blog/draft/2012-03-skolelinux-wolfgang-schweer.txt

   1 Title: Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer
   2 Tags: english, debian edu, intervju
   3 Date: 2012-03-15 11:30
   4
   5 <p>Germany is a core area for the
   6 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
   7 Skolelinux user community, and this time managed to get hold of
   8 Wolfgang Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
   9
  10 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
  11
  12 <p>I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
  13 Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
  14 "<ahref="http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/">Westfalen-Kolleg
  15 Dortmund</a>", a second chance school.  Here, young adults is given
  16 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
  17 examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This
  18 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
  19 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.</p>
  20
  21 <p>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
  22 blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other
  23 information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been
  24 teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my
  25 school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at
  26 the end of April this year.</p>
  27
  28 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
  29 project?</strong></p>
  30
  31 <p>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
  32 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
  33 Project).  At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
  34 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
  35 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
  36 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
  37 reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
  38 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
  39 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
  40 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
  41 Skolelinux.</p>
  42
  43 <p>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
  44 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
  45 clients.  The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
  46 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
  47 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
  48 the admin teachers.</p>
  49
  50 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  51 Edu?</strong></p>
  52
  53 <p>It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
  54 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
  55 So it was a perfect choice.</p>
  56
  57 <p>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's
  58 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
  59 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp.  It's of
  60 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
  61 a school and to choose where to get support for this.</p>
  62
  63 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  64 Edu?</strong></p>
  65
  66 <p>Nothing yet.</p>
  67
  68 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
  69
  70 <p>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
  71 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
  72 Annotator).  At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
  73 LibreOffice.</p>
  74
  75 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
  76 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
  77
  78 <p>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
  79 that doesn't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
  80 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.</p>