blog/draft/2012-04-skolelinux-jurgen-leibner.txt

   1 Title: Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner
   2 Tags: english, debian edu, intervju
   3 Date: 2012-03-15 11:30
   4
   5 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
   6
   7 Jürgen Leibner
   8
   9 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
  10
  11 <p>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
  12 Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany.  I worked nearly 20 years as
  13 certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
  14 international company for machinery and equipment.  Since 2011 I'm a
  15 certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
  16 documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer.  From next month on I
  17 will manage the department of technical documentation at a
  18 manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.</p>
  19
  20 <p>My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
  21 it at company and at home repeatedly but not exclusive as I do now at
  22 home since 2006.</p>
  23
  24 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
  25 project?</strong></p>
  26
  27 <p>Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
  28 daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
  29 middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
  30 him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
  31 asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
  32 computers in use. I answered: "Yes".</p>
  33
  34 <p>Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
  35 running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
  36 gift and installed a first computer room with a peer-to-peer
  37 network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
  38 and with a lot of fun.  About one year later the school was connected
  39 to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
  40 building.  That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
  41 linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
  42 being able to do this in a transparent and economic way and without
  43 extra costs like licence and software costs.  So I searched for a
  44 school server system running under linux and I found a couple of
  45 people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
  46 prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school.  I
  47 managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
  48 the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
  49 Bielefeld in December of 2006.</p>
  50
  51 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  52 Edu?</strong></p>
  53
  54 <p>When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
  55 for me as today.</p>
  56
  57 <p>In the past there were advantages like:</p>
  58
  59 <p><ul>
  60
  61 <li>I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
  62 they had less money to spent for computers and software.</li>
  63
  64 <li>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it in free.</li>
  65 <li>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
  66 schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
  67 clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
  68 infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
  69 server</li>
  70 <li>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the school.</li>
  71
  72 </ul></p>
  73
  74 <p>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
  75 came up in this way:</p>
  76
  77 <p><ul>
  78
  79 <li>Most schools here do have money to buy hard- and software now.</li>
  80
  81 <li>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
  82 have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
  83 because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.</li>
  84
  85 <li>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
  86 management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
  87 interfaces used in the past.</li>
  88
  89 <li>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
  90 different needs.</li>
  91
  92 <li>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.</li>
  93
  94 <li>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
  95 world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
  96 is sharing knowledge and minds.</li>
  97
  98 <li>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
  99 solved today by Debian Edu. </li>
 100
 101 </ul></p>
 102
 103 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
 104 Edu?</strong></p>
 105
 106 <p><ul>
 107
 108 <li>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
 109 their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
 110 whole municipality areas.</li>
 111
 112 <li>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projekts not
 113 enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
 114 politicians.</li>
 115
 116 <li>Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.</li>
 117
 118 </ul></p>
 119
 120 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
 121
 122 <p>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
 123 computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. On applications I use
 124 on my laptop and my desktop Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel, KMail,
 125 DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I need
 126 from the KDE environment.  On console I use newsbeuter, mutt, screen,
 127 irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.</p>
 128
 129 <p>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
 130 and mutt over ssh on console, file services with samba, nfs, rsync,
 131 web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services with
 132 gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with mysql for me and the
 133 whole family.  Maybe I forgot something.</p>
 134
 135 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
 136 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
 137
 138 <p>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
 139 Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
 140 countries and areas all over the world.</p>