blog/draft/2012-06-skolelinux-george-bredberg.txt

   1 Title: Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg
   2 Tags: english, debian edu, intervju
   3 Date: 2012-06-25 11:30
   4
   5 <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
   6 Skolelinux</a> project have users all over the globe, but until
   7 recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
   8 Sweden.  This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March this
   9 year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how to
  10 adjust and scale the just released
  11 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
  12 Wheezy</a> setup to his liking.  He granted me an interview, and I am
  13 happy to share his answers with you here.</p>
  14
  15 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
  16
  17 <p>I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
  18 the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
  19 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
  20 "folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups.  In
  21 Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
  22 in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
  23 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
  24 perspective when working with IT.</p>
  25
  26 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
  27 project?</strong></p>
  28
  29 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
  30 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
  31 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
  32 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
  33 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
  34 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
  35
  36 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  37 Edu?</strong></p>
  38
  39 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
  40 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, windows
  41 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
  42 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
  43 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
  44 well. But that is VNC-based and LTSP, to me, is better when it comes
  45 to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is showing videos from
  46 Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to mix thinclients with
  47 workstations, since the user settings will be the same. In our
  48 VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by setting up a
  49 second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the workstations,
  50 because they will be different from the ones used on the
  51 thinclients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
  52 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
  53 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
  54 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
  55 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
  56 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time.  Our
  57 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
  58 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
  59 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
  60 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
  61 quicker to update.
  62
  63 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  64 Edu?</strong></p>
  65
  66 <p>Debian is a bit to quick when it comes to updating. As an example
  67 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
  68 year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
  69 sound from working with them.  It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
  70 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
  71 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.</p>
  72
  73 <p>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
  74 install time. In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
  75 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba
  76 integration. That is more a cosmetic /translation issue, and not a
  77 real problem.  Running windows applications within the Skolelinux
  78 environment needs to be better supported. That is, running them
  79 seamlessly via RDP, and support for single-sign on.  That will make
  80 the transition to free software easier, because you can keep the
  81 applications you really need.  No support will make it impossible if
  82 you work in a school were some applications can't be open source. As
  83 for us we really need to run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes.
  84 We run a journalist education, and is one of the very few non
  85 university ones that is ok:d by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish
  86 journalist association).  Our education gives the pupils the right of
  87 membership there, once they are done.  This is important if you want
  88 to get a job.</p>
  89
  90 <p>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
  91 magazines.  We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
  92 market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
  93 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
  94 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
  95 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
  96 edit and compile a newspaper. But politically at our school we are not
  97 there yet. And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.</p>
  98
  99 <p>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
 100 the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
 101 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
 102 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more openminded. We have
 103 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
 104 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
 105 studio. Its way to complex and the gui is to scattered when you only
 106 want to cut, make passovers, add extra channels and normalize. Thoose
 107 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
 108 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
 109 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
 110 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequentlly
 111 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
 112 sound file.</p>
 113
 114 <p>So, I am not sure we will succed in replacing even Audition, but we
 115 will try.  Problem is the students have certain expectations when they
 116 start an education towards a profession. So the programs has to look
 117 and feel professional. Good thing with radio, there are many programs
 118 out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised as
 119 Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what program
 120 they learn, because once they start working they still have to learn
 121 the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn the
 122 editing part without to much focus on a specific software.</p>
 123
 124 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
 125
 126 <p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days. I use almost
 127 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
 128 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
 129 )</p>
 130
 131 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
 132 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
 133
 134 <p>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
 135 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
 136 it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
 137 flawlessly. Problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever will
 138 create problems when it comes to both teachers and students. Economy
 139 are also important for schools, so using thinclients,as long as they
 140 have good multimedia support, are a very good idea. It's also
 141 important that the open source software works even for the
 142 administration. It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with open
 143 source, if the principal has to run Windows. It also creates a problem
 144 if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that will
 145 create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good support for
 146 running windows applications via the thin client (Linux) desktop is
 147 essential. At least at our school, where we have mixed level of
 148 educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
 149
 150
 151     > Is this Adobe InDesign?  What is it doing that the free software
 152     > alternatives can not offer?
 153
 154