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  13  <h1>
  14      <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  15
  16  </h1>
  17
  18 </div>
  19
  20
  21     <h3>Entries tagged "debian".</h3>
  22
  23     <div class="entry">
  24       <div class="title">
  25         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html">Streaming the Linux desktop to Kodi using VLC and RTSP</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28         12th July 2018
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>A while back, I was asked by a friend how to stream the desktop to
  32 my projector connected to Kodi.  I sadly had to admit that I had no
  33 idea, as it was a task I never had tried.  Since then, I have been
  34 looking for a way to do so, preferable without much extra software to
  35 install on either side.  Today I found a way that seem to kind of
  36 work.  Not great, but it is a start.</p>
  37
  38 <p>I had a look at several approaches, for example
  39 <a href="https://github.com/mfoetsch/dlna_live_streaming">using uPnP
  40 DLNA as described in 2011</a>, but it required a uPnP server, fuse and
  41 local storage enough to store the stream locally.  This is not going
  42 to work well for me, lacking enough free space, and it would
  43 impossible for my friend to get working.</p>
  44
  45 <p>Next, it occurred to me that perhaps I could use VLC to create a
  46 video stream that Kodi could play.  Preferably using
  47 broadcast/multicast, to avoid having to change any setup on the Kodi
  48 side when starting such stream.  Unfortunately, the only recipe I
  49 could find using multicast used the rtp protocol, and this protocol
  50 seem to not be supported by Kodi.</p>
  51
  52 <p>On the other hand, the rtsp protocol is working!  Unfortunately I
  53 have to specify the IP address of the streaming machine in both the
  54 sending command and the file on the Kodi server.  But it is showing my
  55 desktop, and thus allow us to have a shared look on the big screen at
  56 the programs I work on.</p>
  57
  58 <p>I did not spend much time investigating codeces.  I combined the
  59 rtp and rtsp recipes from
  60 <a href="https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Streaming_HowTo/Command_Line_Examples/">the
  61 VLC Streaming HowTo/Command Line Examples</a>, and was able to get
  62 this working on the desktop/streaming end.</p>
  63
  64 <blockquote><pre>
  65 vlc screen:// --sout \
  66   '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{dst=projector.local,port=1234,sdp=rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/test.sdp}'
  67 </pre></blockquote>
  68
  69 <p>I ssh-ed into my Kodi box and created a file like this with the
  70 same IP address:</p>
  71
  72 <blockquote><pre>
  73 echo rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/test.sdp \
  74   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
  75 </pre></blockquote>
  76
  77 <p>Note the 192.168.11.4 IP address is my desktops IP address.  As far
  78 as I can tell the IP must be hardcoded for this to work.  In other
  79 words, if someone elses machine is going to do the steaming, you have
  80 to update screenstream.m4u on the Kodi machine and adjust the vlc
  81 recipe.  To get started, locate the file in Kodi and select the m3u
  82 file while the VLC stream is running.  The desktop then show up in my
  83 big screen. :)</p>
  84
  85 <p>When using the same technique to stream a video file with audio,
  86 the audio quality is really bad.  No idea if the problem is package
  87 loss or bad parameters for the transcode.  I do not know VLC nor Kodi
  88 enough to tell.</p>
  89
  90 <p><strong>Update 2018-07-12</strong>: Johannes Schauer send me a few
  91 succestions and reminded me about an important step.  The "screen:"
  92 input source is only available once the vlc-plugin-access-extra
  93 package is installed on Debian.  Without it, you will see this error
  94 message: "VLC is unable to open the MRL 'screen://'.  Check the log
  95 for details."  He further found that it is possible to drop some parts
  96 of the VLC command line to reduce the amount of hardcoded information.
  97 It is also useful to consider using cvlc to avoid having the VLC
  98 window in the desktop view.  In sum, this give us this command line on
  99 the source end
 100
 101 <blockquote><pre>
 102 cvlc screen:// --sout \
 103   '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{sdp=rtsp://:8080/}'
 104 </pre></blockquote>
 105
 106 <p>and this on the Kodi end<p>
 107
 108 <blockquote><pre>
 109 echo rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/ \
 110   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
 111 </pre></blockquote>
 112
 113 <p>Still bad image quality, though.  But I did discover that streaming
 114 a DVD using dvdsimple:///dev/dvd as the source had excellent video and
 115 audio quality, so I guess the issue is in the input or transcoding
 116 parts, not the rtsp part.  I've tried to change the vb and ab
 117 parameters to use more bandwidth, but it did not make a
 118 difference.</p>
 119
 120 <p>I further received a suggestion from Einar Haraldseid to try using
 121 gstreamer instead of VLC, and this proved to work great!  He also
 122 provided me with the trick to get Kodi to use a multicast stream as
 123 its source.  By using this monstrous oneliner, I can stream my desktop
 124 with good video quality in reasonable framerate to the 239.255.0.1
 125 multicast address on port 1234:
 126
 127 <blockquote><pre>
 128 gst-launch-1.0 ximagesrc use-damage=0 ! video/x-raw,framerate=30/1 ! \
 129   videoconvert ! queue2 ! \
 130   x264enc bitrate=8000 speed-preset=superfast tune=zerolatency qp-min=30 \
 131   key-int-max=15 bframes=2 ! video/x-h264,profile=high ! queue2 ! \
 132   mpegtsmux alignment=7 name=mux ! rndbuffersize max=1316 min=1316 ! \
 133   udpsink host=239.255.0.1 port=1234 ttl-mc=0 auto-multicast=1 sync=0 \
 134   pulsesrc device=$(pactl list | grep -A2 'Source #' | \
 135     grep 'Name: .*\.monitor$' |  cut -d" " -f2|head -1) ! \
 136   audioconvert ! queue2 ! avenc_aac ! queue2 ! mux.
 137 </pre></blockquote>
 138
 139 <p>and this on the Kodi end<p>
 140
 141 <blockquote><pre>
 142 echo udp://@239.255.0.1:1234 \
 143   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
 144 </pre></blockquote>
 145
 146 <p>Note the trick to pick a valid pulseaudio source.  It might not
 147 pick the one you need.  This approach will of course lead to trouble
 148 if more than one source uses the same multicast port and address.
 149 Note the ttl-mc=0 setting, which limit the multicast packages to the
 150 local network.  If the value is increased, your screen will be
 151 broadcasted further, one network "hop" for each increase (read up on
 152 multicast to learn more. :)!</p>
 153
 154 <p>Having cracked how to get Kodi to receive multicast streams, I
 155 could use this VLC command to stream to the same multicast address.
