+Title: Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda
+Tags: english, debian edu, intervju
+Date: 2012-06-25 11:30
+
+<p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
+
+
+
+<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
+
+<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
+project?</strong></p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
+
+<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
+get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
+
+ Giorgio Pioda <gfwp@ticino.com> (May 27) (for_me inbox intervju skolelinux year-2012)
+ Subject: Re: Are you willing to be interviewed for my blog?
+ To: Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>
+ Date: Sun, 27 May 2012 08:53:38 +0200
+
+ Hi Petter,
+
+ of course, see below...
+
+ On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 09:55:47PM +0200, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
+ > Hi, Giorgio.
+ >
+ > I am running a serie of interviews about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.
+ > Would you be willing to answer these questions and have the answers
+ > published on my blog?
+ >
+ > * 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
+ an LMS 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 exemple NMR analisys of protein folding)
+ and in the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self training
+ is anyway very important
+
+ > * How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu project?
+
+ Looking for Linux/PDC I foud 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 exemple 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 distro (I have such a 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 (http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html)
+ 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.
+
+ > * 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 tendencially 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 responsability
+ to keep the laptop ready to use; we were really unsatisfied with M$ 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.
+
+ > * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
+
+ Some other school IT managers, collecting a database of success cases,
+ so that also schools managers at higher level would get an enhanced
+ sensibility towards GNU/Linux in the schools.
+
+ >
+
+ Fell free to correct my mistakes...
+
+ Cheers
+
+ Giorgio
+
+ [ 4-line signature. Click/Enter to show. ]
+ --
+ Giorgio Pioda - Sysadmin SPSE-Tenero
+ Cell +41 79 629 20 63
+ Uff. +41 91 735 62 48
+
+Giorgio Pioda <gfwp@ticino.com> (May 27) (flagged for_me inbox intervju skolelinux year-2012)
+Subject: [gfwp@ticino.com: Re: Are you willing to be interviewed for my blog?]
+To: pere@hungry.com
+Date: Sun, 27 May 2012 13:25:51 +0200
+
+Hi,
+
+you can also add that I use daily texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit
+of R statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OOffice.
+
+I live in the italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the SPSE
+school (secondary) is a very special sport school for
+jung people who try to became sport pro (for all sports,
+we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
+recognized by the Olympic Swiss Organization. (www.spse.ch)
+
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