- <title>Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Mon, 9 Jul 2012 00:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
- <description><p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
-Skolelinux</a> project have users all over the globe, but until
-recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
-country Sweden. This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
-this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
-to adjust and scale the just released
-<a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
-Wheezy</a> setup to his liking. He granted me an interview, and I am
-happy to share his answers with you here.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
-the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
-background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
-"folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups. In
-Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
-in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
-just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
-perspective when working with IT.</p>
-
-<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
-project?</strong></p>
-
-I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
-now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
-time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
-a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
-K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
-seriously into Skolelinux instead.
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
-distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
-integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
-administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
-based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
-well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
-when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
-showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
-mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
-same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
-setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
-workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
-thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
-convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
-projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
-small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
-have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
-clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time. Our
-old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
-nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
-comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
-such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
-quicker to update.
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
-we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
-year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
-sound from working with them. It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
-to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
-a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.</p>
-
-<p>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
-install time. In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
-distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
-That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
-Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
-to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
-support for single-sign on. That will make the transition to free
-software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
-need. No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
-some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
-run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes. We run a journalist
-education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
-by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association). Our
-education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
-are done. This is important if you want to get a job.</p>
-
-<p>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
-magazines. We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
-market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
-world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
-to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
-are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
-edit and compile a newspaper. But politically at our school we are not
-there yet. And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.</p>
-
-<p>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
-the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
-Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
-Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
-tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
-program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
-studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
-want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise. Those
-things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
-have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
-fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
-one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
-because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
-sound file.</p>
-
-<p>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
-will try. The problem is the students have certain expectations when
-they start an education towards a profession. So the programs has to
-look and feel professional. Good thing with radio, there are many
-programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
-as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
-program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
-learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
-the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
-
-<p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days. I use almost
-only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
-to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
-)</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
-get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
-
-<p>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
-source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
-it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
-flawlessly. The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
-will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
-students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
-clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
-idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
-the administration. It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
-open source, if the principal has to run Windows. It also creates a
-problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
-will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
-support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
-desktop is essential. At least at our school, where we have mixed
-level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
-
-<p>Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
-useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
-article <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/481607/">Radio station
-management with Airtime</a>,
-<a href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/">Airtime</a> which
-claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
-<a href="http://www.rivendellaudio.org/">Rivendell</a> which claim to
-be complete radio broadcast automation solution. All of them seem
-useful to the aspiring radio producer.</p>
+ <title>Skolelinux noe for Ballangen? (Leserinnlegg til avisen Fremover)</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux_noe_for_Ballangen___Leserinnlegg_til_avisen_Fremover_.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux_noe_for_Ballangen___Leserinnlegg_til_avisen_Fremover_.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sun, 14 Oct 2012 20:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Tirsdag 2012-10-09 sendte jeg følgende leserinnlegg til avisen
+<a href="http://www.fremover.no/">Fremover</a>, etter å ha vært nordpå
+noen dager og lest noen gamle aviser. Publiserer den her i sin helhet
+for fremtidig referanse. Fremover publiserer dessverre ikke
+leserinnlegg på nett.</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>To: redaksjon (at) fremover.no
+<br>Subject: Leserinnlegg til Fremover: Skolelinux noe for Ballangen?</p>
+
+<p>Ærede redaktør</p>
+
+<p>I sommer (2012-07-23) hadde Fremover et oppslag om at Narvik
+kommune hadde spart mellom 10 og 20 millioner kroner de siste årene på
+å bruke Skolelinux på sine skoler. Harstad har også tatt i bruk
+Skolelinux på alle sine skoler. Som tidligere Ballangsværing gledet
+det meg stort å se at skoleløsningen vi har utviklet siden 2001 tas i
+bruk i området der jeg vokste opp, og dermed bidrar til en bedre og
+billigere skolehverdag.</p>
+
+<p>Skolelinux er en komplett IT-løsning for elevnettverket på en
+skole, med både nettverkstjenester og løsning for elevmaskiner med
+pedagogisk programvare, som tillater en å øke levetiden på en
+datamaskin i skolen med mange år. En undersøkelse publisert i mars
+2012 viste at de 56 norske skolene som har offentliggjort at de bruker
+Skolelinux eller annen Linuxutgave hadde 36% større PC-tetthet enn
+landsgjennomsnittet, når en ser på tall rapportert til Grunnskolens
+Informasjonssystem. I følge Paul Reidar Løsnesløkken, IKT-konsulent i
+Nord-Odal, fungerer datamaskiner godt til de er 8 til 10 år gamle.</p>
+
+<p>I høst (2012-09-29) fortalte Fremover hvordan Ballangen kommune har
+opparbeidet seg 20 millioner i underskudd og nok havner på Robek-lista
+fra nyttår. Kanskje Ballangen også burde ta i bruk Skolelinux for å
+spare penger? Hvis kommunen mangler kompetanse lokalt på Linux finnes
+det kommersielle selskaper som tilbyr driftstjenester rundt
+Skolelinux, og jeg bør vel avsløre at jeg selv er involvert i et av
+dem, Skolelinux Drift AS. Kommunen kan dermed få hjelp hvis de ikke
+ønsker å bygge opp egen kompetanse.</p>
+
+<p>Vennlig hilsen
+<br>Petter Reinholdtsen
+<br>Fri programvareutvikler</p>
+
+<p>Referanser:</p>
+
+<ul>
+
+<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Linux_skoler_har_h_yere_PC_tetthet_enn_landsgjennomsnittet___pressemelding_fra_FRiSK.html">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Linux_skoler_har_h_yere_PC_tetthet_enn_landsgjennomsnittet___pressemelding_fra_FRiSK.html</a></li>
+<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gladoppslag_om_Skolelinux_i_avisen_Fremover.html">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gladoppslag_om_Skolelinux_i_avisen_Fremover.html</a></li>
+
+</ul>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Innlegget ble så vidt jeg vet trykket i papirutgaven et par dager
+senere, men jeg har ikke sett det selv.</p>