 156 The image quality is way better than the rtsp approach.</p>
 157
 158 <blockquote><pre>
 159 cvlc screen:// --sout '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{mux=ts,dst=239.255.0.1,port=1234,sdp=sap}'
 160 </pre></blockquote>
 161
 162 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 163 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 164 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 165
 166       </div>
 167       <div class="tags">
 168
 169
 170         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
 171
 172
 173       </div>
 174     </div>
 175     <div class="padding"></div>
 176
 177     <div class="entry">
 178       <div class="title">
 179         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_in_2018_.html">What is the most supported MIME type in Debian in 2018?</a>
 180       </div>
 181       <div class="date">
 182          9th July 2018
 183       </div>
 184       <div class="body">
 185         <p>Five years ago,
 186 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">I
 187 measured what the most supported MIME type in Debian was</a>, by
 188 analysing the desktop files in all packages in the archive.  Since
 189 then, the DEP-11 AppStream system has been put into production, making
 190 the task a lot easier.  This made me want to repeat the measurement,
 191 to see how much things changed.  Here are the new numbers, for
 192 unstable only this time:
 193
 194 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
 195
 196 <pre>
 197   count MIME type
 198   ----- -----------------------
 199      56 image/jpeg
 200      55 image/png
 201      49 image/tiff
 202      48 image/gif
 203      39 image/bmp
 204      38 text/plain
 205      37 audio/mpeg
 206      34 application/ogg
 207      33 audio/x-flac
 208      32 audio/x-mp3
 209      30 audio/x-wav
 210      30 audio/x-vorbis+ogg
 211      29 image/x-portable-pixmap
 212      27 inode/directory
 213      27 image/x-portable-bitmap
 214      27 audio/x-mpeg
 215      26 application/x-ogg
 216      25 audio/x-mpegurl
 217      25 audio/ogg
 218      24 text/html
 219 </pre>
 220
 221 <p>The list was created like this using a sid chroot: "cat
 222 /var/lib/apt/lists/*sid*_dep11_Components-amd64.yml.gz| zcat | awk '/^
 223 - \S+\/\S+$/ {print $2 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20"</p>
 224
 225 <p>It is interesting to see how image formats have passed text/plain
 226 as the most announced supported MIME type.  These days, thanks to the
 227 AppStream system, if you run into a file format you do not know, and
 228 want to figure out which packages support the format, you can find the
 229 MIME type of the file using "file --mime &lt;filename&gt;", and then
 230 look up all packages announcing support for this format in their
 231 AppStream metadata (XML or .desktop file) using "appstreamcli
 232 what-provides mimetype &lt;mime-type&gt;.  For example if you, like
 233 me, want to know which packages support inode/directory, you can get a
 234 list like this:</p>
 235
 236 <p><blockquote><pre>
 237 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype inode/directory | grep Package: | sort
 238 Package: anjuta
 239 Package: audacious
 240 Package: baobab
 241 Package: cervisia
 242 Package: chirp
 243 Package: dolphin
 244 Package: doublecmd-common
 245 Package: easytag
 246 Package: enlightenment
 247 Package: ephoto
 248 Package: filelight
 249 Package: gwenview
 250 Package: k4dirstat
 251 Package: kaffeine
 252 Package: kdesvn
 253 Package: kid3
 254 Package: kid3-qt
 255 Package: nautilus
 256 Package: nemo
 257 Package: pcmanfm
 258 Package: pcmanfm-qt
 259 Package: qweborf
 260 Package: ranger
 261 Package: sirikali
 262 Package: spacefm
 263 Package: spacefm
 264 Package: vifm
 265 %
 266 </pre></blockquote></p>
 267
 268 <p>Using the same method, I can quickly discover that the Sketchup file
 269 format is not yet supported by any package in Debian:</p>
 270
 271 <p><blockquote><pre>
 272 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype  application/vnd.sketchup.skp
 273 Could not find component providing 'mimetype::application/vnd.sketchup.skp'.
 274 %
 275 </pre></blockquote></p>
 276
 277 <p>Yesterday I used it to figure out which packages support the STL 3D
 278 format:</p>
 279
 280 <p><blockquote><pre>
 281 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype  application/sla|grep Package
 282 Package: cura
 283 Package: meshlab
 284 Package: printrun
 285 %
 286 </pre></blockquote></p>
 287
 288 <p>PS: A new version of Cura was uploaded to Debian yesterday.</p>
 289
 290 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 291 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 292 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 293
 294       </div>
 295       <div class="tags">
 296
 297
 298         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
 299
 300
 301       </div>
 302     </div>
 303     <div class="padding"></div>
 304
 305     <div class="entry">
 306       <div class="title">
 307         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_APT_upgrade_without_enough_free_space_on_the_disk___.html">Debian APT upgrade without enough free space on the disk...</a>
 308       </div>
 309       <div class="date">
 310          8th July 2018
 311       </div>
 312       <div class="body">
 313         <p>Quite regularly, I let my Debian Sid/Unstable chroot stay untouch
 314 for a while, and when I need to update it there is not enough free
 315 space on the disk for apt to do a normal 'apt upgrade'.  I normally
 316 would resolve the issue by doing 'apt install &lt;somepackages&gt;' to
 317 upgrade only some of the packages in one batch, until the amount of
 318 packages to download fall below the amount of free space available.
 319 Today, I had about 500 packages to upgrade, and after a while I got
 320 tired of trying to install chunks of packages manually.  I concluded
 321 that I did not have the spare hours required to complete the task, and
 322 decided to see if I could automate it.  I came up with this small
 323 script which I call 'apt-in-chunks':</p>
 324
 325 <p><blockquote><pre>
 326 #!/bin/sh
 327 #
 328 # Upgrade packages when the disk is too full to upgrade every
 329 # upgradable package in one lump.  Fetching packages to upgrade using
 330 # apt, and then installing using dpkg, to avoid changing the package
 331 # flag for manual/automatic.
 332
 333 set -e
 334
 335 ignore() {
 336     if [ "$1" ]; then
 337         grep -v "$1"
 338     else
 339         cat
 340     fi
 341 }
 342
 343 for p in $(apt list --upgradable | ignore "$@" |cut -d/ -f1 | grep -v '^Listing...'); do
 344     echo "Upgrading $p"
 345     apt clean
 346     apt install --download-only -y $p
 347     for f in /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb; do
 348         if [ -e "$f" ]; then
 349             dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb
 350             break
 351         fi
 352     done
 353 done
 354 </pre></blockquote></p>
 355
 356 <p>The script will extract the list of packages to upgrade, try to
 357 download the packages needed to upgrade one package, install the
 358 downloaded packages using dpkg.  The idea is to upgrade packages
 359 without changing the APT mark for the package (ie the one recording of
 360 the package was manually requested or pulled in as a dependency).  To
 361 use it, simply run it as root from the command line.  If it fail, try
 362 'apt install -f' to clean up the mess and run the script again.  This
 363 might happen if the new packages conflict with one of the old
 364 packages.  dpkg is unable to remove, while apt can do this.</p>
 365
 366 <p>It take one option, a package to ignore in the list of packages to
 367 upgrade.  The option to ignore a package is there to be able to skip
 368 the packages that are simply too large to unpack.  Today this was
 369 'ghc', but I have run into other large packages causing similar
 370 problems earlier (like TeX).</p>
 371
 372 <p>Update 2018-07-08: Thanks to Paul Wise, I am aware of two
 373 alternative ways to handle this.  The "unattended-upgrades
 374 --minimal-upgrade-steps" option will try to calculate upgrade sets for
 375 each package to upgrade, and then upgrade them in order, smallest set
 376 first.  It might be a better option than my above mentioned script.
