30th April 2012
</div>
<div class="body">
- <!-- IMG_5869.JPG -->
-<img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-1611.jpeg">
+ <p><!-- IMG_5869.JPG -->
+<img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-1611.jpeg"></p>
<p>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.
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 hair dresser that we
+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 hair dresser I visited had
+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.</p>
<p>The next step was to find somewhere to buy it. This was not
-straight forward. The list of suppliers I got from the hair dresser
+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
</div>
<div class="padding"></div>
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html">Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 13th May 2012
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
+publish another interview with the people behind
+<a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
+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.
+
+<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 April this year
+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 work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively 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
+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.</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 little money to spent for computers and software.</li>
+
+<li>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
+cost.</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 hardware 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 projects 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. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColorHug___USB_and_free_software_based_screen_color_calibration.html">ColorHug - USB and free software based screen color calibration</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 18th May 2012
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>In january, I
+<a href="http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2012/01/17/colorhug-has-arrived/">discovered
+the ColorHug</a>, a USB dongle from
+<a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">Hughski</a> to calibrate
+the color on a computer screen. The software required is
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">included
+in Debian</a>, 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. :)</p>
+
+<p>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. :)</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html">The cost of ODF and OOXML</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 26th May 2012
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>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.</p>
+
+<p><blockquote> <p>Hi. I just noted your
+<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/does-microsoft-office-lock-in-cost-the-uk-government-500-million/index.htm">http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/does-microsoft-office-lock-in-cost-the-uk-government-500-million/index.htm</a>
+comment:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote>"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."
+</blockquote></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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. :)</p>
+
+<p>See
+<a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php</a>
+and
+<a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php</a>
+for background information. Norwegian only, sorry. :)</p>
+</blockquote></p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html">Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 27th May 2012
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the
+<a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
+mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
+up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils. His name was Ralf
+Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
+since then, helping to make sure the
+<a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
+Squeeze</a> release became as good as it is..</p>
+
+<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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).</p>
+
+<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
+project?</strong></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
+
+<p>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)</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
+get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
+
+<p><ol>
+
+<li>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.</li>
+
+<li>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.</li>
+
+<li>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.</li>
+
+<li>Don't limit ourself to free software 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.).</li>
+
+<li>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.</li>
+
+<li>Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.</li>
+
+<li>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.</li>
+
+</ol></p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html">First monitor calibration using ColorHug</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 31st May 2012
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>A few days ago my color calibration gadget
+<a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">ColorHug</a> arrived in the
+mail, and I've had a few days to test it. As all my machines are
+running Debian Squeeze, where
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">the
+calibration software</a> is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid),
+I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD. This worked
+just fine. So far I have only done the quick calibration. It was
+slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for
+another day.</p>
+
+<p>After calibration, I get a
+<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile">ICC color
+profile</a> file that can be passed to programs understanding such
+tools. KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched
+for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X.
+xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single
+monitor setups. But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen
+attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct
+monitor. After searching a bit, I
+<a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347896">discovered</a>
+that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted,
+and a simple</p>
+
+<p><pre>
+dispwin -d 1 profile.icc
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor. The
+result was a bit more pink than I expected. I guess I picked the
+wrong monitor type for the "led" monitor I got, but the result is good
+enough for now.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">SOAP based webservice from Dell to check server support status</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 1st June 2012
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>A few years ago I wrote
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">how
+to extract support status</a> for your Dell and HP servers. Recently
+I have learned from colleges here at the
+<a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> that Dell have
+made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service. Given
+the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
+readable information about the support status. This perl code
+demonstrate how to do it:</p>
+
+<p><pre>
+use strict;
+use warnings;
+use SOAP::Lite;
+use Data::Dumper;
+my $GUID = '11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111';
+my $App = 'test';
+my $servicetag = $ARGV[0] or die "Please supply a servicetag. $!\n";
+my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
+my $s = SOAP::Lite
+ -> uri('http://support.dell.com/WebServices/')
+ -> on_action( sub { join '', @_ } )
+ -> proxy('http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx')
+ ;
+my $a = $s->GetAssetInformation(
+ SOAP::Data->name('guid')->value($GUID)->type(''),
+ SOAP::Data->name('applicationName')->value($App)->type(''),
+ SOAP::Data->name('serviceTags')->value($servicetag)->type(''),
+);
+print Dumper($a -> result) ;
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>The output can look like this:</p>
+
+<p><pre>
+$VAR1 = {
+ 'Asset' => {
+ 'Entitlements' => {
+ 'EntitlementData' => [
+ {
+ 'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
+ 'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
+ 'Provider' => '',
+ 'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
+ 'DaysLeft' => '0'
+ },
+ {
+ 'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
+ 'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
+ 'Provider' => '',
+ 'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
+ 'DaysLeft' => '0'
+ },
+ {
+ 'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
+ 'EndDate' => '2007-07-29T00:00:00',
+ 'Provider' => '',
+ 'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
+ 'DaysLeft' => '0'
+ }
+ ]
+ },
+ 'AssetHeaderData' => {
+ 'SystemModel' => 'GX620',
+ 'ServiceTag' => '8DSGD2J',
+ 'SystemShipDate' => '2006-07-29T19:00:00-05:00',
+ 'Buid' => '2323',
+ 'Region' => 'Europe',
+ 'SystemID' => 'PLX_GX620',
+ 'SystemType' => 'OptiPlex'
+ }
+ }
+ };
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
+service outside the
+<a href="http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation">inline
+documentation</a>, and according to
+<a href="http://iboyd.net/index.php/2012/02/14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/">one
+comment</a> it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
+scraping HTML pages. :)</p>
+
+<p>Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service. If
+you know of one, drop me an email. :)</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 2nd June 2012
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
+<a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
+mailing list. He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
+thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
+<a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
+Squeeze</a> version.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
+
+<p>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
+Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
+(Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
