 Hi everyone, I'm Artis Gilgopoulos and this is my colleague Otini Ciami. We are IT teachers from Greece, and we would like to present the success story of how more than a thousand Greek schools migrated from windows to open source software. Specifically, the tools that we used were the Edbuntu or Ubuntu or Debian as the operating system. We used a package called LTSP, the Linux Terminal Server Project, to network the clients. We developed a software of our own, we call it a BOTIS, and the teacher uses it to monitor the students screens. And another software which we initially called School Screens that the system administrator uses to manage the computer lab with GUI. That project is currently being devinized as part of a Debian Outreach project, and it will be in Debian soon. And we also have developed some repositories of our own to host some Greek educational software. Let's start with what the typical Greek school looks like. Schools in Greece are somewhat small. They have about 50 to 200 students and maybe 15 to 30 teachers. And there's usually one IT teacher that doesn't have a lot of technical skills. And he's usually maintaining one computer lab. That computer lab has one server which is also used as a teacher workstation. And usually about 12 clients, but very diverse, they vary a lot. They can be all like random three computers or new ones like Intel Core i5. But usually schools have minimal budget for hardware and software. So that's what we wanted to put open source into. In Greece we have three levels of IT support for schools. At the school level there's the IT teacher whose main responsibility is to teach. So he can only dedicate a couple of hours per week to maintain the computer lab. And he usually doesn't have any Linux experience. So we cannot assume that he can use the console. He can only use good programs to administer the school, the computer lab. At the prefecture level there's two to four IT teachers which go to an office and serve as full-time students for about two to three hundred schools. Those are more experienced, but they usually don't have any Linux experience either. And at the national level there's a team of about five developers that test new solutions and write documentations and best practice guides. And schools can follow those on a voluntary basis. The decision is per school. There's nothing mandatory. And the teachers can communicate with the prefecture or the national team using forums or a health desk system or IRC or even VNC for remote support. The first software that we use in those schools is LTSP. This is the Linux Terminal Server project which can be used to met food think clients. Think clients are done terminals without a disk, that load the operating system from the network from the server and after login all the applications run on the server and the screen is transferred to the clients like remote desktop. The protocol used there is remote X. LTSP uses a lot of other software to accomplish that. The list is to the right. And we only had to develop a couple of our own software like a display manager called LDM and the file system for remote CDs and USB sticks to make them remotely available called LTSPFS. There are many benefits to using LTSP and Linux. Some of them are listed here. For example, financial benefits like we can reuse all desktop PCs as think clients. So a school that has spent in three can use those and only buy a new server and a gigabit switch with like 500 euros and upgrade the computer lab. There are no software licenses involved and it needs less personnel for support because we only have to maintain one installation. Only the server installation is maintained since the clients are discussed. It's also easier to maintain because the software is open and we can adjust it to our needs. Another benefit is that it can coexist with existing Windows installations. So if a school has a Windows based computer lab he can add the option to boot LTSP without formatting any client without touching the client disks and the teachers can select to boot to LTSP or to Windows from the boot manager. And it's a good thing that it doesn't have any viruses. So the national team heard about all those benefits and back in 2007 and decided to do a pilot program. They bought 20 servers and installed a debut on them, 704, and send them to 20 schools. And while those servers were pre-installed it was still difficult to get LTSP up and running because the networking parts were rather hard. The server had two network cards and it needed separate switch for the think clients so the IT teacher had to rewire some stuff and to edit some configuration files. For example, the master image was cloned to those 20 servers and network cards were named differently because of the cloning process and no one was able to fix it so this pilot program was a complete failure. Those schools were not able to run LTSP except for my school. I was one of the test schools there and it took me about a couple of months to get LTSP running because I could only dedicate about a couple of hours per week to work on that. So that first contact was a failure. In the next year I was invited to join the national team and the first task that I thought should be done was to write an extensive guide about how to set up the operating system, how to install the LTSP and add all the necessary software and how to create user accounts. But while I documented all that it was still hard because it involved the command line in several of the