 377 Also, "aptutude upgrade" can upgrade single packages, thus avoiding
 378 the need for using "dpkg -i" in the script above.</p>
 379
 380 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 381 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 382 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 383
 384       </div>
 385       <div class="tags">
 386
 387
 388         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 389
 390
 391       </div>
 392     </div>
 393     <div class="padding"></div>
 394
 395     <div class="entry">
 396       <div class="title">
 397         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Version_3_1_of_Cura__the_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian.html">Version 3.1 of Cura, the 3D print slicer, is now in Debian</a>
 398       </div>
 399       <div class="date">
 400         13th February 2018
 401       </div>
 402       <div class="body">
 403         <p>A new version of the
 404 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">3D printer slicer
 405 software Cura</a>, version 3.1.0, is now available in Debian Testing
 406 (aka Buster) and Debian Unstable (aka Sid).  I hope you find it
 407 useful.  It was uploaded the last few days, and the last update will
 408 enter testing tomorrow.  See the
 409 <a href="https://ultimaker.com/en/products/cura-software/release-notes">release
 410 notes</a> for the list of bug fixes and new features.  Version 3.2
 411 was announced 6 days ago.  We will try to get it into Debian as
 412 well.</p>
 413
 414 <p>More information related to 3D printing is available on the
 415 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3DPrinting">3D printing</a> and
 416 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3D-printer">3D printer</a> wiki pages
 417 in Debian.</p>
 418
 419 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 420 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 421 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 422
 423       </div>
 424       <div class="tags">
 425
 426
 427         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 428
 429
 430       </div>
 431     </div>
 432     <div class="padding"></div>
 433
 434     <div class="entry">
 435       <div class="title">
 436         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cura__the_nice_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian_Unstable.html">Cura, the nice 3D print slicer, is now in Debian Unstable</a>
 437       </div>
 438       <div class="date">
 439         17th December 2017
 440       </div>
 441       <div class="body">
 442         <p>After several months of working and waiting, I am happy to report
 443 that the nice and user friendly 3D printer slicer software Cura just
 444 entered Debian Unstable.  It consist of five packages,
 445 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">cura</a>,
 446 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura-engine">cura-engine</a>,
 447 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libarcus">libarcus</a>,
 448 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fdm-materials">fdm-materials</a>,
 449 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libsavitar">libsavitar</a> and
 450 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/uranium">uranium</a>.  The last
 451 two, uranium and cura, entered Unstable yesterday.  This should make
 452 it easier for Debian users to print on at least the Ultimaker class of
 453 3D printers.  My nearest 3D printer is an Ultimaker 2+, so it will
 454 make life easier for at least me. :)</p>
 455
 456 <p>The work to make this happen was done by Gregor Riepl, and I was
 457 happy to assist him in sponsoring the packages.  With the introduction
 458 of Cura, Debian is up to three 3D printer slicers at your service,
 459 Cura, Slic3r and Slic3r Prusa.  If you own or have access to a 3D
 460 printer, give it a go. :)</p>
 461
 462 <p>The 3D printer software is maintained by the 3D printer Debian
 463 team, flocking together on the
 464 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/3dprinter-general">3dprinter-general</a>
 465 mailing list and the
 466 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-3dprinting">#debian-3dprinting</a>
 467 IRC channel.</p>
 468
 469 <p>The next step for Cura in Debian is to update the cura package to
 470 version 3.0.3 and then update the entire set of packages to version
 471 3.1.0 which showed up the last few days.</p>
 472
 473       </div>
 474       <div class="tags">
 475
 476
 477         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 478
 479
 480       </div>
 481     </div>
 482     <div class="padding"></div>
 483
 484     <div class="entry">
 485       <div class="title">
 486         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Generating_3D_prints_in_Debian_using_Cura_and_Slic3r__prusa_.html">Generating 3D prints in Debian using Cura and Slic3r(-prusa)</a>
 487       </div>
 488       <div class="date">
 489          9th October 2017
 490       </div>
 491       <div class="body">
 492         <p>At my nearby maker space,
 493 <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Sonen</a>, I heard the story that it
 494 was easier to generate gcode files for theyr 3D printers (Ultimake 2+)
 495 on Windows and MacOS X than Linux, because the software involved had
 496 to be manually compiled and set up on Linux while premade packages
 497 worked out of the box on Windows and MacOS X.  I found this annoying,
 498 as the software involved,
 499 <a href="https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura">Cura</a>, is free software
 500 and should be trivial to get up and running on Linux if someone took
 501 the time to package it for the relevant distributions.  I even found
 502 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/706656">a request for adding into
 503 Debian</a> from 2013, which had seem some activity over the years but
 504 never resulted in the software showing up in Debian.  So a few days
 505 ago I offered my help to try to improve the situation.</p>
 506
 507 <p>Now I am very happy to see that all the packages required by a
 508 working Cura in Debian are uploaded into Debian and waiting in the NEW
 509 queue for the ftpmasters to have a look.  You can track the progress
 510 on
 511 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=3dprinter-general%40lists.alioth.debian.org">the
 512 status page for the 3D printer team</a>.</p>
 513
 514 <p>The uploaded packages are a bit behind upstream, and was uploaded
 515 now to get slots in <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW
 516 queue</a> while we work up updating the packages to the latest
 517 upstream version.</p>
 518
 519 <p>On a related note, two competitors for Cura, which I found harder
 520 to use and was unable to configure correctly for Ultimaker 2+ in the
 521 short time I spent on it, are already in Debian.  If you are looking
 522 for 3D printer "slicers" and want something already available in
 523 Debian, check out
 524 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r">slic3r</a> and
 525 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r-prusa">slic3r-prusa</a>.
 526 The latter is a fork of the former.</p>
 527
 528 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 529 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 530 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 531
 532       </div>
 533       <div class="tags">
 534
 535
 536         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 537
 538
 539       </div>
 540     </div>
 541     <div class="padding"></div>
 542
 543     <div class="entry">
 544       <div class="title">
 545         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Visualizing_GSM_radio_chatter_using_gr_gsm_and_Hopglass.html">Visualizing GSM radio chatter using gr-gsm and Hopglass</a>
 546       </div>
 547       <div class="date">
 548         29th September 2017
 549       </div>
 550       <div class="body">
 551         <p>Every mobile phone announce its existence over radio to the nearby
 552 mobile cell towers.  And this radio chatter is available for anyone
 553 with a radio receiver capable of receiving them.  Details about the
 554 mobile phones with very good accuracy is of course collected by the
 555 phone companies, but this is not the topic of this blog post.  The
 556 mobile phone radio chatter make it possible to figure out when a cell
 557 phone is nearby, as it include the SIM card ID (IMSI).  By paying
 558 attention over time, one can see when a phone arrive and when it leave
 559 an area.  I believe it would be nice to make this information more
 560 available to the general public, to make more people aware of how
 561 their phones are announcing their whereabouts to anyone that care to
 562 listen.</p>
 563
 564 <p>I am very happy to report that we managed to get something
 565 visualizing this information up and running for
 566 <a href="http://norwaymakers.org/osf17">Oslo Skaperfestival 2017</a>
 567 (Oslo Makers Festival) taking place today and tomorrow at Deichmanske
 568 library.  The solution is based on the
 569 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">simple
 570 recipe for listening to GSM chatter</a> I posted a few days ago, and
 571 will show up at the stand of <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Åpen
 572 Sone from the Computer Science department of the University of
 573 Oslo</a>.  The presentation will show the nearby mobile phones (aka
 574 IMSIs) as dots in a web browser graph, with lines to the dot
 575 representing mobile base station it is talking to. It was working in
 576 the lab yesterday, and was moved into place this morning.</p>
 577
 578 <p>We set up a fairly powerful desktop machine using Debian
 579 Buster/Testing with several (five, I believe) RTL2838 DVB-T receivers
 580 connected and visualize the visible cell phone towers using an
 581 <a href="https://github.com/marlow925/hopglass">English version of
 582 Hopglass</a>.  A fairly powerfull machine is needed as the
 583 grgsm_livemon_headless processes from
 584 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a> converting
 585 the radio signal to data packages is quite CPU intensive.</p>
 586
 587 <p>The frequencies to listen to, are identified using a slightly
 588 patched scan-and-livemon (to set the --args values for each receiver),
 589 and the Hopglass data is generated using the
 590 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/IMSI-catcher/tree/meshviewer-output">patches
 591 in my meshviewer-output branch</a>.  For some reason we could not get
 592 more than four SDRs working.  There is also a geographical map trying
 593 to show the location of the base stations, but I believe their
 594 coordinates are hardcoded to some random location in Germany, I
 595 believe.  The code should be replaced with code to look up location in
 596 a text file, a sqlite database or one of the online databases
 597 mentioned in
 598 <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher/issues/14">the github
 599 issue for the topic</a>.
