Emmabuntüs, Linux distribution and reuse – Patrick and Yves

Emmabuntüs with Patrick and Yves

Walid : Dear listeners, hello and welcome, new episode of Projets Libres!

Today, we’re going to talk about Linux distribution once again! This is the second episode on Linux distributions and I’m very happy because today, we’re going to talk about Emmabuntüs. This is a project that I have been following for some time and that I had already installed on old computers a few years ago. I was super curious to ask questions to the people who are doing the project. So I’m delighted because today with me I have Patrick and Yves, two people at the heart of the project and here they will be able to answer all my questions.

Well listen gentlemen I hope you are well, welcome to the podcast Projet Libre.

Patrick : Good evening Walid, thank you for having us on your podcast.

Presentation of Patrick and Yves

Walid : All the pleasure is for me and I will ask you to start by introducing yourself, ritual question. Patrick, would you like to start by introducing yourself, explaining to us a little bit where you come from and how you discovered free software?

Patrick : Okay, Walid, no problem. I started free software for personal needs because I was tired of using the old system where I had problems. And so, I started tinkering in my corner in 2009, there. And then afterwards, I had the opportunity to install Ubuntu at the beginning. And I had the opportunity to meet people at Emmaus, who came to help them recondition equipment. That’s how I started with projects.

Walid : ok, very well and you Yves?

Yves : I have worked mainly with machines, microprocessors and then mini-computers in my career. And when I retired, I tended to try to get back to the Unix world a little bit. And Linux of course was the most obvious gateway to start off on the right foot in this world. So that’s kind of how it happened.

Walid : What does free software mean to you, Patrick?

Patrick : It’s opportunities to be able to make a distribution, to use some free software and to adapt it to your personal needs.

Walid : And you, Yves?

Yves : For me it’s synonymous with freedom with a capital L, that is to say not to be feet of points related to proprietary software and to be able to study code, to be able to modify it, so all this suits me very very well.

Computer refurbishing

Walid : ok, great. Before we start talking about the genesis of Emmabuntüs, I wanted to know a little bit, how you are, well you started to talk about it a little bit, but how did you come across this whole sector of reuse and reconditioning of computer equipment? Patrick?

Patrick : I was the one who started in 2010, I wanted to change my life a little bit and so I initially suggested to Emmaus that we do computer classes in evening classes and then they told me that it was not possible. And they told me, you know, in your city of Neuilly-Plaisance, there’s an Emmaus that is looking for people to refurbish computers.

So I went there and I met a person who supported me at the beginning, called Djebar, whom I thank, who has unfortunately since passed away, and who told me “you’re in luck, that’s all we have to do as a job”. And that’s how I started.

And at the beginning, I started by refurbishing computers, at the time on Windows XP. And seeing the difficulty of the task, I started to make a small script to automate the uninstallation of certain software and the installation of free software on Windows XP.

Walid : What do you mean by refurbishing?

Patrick : So reconditioning is an operation that consists of changing the software that is present or removing certain software to have a system that is as clean as possible. It’s a little bit like cleaning the software part of the computer.

Often we try to find out, for example, when we do reconnaissance of the computer that is given to us, we try to see if people have not left their password, have not left their photo, have not left forbidden videos, that’s part of the software.

So there are several methods, on some HP-style computers, there is a factory reset procedure, but other companies don’t offer that. And so, either we clean the computer manually by removing some software, or that’s what happened later, we install a Linux system, so we can rest easy.

It’s much faster and you don’t have to worry about passwords, whether they are kept or not.

Walid : And so, when the computers arrive, you never know what type of computer you’re going to have and potentially do you change cards, hard drives, do you change parts in them?

Patrick : So what we were doing at the time were computers from individuals in the Emmaus communities, they essentially recover computers from individuals, so they are heterogeneous computers, there are none of them that are the same and indeed often people gave them away without a hard drive.

That’s why we essentially switched to Linux, because when there was no hard drive, we couldn’t keep the license, and if we wanted to reinstall a Windows license, we were a little bit illegal. Well, some people do it, Windows lets it happen, they’re quite conciliatory about it, but to get legal, on these computers, we started to install Linux.

And so, Djebar gave me permission at the beginning. At first, he told me “Oh no, but Linux…” I tried it, it didn’t work” when they tried to recondition on Linux, on classic Ubuntu. And so, I said, “Well, what we’re going to do, we’re going to make an improved classic Ubuntu.” And it gave birth some time later, a year and a half later, to Emmabuntüs.

That’s why in Emmabuntüs, we find the origin in the word Emmaus and Ubuntu.

Walid : You, Yves, when did you get to the Emmabuntüs project?

Yves: I don’t remember to tell you the truth, maybe Patrick does?

Patrick : I think it must have happened in the years 2014-2015. Did you know about the partnership with Yvo Togo?

Yves : Yes, that’s right.

Patrick : So you must have arrived in the years 2014, 2015?

Yves : That’s right, maybe.

Patrick : were we already on Debian?

Yves : No, it was the tipping point, it was a little bit before.

Patrick : So yes, it was in the years 2013, 2014.

Yves : When I retired, I said to myself “hey, I should start doing something interesting, interesting rather than staying in my corner”. I came across the Montpel’Libre association and I asked them if they knew people who worked in the free software industry, who reconditioned, etc. And they directed me right away to Patrick. So I sent an email to Patrick and then we started talking and Patrick welcomed me with open arms and since then we have been trying to work together.

Patrick : And since then we’ve been friends.

Walid : So if I go back to it, the initial objective of the Emmabuntüs distribution was to be able to install Linux on the heterogeneous computers that you were recovering at the time for refurbishing at Emmaüs.

Patrick : Absolutely.

Yves : Emmaus or others, because I work in a resource centre where I have exactly the same problem, it’s the same problem.

Patrick : Yes, that’s true, Yves, but it was at the beginning, at the beginning it was that, it was made for the Emmaus community where I live in Neuilly-Plaisance, which is called Emmaus Neuilly Avenir.

Walid : ok.

