The Debian Edu / Skolelinux
+project consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
+was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
+up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
+successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School. Say hello
+to Dominik
+George.
+
+
Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
-
I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
-professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
-mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
-probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.
-
-
I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
-and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
-packaging, publicity and translation.
+
I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
+life with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a
+student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
+Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
+voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
+a bit vacant right now however.
+
+
I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
+(public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
+around 2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
+it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
+network of that school together with a team of very interested and
+talented students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to
+learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
+to help building another school's informational education concept from
+scratch.
+
+
That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids
+and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
+ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.
+
+
When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
+and cycling.
How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project?
-
I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
-the
-Debian Edu manual for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
-then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
-manual.
-
-
I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
-virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
-shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
-how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.
-
-
What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
-ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
-by GOsa². What pleased
-me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
-there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages,
-to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
-artistic skills with music (Ardour,
-Audacity) and
-movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
-Stopmotion).
-
-
I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
-#debian-edu.
-Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this
-beautiful project.
-
+
I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
+FrOSCon and visited the project
+booth. I think I wasn't too interested back then because I used to
+have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
+own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
+"out-of-the-box" solution ;).
+
+
The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
+OpenRheinRuhr 2011 when the
+BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
+really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
+ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
+a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
+guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
+small demonstration, but there wasn't any real feedback and the guys
+seemed rather uninterested.
+
+
After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
+mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
+reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
+basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!
+
What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?
-
For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
-community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
-fact that it provides a solution ready to use.
-
-
I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
-distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
-of educational free software.
-
+
The most important advantage seems to be that it "just
+works". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
+in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
+without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
+from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't
+have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
+and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
+server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
+notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
+and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
+it. I could use 8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
+tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that's enough to say
+that it rocks!
+
+
Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no
+politician will ever permit a setup described as "Debian, an universal
+operating system, with some really cool educational tools" while they
+will be jsut fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
+school network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
+this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
+too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).
+
What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?
-
Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
-project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
-not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
-solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
-is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.
-
-
One can find support from a company by looking at
-the
-wiki dokumentation, where some countries already have a number of
-companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
-Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
-for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
-consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
-support for Debian Edu as well.
-
-
Which free software do you use daily?
-
-
I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
-most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
-scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice. I am
-also using the mathematical software
-Scilab and
-Sage (built from
-source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).
-
-
Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
-using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
-statistics?
-
-
I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our
-university, we use both R and
-Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
-geometry, there are nice programs:
+
I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
+answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
+other words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I
+can list a few points about that:
-- drgeo and
-kig to do
-constructions in planar geometry
-
-
- kali
-to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze
-groups), although the interface looks a bit old.
+ - always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
+
- be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
+
- be helpful at being helpful ;)
-
I like also
-cantor, which
-provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage,
-Octave, etc...
-
-
Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
-get schools to use free software?
-
-
My suggestions would be to
-
-
+I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!
-- advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.
-
-- communicate about the quality of free software projects, using
- well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and
- OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.
+Which free software do you use daily?
-- advertise the living and strong community around the project.
+First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
+all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
+year.
+
+I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
+run text tools. I use
+mksh as shell,
+jupp as very advanced
+text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
+based full-featured student management software with the two),
+mcabber for XMPP and
+irssi for IRC. For that overly
+coloured world called the WWW, I use
+Iceweasel
+(Firefox). Oh, and mutt for
+e-mail.
+
+However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
+are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
+least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
+kids. One of these things is Jappix,
+which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
+Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
+Facebook now ;).
-- show that it is not more difficult to use than any other
- system.
+Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
+get schools to use free software?
-
+
Well, that's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
+side is what I have experienced.
+
+
I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
+that won't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
+grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
+to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
+see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
+students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
+desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
+they jsut refused to use it because "Linux sucks". It is something
+that makes the council of our city spend around 600000 ⬠to buy
+software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
+networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
+not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
+already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
+if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
+that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
+plain criminal.
+
+
That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
+method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
+founded an association named
+Teckids here in Germany that does
+just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
+area of free and open source software, for example the
+FrogLabs, which share staff with
+Teckids and are the youth programme of
+the Free and Open Source Software
+Conference (FrOSCon). We do a lot more than most other conferences
+- this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
+aged 10 to 16. It was a huge success, with approx. 30 kids taking part
+and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
+of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.
+
+
Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
+the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
+their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
+Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
+clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
+it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
+who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
+We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
+open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
+software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
+group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
+Skolelinux in the future ;)!
+
+
So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren't for the world
+being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
+that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
+but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.
+
+
