Skolelinux Interview by Waldo Bastian

Skolelinux is an ambitious project that aims to provide schools with a flexible and low-cost IT solution based on Linux and KDE. I interviewed Bart Cornelis (Belgian), Kurt Gramlich (German), Conrad Newton (American) and Knut Yrvin (Norwegian) to learn more about Skolelinux and the role that KDE plays in it.

Knut Yrvin: Skolelinux is the Debian-edu project's Custom Debian Distribution (CDD) in development. It's aiming to provide an out-of-the-box localised environment tailored for schools and universities.

The out-of-the-box environment comes with 75 applications aimed at schools, as well as 15 network services pre-configured for a school environment. Coupled with an easy, three question installation, this means that the amount of technical knowledge required is minimal.

Skolelinux is Debian. This means, among other things, that there are no licence costs or worries, and that upgrade and maintenance of the software can be done over the Internet with the power of Debian's apt-get.

Knut Yrvin: At a summer party in June 2001, Petter Reinholdtsen (the project's system architect) and I were talking about how sad it was that most local schools had little besides old computers and a few applications running on Windows, and very little money for upgrades. It was frustrating to see that software in use at Norwegian schools prevented pupils interested in technical, under-the-hood things from learning by example - from source code written by expert programmers. We decided there and then to stop talking about it and simply do it. 13 participants (with 12 other interested parties unable to attend) had a kick-off meeting on July 2, 2001.

Bart Cornelis: I got started on Skolelinux about march last year (which is about the time when Skolelinux started to have things available in non-norwegian) when Petter (our most active developer) asked for translations of the language choice question used in the new debian-installer.

Kurt Gramlich: In Germany we started on September 15, 2002 with www.computerinfotag.de All german linux school servers had a lot of security holes and we were designing a Debian based GNU/Linux system to address that. In November 2002 we discovered Skolelinux and joined them.

Conrad Newton: I am an American who recently came to Norway. I wanted to get involved in a local Linux-related project, and it rapidly became apparent that Skolelinux was an excellent project.

Bart Cornelis: It's main goals are easy installation, having all services configured out-of-the-box for a school situation, availability in the local language.

Conrad Newton: Others can probably say this better than I can, but I will have my say too. The goal of Skolelinux is to provide an inexpensive, easy-to-install, and easy to administer computer system with school-related software.

Kurt Gramlich: Yes, the ability to use old hardware is certainly a goal and also to have a complete solution from server to desktop entirely based on Free Software.

Knut Yrvin: One of the core goals of Skolelinux is to ensure that there are no language barriers keeping the majority of pupils whose mother tongue is not English from finding their way to the information highway.

Another key goal is to lessen the burden on teachers and school system administrators. A report by the Norwegian Ministry of Trade and Industry and Statskonsult documented (p31, p11) that Skolelinux cut the time needed for administration in half, while at the same time allowing to double the amount of hardware for the same price (compared with the Windows solution).

See page 11 of Rapport 2003:24 Erfaringer fra bruk av Skolelinux from Statskonsult and page 31 of Åpen programvare i Norge Status, effekter, hindringer og drivere published by the Ministry of Trade and Industry (both in Norwegian).

Conrad Newton: I have traveled the world, and among other things I discovered that no matter how expert you become at foreign languages, you will never feel as comfortable with them as you are with your native language.

Bart Cornelis: Having support for local languages is one of the core goals of Skolelinux. We currently support 14 languages: Catalan, Danish, German, Spanish, Finnish, French, Italian, Latvian, Bokmal, Dutch, Nynorsk, Brazilian, Northern Saami and Swedish. Of these Italian and Swedisch currently lack a maintainer so if anybody would like to jump in please contact me.

Kurt Gramlich: German language support is very important here in Germany, for example the teachers in the eastern part of Germany speak Russian but no English ;-) Support is growing rapidly: When I came to Oslo in July 2003 we had 6 languages, when I left a week later we had 11 already. We now have 14.

Knut Yrvin: When the goal is to produce software that will be used by relatively inexperienced teachers and pupils, native-language support is crucial. When you are in your home directory, you want to feel "at home".

The Skolelinux effort is about enabling people to use their native tongue when reading the signposts and operating on the information highway. This is why the Saami parliament and The Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development has partly financed translation of free software to The Northern Saami Language. Also The Nynorsk dialect is of great importance. The translation to Nynorsk ("New Norwegian") was the reason why Skolelinux went for KDE in the first place. Gaute Hvoslef Kvalnes had translated KDE 2 to Nynorsk in the year 2000, and got a reward for his voluntary work from The Norwegian Dialect Union. Also the translation of KDE to Northern Saami was boosted by the Skolelinux-effort.

