rikgoldman

Revision 18 as of 2010-12-28 02:40:58

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http://9while9.com

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On TurnKey Linux

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/users/rikgoldman

Brief Vita

I'm currently a teacher of Literature and advanced technology at a nonpublic independent school. Before teaching high school, I taught literature and composition to undergraduate students at a college and a university.

My professional experience in information technology started in 1994 as I took on webmaster responsibilities for a nonprofit organization. Soon after, I began designing and deploying databases, first for nonprofit media outlets, then for my department in graduate school through 2006.

I took on webmaster responsibilities for the college of arts and sciences at my university, until I ultimately became system administrator for our Center for Literary Computing, where I administered Solaris and Irix machines. I was very proud to have integrated Macs, Windows PCs, and the two servers using smb.

I subsequently designed and maintained the department website at the college where I taught, until taking a position as Instructional Technologist for the college. While working in this capacity, I became increasingly frustrated with closed source solutions and with the vendor lock that resulted from it.

I began experimenting with Linux distributions in 1996. In 2005, I began relying solely on Ubuntu on my spare boxes. After I began teaching advanced technology, my students built a new machine for me; at this point I began using Ubuntu on my main computer. I subsequently moved all my home machines to Ubuntu.

Technology Instruction

In my role as an information systems management instructor, I've worked together with teams of high school students to contribute to the FOSS community. We worked together to build virtual appliances based on Ubuntu in general, and specifically on TurnKey Linux distributions.

In November 2010 we placed bronze in TurnKey Linux's international development contest, which recognized our contributions to TKL, and gave us an opportunity to celebrate that three of our appliances had been adopted by TKL and would be incorporated into their appliance library. As we've been reminded by developers, our contributions are not only to TurnKey Linux, but to the individual projects as well. After UDS 2010, we committed ourselves to the SchoolServer in a Box project discussed at UDS. Together, we've worked to create TKLPatches for as many of the appliances as possible on the blueprint. Although my work is predominantly with high school students, I also mentored a colleague, Sabre Goldman, as she worked to create an appliance for the Sahana Foundation's Agasti project.

Together with a team of students, I'm working on contributing to the Sahana Foundation's Eden project; we're working toward livecd/installers that will install a TurnKey Linux Ubuntu Lucid distribution with Eden preconfigured, as defined on their blueprint.

As a result of the success the students have had with advanced technology, my computer lab, which has 6 machines, was shifted to run entirely open-source software. Each computer runs Lucid from a custom distribution students made with remasterys; in addition, students administer 4 Lucid virtual machines, a Debian VM, a LinuxMint vm, and a Fedora VM.

Appliance Contributions

  • Ampache: A free and open-source web-based streaming media and media management solution.

  • Elgg: A free and open-source web-based social networking technology.

  • LimeSurvey: A web-based, free and open-source survey construction and deployment application.

  • IEP-IPP: A free and open-source individual education plan solution.

  • Mahara: A free and open-source e-portfolio, resume manager, and social networking tool.

  • OpenSIS (community edition): A free and open-source student information system.

  • Sahana Agasti: A free and open-source disaster management and recovery solution.

Documentation

In addition to documenting appliances on our projects' home at http://9while9.com, I've tried to contribute documentation to the FOSS community at every opportunity. I've contributed documentation for Ampache, TurnKey Linux's TKLPatch, and for the Sahana Eden development environment I've completed (usage notes and build notes).

Near and Long Term

In the near term I look forward to working with a mentor and my students to package Sahana's Agasti for Ubuntu and Debian. Longer term, I anticipate working with the same mentor to package web2py and then Sahana Eden. Ultimately, I'd like to contribute in the role of MOTU, where I think my skillset can be of the most powerful service. In the meantime, I'm learning PHP and MySQL so I can commit skills to the Ampache project. I'd also like to contribute to Sahana Eden using the Python skills I'm developing through coursework.