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

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