In our opinion native language-support is one of the most neglected "properties" in computer programs. It's easy to be in a large country like Mexico and say "hey free software is fun, it's in my native tongue". It's not the same if you are one of the 30.000 who speak Northern Saami. And it's all about usability - as properly explained in this article:

Gartner Research estimates that 70 percent of Thai consumers will stick with Linux, citing freely available software, lower prices and lack of knowledge among first-time PC owners as the reasons. For the first time PC owners, they do not know the difference between Windows and Linux. But the availability of localisation and superior support from Thai-OSS community, Linux is winning the hearts of these first timers.

The native language support is a huge political and cultural issue in the Nordic countries. Last August, the Nordic Council of Ministers launched a joint Nordic website from which private and professional users can download open-source programmes, providing this rationale:

Open-source programmes which are distributed to small language areas have the advantage over license-based [proprietary] programmes that the users themselves adapt the source code. This means that the programme can be translated and become an important part in the small countries' fight to maintain linguistic and national identity.

www.nordicos.org is published in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Icelandic and English. The project has been financed by a grant of approximately DKK 500,000 from the Nordic Council of Ministers.

Last but not least, Skolelinux does its part translating KDE to three languages, two of which are very similar. This reduces the time spent on translation of the second dialect to 2/3 of the translation effort when translating directly from English. The Saami translation has to be done directly from English anyway, so it takes more time. We also have problems recruiting computer savvy translators to the Saami translator team.

Bart Cornelis: The way the Skolelinux network is set-up allows for one or more thin-client servers to be deployed (normal workstations are of course also possible), so older computers can be used as thin-clients. Besides that we are Debian which means there are no licence costs or worries.

Conrad Newton: To reduce costs on the software side, Skolelinux fits seamlessly into the Debian Free Software superstructure, so that the burden of updating and securing the system is spread globally.

Knut Yrvin: We do three things. First, we recommend the use of recycled machines as thin clients. We love The Linux Terminal Server Project. The school should purchase a new server, follow our architecture recommendations, and use network cards with support for Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE).

Second, using uniform hardware for the thin clients will lessen the installation and administration burden significantly. One option is to buy identical recycled machines for use as thin clients from a company specialized in selling computers to schools. As an example of what kind of offerings are available, schools can get 3 new servers, 96 thin clients (that are reused PC's), and the necessary network components (switches and so on) in an all-in-one Skolelinux-package at around 35,000 EUR (300,000 NOK), including taxes. This even includes 6 hours of user training for all the teachers who will be using the system in their school. We offer help to all interested suppliers of hardware in Norway that want to offer Skolelinux-packages in the market. (See e.g. The Skolelinux-offer from In/Out)."

The third point is acquiring sufficient system knowledge and purchasing skills. The Norwegian Net-School charges 350 EUR for a 40 hour Internet course where teachers get to know Skolelinux. Our recommendation is to get familiar with Skolelinux in a test setup with one firewall, a workstation (500 MHz) with two network cards, and a thin client with a crossed cable.

In the above course, teachers also get some basic knowledge in purchasing computers. Skolelinux has also made a platform independent requirements guide for schools. Here we have taken all recommendations and expectation from The Norwegian Education authorities, and combined and distilled them into a hopefully consistent and complete requirement specification (also in Norwegian).

Knut Yrvin: Indeed, the IT-coordinator at a primary school has some 1-4 hours a week to do system maintenance. (In fact it's a school sysadmin position, but the job titles is a bit strange in the schools :). They often serve 300-400 user accounts, including pupils and teachers on a per-PC total annual budget of around 310 EUR for operations, maintenance and investment. At a school with 60 PCs they have a total of 18,600 EUR for everything from computer maintenance to broadband subscription to system maintenance.

Bart Cornelis: Skolelinux currently uses Webmin as its main adminstration tool, along with some custom build Webmin modules that are under active development.

Knut Yrvin: Yes, we have made a simple tool for user administration that we wrote as part of the project. It has been programmed three times, and now I think we got it right. The user administration tool is part of Webmin. We have also made an easy-to-use backup-tool. School sysadmins also use two other web-enabled tools for configuring parts of the system. The sysadmins need to configure the dhcp-server somewhat, depending on how they use the LTSP-server. They also need to configure CUPS for printing. They can also resize the disks with LVM which is mandatory on a Skolelinux installation. I think there are about 5-6 tools the sysadmins really need to know. The other options are pre-configured.

