--- /dev/null
+Title: Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner
+Tags: english, debian edu, intervju
+Date: 2012-03-15 11:30
+
+<p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
+
+Jürgen Leibner
+
+<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
+
+<p>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 next month on I
+will manage the department of technical documentation at a
+manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.</p>
+
+<p>My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
+it at company and at home repeatedly but not exclusive as I do now at
+home since 2006.</p>
+
+<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
+project?</strong></p>
+
+<p>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".</p>
+
+<p>Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
+running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
+gift and installed a 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 and without
+extra costs like licence and software costs. 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.</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
+for me as today.</p>
+
+<p>In the past there were advantages like:</p>
+
+<ul>
+ - I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school
+ as they had less money to spent for computers and software.
+ - It has a licence which grands all rights to use it in free.
+ - 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.
+</ul>
+
+<p>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
+came up in this way:</p>
+
+<ul>
+ - Most schools here do have money to buy hard- 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.
+</ul>
+</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p><ul>
+
+<li>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.</li>
+
+<li>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projekts not
+enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
+politicians.</li>
+
+<li>Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.</li>
+
+</ul></p>
+
+<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
+computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. On applications I use
+on my laptop and my desktop 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.</p>
+
+<p>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
+and mutt over ssh on 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. Maybe I forgot something.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
+get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
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