Petter Reinholdtsen: Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby
Debian Edu / Skolelinux
users are spread all across the globe. The second inteview after
the
Squeeze release was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
long time Linux user in United Kingdom.
Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
installations.
How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?
Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
these things we decided to try it.
What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?
By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
proprietary software everywhere.
What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?
As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!
Which free software do you use daily?
Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
that counts...)
Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?
That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
applications". However, schools today are experiencing budget
constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
XP. At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.
I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu users in this country has to be part of it.
This weekend, I launched an extremely ambitious effort to collect
evidence of extremely ambitious efforts. The result was a short
program that 
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 18:22:10 +0000
Some of my recent time has been devoted to making our boot media more Mac friendly, which has entailed rather a lot of rebooting. This would have been fine, if tedious, except that some number of boots would fall over with either a clearly impossible kernel panic or userspace segfaulting in places that made no sense. Something was clearly wrong. Crashes that shouldn't happen are generally an indication of memory corruption. The question is how that corruption is being triggered. Hunting that down wasn't terribly easy.
So, since Wednesday, we have no more teenagers among our children.
Indeed, our youngest, Magali, turned 20 and we happily celebrated that
in a japanese restaurant in Paris : Magali is living in a (very) small
flat in Paris as she attends preparation courses for exams meant to
enter physical therapist schools. She's currently working very hard to
prepare these and is left with only one week before the first exam.
We're 100% confident that she'll succeed.
Really, the days where our little shrimp was crawling across her bed,
turning clockwise and finally sleeping in the width of the bed....do
not seem so far. And still, these folks we call "our kids" are now
grown-up persons living their own lives : Jean-Baptiste (some of my
friends reading this blog have met him at DebConf 10) will soon enter
profesionnal life after graduating an engineering school in
electronics, at 24. Sophie, now 22, will resume her social worker
school in Bordeaux in September and will probably start working as
social worker ("assistante sociale", in French) afterwards. And we
hope that our little shrimp (which her sister calls "mini-poop")
starts a physical therapist school next year.
So, well, more and more, Elisabeth and I are old parents and weeks
where we're indeed both alone at home are now common (not to mention
weeks where only one of us is alone either because she has
professionnal commitments on some other side of the planet or I have
some free software event on another side of the planet).
It is indeed really likely that this year's holidays will be the first
ones where we have a distant travel...which we'll be doing alone.
Holidays in Nicaragua (you probably guess why Nicaragua) are much
awaited and will be enjoyed a lot, but still...:-)
So, well, to all those of you who read this and are parents, or plan
to become parents, be happy. The wonder that it is lasts for years and
it's very hard to describe precisely the link that connects parents
and their children. At least the one we have with our children, which
both us and them are proud of. And that pride and this link have no
price. I really wish you guys to develop the same with your newborns
(particularly those of you who very very very recently became parents
anbd, yes I mean you who know who you are...).
After a long silence, I updated the bpo Debian-installer for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.4, Squeeze. You know, you can take it from 
One of the earliest features I wrote for the Debian bug tracking
system (Debbugs) after joining the team was support for forcibly
merging bugs. Originally, merging two bugs required that the bugs be
in exactly the same state before merging them; 
Over the past few weeks, I upgraded my Ubuntu hosts to the Precise release due to be published next month. While the upgrade on my desktops from Oneiric to Precise went mostly well, the upgrade of my terminal server from Lucid to Precise was more daunting. In short: too many packages leave an undue amount of cruft behind, namely tons of obsolete configuration files that are not correctly handled by maintainer scripts, to either delete obsolete files or to rename them to the currently valid filename. At Debian, these oversights are periodically monitored using piuparts and reported to the package maintainer, but Ubuntu doesn't seem to offer this sort of automated Quality Assurance process yet. Perhaps this would be something worth developing?
PS: For those who wonder how I spotted those obsolete configuration files, I simply enabled the 
Just as I promised yesterday, I pushed a new 
For a while now the git repository used for packaging WebKitGTK+ has been broken. Broken as in nobody was able to clone it. In addition to that, the packaging workflow had been changing over time, from a track-upstream-git/patches applied one to a import-orig-only/patches-not-applied one.
After spending some more time trying to unbreak the repository for the third time I decided it might be a good time for a clean up. I created a