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'm a 25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
-which is also my country of origin. Back in 2009, at a New Year's Eve
-party, I had a very nice beer discussion with a
-friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
-country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
-community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
-began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
-constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
-field.
-
-
A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
-provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
-activities. For the last 13 months, I have been the Technical Director
-of FundaÈia Ceata, which is a free
-software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
-the only one we have in our country.
+
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?
-
The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
-even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
-it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
-educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
-love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
-technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
-ways to contribute.
-
-
My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
-configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
-haven't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
-areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
-software in my country is pretty low, I'll be happy to be the first
-one around here advocating for the project's adoption in educational
-environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
-for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
-from now on, time will tell what I'll be doing next, but I think I
-have a pretty consistent starting point.
-
-
What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
+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?
-Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
-maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
-took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
-Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
-time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
-with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
-out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
-it comes to managing a school's network, for example.
-
-Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
-availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
-scenarios is something I can't wait to experiment "into the wild" (I
-only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
-lot more I haven't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
-project.
+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?
-As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
-disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
-project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
-a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story. I'd like to see
-Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
-ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
-lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
-opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project's dynamics. Not
-to mention it's a very fun blend to work on!
-
-Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
-with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
-to all blends and derivatives, but it's an issue we can all work
-on.
-
-Which free software do you use daily?
-
-I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
-daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
-am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
-Enlightenment project a lot!),
-Claws Mail due to its ease of
-use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
-Redshift, which helps me
-get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
-stuff in this bag, but I'll need a blog on my own for doing this!
-
-Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
-get schools to use free software?
-
-Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
-now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
-that:
+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:
-- schools would like to get rid of proprietary software
+ - 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 ;)
+
+
-students will love the openness of the system, and will want to
- experiment with it - maybe we need to harvest the native curiosity
- of teenagers more?
+I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!
-there is no "right one" when it comes to strategies, but it would
- be useful to have some success stories published somewhere, so
- other can get some inspiration from them (I know I'd promote
- them!)
+Which free software do you use daily?
-more active promotion - talks, conferences, even small school
- lectures can do magical things if they encounter at least one
- person interested. Who knows who that person might be? ;-)
+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 ;).
-
+Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
+get schools to use free software?
-I also see some problems in getting Skolelinux into schools; for
-example, in our country we have a great deal of corruption issues, so
-it might be hard(er) to fight against proprietary solutions. Also,
-people who relied on commercial software for all their lives, would be
-very hard to convert against their will.
+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.
+
+