+
+
8th April 2012
+
It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
+like Debian Edu / Skolelinux,
+and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
+contributor to the
+Debian
+Edu Squeeze release manual.
+
+
Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
+
+
I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
+occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.
+
+
How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
+project?
+
+
I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user! The only
+reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
+around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
+they'd like a native English speaker to proofread... So I did a sweep
+through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
+"localisation".
+
+
What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
+Edu?
+
+
What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
+Edu?
+
+
These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it! In fact I
+had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the
+education system.
+
+
I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
+as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
+everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
+money on the latest hardware.
+
+
Which free software do you use daily?
+
+
I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
+software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
+words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).
+
+
Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
+get schools to use free software?
+
+
Well, I don't know. I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning
+with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
+you would hardly need a strategy.
+
+
+
+
+
6th April 2012
+
Recently I have spent time with
+Skolelinux Drift AS on speeding
+up a Debian Edu / Skolelinux
+Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
+process I discovered something very surprising. The reason the KDE
+menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
+due to the way KDE find application icons. I discovered that showing
+the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
+passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server. Most of these were
+
+NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response. Because the
+ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
+ms, the menus would be very slow. Looking at the strace of kicker in
+Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
+the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
+non-existing files. KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
+one icon file. In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
+around 230 access(2) calls.
+
+
The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
+directories, and the list of possible directories is large. In
+(almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
+and .xpm. The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
+mounted. Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
+requests. I am not the first one to discover this. I found a
+KDE bug report
+from 2009 about this problem, and it is still unsolved.
+
+
My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
+kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
+used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
+for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
+icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/. Finally, I add symlinks to
+these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
+for them. This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
+one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
+almost instantaneous. I'm not quite sure where to make the package
+publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.
+
+
The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
+and icon handling, but also the login process. Not quite sure how to
+speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
+that is not really an option at the moment.
+
+
If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
+(at) lists.debian.org.
+
+
+
+
+
1st April 2012
+
Germany is a core area for the
+Debian Edu and Skolelinux
+user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
+Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
+
+
Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
+
+
I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
+Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
+"Westfalen-Kolleg
+Dortmund", a second chance school. Here, young adults is given
+the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
+examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This
+second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
+or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.
+
+
Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
+blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other
+information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been
+teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my
+school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at
+the end of April this year.
+
+
How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
+project?
+
+
The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
+attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
+Project). At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
+using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
+2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
+clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
+reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
+Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
+two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
+known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
+Skolelinux.
+
+
Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
+better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
+clients. The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
+was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
+and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
+the admin teachers.
+
+
What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
+Edu?
+
+
It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
+Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
+So it was a perfect choice.
+
+
Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's
+possible to point teachers and students to programs like
+OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp. It's of
+high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
+a school and to choose where to get support for this.
+
+
What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
+Edu?
+
+
Nothing yet.
+
+
Which free software do you use daily?
+
+
At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
+Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
+Annotator). At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
+LibreOffice.
+
+
Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
+get schools to use free software?
+
+
Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
+that doesn't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
+interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.
+
+
+
30th March 2012
@@ -26,15 +260,14 @@
FiksGataMi. Med 56 kommuner
som lenker til FiksGataMi fra sine hjemmesider er "markedsandelen"
oppe i 13% (av 429 kommuner). Sist ut er Sel kommune, som slår følge
-med kommunene Askim, Askøy, Audnedal, Aure, Bærum kommune, Eide,
-Farsund, Flekkefjord, Folldal kommune, Gran, Grue, Hadsel, Halden,
-Halsa, Hamar, Hobøl, Holtålen, Hægebostad, Høyanger, Kongsberg,
-Kristiansund kommune, Kvinesdal, Kviteseid, Levanger, Lindesnes,
-Luster, Lyngdal, Lørenskog, Løten, Mandal, Marnardal, Moss, Namsos
-kommune, Nissedal, Nordreisa, Randaberg, Rindal, Sirdal, Skiptvet,
-Sortland, Spydeberg, Stjørdal, Stord, Søgne, Sør-Odal, Tolga, Trysil,
-Tynset, Tysvær, Ullensvang Herad, Vennesla, Verdal, Vågan, Vågå og
-Ã
seral.