Patrick : And then we broadcast, then we formed a group, a collective, that was in March 2011. So at the origin of this collective there were Hervé, Yves (Editor’s note: correction, it’s David), Morgan – there were four of us – as well as myself, we were the co-founders of what we called the Emmabuntüs collective. That’s when we released our first ISO version for download on the Internet.

Walid : Can you explain what you mean by collective?

Patrick : A collective is like an association, except that we don’t have an official status.

Walid : It’s just a group of people?

Patrick : Yes, absolutely. Like a community, a mix between the community and the association.

The initial relationship with Emmaus

Walid : And at the beginning, when you started this project, what was the relationship with Emmaus in general? Because there is Emma from Emmaus in the name. Do they see it in a benevolent way? How does it work at the beginning? Or do they not say anything in particular to each other?

Patrick : In fact, Emmaus is… There are several communities in France, there are more than a hundred, perhaps 130 at the moment. So it was in the community where I was in Neuilly-Plaisance, I was well received by the managers, by the IT manager who was called Djebar, he was delighted with what we were doing and he pushed me to continue in this project.

And when we sold the first computers at the beginning of Christmas 2010, we made 4 under Emmabuntüs and 4 under Windows. And when I came back from leave, he told me “it’s great and everything, we’ve sold all the Emmabuntüs, we’re continuing”. But at the time, it wasn’t called Emmabuntüs. But that’s what it was to become, Emmabuntüs. We didn’t give the name right away, actually.

The beginnings of distribution

Walid : And from that moment on, the ISO, when does it arrive? When you created the collective and released the first version of Emmabuntüs?

Patrick : in March 2011. And I had already been working at Emmaus for 9 months. In March 2011. The very first version was in October 2010 when I had an Ubuntu Party.

This is the very first version but we didn’t have the ISO yet. We installed it on the computers, we took an ISO of Ubuntu, 10.0.4, we installed it and then we launched a script that installed all the additional packages as well as the doc to make the configuration we have at the moment.

Walid : ok. Did the version of Ubuntu that you did, it had any main objectives apart from the fact that it was installed on heterogeneous hardware in terms of use,

in terms of publishing? Did you have goals that you wouldn’t necessarily have found with other Linux distributions?

Patrick : We took Ubuntu because it was a version that was the most used by the general public, let’s say. And then it also had an advantage, because now so deviant, which is that it was very well suited to different kinds of equipment. There were quite a few built-in software drivers. So to avoid problems, incompatibilities. That’s why we chose Ubuntu.

Walid : And you’re saying that you added a dock, so you added elements, you customized the version of Ubuntu a bit?

Patrick : Yes, of course.

Walid : But what did these personalizations affect? They only touched on the graphic part?

Patrick : These customizations, there is the dock that still exists and then there is a set, more than sixty software programs that are installed on top. So that’s the particularity of Emmabuntüs. So some people say that we put too much software, for them it’s that as the software grows, we remove it as we release versions. But otherwise it allows the users, the audience we were targeting, in fact in the audience we were targeting, we were targeting three different types of audiences, parents, children and grandparents, so that’s why we put software for the different audiences we were targeting and all that was installed from the start. It saved people from having to learn certain things. If they needed software, for example, to show children how to use mental arithmetic, they had Tuxmat software.

If they wanted to do a little genealogy for grandparents, they had genealogy software. So some criticized us on this because we had too much software. Our goal was to have an all-in-one system installed from the start. Do you confirm Yves?

Patrick : Absolutely. And then maybe we can also add the offline part, that is to say that when these computers are sent to Africa for example, where they don’t have a very efficient internet in general, they don’t need to download new applications, they are already there. It’s still a plus.

Patrick : Absolutely. This was one of the objectives that Hervé, who is one of the co-founders of our collective, had asked me to do, and who also continues to reuse in Nanterre. It was to have something that was all integrated. And precisely, he told me, you have to do the ISO, because he needed that for his projects that he had in Africa. He already had reconditioning projects, he had a computer room in Africa at the time and so he wanted this kind of online distribution.

But at the beginning, when I started, I didn’t have the vision and the ambition to go abroad.

Distribution in the French-speaking ecosystem

Walid : When you install Emmabuntüs, you typically have a Framasoft logo.

Patrick : Yes.

Walid : I was actually wondering if you have any relations with Framasoft, with other associations, with other people who work on projects. In fact, how does the distribution fit in a little bit in this whole French-speaking free panorama?

Patrick : So the relationship we have with Framasoft, when I put this Framasoft wallpaper, it’s because I wanted to make a nod to the site that had brought me to free software in the years, let’s say 2008. So it’s thanks to this site that I started to have the notion of free software that I didn’t know before.

And I thought these wallpapers were nice, we’ve had them since the beginning. For the moment we’re keeping them, there are some of us who find that they’re a bit old school let’s say, but hey we’re keeping them for now, we have other wallpapers now that we can change at startup, for people who are allergic to penguins who slide on ice, but otherwise we keep them in standard installation to have a certain style. Even if some people don’t like it, we know that some people don’t like it.

We were very criticized for our name at the level of Emmabuntüs, a lot, and for our old school wallpapers.

Walid : Why were you criticized for the name? What does the name have?

Patrick : Internationally criticized. Since 2011, we have gone into visibility, let’s say, into small international visibility. There are people who, bloggers, a little bit like journalists, have criticized us for this kind of thing. Sometimes it was nice, sometimes it was mean.

Walid : Why? Because the name is not pronounceable?

Patrick: The name is not pronounceable for us, and for English speakers, they make an amalgam with a Spice Girls muse. Now I know, at the time, when we took that name, I hadn’t thought about the Spice Girls at all. And then for some, it’s unpronounceable, and for others now, it’s contradictory since we don’t use Ubuntu anymore, so it causes them metaphysical problems.

I explain to them that it’s not a big deal for us, it would be very complicated to change the name within our collective. What do you think, Yves?

Yves : I use two terminologies, Emmabuntüs is the official name and then between us we say EmmaDE, because now we are Debian Edition, so it sounds like EmmaDE. I also like the little name if you want, so it suits me very well.