 600
 601 <p>If this sound interesting, visit the stand at the festival!</p>
 602
 603       </div>
 604       <div class="tags">
 605
 606
 607         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 608
 609
 610       </div>
 611     </div>
 612     <div class="padding"></div>
 613
 614     <div class="entry">
 615       <div class="title">
 616         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">Easier recipe to observe the cell phones around you</a>
 617       </div>
 618       <div class="date">
 619         24th September 2017
 620       </div>
 621       <div class="body">
 622         <p>A little more than a month ago I wrote
 623 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">how
 624 to observe the SIM card ID (aka IMSI number) of mobile phones talking
 625 to nearby mobile phone base stations using Debian GNU/Linux and a
 626 cheap USB software defined radio</a>, and thus being able to pinpoint
 627 the location of people and equipment (like cars and trains) with an
 628 accuracy of a few kilometer.  Since then we have worked to make the
 629 procedure even simpler, and it is now possible to do this without any
 630 manual frequency tuning and without building your own packages.</p>
 631
 632 <p>The <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a>
 633 package is now included in Debian testing and unstable, and the
 634 IMSI-catcher code no longer require root access to fetch and decode
 635 the GSM data collected using gr-gsm.</p>
 636
 637 <p>Here is an updated recipe, using packages built by Debian and a git
 638 clone of two python scripts:</p>
 639
 640 <ol>
 641
 642 <li>Start with a Debian machine running the Buster version (aka
 643   testing).</li>
 644
 645 <li>Run '<tt>apt install gr-gsm python-numpy python-scipy
 646   python-scapy</tt>' as root to install required packages.</li>
 647
 648 <li>Fetch the code decoding GSM packages using '<tt>git clone
 649   github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher.git</tt>'.</li>
 650
 651 <li>Insert USB software defined radio supported by GNU Radio.</li>
 652
 653 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
 654   scan-and-livemon</tt>' to locate the frequency of nearby base
 655   stations and start listening for GSM packages on one of them.</li>
 656
 657 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
 658   simple_IMSI-catcher.py</tt>' to display the collected information.</li>
 659
 660 </ol>
 661
 662 <p>Note, due to a bug somewhere the scan-and-livemon program (actually
 663 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/issues/336">its underlying
 664 program grgsm_scanner</a>) do not work with the HackRF radio.  It does
 665 work with RTL 8232 and other similar USB radio receivers you can get
 666 very cheaply
 667 (<a href="https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=rtl+2832">for example
 668 from ebay</a>), so for now the solution is to scan using the RTL radio
 669 and only use HackRF for fetching GSM data.</p>
 670
 671 <p>As far as I can tell, a cell phone only show up on one of the
 672 frequencies at the time, so if you are going to track and count every
 673 cell phone around you, you need to listen to all the frequencies used.
 674 To listen to several frequencies, use the --numrecv argument to
 675 scan-and-livemon to use several receivers.  Further, I am not sure if
 676 phones using 3G or 4G will show as talking GSM to base stations, so
 677 this approach might not see all phones around you.  I typically see
 678 0-400 IMSI numbers an hour when looking around where I live.</p>
 679
 680 <p>I've tried to run the scanner on a
 681 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi 2 and 3
 682 running Debian Buster</a>, but the grgsm_livemon_headless process seem
 683 to be too CPU intensive to keep up.  When GNU Radio print 'O' to
 684 stdout, I am told there it is caused by a buffer overflow between the
 685 radio and GNU Radio, caused by the program being unable to read the
 686 GSM data fast enough.  If you see a stream of 'O's from the terminal
 687 where you started scan-and-livemon, you need a give the process more
 688 CPU power.  Perhaps someone are able to optimize the code to a point
 689 where it become possible to set up RPi3 based GSM sniffers?  I tried
 690 using Raspbian instead of Debian, but there seem to be something wrong
 691 with GNU Radio on raspbian, causing glibc to abort().</p>
 692
 693       </div>
 694       <div class="tags">
 695
 696
 697         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 698
 699
 700       </div>
 701     </div>
 702     <div class="padding"></div>
 703
 704     <div class="entry">
 705       <div class="title">
 706         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">Simpler recipe on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher using Debian</a>
 707       </div>
 708       <div class="date">
 709          9th August 2017
 710       </div>
 711       <div class="body">
 712         <p>On friday, I came across an interesting article in the Norwegian
 713 web based ICT news magazine digi.no on
 714 <a href="https://www.digi.no/artikler/sikkerhetsforsker-lagde-enkel-imsi-catcher-for-60-kroner-na-kan-mobiler-kartlegges-av-alle/398588">how
 715 to collect the IMSI numbers of nearby cell phones</a> using the cheap
 716 DVB-T software defined radios.  The article refered to instructions
 717 and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjwgNd_as30">a recipe by
 718 Keld Norman on Youtube on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher</a>, and I decided to test them out.</p>
 719
 720 <p>The instructions said to use Ubuntu, install pip using apt (to
 721 bypass apt), use pip to install pybombs (to bypass both apt and pip),
 722 and the ask pybombs to fetch and build everything you need from
 723 scratch.  I wanted to see if I could do the same on the most recent
 724 Debian packages, but this did not work because pybombs tried to build
 725 stuff that no longer build with the most recent openssl library or
 726 some other version skew problem.  While trying to get this recipe
 727 working, I learned that the apt->pip->pybombs route was a long detour,
 728 and the only piece of software dependency missing in Debian was the
 729 gr-gsm package.  I also found out that the lead upstream developer of
 730 gr-gsm (the name stand for GNU Radio GSM) project already had a set of
 731 Debian packages provided in an Ubuntu PPA repository.  All I needed to
 732 do was to dget the Debian source package and built it.</p>
 733
 734 <p>The IMSI collector is a python script listening for packages on the
 735 loopback network device and printing to the terminal some specific GSM
 736 packages with IMSI numbers in them.  The code is fairly short and easy
 737 to understand.  The reason this work is because gr-gsm include a tool
 738 to read GSM data from a software defined radio like a DVB-T USB stick
 739 and other software defined radios, decode them and inject them into a
 740 network device on your Linux machine (using the loopback device by
 741 default).  This proved to work just fine, and I've been testing the
 742 collector for a few days now.</p>
 743
 744 <p>The updated and simpler recipe is thus to</p>
 745
 746 <ol>
 747
 748 <li>start with a Debian machine running Stretch or newer,</li>
 749
 750 <li>build and install the gr-gsm package available from
 751 <a href="http://ppa.launchpad.net/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gr-gsm/">http://ppa.launchpad.net/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gr-gsm/</a>,</li>
 752
 753 <li>clone the git repostory from <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher">https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher</a>,</li>
 754
 755 <li>run grgsm_livemon and adjust the frequency until the terminal
 756 where it was started is filled with a stream of text (meaning you
 757 found a GSM station).</li>
 758
 759 <li>go into the IMSI-catcher directory and run 'sudo python simple_IMSI-catcher.py' to extract the IMSI numbers.</li>
 760
 761 </ol>
 762
 763 <p>To make it even easier in the future to get this sniffer up and
 764 running, I decided to package
 765 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/">the gr-gsm project</a>
 766 for Debian (<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/871055">WNPP
 767 #871055</a>), and the package was uploaded into the NEW queue today.
