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15 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen
</a>
22 <h3>Entries from April
2012.
</h3>
26 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html">Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer
</a>
32 <p>Germany is a core area for the
33 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux
</a>
34 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
35 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
37 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
</strong></p>
39 <p>I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
40 Bochum, Germany. Since
1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
41 "
<a href=
"http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/">Westfalen-Kolleg
42 Dortmund
</a>", a second chance school. Here, young adults is given
43 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
44 examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This
45 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
46 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.</p>
48 <p>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
49 blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other
50 information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been
51 teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my
52 school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at
53 the end of April this year.</p>
55 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
58 <p>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
59 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
60 Project). At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
61 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
62 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
63 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
64 reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
65 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
66 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
67 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
70 <p>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
71 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
72 clients. The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
73 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
74 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
75 the admin teachers.</p>
77 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
80 <p>It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
81 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
82 So it was a perfect choice.</p>
84 <p>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's
85 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
86 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp. It's of
87 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
88 a school and to choose where to get support for this.</p>
90 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
95 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
97 <p>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
98 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
99 Annotator). At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
102 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
103 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
105 <p>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
106 that doesn't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
107 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.</p>
113 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu
">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english
">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju
">intervju</a>.
118 <div class="padding
"></div>
122 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html
">Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News</a>
128 <p>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
129 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a> by
130 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News. The result was made public for
131 non-subscribers today. I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
132 for schools. Check out his article
133 <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/
488805/
">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
134 distribution for education</a> if you want to learn more.</p>
140 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu
">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english
">english</a>.
145 <div class="padding
"></div>
149 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_the_KDE_menu_is_slow_when__usr__is_NFS_mounted___and_a_workaround.html
">Why the KDE menu is slow when /usr/ is NFS mounted - and a workaround</a>
155 <p>Recently I have spent time with
156 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/
">Skolelinux Drift AS</a> on speeding
157 up a <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
158 Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
159 process I discovered something very surprising. The reason the KDE
160 menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
161 due to the way KDE find application icons. I discovered that showing
162 the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
163 passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server. Most of these were
165 NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response. Because the
166 ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
167 ms, the menus would be very slow. Looking at the strace of kicker in
168 Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
169 the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
170 non-existing files. KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
171 one icon file. In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
172 around 230 access(2) calls.</p>
174 <p>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
175 directories, and the list of possible directories is large. In
176 (almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
177 and .xpm. The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
178 mounted. Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
179 requests. I am not the first one to discover this. I found a
180 <a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=
211416">KDE bug report
181 from 2009</a> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.</p>
183 <p>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
184 kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
185 used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
186 for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
187 icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/. Finally, I add symlinks to
188 these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
189 for them. This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
190 one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
191 almost instantaneous. I'm not quite sure where to make the package
192 publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.</p>
194 <p>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
195 and icon handling, but also the login process. Not quite sure how to
196 speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
197 that is not really an option at the moment.</p>
199 <p>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
200 (at) lists.debian.org.</p>
206 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu
">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english
">english</a>.
211 <div class="padding
"></div>
215 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html
">Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye</a>
221 <p>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
222 like <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/
">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>,
223 and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
225 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze
">Debian
226 Edu Squeeze release manual</a>.
228 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
230 <p>I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
231 occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.</p>
233 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
234 project?</strong></p>
236 <p>I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user! The only
237 reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
238 around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
239 they'd like a native English speaker to proofread... So I did a sweep
240 through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
243 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
246 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
249 <p>These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it! In fact I
250 had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the
251 education system.
</p>
253 <p>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
254 as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
255 everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
256 money on the latest hardware.
</p>
258 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?
</strong></p>
260 <p>I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
261 software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
262 words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).
</p>
264 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
265 get schools to use free software?
</strong></p>
267 <p>Well, I don't know. I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning
268 with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
269 you would hardly need a strategy.
</p>
275 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju
</a>.
280 <div class=
"padding"></div>
284 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Jeg_skal_p__konferansen_Go_Open_2012.html">Jeg skal på konferansen Go Open
2012</a>
290 <p>Jeg har tenkt meg på konferansen
<a href=
"http://www.goopen.no/">Go
291 Open
2012</a> i Oslo
23. april.
292 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/">Medlemsforeningen NUUG
</a> deler ut
293 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/prisen/">prisen for fremme av fri
294 programvare i Norge
</a> der i år. Kommer du?
</p>
300 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug
</a>.
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