Petter Reinholdtsen: Debian Edu interview: Dominik George
The Debian Edu / Skolelinux
project consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School. Say hello
to Dominik
George.
Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
life with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a
student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
a bit vacant right now however.
I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
(public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
around 2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
network of that school together with a team of very interested and
talented students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to
learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
to help building another school's informational education concept from
scratch.
That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids
and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.
When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
and cycling.
How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project?
I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
FrOSCon and visited the project
booth. I think I wasn't too interested back then because I used to
have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
"out-of-the-box" solution ;).
The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
OpenRheinRuhr 2011 when the
BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
small demonstration, but there wasn't any real feedback and the guys
seemed rather uninterested.
After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!
What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?
The most important advantage seems to be that it "just
works". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't
have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
it. I could use 8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that's enough to say
that it rocks!
Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no
politician will ever permit a setup described as "Debian, an universal
operating system, with some really cool educational tools" while they
will be jsut fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
school network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).
What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?
I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
other words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I
can list a few points about that:
- always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
- be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
- be helpful at being helpful ;)