 Holger Lefsen is hier te praten over Skoll Linux of Debian Edu of hoe we het willen proberen. Hoe of wanneer we het in de Debian Main Archive gaan. Holger. Dank je. Hallo. De talk is titled The Long Road to Debian Edu in Debian Lenny Main. Ik zal het een beetje vertellen over Debian Edu en wat we in Edge gedaan hebben. En dan explainen hoe we het ontwikkelen en onze plans voor Lenny zijn. De uitleg is niet echt de uitleg die de talk heeft. En dit zou een alternatieve tijden zijn, wat in mijn gevoel kwam, tijdens het uitleggen wat we doen, maar ik denk dat de andere is meer correct. Ik ga dit doen, wat ik in dit slide heb over de historie van Debian, maar ik heb het over het laatste jaar en het vorige jaar gezegd. De originele idee van Debian Edu is om een software distributie met een complete IT-platform voor primaire schoolen. Nu is het ook voor universities. De ethicale goalen zijn ook, ik denk, ook veilig hier, zodat kinderen niet alleen de software kunnen gebruiken en gebruiken om de interface te gebruiken, maar ook om de scene achter te houden, om de sourcecode te veranderen en zo. En het is gebouwd in langzaamheden en andere vanavondes, maar dit is niet echt waarom Free Software goed is in schoolen. En dit is dezelfde, wat ik denk dat het echt heel klart is. En Debian Edu, eigenlijk, en School Linux started separately. In 2001 in Noorway, School Linux was started en rond dezelfde keer, Rafael Herzog started Debian Edu. We merged en kept both name, want in certain areas education translated and other school is to school and other names. I tend to say Debian Edu is the project name in School Linux as the distribution just to make a distinguish for me, but you can really have it like you want. School specific needs are also not really school specific. Low maintenance wants everybody. Out of the box setup is also a feature everybody wants. Literary sources is fine localization and certain tools, which are used in schools and the source code availability. But both schools nowadays really need office, Java and Flash because all these school applications are written either in Java or in Flash. And that is not really school specific at all. Also small businesses, they also need big businesses. They need office, they need Flash and they need Java. And nowadays was Lenny hopefully Java and Flash should be free in Debian. We'll see if this really works out. Debian Edu is an official custom Debian distribution. We're a subproject. We have, so in Debian Edu, there are about 30 people working really on Debian Edu and lots of translators. But we really use the manpower of the thousand developers in Debian. We only have a tail later 25 packages are different at the moment. We also do a lot of real life gatherings. We had one already this year in Norway and we plan to have three or four or five more because it's better to discuss stuff than on the mailing list. It's not really so good to work mostly because you discuss more than you get work done. In Edge we had nine packages which were not in Debian and 16 we modified. For Lenny we want to have zero and I'll come to that in more detail later. We contribute a lot to Debian because we have our own archives so people learn to use the Debian tools like DubLoad or Lintian or whatever packaging so they can upload to our archive and don't upload to Debian. We get the right earlier. Then with the money from the school Linux Foundation we also founded the development of Debian Installer four years ago or something in that range and also the preceding of Debian Installer was developed because Debian Edu needed it and testing security was kicked off with money and LTSP Java en Ginesh is more work which is done by Debian Edu people because we need these packages. LTSP is the Linux Terminal Server project for thin clients and just-land workstations. We tried to get our work in Debian. We don't want to have the work extra. The development model is the same as Debian or it's not the same. De Debian is a source code management system like SVN or Git or whatever is not mandatory. It's also not mandatory for our packages but we use it and we encourage and it doesn't make sense to not use one. We unfortunately have two bug tracking systems which is a bit painful. We have bugs Debian org for the packages and we have bugs school Linux org which is a bugzilla instance which is mostly used by users whose report problems with the distributions could be reassigned to the Debian BTS but we just use both bug tracking systems. We try to commit everything upstream and of course follow the license and also we try to give people the right to do stuff, give out access fairly easily because it's easy to revert actions and revoke access. That's less work than always merging patches and handholding the people. And as in Debian, the person who does something decides it. Our main development tool is the mailing list. We have Debian Edu, at least Debian org as the development mailing list. There are many more support mailing list in different local languages and now there's also Debian Edu announce where we announce security updates and updated packages. We use wiki Debian org for our development centric pages. We also have localized wikis like wikiskolelinux.de is the German wiki and wikiskolelinux.no is the Norwegian wiki and we have an IRC channel where we do monthly IRC meetings regularly with summaries and they are also we have a strict time limit on it. It's one hour and not more. We do these frequent real life gatherings and we use alios as a subversion project. We have our own archive and our own cd-builds. In the archive we have such edge test lennie and lennie test lennie test and edge tests are a bit like sit in Debian so we upload to edge test or lennie test and then manually move the packages to any or ledge. Edge test and lennie test are auto-build for i386, AMD64 and PowerPC which are the architectures we support and now edge and search are untouchable that is the archive software doesn't accept any new packages there we have to manually unfreeze the archive to accept packages and we give upload rights to non-debian developers we have policies for that which are basically the same rules than Debian but it's much easier process you just send a mail, I want access and if you are known because you did work then you get access otherwise you need to explain why you want access you usually also get SVN access first so you can work in the subversion repository and then later you get upload rights and as soon as something is