Petter Reinholdtsen

Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye
8th April 2012

It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution like Debian Edu / Skolelinux, and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big contributor to the Debian Edu Squeeze release manual.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu project?

I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user! The only reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things they'd like a native English speaker to proofread... So I did a sweep through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of "localisation".

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu?

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu?

These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it! In fact I had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the education system.

I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend money on the latest hardware.

Which free software do you use daily?

I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools to use free software?

Well, I don't know. I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked you would hardly need a strategy.

Tags: debian edu, english, intervju.

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