After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
Debian Edu and Skolelinux
community, I finally found time to wrap up another. This time it is
Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.
Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
training is anyway very important
I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
SPSE school (secondary) is a very
special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?
Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
already several years ago. But since the system was still not
Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
hole.
What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?
Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
very generous for help and hints. Chat help is crucial, together with
the mailing list. Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
hassle.
What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?
The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
devices that have specific software packages for another specific
distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)
Which free software do you use daily?
I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
Perceus
has the same...
For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
something breaks. Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.
Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?
I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
just because they are normally not open to change.
Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
don't.
We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.
