- <li>FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
- You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it </li>
-
- <li>Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
- (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
- (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
- (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
- (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
- (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
- sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
- (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
- </li>
-
- <li>Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
- semi-automatic or manual allocation</li>
-
- <li>Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
- GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports </li>
-
- <li>Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
- with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)</li>
-
- <li>Import/export from CSV format</li>
-
- <li>The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
- formats </li>
-
- <li>Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
- and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
- non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
- (as separate sets)</li>
-
- <li>Each constraint has a weight percentage, from 0.0% to 100.0%
- (but some special constraints are allowed to have only 100% weight
- percentage)</li>
-
- <li>Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
- demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
- memory):
- <ul>
- <li>Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day: 60</li>
- <li>Maximum number of working days per week: 35</li>
- <li>Maximum total number of teachers: 6000</li>
- <li>Maximum total number of sets of students: 30000</li>
- <li>Maximum total number of subjects: 6000</li>
- <li>Virtually unlimited number of activity tags</li>
- <li>Maximum number of activities: 30000</li>
- <li>Maximum number of rooms: 6000</li>
- <li>Maximum number of buildings: 6000</li>
- <li>Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
- students sets for each activity. (it is possible
- also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
- activity)</li>
- <li>Virtually unlimited number of time constraints</li>
- <li>Virtually unlimited number of space constraints</li>
- </ul></li>
-
- <li>A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
- <ul>
- <li>Break periods</li>
- <li>For teacher(s):
- <ul>
- <li>Not available periods</li>
- <li>Max/min days per week</li>
- <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
- <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
- <li>Min hours daily</li>
- <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
-
- <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
- days per week</li>
- </ul></li>
- <li>For students (sets):
- <ul>
- <li>Not available periods</li>
- <li>Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)</li>
- <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
- <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
- <li>Min hours daily</li>
- <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
-
- <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
- days per week</li>
- </ul></li>
- <li>For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
- <ul>
- <li>A single preferred starting time</li>
- <li>A set of preferred starting times</li>
- <li>A set of preferred time slots</li>
- <li>Min/max days between them</li>
- <li>End(s) students day</li>
- <li>Same starting time/day/hour</li>
- <li>Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
- flexible constraint, useful in many situations)</li>
- <li>Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for 2 or 3 (sub)activities)</li>
- <li>Not overlapping</li>
- <li>Max simultaneous in selected time slots</li>
- <li>Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities</li>
- </ul></li>
- </ul></li>
-
- <li>A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
- <ul>
- <li>Room not available periods</li>
- <li>For teacher(s):
- <ul>
- <li>Home room(s)</li>
- <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
- <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
- </ul>
- </li>
-
- <li>For students (sets):
- <ul>
- <li>Home room(s)</li>
- <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
- <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
- </ul>
- </li>
- <li>Preferred room(s):
- <ul>
- <li>For a subject</li>
- <li>For an activity tag</li>
- <li>For a subject and an activity tag</li>
- <li>Individually for a (sub)activity</li>
- </ul>
- </li>
-
- <li>For a set of activities:
- <ul>
- <li>Occupy a maximum number of different rooms</li>
- </ul>
- </li>
- </ul>
- </li>
-</ul></p>
-
-<p>I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
-planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it. If you
-need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
-manually, check it out.
-
-A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
-<a href="http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/2012/03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/">a
-blog post from MarvelSoft</a>. If you find FET useful, please provide
-a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
-<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos">Debian Edu HowTo
-section</a>.</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
- <item>
- <title>Why do schools waste money on IT?</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Sun, 8 Jul 2012 09:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
- <description><p>In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
-of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
-in schools and municipalities. We provide what the happy users of
-Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
-alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution. I
-was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
-Steinberg in his blog post
-"<a href="http://www.mysociety.org/2012/06/19/can-you-recognize-the-million-pound-chair/">Can
-you recognize the million pound chair?</a>". Read it and weep for the
-spending of your tax money.</p>
-
-<p>Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
-projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
-causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
-to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
-public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
-purchases.</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
- <item>
- <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>
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