Petter Reinholdtsen

In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the Debian Edu and Skolelinux mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupiles. His name was Ralf Gesellensetter, and he have been an important tester and contributor since then, helping to make sure the Debian Edu Squeeze release became as good as it is..

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography, Mathematics, and Computer Science ("Informatik"). During the past 12 years (since 2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon, also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as O- or A-level ("Abitur"). For quite as long, I've been taking care of our computer network.

Now, in my early 40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my spare time together with my wife, our son (3 years) and our daughter (4 months).

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu project?

We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award ("Best Newcomer Distribution", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt, 2005 (IIRC). Few months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud (Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others. For more than 7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and approximately 50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a locally installed Skolelinux image. As a consequence, I joined quite a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian (Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me, one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu?

Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware, up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available labs). Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your administration costs tend towards zero.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu?

While Debian's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of office packages or desktop environments. These schools have the option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the capacity to do so. Another issue is that Debian release cycles include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux within the new setting of the version to come. During this process, the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional, i.e. harder to understand for novices.

Which free software do you use daily?

LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox), KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools to use free software?

1. Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make people really "own" their hardware, to make them understand the difference between proprietary software products, and free software developing.
2. Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany's public schools there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including licenses), so schools won't benefit from any savings here. This privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large share among German Skolelinux schools.
3. Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are trained. In many cases, teachers' software customs are respected by decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.
4. Don't stick to free software as to be run natively. Everybody uses free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be shared world wide (school books e.g.).
5. Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre) office suites is much above 20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don't need to know the "ribbon menu" in order to get employed.
6. Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.
7. Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials. And keep sending documents in ODF formats.

I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK government. I just sent him an email to let him know that his assumption are most likely wrong. Sharing it here in case some of my blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.

Hi. I just noted your http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/does-microsoft-office-lock-in-cost-the-uk-government-500-million/index.htm comment:

"They're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even with the help of Google Translate I can't find any figures about the savings of "moving to a flexible two standard" as claimed by the Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let's take it, and the £500 million figure for the UK, on trust."

I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated. I believe it is the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around 2007, and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look at the content. In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost 10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver. In reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not 20 minutes of wasted effort.

Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending 10 minutes converting to ODF. :)

See http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php and http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php for background information. Norwegian only, sorry. :)

De siste dagene har høringsuttalelsene om DIFIs forslag til standardkatalog v3.1 blitt publisert på DIFIs nettside, og jeg kunne der glede meg over at NUUGs uttalelse er kommet med. En uttalelse som overrasker og forvirrer meg er den fra Norges Blindeforbund, som 5 år etter at Klaus Knopper sammen med sin blinde kone blant annet demonstrerte høyttalende OpenOffice.org på nynorsk for blinde på et NUUG-møte.

Norges Blindeforbund skriver følgende, som for meg virker å være formulert på sviktende grunnlag:

Bruk av fri programvare

I FRIPROGSENTERET, RAPPORT 2009-02: Universell utforming http://www.kunnskapsbazaren.no/filer/Friprogsenteret-Rapport-Universell_utforming.pdf sies det "Det finnes i dag ikke mange fri programvare-rammeverk eller generelle løsninger som støtter tilgjengelighet eller som er universelt utformet."

Til tross for at det gjennom prinsippene i fri programvare åpnes for større frihet til selv å påvirke programvareløsninger i retning av universell utforming viser praksis at virkeligheten er en annen. Mange av de mest alminnelige frie programvarepakkene mangler delvis eller fullstendig tilgjengelighet for mennesker med nedsatt syn. Eksempler på dette er OpenOffice og LibreOffice m.fl.

