dc10 - 0.5
DebConf10
Speakers | |
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Frank B. Brokken |
Schedule | |
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Day | DebConf Day 1 / Debian Day (2010-08-01) |
Room | Interschool Lab |
Start time | 14:00 |
Duration | 01:00 |
Info | |
ID | 563 |
Event type | lecture |
Track | Community Outreach |
Language | en |
Feedback | |
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Debian at a large Dutch University
The paper and and presentation I propose will concentrate on the importance of Debian products for the University of Groningen, one of the major Dutch Universities.
To summarize:
- The university's Center of Information Technology (CIT) is responsible
for the correct functioning of the University's Information Technology
facilities. This involves making available `standard working
environments' for its 5000 staff members and 20,000 students, monitoring
and maintaining the integrity of its 10Gb Internet connection as well as
the computers that are responsible for providing the facilities that are
considered essential for the university.
The University uses various means to protect and monitor the well-being
of its computers. Among other means the Stealth File Integrity Control
program, a Debian package, is used to monitor the file integrity of its
core computer systems.
- The standard working environment offered by the university to its
employees and students has always been a non-Linux system. Fortunately
that has changed by now and Linux systems are now deployed in more and
more departments of the university. This `Linux Working Place' (LWP) as
it is affectionately called is strictly speaking not Debian but Ubuntu,
but the close links Ubuntu has with Debian result in a de-facto use of
Debian (see also below). In addition to this `official' acceptance of
Linux, several departments (Astronomy, Computer Science, Artificial
Intelligence, to name a few) have been using Debian Linux for a long
time.
- Various programming languages are actively being taught by the
University. Since the mid-80s I have organized a course on the C
programming language, augmented with C++ since the early 90s. The
addition of C++ resulted in the `C++ Annotations', which became the main
text-book for that course. The C++ Annotations have also found their way
into Debian and are used by many individuals and organizations on a
world-wide basis for teaching and honing knowledge about C++.
- Students reaching the advanced levels of the C++ course use a parser
generator specifically designed to be used with C++ when
when designing and implementing their own grammars. This parser
generator is Bisonc++, also a Debian package.
- Students of my class `Information Security' use classes and templates of
my `Bobcat' software library to implement algorithms requiring
computations with integral values of unlimited sizes. They usually
prefer using these specially designed classes over the raw use of the
underlying OpenSSL library functions. Bobcat is not only used in this
context, but many C++ programs developed during the C++ course or used
by the C++ course students rely on Bobcat. Bobcat is also used in other
sections of the University. The departments of Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence customarily have Bobcat installed on their
systems as well.
- Various generic tools (Icmake for program development, Xd for fast
directory changes and other Debian-based tools) are used by students and
staff-members to simplify their daily activities.
Spin-offs of these projects were developed or are being developed right now by
others, like ccbuild' (Bram Neijt) and
flexc++' (Jean-Paul van Oosten,
Richard Berendsen, and myself). Moreover, the Debian Developer George Danchev
visited us last fall when the CIT organized a course on Debian
Package Construction.