The European Union's interoperability page reports
The primary school in Saint Léger en Yvelines (France) has nearly completely switched to using free software reports the village's deputy mayor Olivier Guillard. "Do not underestimate the task", he advises others on the forum of Etalab, France's open government portal, "and, most of all, persist".
Saint Léger en Yvelines is a commune some 50 km west of Paris. The village has one school, with 6 classes, and includes pre-school. The Jean Moulin school is attended by all of the around 30 children in the commune up to the age of 11. On [April 15], deputy mayor Guillard published his recommendations for others that want to "free their schools from the commercial agenda of proprietary software vendors". Free software is unhindered by the constraint of financial profitability, he argues: there is no planned obsolescence and no lock-in to specific hardware.
Olivier Guillard urges rigorous testing of solutions before suggesting them to teachers. Just as important is to convince the teachers of the benefits of free software. He also recommends being proactive on maintenance and monitoring.
He cautions patience. The school's transition to free software took years, he writes. "Seven years of convincing. Seven years to find free software alternatives for each new commercial offering. Seven years of creating a dialogue and building communication channels with teachers dedicated to digitisation of education."
The school has not rid itself of proprietary software completely. Whiteboard solutions and office documents exchanged in France's education sector forces teachers to use proprietary software, for which the school keeps apart two PCs with proprietary office tools, the deputy mayor writes.
Blogger, Linux advocate, and retired 1-man school IT staff Robert Pogson has a short (two paragraph) post. [It offers several open-source software alternatives as well as hardware recommendations — fair use precludes including the whole post here. -Ed.]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2016, @10:10PM
Blogger, Linux advocate, and one-man IT. What a guy!!
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @02:59AM
Pogson made a living doing Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, and finally Education.
His IT education is completely self-taught and that came by necessity.
When he arrived at his first teaching assignment, he found a pile of PCs that were infected to the gunwales and quite useless.
Doing some research, he discovered Free(dom) Software.
For $0 (in a remote, impoverished school district), he installed Linux on the "broken" boxes and turned the kids loose on them.
Same hardware, same users, but the problems disappeared.
Not having to give any more money for easily-infected EULAware, he could put all of the monetary resources toward hardware.
Smart dude; good problem solver.
Pitted in a contest of knowledge against this polymath, [google.com] who has had over 65 years to amass his substantial knowledge base, I'm quite certain that you would come up on the short end.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2016, @10:10PM
"he argues: there is no planned obsolescence and no lock-in to specific hardware."
Systemd, "newer cpu", ....
free software was about freedom. Cutting e-waste with not having to upgrade every 2-3 years. Now, it supports about 6-8 years backward hardware compatibility. OS are tossed 12months or 4 years (LTS). Yup no planned obsolesce, just forced.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hendrikboom on Monday April 25 2016, @11:31PM
I'm still running on decade-old hardware. Went through a few distros in the early days, then settled on debian, now in transition to devuan. My old code still runs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @08:10AM
Just what I was going to post. Right down to the details!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @11:43AM
Yes, I have old hardware too.
486sx25 w/ 12MB of memory. Use to run NT3 and Slackware. Now only can get 8 to 10 year firewall software only.
K6-2 400 w/ 768MB of memory. Use to run Win98, ME, XP, Ubuntu 7 and 8. Now only can get 3 year firewall software. BUT If i install Ubuntu 7, I can update to Ubuntu 9, but have to go through all in-between versions. Can't load 8 or 9 directly.
C6 200 w/ 128MB of memory. I got Gentoo running on it, but cannot compile on the machine since the GCC compiler required 128MB of memory for itself.
PS: I came for the 8bit hybrid world and systems that ran in less than 1MB supporting 75 users with sub-second response time.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Tuesday April 26 2016, @01:48AM
Let's just put it this way. Some operating systems never had system'd and don't have any plans to ever touch it. And it can run on 80486 or better. The only thing that forces upgrades are that newer versions have more functionality and thus uses more memory.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2016, @02:31AM
Yes, AmigaOS Forever!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @02:27AM
...or perhaps you are aware and are simply a troll.
