blog/archive/2014/07/07.rss

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   4                 <title>Petter Reinholdtsen - Entries from July 2014</title>
   5                 <description>Entries from July 2014</description>
   6                 <link>http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/</link>
   7
   8
   9         <item>
  10                 <title>Debian Edu interview: Bernd Zeitzen</title>
  11                 <link>http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html</link>
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  13                 <pubDate>Thu, 31 Jul 2014 08:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
  14                 <description>&lt;p&gt;The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for
  15 schools, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu /
  16 Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
  17 involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
  18 from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
  19 the setup.  I managed to interview him this summer.&lt;/p&gt;
  20
  21 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who are you, and how do you spend your days?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
  22
  23 &lt;p&gt;My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I&#39;m married with Hedda, a self
  24 employed physiotherapist.  My former profession is tool maker, but I
  25 haven&#39;t worked for 30 years in this job.  30 years ago I started to
  26 support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
  27 administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
  28 Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
  29 Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
  30 works with Windows . :-(&lt;/p&gt;
  31
  32 &lt;p&gt;In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
  33 Windows 98, 2000, XP, …, 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX.  Today we are running a
  34 Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of
  35 children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
  36 psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
  37 work with the documentations of our patients.&lt;/p&gt;
  38
  39 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
  40 project?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
  41
  42 &lt;p&gt;Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
  43 his school (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gymnasium-harsewinkel.de/&quot;&gt;Gymnasium
  44 Harsewinkel&lt;/a&gt;).  They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
  45 were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
  46 software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
  47 computer skills in optional lessons.  I&#39;m spending 4-6 hours a week
  48 with this job.&lt;/p&gt;
  49
  50 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
  51 Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
  52
  53 &lt;p&gt;The independence.&lt;/p&gt;
  54
  55 &lt;p&gt;First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
  56 software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
  57 included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.&lt;/p&gt;
  58
  59 &lt;p&gt;Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
  60 possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices.  The
  61 servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
  62 working reliable. &lt;/p&gt;
  63
  64 &lt;p&gt;We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45
  65 workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
  66 solution for all classrooms.  These machines are all booting from the
  67 terminal server.  In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile
  68 workstations.  Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
  69 machines in their classrooms.  Internet access is realized by a WLAN
  70 router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
  71 dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.&lt;/p&gt;
  72
  73 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
  74 Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
  75
  76 &lt;p&gt;Teachers and pupils are Windows users.  &amp;lt;Irony on&amp;gt; And Linux
  77 isn&#39;t cool. It&#39;s software for freaks using the command line. &amp;lt;Irony
  78 off&amp;gt; They don&#39;t realize the stability of the system. &lt;/p&gt;
  79
  80 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which free software do you use daily?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
  81
  82 &lt;p&gt;Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Samba,
  83 Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, … and Skolelinux / Debian Edu)&lt;/p&gt;
  84
  85 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
  86 get schools to use free software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
  87
  88 &lt;p&gt;In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
  89 which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
  90 teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
  91 Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
  92 Office. They don&#39;t know about the possibility to use Free Software
  93 instead.  Another problem are the publisher of school books.  They
  94 develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.&lt;/p&gt;
  95 </description>
  96         </item>
  97
  98         <item>
  99                 <title>98.6 percent done with the Norwegian draft translation of Free Culture</title>
 100                 <link>http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/98_6_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html</link>
 101                 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/98_6_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html</guid>
 102                 <pubDate>Wed, 23 Jul 2014 22:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
 103                 <description>&lt;p&gt;This summer I finally had time to continue working on the Norwegian
 104 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.docbook.org/&quot;&gt;docbook&lt;/a&gt; version of the 2004 book
 105 &lt;a href=&quot;http://free-culture.cc/&quot;&gt;Free Culture&lt;/a&gt; by Lawrence Lessig,
 106 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with todays copyright
 107 law.  Yesterday, I finally completed translated the book text.  There
 108 are still some foot/end notes left to translate, the colophon page
 109 need to be rewritten, and a few words and phrases still need to be
 110 translated, but the Norwegian text is ready for the first proof
 111 reading. :) More spell checking is needed, and several illustrations
 112 need to be cleaned up.  The work stopped up because I had to give
 113 priority to other projects the last year, and the progress graph of
 114 the translation show this very well:&lt;/p&gt;
 115
 116 &lt;p&gt;&lt;img width=&quot;80%&quot; align=&quot;center&quot; src=&quot;https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
 117
 118 &lt;p&gt;If you want to read the result, check out the
 119 &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig&quot;&gt;github&lt;/a&gt;
 120 project pages and the
 121 &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true&quot;&gt;PDF&lt;/a&gt;,
 122 &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true&quot;&gt;EPUB&lt;/a&gt;
 123 and HTML version available in the
 124 &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive&quot;&gt;archive
 125 directory&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
 126
 127 &lt;p&gt;Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
 128 you find any.&lt;/p&gt;
 129 </description>
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