 The next talk I will be by Dominic Gorghe and Mike April on Debian Edo's school linux. Yeah, welcome to our talk, thanks for being here. Yeah, as you already heard in the introduction, we will be talking about Debian Edo. Who of you has already heard about the Debian Edo project? Very cool. Okay, who of you has heard about school linux? Okay, for those who have an aura, can you use a small refreshment on what this is? Debian Edo is a project inside Debian. It's a pure blend and it cares about everything that has to do with the use of Debian in schools and in education. In several regards. First of all, Debian Edo offers pre-configured installation media that can be used to install and operate a fully featured educational network for schools, both for operating servers, including all the nice things like managing hosts and groups of computers, for computer labs, for example, users, access rights for the users, and stuff around that, like doing backups, having internal email for the users, stuff like that. And also, which is probably the most important part, network boot environment, so computer labs can be booted over the network using PXE or can be installed over the network. And on top of that, there's a desktop environment that can be installed pre-configured to work very well with this network, and it offers quite a huge set of educational software that can be used in the different subjects at school, starting from informatics, of course, but also an office suite, educational software for geography, biology, chemistry, and all that. I think, do you know how many packages are pre-selected? I'm not so good at statistics. I think it's something around 100 that are pre-selected. And of course, as it basically is just Debian, of course, there are tons of other packages for educational use available. Today, we want to mainly talk about what we intend to happen to Debian Edo this year, or in the foreseeable future, what has already happened, give a small update about what happened in the past, and to get started with that, we will start by telling a bit about different groups of people who are interested in Debian Edo, or maybe should be, or sadly aren't yet, who knows. Can you tell a bit about the development of Skolinox and what is special about it, what makes it special inside Debian and what developers do, what we care for? Yes, thank you. So I'm one of the Debian developers, the Debian Edo developers. And there are other people here in the room that actually receive our highest appreciation. One of them is actually Wolfgang, who has been keeping the development up for the last three years. Then it's Holger, who is sort of involved in everything, and also in Debian Edo, and is doing a great job as a release manager. So the main thing for the last two years we have to mention is that Debian Edo has really travelled back inside Debian. So it was some overlay thing with extra packages outside of Debian for quite a few years, and the release cycle of Debian Edo was sort of laid back in comparison to Debian. So at the moment it's like there is the first release of the next Debian stable, and with the first point release or the second at the latest, you have the Debian Edo system ready for installation. So I guess that's Holger and Wolfgang, who mainly earned the credits. So if you want to clap your hands, that's the point you should do. Thank you. And also over the years that I've sort of either contributed or observed the Debian Edo development, it's really like chasing a move and target all the time. So it's quite a hard job to actually sort of follow up what is changing in Debian over a release cycle. And then the freeze comes and then you have like four weeks or up to eight weeks maybe to actually put the last jigsaw pieces together and get the system up and running so that you put in your ISO image or your USB stick and install from that and then you mainly have something like a small business server for school. So technical plans for development. So at the moment on the school level or the municipality level in different counties all over Germany, you have the challenge or they actually give the challenge to us to not set up an insular school system at one school, but they want to actually connect their schools, have a user identity management system across the municipality or even across the county. And we are not ready for that, but we are looking at it on a technical level to actually hook different scholarly nooks installation together, either with another scholarly nooks installation as a master server or a dual master server setup. Or what is quite common at the moment is that the Univention people with their UCS at school product, they actually have their foot on the county level. So the educational ministries, they sort of get in touch with Univention, get to know the UCS server and start deploying an identity management system for teachers and students. And they are interested and we are interested actually on hooking those two systems together, like the scholarly nooks system being a slave machine for a county-wide or municipality-wide UCS. Anything else development-wise that we should mention here? Okay, yeah, good. Thank you. So there is obviously one group of people who are interested in the scholarly nooks as users, which are teachers, and you know how that goes. Teachers have lessons to do, they have to prepare lessons, they run their lessons, and sometimes they want to do those new shiny, digital things. Sometimes they even do and don't only want to do. The most important thing for teachers is that they are offered a system that simply works. There's no time for digging around in the system, making something work, trying endlessly whether something will be fine at the end. They just want to basically enter the computer lab, sit a class down, boot machines, have them lock in and the system works. And sometimes there's quite a big difference between what developers think works and what users think works. Sometimes there's even a bigger difference in what teachers think works. So one of the important things at the point where we as a developing community come together with schools is finding out what they want, what issues they have and tailoring the system to the special needs. Yeah, students are using the system as well. They are mostly used to Windows desktops or sometimes macOS or their smartphones. There are some issues that are new to me, that there are new issues every year. I work with many children and adolescents in different projects. I think one interesting story is that 10 years ago when I started, or more, 12 years ago when I started giving lessons to children, there was half of a classroom that did not use a computer on a regular basis at home. Then two years