There's a distro that doesn't suit your needs?
Don't use it.
There are hundreds more available.
Here's the "Top 100". [distrowatch.com]
Don't like systemd?
Don't use it.
There are plenty of distros that don't like it either. [without-systemd.org]
Still can't find what you want?
Build your own version, customized to your own peculiar tastes.
Linux From Scratch [google.com]
Your scorn for "choice" shows you to be a fool.
...and I'll bet the hardware on which I am contentedly running Linux is older than that used by hendrikboom.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @05:07AM
Yeah, right. Many software packages now have systemd as a depend. Seriously, wtf? An init system is a requirement for software?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @06:07AM
Name 3 such packages.
Substantiating links are welcome.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @01:37PM
Not the above AC here.
Open synaptic, right-click on any systemd component (libsystemd-login, libsystemd-daemon, libsystemd-journal, ...) then "Properties". Finally, open the "dependencies" tabs and select "Package that depends on this package" (or whatever it's named in English) in the drop-down list.
There you are: pulseaudio, gdm, network-manager, dbus, gnome-whatever (plus each systemd package depending on the others, but that's expected behavior). And that's on Ubuntu 14.04 which is still supposed to use upstart last I heard.
I don't give a damn fuck about systemd as long as my system is running, but the way it keeps spreading surreptitiously in the OS in places where I wouldn't axpect an init system to be is slowly beginning to give me the creeps.
That or let's just be honest, systemd is not an init system anymore, it's a whole extra layer between the DE and the kernel and whatever already existed as extra layers between the two.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @08:03PM
gnome-whatever
...except that GNOME still runs under *BSD [google.com] and systemd doesn't, so that's a choice of the *package builder*--clearly not a requirement.
Non-systemd Linux distros also have GNOME running.
A solution is to find a different source for your Linux builds.
There's a bunch of those. [without-systemd.org]
N.B. Around these parts, I have mentioned antiX (pronounced "Antiques") a bunch of times for various reasons.
the way it keeps spreading surreptitiously in the OS in places where I wouldn't [expect] an init system to be
In *some* distros of the GNU/Linux OS.
Definitely **not** all.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @09:26PM
Expect the links between Gnome and Systemd to get more entrenched.
That Gnome runs on non-systemd installs are because of Gnome dev efforts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2016, @06:18AM
Yeah, whatever. May I remind you that you asked to name three such packages and I gave you >5? 4 when excluding gnome. I should have added policykit to the lot for good measure.
In *some* distros of the GNU/Linux OS.
In *the most widely used* distros ... FTFY
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2016, @09:14AM
Open synaptic, right-click on any systemd component
Debian and debian based distros have always had arbitrary dependencies. It is one of the things that eventually drove me from debian.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2016, @07:56AM
p cinnamon Depends gnome-settings-daemon (>= 2.91.5.1)
p gnome-settings-daemon Depends libpam-systemd
p libpam-systemd Depends systemd (= 215-17+deb8u3)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @10:23AM
I think only GNOME really depends on systemd... but I ditched that eons ago already.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @08:06PM
*BSD and systemd are incompatible.
If what you say was true, GNOME wouldn't run under e.g. FreeBSD these days.
...but it still does. [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @08:05PM
You know what? I just compiled Enlightenment E19 last summer without any systemd, and systemd is an explicit dependency of Enlightenment. I haven't had the time to try E20, but I have a feeling it will be similar. There are quality ebuilds out there for Gentoo users who have a section in their package mask file that is simply labeled "Poettering" (no systemd, pulseaudio, or networkmanager tyvm).
Maybe I won't ever experience Unity or Gnome 3 without systemd. I'm not certain what I'm missing out on there. I've been a happy XFCE user for quite a while now, with some dabbling on the side. lxdm gets me logged in without needing systemd.
