+
The Debian Edu /
+Skolelinux 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
+Debian Edu
+Wheezy setup to his liking. He granted me an interview, and I am
+happy to share his answers with you here.
+
+
Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
+
+
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.
+
+
How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
+project?
+
+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.
+
+
What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
+Edu?
+
+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.
+
+
What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
+Edu?
+
+
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.
+
+
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.
+
+
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.
+
+
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.
+
+
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.
+
+
Which free software do you use daily?
+
+
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 ;)
+)
+
+
Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
+get schools to use free software?
+
+
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.
+
+
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 Radio station
+management with Airtime,
+Airtime which
+claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
+Rivendell which claim to
+be complete radio broadcast automation solution. All of them seem
+useful to the aspiring radio producer.
+
+
