I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
-another interview with the people behind
-Debian Edu and Skolelinux.
-This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo RodrÃguez, one of our great
-helpers from Spain. His effort was the reason we added support for
-several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
-Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
-Debian Edu
-Squeeze version.
After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
+Debian Edu and Skolelinux
+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?
-
I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
-ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
-ICT in schools
+
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?
-
At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
-project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
-similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
-I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.
+
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?
-
A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
-really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
-concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
-been used everyday inside Debian Edu.
+
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?
-
Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
-economical and technical resources in the different countries don't
-allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
-approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
-lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
-technologies in school.
+
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?
-
Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
-between Iceweasel, Geany and
-Terminator.
+
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...
+
+
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?
-
I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
-different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
-environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
-laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.
-
-
Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
-not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
-universities. So different strategies are needed.
-
-
But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
-we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
-our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
-multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
-more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
-using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in
-the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
-them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
-working there.
+
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.