2008-FAD-report

IT staff Hurum council
v / Foundation SLX Debian LABS
c / o Petter Reinholdtsen
All 7 Nydalen
0484 OSLO 0484 OSLO

3. Auguest 2008

Ministry of Government Administration and Reform
PO Box 8004 Dep,
NO-0030 Oslo

Finale report for the project "Further development of Skolelinux"

Right before the July 2007 granted Ministry of Government Administration and 450,000 dollars in support for the development of educators in working with Hurum municipality. The spending is managed by the Foundation SLX Debian Labs. The foundation was created in 2004 to manage safe and further development of Skolelinux for education.

This is a report of what the money has gone to in 2008. The report provides an overview of significant activities, a little about how the project grant was used, and the way forward in 2009. The development of Skolelinux is done through voluntary contributions and will continue to do so also after 2008. There are also domestic and foreign individuals, and organizations and companies that sponsor the development. This particularly applies to areas where Skolelinux must be adapted to local conditions.

Developer Files Developer Files

Usually The Skolelinux project organises from 6 to 8 developing collections annually. Although most free software development happens over the Internet via e-mail lists, instant messaging and online repositories, personal contact is essential when managing complex free software development. Questions about technical choices and such are easier to manage when people meet. Such meetings contribute quickly to problem solving, motivation and progress. Also there it's a considerable growth in contributions weeks after a code sprint compared to weeks before code sprints.

Desktop interface KDE 4 was released January 2008 with several incremental releases throughout the year. Both before and after the main release, there have been hard work with translating one of the two major desktops on Skolelinux. In addition, it is intense wrok to establish a common network architecture for schools, for use by states as Extramadura in Spain and the German state Rheinland-Pfalz. Debian GNU/Linux is customized and installed on 80,000 computers at schools in Extramadura. Developers in Germany is working with an international system for user management. It is scheduled for a major deployment of Skolelinux in Oslo, the capital city of Norway. The international activities deploying Skolelinux for hundreds of thousands of students, have identified improvements that have been included in Skolelinux. Coordination of this work takes place both at code sprints and online status meetings.

It is held eight developing collections and uses a large collection in 2008. Participants in the project has presented Skolelinux at three international conferences for free software. This is to ensure that more contributes to the further development of the solution.

(*) There are many more contributors in Skolelinux than those participating in developing collections. An overview of e-mail activity in 2008 shows that over 100 people actively contributing to the code, translation, documentation and bug reports.

(**) It often takes a day or two to travel to a Skolelinux code sprint. For example take the fast five-six hours to get from Oslo to Narvik in Bjerkvik i Norway, given that the weather is good. Travels from Bergen may take even a couple-three hours extra in one direction. Sometimes the journey supersedes time used to contribute at code sprints. But the face to face project coordination at code sprint, makes traveling worth while.

User

In spring 2008, the research team Lars Risan a field report on user experiences with Skolelinux. The report intent was to highlight potential for improvements with educators viewpoints. The report was done in cooperation with Hurum council, University of Agder and SLX Debian Labs. The results from the survey were presented at at the Oslo University College for coming teachers and the Skolelinux user conference 13. October 2008.

Student Project with mobile software

Skolelinux project has a desire to be ahead of developments. Mobile phones may be one of the most important tools students use in school. Finding positive ways phones can be used in education, is an important area which Skolelinux will provide solutions. In the spring of 2008, four student project working with the development of software for mobile devices. All students have been successful with their student projects. Some of the projects were presented at aKademy 2008.

Support for Northern Sami spell checker

During the spring there is a support for Sami spelling for future editions of Skolelinux and OpenOffice. Support for the Sami has been a priority for educators in many years. For example, are significant parts of the KDE desktop translated in the direction of the project. The Sami Parliament has funded a comprehensive work with online language tools for the Sámi languages. and the project has thus including the spelling of Sami based on this work. In this way, users of Linux and other free software like OpenOffice.org and Firefox write support with Sami spelling. The plan is to provide same solutions when the other languages get spelling support for Linux.

Skolelinux user conference with Norwegian

In October 2008 we arranged a user conference for educators. Much of the organization was made by Lars Risan. The conference was successful with more than 50 participants from Norway and abroad. It was exciting lectures about lessons learned from Extremadura in Spain, Rheinland-Pfalz in Germany and Linux educacional in Brazil. The report on user experiences with educators were also presented at the conference.

Milestones for 2008

• Held the first big user conference for educators and users of free software in schools in Norway.
• Code sprint for Gnash developers, a free implementation of the Flash Player for browser.
• Eight develop and translate the collection of which five are held in Norway.
• Guided four student projects and presentation of results at international conferences.
• Servers and test equipment for educators has been a solid upgrade. Among other things, we have purchased mini-notebook and notebooks to testing.
• Presentation of educators at three international conferences.

Activity in 2009

Although the activity in 2009 is not part of the support from the Ministry of Administration and Reform, it's worth mentioning that the activity in the Skolelinux project has increased slightly. There has been conducted four code sprints in Bergen, Trondheim and Oslo in the spring 2009. There have also been held a user conference in Narvik with more than 25 participants from schools and IT staff from surrounding municipalities. Developers from the One Laptop per Child participated in code sprint in Bergen. This to include work on getting Sugar Desktop as part of Skolelinux. It was also carried four student projects. Two of the projects with performance testing and connection to the mobile Internet was presented at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in Spain.

Next version of Skolelinux is coming soon. There are not many remaining errors left to addressed before next Skolelinux can be released according to status: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Lenny

Spending Overview 2008

There have been delivered more than 2,300 hours developing, debugging, translation and documentation at code sprints in 2008. Traveling is not included. Activities between code sprints are considerable higher, but are not included in our estimates. Should some one finance the Skolelinux endeavour commercially in 2008, the cost for just development would be at least 10 times higher than the governmental grant of 450,000 NOK (52.000 Euro).