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Interview with Knut Yrvin, Project Leader of Skolelinux

[This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar]

September traditionally means back to school in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere and this year is no different. What will be different, however, is the operating system that many Norwegian pupils will find on their school's computers once they return to the classrooms. That's because despite the excruciating heat wave that hit much of Europe this summer, the Skolelinux developers did not take a break. Skolelinux? Yes, Skolelinux, a project to create a Linux distribution with the goal of replacing the proprietary operating systems in schools throughout Norway. The project's two primary objectives are the ability to run on low-end computer systems as well as a complete support for all Norwegian languages, including the minority ones.

Knut Yrvin, the Project Leader at Skolelinux kindly agreed to answer a few questions for LWN.

Knut, thank you very much for your time. Firstly, can you tell us about the beginnings of Skolelinux? What motivated the initiation of the project?

It all started when Petter [Reinholdtsen, the project's system architect] and myself, were attending a summer party one day in June 2001. We talked about how sad it was that most local schools had little besides old computers and a few applications running on Windows, and very little money for upgrades. We found it frustrating that closed-source software prevented our pupils interested in technical, under-the-hood things from learning by example - from source code written by expert programmers. That's when we decided to stop talking about it and simply do it. We had a start-up meeting on July 2, 2001, with 13 participants and 12 other interested parties who could not attend personally.

As the name suggests, Skolelinux is specifically designed for deployment in schools. How do you go about convincing schools to switch to Skolelinux?

We use the "seeing is believing" strategy. We let teachers try Skolelinux for themselves and make a decision only once they've used it. We also get a lot of help from the Unix/Linux User Groups around the country who are helping with deployment. The whole process is then self-propagating; we often get references and hear about installations in places we didn't even know existed!

We have also written a considerable amount of tailor-made documentation for teachers. We provide a day-to-day Operation Handbook, a Getting Started guide, a Get-to-know Skolelinux course, and other documents. Everything is written in Norwegian in a simple, non-technical language.

IBM Norway is helping as well. They started promoting Skolelinux in December 2002 and soon afterwards many more hardware vendors jumped on the bandwagon. Suddenly there seems to a be a lot of momentum behind the Skolelinux project!

How many schools are using Skolelinux at present?

Officially about 20. But unofficially we have reports of entire towns, municipalities and counties that are testing Skolelinux in one or two schools before making an official commitment. We know of an IT department responsible for all schools in one city which has agreed not to disclose their plans to deploy Skolelinux just to avoid the inevitable bureaucracy associated with such a transition. We also know of 8 or 9 communities, which are going to switch to Skolelinux later this year. We have asked them to do it slowly in the beginning to gain experience (and to let us sort out the 5 remaining release critical bugs ;-)).

What kind of response have you been getting from schools? Would you say that there is a lot of enthusiasm for Linux? Have you met with any resistance?

Yes, we have met with opposing ideas. These usually come from the administration in municipalities and Microsoft professionals who believe that "Windows is the answer, what's the question again?". We try to by-pass them and go straight to the schools' principals asking them about important values, such as the use of the Norwegian languages, IT budgets, and Internet-based solutions in cases where The Ministry of Education and Science mandates that schools conduct their examinations on the Internet.

In Spain, there are several provinces the governments of which have mandated exclusive use of Linux in all levels of schools. Is there a similar situation in Norway? Do you get any support from the Norwegian government?

The government helped financing the initial project report which discussed the use of free software in education and funding of associated activities. There is a will to continue contributing in the future so that the mostly voluntary work can be transformed into secure jobs for the people involved.

The development, translation, deployment, maintenance and support of Skolelinux costs money. How do you go about raising funds for your work?

Initially, it was the NUUG Foundation which helped funding the effort. They have covered the cost of travel to developer meetings from various parts of Norway and even from other countries. Now there are 4 or 5 of us on their payroll to ensure the continuity of the development, effective project leadership and translation work.

Every successful deployment of Skolelinux in a Norwegian school means a lost sale for Microsoft. Has there been any reaction from Microsoft Norway?

Well, we did receive a letter from Steve Ballmer wishing us good luck with the Skolelinux project. This was after a meeting with Microsoft and a round-table conference with some well known IT-personalities in Norway. The meeting was initiated by Microsoft Norway who invited us to join a 60-minute discussion to talk about some controversial issues regarding the way Microsoft conducts some of their business. It was interesting and Ballmer was up to speed on questions like security, intellectual property rights, etc. Unfortunately, he had to leave early, just when the discussion was beginning to heat up. Anyway, we are of the opinion that Microsoft people are nice, and hopefully they think the same about us. We don't agree on some crucial principles concerning the ownership of the source code, but we try to focus on our task, rather than politics. However, we know that Microsoft has offered some Norwegian schools huge discounts to undermine the advancements of Skolelinux.

You have chosen Debian GNU/Linux as a base for your distribution. Any particular reasons?

The openness, Debian project's acceptance of our contributions, apt-get, the conservative and well-tested packages and of course, the community - these were the main reasons.

From the technical point of view, what exactly is the main focus of your development work?

We currently work on a new Debian installer as well as an out-of-the-box services and network setup. We have also created a user administration system with LDAP, Webmin, and netgroups. This is because the IT coordinators in schools need an easy-to-use, web-based and secure system for creating and managing user accounts for pupils and teachers. Another essential area of our work is writing user-friendly documentation in local languages.

Knut, thank you very much for your time and good luck with your project!

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