triggered in the cd-building script or a package is uploaded then the cds are auto-build automatically or cds and dvds so we upload to edge test or lennie test so we can test the changes there and then we say ok we want to move the package from lennie test to lennie when we think it's more stable at the moment we don't care about lennie we just care about lennie test we just test lennie is not in the stage that is really usable during edge when we developed on edge till December basically when we did our last point release there it was that we uploaded to edge test did many cd tests in edge test and then moved the packages over to edge and did only small test on the edge thing because the chances are so small but changes are not the chances we had we had we have a debien installer which we further simplified i think debien has 12 questions you need to answer and we have 5 i think we have a multi archdvd is only 3 architecture so there is 1.6 or something gigabyte for each architecture which is enough to do a full install without the network we have kde as a default desktop which we have on flash and we have also the kde kios mode preconfigured so we reorder the menus a bit and do other changes from debien to make it more suited for schools and we have live cds which are auto built also they are not manually done but they are built with scripts i explain this because this network architecture of course you can do it with debien or the other features but we made choices which the teachers or users don't have to do so they don't have to think about the network architecture which IP addresses they take or what layout they have or if they choose kde or no we choose kde and that's it if they want to change they can change this is bad and the nice thing about can you read this hardly we have just we have defined we have a router which is not a debien edu system which is any router it has a fixed IP address 10.0.2.1 and the servers always 10.2.2.2 and with this we configure all these services we have held up where we keep the users in and the machine names and we have home.js with NFS we have web server configured for this we have mail configured remote syslog, munion, cups and the basic network services which are all set up so the first thing you do is you install the server which has this fixed IP address and then you install another machine and we change the debien installer questions so that the one question you are asked after the languages is what type of system you want to install you want to install the main server a workstation or a workstation server or a standalone system which is not there and after you choose this the machine gets configured according to this profile and to configure this without command line we now have elvat which is a very young tool before that we had wetmin which was had more features but then due to code quality issues was removed from debien so we had to come up with something new for edge and personally I think we should maybe come up with something else for lenny but then on the other hand changing the datmin tool every release is also a bad idea and the elvat also of course also wants to improve the software so maybe we just stay with it because it works for our needs yeah this is really important that it works after installing just by answering these questions and we have a manual which is developed in a wiki I do the review of all commitmails sometimes I do some changes like move stuff in a different chapter or even move stuff out because I think it doesn't belong into the manual then it's exported from Moin Moin as XML doc book then it was PO for all transferred to get text files they are translated by translators and then we create html or pdfs and then this is all in the debien edu doc package in subversion the translations are there and if we can update the XML files also in the subversion package and then so we have the feature that we can edit in a wiki everybody can edit there and we still have translations which are not done in the wiki but with getex getex is much better for translations than Moin Moin or any other wiki and since October I upload the package once a month because I have time to catch up with translations and I plan to do this during edge lifetime basically also at the moment I upload 2 versions I upload 2 edge our edge which is the stable archive or edge test in this case and the same package to sit I come to that back later and if somebody is working on Moin Moin the Moin Moin doc port export is really broken like the our document is at the moment 80 pages has between 1000 and 2000 XML errors and the italian documentation which is another norwegian document with 400 pages has over 10.000 XML errors from the Moin Moin doc port export the code is fairly unmaintained so if somebody wants to do something that's a good thing we we we install useplash per default en enable that in all also if you just install the server the server has useplash we have useplash on every system we also have dash on every system for faster boot and for faster script running etc is automatically kept in svk svk is distributed add on and we have avm auto resize that is the when we set up when we partition the hard drive we keep the most space empty and we have different partitions and there's a script which we have not enabled on default but it's just one entry in the cron trap and then the partition gets resized made bigger the partition is 70 80% full or something some somewhere you and these are changes which are in Debian but which are not enabled in Debian in default you can also do in dpkg reconfigure dash and then you have dash per default we've done this and have many users who use it this point so in july 2007 we had our edge space release which was 3 months after edge because we had to test our changes and it took some time to test them all and for the point release we fixed 40 bucks about which were mostly in our bugzilla not Debian bugs and we updated 18 packages which comes in more detail and we built new cd en dvd images and now edge is really frozen for us if there are still fixes our development is now for lenny also in the trunk of the SVN repository and we branch for edge if necessary but so far it has not been necessary there are one two bugs which are fixed and we could do they are not too many people screaming so we don't do it so the only thing what really is happening is the documentation updates that's it so this is yeah there are 18,786 or something packages in edge and we have 25 