blog/archive/2012/04/04.rss

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   4                 <title>Petter Reinholdtsen - Entries from April 2012</title>
   5                 <description>Entries from April 2012</description>
   6                 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
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   8
   9         <item>
  10                 <title>Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer</title>
  11                 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html</link>
  12                 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html</guid>
  13                 <pubDate>Sun, 1 Apr 2012 23:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
  14                 <description>&lt;p&gt;Germany is a core area for the
  15 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu and Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;
  16 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
  17 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
  18
  19 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who are you, and how do you spend your days?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
  20
  21 &lt;p&gt;I&#39;ve studied Mathematics at the university &#39;Ruhr-Universität&#39; in
  22 Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I&#39;m working as a teacher at the school
  23 &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/&quot;&gt;Westfalen-Kolleg
  24 Dortmund&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, a second chance school.  Here, young adults is given
  25 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
  26 examination &#39;Abitur&#39;, which will allow to study at a university. This
  27 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
  28 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.&lt;/p&gt;
  29
  30 &lt;p&gt;Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
  31 blended learning project called &#39;abitur-online.nrw&#39; and in some other
  32 information technology related projects. For about ten years I&#39;ve been
  33 teacher and coordinator for the &#39;abitur-online&#39; project at my
  34 school. Being now in my early sixties, I&#39;ve decided to leave school at
  35 the end of April this year.&lt;/p&gt;
  36
  37 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
  38 project?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
  39
  40 &lt;p&gt;The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
  41 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
  42 Project).  At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
  43 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
  44 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
  45 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
  46 reach. At home I&#39;m using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
  47 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
  48 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
  49 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
  50 Skolelinux.&lt;/p&gt;
  51
  52 &lt;p&gt;Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
  53 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
  54 clients.  The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
  55 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
  56 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
  57 the admin teachers.&lt;/p&gt;
  58
  59 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  60 Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
  61
  62 &lt;p&gt;It&#39;s open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it&#39;s
  63 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
  64 So it was a perfect choice.&lt;/p&gt;
  65
  66 &lt;p&gt;Being open source, there are no license problems and so it&#39;s
  67 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
  68 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp.  It&#39;s of
  69 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
  70 a school and to choose where to get support for this.&lt;/p&gt;
  71
  72 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  73 Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
  74
  75 &lt;p&gt;Nothing yet.&lt;/p&gt;
  76
  77 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which free software do you use daily?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
  78
  79 &lt;p&gt;At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
  80 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
  81 Annotator).  At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
  82 LibreOffice.&lt;/p&gt;
  83
  84 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
  85 get schools to use free software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
  86
  87 &lt;p&gt;Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
  88 that doesn&#39;t seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
  89 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.&lt;/p&gt;
  90 </description>
  91         </item>
  92
  93         <item>
  94                 <title>Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News</title>
  95                 <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html</link>
  96                 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html</guid>
  97                 <pubDate>Thu, 5 Apr 2012 08:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
  98                 <description>&lt;p&gt;About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
  99 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu and Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; by
 100 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News.  The result was made public for
 101 non-subscribers today.  I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
 102 for schools.  Check out his article
 103 &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/488805/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
 104 distribution for education&lt;/a&gt; if you want to learn more.&lt;/p&gt;
 105 </description>
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