At the international Skolelinux user conference in Oslo, Norway, Kurt Gramlich, project leader of the German Skolelinux team, announced the decision to use Skolelinux as basis for installations in schools in the county Rhineland-Palatinate. Rhineland-Palatinate is one of the 16 federal states (German: Bundesländer) of Germany, has 4 Million citizens and approximately 1700 schools (about 900 primary schools).
Skolelinux has been successful internationally since 2003, is based on the Debian distribution, and can be freely used, copied and redistributed by anybody.
The Skolelinux community welcomes the decision made by the federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate. Kurt Gramlich: "After Hamburg this is the second federal state to select Skolelinux for their schools. It will be rolled out with professional support paid by the federal state. Wishes and suggestions from teachers of Rhineland-Palatinate will be included in the further development and adaptation of the software. I am looking forward to continued cooperating with the 11 pilot schools. Skolelinux will be enriched by the educational material that those schools is set out to produce. The adaptations we make will be integrated back into the international project through the Debian community."
The University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern has appointed prof. Dr. Bettina Reuter and certified engineer Klaus Knopper as project leaders. Both are lecturers of business economics faculty at the University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern. They are in charge of the adaptation of Skolelinux for Rhineland-Palatinate and the reintegration into the international project.
The newly founded "Association for the promotion of Free Software at schools in Rhineland-Palatinate", lead by Thomas Rohde, collects wishes and suggestions from teachers and pass them on to the project leaders. "The possibility for the schools in Rhineland-Palatinate to base their teaching on Free Software is long overdue", says Rohde. "Everyone can engage in the future of information technology like this and have fun." Pupils can of course take the school software with them home and use it privately too.
Klaus Knopper, known to users of free software as the producer of KNOPPIX, says that Debian and Skolelinux are mature and complete solutions: "Because of their openness and compliance with public standards, they reach a level of stability that cannot be achieved by current proprietary systems."
Mister Burkhard Schäfer at the Department of Education: "With the adapted Skolelinux for Rhineland-Palatinate we offer the schools the possibility to use a powerful and sustainable network solution without license fees. It is a solution which is user friendly for both teachers and pupils. We will not develop a new Linux distribution this way, but instead join the advantages of the existing professional network solutions of Skolelinux."
The first phase of the project will finish in March 2009. The prior network structures will be integrated into Skolelinux and easily administered with the Skolelinux server.