 768 Luckily the gnuradio maintainer has promised to help me, as I do not
 769 know much about gnuradio stuff yet.</p>
 770
 771 <p>I doubt this "IMSI cacher" is anywhere near as powerfull as
 772 commercial tools like
 773 <a href="https://www.thespyphone.com/portable-imsi-imei-catcher/">The
 774 Spy Phone Portable IMSI / IMEI Catcher</a> or the
 775 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker">Harris
 776 Stingray</a>, but I hope the existance of cheap alternatives can make
 777 more people realise how their whereabouts when carrying a cell phone
 778 is easily tracked.  Seeing the data flow on the screen, realizing that
 779 I live close to a police station and knowing that the police is also
 780 wearing cell phones, I wonder how hard it would be for criminals to
 781 track the position of the police officers to discover when there are
 782 police near by, or for foreign military forces to track the location
 783 of the Norwegian military forces, or for anyone to track the location
 784 of government officials...</p>
 785
 786 <p>It is worth noting that the data reported by the IMSI-catcher
 787 script mentioned above is only a fraction of the data broadcasted on
 788 the GSM network.  It will only collect one frequency at the time,
 789 while a typical phone will be using several frequencies, and not all
 790 phones will be using the frequencies tracked by the grgsm_livemod
 791 program.  Also, there is a lot of radio chatter being ignored by the
 792 simple_IMSI-catcher script, which would be collected by extending the
 793 parser code.  I wonder if gr-gsm can be set up to listen to more than
 794 one frequency?</p>
 795
 796       </div>
 797       <div class="tags">
 798
 799
 800         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 801
 802
 803       </div>
 804     </div>
 805     <div class="padding"></div>
 806
 807     <div class="entry">
 808       <div class="title">
 809         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_is_now_available.html">Norwegian Bokmål edition of Debian Administrator's Handbook is now available</a>
 810       </div>
 811       <div class="date">
 812         25th July 2017
 813       </div>
 814       <div class="body">
 815         <p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-07-25-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.png"/></p>
 816
 817 <p>I finally received a copy of the Norwegian Bokmål edition of
 818 "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
 819 Handbook</a>".  This test copy arrived in the mail a few days ago, and
 820 I am very happy to hold the result in my hand.   We spent around one and a half year translating it. This paperbook edition
 821 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian">is available
 822 from lulu.com</a>.  If you buy it quickly, you save 25% on the list
 823 price.  The book is also available for download in electronic form as
 824 PDF, EPUB and Mobipocket, as can be
 825 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/browse/nb-NO/stable/">read online
 826 as a web page</a>.</p>
 827
 828 <p>This is the second book I publish (the first was the book
 829 "<a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>" by Lawrence Lessig
 830 in
 831 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>,
 832 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">French</a>
 833 and
 834 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
 835 Bokmål</a>), and I am very excited to finally wrap up this
 836 project.  I hope
 837 "<a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/rapha%C3%ABl-hertzog-and-roland-mas/h%C3%A5ndbok-for-debian-administratoren/paperback/product-23262290.html">Håndbok
 838 for Debian-administratoren</a>" will be well received.</p>
 839
 840       </div>
 841       <div class="tags">
 842
 843
 844         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 845
 846
 847       </div>
 848     </div>
 849     <div class="padding"></div>
 850
 851     <div class="entry">
 852       <div class="title">
 853         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/N_r_nynorskoversettelsen_svikter_til_eksamen___.html">Når nynorskoversettelsen svikter til eksamen...</a>
 854       </div>
 855       <div class="date">
 856          3rd June 2017
 857       </div>
 858       <div class="body">
 859         <p><a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/norge/Krever-at-elever-ma-fa-annullert-eksamen-etter-rot-med-oppgavetekster-622459b.html">Aftenposten
 860 melder i dag</a> om feil i eksamensoppgavene for eksamen i politikk og
 861 menneskerettigheter, der teksten i bokmåls og nynorskutgaven ikke var
 862 like.  Oppgaveteksten er gjengitt i artikkelen, og jeg ble nysgjerring
 863 på om den fri oversetterløsningen
 864 <a href="https://www.apertium.org/">Apertium</a> ville gjort en bedre
 865 jobb enn Utdanningsdirektoratet.  Det kan se slik ut.</p>
 866
 867 <p>Her er bokmålsoppgaven fra eksamenen:</p>
 868
 869 <blockquote>
 870 <p>Drøft utfordringene knyttet til nasjonalstatenes og andre aktørers
 871 rolle og muligheter til å håndtere internasjonale utfordringer, som
 872 for eksempel flykningekrisen.</p>
 873
 874 <p>Vedlegge er eksempler på tekster som kan gi relevante perspektiver
 875 på temaet:</p>
 876 <ol>
 877 <li>Flykningeregnskapet 2016, UNHCR og IDMC
 878 <li>«Grenseløst Europa for fall» A-Magasinet, 26. november 2015
 879 </ol>
 880
 881 </blockquote>
 882
 883 <p>Dette oversetter Apertium slik:</p>
 884
 885 <blockquote>
 886 <p>Drøft utfordringane knytte til nasjonalstatane sine og rolla til
 887 andre aktørar og høve til å handtera internasjonale utfordringar, som
 888 til dømes *flykningekrisen.</p>
 889
 890 <p>Vedleggja er døme på tekster som kan gje relevante perspektiv på
 891 temaet:</p>
 892
 893 <ol>
 894 <li>*Flykningeregnskapet 2016, *UNHCR og *IDMC</li>
 895 <li>«*Grenseløst Europa for fall» A-Magasinet, 26. november 2015</li>
 896 </ol>
 897
 898 </blockquote>
 899
 900 <p>Ord som ikke ble forstått er markert med stjerne (*), og trenger
 901 ekstra språksjekk.  Men ingen ord er forsvunnet, slik det var i
 902 oppgaven elevene fikk presentert på eksamen.  Jeg mistenker dog at
 903 "andre aktørers rolle og muligheter til ..." burde vært oversatt til
 904 "rolla til andre aktørar og deira høve til ..." eller noe slikt, men
 905 det er kanskje flisespikking.  Det understreker vel bare at det alltid
 906 trengs korrekturlesning etter automatisk oversettelse.</p>
 907
 908       </div>
 909       <div class="tags">
 910
 911
 912         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll</a>.
 913
 914
 915       </div>
 916     </div>
 917     <div class="padding"></div>
 918
 919     <div class="entry">
 920       <div class="title">
 921         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detecting_NFS_hangs_on_Linux_without_hanging_yourself___.html">Detecting NFS hangs on Linux without hanging yourself...</a>
 922       </div>
 923       <div class="date">
 924          9th March 2017
 925       </div>
 926       <div class="body">
 927         <p>Over the years, administrating thousand of NFS mounting linux
 928 computers at the time, I often needed a way to detect if the machine
 929 was experiencing NFS hang.  If you try to use <tt>df</tt> or look at a
 930 file or directory affected by the hang, the process (and possibly the
 931 shell) will hang too.  So you want to be able to detect this without
 932 risking the detection process getting stuck too.  It has not been
 933 obvious how to do this.  When the hang has lasted a while, it is
 934 possible to find messages like these in dmesg:</p>
 935
 936 <p><blockquote>
 937 nfs: server nfsserver not responding, still trying
 938 <br>nfs: server nfsserver OK
 939 </blockquote></p>
 940
 941 <p>It is hard to know if the hang is still going on, and it is hard to
 942 be sure looking in dmesg is going to work.  If there are lots of other
 943 messages in dmesg the lines might have rotated out of site before they
 944 are noticed.</p>
 945
 946 <p>While reading through the nfs client implementation in linux kernel
 947 code, I came across some statistics that seem to give a way to detect
 948 it.  The om_timeouts sunrpc value in the kernel will increase every
 949 time the above log entry is inserted into dmesg.  And after digging a
 950 bit further, I discovered that this value show up in
 951 /proc/self/mountstats on Linux.</p>
 952
 953 <p>The mountstats content seem to be shared between files using the
 954 same file system context, so it is enough to check one of the
 955 mountstats files to get the state of the mount point for the machine.
 956 I assume this will not show lazy umounted NFS points, nor NFS mount
 957 points in a different process context (ie with a different filesystem
 958 view), but that does not worry me.</p>
 959
 960 <p>The content for a NFS mount point look similar to this:</p>
 961
 962 <p><blockquote><pre>
 963 [...]
