- <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel</a></div>
- <div class="date"> 2nd June 2012</div>
- <div class="body"><p>Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
-<a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
-mailing list. He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
-thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
-<a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
-Squeeze</a> version.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
-
-<p>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
-Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
-(Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
-by Angela).</p>
-
-<p>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
-and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
-touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
-the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
-becoming an osteopath.</p>
-
-<p>Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
-have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
-introducing free software into schools. The project's name is
-"IT-Zukunft Schule" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
-skills with communication skills.</p>
-
-<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
-project?</strong></p>
-
-<p>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
-"IT-Zukunft Schule" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
-reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
-people said. From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
-distributions that target being used for school networks.</p>
-
-<p>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
-commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
-Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
-went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
-and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
-Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
-got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
-attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
-the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.</p>
-
-<p>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
-people. People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
-protection experts, other IT professionals.</p>
-
-<p>We came to two conclusions:</p>
-
-<p>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
-bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
-by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
-whereas most of each school's requirements could mapped by a standard
-IT solution. The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
-customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
-possible. In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
-standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
-degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
-locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
-point.</p>
-
-<p>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
-all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
-for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
-has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
-of people into using IT and teaching with IT. "IT-Zukunft Schule"
-tries to provide an approach for this.</p>
-
-<p>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
-defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
-Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school's IT
-equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
-teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
-spare time.</p>
-
-<p>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
-networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
-here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
-teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
-non-existent until 2010/2011.</p>
-
-<p>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
-class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
-avoidance do exist.</p>
-
-<p>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
-social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
-for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
-several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
-they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
-at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
-and probably a gain for all.</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
-any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
-the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
-workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
-project communication, honest communication within the group of
-developers, etc.</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>Every coin has two sides:</p>
-
-<p>Technically: <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/311188">BTS issue
-#311188</a>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
-client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
-should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
-about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
-several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
-contribute).</p>
-
-<p>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
-find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
-Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
-promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
-there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
-these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
-all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
-meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
-there being rather disconnected from the development department of
-Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
-
-<p>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.</p>
-
-<p>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
-serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
-more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.</p>
-
-<p>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
-development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
-PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
-is being integrated in Ubuntu's software center.</p>
-
-<p>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
-as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
-I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
-the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
-whiteboard.</p>
-
-<p>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
-get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
-
-<p>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
-enrol people.</p>
+ <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a></div>
+ <div class="date">21st December 2012</div>
+ <div class="body"><p>It has been a while since I wrote about
+<a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
+peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
+have been busy elsewhere. But two days ago, I started looking at the
+state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
+Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet. The package
+is now maintained by a
+<a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
+people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team. We
+owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
+But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
+Wheezy. It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
+backports). The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
+it from entering testing. To try to help the team and improve the
+situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
+reports. I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
+Corallo in a
+<a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
+Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
+Debian package.</p>
+
+<p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
+IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
+improve the package. It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
+me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
+package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
+setup. As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
+<a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
+patch to backport</a> the latest version. Jonas is going to look at
+it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
+new version to unstable.
+
+<p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
+centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system. I
+find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
+transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
+that the major credit card companies can block legal money
+transactions to Wikileaks. But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
+need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
+they sell products and services. Improving the bitcoin support in
+Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
+Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
+pay with bitcoin is still not very good. The bitcoin: URI is a step
+in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
+use. Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
+quick transaction. I believe there are other clients available, but
+have not tested them.</p>
+
+<p>My
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
+with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
+I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
+years ago, as can be
+<a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
+on the blockexplorer service</a>. Thank you everyone for your
+donation. The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
+bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
+number of users have gone up since then. If you use bitcoin and want
+to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
+the same address as last time,
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
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