After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
Debian Edu and Skolelinux
-mailing list. He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
-thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
-Debian Edu
-Squeeze version.
+community, I finally found time to wrap up another. This time it is
+Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
+this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
+administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
+conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.
Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
-
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 FuÃ) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
-by Angela).
-
-
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.
-
-
Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela FuÃ, 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.
+
I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
+in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
+university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
+Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
+IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
+got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
+labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
+the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
+training is anyway very important
+
+
I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
+SPSE school (secondary) is a very
+special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
+all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
+recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
-
We came to two conclusions:
-
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
-
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.
+
Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
+already several years ago. But since the system was still not
+Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
+use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
+next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
+hole.
What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?
-
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.
+
Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
+very generous for help and hints. Chat help is crucial, together with
+the mailing list. Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
+engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
+and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
+can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
+platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
+head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
+hassle.
What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?
-
Every coin has two sides:
-
-
Technically: BTS issue
-#311188, 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).
-
-
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.
+
The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
+flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
+there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
+need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
+devices that have specific software packages for another specific
+distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
+Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
+and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)
Which free software do you use daily?
-
For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.
-
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
-
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.
+
I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
+mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
+combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
+Perceus
+has the same...
-
My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.
+
For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
+only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
+something breaks. Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
+statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.
Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?
-
Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
-enrol people.
+
I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
+cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
+just because they are normally not open to change.
+
+
Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
+to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
+don't.
+
+
We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
+laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
+we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
+machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
+reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
+repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
+Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.
+
+