steps and I didn't think that the other IT teachers would be able to use the command line. So that's when I felt the first version of the software was called School Scripts which at that point where was a whipped tail and a face was teachers just selected the script to run at each phase chapter of the guide. So now I'm supposed to create user accounts, let's run the script. It involved a lot afterwards. It evolved, sorry. Another thing that was missing at that time was that we had more than a hundred windows-based educational apps in Greece and we weren't able to use them in the Linux environment. So we had to create a Debian repository which we managed with Reprepo and we devinized all those windows applications. We created the packages from there and put them to that repository and we used Wine or Java or HTML or Flask technologies to make them run under Linux. And we needed an additional repository and it would be a PDA to ship newer versions of some software that we needed either ours or from others that we could have backward. So here's the screenshot that a known education menu looked like in a school that installed some Greek software for language and geography and math. Everything was integrated now all the windows applications. And the next year I was invited by Canadian LTSP developer to join the upstream LTSP team. And one of my first contributions there was to add support for the proxy TCP protocol. That protocol simplified the networking a lot. We no longer had to require anything. We didn't have to have two switches. Server did only a single network app. It was more plug and play. I had support for that in LTSP but I also had to ask other developers to add support for that like the DNSMAS developer or the IPXC or the Win32 loader developers. And I was very excited to see that they implemented that in a matter of days. It was an amazing experience. The result of that was here's the screenshot that existing Windows-based computer labs could just run an application from Debian Win32 loader.exe and get a menu entry in the Windows boot loader to select between Windows and boot from the network. So it became extremely easy to deal with. In the next year two LTSP developers Jonathan Carter and Stefan Grabber added the first version of a plugin to support FAT clients in LTSP. Now we know that the LTSP think clients are dumb terminals that load the operating system from the server and then run the applications on the server. That means that the server needs to be busy and that they consume a lot of network bandwidth. So gigabit is the minimum. And this plugin added support for newer clients that would again be diskless and would again load the operating system from the server but they would run it with their own resources and their own CPU and RAM which means that applications run locally there was no need for a beefy server anymore but the client specifications now would be the same as normal workstations so they would need one gigabyte RAM and a recent CPU. Of course there would still be diskless. That was ideal for our newer school computer labs. So we invested a lot of years on supporting that scenario and now it's even been proposed a method to install LTSP. Up until 2011 we were using a software called Italk to manage the users' screens. So the teacher was able to see the students' screens and broadcast his screen but that was not really maintained. It was very buggy. So we decided to develop our own tool. We first developed it in Greek only. It allowed to wake the clients on land or log them out or send them down. It allowed the teacher to broadcast his screen or to monitor the user's screens or to send them messages. And later on we internationalized it and Vagrant uploaded to Debian in 2011. Another milestone in our story was the introduction of a thing we badly named LTSP Playbook. In the classical TSP installation we actually have to maintain two operating systems. One is the server and another is the G-root that we use as the virtual disk for the clients. So the teacher had to install the software on the server using Synaptic or some other package manager and he would then have to use the G-root command to handle that virtual disk for the clients and install the same software using the command line which was difficult and sometimes it was buggy. So I had an idea to clone the server installation. Now the teacher would only use Synaptic he wouldn't use the console at all and at some point he would run a command that would clone the server installation and make the client image out of that. Of course it would omit sensitive data like user accounts and there's a drawback here that the server and the clients need to build the same architecture so we usually use the 32-bit installations in order to be able to boot our older clients. In 2012 we faced another challenge that the newer versions of GNOME and Unity needed OpenGL to run and OpenGL doesn't run well over the network so older thin clients didn't run well at that point. Another test of environment called GNOME Plasback was suitable but there was no distribution that defaulted to that test of environment so we actually had to create our own live CDs and we took the opportunity to create three different DVDs one for its education level one for primary schools with all the software for primary schools etc. Those became very popular we no longer need that because we switched to MATEK At that point our solution was very stable and we didn't have any serious issues to solve so we took