blog/draft/2012-06-skolelinux-george-bredberg.txt

   1 Title: Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg
   2 Tags: english, debian edu, intervju
   3 Date: 2012-06-08 11:30
   4
   5 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
   6
   7  >  * Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
   8
   9 Im a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at the
  10 same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
  11 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
  12 folkhighschool teacher, that is, for teaching grownups. In Norwegian I
  13 believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master in
  14 "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I just
  15 like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
  16 perspective when working with IT.
  17
  18  >  * How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
  19  > project?
  20
  21 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
  22 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-ltsp project, which we used for some
  23 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
  24 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
  25 K12-ltsp abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
  26 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
  27
  28  >  * What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  29  > Edu?
  30
  31 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
  32 distribution, ready to install. It has ldap-support, windows
  33 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an admin a
  34 lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux based
  35 thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very well. But
  36 that is vnc-based and ltsp, to me, is better when it comes to the kind
  37 of multimedia used in schools. That is showing videos from Youtube or
  38 educational TV. It is also easier to mix thinclients with
  39 workstations, since the user settings will be the same. In our
  40 vnc-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by setting up a
  41 second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the workstations,
  42 because they will be different from the ones used on the
  43 thinclients. Skolelinux support for discless workstations are very
  44 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
  45 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
  46 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
  47 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the
  48 thinclients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time.
  49 Our old system was also based on RedHat and CentOs. They are both very
  50 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
  51 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
  52 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
  53 quicker to update.
  54
  55  >  * What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  56  > Edu?
  57
  58 Debian is a bit to quick when it comes to updating. As an example we
  59 use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this year
  60 (2012) the updates you get from the repos has stopped sound from
  61 working with them. It's a kernel/Alsa issue. So you have to be more
  62 carefull properly testing the updates before you run them in a
  63 production environment. This has never happend with CentOS.
  64
  65 I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at install
  66 time. In Skolelinux they are kind of hardcoded into the distribution,
  67 when it comes to ldap and at least samba integration. That is more a
  68 cosmetic /translation issue, and not a real problem. Running windows
  69 applications within the skolelinux environment needs to be beter
  70 supported. That is, running them seamlessly via rdp, and support for
  71 single-sign on. That will make the transition to free software easier,
  72 because you can keep the applications you really need. No support will
  73 make it impossible if you work in a school were some applications cant
  74 be opensource. As for us we really need to run InDesign in our
  75 journalist classes.
  76
  77
  78  >  * Which free software do you use daily?
  79
  80 Myself Im running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days. I use almost only
  81 opensource software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes to most
  82 used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;) )
  83
  84  >  * Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
  85  > get schools to use free software?
  86
  87 To get scools to use free software there has to be good opensource
  88 software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But it's also
  89 very important that the multimedia support is working
  90 flawlessly. Problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever will
  91 create problems when it comes to both teachers and students. Economy
  92 are also important for schools, so using thinclients,as long as they
  93 have good multimedia support, are a very good idea. It's also
  94 important that the opensource software works even for the
  95 administration. It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
  96 opensource, if the principal has to run Windows. It also creates a
  97 problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
  98 will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
  99 support for running windows applications via the thinclient (linux)
 100 desktop is essential. At least at our school, where we have mixed
 101 level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.