Patrick : But if we wanted to change, there are some who are for change, let’s say, and others who are against change in our collective, so it would be a major split, so I never took the risk of changing.

Walid : How many of you are currently in the collective?

Patrick : So at the level of the perimeter of the collective we don’t know it. It’s a little bit like the size of the universe, we don’t know it. We’re going to try to do a little philosophy. Someone once did, so I don’t know, Sylvain I think, you will tell me Yves, who did a survey on our collective as part of his end-of-studies defense. It was someone who was a member of our mailing list, we didn’t even know. One day he told us about an investigation, then I understood that he was already a member of our mailing list. He did an investigation, he sent us a doc of how many… twenty pages, thirty pages? A somewhat psychological investigation, I don’t know, which proved that we were a collective. There were 25 people who answered, I was very surprised, I thought there would only be three of us to answer. So there are at least 20 to 25 people who follow what we do. Even if sometimes I feel like I’m a little bit alone, isn’t it Yves?

Walid : It smells like a little call to people who want to contribute.

Patrick : ah of course we’ve been looking for it, we can talk about it, I can make a parenthesis about that, now we’re going to release a new version of Emmabuntüs, an evolution but which is a very, very important evolution, we’ve been working on it for six months and we’ve made calls internationally, We sent to a specialized free software mailing list that didn’t answer us, we first asked the administrators if we could make a call for a tester, our call was not received. After we even made an official announcement on the Distrowatch website that you should know, and so he made us an announcement on his newsletter and we had a person contact us, then we contacted him again and we didn’t hear back. And so it’s still an ad that 70,000 people pass by every day. Not only on our small ad, on the whole, there are people who were able to see what was scored so we didn’t get any results.

Yves : Patrick, you need to explain a little bit about the complexity of the tests for the blind.

Patrick : yes, it was for an evolution that concerns visual impairment. After us Yves, for the moment, we’re lucky, knock on wood, we can see correctly but we can do the test without putting ourselves in a completely blind situation. We can do it, otherwise we wouldn’t have moved forward.

The transition from Ubuntu to Debian

Walid : Precisely there you are talking about evolution, in fact I would have liked us to come back to the evolution of Emmabuntüs. What I’d like to understand is a little bit about the main stages of distribution development between the first version and now. What was important?

Patrick : I’m going to give the floor to Yves, do you want to speak Yves?

Yves : An important step that emerged when Ubuntu, since Emmabuntüs was based on Ubuntu at startup, when Ubuntu dropped the 32-bit versions and decided to support only 64-bit. However, the hardware that we wanted to continue to support was, I would say, mostly 32 bits. Well since then there has been an evolution I think, but at the time 32 bits were important. And that’s when Patrick decided, with the help of another friend called Arpinux, to develop a version that was based on Debian. And no longer under Ubuntu. Ubuntu being a daughter of Debian, as we know of course. So I think that was a decisive step in the evolution.

Walid : Is that a big job?

Patrick : yes, it was a big job. We were in the unknown, first of all it’s not the same assembly tools, so now we use the standard Debian software called LiveBuild. So we had to master that. That’s why we got closer to Arpinux who had developed HandyLinux at the time, and then he had made tutorials on the use of LiveBuild. So there was that as a big unknown, there was the big unknown of hardware support, would Debian hold up in terms of the different hardware we have?

So we weren’t sure that there was also that as an unknown.

Walid : what year is that?

Patrick: That’s right, we started the switch in the years 2014-2015. And then we had two versions at one point, we had to make the choice. If we maintained both, I said “I don’t maintain both”, so we stopped the Ubuntu version. And after Ubuntu changed its mind, if you want it changed its mind, they continued to pursue their 32-bit version. Now they have just stopped it, they had to stop it in 2018. They made two other versions afterwards, major ones let’s say. Because we only use the Long Term Support versions. That’s it, so they continued.

It’s a big evolution for us. And then we also lost, we lost, we have since recovered it, we lost an installer, we lost an installer which was a graphical installer, the equivalent now it is integrated, it is called Calamares , we lost that, in fact we switched to an older generation installer, what we call the classic Debian live installer. So that was also a loss for our users.

The objectives of Emmabuntüs distribution

Walid : ok so that’s the big seesaw, that was the big rock, yes I didn’t ask but your goal is really to make sure that you can support the equipment for as long as possible?

Patrick : yes of course, that’s the point. And then there is also another goal, there are two other goals, we haven’t talked about it, but hey, it’s to help associations like the Emmaus communities, for us it’s an association like any other, to recondition their own equipment for their own project or for sale. We are not against sales, and also to allow the discovery of Linux to as many people as possible with a version that we consider more accessible. Others don’t think so, but this is what we consider more accessible because everything is installed from the start, so others, specialists, developers, or those who make the reviews, they refine their version. They would like everyone to do the same as them, but someone, for example, now when you buy a car, you don’t need to tinker with anything. We go to the garage and we don’t need to tinker as much and less. It’s the same here.

Walid : Personally I use on a Sony Vaio that is about 15 years old.

Yves : Does it still work?

Walid : yes, it always works.

Patrick : We’re lucky. 15 years is for us, we made a manual recently because we don’t just work on distribution, we’re going to talk about it. We made a manual for refurbishers, I sent you the link. We consider that 15 years is the limit. So we don’t want to do geriatrics, if I could say so, in reconditioning. For us, this is a bit of a limit. So we’re aiming for machines between 5 years, we’re aiming for machines between 5 years, which is an old machine now, for the world of industry, 5 years and 10 years.

Walid : Okay. Oh yes, it’s interesting to see what kind of equipment it serves.

Patrick : The equipment we send to Africa is equipment, there are people who don’t have this equipment at home, so there are people who would be jealous of the equipment that is five years old. The equipment is all uniform: here we will recover a batch, we will have between 80 and 130 central units that will all be the same.

