blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html

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   6     <title>Petter Reinholdtsen: Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda</title>
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  12  <h1>
  13      <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  14
  15  </h1>
  16
  17 </div>
  18
  19
  20     <div class="entry">
  21       <div class="title">Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda</div>
  22       <div class="date">17th September 2012</div>
  23       <div class="body"><p>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
  24 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
  25 community, I finally found time to wrap up another.  This time it is
  26 Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
  27 this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
  28 administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
  29 conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.</p>
  30
  31 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
  32
  33 <p>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
  34 in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
  35 university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
  36 Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
  37 IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
  38 got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
  39 labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
  40 the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
  41 training is anyway very important</p>
  42
  43 <p>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
  44 <a href="http://www.spse.ch/">SPSE school</a> (secondary) is a very
  45 special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
  46 all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
  47 recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
  48
  49 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
  50 project?</strong></p>
  51
  52 <p>Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
  53 already several years ago. But since the system was still not
  54 Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
  55 use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
  56 next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
  57 hole.</p>
  58
  59 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  60 Edu?</strong></p>
  61
  62 <p>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
  63 very generous for help and hints.  Chat help is crucial, together with
  64 the mailing list.  Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
  65 engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
  66 and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
  67 can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
  68 platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
  69 head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
  70 hassle.</p>
  71
  72 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  73 Edu?</strong></p>
  74
  75 <p>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
  76 flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
  77 there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
  78 need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
  79 devices that have specific software packages for another specific
  80 distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
  81 Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
  82 and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)</p>
  83
  84 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
  85
  86 <p>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
  87 mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
  88 combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
  89 <a href="http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html">Perceus</a>
  90 has the same...</p>
  91
  92 <p>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
  93 only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
  94 something breaks.  Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
  95 statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.</p>
  96
  97 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
  98 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
  99
 100 <P>I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
 101 cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
 102 just because they are normally not open to change.</p>
 103
 104 <p>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
 105 to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
 106 don't.</p>
 107
 108 <p>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
 109 laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
 110 we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
 111 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
 112 reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
 113 repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
 114 Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.</p>
 115 </div>
 116
 117       <div class="tags">Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.</div>
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