<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: Klaus Knopper</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 6 Dec 2013 09:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview,
+but the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
+Skolelinux</a> community is still going strong, and yesterday we even
+had a new school administrator show up on
+<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a> to share
+his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school. This
+time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of
+Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in
+Germany a few years ago.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I am Klaus Knopper. I have a master degree in electrical
+engineering, and is currently professor in information management at
+the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and
+freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.</p>
+
+<p>All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart
+from teaching, I'm also conducting some more or less experimental
+projects like the <a href="http://www.knoppix.org">Knoppix GNU/Linux live
+system</a> (Debian-based like Skolelinux),
+<a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html">ADRIANE</a>
+(a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and
+<a href="http://www.knopper.net/linbo/index-en.html">LINBO</a>
+(Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair
+system supporting various operating systems).</p>
+
+<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
+project?</strong></p>
+
+<p>The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German
+coordinator for Skolelinux. We were looking for an all-in-one open
+source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt
+introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<ul>
+ <li>Quick installation,</li>
+ <li>works (almost) out of the box,</li>
+ <li>contains many useful software packages for teaching and learning,</li>
+ <li>is a purely community-based distro and not controlled by a
+ single company,</li>
+ <li>has a large number of supporters and teachers who share their
+ experience and problem solutions.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<ul>
+ <li>Skolelinux is - as we had to learn - not easily upgradable to
+ the next version. Opposed to its genuine Debian base, upgrading to
+ a new version means a full new installation from scratch to get it
+ working again reliably.
+
+ <li>Skolelinux is based on Debian/stable, and therefore always a
+ little outdated in terms of program versions compared to Edubuntu or
+ similar educational Linux distros, which rather use Debian/testing
+ as their base.
+
+ <li>Skolelinux has some very self-opinionated and stubborn default
+ configuration which in my opinion adds unnecessary complexity and is
+ not always suitable for a schools needs, the preset network
+ configuration is actually a core definition feature of Skolelinux
+ and not easy to change, so schools sometimes have to change their
+ network configuration to make it "Skolelinux-compatible".
+
+ <li>Some proposed extensions, which were made available as
+ contribution, like secure examination mode and lecture material
+ distribution and collection, were not accepted into the mainline
+ Skolelinux development and are now not easy to maintain in the
+ future because of Skolelinux somewhat undeterministic update
+ schemes.</li>
+
+ <li>Skolelinux has only a very tiny number of base developers
+ compared to Debian.</li>
+
+</ul>
+
+<p>For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now
+rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until
+Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes
+upgradeable without reinstallation.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
+
+<p>GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and
+programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence,
+occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various
+programming languages for teaching.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
+get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
+
+<p>Strong arguments are
+
+<ul>
+
+ <li>Knowledge is free, and so should be methods and tools for
+ teaching and learning.</li>
+
+ <li>Students can learn with and use the same software at school, at
+ home, and at their working place without running into license or
+ conversion problems.</li>
+
+ <li>Closed source or proprietary software hides knowledge rather
+ than exposing it, and proprietary software vendors try to bind
+ customers to certain products. But teachers need to teach
+ science, not products.</li>
+
+ <li>If you have everything you for daily work as open source, what
+ would you need proprietary software for?</li>
+
+</ul>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
<item>
<title>Dugnadsnett for alle, a wireless community network in Oslo, take shape</title>
<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnadsnett_for_alle__a_wireless_community_network_in_Oslo__take_shape.html</link>
</description>
</item>
- <item>
- <title>Teaching vmdebootstrap to create Raspberry Pi SD card images</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Teaching_vmdebootstrap_to_create_Raspberry_Pi_SD_card_images.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Teaching_vmdebootstrap_to_create_Raspberry_Pi_SD_card_images.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Sun, 27 Oct 2013 17:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
- <description><p>The
-<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
-program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images. It
-create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
-debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
-stick. Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
-<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
-of a plan to simplify the build system for
-<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
-project</a>. The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
-the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
-based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
-Raspberry Pi.</p>
-
-<p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
-architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
-code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
-Debian laptop. I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
-allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
-<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
-Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>. First, the
-<tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
-call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
-generated chroot before running the second stage. This allow
-vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host. Next I added
-two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
-fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
-given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
-partition for the /boot/ stuff. I also added a <tt>--variant
-variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
-Debian base system packages installed. Finally, I added an option
-<tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
-as a boot loader. It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
-most other non-x86 architectures. The changes were accepted by the
-upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
-available from
-<a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
-upstream project page</a>.</p>
-
-<p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
-create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
-binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
-list:</p>
-
-<p><pre>
-#!/bin/sh
-set -e # Exit on first error
-rootdir="$1"
-cd "$rootdir"
-cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
-deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
-EOF
-# Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi. This
-# install a kernel somewhere too.
-wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
- -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
-chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
-mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
-touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
-chroot $rootdir rpi-update
-</pre></p>
-
-<p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
-to build the image:</p>
-
-<pre>
-sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
- --variant minbase \
- --arch armel \
- --distribution jessie \
- --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
- --image test.img \
- --size 600M \
- --bootsize 64M \
- --boottype vfat \
- --log-level debug \
- --verbose \
- --no-kernel \
- --no-extlinux \
- --root-password raspberry \
- --hostname raspberrypi \
- --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
- --customize `pwd`/customize \
- --package netbase \
- --package git-core \
- --package binutils \
- --package ca-certificates \
- --package wget \
- --package kmod
-</pre></p>
-
-<p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
-rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
-exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
-/etc/hosts with the minbase variant. I really wish there was a way to
-set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
-that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
-using a non-free binary blob.</p>
-
-<p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
-probably a few others installed. I have not checked the complete
-build dependency list.</p>
-
-<p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
-on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
-optimized for that use. So the images created will be a bit slower
-than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
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