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                <title>Petter Reinholdtsen - Entries from April 2012</title>
                <description>Entries from April 2012</description>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>

        
        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html</link>        
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                <pubDate>Sun, 1 Apr 2012 23:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Germany is a core area for the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu and Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;
user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who are you, and how do you spend your days?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I&#39;ve studied Mathematics at the university &#39;Ruhr-Universität&#39; in
Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I&#39;m working as a teacher at the school
&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/&quot;&gt;Westfalen-Kolleg
Dortmund&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, a second chance school.  Here, young adults is given
the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
examination &#39;Abitur&#39;, which will allow to study at a university. This
second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
blended learning project called &#39;abitur-online.nrw&#39; and in some other
information technology related projects. For about ten years I&#39;ve been
teacher and coordinator for the &#39;abitur-online&#39; project at my
school. Being now in my early sixties, I&#39;ve decided to leave school at
the end of April this year.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
Project).  At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
reach. At home I&#39;m using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
Skolelinux.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
clients.  The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
the admin teachers.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It&#39;s open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it&#39;s
Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
So it was a perfect choice.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Being open source, there are no license problems and so it&#39;s
possible to point teachers and students to programs like
OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp.  It&#39;s of
high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
a school and to choose where to get support for this.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Nothing yet.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which free software do you use daily?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
Annotator).  At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
LibreOffice.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
that doesn&#39;t seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
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        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html</link>        
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                <pubDate>Thu, 5 Apr 2012 08:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu and Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; by
Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News.  The result was made public for
non-subscribers today.  I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
for schools.  Check out his article
&lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/488805/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
distribution for education&lt;/a&gt; if you want to learn more.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
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                <title>Why the KDE menu is slow when /usr/ is NFS mounted - and a workaround</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_the_KDE_menu_is_slow_when__usr__is_NFS_mounted___and_a_workaround.html</link>        
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                <pubDate>Fri, 6 Apr 2012 22:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Recently I have spent time with
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.slxdrift.no/&quot;&gt;Skolelinux Drift AS&lt;/a&gt; on speeding
up a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu / Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;
Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
process I discovered something very surprising.  The reason the KDE
menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
due to the way KDE find application icons.  I discovered that showing
the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server.  Most of these were

NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response.  Because the
ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
ms, the menus would be very slow.  Looking at the strace of kicker in
Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
non-existing files.  KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
one icon file.  In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
around 230 access(2) calls.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
directories, and the list of possible directories is large.  In
(almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
and .xpm.  The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
mounted.  Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
requests.  I am not the first one to discover this.  I found a
&lt;a href=&quot;https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211416&quot;&gt;KDE bug report
from 2009&lt;/a&gt; about this problem, and it is still unsolved.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/.  Finally, I add symlinks to
these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
for them.  This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
almost instantaneous.  I&#39;m not quite sure where to make the package
publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
and icon handling, but also the login process.  Not quite sure how to
speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
that is not really an option at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
(at) lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
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        <item>
                <title>Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 8 Apr 2012 10:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu / Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;,
and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
contributor to the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze&quot;&gt;Debian
Edu Squeeze release manual&lt;/a&gt;.

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who are you, and how do you spend your days?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user!  The only
reason my name&#39;s in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
they&#39;d like a native English speaker to proofread...  So I did a sweep
through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
&quot;localisation&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;These questions are too hard for me - I don&#39;t use it!  In fact I
had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I&#39;d got out of the
education system.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
money on the latest hardware.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which free software do you use daily?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I&#39;ve been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Well, I don&#39;t know.  I suppose I&#39;d be inclined to try reasoning
with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
you would hardly need a strategy.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
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