blog/data/2012-07-08-skolelinux-george-bredberg.txt

   1 Title: Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg
   2 Tags: english, debian edu, intervju
   3 Date: 2012-07-09 00:30
   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 country Sweden.  This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
   9 this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
  10 to 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, MS 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 Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
  45 when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
  46 showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
  47 mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
  48 same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
  49 setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
  50 workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
  51 thin clients. 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 too 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 integration.
  76 That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
  77 Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
  78 to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
  79 support for single-sign on.  That will make the transition to free
  80 software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
  81 need.  No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
  82 some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
  83 run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes.  We run a journalist
  84 education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
  85 by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association).  Our
  86 education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
  87 are done.  This is important if you want to get a job.</p>
  88
  89 <p>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
  90 magazines.  We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
  91 market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
  92 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
  93 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
  94 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
  95 edit and compile a newspaper.  But politically at our school we are not
  96 there yet.  And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.</p>
  97
  98 <p>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
  99 the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
 100 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
 101 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
 102 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
 103 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
 104 studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
 105 want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise.  Those
 106 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
 107 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
 108 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
 109 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
 110 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
 111 sound file.</p>
 112
 113 <p>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
 114 will try.  The problem is the students have certain expectations when
 115 they start an education towards a profession.  So the programs has to
 116 look and feel professional.  Good thing with radio, there are many
 117 programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
 118 as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
 119 program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
 120 learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
 121 the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.</p>
 122
 123 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
 124
 125 <p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days.  I use almost
 126 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
 127 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
 128 )</p>
 129
 130 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
 131 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
 132
 133 <p>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
 134 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
 135 it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
 136 flawlessly.  The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
 137 will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
 138 students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
 139 clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
 140 idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
 141 the administration.  It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
 142 open source, if the principal has to run Windows.  It also creates a
 143 problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
 144 will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
 145 support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
 146 desktop is essential.  At least at our school, where we have mixed
 147 level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
 148
 149 <p>Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
 150 useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
 151 article <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/481607/">Radio station
 152 management with Airtime</a>,
 153 <a href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/">Airtime</a> which
 154 claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
 155 <a href="http://www.rivendellaudio.org/">Rivendell</a> which claim to
 156 be complete radio broadcast automation solution.  All of them seem
 157 useful to the aspiring radio producer.</p>