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 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?
-
-
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?
-
-
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?
-
-
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?
-
-
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 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.
-
