Hi Mathias, On Di 22 Sep 2026 08:37:12 CEST, Mathias Harald Andersen wrote:
Hi Debian Edu team, My name is Mathias, I am a 16 year old student and open source developer from Denmark.
Welcome! Thanks for reaching out.
Over the past year, I have been working closely with local schools and municipal IT coordinators including the Danish OS2 public community on an initiative called SkoleOS. Our goal is to prevent thousands of functional, end of life AUE Chromebooks from becoming e-waste and provide a GDPR compliant, privacy first desktop for K 12 education.
A similar project exists in the Netherlands. The communicate via the CEDO-EU Matrix group.
We have successfully migrated several common school models such as the Dell Chromebook 3100 with 4GB RAM and newer Intel N100 AMD 3015Ce hardware to full Coreboot UEFI running a lightweight Debian SkoleOS based environment.
Very nice!
A few things we have learned and implemented so far: zRAM instead of disk swap By using zRAM exclusively, we eliminated eMMC flash wear while maintaining great multitasking headroom on 4GB devices idle CPU at ~0.6%, zero disk paging.
Interest! Thanks for sharing!
Hardware driver fixes We patched and tuned custom ALSA/UCM2 audio topologies and I2C touchpad ACPI power sequencing for newer educational hardware where mainline Linux was previously failing.
Have you started upstreaming those patches to the Linux kernel? Would you maybe need help with that?
Client side local filtering & privacy We developed local semantic tools to block distractions and telemetry while keeping official learning portals open without external cloud logging.
Nice! Are those implementations licensed under a FLOSS license? If so, would it make sense to bring these to Debian as official packages?
As we are preparing to pilot this across more classrooms, I would love to connect with the Debian Edu community:
ok... getting curious...
Are any of you currently looking into repurposing municipal Chromebook fleets in European schools, especially under the new EU Right to Repair and Ecodesign frameworks?
Not people directly from our team (as we are more busy with packaging software and getting Debian Edu 13 released at the moment. So, we are more busy in the development realm.
However, I am in contact with a Swedish municipality that might go the Debian Edu route and if so, they face a similar Chromebook challenge. Very comparable to yours.
How does Debian Edu currently approach offline/local profile synchronization for floating student laptops Roaming Workstations without heavy centralized server dependencies?
At the moment, there is no solution for it. In another project contexts (related to Linux enterprise desktops in government) we have been discussing various approaches. In fact, there is a very old implementation developed for the Limux project (Munich's first attemp to get Linux onto the desktop), that could be take as inspiration.
The overall approach would be:
* there is a profile syncing daemon that by default
does not do any syncing by itself, but dispatches syncing events
* this syncing daemon also takes care of managing profiles (multiple logins,
which client's user session is authoritative, etc.
* a trigger event could be: application gets closed/opened, user
logs-in/logs-out, etc.
*i ndividual apps should then provide a hook executable that will
do the actual profile syncing
I would be thrilled to exchange experiences and learn from the decades of work you have put into Debian Edu Skolelinux.
This all sounds very interesting, indeed.Also, I would love to learn more about the OS2Skole project, its scope and if Debian Edu and OS2Skole can join forces possibly.
As I am not living to far away from Denmark (40km below Danish border / Jutland), I'd be also interested in meeting with you and your colleagues.
Looking forward to more exchange on the topic! Mike -- mike gabriel aka sunweaver (Debian Developer) mobile: +49 (1520) 1976 148 landline: +49 (4351) 486 14 27 GnuPG Fingerprint: 9BFB AEE8 6C0A A5FF BF22 0782 9AF4 6B30 2577 1B31 mail: [email protected], http://sunweavers.net
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