later, everyone was using a computer on a regular basis at home. And they all knew their way around. Basically, they could use a mouse and a keyboard. They could basically write text in an office application. And in that regard, there was basically a refinement of this knowledge going on. And for a few years now, I have been stumbling across students in fifth or sixth grade or something, and they are about to type something on the computer. And they tell them, yeah, there are spaces missing in your code. And they ask, what is the space bar? And this is because they are used to their smartphones. They type in word, and it's just auto-correction and auto-completion. And the user interface is changing. And maybe this is also a difficulty that will become bigger. And in that regard, and in some more regards, it's very important to also listen to students when it comes to a system deployed and used at schools. So Mike will tell you about... I guess that's me. Well, that's the goal. Okay, so about the support system. IT at school used to be something for one or two teachers. If you were lucky, there were two of you who could set up a network, one server and some workstations. I think this time has passed. IT at schools, you wouldn't fix your sync. You would call a plumber, so if the computer lab is broken, normally these days you call an IT company. And promoting Scholar Linux in Germany means that there needs to be, at some point, we need to be really quick setting up a support structure. And in former times there was a Scholar Linux certificate. So if you wanted to become a Scholar Linux admin, an administration company, or admin on a personal level, you had to obtain your certificate. And there were coaching, consulting sessions, training sessions for those companies providing professional support. We are thinking about reviving that. We have, in Northern Germany, we have a couple of schools, and there was one company that was doing first level support that was supervised by me. And at the moment there are more companies coming in, and I am about to start a third level support concept so that you can book my company, or actually myself as a person, to support Scholar Linux. And I think that we need, if you want to facilitate people using free software at schools, we need to consolidate that on a highly professional level, in fact. And this is something that you might be talking in two minutes about as well. Yeah, so we need to think about professionalism here, and get people into Scholar Linux in terms of how to configure that system, because it's not Debian, it's different. I think it's for you. Yeah, that's me too. Brief history. So I came to Scholar Linux in 2011, and that was at a quite, well, it was a quite difficult point of time. Actually, there was a county-wide solution in one of the more southern counties in Germany. That's sort of where the overall result was. It failed because there was a lot of work done for Scholar Linux, or with Scholar Linux actually, and it ended up with none of that being upstream back to Debian. So, and we also had the observation that there was the international team, which was like the developers hanging around on hash Debian Edu on IRC, and on the Debian Edu English mailing list. And there was a, say, marketing group in Germany at least, not sure about other countries, that attended Linux days and set up a booth there and talked about Scholar Linux. And these two groups, they sort of got actually, they diverged. Well, there was a lack of communication at some point. And I think here, and also with previous meetings, we are about to change that because the Scholar Linux representation in Germany has just been moved over to the Techids NGO in Germany. And we have two developers, Debian developers there, one Debian Edu developer, which is Nick, so that what was sort of split apart a bit, has been split apart, is now actually rejoining again, which is really, really good. Okay, so, at the end of last year, yeah, things, I have to be honest regarding the use of Scholar Linux, Debian Edu, and publicity, the community support, community meetings, everything looked very sad. And that's why we start an effort to revive some things. And what happened this year, I'm running out of time, so I have to hurry a bit, sorry. The community coordination was transferred to an NGO, Techids, some of you might hear about it, there's also a lightning talk scheduled for later. And we care about many things concerning education and free software. And what we want to do is, what Mike already said, we want to bring these different groups, the users, people who support the system, people who present the software, the project at conferences and developers in Germany and other countries, we want to bring them closer together, which has started to work quite well. There have been meetings in the past in Norway that we attended and here at Depconf, and yeah, there's quite a bit going on. We have updated the website, there's a nice landing page for people who are looking for a product, because that's maybe one important catch word, because teachers or people who make decisions for the use of software in schools, they don't want a wiki and a mailing list and something they want to find a product, something that looks like a product. And that is one thing that we want to move the presentation to. And we started doing surveys with the companies who once offered support for DM&EDU and with some schools, how they use it, which is in quite an early stage. I hope that we will be able to present successful details about that at a later conference. Yeah, okay. For those of you who are interested in education and children and free software in general, you're welcome to attend the lightning talk where I will give a few details about what TechEds does together with children. We are very eager to integrate children in the free software community. Normally there would have been some kids around here as well, but this didn't work out because the travel and school and all of that, if you're interested, just attend the lightning talk. Okay, just a picture of all the children interested in Debian and free software at some conference. Okay. So, a goal for 2018, bring all the groups together. On a technical level, do we want to say repeat some words again? Yeah, so one goal I forgot and one person I forgot to mention is Phil Hans. Phil Hans is a DD as well. He is here at the conference and he's trying to get the Debian Edo installer into the Debian installer sort of workflow thing so that we actually, we used to build the Debian Edo ISO images on a separate machine and it was always a bit tricky. So we hope for the Buster release that we have that in the Debian installer build environment and that Debian builds