blog/draft/2012-07-skolelinux-giorgio-pioda.txt

   1 Title: Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda
   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 Giorgio Pioda
   8
   9 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
  10
  11 <p>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
  12 in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
  13 university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage an LMS server
  14 and slowly I got more and more involved with IT. 3 years ago the
  15 graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I got the head of the
  16 IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry labs computers (for
  17 example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in the IT-courses during
  18 university where sufficient to start. Self training is anyway very
  19 important</p>
  20
  21 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
  22 project?</strong></p>
  23
  24 <p>Looking for Linux/PDC I found it already several years ago. But
  25 since the system was still not Kerberized and since our schools relies
  26 strongly on laptops I didn't use it. I plan to introduce it in the
  27 next future, probably for the next school year, since the squeeze
  28 release solved this security hole.</p>
  29
  30 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  31 Edu?</strong></p>
  32
  33 <p>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
  34 very generous for help and hints. Chat help is crucial, together with
  35 the mailing list. Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
  36 engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
  37 and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
  38 can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
  39 platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
  40 head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
  41 hassle.</p>
  42
  43 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  44 Edu?</strong></p>
  45
  46 <p>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
  47 flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
  48 there are many reasons that force for another choice. For exemple the
  49 need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
  50 devices that have specific software packages for another specific
  51 distro (I have such a a case for Whiteboards that have only Ubuntu
  52 packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient and
  53 eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)</p>
  54
  55 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
  56
  57 <p>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos,NIS,NFS) with mixed
  58 Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad combination is
  59 exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that Perceus
  60 (http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html) has the same...</p>
  61
  62 <p>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
  63 only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
  64 something breaks.</p>
  65
  66 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
  67 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
  68
  69 <P>I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
  70 cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
  71 just because they are tendencially not open to change.</p>
  72
  73 <p>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
  74 to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
  75 don't.</p>
  76
  77 <p>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
  78 laptop and we have the responsability to keep the laptop ready to use;
  79 we were really unsatisfied with M$ since every monday we had 20
  80 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
  81 reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
  82 repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to
  83 Linux. Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.</p>
  84
  85  >  * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
  86
  87 <p>Some other school IT managers, collecting a database of success
  88 cases, so that also schools managers at higher level would get an
  89 enhanced sensibility towards GNU/Linux in the schools.
  90
  91
  92  Fell free to correct my mistakes...
  93
  94  Cheers
  95
  96  Giorgio
  97
  98
  99 Hi,
 100
 101 you can also add that I use daily texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit
 102 of R statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OOffice.
 103
 104 I live in the italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the SPSE
 105 school (secondary) is a very special sport school for
 106 young people who try to became sport pro (for all sports,
 107 we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
 108 recognized by the Olympic Swiss Organization. (www.spse.ch)
 109