which are modified these are the packages which are not in main this is edge test and this is edge so in edge test we added these flash packages can you read ok yeah so and these two flash pack packages are not actually in edge and i doubt we'll put them in edge life helper is just used for our cd building so the other packages are localization config which did some changes this is LTSPFS is local support for local device support for LTSP so that if you have a diskless or workstation or a thin client that the usb stick and cd drive works locally elva is this admin tool so the really important ones are db and edu install and db and edu config which do some changes to db installer and to the package selection and this is the list of packages which are newer than in db and edu edge that is mostly after the point release in december where we fixed small bugs the kde package the i18n packages just contains new translations for norwegian bukmal and norsk which is great i upload 100 binary packages to fix too yeah discover had some more hardware support db and edu archive keering was updated i think for some lintian errors or something or maintainers so maintainers field we fixed the bug in munin we have a new feature inside summary we added a new hardcard and accept configurator so we are less strict than db in our policy regarding point releases yeah less work less work is always a good motivation also better security support and stuff we cannot we rely on db we have a security team ourselves but that's too active people so if we can get the more we can get integrated in db the more we can concentrate on making the distribution fit for educational use which is what we want to do we don't want to fix hardware problems or we don't want to do lots of stuff we do not at the moment because we have to do yeah personally i also see db and edu as a testbed for changes in db like we have dash enabled since i don't know when it happened in the edge development cycle and db is now thinking about doing it but we prove that for our set of packages it works without problems and there are many similar things like i have some more later yeah for the landing release linux is another custom db distribution for schools used in the region and extramadura in spain and they made their own distribution and last year you did a upload on chaser of woody was 2618 kernel i think yeah as such of course but still 2618 so and they decided to now use db and edu to not have another custom system derivative so they can also we can join forces on the effort for example they have a mass teacher who is working on the distribution who does these hardware changes but he would rather work to work would like to work on mass packages and because this is what he's good at and the other thing he's more doing is because he has to do it so we can get lots of synergy effects there and the problem was that linux wants to deploy already this summer before lenny is released so maybe they will just freeze lenny and do another point or another slittle fork what is new for us there is that knoam as a default why we used kde historically so with the next release we provide means to choose either kde or gnome and have this integrated with the rest of the desktop changes like we also have icons on the desktop i set this kde kiosk mode and we need to do similar changes for gnome and i think that we might hope we will release with lenny but i think it might be sensible to do point releases after lenny not in sync with debi maybe do that i'm not sure i'm happy to discuss this it's an idea and just the marketing problem our version number was 3.0 the edge space release and debi was 4.0 so maybe debi and edu will just skip 4.0 i'm not sure what else do we plan eldapify services at the moment we are looking at the dns server bind and dhcp to that they get their configuration data from eldap and not from text files anymore because then we can use eldap tools to administrate them and then the most important services can all be configured with the same tool and not in schools the administrators are often teachers who do it after school who don't have much time so we want to help them there and what you can see in this bug which i'll show the next slides there i'll come to this bug in the next slide and another thing we really want to do is to make it easier to change the IP addresses called architecture because often people have certain IP networks and they cannot change them so and then if they cannot change the IP address then the whole auto setup of eldap and the other stuff doesn't work so there's a how to how to do it manually but we want to have an option in di that you can enter the IP addresses there and at the moment the workstations are also required to be in the network to get the login information from eldap and it's not you can catch the eldap information but this is not done so if you get have a laptop as a workstation and you take the laptop outside the school network then you cannot log in anymore and we need to fix this I told this about KDE and and we we want to switch to remote syslog because we found the maintainer of the syslog D in Debian was not really helpful with the changes we need to make it so that we can configure it the way we need it so we would switch the syslog which is also now discussed in Debian which is the same thing with useplash or what I see that you can easier do changes in Debian than they are possibly to be done in Debian so this is also a reason why I like to work on Debian because we can just change stuff very easily there readahead is a way to improve the boot speed so this wonderful bug was the easy to memorize number even has its own wiki page because it's easier to track it than with the bts the bug was the severity was RC for 2 years then 2 weeks or so I downgraded it after discussing it was the release team for the 5th time or something because we don't violate policy by the world the user chooses to install Debian edu so it's the user choice and then the package modifies other packages confiles which is okay the user chooses but it makes upgrades really painful that was worse with woody and sarge because we modified many many more packages than we do now but it will still be painful for upgrades to lenny we don't know yet at the moment these are the bugs which are left and they are all the same type make this package automatically configurable because for the ntp package for example the ntp packages use it as default pool.debian pool.ntp org of whatever