 964 device /dev/mapper/Debian-var mounted on /var with fstype ext3
 965 device nfsserver:/mnt/nfsserver/home0 mounted on /mnt/nfsserver/home0 with fstype nfs statvers=1.1
 966         opts:   rw,vers=3,rsize=65536,wsize=65536,namlen=255,acregmin=3,acregmax=60,acdirmin=30,acdirmax=60,soft,nolock,proto=tcp,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,mountaddr=129.240.3.145,mountvers=3,mountport=4048,mountproto=udp,local_lock=all
 967         age:    7863311
 968         caps:   caps=0x3fe7,wtmult=4096,dtsize=8192,bsize=0,namlen=255
 969         sec:    flavor=1,pseudoflavor=1
 970         events: 61063112 732346265 1028140 35486205 16220064 8162542 761447191 71714012 37189 3891185 45561809 110486139 4850138 420353 15449177 296502 52736725 13523379 0 52182 9016896 1231 0 0 0 0 0
 971         bytes:  166253035039 219519120027 0 0 40783504807 185466229638 11677877 45561809
 972         RPC iostats version: 1.0  p/v: 100003/3 (nfs)
 973         xprt:   tcp 925 1 6810 0 0 111505412 111480497 109 2672418560317 0 248 53869103 22481820
 974         per-op statistics
 975                 NULL: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
 976              GETATTR: 61063106 61063108 0 9621383060 6839064400 453650 77291321 78926132
 977              SETATTR: 463469 463470 0 92005440 66739536 63787 603235 687943
 978               LOOKUP: 17021657 17021657 0 3354097764 4013442928 57216 35125459 35566511
 979               ACCESS: 14281703 14290009 5 2318400592 1713803640 1709282 4865144 7130140
 980             READLINK: 125 125 0 20472 18620 0 1112 1118
 981                 READ: 4214236 4214237 0 715608524 41328653212 89884 22622768 22806693
 982                WRITE: 8479010 8494376 22 187695798568 1356087148 178264904 51506907 231671771
 983               CREATE: 171708 171708 0 38084748 46702272 873 1041833 1050398
 984                MKDIR: 3680 3680 0 773980 993920 26 23990 24245
 985              SYMLINK: 903 903 0 233428 245488 6 5865 5917
 986                MKNOD: 80 80 0 20148 21760 0 299 304
 987               REMOVE: 429921 429921 0 79796004 61908192 3313 2710416 2741636
 988                RMDIR: 3367 3367 0 645112 484848 22 5782 6002
 989               RENAME: 466201 466201 0 130026184 121212260 7075 5935207 5961288
 990                 LINK: 289155 289155 0 72775556 67083960 2199 2565060 2585579
 991              READDIR: 2933237 2933237 0 516506204 13973833412 10385 3190199 3297917
 992          READDIRPLUS: 1652839 1652839 0 298640972 6895997744 84735 14307895 14448937
 993               FSSTAT: 6144 6144 0 1010516 1032192 51 9654 10022
 994               FSINFO: 2 2 0 232 328 0 1 1
 995             PATHCONF: 1 1 0 116 140 0 0 0
 996               COMMIT: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
 997
 998 device binfmt_misc mounted on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc with fstype binfmt_misc
 999 [...]
1000 </pre></blockquote></p>
1001
1002 <p>The key number to look at is the third number in the per-op list.
1003 It is the number of NFS timeouts experiences per file system
1004 operation.  Here 22 write timeouts and 5 access timeouts.  If these
1005 numbers are increasing, I believe the machine is experiencing NFS
1006 hang.  Unfortunately the timeout value do not start to increase right
1007 away.  The NFS operations need to time out first, and this can take a
1008 while.  The exact timeout value depend on the setup.  For example the
1009 defaults for TCP and UDP mount points are quite different, and the
1010 timeout value is affected by the soft, hard, timeo and retrans NFS
1011 mount options.</p>
1012
1013 <p>The only way I have been able to get working on Debian and RedHat
1014 Enterprise Linux for getting the timeout count is to peek in /proc/.
1015 But according to
1016 <ahref="http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/816-4555/netmonitor-12/index.html">Solaris
1017 10 System Administration Guide: Network Services</a>, the 'nfsstat -c'
1018 command can be used to get these timeout values.  But this do not work
1019 on Linux, as far as I can tell.  I
1020 <ahref="http://bugs.debian.org/857043">asked Debian about this</a>,
1021 but have not seen any replies yet.</p>
1022
1023 <p>Is there a better way to figure out if a Linux NFS client is
1024 experiencing NFS hangs?  Is there a way to detect which processes are
1025 affected?  Is there a way to get the NFS mount going quickly once the
1026 network problem causing the NFS hang has been cleared?  I would very
1027 much welcome some clues, as we regularly run into NFS hangs.</p>
1028
1029       </div>
1030       <div class="tags">
1031
1032
1033         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
1034
1035
1036       </div>
1037     </div>
1038     <div class="padding"></div>
1039
1040     <div class="entry">
1041       <div class="title">
1042         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_complete__proofreading_in_progress.html">Norwegian Bokmål translation of The Debian Administrator's Handbook complete, proofreading in progress</a>
1043       </div>
1044       <div class="date">
1045          3rd March 2017
1046       </div>
1047       <div class="body">
1048         <p>For almost a year now, we have been working on making a Norwegian
1049 Bokmål edition of <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian
1050 Administrator's Handbook</a>.  Now, thanks to the tireless effort of
1051 Ole-Erik, Ingrid and Andreas, the initial translation is complete, and
1052 we are working on the proof reading to ensure consistent language and
1053 use of correct computer science terms.  The plan is to make the book
1054 available on paper, as well as in electronic form.  For that to
1055 happen, the proof reading must be completed and all the figures need
1056 to be translated.  If you want to help out, get in touch.</p>
1057
1058 <p><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-handbook/debian-handbook-nb-NO.pdf">A
1059
1060 fresh PDF edition</a> in A4 format (the final book will have smaller
1061 pages) of the book created every morning is available for
1062 proofreading.  If you find any errors, please
1063 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">visit
1064 Weblate and correct the error</a>.  The
1065 <a href="http://l.github.io/debian-handbook/stat/nb-NO/index.html">state
1066 of the translation including figures</a> is a useful source for those
1067 provide Norwegian bokmål screen shots and figures.</p>
1068
1069       </div>
1070       <div class="tags">
1071
1072
1073         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1074
1075
1076       </div>
1077     </div>
1078     <div class="padding"></div>
1079
1080     <div class="entry">
1081       <div class="title">
1082         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlimited_randomness_with_the_ChaosKey_.html">Unlimited randomness with the ChaosKey?</a>
1083       </div>
1084       <div class="date">
1085          1st March 2017
1086       </div>
1087       <div class="body">
1088         <p>A few days ago I ordered a small batch of
1089 <a href="http://altusmetrum.org/ChaosKey/">the ChaosKey</a>, a small
1090 USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith
1091 Packard.  Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it
1092 work great!  According to its designers, to get it to work out of the
1093 box, you need the Linux kernel version 4.1 or later.  I tested on a
1094 Debian Stretch machine (kernel version 4.9), and there it worked just
1095 fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly.  I wrote a small
1096 test oneliner to test.  It first print the current entropy level,
1097 drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds.
1098 Here is the situation without the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
1099
1100 <blockquote><pre>
1101 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1102   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
1103   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
1104      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1105      sleep 1; \
1106   done
1107 300
1108 0+1 oppføringer inn
1109 0+1 oppføringer ut
1110 28 byte kopiert, 0,000264565 s, 106 kB/s
1111 4
1112 8
1113 12
1114 17
1115 21
1116 %
1117 </pre></blockquote>
1118
1119 <p>The entropy level increases by 3-4 every second.  In such case any
1120 application requiring random bits (like a HTTPS enabled web server)
1121 will halt and wait for more entrpy.  And here is the situation with
1122 the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
1123
1124 <blockquote><pre>
1125 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1126   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
1127   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
1128      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1129      sleep 1; \
1130   done
1131 1079
1132 0+1 oppføringer inn
1133 0+1 oppføringer ut
1134 104 byte kopiert, 0,000487647 s, 213 kB/s
1135 433
1136 1028
1137 1031
1138 1035
1139 1038
1140 %
1141 </pre></blockquote>
1142
1143 <p>Quite the difference. :) I bought a few more than I need, in case
1144 someone want to buy one here in Norway. :)</p>
1145
1146 <p>Update: The dongle was presented at Debconf last year.  You might
1147 find <a href="https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/94/">the talk
1148 recording illuminating</a>.  It explains exactly what the source of
1149 randomness is, if you are unable to spot it from the schema drawing
1150 available from the ChaosKey web site linked at the start of this blog
1151 post.</p>
1152
1153       </div>
1154       <div class="tags">
1155
1156
1157         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1158
1159
1160       </div>
1161     </div>
1162     <div class="padding"></div>
1163
1164     <div class="entry">
1165       <div class="title">
1166         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Where_did_that_package_go___mdash__geolocated_IP_traceroute.html">Where did that package go? &mdash; geolocated IP traceroute</a>
1167       </div>
1168       <div class="date">
1169          9th January 2017
1170       </div>
1171       <div class="body">
1172         <p>Did you ever wonder where the web trafic really flow to reach the
1173 web servers, and who own the network equipment it is flowing through?
