At the moment Free Software in education is one of my main interests in the Free Software ecosystem. FSFE’s Fellowship wiki already provides some useful information on this topic. It’s quite interesting to see the development in this area. Further I think schools play an important role for the adoption of Free Software in many areas. What pupils learn and get used to during school is what they want to use and what they demand if they enter the business world. I also think that it is important to get as early as possible at least a basic idea about the role of software in the information society.

Today I read an interesting article about a school in Austria which uses GNU/Linux systems on USB sticks (German only). With LinuxAdvanced the school created their own distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (aka Lenny) and the lightweight desktop environment Xfce.

The Kremser Bundesgymnasium uses this system since two years on all computers in the computer science classrooms. Now they decided to switch from local installations to live systems on USB sticks. The advantage: The pupils can carry their system around with themselves. They can use it at school, at home or at any computer they want. About 50% of all pupils uses the system regularly at home. It seems like especially the young pupils using the system quite naturally and have no reservations. Further Rene Schwarzinger explains: “We don’t want to encourage our pupils to create illegal copies just to be able to work at home with the same programs as at school”. The obvious solution to avoid this is to use only Free Software at school and pass it down to the pupils.

In autumn they want to introduce netbooks together with the GNU/Linux USB stick to the pupils.

I really like the idea using USB sticks instead of normal installations on hard disks. Live systems are nothing new but I think it makes much sense in this scenario. With the USB sticks the pupils can work with their systems and their data wherever they want without having to convince their parents to install a new operating system at home which could be quite challenging, both technically and philosophically.

I’m interested in more success stories about Free Software and GNU/Linux in schools. Please let me know if you know schools (especially in Germany or Europe) which already uses GNU/Linux or prepare the switch to Free Software.

E-Mail, News, Editing, Writing, Programming,… Since a few year now I use GNU Emacs for almost everything i do regularly on my computer. But there is still so many to discover and learn. The last few weeks I started to use org-mode for notes, ToDo lists, etc and i really love it. Especially the feature to link from your ToDo list or note directly to an mail in Gnus. Just copy (C-c l) the link to the mail in Gnus and insert (C-c C-l) it into the note. Now I can click on the link in my ToDo list and Emacs will show me directly the corresponding mail/thread in my mail client. Great!

As already said, for mails and news I use Gnus. Until now I always set up postfix as my Mail Transport Agent (MTA). Only today I learnt that Gnus is able to send e-mails directly without an external MTA. The only pitfall, you have to install gnutls-bin and starttls to use SSL/TLS. Otherwise it will not work and you will not get a meaningful error message. After that it is fairly easy. I just had to enter this into my ~/.gnus:

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(setq smtpmail-smtp-server "smtp-server")
(setq smtpmail-smtp-service 25)
(require 'smtpmail)
(setq message-send-mail-real-function 'smtpmail-send-it)
(setq smtpmail-auth-credentials
 '(("smtp-server" 25 "user" "passwd")))
(setq smtpmail-starttls-credentials
     '(("smtp-server" 25 nil nil)))
(setq starttls-use-gnutls t)
(setq starttls-gnutls-program "gnutls-cli")
(setq starttls-extra-arguments nil)

That’s it. Now I can apt-get remove postfix and have one service less in the background of my daily computing.

Dieses Jahr gibt es was zu feiern, GNU wird 25 Jahre alt und niemand geringeres als Stephen Fry hat die Geburtstagsrede gehalten.

Vor 25 Jahren begann alles, als sich Richard Stallman mit der zunehmenden Proprietarisierung von Software nicht abfinden wollte und sich entschloss ein vollständig freies Betriebssystem zu schreiben: GNU. Schnell fand er viele Mitstreiter und Anfang der 90er war das Betriebssystem so gut wie fertig. Es fehlte nur noch ein Kernel, dass Programm das für die Steuerung der Hardware zuständig ist. Hier kommt Linus Torvalds ins Spiel, der einen Kernel namens Linux schrieb und diesen als Freie Software unter der GPL veröffentlichte. Von diesem Tag an war es möglich, indem man GNU und Linux kombiniert (daher auch der Name GNU/Linux),  ein vollständig freies Betriebssystem zu verwenden. Seitdem ist die Freie Software Gemeinschaft immer größer geworden und es sind in den letzten 25 Jahren viele großartige Projekte entstanden, die heute in vielen Bereichen gar nicht mehr wegzudenken sind.

Da bleibt mir nur noch zu sagen…

Happy Birthday GNU! Und auf die nächsten 25 Jahre!