School sysadmins tell us they are maintaining more than 3 times the number of user accounts and machines with Skolelinux compared to what they did when they were running a Windows NT/2000 network.

Knut Yrvin: There are 74 schools that we know of (there are probably many more). Look at our map or the list over test-schools

Kurt Gramlich: In Germany we started with 4 primary schools in October 2002. Now there are some secondary school preparing for Skolelinux. There are also some in Switzerland and Austria.

Bart Cornelis: In Belgium we're still getting started, hopefully things will start rolling after the FreeEDEM-conference in Brussels on 21-22 february.

Knut Yrvin: Hopefully in March 2004. We still have 6 critical bugs open. Although they have known solutions we don't close a bug before the fix is in a debian-package, and tested in a production system.

Knut Yrvin: A lot. We should mention the German Skolelinux team, they are a great inspiration. But we also get a lot of help from people in Belgium, Finland, Sweden, Latvia, Portugal and Spain. We have also heard from people in Brazil, and Greece.

One more thing. We have a vested interest in debian-installer. We took a grip on the new Installer 2 1/2 years ago from the design-guides from Joey Hess and his associates. Some of our developers did a lot of the initial effort to get it working. We have reduced the number of questions from 128 in the first Skolelinux-installation (autumn 2001) to 5 (may 2002). We can now do the installation in 3 question if we choose.

Bart Cornelis: Skolelinux is a communtity-driven project so everything is done by volunteers. Off course the Norwegian Branch of the project managed to get some funding, so there's some payed people there.

Knut Yrvin: In Norway the NUUG Foundation has paid some people to get more funding, and to meet important people in daytime. They also pay me to organise the project. That was after 1 year of voluntary effort, and with acceptance by the community. We also have 9 people working in their spare time translating OpenOffice to New Norwegian and Bokmål. This is partly financed by 8 County Councils and The Ministry of Education and Research.

It seems that some more money is coming our way. The Ministry of Education has requested that we must earn money by charging schools for our services. Computer programming is not gratis, and the governmental bodies expect us to make business. We have to do this in a gentle way though. We should avoid loosing developers and translators because of arguing over money. It seems that we are able to balance the voluntary work with the need for business.

We will not start selling CDs but it's very likely that we will sell support and maintenance services.

Bart Cornelis: They should contact the English development list, the coordinator for their language, or me if they're interested in starting a new localization.

Kurt Gramlich: German speaking people can subscribe to user@skolelinux.de

Knut Yrvin: More information is available from our developer-site. A lot of work remains, from closing bugs to writing teacher-friendly documentation.

Bart Cornelis: KDE is the desktop used in Skolelinux installs (due to space-concerns it's also the only desktop on the install-cd).

Knut Yrvin: KDE is the desktop, and it gives us the translation tools (kbabel). We still use KDE 2.2.2 as that's in Debian Woody 3.0r2 - with some kde-edu applications, kmail, KOffice and more. The teachers in lower grades love KOffice which is more than enough for writing, simple drawing and so one. We also use applications as Mozilla and OpenOffice.

Personally I use Debian-unstable with KDE 3.2 - which is wanted by many schools in Norway, but we cannot release in Skolelinux because of various security and maintenance issues. The problem is that the schools have to be certain that security fixes and updates come as a mandatory property of the software in use. When using Debian-unstabe packages the security patches are not mandatory. Now that KDE 3.2 is backported to Debian-stable, it would be nice if the security patches could be maintained for it just as it is done in Debian-stable itself.

Knut Yrvin: The main reason was the support of native tongues in Norway. The people that had translated KDE-applications to New Norwegian explained how we should proceed to get the job done.

The other thing is that we live in Norway, the birthplace of object oriented programming. One of my professors as a student in computer science was Kristen Nygaard, one of the inventors of SIMULA, the first object oriented language. Had it not been for the lousy marketing, SIMULA would probably been used instead of Pascal as a teaching language in the US. Then object oriented programming could have been adopted more rapidly in the computer industry. Anyway, the object oriented ideas have won enough ground over the last decade -- so why am I complaining ... Trolltech with the Qt library is also made in Norway, and this also influenced us.

When we started, 2 1/2 years ago, KDE also was a lot more mature than GNOME. We needed a rock solid desktop. It got the job done, and the interface didn't give the teachers any problems when using it. It was easier to switch from Windows to KDE, than switching from Win 3.11 to Win 95, one teacher told us.