1174 It is possible to get a glimpse of this from using traceroute, but it
1175 is hard to find all the details.  Many years ago, I wrote a system to
1176 map the Norwegian Internet (trying to figure out if our plans for a
1177 network game service would get low enough latency, and who we needed
1178 to talk to about setting up game servers close to the users.  Back
1179 then I used traceroute output from many locations (I asked my friends
1180 to run a script and send me their traceroute output) to create the
1181 graph and the map.  The output from traceroute typically look like
1182 this:
1183
1184 <p><pre>
1185 traceroute to www.stortinget.no (85.88.67.10), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1186  1  uio-gw10.uio.no (129.240.202.1)  0.447 ms  0.486 ms  0.621 ms
1187  2  uio-gw8.uio.no (129.240.24.229)  0.467 ms  0.578 ms  0.675 ms
1188  3  oslo-gw1.uninett.no (128.39.65.17)  0.385 ms  0.373 ms  0.358 ms
1189  4  te3-1-2.br1.fn3.as2116.net (193.156.90.3)  1.174 ms  1.172 ms  1.153 ms
1190  5  he16-1-1.cr1.san110.as2116.net (195.0.244.234)  2.627 ms he16-1-1.cr2.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.244.48)  3.172 ms he16-1-1.cr1.san110.as2116.net (195.0.244.234)  2.857 ms
1191  6  ae1.ar8.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.242.39)  0.662 ms  0.637 ms ae0.ar8.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.242.23)  0.622 ms
1192  7  89.191.10.146 (89.191.10.146)  0.931 ms  0.917 ms  0.955 ms
1193  8  * * *
1194  9  * * *
1195 [...]
1196 </pre></p>
1197
1198 <p>This show the DNS names and IP addresses of (at least some of the)
1199 network equipment involved in getting the data traffic from me to the
1200 www.stortinget.no server, and how long it took in milliseconds for a
1201 package to reach the equipment and return to me.  Three packages are
1202 sent, and some times the packages do not follow the same path.  This
1203 is shown for hop 5, where three different IP addresses replied to the
1204 traceroute request.</p>
1205
1206 <p>There are many ways to measure trace routes.  Other good traceroute
1207 implementations I use are traceroute (using ICMP packages) mtr (can do
1208 both ICMP, UDP and TCP) and scapy (python library with ICMP, UDP, TCP
1209 traceroute and a lot of other capabilities).  All of them are easily
1210 available in <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>.</p>
1211
1212 <p>This time around, I wanted to know the geographic location of
1213 different route points, to visualize how visiting a web page spread
1214 information about the visit to a lot of servers around the globe.  The
1215 background is that a web site today often will ask the browser to get
1216 from many servers the parts (for example HTML, JSON, fonts,
1217 JavaScript, CSS, video) required to display the content.  This will
1218 leak information about the visit to those controlling these servers
1219 and anyone able to peek at the data traffic passing by (like your ISP,
1220 the ISPs backbone provider, FRA, GCHQ, NSA and others).</p>
1221
1222 <p>Lets pick an example, the Norwegian parliament web site
1223 www.stortinget.no.  It is read daily by all members of parliament and
1224 their staff, as well as political journalists, activits and many other
1225 citizens of Norway.  A visit to the www.stortinget.no web site will
1226 ask your browser to contact 8 other servers: ajax.googleapis.com,
1227 insights.hotjar.com, script.hotjar.com, static.hotjar.com,
1228 stats.g.doubleclick.net, www.google-analytics.com,
1229 www.googletagmanager.com and www.netigate.se.  I extracted this by
1230 asking <a href="http://phantomjs.org/">PhantomJS</a> to visit the
1231 Stortinget web page and tell me all the URLs PhantomJS downloaded to
1232 render the page (in HAR format using
1233 <a href="https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/blob/master/examples/netsniff.js">their
1234 netsniff example</a>.  I am very grateful to Gorm for showing me how
1235 to do this).  My goal is to visualize network traces to all IP
1236 addresses behind these DNS names, do show where visitors personal
1237 information is spread when visiting the page.</p>
1238
1239 <p align="center"><a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml"><img
1240 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geoip-small.png" alt="map of combined traces for URLs used by www.stortinget.no using GeoIP"/></a></p>
1241
1242 <p>When I had a look around for options, I could not find any good
1243 free software tools to do this, and decided I needed my own traceroute
1244 wrapper outputting KML based on locations looked up using GeoIP.  KML
1245 is easy to work with and easy to generate, and understood by several
1246 of the GIS tools I have available.  I got good help from by NUUG
1247 colleague Anders Einar with this, and the result can be seen in
1248 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/kmltraceroute">my
1249 kmltraceroute git repository</a>.  Unfortunately, the quality of the
1250 free GeoIP databases I could find (and the for-pay databases my
1251 friends had access to) is not up to the task.  The IP addresses of
1252 central Internet infrastructure would typically be placed near the
1253 controlling companies main office, and not where the router is really
1254 located, as you can see from <a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml">the
1255 KML file I created</a> using the GeoLite City dataset from MaxMind.
1256
1257 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg"><img
1258 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy-small.png" alt="scapy traceroute graph for URLs used by www.stortinget.no"/></a></p>
1259
1260 <p>I also had a look at the visual traceroute graph created by
1261 <a href="http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/">the scrapy project</a>,
1262 showing IP network ownership (aka AS owner) for the IP address in
1263 question.
1264 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg">The
1265 graph display a lot of useful information about the traceroute in SVG
1266 format</a>, and give a good indication on who control the network
1267 equipment involved, but it do not include geolocation.  This graph
1268 make it possible to see the information is made available at least for
1269 UNINETT, Catchcom, Stortinget, Nordunet, Google, Amazon, Telia, Level
1270 3 Communications and NetDNA.</p>
1271
1272 <p align="center"><a href="https://geotraceroute.com/index.php?node=4&host=www.stortinget.no"><img
1273 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-small.png" alt="example geotraceroute view for www.stortinget.no"/></a></p>
1274
1275 <p>In the process, I came across the
1276 <a href="https://geotraceroute.com/">web service GeoTraceroute</a> by
1277 Salim Gasmi.  Its methology of combining guesses based on DNS names,
1278 various location databases and finally use latecy times to rule out
1279 candidate locations seemed to do a very good job of guessing correct
1280 geolocation.  But it could only do one trace at the time, did not have
1281 a sensor in Norway and did not make the geolocations easily available
1282 for postprocessing.  So I contacted the developer and asked if he
1283 would be willing to share the code (he refused until he had time to
1284 clean it up), but he was interested in providing the geolocations in a
1285 machine readable format, and willing to set up a sensor in Norway.  So
1286 since yesterday, it is possible to run traces from Norway in this
1287 service thanks to a sensor node set up by
1288 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG assosiation</a>, and get the
1289 trace in KML format for further processing.</p>
1290
1291 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.kml"><img
1292 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.png" alt="map of combined traces for URLs used by www.stortinget.no using geotraceroute"/></a></p>
1293
1294 <p>Here we can see a lot of trafic passes Sweden on its way to
1295 Denmark, Germany, Holland and Ireland.  Plenty of places where the
1296 Snowden confirmations verified the traffic is read by various actors
1297 without your best interest as their top priority.</p>
1298
1299 <p>Combining KML files is trivial using a text editor, so I could loop
1300 over all the hosts behind the urls imported by www.stortinget.no and
1301 ask for the KML file from GeoTraceroute, and create a combined KML
1302 file with all the traces (unfortunately only one of the IP addresses
1303 behind the DNS name is traced this time.  To get them all, one would
1304 have to request traces using IP number instead of DNS names from
1305 GeoTraceroute).  That might be the next step in this project.</p>
1306
1307 <p>Armed with these tools, I find it a lot easier to figure out where
1308 the IP traffic moves and who control the boxes involved in moving it.
