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@DebConf17: Story Telling about Debian Edu in Northern Germany

Last Monday, I gave a 20min talk about our little FLOSS school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" at the Debian Conference 17 in Montreal.

The talk had video coverage, so may want to peek in, if you couldn't manage to watch the life stream:

http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2017/debconf17/su...

I'd like to share some major outcomes (so far) of this talk.

  1. I realized how attached I am to "IT-Zukunft Schule" and how much it means to me that our kids grow up in a world of freedom and choice. Also and esp. when it comes to choosing your daily communication tools and computer working environment
  2. I met Foteini Tsiami and Alkis Georgopoulos from Greece. They work on LTSP and have deployed 1000+ schools in Greece with LTSP + Debian GNU/Linux + MATE Desktop Environment
  3. I met Vagrant Cascadian who is the maintainer of LTSP in Debian and also a major LTSP upstream contributor
  4. I received a lot of fine feedback that was very encouraging to go on with our local work in Schleswig-Holstein

If you have some more time for watching DebConf talks on video, I dearly recommend the talk given by Alkis and Foteini on their Greek FLOSS success story. If you don't have that much time, please skip through the video until you are at 26:15 and enjoy the map that shows how much Debian + LTSP has spread over all of Greece.

http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2017/debconf17/lt...

Unfortunately, the schools in Greece are so much smaller than schools in Germany. Most schools there have between 50 and 300 students. So at the Greek schools, it is possible to have a teacher machine being the server for one computer lab. This teacher / server machine provides the infrastructure for a room full of LTSP fat clients (no hard drive inside) and that's it.

For German schools, unfortunately, we need a larger scale setup. German schools often have 800+ students and network services need to be spread over more than one server machine. So, the current approach with one server running LDAP, Kerberos etc. is quite appropriate, but also extendible, possibly on municipality level or on county level.

We (from IT-Zukunft Schule) are quite positive that there will be opportunities for introducing FLOSS approaches more on the county level in Schleswig-Holstein in the near future. So stay tuned...