1. Open Minds Conference LinEx: Open source in all the schools of Extremadura José L. Redrejo Rodríguez Indianápolis, 10 de Octubre de 2007

2. Why am I here? ● Because I'm a father ● I'm a teacher ● I'm an engineer ● I'm part of the development core team of LinEx and in charge of its setup in the schools ● Notice: I am not a politician, and I am not an english native speaker, as you have already noticed ;-)

3. History of the project (I) ● Euronews video as a better explanation ● The regional government of Extremadura was transferred the Educational administration from the Spanish government on January 1, 2000. ● The Intranet was designed and began to be implemented in mid 2000. ● The Open Software solution began to be studied at 2001, and the decision to make our own Linux distribution was made on November, 2001. ● The first version (LinEx 2.0) was released in March, 2002, based on Debian Potato, made by a private startup company.

4. ● In June 2002, the regional government took control of the development and released Linex 3.0, based on Debian Woody in October ● For the years, there have been several upgrades of the distribution. Now we are running LinEx 2006 version, planning to upgrade next summer. ● In Extremadura there are about 160.000 students in schools. ➢ With a goal of a ratio of one PC per two students we have 80,000 machines ➢ Today they all have been working only with free software for almost five years History of the project (II)

5. ➢ The entity responsible for the project is the Consejería (Regional ministry) of Education. ➢ Initially, the project was divided in three main parts: ➢ The intranet was developed by one of the main Spanish phone companies ➢ The Linux distribution was originally prepared by a small Linux company. Some months later Antonio & José L. (working as teachers in the educational public system) took over the responsibility of continuing the development of new versions. ➢ Training, publicity and support for the project was made by government employees and a public IT company. People and entities involved in the project

6. Budget allocation (2003 numbers) ● LinEx development: ● Hardware 170,000 € ● Software 89,000 € ● Training, support, and diffussion: 300,000 € ● TOTAL: 559,000 € ● Rest of the Technological Educative Network: ● School PC, servers and associated infrastructure: 66,710,000 € ● Training, support employees, and documentation: 540,000 € ● TOTAL: 67,250,000 €

7. General tasks we've done ● Customize Debian distribution changing some of its default configs to our users goals ● Translation of all pending applications ● Create new applications to fulfil some of the users demands ● First year, prior to the installation of the computers, all teachers in the region where trained in general use of the computer, specific use of the computer for their subjects ● Interactive boards in primary schools

8. Software developments we've done (I): ● ControlAula, some sysadmin tools ● Involvement in the development of some others: Debian, wxmaxima, Wims, Squeak, Gambas, recordmydesktop, qucs, atnag, glpi, etc. ● Customizations: default configs to make teachers and students life easier.

9. Software developments we've done (II): ● LinexEdu: special metapackages for mathematics, physics, languages, etc. with all the educative applications we have been able to find and package ● Prepare a special setup for the schools (different in primary and secondary schools) ● Prepare a special distributions branching from LinEx: Linex Colegios with a special setup for primary schools, and JuegaLinex, a DVD full of linux games.

10. School setups ● In every school: file server, dns server, proxy cache, ldap server, etc. (all these services in one or two machines) ● In every secondary school: one sysadmin to support hardware and software incidences. ● Mobility desktops for all the teachers. ● Mobility desktops for every student in secondary schools (they have one pc in every desktop, for every two kids). ● Special desktops for primary schools: they have several computer classrooms. ● Pyramid structure: One regional server, one server per school, desktops connect to that server.

11. Now, working on: (I) ● Automatic inventory of all the computers, linked with the front-desk application (ocs inventory linked with glpi) ● Front desk application, glpi, gpl licensed, added multicenter setup to the sources ● A bunch of free courses for teachers at the training centers (every year since the beginning of the project)

12. Now, working on: (II) ● Rayuela: internal organizative application for the whole educative community: parents, teachers, students, administration and government. From the economical management of the schools to the qualifications, or SMS warnings to the parents with the same application. ● Preparing a tender for a pedagogical tool, linked with Rayuela for authentication purposes, but with its focus in the collaboration between teachers, students, content clasification (based on thesaurus), automatic generation of personal, school and government portals, etc. ● New linex-colegios version, with changes in the interface ● New Squeak image and improving its community portal ● Implementation of puppet as our standard tool to manage all the system.

13. Past and present problems ● Teachers inertia for those who were used to computers ● Training of all the teachers, most of them didn't use computers, or at least didn't use computers for their classes. ● Sometimes,living on the edge trying to fix different problems with different approaches instead of using a global view (lack of time and trained people) ● The regional intranet was great in its beginning seven years ago, most people only had isdn or rtb internet access. Today, compared to our home adsl connections is too slow ● PC obsolescence

14. The future ● I ntegration with DebianEdu, we will add about 700 schools to the project with more than 80.000 computers and five years of experience. We think we can add ideas, value and people and receive the same from that project. ● New intranet public tender ● Study, improve and integrate with some other projects with repositories of educative contents and applications, mainly focused on the students curricula and standarized thesaurus. All the projects should be integrated in a web site with one login/password. ● Study alternatives to the never-ending PC obsolescence: low-fat clients are a possible candidate

15. Thanks Questions?