- Giorgio Pioda <gfwp@ticino.com> (May 27) (for_me inbox intervju skolelinux year-2012)
- Subject: Re: Are you willing to be interviewed for my blog?
- To: Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>
- Date: Sun, 27 May 2012 08:53:38 +0200
-
- Hi Petter,
-
- of course, see below...
-
- On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 09:55:47PM +0200, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
- > Hi, Giorgio.
- >
- > I am running a serie of interviews about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.
- > Would you be willing to answer these questions and have the answers
- > published on my blog?
- >
- > * 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
- an LMS 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 exemple NMR analisys of protein folding)
- and in the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self training
- is anyway very important
-
- > * How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu project?
-
- Looking for Linux/PDC I foud 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 exemple 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 distro (I have such a 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 (http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html)
- 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.
-
- > * 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 tendencially 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 responsability
- to keep the laptop ready to use; we were really unsatisfied with M$ 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.
+<P>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 tendencially not open to change.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
+laptop and we have the responsability to keep the laptop ready to use;
+we were really unsatisfied with M$ 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.</p>