For servers, steering clear of systemd is a breeze. My NAT/UPnP/IPv6 router/DNS cache/DHCP/radvd/wireless AP box is systemd-free just fine. It's also X windows free because there's no goddamn reason for X windows to be on there. Same with my server in the clouds (Apache/PostgreSQL/Dovecot/InspIRCd/XMPP/tons of crap).
Jfyi, I'm waiting for the ebuilds to stabilize for the new nVidia driver that was released for Wayland/Mir. I'm sure there's a repository/overlay out there that has it, I'm just too lazy to find it. Also too lazy to compile from source myself like I used to when I was younger. But I'm excited about finally at least being able to try to move to Wayland and unmerging the shit out of X windows if successful.
Just because something is new doesn't mean it's shit. Please at least whine about your mysterious lack of network transparency in Wayland before the time to spread FUD about that is over. I actually have no idea if systemd is shit or not these days. I don't care about systemd for being systemd. I just don't think Lennart Poettering and friends can code worth jack shit, and I'm perfectly happy with grub/OpenRC/getty/lxdm. It's as simple as that.
Just stop posting this systemd is a lizard people conspiracy-quality shit. At least post something entertaining like the apps guy on the old site.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2016, @08:00AM
It's not so strange. If it's designed to run as a service, then the package will need to supply the scripts for starting/stopping that service. Which depends on what service manager you have, which almost always depends on the init system you have.
Until packages decouple themselves from all service management systems, and simply provide separate scripts for each of the actions, such that a *generic* (by service) script specific to that service management system can manage all services with no modifications, you're stuck with this mess.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2016, @10:17PM
These French are savvy fellows. It's great when software comes with a free trial period. Try it for 30 days or whatever, and if you like it, you can buy it. If it doesn't suit your purpose, just stop using it, with no cost or obligation. I wish my local government were as careful about spending money.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2016, @10:31PM
But then they'd still be using non-free proprietary user-subjugating software, which is unacceptable for any school to do.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2016, @11:06PM
I don't understand this point of view. Children must learn consumerism in school as well as when "out in the wild". The onslaught of marketing and advertising isn't sufficient to produce enough dedicated consumers to support a growing economy.
Vendor lock-in and brand loyalty are better learned at a young age when there is the least amount of resistance.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday April 25 2016, @11:43PM
Except that for non-trivial software 30 days may not (and in most cases, it isn't) be possible to evaluate.
The current successful model for software is: get a free community edition, pay for extended edition and/or support.See Zimbra, Atlassian products, Redhat, etc.
Many OSS get a step further: the fully-functional product is free, the software "house" gets its money from training, consultancy and/or customization.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Demose on Monday April 25 2016, @11:36PM
How dissimilar are interactive white boards from digitizing tablets? If someone were to acquire one for the people writing drivers for wacom tablets do you think they would be willing to write drivers for said educational aids?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by tftp on Tuesday April 26 2016, @01:06AM
I used to make some drivers by reverse-engineering the USB protocol of proprietary devices. This is a dead end, and I do not recommend anyone to do the same. First of all, you have no idea what those registers in the device are doing. You may be voiding the warranty, or causing damage by overloading circuits in the hardware by incorrect programming of FSM knows what bits. Early versions of SANE used to do pretty bad things to scanners - causing mechanical resonance, for example, by running the stepper motor at a certain frequency. The original software was smooth as silk... on Windows.
Secondly, there is such thing as firmware upgrades... sometimes they are really necessary... and they can break your so carefully reverse-engineered protocol. The proprietary driver may be upgraded, or even come with enough smarts to understand the new protocol on the fly. Your driver only knows about the device that you personally had in your possession during the work. The device does not benefit from upgrades of the driver that are pushed out by the OEM. It is common that there are many - sometimes, tens - revisions of hardware and software. It is challenging even for the OEM to herd all those cats. You, as a 3rd party with no knowledge of the issues, have no chance.