Walid : We’ll talk about all this later because it’s very interesting, I ask you to know a little bit where you get it etc. But I interrupted you while we were talking about the evolutions to the distribution, now you just talked about the transition from Ubuntu to Debian. So that’s in 2015 if I understood myself correctly?

Patrick : yes, we’ll say 2015.

Other distro evolutions

Walid : And then from that moment on, what happened in terms of evolution in distribution?

Patrick : After what happened, it was the integration of Calamares.

Walid : the graphical installer.

Patrick : Personalization because well… I don’t want to criticize but in some Linux distributions it is not necessarily well installed… In some yes, but in others it is not very well installed so that was it.

After that it was to add some software, remove other software, I don’t know, I don’t remember everything but that’s the work we did. After that, we switched to… I worked for quite a while, about two years, but not continuously, on what is called the reuse key. So, that’s when we did what we called our reuse campaign, under the initiative of Arpinux, who, at the time, was the president of the Debian-Facile association.

We said, at the level of our collective: we already have a reuse key that we use internally, which we have not distributed freely. And so we made it evolve, it took two years, to make something much more usable by everyone. Even we are enjoying it now. In addition to the manuals, Yves has participated enormously in the manuals of this reuse key.

Amaury, who couldn’t join us tonight, made a lot of videos of use, demonstration of this key and participated in the test of this key by telling me “this needs to be improved”.

So now we have a reuse key that is really very flexible in terms of its use because at the beginning we had a structure for installing hard disks that was fixed, okay. And there we have a structure that is much more flexible, we can put partitions in any order, we can also have a separate /home partition with the separate route partition.

The key to reuse

Walid : What do you call a reuse key? What does it change compared to… First of all, physically what is it? And then, what does it do more than just an ISO on a USB stick?

Patrick : Okay. Yves, do you want to explain it?

Yves : The reuse key is a USB key with a small program that starts.

In general, Ventoy is used to shape it. From Ventoy, you can boot whatever you want, like ISO, on your USB stick. One of the possibilities is to have an image of an installation that you have already done, especially if you want to do what is called OEM, that is to say that you prepare your system, you format it as you want, except for the data specific to the end user, for example his name, his password, things like that. And you create an image that you’re going to put on your USB key in a very specific directory, and when you’re going to do your reconditioning, you’re just going to say: “well, I just want to get this clone, this image, to transfer it directly to my computer to be reconditioned”, and it takes care of itself. In the space of a few minutes, you have a brand new computer at the system level.

Walid : So typically if you receive four years of computer use, the installation of the four computers will be quite fast.

Patrick : It’s a day and a half, I already know the time. Yes, quite before when we started to make the iso of the Emmabuntüs, there are specific menus that Yves explained in the installation manual. There are specific menus, we don’t detail them all, which are intended for repackaging. That is to say, for example, there is a menu called automatic partitioning, where we will do a predefined partitioning, we will put a predefined password. When the user is going to restart, the post-installation screens will be pre-configured, you have to click. When we did this at Emmaus, we started like that with our specific menu, which is only for the French, we didn’t do it for the English-speakers, that’s it, they do the classic installation, they answer the 30 questions that we just do, what do we do? We just choose the disk and partition, ok.

So we had already automated this part on the part of the classic goods at the installation level. And also on Ubuntu it was the same thing. So when you do an installation like that, the installation takes about twenty minutes. When you restart the post-installation, you have to remove languages, it takes 5 to 10 minutes. So all this would take 25 minutes to install a computer with manual interventions, that is to say that the person cannot leave, he or she must be in front of his or her computer.

With the new system, which is cloning, we do this once on a computer with a disk smaller than the target disks, of course, that’s an obligation, and then we make a clone using a software called Clonezilla that we use. And this Clonezilla, we instrumented it with our reuse key. We have two scripts that drive the Clonezilla. We only did the work part, the interface part in fact, choosing the ISO, choosing the clone rather. That’s the script we made.

It means that the user arrives, he plugs in his key, there is a mode that is almost automatic, the last mode we put on, he has already predicted, put an initialization file, he says such and such a clone he is in such and such a place, the key starts, it formats, it partitions, it installs, it makes a little ringtone at the end and it restarts the computer. So the person when he has integrated the key that he has started it, it is all done automatically. So it’s five minutes machine. But the user, a user, me for example, or others, a reconditioner, let’s say in our community, he makes four machines in parallel. You can assemble, a reconditioner can make six machines in parallel. All right?

So this allows us, a day and a half, with two people, to do the reconditioning of the computers, plus cardboarding. And then, as we have time for projects on Togo, we take the luxury of copying the offline Wikipedias that take 20 minutes to copy. So that’s what slows us down a little so we’re at half an hour per machine to recondition it.

Walid : Do you have that much volume? What is the volume of computer in your collective?

Patrick : It’s not that we have a lot of volume, it’s that if you want, when we do the reuse sessions, we condense them at the time, so the YovoTogo association, they’re based in the Vendée. I’m in the Paris region, so when I went there, it was for the weekend.

So if you want, we work all day, in the evening we party a little bit anyway, we have to relax in the city, but it’s condensed, okay. Someone who is in a structure, a refurbishing workshop, he makes 5 computers a day, he spreads his work over the week. That we had condensed.

Once, they reconditioned with the very first keys, which we hadn’t yet made the version that we delivered for everyone, they were working in a room that was 10 degrees. So it motivates you to work, because you have lent the premises to do this, and so you have to do things very quickly. So that’s the point.

So then others use it, but that’s why we wanted to have speed and especially also automation because if we… at the beginning we did it with Clonezilla, but there were people after a while, you see all the screens, you make mistakes, you start over, you crash, now it’s automatic. You can’t make a mistake. Except that I couldn’t put the key in the computer. There you go.

Walid : I’ve deviated again from my question of evolutions, so the evolution of distribution is a bit disjointed, but here you have created the reuse key.

Patrick : Sorry. no, no, but it is I who… But it’s in chronological order, you’ll say, it’s in chronological order.

Improvements in distribution for the visually impaired

Walid : After the reuse key, were there any other major developments before we moved on to the next step?

