blog/data/2012-05-13-skolelinux-jurgen-leibner.txt

   1 Title: Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner
   2 Tags: english, debian edu, intervju
   3 Date: 2012-05-13 20:30
   4
   5 <p>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
   6 publish another interview with the people behind
   7 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
   8 This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
   9 years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
  10 details get right before release.
  11
  12 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
  13
  14 <p>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
  15 Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany.  I worked nearly 20 years as
  16 certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
  17 international company for machinery and equipment.  Since 2011 I'm a
  18 certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
  19 documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer.  From April this year
  20 I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
  21 manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.</p>
  22
  23 <p>My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
  24 it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
  25 home since 2006.</p>
  26
  27 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
  28 project?</strong></p>
  29
  30 <p>Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
  31 daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
  32 middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
  33 him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
  34 asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
  35 computers in use. I answered: "Yes".</p>
  36
  37 <p>Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
  38 running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
  39 gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
  40 network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
  41 and with a lot of fun.  About one year later the school was connected
  42 to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
  43 building.  That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
  44 Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
  45 being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
  46 costs for things like licence and software.  So I searched for a
  47 school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
  48 people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
  49 prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school.  I
  50 managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
  51 the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
  52 Bielefeld in December of 2006.</p>
  53
  54 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  55 Edu?</strong></p>
  56
  57 <p>When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
  58 for me as today.</p>
  59
  60 <p>In the past there were advantages like:</p>
  61
  62 <p><ul>
  63
  64 <li>I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
  65 they had little money to spent for computers and software.</li>
  66
  67 <li>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
  68 cost.</li>
  69
  70 <li>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
  71 schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
  72 clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
  73 infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
  74 server</li>
  75
  76 <li>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
  77 school.</li>
  78
  79 </ul></p>
  80
  81 <p>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
  82 came up in this way:</p>
  83
  84 <p><ul>
  85
  86 <li>Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
  87 now.</li>
  88
  89 <li>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
  90 have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
  91 because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.</li>
  92
  93 <li>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
  94 management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
  95 interfaces used in the past.</li>
  96
  97 <li>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
  98 different needs.</li>
  99
 100 <li>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.</li>
 101
 102 <li>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
 103 world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
 104 is sharing knowledge and minds.</li>
 105
 106 <li>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
 107 solved today by Debian Edu. </li>
 108
 109 </ul></p>
 110
 111 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
 112 Edu?</strong></p>
 113
 114 <p><ul>
 115
 116 <li>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
 117 their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
 118 whole municipality areas.</li>
 119
 120 <li>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
 121 enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
 122 politicians.</li>
 123
 124 <li>Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.</li>
 125
 126 </ul></p>
 127
 128 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
 129
 130 <p>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
 131 computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
 132 use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
 133 KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
 134 need from the KDE environment.  On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
 135 screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.</p>
 136
 137 <p>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
 138 and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
 139 rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
 140 with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
 141 and the whole family.  I probably forgot something.</p>
 142
 143 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
 144 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
 145
 146 <p>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
 147 Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
 148 countries and areas all over the world.</p>