and we want to use it as the ntp server this tjena server which is the main server and only that server should use an external ntp server so we have to have a different package configuration these are the same bugs I'm not expecting you to look up the numbers now anyway so I'll just go fast and basically it's just the plea to maintain something like etc apache2 conf where you can drop in config files or use hidden depth conf questions when that's sensible because it's not only debi and edu which needs this configuration but also other custom distribution also have the same changes to do so you not only help debi and edu but everybody and we need lots of people with different skills in different areas and that's it we know about 400 schools in europe who use it we know the biggest installation has something like 30.000 users and these 400 schools in europe don't count the extrema dura I don't know it's this estimation how many debi and users are it was also something from 20 million to 100 million or something and it's numbers there are numbers from the archive how many security updates there are but this is not users, this is schools we are planning to make small conferences for persons from different countries which would like to become ambassadors for the project not yet I think it would be a good idea we are actually going to have such meeting we will call it the international developer gathering we will call that to happen in june 2008 i think it will be more formal we are also inviting people so they can come and share experiences with any new over a free software project and we are also inviting some special guests or maybe from the US or certainly from extrema dura and we are going to have two things experience sharing and over is regular development i am most likely at the university of augur south of moray but they said yes actually we are quite open to do that and we got the money this is not a normal developer gathering this is a debi and edu gathering of a different kind because as I understood her question it was about ambassadors ambassadors would be inviting because we had a few mattress hour thanks considering switching the edu and they had this they had this question how should we manage that how should we start and when you have a US state for instance 6 million inhabitants and 1 million peoples they need some help just to get started so what we want to do is we invite these people there so they can learn from experience and also combine that with the regular developer gathering this is very important not treating free software developers as apes with pina they need to integrate that into the process and also the new ambassadors learn from what they already have done of the work also there might be some money in the European Union especially for translating educational programmes which already exist in Spanish in French to make them into this schooling system as anybody tried to find out whether there could be money or some funding for this we need now look at applies only from the EU but the people we talked to said it was a lot of work and we didn't have the manpower to get into it it's a question of manpower and spending hours talking to the EU bureaucracy so if you have if you want to help out more than we need you Anna can you just write the application for us a good question how do you handle the deviant point releases because you said you made only one point release did that include the previous deviant point releases we just used the deviant archives the school linux machine uses both archives our archives only contains these 25 packages and the rest of deviant so far the deviant point releases didn't really change the deviant installer much so this is the really only thing we we copy we copy this the init ID from the installer this is what we copy and then we build the installer ourselves so as long as there are no changes then it's fine is that like that where you wouldn't have terminal machines in the key sorry the user's hands the question if you can like the question was whether you have cooperation with other projects like old pc because that's a very different approach so the question I think was whether there are still some cooperation possible because it's both about the school case we have even formal cooperation I think with our pc at least that's what I had on a different slide where we had cooperation also with kde kde edu project with edu wuntu but there's not much there's an exchange of ideas and stuff but that is the exchange in the end more about the server and terminals where the server manages lots of things and the terminal of the screens for the classroom and when pc is more like we do PC's for children this is one of the problems I mentioned that this laptops are not useful outside the classroom at the moment with our architecture and this is certainly targeted at this and I'm also a OIPC developer and I gave an OIPC borrowed it to somebody so he can investigate how to use them in schools because laptops have advantages in schools like with desktop PCs extrema dura you have to fix the tables so then you cannot arrange the tables in the classroom anymore teachers would love to have laptops so there is cooperation yeah I have to say this we have even sponsored to have developer gathering handling for instance as we pointed out the issue about logging on laptops into the network we also need to log on other stuff on that for instance if we could do some work with sandbag integration even better top screen with sandbag it will help maybe also connect other kind of devices because some people also are very addicted to some Microsoft stuff and just to let them use their stuff or network is better than install a Windows 2003 server or 2007 server so this can still use their identity to Microsoft stuff and it will not be cool to know that hopefully on video already but my point is that when we put the money on the table and we have actually sponsored that activity and also people to come everybody is kind of I'm doing that I'm doing that so to just get the right team to do good things is not always easy because it's a lot of logistics doing exactly that even everybody in favor of it so if people could maybe look to more opportunities for cooperation, operation or as well in organizing that we actually got some traveling money over we don't pay for that in sponsoring we pay for the travels we do that we also seem to stay at a hotel we will continue with talk by Luc Klaas about the landing release