It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
-publish another interview with the people behind
-Debian Edu and Skolelinux.
-This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
-years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
-details get right before release.
-
-
Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
-
-
My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
-Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany. I worked nearly 20 years as
-certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
-international company for machinery and equipment. Since 2011 I'm a
-certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
-documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer. From April this year
-I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
-manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.
-
-
My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
-it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
-home since 2006.
-
-
How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
-project?
-
-
Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
-daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
-middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
-him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
-asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
-computers in use. I answered: "Yes".
-
-
Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
-running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
-gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
-network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
-and with a lot of fun. About one year later the school was connected
-to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
-building. That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
-Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
-being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
-costs for things like licence and software. So I searched for a
-school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
-people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
-prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school. I
-managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
-the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
-Bielefeld in December of 2006.
-
-
What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?
-
-
When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
-for me as today.
-
-
In the past there were advantages like:
-
-
-
-- I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
-they had little money to spent for computers and software.
-
-- It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
-cost.
-
-- It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
-schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
-clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
-infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
-server
-
-- I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
-school.
-
-
-
-
Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
-came up in this way:
-
-
-
-- Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
-now.
-
-- They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
-have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
-because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.
-
-- With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
-management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
-interfaces used in the past.
-
-- It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
-different needs.
-
-- The documentation is usable and gets better every day.
-
-- More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
-world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
-is sharing knowledge and minds.
-
-- Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
-solved today by Debian Edu.
-
-
-
-
What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?
-
-
-
-- There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
-their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
-whole municipality areas.
-
-- Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
-enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
-politicians.
-
-- Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.
-
-
-
-
Which free software do you use daily?
-
-
I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
-computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
-use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
-KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
-need from the KDE environment. On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
-screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.
-
-
My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
-and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
-rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
-with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
-and the whole family. I probably forgot something.
-
-
Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
-get schools to use free software?
-
-
I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
-Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
-countries and areas all over the world.
-
