Title: Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner
Tags: english, debian edu, intervju
Date: 2012-03-15 11:30

<p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>

Jürgen Leibner

<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>

<p>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany.  I worked nearly 20 years as
certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
international company for machinery and equipment.  Since 2011 I'm a
certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer.  From next month on I
will manage the department of technical documentation at a
manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.</p>

<p>My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
it at company and at home repeatedly but not exclusive as I do now at
home since 2006.</p>

<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?</strong></p>

<p>Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
computers in use. I answered: "Yes".</p>

<p>Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
gift and installed a first computer room with a peer-to-peer
network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
and with a lot of fun.  About one year later the school was connected
to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
building.  That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
being able to do this in a transparent and economic way and without
extra costs like licence and software costs.  So I searched for a
school server system running under linux and I found a couple of
people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school.  I
managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
Bielefeld in December of 2006.</p>

<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?</strong></p>

<p>When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
for me as today.</p>

<p>In the past there were advantages like:</p>

<p><ul>

<li>I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
they had less money to spent for computers and software.</li>

<li>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it in free.</li>
<li>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
server</li>
<li>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the school.</li>

</ul></p>

<p>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
came up in this way:</p>

<p><ul>

<li>Most schools here do have money to buy hard- and software now.</li>

<li>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.</li>

<li>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
interfaces used in the past.</li>

<li>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
different needs.</li>

<li>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.</li>

<li>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
is sharing knowledge and minds.</li>

<li>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
solved today by Debian Edu. </li>

</ul></p>

<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?</strong></p>

<p><ul>

<li>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
whole municipality areas.</li>

<li>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projekts not
enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
politicians.</li>

<li>Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.</li>

</ul></p>

<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>

<p>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. On applications I use
on my laptop and my desktop Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel, KMail,
DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I need
from the KDE environment.  On console I use newsbeuter, mutt, screen,
irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.</p>

<p>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
and mutt over ssh on console, file services with samba, nfs, rsync,
web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services with
gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with mysql for me and the
whole family.  Maybe I forgot something.</p>

<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?</strong></p>

<p>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
countries and areas all over the world.</p>