<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
<atom:link href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/index.rss" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
+ <item>
+ <title>Debian Edu interview: Roger Marsal</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Roger_Marsal.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Roger_Marsal.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sun, 30 Mar 2014 11:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
+keep gaining new users. Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC,
+<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>, with a
+wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great
+contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
+
+<p>My name is Roger Marsal, I'm 27 years old (1986 generation) and I
+live in Barcelona, Spain. I've got a strong business background and I
+work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent. Additionally,
+I've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the
+last development phase of a new social networking concept.</p>
+
+<p>I'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years
+ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability
+and as a necessary step to gain expertise.</p>
+
+<p>In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I
+can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux
+hunger.</p>
+
+<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
+project?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I discovered the <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP</a> advantages
+with "Ubuntu 12.04 alternate install" and after a year of use I
+started looking for an alternative. Even though I highly value and
+respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to
+change to a more robust and stable alternative. As far as I was using
+Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install
+Debian and configure an LTSP server myself. Surprised, I discovered
+that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent,
+and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and
+running. I just loved it.</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I found a main advantage in that, once you know "the tips and
+tricks", a new installation just works out of the box. It's the most
+complete alternative I've found to create an LTSP network. All the
+other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to
+be made of steel.</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I found two main disadvantages.</p>
+
+<p>I'm not an expert but I've got notions and I had to spent a considerable
+amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I'm quite
+stubborn and I just worked until I did but I'm sure many people with few
+resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched
+or dropped.</p>
+
+<p>It's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved
+this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets
+more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can
+discourage many people too.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and
+Virtualbox.</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 don't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free
+attribute in both "freedom" and "no price" meanings is what will
+really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of
+the <a href="http://www.r-project.org/">"R" statistical language</a>; a
+few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people.
+Today it's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many
+different level of studies. I believe free and open software will
+increasingly gain popularity, but I'm sure schools will be one of the
+first scenarios where this will happen.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
<item>
<title>Dokumentaren om Datalagringsdirektivet sendes endelig på NRK</title>
<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dokumentaren_om_Datalagringsdirektivet_sendes_endelig_p__NRK.html</link>
</description>
</item>
- <item>
- <title>Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Mon, 3 Feb 2014 13:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
- <description><p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
-their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
-boot system instead of their old one. This follow up on the
-<a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
-Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
-get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux. To get started,
-I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
-<a href="http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz">http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz</a>,
-and started it using virt-manager.</p>
-
-<p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
-password) was to get the network operational. I followed
-<a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
-instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
-commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
-kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
-kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
-kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
-dhclient /dev/eth0
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
-upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
-enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
-
-<p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
-running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
-set. Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
-compression from working. Remember to turn that off on the client
-side.</p>
-
-<p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
-stuff:</p>
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
-deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
-EOF
-apt-get update
-apt-get dist-upgrade
-apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
- sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
-update-alternatives --config runsystem
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
-<tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
-yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
-'reboot' command. After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
-upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
-after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
-start is no longer needed. But for some strange reason, there are no
-longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
-ssh instead.
-
-<p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
-fail some times. No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
-figure it out. At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
-irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem. A way to reduce
-the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
-adding this repository to the machine:</p>
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
-deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
-EOF
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
-http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
-unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
-BTS. This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-# aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
-i emacs - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
-i gdb - GNU Debugger
-i hurd-recommended - Miscellaneous translators
-i isc-dhcp-client - ISC DHCP client
-i isc-dhcp-common - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
-i libc-bin - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
-i libc-dev-bin - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
-i libc0.3 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
-i A libc0.3-dbg - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
-i libc0.3-dev - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
-i multiarch-support - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
-i A x11-common - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
-i xorg - X.Org X Window System
-i A xserver-xorg - X.Org X server
-i A xserver-xorg-input-all - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
-#
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
-X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
-the porters instructions to fix it. This time I was interested in the
-command line stuff.<p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
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