a couple of years to promote it. The national team traveled to about 50 cities and educated about 2,000 ID teachers which is about one-third of all Greek ID teachers The education ministry listened and heard about the solution and it actively started promoting open source for example in some laptops 120,000 laptops that they bought for students they asked that they also have Edubuntu in them which was a success They even started mentioning LTSP and FOS in general in some school books At that point I also joined the local prefecture team and advocated LTSP there so the result is that in my prefecture about 80% of schools use Linux which is a large percentage Now, Fortineen will tell us her style of the story I'm Fortineen Xiangwin and I work as an ID teacher in public schools in Greece How my story about LTSP starts In 2011 I attended a workshop in a conference in Greece where Alkis and his team presented the LTSP solutions Since my school's lab was an old Windows 2000 based lab with expired licenses and old Pentium 3 workstations I thought that it was worth trying the solution However, I was worried about technical issues that might accompany this new technology but Alkis assured me that he would technically support me if I had installation problems and that if I would change my mind I would return to my previous lab configuration without any additional effort as no software would be installed in students' workstation This made me feel confident enough to experiment So, within a day we installed LTSP, a Poptis and school scripts in my school lab and me and my students started enjoying many benefits Modern software without license problems No viruses in the lab Students could get software at home It's worth saying that my students adjusted very easily in the new environment So, the experiment with students succeeded But, what about my colleagues were they willing to change the technology used From 2013 to 2016 I also worked as a teacher trainer in some seminars and a prefecture I decided to use an LTSP lab for the training courses So, my colleagues had the opportunity to use the lab as students and see the benefits of LTSP and see a Poptis school script shared folders in action The feedback was very positive They were excited and one after the other wanted to implement the LTSP solution in their school In 2015 I joined the National School Support Team and I worked on promoting and documenting the LTSP solution in Greece What about me and Debian Outreaching? In 2016 I heard about Outreaching and thought that it would be a good idea to participate as an intern In an Outreaching project about internationalizing the part of the Greek solution that was missing from Debian This was the school script software Why would the community be interested in the school script software? What does it do? School scripts have evolved a lot since 2008 and now it is a very viable GUI-based tool as it allows the school administrator to perform all the necessary tasks without using a terminal attendee point Some of its features it automatically installs all dependencies and transforms the workstation into an LTSP server It exposes all configuration and LTSP virtual disk management in GUI menus It supports creation, mass creation and management of users and groups It supports third-folders of the group Here you can see a screenshot from the LTSP manager's main point In the left pane there is a list with the groups already created While in the right pane you can see the users that belong in the selected A1 group The school lab administrator can massively process these users for example remove them from the selected group Here we see the dialogue that the school lab administrator uses in order to create student accounts for workstations for all student classes Specifically, its class represents a group Here we have six classes from A1 to C2 and we need 12 accounts for each class because we have 12 workstations in the lab So the lab administrator fills the first two fields and then when he presses the create button 72 accounts will be created I tried to give you a small taste of the LTSP manager features and now I will focus on some of the steps regarding its internalization process Keep in mind that it was a Greek software so it had to be translated to English and then localized to Greek In order to translate the application dialogues from Greek to English I used the Glade software Let's focus on the example This is the Glade environment and in the left pane you see the dialogue that students use for the sign-up process While in the right pane you see the way that each label is translated This screenshot is from the translating environment of Lonspot that they use for the localization process Specifically, as you can see using this environment I translated all labels and messages from English to Greek All steps of my outreach project are explained in my blog My mentors will upload the LTSP manager to the daily experiment within August and then I have to deal with troubleshooting and documentation Of course, after the end of my project I will continue using the software in schools I will continue suggesting improvements and reporting issues presenting the LTSP solution in future seminars Now some thoughts about my outreach experience What the outreach experience meant to me? It gave me the opportunity to get involved with the daily community and contribute even though I am not an expert in coding So, I got a very valuable experience and I feel that now I have the necessary