Bart Cornelis: That is a difficult question, there's so much things to love about KDE ... the flexibility of KDE?

Conrad Newton: It is solid, well-designed, and feature-rich software. Need one say more?

Knut Yrvin: There are around 4000 spoken languages in the world, of which more than 250 are written. KDE 3.1.5 is "fully" translated to 42, thus there are still many more to go. But we love it because it is translated to two norwegian languages, and partly to sami. We get no complaints from teachers or pupils when using KDE. They say it's easy and straightforward - and it looks great to. Unfortunately Konqueror doesn't do a good job in KDE 2.2.2, so we have to recommend Mozilla for better flash and Java support. Believe me, teachers have no time to spare on getting applications to work properly. So strangely enough, the most appealing feature is that we don't get any complaints.

Kurt Gramlich: We are still missing educational software and tools for teaching. There is some good teaching software that is still only available for Miscrosoft Windows, for example "Lernwerkstatt"

Knut Yrvin: We had to drastically cut the number of available packages (if you can call that a limitation). The teachers complained that there were far too many programs. Now it's 75 and this is also too many. We could handle this with kschoolmenu. Kschoolmenu is a simple KDE-application that reorganises the menu items for different school levels. It is still work in progress, but we hope it will solve the problem of too many visible programs in the menus.

Bart Cornelis: Definately, there's already been one thread on the kde-debian list about cooperation with Skolelinux, and both me and Conrad are following that list. And of course the Norwegian branch of Skolelinux is responsible for the Norwegian nynorsk, and Northern Sami translations in kde (as well as being active on the Norwegian Bokmal translation).

Kurt Gramlich: i know another Kurt from KDE and we are friends and normaly the name Kurt is a symbol for good quality ;-) (Kurt Pfeifle)

Conrad Newton: When "Enterprise" becomes involved, we can expect the amount of money and effort to increase exponentially. The crumbs that fall from this table will clearly benefit all users of free software, not least Skolelinux.

An obvious immediate benefit will be the porting of KDE 3.2 to Debian-stable, since Skolelinux is based on the stable version of Debian.

Now all we need is to get "Enterprise" interested in XFree86-4.3. ;-)

Knut Yrvin: We have the architecture needed for small and medium sized businesses. A new and easy user interface and a distributed user management system has been made in the Skolelinux-project. This could be used to ease deployment in business. This is really a huge advantage. The installation time is less than 20 minutes for everything on a standard server. After some teacher-friendly configuration of LTSP (one line that directs the dhcp-server to use PXE-start-up), the thin clients just pop up. You should really try this yourself!

Bart Cornelis: The development pace of KDE never ceases to amaze me, I really can't think of anything that isn't already being worked on. IMHO the main things for us are tighter integration with debian and non-kde apps (the kde-debian guys are making an amazing amount of progress on these fronts :-), a kiosk-GUI would also be usefull, and of course more educational apps in kdeedu.

Kurt Gramlich: Educational software - I heard of KLOGO ;-) what about coWiki? It would be nice to have a Debian maintainer for a cms-wiki system.

Conrad Newton: Obviously, more educational software would be nice. I look forward to the day when the teacher can take the day off, and the pupils will learn math, french, and geography on their own. We are not there yet.

Knut Yrvin: We really want to cooperate with both the UserLinux and the KDE teams as part of the Debian effort, but haven't been able to give it time and priority yet. We believe these efforts will help Skolelinux both directly by fixing problems for us and indirectly by making more users aware of Debian.

We think our architecture could be suitable for small and medium sized businesses. A new and easy user interface and a distributed user management system has been made in the Skolelinux-project. This could hopefully be beneficial to all the projects.

To be more specific in the short run. A lot of schools ask for back port of the newest vestion of KDE with security upkeep, and the newest hardware support in X (XFree).

People from small businesses ask for groupware-support. Most of all I think that easy groupware deployment should be a main goal, preferably integrated whith easy-to-use user management. A teacher or a sales office employe should be able to just type in the users or get them from a file, give them a standard password, and run -- without having to bother with setting up LDAP-schemas. Let the Windows-people worry about Active Directory and the additional manpower and cost for that kind of solutions.

Kurt Gramlich: It's doing great. We started in august 2003 with 38 Subscribers of user@skolelinux.de and we now have 115 already. 2004 is our year to tell the whole German speeking world about Skolelinux, so we try to be present at all big events for Free Software and education.

For starters we will be present at FOSDEM in Brussels this weekend (February 21-22, 2004) and later this year at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tag (March 6-7, 2004).

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Last update: 2008-01-11