Naturally, the last thing the F/OSS community wants is a frantic 3 AM call from the department of education in some faraway country, claiming that the white boards suddenly failed in all their 30,000 schools. What do you do if that happens? Start the rev-eng all over again? How much time will that take? How much money? How much use will be lost to the end users who need those white boards to work? How are they going to teach without them if the process is tied to them - say, if every student receives a PDF with everything that was written on the board in class?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Whoever on Tuesday April 26 2016, @01:41AM
At least one whiteboard manufacturer supports Linux. Their software is written in Java and runs on Ubuntu at least.
Purchase decisions need to take this into account. It's not just an issue of support for Linux: what happens when the manufacturer decides that it doesn't want to support that older version of Windows?
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Tuesday April 26 2016, @01:43AM
After some time of usage. The functionality can be observed, and if it works for some time. It's likely to continue to do so. Firmware upgrades can be refused. And if register fuckup is a concern, then the supplier can supply proper documentation.
If 30 000 units are used, the cost of RE can be spread across all devices and some person can be dedicated to this task.
Now suppose some FOSS server with a database, middleware talks via the network to whiteboards. Upgrades and security can be kept under control. However if a proprietary driver needs to be used , then perhaps you need to add a powerful local PC with a specific OS version that can't be upgraded due to security because then said driver will not work and it needs constant updates, that someone (person=$$) will need to keep an eye on. This one will then need to talk to some proprietary middleware that only talk to database X v5.0 that will only run under OS v8.2 etc and the dependency hell can run with it. And whenever a major version upgrade comes, the school will need to rewrite any custom software from the ground, again. Because APIs are changed without a rational reason.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tftp on Tuesday April 26 2016, @02:17AM
After some time of usage. The functionality can be observed, and if it works for some time. It's likely to continue to do so. Firmware upgrades can be refused.
You can do that. What you can't do, however, is you cannot buy a new device as a replacement for the old, broken one. From the POV of the OEM it's the same device, as their driver accommodates all the differences in hardware and firmware. From your POV it's a completely new device that may not work at all (if you are lucky), or may fail intermittently (if you are not so lucky.) Frequently the order of register writes matter, as certain commands affect the other - say, by resetting things. Less frequently, but still annoyingly often, there must be a mandatory timeout between commands. Look at the datasheet of any parallel LCD for a quick example. In my experience I came across quite a few weird things. In the end I solved almost all of them, but not quite. Complex, proprietary data encoding and compression is one popular difficulty. The OEMs are unwilling to tell you how they do compression - perhaps, because they forgot to pay royalties on a patent or two? Who knows; it's all obfuscated.
if a proprietary driver needs to be used , then perhaps you need to add a powerful local PC with a specific OS version
It may be cheaper this way, considering that this is a supported configuration, and if something does not work you can call the OEM and request assistance; and you will get it. The important issue here is a known path to the solution - known both in "how to" and in "how long will it take". A homegrown approach does not come with these. The device stopped working, you call the OEM, but they tell you to run a Windows diagnostic utility that talks to their driver. You don't have a Windows driver. Now what?
One of less apparent paradoxes here is that the hardware is cheap, fixed cost, and one-time expense. Humans are not cheap at all, their costs grow with time spent on solving your problem, and you need to pay them whenever you have a problem. Remember all that talk from Microsoft about TCO? Well, that's one part of it.
And whenever a major version upgrade comes, the school will need to rewrite any custom software from the ground, again. Because APIs are changed without a rational reason.
