The Debian Edu /
Skolelinux project have users all over the globe, but until
recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
country Sweden. This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
to adjust and scale the just released
Debian Edu
Wheezy setup to his liking. He granted me an interview, and I am
happy to share his answers with you here.
Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
"folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups. In
Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
perspective when working with IT.
How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?
I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
seriously into Skolelinux instead.
What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?
The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time. Our
old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
quicker to update.
What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?
Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
sound from working with them. It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.
I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
install time. In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
support for single-sign on. That will make the transition to free
software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
need. No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes. We run a journalist
education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association). Our
education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
are done. This is important if you want to get a job.
Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
magazines. We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
edit and compile a newspaper. But politically at our school we are not
there yet. And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.
We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise. Those
things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
sound file.
So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
will try. The problem is the students have certain expectations when
they start an education towards a profession. So the programs has to
look and feel professional. Good thing with radio, there are many
programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.
Which free software do you use daily?
Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days. I use almost
only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
)
Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?
To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
flawlessly. The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
the administration. It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
open source, if the principal has to run Windows. It also creates a
problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
desktop is essential. At least at our school, where we have mixed
level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.
Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
article Radio station
management with Airtime,
Airtime which
claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
Rivendell which claim to
be complete radio broadcast automation solution. All of them seem
useful to the aspiring radio producer.
