blog/draft/2012-03-skolelinux-john-ingleby.txt

   1 Title: Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby
   2 Tags: english, debian edu, intervju
   3 Date: 2012-03-15 11:30
   4
   5 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu anb
   6 Skolelinux</a>
   7
   8 John Ingleby
   9
  10 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
  11
  12 <p>I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
  13 Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
  14 author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
  15 contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
  16 encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
  17 years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
  18 weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
  19 installations.</p>
  20
  21 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
  22 project?</strong></p>
  23
  24 <p>Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
  25 London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
  26 just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
  27 along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
  28 mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
  29 well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
  30 have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
  31 LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
  32 these things we decided to try it.</p>
  33
  34 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  35 Edu?</strong></p>
  36
  37 <p>By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
  38 from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
  39 goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
  40 would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
  41 low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
  42 that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
  43 Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
  44 proprietary software everywhere.</p>
  45
  46 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  47 Edu?</strong></p>
  48
  49 <p>As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
  50 how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
  51 various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
  52 English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
  53 users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!</p>
  54
  55 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
  56
  57 <p>Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
  58 OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
  59 desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
  60 use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
  61 that counts...)</p>
  62
  63 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
  64 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
  65
  66 <p>That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
  67 and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
  68 the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
  69 applications".  However, schools today are experiencing budget
  70 constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
  71 XP.  At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
  72 iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
  73 longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
  74 realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
  75 putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
  76 first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.</p>
  77
  78 <p>I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
  79 free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
  80 Edu users in this country has to be part of it.</p>