- <title>Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Sun, 27 May 2012 17:15:00 +0200</pubDate>
- <description><p>In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the
-<a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
-mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
-up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils. His name was Ralf
-Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
-since then, helping to make sure the
-<a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
-Squeeze</a> release became as good as it is..</p>
-
-<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
-Mathematics, and Computer Science ("Informatik"). During the past 12
-years (since 2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
-also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
-O- or A-level ("Abitur"). For quite as long, I've been taking care of
-our computer network.</p>
-
-<p>Now, in my early 40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
-spare time together with my wife, our son (3 years) and our daughter
-(4 months).</p>
-
-<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
-project?</strong></p>
-
-<p>We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
-my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
-very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
-("Best Newcomer Distribution", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
-to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt, 2005 (IIRC). Few
-months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
-(Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others. For more
-than 7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
-our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
-approximately 50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
-locally installed Skolelinux image. As a consequence, I joined quite
-a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
-(Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
-one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
-project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
-the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
-computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
-free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
-up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
-labs). Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
-administration costs tend towards zero.</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>While Debian's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
-might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
-budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
-supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
-office packages or desktop environments. These schools have the
-option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
-capacity to do so. Another issue is that Debian release cycles
-include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
-power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
-within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
-the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
-i.e. harder to understand for novices.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
-
-<p>LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
-KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
-PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
-get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
-
-<p><ol>
-
-<li>Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
-people really "own" their hardware, to make them understand the
-difference between proprietary software products, and free software
-developing.</li>
-
-<li>Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany's public schools
-there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
-licenses), so schools won't benefit from any savings here. This
-privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
-share among German Skolelinux schools.</li>
-
-<li>Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
-trained. In many cases, teachers' software customs are respected by
-decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.</li>
-
-<li>Don't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
-free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
-general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
-shared world wide (school books e.g.).</li>
+ <title>Debian Edu - some ideas for the future versions</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___some_ideas_for_the_future_versions.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___some_ideas_for_the_future_versions.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Mon, 11 Jun 2012 14:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>During my work on
+<a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.nb.html">Debian Edu
+based on Squeeze</a>, I came across some issues that should be
+addressed in the Wheezy release. I finally found time to wrap up my
+notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
+explanation.</p>
+
+<p><ul>
+
+<li>We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
+changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
+with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
+system depend on tasksel tasks in
+/usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
+installation.</li>
+
+<li>Enable Kerberos login for more services. Now with the Kerberos
+foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
+services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions. We should
+at least try to enable it for these services:
+<ul>
+
+ <li>CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
+ quotas.</li>
+ <li>Nagios for admins checking the system status.</li>
+ <li>GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.</li>
+ <li>LDAP for admins updating LDAP.</li>
+ <li>Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.</li>
+ <li>ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.</li>
+
+</ul></li>
+
+<li>When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
+authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
+use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
+is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind</li>
+
+<li>Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install. The split made
+sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
+inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.</li>
+
+<li>Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
+touching the disk if the disk is too small. This is
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/653305">BTS report #653305</a> and the
+d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
+it and upload. After this is done we need to adjust
+debian-edu-install to use this new hook.</li>
+
+<li>Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
+time config). LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
+packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
+in Wheezy.
+
+<li>Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
+the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
+up KDE login on slow networks.</li>
+
+<li>Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
+change on first login. This is useful when handing out password on
+paper, to make sure only the user know the password. This require
+fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.</li>
+
+<li>Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
+The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
+familiar with GUIs. This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
+have it available where the admin will be looking for it..</li>
+
+<li>We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
+actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses). None of the
+Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.</li>
+
+<li>We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
+using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
+packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.</li>
+
+<li>We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
+when changing password using the Kerberos protocol. The hook was
+requested in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/588968">BTS report
+#588968</a> and is now available in Wheezy. We might need to write a
+MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.</li>
+
+<li>We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
+<ul>
+
+<li>reduce the number of chemistry visualisers</li>
+<li>consider dropping xpaint</li>
+<li>and probably more?</li>
+</ul></li>
+
+<li>Some hardware need external firmware to work properly. This is
+mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
+examples too. For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
+firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
+some GUI to do this. Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
+could consider using their packages. At the moment we have some
+command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
+for the LTSP chroot).</li>
+
+
+<li>In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options. We
+should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
+install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
+use.</li>
+
+<li>The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
+interesting educational packages. We should work on the package
+tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
+packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
+new applications with a simple mouse click.</li>
+
+<li>The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
+with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
+be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
+filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled. We should
+implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
+instead of the "it is documented" method of today.</li>
+
+<li>A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
+"take over" the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
+There are at least three implementations,
+<a href="italc.sourceforge.net/">italc</a>,
+<a href="http://www.itais.net/help/en/">controlaula</a> og
+<a href="http://www.epoptes.org/">epoptes</a> and we should pick one of
+them and make it trivial to set it up in a school. The challenges is
+how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
+and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
+given room.</li>
+
+<li>Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
+should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
+the Debian Edu network. Not quite sure how. Perhaps we should
+provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
+them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
+configuration and data with the central server. This should be
+investigated.</li>
+
+</ul></p>
+
+<p>I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
+version.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Litt statistikk fra Offentlig Elektronisk postjournal</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Litt_statistikk_fra_Offentlig_Elektronisk_postjournal.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Litt_statistikk_fra_Offentlig_Elektronisk_postjournal.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sun, 10 Jun 2012 20:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>De siste månedene har jeg sammen med andre i NUUG jobbet med å
+gjøre det enklere å få innsyn i offentlige dokumenter, og dette
+inkluderer å gjøre postjournaler enklere tilgjengelig for maskinell
+analyse og søk. I den forbindelse tok jeg i dag å tittet litt på
+<a href="http://www.oep.no/">Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal
+(OEP)</a>, FAD/DIFIs fellesløsning for departementer og statlige
+etater.</p>
+
+<p>Her er antall oppføringer pr. måned det siste året,
+<a href="https://api.scraperwiki.com/api/1.0/datastore/sqlite?format=htmltable&name=postliste-oep&query=select%20strftime(%22%25Y-%25m%22%2C%20%60recordpublishdate%60)%20as%20oeppubmonth%2C%20count(*)%20from%20%60swdata%60%20group%20by%20oeppubmonth%20order%20by%20oeppubmonth">summert
+opp</a> ved hjelp av
+<a href="https://scraperwiki.com/scrapers/postliste-oep/">en
+Scraperwiki-database</a>. Merk at denne Scraperwikien har
+ytelsesproblemer pga. mengden data. </p>
+
+<p><table border="1">
+<tr><th>Måned</th><th>Antall</th></tr>
+<tr><td>2011-07</td><td>164355</td></tr>
+<tr><td>2011-08</td><td>153662</td></tr>
+<tr><td>2011-09</td><td>173134</td></tr>
+<tr><td>2011-10</td><td>170665</td></tr>
+<tr><td>2011-11</td><td>198409</td></tr>
+<tr><td>2011-12</td><td>175908</td></tr>
+<tr><td>2012-01</td><td>206875</td></tr>
+<tr><td>2012-02</td><td>202862</td></tr>
+<tr><td>2012-03</td><td>204225</td></tr>
+<tr><td>2012-04</td><td>207931</td></tr>
+<tr><td>2012-05</td><td>223754</td></tr>
+</table></p>