (for_me inbox intervju skolelinux year-2012)
  27  Subject: Re: Are you willing to be interviewed for my blog?
  28  To: Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>
  29  Date: Sun, 27 May 2012 08:53:38 +0200
  30
  31  Hi Petter,
  32
  33  of course, see below...
  34
  35  On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 09:55:47PM +0200, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
  36  > Hi, Giorgio.
  37  >
  38  > I am running a serie of  interviews about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.
  39  > Would you be willing to answer these questions and have the answers
  40  > published on my blog?
  41  >
  42  >  * Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
  43
  44  I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
  45  in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of
  46  "light" university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage
  47  an LMS server and slowly I got more and more involved with IT. 3 years
  48  ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I got the
  49  head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry labs
  50  computers (for exemple NMR analisys of protein folding)
  51  and in the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self training
  52  is anyway very important
  53
  54  >  * How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu project?
  55
  56  Looking for Linux/PDC I foud it already several years ago. But since
  57  the system was still not Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly
  58  on laptops I didn't use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future,
  59  probably for the next school year, since the squeeze release solved this
  60  security hole.
  61
  62  >  * What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu?
  63
  64  Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
  65  very generous for help and hints. Chat help is crucial, together with
  66  the mailing list. Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
  67  engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
  68  and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I can
  69  tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard platform,
  70  it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the head
  71  IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much hassle.
  72
  73  >  * What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu?
  74
  75  The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less flexible
  76  at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but there are many
  77  reasons that force for another choice. For exemple the need of new drivers
  78  for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some devices that have
  79  specific software packages for another specific distro (I have such a a case
  80  for Whiteboards that have only Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared
  81  compatibility packages educlient and eduroaming, hoping not to
  82  use them ;-)
  83
  84  >  * Which free software do you use daily?
  85
  86  I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos,NIS,NFS) with mixed Debian and
  87  Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad combination is exotic... well
  88  I discovered right yesterday that Perceus (http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html)
  89  has the same...
  90
  91  For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good only
  92  I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if something breaks.
  93
  94  >  * Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools
  95  >    to use free software?
  96
  97  I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
  98  cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability, just because
  99  they are tendencially not open to change.
 100
 101  Students adapts very quickly
 102  to GNU/Linux (and for them being able to switch between
 103  different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers don't.
 104
 105  We decided
 106  to move to Linux because students at our school have own laptop
 107  and we have the responsability
 108  to keep the laptop ready to use; we were really unsatisfied with M$ since
 109  every monday we had 20 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux
 110  this has been reduced to zero, since people installs almost only
 111  from official repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to
 112  Linux. Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.
 113
 114  >  * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
 115
 116  Some other school IT managers, collecting a database of success cases,
 117  so that also schools managers at higher level would get an enhanced
 118  sensibility towards GNU/Linux in the schools.
 119
 120  >
 121
 122  Fell free to correct my mistakes...
 123
 124  Cheers
 125
 126  Giorgio
 127
 128  [ 4-line signature. Click/Enter to show. ]
 129  --
 130  Giorgio Pioda - Sysadmin SPSE-Tenero
 131  Cell +41 79 629 20 63
 132  Uff. +41 91 735 62 48
 133
 134 Giorgio Pioda <gfwp@ticino.com> (May 27) (flagged for_me inbox intervju skolelinux year-2012)
 135 Subject: [gfwp@ticino.com: Re: Are you willing to be interviewed for my blog?]
 136 To: pere@hungry.com
 137 Date: Sun, 27 May 2012 13:25:51 +0200
 138
 139 Hi,
 140
 141 you can also add that I use daily texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit
 142 of R statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OOffice.
 143
 144 I live in the italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the SPSE
 145 school (secondary) is a very special sport school for
 146 jung people who try to became sport pro (for all sports,
 147 we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
 148 recognized by the Olympic Swiss Organization. (www.spse.ch)
 149