Yves : There are now…

Patrick : the current evolution on visually impaired and blind people. Yes, that’s the big evolution, we’ve been on it for 6 months.

Walid : Has this evolution come out or is it going to be released?

Patrick : If you want to test it, we can give it to you for testing, but it’s not officially released yet. It will be released, I hope, in July-August in an official version. But now we have a date, Yves knows it very well because I’m pushing him a little. We have a date for July 11 in fact, we have to deliver our clone with this version.

(Editor’s note: the version was released: https://emmabuntus.org/le-29-juillet-2024-emmade5-accessible-aux-personnes-deficientes-visuelles/)

Because this project, in fact, to add these features for the visually impaired, it was requested by the association with which we work on Togo which is called YovoTogo.

It’s a French and Vendée association that we’ve been working with since 2015, which has already equipped more than thirty computer rooms in Togo and another association called Jump Lab’orione which manages all the computer equipment on site, which trains the master trainers who are in the computer rooms. And so, the YovoTogo association is an association that has been working on disability for many years, since 2010, 2011.

And so they worked with a new association which is the National Federation of Disabled People of Togo, with whom they worked for container and equipment partnerships.

Then they said to themselves, it’s true that you’re all over Togo, would you like to be given computers? So the association said, yes, that’s good. Then Claude had an idea, but why not make a version adapted to the visually impaired for Togo?

Those were the reflections of December. And so I say at the beginning, you know it’s going to be super hard and everything, we’re going to try to find something that’s already done. And so we didn’t manage to find something that was already done in the Linux world, and so we set off trying to make something that could be used in Togo and for the visually impaired.

Because there are Linux distributions, but for the visually impaired, they didn’t convince me. So there you go, we’re going to try to do something better.

Walid : I wonder a little, what have you improved in distribution, precisely, to work on these problems of visual impairment?

Patrick : So, we’re going to ask Yves, who made the manual. What do you think, Yves?

Yves : I think there’s a big level of integration of features. There is a systematization of shortcuts. So you have to know that visually impaired people don’t use the mouse very little, they don’t see the screen, and so they use shortcuts a lot and they listen to what the system says. It must be said that we based ourselves on Orca, which pre-existed, but Patrick put in, I think, all… in English we say glue, I don’t know how to say in French, glue,

Patrick : the binder

Yves : All the binders around and above Orca to make any utilities or main applications work in harmony.

That’s what was difficult, that everything worked in a homogeneous way. What do you think of it, Patrick?

Patrick : yes that’s very good, I agree with you Yves. In fact we added an interface too, in fact this version we had an additional constraint, it has to be a dual system, that is to say that it can be used by a blind person and by a sighted person, or by a visually impaired person and a sighted person.

So it has to switch automatically from one mode to another without there being any disturbances, that is to say that for example if a sighted person starts when he is in accessibility mode, okay, so for the blind, Orca will start right away. You can even have a zoom by a software called Compiz. Well, he won’t see the zoom too much, it won’t change him. But on the other hand, he will constantly hear Orca talking to him.

So here, we added a function that allows, tac, to switch from one mode to another. So either by clicking on a button that we explain where it is, or by a shortcut, we click, we uncheck a box and bam, we switch to the other mode. This was a constraint and a request also from the YovoTogo association. So we have that and we added a lot of software that we found in different places, we even pushed the vice a little bit to add software for people with motor impairments, to be able to click on a mouse, that kind of thing. So we pushed a little further than what was initially required.

And we added a lot of software by telling ourselves how they will do this, how they will do this. We asked a lot of questions to which we didn’t get answers. We found bugs, a lot of bugs, that weren’t resolved. So there you have it, we’re not entirely convinced of the result. There are still things to improve, but we tried to do as much as possible in the six months we had. At first, I told Claude it will take 6 months, he told me no look you just made me a demo with Orca, I said yes but wait Claude… This is just the screen reader, you have to put everything around it for it to work well.

When you have the screen reader, it only reads software for which it is suitable, there is software for it, it’s a black window so it doesn’t read, so we had to find some software, change it for example. We changed the calculator, so that the calculator is accessible to the blind. Here is for example.

Walid : The question I’m asking myself here is that from what I understand, I have the impression that there are two jobs. There is a first work which is to integrate packages into the distribution. And there is a second work which is more about changing behaviour. Are you redoing packaging? How do you integrate all this?

Patrick : So, sometimes, we come to patch certain software in the source code. We avoid doing it, okay? We add a few scripts in certain places and then, with some software, we try to solicit the people who maintain it to make it evolve, but sometimes, it’s a dead letter, that’s it. There are both. But we don’t repackage, we don’t repackage. We didn’t do that in separate packages at one time. Someone wanted to help me do this, but it’s a lot of work to make separate packages.

We don’t manage the depots, we do everything in one piece. It’s doable, but it’s extra work. And they must be validated. First of all, we don’t have the people to validate the changes we’ve made. So now we’re going to come out with evolutions that aren’t tested with the level of requirement we’d like. Never mind, we go out, it’s not a big deal, but that’s how it is.

Current relations with Emmaus

Walid : If we move on, did you still have relations with Emmaus? Do you know if they still use Emmabuntüs for refurbishment? Just a little bit to know where it stands.

Patrick : So with Emmaus we still have a few relationships. We have a relationship with another, Yves, who is in Dijon, who always repackages with Emmabuntüs, but he is the one who manages the stand at Emmaus as a volunteer. We certainly have other Emmaus communities that use it, but even when they used it, it was always very difficult to get feedback.

You see, so it was always difficult. When you send emails to people saying, well, you should do some small feedback, people have a hard time giving feedback. Same for our users or people who come to the forum, it’s very rare that people, at the moment, I don’t know how it was before, but when it works, they come to say thank you, it works.

In general, when you don’t get any feedback, it’s because it’s working. But we don’t have a lot of feedback, the best feedback we get, that’s why we work with them, with the YovoTogo and Jump Lab’orione associations, because we have a lot of feedback on the equipment on site, on maintenance. We have an exchange group on WhatsApp to continue this and so we have a lot of feedback and we monitor what is happening a lot.

