In Collaboration with

Developer gathering Erkelenz 26-28th of Jan 2006

project manager Knut Yrvin. Foils only for free distribution

SLX Debian Labs

Huge differences

The ICT-operation at the municipalities of Nittedal supports 400 office PC's and 400 users with 6 employees

The operational cost for a PC in the municipality is 791 EURO a year

10 primary schools in Nittedal have 506 PC's with Skolelinux and 3200 users. The system is maintained with an operator with a half position (2 ½ days a week).

In addition the schools have a local ICT-contact with 1-4 hours a week to do “helpdesk” support. They also have a pedagogic coordinator with a half position for all the schools. Totally this is about a 1½ man-year to support 3200 users,

The operational cost for a PC in the school is 100 EURO

The regional hospital paid 3.800 EURO a year to operate a standard office PC in 2001

The administration have 5 times more to operate PC's

Many principles have to choose between hardware or people. Most of the schools have to pay expenses that compare to one or two teacher positions, says the headmaster ...

A complete ICT-solution for the schools

network architecture out of the box

operational concept

digital user profile

OpenOffice and 75 user programs

Made on our mother tongue with the schools curriculum in mind

Made for the school budget

Skolelinux-project

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The basic idea

Pupils interested in technical, under-the-hood things – could learn by example – from source code written by expert programmers

Using our own mother thong when travelling on the information highway

Get more ICT-equipment and programs, and less time with maintenance. More for less

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Start

25 people said they would participate, 13 meet on the first meeting

After a couple of moths we grew to 40

E-mails is efficient, but could turn into flame-wars when people don't know each other

Precise goals

Some characteristics

Started as an voluntary effort 2. July 2001

Contribution is over 64.000 man-hours from
~ 200 developers, translators, and testers

More than 25 developer gatherings with 20 until 190 participants

18 in Norway with local Skolelinux-development

7 Internationally in Norway, Germany and Brazil

The version system “is our project”

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> 200 Skolelinux-schools

Hardware vendors: its many more

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Have to obey

All code, translations and documentation has to be committed to the Concurrent Versions System on Internet

Bugs has to be committed to the bug-tracking system

Commit everything upstream. That means release often running code

Follow the licence-terms

Help people to help them selves!

The person who does something decides

Do-ocracy

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The amunt of servers

3 schools. 150 clients and 400 users at every school

* FreeNX or Citrix have limitations on supporting media rich appl.

Prices in the marked

Time used by the local ICT-support desk not counted in

Network cost don't counted in

Q & A

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Who is Skolelinux today
(aka Debian-edu)

SLX Debian Labs (a foundation)

A part of the Debian project

3-4 paid man years

A member organisation

It's own border

130 active developers

30 over active developers

> 20 translators

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Developers and users

Some successes

We are a Debian project

Debian edu, Custom Debian Distribution for schools – turn key solution

New Debian installer, half thick clients

A lot of attention and installations

Use in many countries

Awards (e.g. New Media Award 2004)

Have kick-started others

etch w/security, Edubuntu many languages

Challenges

Paying people doing software development

Maintenance when some people get interested doing other things

Founding the gatherings

Making a sustainable commercial entity selling maintenance services and up-keep

To founding development etc.

Lack of open standards even if the policies are right (things takes time)

Collaboration

Had to apply for founding to make developer gatherings

The e-mailings got to hot

29400 Euro for HW and the first 8 gatherings

Had to make an infrastructure for developers and manuals for contributors

Had to do a lot of motivating effort

2004-02-19T10:58:03