The complete and free âout of the boxâ software solution for
+schools, Debian Edu /
+Skolelinux, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
+involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
+from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
+the setup. I managed to interview him this summer.
Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
-
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.
+
My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I'm married with Hedda, a self
+employed physiotherapist. My former profession is tool maker, but I
+haven't worked for 30 years in this job. 30 years ago I started to
+support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
+administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
+Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
+Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
+works with Windows . :-(
+
+
In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
+Windows 98, 2000, XP, â¦, 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX. Today we are running a
+Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of
+children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
+psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
+work with the documentations of our patients.
How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project?
-
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 ;)!
+
Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
+his school (Gymnasium
+Harsewinkel). They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
+were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
+software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
+computer skills in optional lessons. I'm spending 4-6 hours a week
+with this job.
What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?
-
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).
+
The independence.
-
What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
-Edu?
+
First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
+software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
+included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.
-
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:
+
Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
+possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices. The
+servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
+working reliable.
-
+We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45
+workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
+solution for all classrooms. These machines are all booting from the
+terminal server. In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile
+workstations. Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
+machines in their classrooms. Internet access is realized by a WLAN
+router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
+dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.
- - 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 ;)
-
-
+
What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?
-
I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!
+
Teachers and pupils are Windows users. <Irony on> And Linux
+isn't cool. It's software for freaks using the command line. <Irony
+off> They don't realize the stability of the system.
Which free software do you use daily?
-
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 ;).
+
Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Samba,
+Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, ⦠and Skolelinux / Debian Edu)
Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?
-
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.
-
-
+
In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
+which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
+teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
+Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
+Office. They don't know about the possibility to use Free Software
+instead. Another problem are the publisher of school books. They
+develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.