Graphic identity

Walid : How did you work on the graphic identity of the Emmabuntüs distribution?

Patrick : So the identity at the beginning was, we did, how would I say, by ourselves. And then there was a version where we asked, we called on people to help us, for a new graphic identity a little bit. And so we had people who came to help us with that. There was Juliette Taka who made official Debian versions, several wallpapers that helped us. There was JCZ who also came to help us with a redesign of our logo. Since then, we haven’t made any other graphic evolutions, they did. It’s on the Emmabuntüs DE4 I think, it’s

evolutions that we have kept on the Emmabuntüs DE5. Me in fact on this version in fact at the time what I was doing was me doing the graphical evolutions of the Debian but like the Debian version which was the 11, I was not convinced of the wallpapers that had also been made by Juliette in the end. I wasn’t convinced, I found it a little too dark, for my taste it’s very beautiful, but in the background of the start screen, I found that a little too dark and so we made a call and then she was the one who offered to come and help us.

We did two interviews, for those who are interested, there are two interviews with each of them on our blog that explain their approach.

The Emmabuntüs community

Walid : I’ll put the links in the transcript of the episode. (Editor’s note: Juliette and Jean-Claude) You talked a little bit about the community, I wanted to know a little bit about who your community was made up of and what do you know about it? And then how you interact with it, by what means. There you talked a little bit about the fact that you have a WhatsApp group, that you work with two associations and everything. Do you know, do you have an idea of who uses a little, who uses Emmabuntüs?

Patrick : There are a lot of questions. The WhatsApp group is not a tool of the Emmabuntüs collective. I would like to clarify, I prefer to say it right away to avoid having people say “What do you mean you use a WhatsApp group?” No, the WhatsApp group is not an Emmabuntüs tool, it’s a tool that is used by the YovoTogo and Jump Lab’orione associations, in which Yves and I are there, aren’t you Yves, you are there too?

Yves : Yes.

Patrick : we have a group for the Jump Lab’orione projects, the computer rooms let’s say, there too we have a link on our site that presents a little bit of the rooms, the mapping of the rooms with some photos of the rooms, one photo per room but we have hundreds, we’re not going to put them all, make photo gallery…

So that’s this group, we also have a group called Emma Adapté, also of which Yves is a member, a WhatsApp group, that’s the group to work with Jean-Pierre, with Justin, who are the visually impaired people who will support this new version in Togo. Because there will be specific training for teachers and visually impaired people who will supervise this version.

It will be everywhere, but in accessibility mode, there will be people who will supervise it. Yves is in the process of making a manual on this subject to present all these developments. How many pages are we at Yves on this manual?

Yves : You told me, about forty I think.

Patrick : I don’t think anymore since you worked on it. Yes. Well, we’ll say about forty pages. All right.

So for the Emmabuntüs collective, the modes of use are mailing lists. So a mailing list that’s at Framasoft. And so we communicate like that with the members. Afterwards, for the tests, we use Framapads. All right? It’s the Framapad that is no longer at Framasoft, we self-hosted it thanks to… to his first name, it doesn’t come back to me… who helped us to set it up.

Yves : isn’t that Ange?

Patrick : No, it’s not Ange, it will come back to me, I have a memory lapse. At 10 a.m., it’s normal. So there you have it, who helped us to set them up. (Editor’s note: precision, it’s Jean-Luc from Webassoc)

So we have this for the tests, that is to say that we send an email to everyone saying we set up such and such a version, the FramaPad there are the download links and you put your feedback on the FramaPad with your first name. These are the modes of exchange that we have in our collective.

After that, we also work on FramaGit, it’s the software forge. It’s at Framasoft, we haven’t migrated yet. And so here we have the latest version, in public version, of which people can see the packages, the scripts, and we discuss the technical evolution part. When, for example, we discuss these EmmAdapted evolutions, the manuals, we work as a group on this. Those who want to come to this and we allow them to participate. Other people can just see what’s going on there without being able to participate.

If someone asks us to participate, we give them the rights without any problem. These are our ways of operating. Have I forgotten anything, Yves?

Yves : No, I don’t think so. In the meantime I took a look at the doc and there are 60 pages at the moment.

Patrick : That’s it, thank you. I knew it.

The Jerry DIT (Do-It-Together) Project

Walid : great. I would now like to talk about a project. I had never heard of it and I discovered during a conference people from Montpellibre at the JDLL, free software day in Lyon. And I thought it was great. This is the Jerry project. So I’d like you to explain a little bit about what the Jerry project is and a little bit about how you get involved in this project.

Patrick : I’ll let Yves speak.

Yves : No, it’s yours Patrick, Jerry is you.

Patrick : Okay, the problem is that I don’t want to monopolize the floor all the time.

Walid : Don’t worry, it’s okay.

Yves : It’s always a pleasure to hear you Patrick.

Patrick : especially when I’ve eaten at your place, when I talk to you for hours, then you have a headache. Okay, so let’s go for the Jerry project.

The Jerry project is the chance of life. At one time, our collective participated much more actively in events. We participated in Ubuntu parties. At the beginning, when I was all alone, that’s how I met Hervé, at an Ubuntu party. We took part in a lot of events: the Fête de l’Humanité, the Saturday of the Free, a lot.

So now, for some time now, we’ve slowed down a bit. I’m a little tired of events. It’s not that I don’t like it, but you can’t do everything in life. So, choices have to be made.

And so, on a Saturday at the Libre, we’re going to come back to this, I met Emilien from Jerry’s project, who had come to present. It was in Paris, at the Cité des Sciences, and so I went to meet Copsa at the end, I saw him pass by with his canister, I said to him, “Hey, what are you doing?”

And then he explains to me that I couldn’t, as I was a presenter on my side, I was doing install parties, I couldn’t attend his conference, and then he tells me “that’s it and everything”, I tell him listen you know, we had a little Emmabuntüs party at my place with friends from the collective, If you want to come, you can explain to us what your project is.