+med kommunene Askim, Askøy, Audnedal, Aure, Bærum, Eide, Farsund,
+Flekkefjord, Folldal, Gran, Grue, Hadsel, Halden, Halsa, Hamar, Hobøl,
+Holtålen, Hægebostad, Høyanger, Kongsberg, Kristiansund, Kvinesdal,
+Kviteseid, Levanger, Lindesnes, Luster, Lyngdal, Lørenskog, Løten,
+Mandal, Marnardal, Moss, Namsos, Nissedal, Nordreisa, Randaberg,
+Rindal, Sirdal, Skiptvet, Sortland, Spydeberg, Stjørdal, Stord, Søgne,
+Sør-Odal, Tolga, Trysil, Tynset, Tysvær, Ullensvang Herad, Vennesla,
+Verdal, VÃ¥gan, VÃ¥gÃ¥ og Ã
seral.
I snitt rapporteres det nå 150 meldinger fra innbyggerne i uka via
FiksGataMi.
@@ -423,272 +656,6 @@ Trond Mæhlum for innspill om skoler med Linux.
-
-
19th March 2012
-
Debian Edu / Skolelinux
-users are spread all across the globe. The second inteview after
-the
-Squeeze release was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
-long time Linux user in United Kingdom.
-
-
Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
-
-
I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
-Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
-author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
-contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
-encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
-years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
-weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
-installations.
-
-
How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
-project?
-
-
Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
-London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
-just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
-along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
-mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
-well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
-have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
-LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
-these things we decided to try it.
-
-
What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?
-
-
By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
-from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
-goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
-would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
-low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
-that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
-Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
-proprietary software everywhere.
-
-
What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?
-
-
As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
-how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
-various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
-English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
-users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!
-
-
Which free software do you use daily?
-
-
Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
-OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
-desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
-use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
-that counts...)
-
-
Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
-get schools to use free software?
-
-
That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
-and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
-the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
-applications". However, schools today are experiencing budget
-constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
-XP. At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
-iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
-longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
-realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
-putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
-first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.
-
-
I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
-free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu users in this country has to be part of it.
-
-
-
-
-
16th March 2012
-
Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
-it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
-translated versions in sync. To do this we have come up with what we
-believe is a very efficient work flow.
-
-
-
-- The documentation is written in a
-moinmoin wiki (see for example
-the
-Squeeze release manual) with support for exporting the content as
-docbook XML.
-
-- This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
-.pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
-with the translated text.
-
-- The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
-which part of the original wiki document is new or changed. They can
-use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
-the translation. There is even a system in place to handle translated
-images.
-
-- The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
-XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.
-
-- The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
-create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.
-
-
-
-
This setup work very well, but have a few issues. The biggest
-issue is that the docbook support
-we use in moinmoin is not actively maintained. The docbook
-support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
-make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.
-
-
If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
-debian-edu-doc
-package.
-
-
-
-
-
12th March 2012
-
Første ut i serien med intervjuer av folk i
-Skolelinux-miljøet etter at
-ny
-versjon av Skolelinux ble lansert i helga, er nylig valgte
-styremedlem i foreningen
-Fri programvare i
-Skolen (FRiSK) som organiserer
-Skolelinux-utviklingen og daglig leder i
-Skolelinux Drift AS, selskapet
-prosjektet opprettet som et tilbud til skoler som ønsket en
-kommersiell samarbeidsparter. Det bør nevnes at jeg er styremedlem i
-Skolelinux Drift AS og styreleder i selskapets hovedeier stiftelsen
-SLX Debian Labs
-som beskytter verdiene til Skolelinux-prosjektet, og kjenner KÃ¥re den
-veien.
