blog/draft/2013-skolelinux-cedric-boutillier.txt

   1 Title: Debian Edu interview: Cédric Boutillier
   2 Tags: english, debian edu, intervju
   3 Date: 2013-06-01 21:30
   4
   5 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
   6
   7 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
   8
   9 <p>I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
  10 professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
  11 mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
  12 probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.</p>
  13
  14 <p>I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
  15 and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
  16 packaging, publicity and translation.</p>
  17
  18 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
  19 project?</strong></p>
  20
  21 <p>I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
  22 the Debian Edu manual for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
  23 then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
  24 manual.
  25
  26 <p>I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
  27 virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
  28 shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
  29 how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.</p>
  30
  31 <p>What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
  32 ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
  33 by <ahref="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa²</a>.  What pleased
  34 me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
  35 there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages,
  36 to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
  37 artistic skills with music (<ahref="http://ardour.org/">Ardour</a>,
  38 <ahref="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a>) and
  39 movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
  40 <ahref="http://linuxstopmotion.sourceforge.net/">Stopmotion</a>).</p>
  41
  42 <p>I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
  43 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>.
  44 Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this
  45 beautiful project.</p>
  46
  47 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
  48 Edu?</strong></p>
  49
  50 <p>For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
  51 community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
  52 fact that it provides a solution ready to use.</p>
  53
  54 <p>I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
  55 distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
  56 of educational free software.</p>
  57
  58 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
  59 Edu?</strong></p>
  60
  61 <p>Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
  62 project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
  63 not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
  64 solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
  65 is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.</p>
  66
  67 <p>One can find support from a company by looking at
  68 <ahref="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Help/ProfessionalHelp">the
  69 wiki dokumentation</a>, where some countries already have a number of
  70 companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
  71 Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
  72 for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
  73 consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
  74 support for Debian Edu as well.</p>
  75
  76 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
  77
  78 <p>I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
  79 most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
  80 scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice.  I am
  81 also using the mathematical software Scilab and Sage (built from
  82 source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).
  83
  84 XXXXXXXXXXX
  85
  86 > Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in using the free
  87 > software in Debian to teach mathematics and statistics?
  88
  89 I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our
  90 university, we use both R and Scilab to teach statistics and
  91 probabilistic simulations. For geometry, there are nice programs:
  92 - drgeo and kig to do constructions in planar geometry
  93 - kali to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze
  94 groups), although the interface looks a bit old.
  95 I like also cantor, which provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage,
  96 Octave, etc...
  97 [I guess they are all installed by default on Debian Edu, although I
  98 didn't check, as I had to get rid of my virtual Debian Edu :( )
  99
 100
 101 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
 102 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
 103
 104 My suggestions would be to
 105
 106 <ul>
 107
 108 <li>advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.</li>
 109
 110 <li>communicate about the quality of free software projects, using
 111     well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and
 112     OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.</li>
 113
 114 <li>advertise the living and strong community around the project.</li>
 115
 116 <li>show that it is not more difficult to use than any other
 117     system.</li>
 118
 119 </ul>