Title: Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda
Tags: english, debian edu, intervju
-Date: 2012-06-25 11:30
+Date: 2012-09-17 12:00
-<p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
-
-Giorgio Pioda
+<p>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
+<a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
+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.</p>
<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
<p>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
-example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in the IT-courses during
-university where sufficient to start. Self training is anyway very
-important</p>
+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</p>
+
+<p>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
+<a href="http://www.spse.ch/">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 Organization.
<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?</strong></p>
-<p>Looking for Linux/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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?</strong></p>
<p>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
+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
<p>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
+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
-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 ;-)</p>
+distribution (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 ;-)</p>
<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
-<p>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...</p>
+<p>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
+<a href="http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html">Perceus</a>
+has the same...</p>
<p>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.</p>
+something breaks. Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
+statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.</p>
<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
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
+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.</p>
-
- > * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
-
-<p>Some other school IT managers, collecting a database of success
-cases, so that also schools managers at higher level would get an
-enhanced sensibility towards GNU/Linux in the schools.
-
-
- Fell free to correct my mistakes...
-
- Cheers
-
- Giorgio
-
-
-Hi,
-
-you can also add that I use daily texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit
-of R statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OOffice.
-
-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
-recognized by the Olympic Swiss Organization. (www.spse.ch)
-
+repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
+Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.</p>
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