He came and so we talked and then we saw all the affinities that were between our two projects and so since then they said that Emmabuntüs was in quotes the official version to install on Jerry.

So I’m going to explain to the listeners anyway, because I didn’t explain what the Jerry was. A Jerry is in fact a 20-liter can that will be the container of a computer. So instead of putting a computer in ugly metal CPUs, we’re going to put them in a canister that can be white, yellow, all that is prettier.

In fact, that’s the fun side. But the practical side is that when you’re in a computer chassis and you want to recondition and you can’t afford to have the computers all identical, they’re all a little different. There are certain formats, for example some power supplies that are not exactly the same size, especially when computers tend to shrink in size. So the fact that we have a canister is that we have a structure that is flexible and we can fix the elements a little bit with clothesline, so it allows us to adapt this structure. For example, in a Jerry you can put a 2.5-inch disk with components from a fixed CPU: that you couldn’t do in a fixed CPU where you will need an adapter. So that allows us to adapt with this structure.

That’s what I liked a lot in Africa because they get equipment that is very, very heterogeneous and with that they have the possibility to continue to make it work. So with two completely different computers, two completely different CPUs, we can make a Jerry that works, where we can put the elements in this famous 20-liter canister, which we can’t do with two conventional CPUs. That’s the big interest.

Walid : That’s great, then I went to look at the different designs, people they completely customize their Jerry’s and everything, it’s great.

Patrick : Then behind there is the actually playful part where you will customize your Jerry and workshops, we have a Jerry that was made by Jerry’s team, it’s the one I have at home there, it’s the Jerry Abbé Pierre, they made the physiognomy of Abbé Pierre with his glasses and all that.

Then we can make Jerrys, there are some who have made cute Jerrys. After that, it’s the creative side that wins out and it allows you to have a portable computer too.

We use it when we did events, we came with the Jerry because for us it was much more practical because we put the cables that go with it inside, we close the cover and we just have to carry the keyboard on one side and the screen on the other and we can carry everything at once, only once.

So if you have a central unit, it’s already much heavier and it’s much harder to carry alone. And so this is a project that has taken a lot in Africa, in Côte d’Ivoire, and they have done events, we continue to do events with them, now it’s called the Jerry Valentin event. They do this at Valentine’s Day. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know. Besides, I’m not a believer. But hey, they do that at Valentine’s Day. And so, they make Jerry’s at that time, in February.

We don’t participate too much as designers, but rather to lead small conferences. And Amaury, he was there, he would have told us about his Jerry roulette. He once made a Jerry roulette with letters on all sides for Valentine’s Day. We said that we had to do an animation in Europe, so he did it on his very professional side.

( Editor’s note: more info on the creation of Jerry on Amaury’s website, Blabla Linux)

That’s the story of the Jerry.

Walid : yes, I think it’s a pretty crazy project, like what.

Patrick : But on the other hand, in Togo, they didn’t get hooked.

Walid : So you went to Togo to help install all this?

Patrick : Oh no no no no, they’re based in France, they’re sent by container to Togo. Then they went back to the very beginning of the project, we were in the north of Togo, 700 km in the north of Togo, okay, now we are going down and now we have two large regions of Togo out of five. And I think next year we will be in five out of five regions with projects for the visually impaired, we will be in eleven new structures with this project. That’s why it’s an important project for us because it’s 60 computers, we don’t do things by halves, it’s 60 computers that are assigned for the blind, in about 11 structures. And so there, we go there essentially, the year I went there in 2017, the first year, for inaugurations and to talk to the teams on site, to meet.

But otherwise, our friends from YovoTogo, they go there every year. But they have other projects on the side, they don’t just do IT. Computer science is a big part, but they sponsor from memory, you’re going to tell me, 60 children I think, right?

Yves : something like that.

Patrick : Yes. 60 children, they do projects to rehabilitate buildings, construction of buildings, that’s what they do.

Yves : They also help women a lot to free themselves a little from the grip of males and to take a little bit of their autonomy.

Emmabuntüs funding

Walid : I realize that there is a subject, a question that I have not asked you, and that is the question of financing. Is all this completely voluntary? You don’t have any funding from anyone at all? Is it in your free time?

Patrick : yes of course, it’s in our free time. We are all volunteers.

The only funding we have, that we have managed to collect thanks to distribution, is funding that comes from the Lilo search engine. In 2017, it was integrated into Emmabuntüs by default, this search engine. And this search engine, not only for us, it gives drops, it allows us to collect drops. For Internet users, every time we do a search or two or three searches, we collect a drop. And these drops after that are transformed into euros, thanks to the financial income that the search engine has by advertisers, the ads I’ve never seen but hey. These advertisers like a little bit like Google, they’re Adsense at the top, it’s not big windows that come through. And thanks to that, we collected 21,000 euros there. And we gave these 21,000 euros, the Emmabuntüs collective doesn’t have a bank account either, since we’re a collective,

and so we gave them through us to the YovoTogo, Jump Lab’orione associations and also at one time Montpel’Libre. But for some time now, we have reduced the number of associations because in terms of search engine revenue, it is less important, and now we will have to, this is critical for this year, we do not have enough funding to pay for the shipment of the material to Togo. So we’ll see how to do it.

We need about 1,500 to 2,000 euros per year to ship the equipment. Which is not excessive, but hey, it’s not nothing either. So all the donations, and then also the purchase of a little bit of equipment like screens, like keyboards. We have people who give us unbeatable prices, okay, so there you have it, in operational reuse equipment. But it still takes about 2000 euros per year to maintain the project.

Yves : Yes, and now for the senders, you need computers that talk.

Patrick : yes, now too, we have to buy headphones.

Emmabuntüs’ challenges

Walid : ok, before we leave, I’d like to move on to the last part which is the future, I’d like to know a little bit about what your big challenges are? From what I understand, there is a challenge of contribution, there is a financial challenge, well, that’s it. I would just like you to summarize a little bit what the challenges are for you in the future in terms of distribution and the collective around distribution.