En annen utfordring ved bruk av fri programvare kan være manglende kundestøtte og muligheter til opplæring i bruk av løsningen. Svaksynte og blinde har et høyere behov for denne typen støtte enn andre brukere ettersom mange av dem har behov for tilleggsprogramvare som skal fungere sammen med den opprinnelige programvaren, og ettersom man ikke har de samme muligheter for overblikk over grensesnittet som en seende bruker. I tillegg til dette kommer de mer tilgjengelighetstekniske utfordringene som ofte må løses i samarbeid med programvareleverandør/produsent.

Fri programvare er ikke på samme måte underlagt lovgivning gjennom for eksempel diskriminerings og tilgjengelighetsloven ettersom det ikke alltid finnes en produsent/tilbyder av tjenesten eller produktet.

Norges Blindeforbund krever at universell utforming og brukskvalitet tas med som viktige hensyn i utredninger som ligger til grunn for valg av standarder som primært leder brukeren mot fri programvare. Et eksempel på dette er bruk av dokumentformatet ODF som leder brukeren i retning av OpenOffice, som er helt eller delvis utilgjengelig for svaksynte og blinde – noe avhengig av plattform og hjelpemiddelprogramvare.

Jeg håper noen involvert i OpenOffice.org og/eller LibreOffice tar kontakt med Norges Blindeforbund og oppklarer det som for meg virker å være en misforståelse, i og med at OpenOffice.org så vidt jeg vet fungerer fint også for blinde.

Jeg ble minnet på problemstillingen da jeg leste Slashdot-saken om "The State of Linux Accessibility", som også hevder at Linux fungerer utmerket for blinde.

Skolelinux-prosjektets musiker og mannen bak opplæringsdokumentene i Rosegarden (norsk utgave) for musikklærere, Alf Tonny Bätz, er neste mann ut i min intervjurunde av folkene bak Skolelinux-løsningen. Jeg har kjent Alf Tonny siden vi møttes som barn på påskefjellet i Ofoten, og ble gledelig overrasket da han dukket opp i Skolelinux-prosjektet etter å ikke ha sett noe til ham på mange år.

Hvem er du, og hva driver du med til daglig?

Jeg er utdannet kokk av yrke, og har utøvet yrket i 12 år. Men etter at ryggen sa takk før seg, studerte jeg nettverksadministrasjon ved Næringsakademiet i Bergen årene 2008-2009 slik at jeg kunne forfølge en av mine største interesser - data. Til daglig jobber jeg ved Parken ungdomsskole med å drifte skolens PC-er. Har også litt musikkundervisning.

Mitt mål er å bevisstgjøre musikklærene mulighetene med de frie programmene som finnes i Skolelinux, blant annet Rosegarden.

Har i mange år drevet med musikk og en av grunnen til at Rosegarden falt i smak for min del, var fordi denne fungere og ligner mest på Windows-programmet (cubase) jeg jobbet mye med da jeg i mine yngre dager var «Windows fanatiker». Ble introdusert til Linux av en kompis av meg for omtrent 14 år siden, og har bare blitt mer og mer glad i dette operativsystemet.

Hvordan kom du i kontakt med Skolelinux-prosjektet?

Da jeg ble sykemeldt fra min gamle jobb, og måtte omskoleres, havnet jeg i 2007 sammen med Viggo Fedreheim på IKT-avdelingen i Narvik kommune, der ble jeg for første gang introdusert til Skolelinuxprosjektet.

Hva er fordelene med Skolelinux slik du ser det?

Skolelinux er enkelt å holde i drift og masse flotte programmer som geogebra, ktouch og kgeografi følger med pakken. Man kan ta i bruk gamle PC-er igjen, slik at skoler med dårlig råd får opp en brukbar PC-park. PC-er som er ca 6-9 år gamle fungere tilfredstillende, bare de har 512 MB RAM eller mer.

Hva er ulempene med Skolelinux slik du ser det?

Ulempene er at noen av de pedagogiske programmene som lærene ønsker å bruke fungere dårlig med Linux. Mye pga. av at disse programmene blir ikke laget til Linuxbaserte operativsystemer.