As opposed to having no major upgrades? It depends on whether you need that upgrade or not. Quite a few upgrades these days are increasing the capabilities of the device - say, increasing accuracy of the scanner or of the touch surface, or reducing power consumption... this is because many devices are now made with MCUs and FPGAs and similar programmable hardware. They release the driver 1.0, and it works, they start selling... and in parallel they continue development, adding functions that they had no time to implement earlier, or fixing hardware bugs, or generally improving things. All that is contained in the binary blobs that they program into the hardware, and in the drivers that they support. Your best bet, as other people already mentioned, is to demand that they support your choice of the OS and provide the driver. As matter of fact, you simply do not deploy 30,000 instances of anything on unsupported platforms.
(Score: 2) by Demose on Tuesday April 26 2016, @01:45AM
Good point. I suppose I'll have to make my own after my current project is complete.
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Tuesday April 26 2016, @01:41AM
Whiteboard solutions and office documents exchanged in France's education sector forces teachers to use proprietary software, for which the school keeps apart two PCs with proprietary office tools, the deputy mayor writes.
Whiteboards? I don't know what the hell he's talking about.
Office Document Exchanges with the rest of the education sector? HE doesn't know what he's talking about.
This is a non-issue unless France is running their education system with a bunch of script burdened spreadsheets. I routinely exchange massive, but not script-laden spread sheets with state agencies, and All I ever use is LibreOffice. I just save documents in MS Office formats. Works great.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @02:41AM
This is a non-issue unless France is running their education system with a bunch of script burdened spreadsheets. I routinely exchange massive, but not script-laden spread sheets with state agencies, and All I ever use is LibreOffice. I just save documents in MS Office formats. Works great.
At my university, most of the paperwork is in MS Office files. Sometimes LibreOffice (mostly) works, sometimes it doesn't.
If you're lucky, there will only be a few formatting problems, fixable while looking at the example PDF. It seems LibreOffice has some hard-coded limits about row height and font handling that MS Office doesn't, which breaks a lot of layouts carefully crafted with newlines and spaces. Yes, you shouldn't create a layout that way in the first place, but that's not a realistic expectation :/
If you're unlucky, there will be an Excel sheet with a script or two, or a Word document with complex tables or something. For these, I have to use a shared PC in the lab, it's the only one with Windows and MS Office.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @08:04AM
At my university, most of the paperwork is in MS Office files. Sometimes LibreOffice (mostly) works, sometimes it doesn't.
The really great thing is, that when it doesn't, you can blame it on MS, since the same thing happens with different versions of their own Office files! "Can't open your attachment!" "Oh, sorry, must be a Microsoft Compatibility Issue." Mischief Managed.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @04:10PM
yeah, and i would bet the problem is with word's BS implementation, not LO. just like how certain(all?) versions of outlook use Word's html rendering instead of IE's (good decision, dumb asses) so you can't use modern html & css in html emails to the hoardes of dipshits using outlook.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @08:27PM
the problem is with [M$] word's BS implementation, not [LibreOffice]
Every time this topic comes up, people who start the topic will purposely(?) omit the fact that the version-to-version compatibility of M$'s products is crap.
Broadly speaking, the compatibility of the FOSS suites with M$'s current product is at least as good as that--often better.
(The standard solution for a M$ Word .DOC that won't open with your version of Redmond's product is to open it with a FOSS word processor and do a Save As. Never seen it fail.)
Word's html
You need to put "HTML" in quote marks for that instance.
Quick exercise:
1) Start with an HTML file that passes muster with the HTML Validator. [w3.org]
2) Open it with M$'s word processor.
3) Do a Save.
4) Feed *that* to the Validator.
5) (Optional) Laugh heartily at how many errors have been injected into the file by M$'s app.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Tuesday April 26 2016, @01:52AM
Did anyone find what software they replaced existing ones with?
I suspect Office became LibreOffice, Photoshop - GIMP etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @10:31AM
Using keywords from TFA, I Googled up the original post by Mr. Guillard, formed an appropriate URL for Google Translate (but didn't submit that to that site directly), and passed the URL to archive.is (to run the JavaScript).
What I got was not significantly more than what the Joinup page said.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]