self-confidence to inspire my students and colleagues to participate in Floss communities Many thanks to Debbie and our treats for the sponsorship and of course to my mentors, artists and fans In this last slide you can see a map with schools in Greece to implement the LTSP solution in computer labs and already use Epoctis and school scripts Thank you very much Any questions? Yes, first of all congratulations on an excellent success story It is really really good to see and so that's wonderful I just have a small question and that is whether it would be feasible to merge the Epoctis software and the LTSP manager software since they both appear to be graphical interfaces and it would seem that there might be some kind of one-to-one relation that they could be merged Is that possible? Initially there were both Epoctis and LTSP manager was one software the school script software but we decided to split them because the system administrator needs to do writes while the teacher doesn't need to do writes so we split them based on the access if he wants to create users he needs to do writes if he wants to edit configuration files he needs to do writes so those belong to LTSP manager while if he just needs to shut down the clients and broadcast his screen that belongs to Epoctis Also congratulations to the good success I remember I was in Greece at the meeting of the devian edu in 2005 Is there some relation to devian edu because devian edu do similar things or is it just some other projects? I'm sorry I missed some part compared to what? Devian edu There's no relation except that devian edu uses LTSP to implement their own solution we evaluated Skull Linux and devian edu at some point but they target bigger schools so essentially they expect the system administrator there while our rule of thumb was that the administrator wouldn't use the command line at all we have smaller schools we have a person there that cannot dedicate a couple of hours per week and he cannot use the console so we weren't able to use Skull Linux because of that restriction other than that we have many tools that we both use and I think maybe they're using Epoctis and LTSP too Congratulations to from my side this matter is fabulous I wish we had that during the week So speaking for the devian edu team the main difference actually is to sort things out is that as I understand LTSP manager is just creating projects account on the machine and then you attach machines to that which is totally fine for the scale of schools and classrooms that you have In devian edu the targeting schools are in Scandinavia and France and Germany at least probably more like thousands of students so we need to run another which is the user management tool and actually the tendency in Germany is quite going in the direction of doing user management in a municipality and that's also happening also I think for students so that you run a central ideal management system that's of course also based on that and then all the different systems attached to that so it is I guess a matter of use case but my invitation from the devian edu team is actually to look at the software you have in your repositories or that you ship with your systems and actually maybe better see the meta packages so that you can also have those in devian and that they are actually maybe even included in the devian edu task files that we use for creating our meta packages so the idea is always to be sustainable and to reduce downloadable work so we definitely should sit together and see where we actually intersect or have different solutions but we want the same outcome so that's an invitation from my side that we stay in touch or getting in touch closer and do more cooperation I love to Thanks a lot for the invitation as well and we'll shortly see that at the end with you although I don't think the meta packages would be useful as they only contain greek software which is in greek for greek but some software surely can some meta packages we can create that involve non greek software of course Thanks a lot Hi my name is Fabian I live here in Montreal and I had the opportunity to talk about these people yesterday we spoke about how the Quebec education system is basically managed by a political structure and even criticizing local decisions at the school level may have to interval in terms of your employment environment so it makes it very difficult to escalate any for example the way that you show that you had these workshops where you used LTSP and that got teachers interested the mere fact that a teacher would show this to someone higher up would probably question their competence and then get them in trouble and so on so two things that I find very intriguing one that normally make people dismiss this kind of solution technically is the inability to run those applications and perhaps your eric applications are not going to be of much use here in Quebec but I'm very very interested in the method that you use and it doesn't seem too clean or nice packaging wine with Java and maybe there's legal issues here or I don't know I'm just interested in the technical side of it and I just want you to remember it's kind of thinking out of the bugs that I never really thought about we just say this doesn't run here or it's difficult to install wine in whatever it never occurred to me that we could put together some kind of package and never mind a repository so that sounds like very intriguing to me the second thing and maybe the question part of my