Video- og bilde-redigering har dessverre en del mangler, mange av programmene har en tendens til og krasje. Det gjelder blant annet kdenlive og openshot, for å nevne noen. De er ikke stabile nok. Når elevene kommer med filmsnutter de ønsker og jobbe med, så godtar ikke programmene filene, og når elevene jobber med redigering bare krasjer programmene uten forvarsel. Det er for vanskelig å få noe som bare fungerer ut av boksen her. Når en elev plugger inn et videokamera eller fotoapparat så er det alltid noe som ikke vil fungere. Programmene godtar ikke format, godtar ikke kameraet, osv., osv. Det er dessverre med på og dra ned en positiv opplevelse av bruk av fri programvare.

Man må ofte bruke flere en et video redigerings program før og få fullført en ønsket oppgave.

Eksempel:

Hvis det ene programmet ikke vil ta i mot videofilen klarer et annet det, men det programmet som klarer det kan ikke gjøre de samme oppgavene som det programmet som ikke ville ta i mot filen, Tilsvarende er det med foto, man må bruke flere programmer for å få et ferdig resultat. Til dags dato har jeg enda ikke funnet et video- og fotoprogram som kan tilfredstillende fullføre en oppgave.

Så man kan klare og fullføre en oppgave, men i verste fall må man innom 3-4 programmer for å få det til. Så jeg har enda ikke til dags dato sett at et program fungere 100% til alt.

Det programmet jeg har best erfaring til er cinelerra, men dessverre har det også tendenser og krasje av og til uten grunn.

Lydsystemet kan også være et mareritt. Konkret snakker jeg om når du bruker for eksempel et smartboard, så følger det med USB-lydkort på disse. Problemet ligger her i at systemet ikke vil velge rett lydkort, så man må inn med padevchooser for å sette opp PulseAudio til og velge at USB-lydkortet skal brukes. Det blir for tungvindt for lærene, de ønsker at ting skal fungere med en gang. (min løsning på det problemet ble at jeg måtte deaktivere lydkortet som fantes på maskinen) men da må man bestandig slå på smartboard-tavla.

Hvilken fri programvare bruker du til daglig?

Programmene jeg bruker mest av er: Rosegarden, jack, qsynth, audacity, k3b, openttd og libreoffice.

Hvilken strategi tror du er den rette å bruke for å få skoler til å ta i bruk fri programvare?

Jeg tror det må bevisstgjøring av Skolene til, dvs. reklamere høylytt og fortelle og vise de andre skolene at frie programvarer faktisk fungere. Jeg trur faktisk mange ikke vet at det finnes frie alternativer.

In january, I discovered the ColorHug, a USB dongle from Hughski to calibrate the color on a computer screen. The software required is included in Debian, and I decided back then to preorder from the next batch. Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the opportunity to order. Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the delivery. I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it should go in the mail on monday. :)

If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software drivers. :)

Peter Hidas fra Gartner melder i Computerworld at Unix nedkjempes av Linux og Windows. For meg er påstanden meningsløs, da Linux er en variant av Unix, og hele diskusjonen om Linux er Unix eller ikke er utdatert og uinteressant. Jeg ser at Helge Skrivervik deler mitt syn på saken i sin kommentar fra i går om at "Unix vs. Linux = uinteressant".

I NUUG-sammenheng møter jeg av og til folk som tror NUUG er for avdankede folk som driver med den samme Unix-varianten som Peter Hidas skriver om i sin kommentar, og dermed er en foreningen for avdankede teknologer interessert i døende teknologi. Intet kunne være lengre fra sannheten.

NUUG er en forening for oss som har sans for fri programvare, åpne standarder og Unix-lignende operativsystemer, som Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Debian, Mint, Gentoo, Android, Gnome, KDE, LXDE, Firefox, LibreOffice, ODF, HTML, C++, ECMA-Script, etc. Kort sagt der nyskapning skjer på IT-fronten i dag. Det innebærer selvfølgelig også de som er interessert i de "gamle" Unix-ene som Solaris og HP-UX, men de er bare et lite mindretall blant NUUGs medlemmer. De aller fleste medlemmene har i dag fokus på Linux.

