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posted by martyb on Monday April 25 2016, @10:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the freeeedom! dept.

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.]


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @06:07AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @06:07AM (#337337)

    Name 3 such packages.
    Substantiating links are welcome.

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @01:37PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @01:37PM (#337469)

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @08:03PM (#337607)

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @09:26PM (#337638)

        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

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2016, @06:18AM (#337816)

        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

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2016, @09:14AM (#338338)

      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

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2016, @07:56AM (#337831)

    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)