+by Angela).</p>
+
+<p>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
+and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
+touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
+the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
+becoming an osteopath.</p>
+
+<p>Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
+have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
+introducing free software into schools. The project's name is
+"IT-Zukunft Schule" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
+skills with communication skills.</p>
+
+<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
+project?</strong></p>
+
+<p>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
+"IT-Zukunft Schule" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
+reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
+people said. From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
+distributions that target being used for school networks.</p>
+
+<p>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
+commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
+Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
+went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
+and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
+got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
+attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
+the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.</p>
+
+<p>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
+people. People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
+protection experts, other IT professionals.</p>
+
+<p>We came to two conclusions:</p>
+
+<p>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
+bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
+by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
+whereas most of each school's requirements could mapped by a standard
+IT solution. The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
+customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
+possible. In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
+standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
+degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
+locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
+point.</p>
+
+<p>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
+all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
+for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
+has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
+of people into using IT and teaching with IT. "IT-Zukunft Schule"
+tries to provide an approach for this.</p>
+
+<p>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
+defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
+Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school's IT
+equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
+teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
+spare time.</p>
+
+<p>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
+networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
+here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
+teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
+non-existent until 2010/2011.</p>
+
+<p>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
+class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
+avoidance do exist.</p>
+
+<p>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
+social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
+for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
+several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
+they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
+at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
+and probably a gain for all.</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
+any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
+the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
+workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
+project communication, honest communication within the group of
+developers, etc.</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>Every coin has two sides:</p>
+
+<p>Technically: <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/311188">BTS issue
+#311188</a>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
+client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
+should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
+about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
+several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
+contribute).</p>
+
+<p>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
+find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
+Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
+promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
+there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
+these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
+all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
+meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
+there being rather disconnected from the development department of
+Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
+
+<p>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.</p>
+
+<p>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
+serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
+more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.</p>
+
+<p>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
+development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
+PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
+is being integrated in Ubuntu's software center.</p>
+
+<p>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
+as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
+I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
+the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
+whiteboard.</p>
+
+<p>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
+get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
+
+<p>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
+enrol people.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_service_to_look_up_HP_and_Dell_computer_hardware_support_status.html">Web service to look up HP and Dell computer hardware support status</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 6th June 2012
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>A few days ago
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">I
+reported how to get</a> the support status out of Dell using an
+unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was
+<a href="http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2012-February/045959.html">discovered
+by Daniel De Marco in february</a>. Combined with my web scraping
+code for HP, Dell and IBM
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">from
+2009</a>, I got inspired and wrote
+<a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/">a
+web service</a> based on Scraperwiki to make it easy to look up the
+support status and get a machine readable result back.</p>
+
+<p>This is what it look like at the moment when asking for the JSON
+output:
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+% GET <a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/?format=json&vendor=Dell&servicetag=2v1xwn1">https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/?format=json&vendor=Dell&servicetag=2v1xwn1</a>
+supportstatus({"servicetag": "2v1xwn1", "warrantyend": "2013-11-24", "shipped": "2010-11-24", "scrapestamputc": "2012-06-06T20:26:56.965847", "scrapedurl": "http://143.166.84.118/services/assetservice.asmx?WSDL", "vendor": "Dell", "productid": ""})
+%
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>It currently support Dell and HP, and I am hoping for help to add
+support for other vendors. The python source is available on
+Scraperwiki and I welcome help in adding more features.</p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="english.rss"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/xml.gif" alt="RSS Feed" width="36" height="14" /></a></p>
<div id="sidebar">
<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
+<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (5)</a></li>
+
</ul></li>
<li>2011
<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (54)</a></li>
- <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (99)</a></li>
+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (103)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (8)</a></li>
- <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (125)</a></li>
+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (3)</a></li>
- <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (15)</a></li>
+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (133)</a></li>
+
+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (16)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (12)</a></li>
- <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (23)</a></li>
+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (27)</a></li>
- <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (15)</a></li>
+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (16)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (8)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (16)</a></li>
- <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (160)</a></li>
+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (169)</a></li>
- <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (124)</a></li>
+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (129)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
- <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (24)</a></li>
+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (25)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (47)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (4)</a></li>
+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (1)</a></li>
+
<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (23)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
- <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (27)</a></li>
+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (29)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (1)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (1)</a></li>
- <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (19)</a></li>
+ <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (20)</a></li>
</ul>
projects / homepage.git / blobdiff