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 Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
-and we have three lovely children, aged 15, 14 and 4(!) I am the IT
-Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
-teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
-Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
-I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
-primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
-so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
-also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
-to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
-appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.
+
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?
-
In around 2004 or 5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
-server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
-samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
-Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn't really improve my setup. I
-did various desperate searches for things like "school Linux server"
-and ended up in a document called "Drift" something or other. Reading
-there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
-problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
-previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
-Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
-downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
-Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
-my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.
+
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?
-
For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
-workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
-ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
-designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
-doesn't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
-school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
-Japan.
+
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?
-
The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
-have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
-make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
-who don't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
-important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
-instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
-default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
-kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
-Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is. A
-second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
-customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
-multiplies. For example, backup wasn't working properly in Lenny. It
-took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
-I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
-help.
+
+
+- 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?
-
Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
-studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
-(customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
-still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
-house, that's very useful for the family photos and music. At school
-the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
-have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
-day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
-installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS. We also
-have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
-and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.
+
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?
-
Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
-and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
-popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
-to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
-file formats and Word than they did 5 years ago. The Edu aspect is
-also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
-Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu? But of course the main attraction is
-budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
-compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
-is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
-are not impressed when their USB drive doesn't work, or their browser
-doesn't play flash, for example.
+
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.