1. Importance of developer gatherings
DebianEdu / Skolelinux
Free Software World Conference 3.0
Project manager Knut Yrvin 4th July 2007

2. Inter project cooperation
Debian installer
Linux Terminal Server Project
Enterprise configuration
New software tailored for teaching
Reuse and maintainability
Importance of upstream
Do-o-cratic
They who does the work decides 2

3. Skolelinux project as an example +400 schools using the system today

4. Before presenting inter project experiences, some important things about computers in schools

5. It's not about office productivity
It's really about:
Sending drawings to school classes in other countries.
Making music, gather information or decode words (in lower grades).
Learn to create and share
It's not about office productivity

6. The basic idea
Pupils interested in technical, under-the-hood things can learn by example – from source code written by expert programmers
Using our own mother tounge when travelling on the information highway
More computers and more software, less time with maintenance. Get more for less 6

7. Experiences with gatherings

8. Rewriting Debian Installer
Initially: Number of choices to install DebianEdu was 128
Auto, auto, auto
Choices was reduced to 3
Voluntary and sponsored development
Choose profile, language and source

9. Workable installer at Debconf 3
Rewriting installer started autumn 2001
Workable installer summer 2003
Made it a Debian project, paid Joey Hess
First released with Skolelinux 1.0
Then Debian Sarge

10. Translating Debian Installer
Kurt Gramlich motivated developers to translate new Debian Installer to 13 languages at Debconf 3, summer of
With Debian Etch we got 54 langages:

11. Skolelinux and Edubuntu Cooperation
Developer gatherings
Linux Terminal Server Project
Educational software
Integration issues, e.g laptop support, hardware recognition

12. Linux Server Terminal Project
Prior versions of LTSP
Distro dependent packages (RedHat)
LTSP with kernel, xfree86 and init- scripts integrated as a “mini distro”
Difficult to maintain and distribute
LTSP 5.0 (MueKow project)
Distro independent Debian, Fedora, SuSE Gentoo, Slackware
LTSP with init-script. Reuse of distro spesiffic kernel, x.org etc.
Easy to maintain and distribute
Mark Shuttleworth asked for LTSP integration in Ubuntu

13. Skolelinux, LinEx, PSL-Brasil
Joint statement, 29 July 2004
The intention is to eliminate the duplication of work and to facilitate communication of ideas between the participants. In this way we hope to improve the competence of our digital skills and to ensure universal access to technology for youth and adults.
Initiated by Anne Østergaard, GNOME

14. DebianEdu / Extremadura 2006
Fixing autopartitioning
Cleaning debian- edu-install/config
Suggest to include LinEx upstream
Maintenance and sustainability

15. Importance of upstream
Upstram project
translating
StopMotion
Gatherings
Different
developers
Rosetta
(Canonical)

16. Developer gatherings
Using the free software development methods and tools - upstram
It will introduce more work and hinder adoption when not contributing upstream
Finance and facilitation of developer gatherings
Speeds up the developing effort and reduces frictions between groups
You could get on or two free loaders out of 30 developers. That's much less than a regular company
Spreading knowledge and experiences
Don't reinvent what others has done. Reuse what others has done together That's more cost efficient and more fun

17. Have to obey
All code, translations and documentation has to be committed to repositories upstream
Bugs has to be committed to the bug-tracking system
Follow the licence-terms. GPL your contribution if possible. And please don't complicate your project introducing complicated licenses schemas
The person who does something decides
Help people to help them selves by applying for economical support, paying for developer gatherings and infrastructure (version system, servers, trips etc.)
Do-ocracy 17

18. Characteristics of DebianEdu / Skolelinux
Started as an voluntary effort 2. July 2001
Contribution is over man-hours from developers, translators and writers since 2001
35 developer gatherings with 7 to 150 participants
Most of them in Norway
Norway, Germany, Greece, France, Spain and Brazil
The version system “is the project” 18

19. New project
Making it easy to use free software in teaching at universities and colleges
Developer tools out of the box
Project planning (KPlato)
Unified Modelling Language (Umbrello)
Workbench (Qdevlop, Kdeveloper, ...)
Qtopia Greenphone SDK
Mobile Developer Days 2007
University of Aalborg in June

20. Questions and Answers
Thanks :)

21. Faster, Better, and Cheaper
Free/Open Source Software Development (F/OSSD) often entails shorter development times that can produce higher quality systems, and incur lower costs than may be realized through developing systems according Software Engineering (SE) techniques. [...]
Internet time and F/OSSD projects also tend to produce incremental software releases at a much faster rate, even to the point of releasing unstable but operational daily system builds. This denotes not only a reduction in product release cycle times compared to SE practice, but also a significantly restructured life cycle process and process cycle time reduction.
Walt Scacchi from Institute for Software Research University of California, Irvine

22. What is Skolelinux A complete ICT-solution for the schools
network architecture out of the box, operational concept
reuse of computers with thin clients and diskless workstations
digital user profile
75 user programs, OpenOffice.org
+50 languages
Support our mother tongue with the schools curriculum in mind
Made for the school budget