It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to publish another interview with the people behind Debian Edu and Skolelinux. This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor details get right before release.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

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 April this year I will manage the department of technical documentation at a manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.

My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at home since 2006.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu project?

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".

Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as gifts and installed the 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, without extra costs for things like licence and software. 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.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu?

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

In the past there were advantages like:

• I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as they had little money to spent for computers and software.
• It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without cost.
• 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
• I was able to configure the server to the needs of the school.

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

• Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software now.
• 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.
• 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.
• It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the different needs.
• The documentation is usable and gets better every day.
• 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.
• Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are solved today by Debian Edu.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu?

• 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.
• Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to politicians.
• Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.

Which free software do you use daily?

I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I use on my laptop and my desktop are 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.

My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube and mutt over ssh on the 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. I probably forgot something.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools to use free software?

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.

I går ble jeg kontaktet på epost av digi.nos Eirik Rossen som lurte på om jeg hadde noen kommentarer til kartverkets pressemelding om Norges tetplassering når det gjelder kart-tilgjengelighet. Jeg svarte følgende, som resulterte i noen sitater i Digis dekning av kartverkets pressemelding.

Takk for muligheten til å kommentere.

Pressemeldingen omhandler tilgjengeligheten av kart for aktører som er medlem i kartellet Norge Digitalt. Det er ingen overraskelse for meg at tilgjengeligheten til kart hos disse medlemmene er god. Men for oss på utsiden av kartellet er tilgjengelighet av det som burde være felleskapets og innbyggernes kart dårlig.

Bruksvilkårene til kartene fra medlemmene i Norge Digital hindrer nyskapning og selv om en er villig til å betale den ublu prisen som forlanges får en fortsatt ikke tilgang til kartdata uten bruksbegresninger. Derfor bruker jeg heller tid på å gjøre fribrukskartet OpenStreetmap bedre. Der fremmer bruksvilkårene nyskapning og lar meg skape nye tjenester uten å måtte søke om tillatelse fra det offentlige.

En annen problemstilling er jo sikkerhet til fjells og til sjøs. Mon tro hvor mange ulykker på sjøen som kunne vært unngått hvis sjøkartdata var tilgjengelig uten bruksbegrensninger, slik at enhver med GPS eller kartplotter tilnærmet kostnadsfritt kunne sikre seg mest mulig oppdaterte sjøkart? Det hjelper jo ikke at offentlige etater har enkel tilgang til sjøkartene når det samme ikke gjelder hver båtkaptein og småbåtfører. Jeg tror samfunnet som helhet hadde tjent på å unngå kostnadene ved disse ulykkene ved å tvinge sjøkartverket til å publisere sine kartdata på Internet uten bruksbegresninger.

I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway. But the last ones have not really been up to the task. My last cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the time, and cutting my head took forever. And the one before that did not work very well either. We have looked for something better for a while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we discovered that there are indeed better tools available. But these are not marketed and sold to "regular consumers". The hair saloons can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell companies. The models they sell, are very different from the ones available from Elkjøp and Lefdal. The main difference is their efficiency. It would cut my hair in 5 minutes, instead of the 30-40 minutes required by my impotent Braun. The hairdresser I visited had a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the producer. But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.

The next step was to find somewhere to buy it. This was not straight forward. The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser did not want to sell anything to me. But searching for the model on the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for around NOK 4000,-. This was a bit much. We kept searching and finally found a Danish supplier selling it for around NOK 1800,-. We ordered one, and it arrived a few days ago.

The instructions said it had to charge for 8 hours when we started to use it, so we left it charging over night. Normally it will only need one hour to charge. The following evening we successfully tested it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair cutter. The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter toys.