Yves : I personally have a challenge. I am the official English translator of the collective and so now that the French version is almost finished, I have to start the English translation of the manual. And then try to convince our partners, we have a few English-speaking partners, for example Linux Format, to name just one, with whom I dialogue – well more precisely I serve as an intermediary between Patrick and his English-speaking people – and I put links to try to promote Emmabuntüs to these people, who a priori always see this Franco-French stuff, With tweezers if you want, you have to coax them a little and show them that you can still stand the English language. Good year, bad year.

Patrick : Absolutely.

Walid : Before, we also said that there was a financial challenge since you would need 1,500 to 2,000 euros per year to send equipment. I understood that there was a human challenge in the sense that you would like to have people come and join you to contribute to it?

Patrick : Yes, we need people who help us with the tests. But not only that, people who want to participate in development are welcome too, but mainly testing, because well, development takes time. I was quite busy on the development, I couldn’t do everything, so there you go…

So Yves is actually in charge of the part, all the writing part, because when we did the distribution, we had to make new manuals. Yves is writing the specific manual for Emmabuntüs developments on accessibility. We also had to make a manual on Orca’s first steps, which were not planned, because they did not exist.

Yves is modest too, because he says he’s going to translate the 60 pages, but hey, it’s going to go very quickly. Because Yves did translate a manual, how many pages did Arpinux write there?

Yves : I participated in the manual called the beginner’s notebooks – Debian Facile.

Patrick : Now yes. So indeed it was a big cobblestone that was in French. And so I contributed a lot to the English translation of this manual.

Patrick : You did all the translation, I think.

Yves : I haven’t done everything but I’ve done quite a few, yes.

Patrick : So there you go, so we also participate, we don’t just do things for our collective. If there are actions that make sense for us, for the free software community, we also participate. We don’t just… Yves, for example, did votes for… What’s the software here, Mr. Potato Head? Did you do English voices?

Yves : It was my wife who did the… These are the English voices of Mr. Patate.

Patrick : But you too, you too have made voices, I know.

Yves : Oh yes, maybe.

Patrick : yes, Robin Hood you did I think.

Yves : Oh yes, it’s possible. So there you have it, we do some things like that. And so there you have it, after that what we’re looking for is people who come to help us, but also people who give us ideas on new projects, such as challenges for example, this accessibility challenge.

Maybe we have a collaboration here, I can’t talk too much about it: we’re going to do a kind of help for a Malagasy association that is developing a Linux distribution that is a priori rather based on Mint. And they want to have our feedback on what we think of their work, for example. So we’ll help them and maybe we’ll be able to convince them to use a Debian base for their future distribution, I don’t know, we’ll see. We are waiting for their first draft of their ISO.

But indeed there is always a need for people in an association, in a collective, in any structure, there is a need for, always new people because the people who are there, they get a little tired of doing the same thing, our testers, we are at the Emmabuntüs DE5 version, All right? That means we’ve made 5 Debian versions, ok? We’ve already done before 2 Ubuntu versions, okay? So we’re at 7!

So every time we launch test campaigns, now I’ve slowed down a bit, let’s say every 6 months, every 6 months we make a new version. So there are versions, it’s just a few small updates, there’s not much, a few fixes. This is a big piece that we have just done and so we need testers every time to check things.

Conclusion

Walid : We’re going to get to the end of the interview, before leaving you an open forum, I would like to ask you two questions, the first would be, what would you say to a Linux user who doesn’t know Emmabuntüs to introduce Emmabuntüs?

Patrick : Very good question! I don’t know, what we said was a distribution that is more accessible and that is more focused on all the people in the family, that’s it. That’s what we tried to do. It’s not a distribution that is aimed at geeks who want to have their own version, but it’s a stable distribution too. We tried to play mainly on the stability of the integrated software, that is to say that we only take standard versions of Debian. We are not going to change the deposits too much, they are the official deposits.

There is just for an Orca, we took a more recent backport version to have new features, but otherwise, and to also have a little more support help, but otherwise we took stable things.

So some will criticize that the software is a bit old, but hey, for me it’s always the race for novelty. Sometimes you don’t need anything new, I mean. So we don’t need the latest LibreOffice, the latest Firefox. If the one we have works well, we have to have the one that works well, than the one that is updated every day and that doesn’t work well, in my opinion. There you go.

Walid : Second question, what would you say to a computer equipment refurbisher who doesn’t know Emmabuntüs?

Yves : Try the key! The reuse key is absolutely brilliant.

Patrick : People at the beginning don’t really understand what it’s all about. Someone who only refurbishes one computer a day, that’s not necessary for them. But someone who makes 10 computers a day, he will see a very significant time saving.

Walid : ok. Before I leave you, I’m going to give you each the floor for an open forum, if you want to get a message across to the listeners of the podcast Projets Libres.

Yves : I don’t have anything special to add, except to thank you for this evening spent with you and Patrick.

Walid : With great pleasure. and Patrick, do you have a message to convey?

Patrick : I would say that people should try free software more to discover its advantages of getting out of proprietary systems that lock them into solutions that are not viable and that are not maintained over time.

Walid: Well great, that’s a very nice conclusion. I’m also going to thank you for your work since it runs my wife’s old Sony Vaio from 15 years ago as I said earlier and it works very well so thank you.

Patrick : And you didn’t get angry with her?

Walid : No, no.

Patrick : then that’s perfect then

Walid : It’s perfect for the moment it’s going pretty well, we just changed the hard drive and put some memory.

Patrick : you have to put SSDs, we haven’t talked about that. yes you have to put SSDs, I now work with SSDs, it’s phenomenal.

Walid : So thank you very much for your work, here I am going to continue to follow what you do for the listeners, I strongly invite you to go see Emmabuntüs and try it of course. I also invite you to share this episode which will be available with a French transcript and an English translation as usual now. See you soon for a next episode.

And then Yves and Patrick, it was a great pleasure.

Yves : So do we.

Patrick : We too, see you soon Walid.

Walid : I hope we’ll talk again next time. See you soon.