-
-
Hvem er du, og hva driver du med til daglig?
-
-
Jeg har siden januar 2010 vært daglig leder i Skolelinux Drift AS,
-som leverer support, installasjon, tilpasning, drift, og opplæring på
-Debian Edu / Skolelinux. Fra 2012 er jeg valgt inn som styremedlem i
-FRiSK. Min forrige jobb var som KAM i Redpill Linpro (som er en av
-eierne i Skolelinux Drift). Før det var jeg daglig leder i et eget 7
-manns konsulent selskap som også startet med fri programvare mot
-slutten.
-
-
Hvordan kom du i kontakt med Skolelinux-prosjektet?
-
-
Jeg hørte om det først når jeg jobbet i Redpill Linpro. Men jeg
-har også en datter som går på en friskole, som også bruker Skolelinux.
-Som kjent har ikke friskoler de samme økonomiske rammebetingelsene som
-offentlige skoler, så for dem var det det absolutt beste alternativet.
-De anser også Skolelinux som et stabilt system, som bare går og går (i
-motsetning til det lille Windows-baserte nettverket de har på
-admin-siden).
-
-
Hva er fordelene med Skolelinux slik du ser det?
-
-
Sentralisert drift av tynne og diskløse arbeidsstasjoner. Således
-lydløse og raskere arbeidsstasjoner som er bedre i klasserommet.
-Lengre levetid på PC'er. Store besparelser på maskinvare og drift. Og
-så klart fjerning av alle lisenskostnader. Personlig synes jeg også at
-mange av programmene er bedre enn alternativene. Men dette er ofte en
-smakssak og avhengig om man må ha det man er vant til fra før.
-
-
Hva er ulempene med Skolelinux slik du ser det?
-
-
For lite kjentskap til løsningen. Noen ganger for dårlig
-kompatibilitet med arbeidsstasjoners/bærbare maskiner sine
-nettverksdrivere eller skjermkort. Men dette løser vi i skolene ved
-standardisering. Ellers er det få, om nesten ingen, av de kjente
-maskinvare / infrastruktur leverandørene til fylkes- / kommuner som
-tilbyr denne plattformen. Skal dette endre seg så må kommunene selv
-sette slike krav til leverandørene.
-
-
Hvilken fri programvare bruker du til daglig?
-
-
Har brukt OpenOffice.org siden starten (2001 ?), Kun Linux på
-desktop siden 2005. Bruker i dag Kubuntu, Libreoffice og ymse annet
-programvare til ulik kontorbruk som er lett å installere / teste via
-alle programarkivene som finnes.
-
-
Hvilken strategi tror du er den rette å bruke for å få
-skoler til å ta i bruk fri programvare?
-
-
Fortsette å presentere flere av de gode eksemplene hvor Debian Edu
-/ Skolelinux brukes i kommuner og enkeltskoler. Vi må få bedre frem
-at det er mulig tilknytte både Windows og Mac klienter på denne
-plattformen (selv om det vil øke driftskostnadene). Dette gjøres
-mange steder. Spesielt er det mange lærere som ønsker å bruke
-Windows/Mac-bærbare, gjerne som sin private PC også. Det er også mulig
-for kommunen å integrere med Active Directory i stedet for OpenLDAP
-som kommer med ut av boksen (selv om også dette øker kostnadene).
-Dette vil muligens bidra til å fjerne noe motstand hos noen
-potensielle brukere / driftpersonell for å ta i bruk noe
-nytt. Fremveksten av mobile brukere og nettbrett går i vår favør.
-Brukerne blir kjent og vant til flere nye operativsystemer /
-brukergrensesnitt. Så utviklerfellesskapet bør jobbe videre med å
-integrere flere nye klienttyper, som ultra lav-kostklienter og
-nettbrett (blant annet fri programvare-alternativet
-Spark med
-Mer OS og
-KDE Active Plasma).
-
-
-