talk here it is you talked about internationalization and so if I understand this correctly you had to translate your stuff to English and then back to Greek and you used Launchpad to do that does that mean that people from outside your technical support structure participated? Did the teachers participate in parents, other people or just the technical people? No parents participated guidance from my mentors so essentially we set up the translations environment in Launchpad we did that for both the bodies and for now for LTSP manager we do our part translated localizing back to Greek but there are others that translated to their own localize for example the bodies have been translated in 40 languages and for right now LTSP manager without being in debut yet without having the format released is already translated in Czech and I don't know where I might go the environment is open people can just go there translated and we pick automatically pick out the translations and put them in the dead package so there is very low barrier to translated and that was my next question is this outside of Greece so if you don't speak French yet they can give you some French lessons and I can work together you can just sign up in Launchpad and translate it from English to French and in the next release you have to localize it I would also like to mention take the privilege of what you asked to mention an example in South Africa last year where they heard about all that solution and while we were lucky in Greece that schools can decide for themselves what to put in their computer labs Windows or Linux they had central management for that but I don't know exactly its title but somewhere below the Minister of Education invited us and we presented the solution and so they decided about implementing DSP in all of the province so maybe you can find some central contact here too it doesn't have to be per school if that's not how it works here so I'll share this for the record I was part of the elections to be sitting school board as an elected person and essentially in Quebec province our taxes paid those salaries and there's a very very strong lobby of a lot of people working actively within the sole mission to block pre-opens our software here in Quebec province we've had public inquiries on construction and health and our mayor being indicted and not going to prison there's a huge issue with corruption and honestly there's no way we can compete with the big companies like Google Microsoft and Apple and so the Chromebooks, iPads and essentially Minecraft if you haven't heard about that it's the way for Microsoft to capture non-accounts it's a huge mess here because now we have three proprietary companies competing so there's not even going to be one standard even if it's proprietary it's growing too I'm trying to change that but the challenge is really huge here and essentially it's political right but yeah there may be a few ways to change that we're looking into that, thank you Any other questions? Yeah so you've produced this amazing system that you clearly prove that it works I think it's for Greece are you available if other people in other places around the world were interested in what you've done and to show them how you did it and maybe give a workshop or something? That's an excellent question and I'd like to point at this point that the national team is necessary for the support of the whole infrastructure three to five developers are enough to support thousands of schools but if those three to five developers don't work for some reason then the whole infrastructure collapses it wouldn't be hard to pass the know-how for devianizing windows applications or setting up all that infrastructure to other countries that have similar needs and we would gladly to show if we are inviting any other questions have you ever thought about actually distributing the diskless set line and thickness images across the country so you have a couple of separate servers and these images don't have to be maintained in this school but you actually hook the system together and then you have a 100% implementation much reliable image on the other hand the counter question is are there any problems with real images actually that are running in schools and they have flaws because they are not 100% adapted to all over the country so we have some meta packages one for example is called gymnasium which is the high school and if the school is high school they can just select that from synaptic and get all the recommended applications and decide that he wants an additional application he can just go to synaptic and add it so we don't want to maintain images globally we just provide meta packages like collections for all the software that is available there since the teacher maintains everything from synaptic or any other package manager the breakout is similar to the breakout we see at home in a simple workstation installation which means about one out of 200 schools IT teachers already decide to remove an essential package and have it broken which we can easily repair with a live CD they come for remote support first in IRC and then we get control with a remote support feature that is based in VNC so for a thousand schools we spend maybe an hour per day for support only we don't need a lot of support thank you thank you too I think it's time for the group photo no, I just wanted to announce the group photo so please just get out to the lab to the lab to send the parking lot to the elegance