the Debian Edo installer CDs. So that's one release, one goal for 2018. Another goal is that we want to promote the remote desktop part in Debian Edo a bit more so that one outstanding feature that other products at the moment don't have is that you can remote log on to your system from home as a teacher and test what you want to do in class in the evening before on the same system hardware software, especially compared to what you have in school. So that is one issue that's always breaking. They prepare stuff at home and have different network conditions and different operating systems and then they are in class and then it takes 15 minutes to set up what they want to show or it doesn't work at all. So that's one thing, remote desktop that we will integrate and it's an outstanding feature not available in other products at the moment. Anything else? We want to secure the file system level a little bit more. We will not talk about that here but there needs to be some work done. Okay, it's not yet ready. It needs work. Okay. So, most important thing every project always needs help both in the development parts but also in the community efforts. We need people who are interested in doing some support in promoting Debian edu in school news and even free software and education in general. If you are interested in that maybe just talk to one of us today or whenever you like. There are two mailing lists. One for the Germany efforts which is more support and community coordination and less development and the general English speaking this Debian edu is more about development and technical stuff. Also about support. If you are interested in the community side and the presentational side and promotion and community you will find details about how to contact TechEd on the TechEd's website. So, there are many ways you can help. One word about the German mailing list. We made the observation yesterday that the technical level on the mailing list was a bit, well, there were questions and no answers or people answering other people that did not really have insight in Debian edu which is okay but what especially I put on my agenda is that I provide support on the German list a bit more than I used to do so that we actually raised the Nivo on the mailing list and also the frequency of posts and the response time to posts from users. And the other thing is that it's also the channel for organizational stuff around ScholarInux now. So, and that's what Nick is doing a lot. For more ways how to support free software education in general, again a reference to the lightning talk and so times over I think so thanks for attending and listening and have a nice meeting. Are there questions or comments? Just one comment which is not so much about Debian edu but about other blends because we tried to build a Debian edu installation image and then that we might create the traditional way but the other questions unsolved from the stretch release is having a blends installer CD in Debian. There was some effort but then it was too late because it was frozen. Buster freezes in half a year so we have half a year to make blends installable in Debian. If somebody is interested please pick it up. So that is blends in general, all blends, okay. Any further questions? Yes, a general question in which countries is currently ScholarInux used nowadays because I know that there are some other at least there are some other educational institutions that were created years back. I don't know the status in different countries across Europe is so currently where is ScholarInux actually used more in Germany, Norway, other countries also? That's a good question in fact. There was on the old ScholarInux website there was a collecting database and schools could put their names on and then they didn't remove their names and in fact that's something we should put on how to do this to get an overview here. There are a few schools in other Germany that I know of. A few schools in North America's failure some in Rhineland files probably some in Oslo I know or they do like they learn from the techniques in Debian Edo but use a plain Debian system to set that up. So there's a lot of school and Linux stuff going on in Greece at the moment. So I guess did a talk at the Debian Conf in Montreal which was really impressing there. Lots of dots on the map were Linux with LTSP and Debian with LTSP was deployed. So, but I can't really answer your question. I'm sorry. So same kind of question about the support and the organization around ScholarInux. Do you know of any other kind of organization like the one you described like your company who is doing support in Germany and take kids? Is it German also? It's an NGO, yeah. So I'm doing that really as a business thing so you can contract me for third level, second level, first level support. The first level support I will hand over to a partner company. At the moment you do it on an NGO level so you sort of write invoices to the schools and then you use it for the association or for well maybe also have contracts with individual persons. If you're a school you can also contract or address me if you want a certain feature and you want that in Debian like a new software that is free software but not yet packaged then it's also, it could be an idea that you address me, either I package it for you or I know someone in Debian who's already working on that and we sort of, you know, dispatch that. Also there are some companies on the Wiki so maybe you want to mention them. There is, on the Debian Wiki there's an area for Debian Edu which is also linked on the German school news website and I think the school news NO and schoolnews.org point there. There's a list of professional support with quite a big list of companies all over the world who do support for Debian Edu. We are just working on cleaning on tidying up the list for the German companies because it is very outdated. I think this is also true for the other countries. We know of three companies throughout Germany who gave us feedback that they are or will be actively supporting the system on a professional level. The problem is if you have been a Scholar Linux supporter like four years ago and then now someone approaches you and says I want Scholar Linux support it's a completely different system different user management now with Kerberos blah blah blah I really want to invite those companies that want to support Scholar Linux to get in touch with firstly the developer group on the Debian Edu English mailing list or contact either of us and see how action interaction can happen. Just doing it and then promising Debian Edu will work for a certain customer and then it fails that it's not good for the project reputation. Okay, sorry, time's up. Thanks again.