blog/data/2012-09-17-skolelinux-giorgio-pioda.txt

   1 Title: Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda
   2 Tags: english, debian edu, intervju
   3 Date: 2012-09-17 14:10
   4
   5 <p>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
   6 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
   7 community, I finally found time to wrap up another.  This time it is
   8 Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
   9 this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
  10 administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
  11 conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.</p>
  12
  13 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
  14
  15 <p>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
  16 in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
  17 university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
  18 Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
  19 IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
  20 got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
  21 labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
  22 the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
  23 training is anyway very important</p>
  24
  25 <p>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
  26 <a href="http://www.spse.ch/">SPSE school</a> (secondary) is a very
  27 special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
  28 all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
  29 recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
  30
  31 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
  32 project?</strong></p>
  33
  34 <p>Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
  35 already several years ago. But since the system was still not
  36 Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
  37 use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
  38 next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
  39 hole.</p>
  40
  41 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  42 Edu?</strong></p>
  43
  44 <p>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
  45 very generous for help and hints.  Chat help is crucial, together with
  46 the mailing list.  Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
  47 engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
  48 and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
  49 can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
  50 platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
  51 head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
  52 hassle.</p>
  53
  54 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  55 Edu?</strong></p>
  56
  57 <p>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
  58 flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
  59 there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
  60 need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
  61 devices that have specific software packages for another specific
  62 distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
  63 Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
  64 and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)</p>
  65
  66 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
  67
  68 <p>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
  69 mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
  70 combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
  71 <a href="http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html">Perceus</a>
  72 has the same...</p>
  73
  74 <p>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
  75 only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
  76 something breaks.  Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
  77 statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.</p>
  78
  79 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
  80 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
  81
  82 <P>I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
  83 cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
  84 just because they are normally not open to change.</p>
  85
  86 <p>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
  87 to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
  88 don't.</p>
  89
  90 <p>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
  91 laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
  92 we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
  93 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
  94 reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
  95 repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
  96 Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.</p>