1309 And every time the link crosses for example the Swedish border, we can
1310 be sure Swedish Signal Intelligence (FRA) is listening, as GCHQ do in
1311 Britain and NSA in USA and cables around the globe.  (Hm, what should
1312 we tell them? :) Keep that in mind if you ever send anything
1313 unencrypted over the Internet.</p>
1314
1315 <p>PS: KML files are drawn using
1316 <a href="http://ivanrublev.me/kml/">the KML viewer from Ivan
1317 Rublev<a/>, as it was less cluttered than the local Linux application
1318 Marble.  There are heaps of other options too.</p>
1319
1320 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1321 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1322 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1323
1324       </div>
1325       <div class="tags">
1326
1327
1328         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
1329
1330
1331       </div>
1332     </div>
1333     <div class="padding"></div>
1334
1335     <div class="entry">
1336       <div class="title">
1337         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Appstream_just_learned_how_to_map_hardware_to_packages_too_.html">Appstream just learned how to map hardware to packages too!</a>
1338       </div>
1339       <div class="date">
1340         23rd December 2016
1341       </div>
1342       <div class="body">
1343         <p>I received a very nice Christmas present today.  As my regular
1344 readers probably know, I have been working on the
1345 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the Isenkram
1346 system</a> for many years.  The goal of the Isenkram system is to make
1347 it easier for users to figure out what to install to get a given piece
1348 of hardware to work in Debian, and a key part of this system is a way
1349 to map hardware to packages.  Isenkram have its own mapping database,
1350 and also uses data provided by each package using the AppStream
1351 metadata format.  And today,
1352 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/appstream">AppStream</a> in
1353 Debian learned to look up hardware the same way Isenkram is doing it,
1354 ie using fnmatch():</p>
1355
1356 <p><pre>
1357 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias \
1358   usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
1359 Identifier: pymissile [generic]
1360 Name: pymissile
1361 Summary: Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher
1362 Package: pymissile
1363 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias usb:v0694p0002d0000
1364 Identifier: libnxt [generic]
1365 Name: libnxt
1366 Summary: utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT brick
1367 Package: libnxt
1368 ---
1369 Identifier: t2n [generic]
1370 Name: t2n
1371 Summary: Simple command-line tool for Lego NXT
1372 Package: t2n
1373 ---
1374 Identifier: python-nxt [generic]
1375 Name: python-nxt
1376 Summary: Python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot
1377 Package: python-nxt
1378 ---
1379 Identifier: nbc [generic]
1380 Name: nbc
1381 Summary: C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
1382 Package: nbc
1383 %
1384 </pre></p>
1385
1386 <p>A similar query can be done using the combined AppStream and
1387 Isenkram databases using the isenkram-lookup tool:</p>
1388
1389 <p><pre>
1390 % isenkram-lookup usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
1391 pymissile
1392 % isenkram-lookup usb:v0694p0002d0000
1393 libnxt
1394 nbc
1395 python-nxt
1396 t2n
1397 %
1398 </pre></p>
1399
1400 <p>You can find modalias values relevant for your machine using
1401 <tt>cat $(find /sys/devices/ -name modalias)</tt>.
1402
1403 <p>If you want to make this system a success and help Debian users
1404 make the most of the hardware they have, please
1405 help<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add
1406 AppStream metadata for your package following the guidelines</a>
1407 documented in the wiki.  So far only 11 packages provide such
1408 information, among the several hundred hardware specific packages in
1409 Debian. The Isenkram database on the other hand contain 101 packages,
1410 mostly related to USB dongles.  Most of the packages with hardware
1411 mapping in AppStream are LEGO Mindstorms related, because I have, as
1412 part of my involvement in
1413 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the Debian LEGO
1414 team</a> given priority to making sure LEGO users get proposed the
1415 complete set of packages in Debian for that particular hardware.  The
1416 team also got a nice Christmas present today.  The
1417 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nxt-firmware">nxt-firmware
1418 package</a> made it into Debian.  With this package in place, it is
1419 now possible to use the LEGO Mindstorms NXT unit with only free
1420 software, as the nxt-firmware package contain the source and firmware
1421 binaries for the NXT brick.</p>
1422
1423 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1424 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1425 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1426
1427       </div>
1428       <div class="tags">
1429
1430
1431         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
1432
1433
1434       </div>
1435     </div>
1436     <div class="padding"></div>
1437
1438     <div class="entry">
1439       <div class="title">
1440         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_updated_with_a_lot_more_hardware_package_mappings.html">Isenkram updated with a lot more hardware-package mappings</a>
1441       </div>
1442       <div class="date">
1443         20th December 2016
1444       </div>
1445       <div class="body">
1446         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
1447 system</a> I wrote two years ago to make it easier in Debian to find
1448 and install packages to get your hardware dongles to work, is still
1449 going strong.  It is a system to look up the hardware present on or
1450 connected to the current system, and map the hardware to Debian
1451 packages.  It can either be done using the tools in isenkram-cli or
1452 using the user space daemon in the isenkram package.  The latter will
1453 notify you, when inserting new hardware, about what packages to
1454 install to get the dongle working.  It will even provide a button to
1455 click on to ask packagekit to install the packages.</p>
1456
1457 <p>Here is an command line example from my Thinkpad laptop:</p>
1458
1459 <p><pre>
1460 % isenkram-lookup
1461 bluez
1462 cheese
1463 ethtool
1464 fprintd
1465 fprintd-demo
1466 gkrellm-thinkbat
1467 hdapsd
1468 libpam-fprintd
1469 pidgin-blinklight
1470 thinkfan
1471 tlp
1472 tp-smapi-dkms
1473 tp-smapi-source
1474 tpb
1475 %
1476 </pre></p>
1477
1478 <p>It can also list the firware package providing firmware requested
1479 by the load kernel modules, which in my case is an empty list because
1480 I have all the firmware my machine need:
1481
1482 <p><pre>
1483 % /usr/sbin/isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
1484 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
1485 %
1486 </pre></p>
1487
1488 <p>The last few days I had a look at several of the around 250
1489 packages in Debian with udev rules.  These seem like good candidates
1490 to install when a given hardware dongle is inserted, and I found
1491 several that should be proposed by isenkram.  I have not had time to
1492 check all of them, but am happy to report that now there are 97
1493 packages packages mapped to hardware by Isenkram.  11 of these
1494 packages provide hardware mapping using AppStream, while the rest are
1495 listed in the modaliases file provided in isenkram.</p>
1496
1497 <p>These are the packages with hardware mappings at the moment.  The
1498 <strong>marked packages</strong> are also announcing their hardware
1499 support using AppStream, for everyone to use:</p>
1500
1501 <p>air-quality-sensor, alsa-firmware-loaders, argyll,
1502 <strong>array-info</strong>, avarice, avrdude, b43-fwcutter,
1503 bit-babbler, bluez, bluez-firmware, <strong>brltty</strong>,
1504 <strong>broadcom-sta-dkms</strong>, calibre, cgminer, cheese, colord,
1505 <strong>colorhug-client</strong>, dahdi-firmware-nonfree, dahdi-linux,
1506 dfu-util, dolphin-emu, ekeyd, ethtool, firmware-ipw2x00, fprintd,
1507 fprintd-demo, <strong>galileo</strong>, gkrellm-thinkbat, gphoto2,
1508 gpsbabel, gpsbabel-gui, gpsman, gpstrans, gqrx-sdr, gr-fcdproplus,
1509 gr-osmosdr, gtkpod, hackrf, hdapsd, hdmi2usb-udev, hpijs-ppds, hplip,
1510 ipw3945-source, ipw3945d, kde-config-tablet, kinect-audio-setup,
1511 <strong>libnxt</strong>, libpam-fprintd, <strong>lomoco</strong>,
1512 madwimax, minidisc-utils, mkgmap, msi-keyboard, mtkbabel,
1513 <strong>nbc</strong>, <strong>nqc</strong>, nut-hal-drivers, ola,
1514 open-vm-toolbox, open-vm-tools, openambit, pcgminer, pcmciautils,
1515 pcscd, pidgin-blinklight, printer-driver-splix,
1516 <strong>pymissile</strong>, python-nxt, qlandkartegt,
1517 qlandkartegt-garmin, rosegarden, rt2x00-source, sispmctl,
1518 soapysdr-module-hackrf, solaar, squeak-plugins-scratch, sunxi-tools,
1519 <strong>t2n</strong>, thinkfan, thinkfinger-tools, tlp, tp-smapi-dkms,
1520 tp-smapi-source, tpb, tucnak, uhd-host, usbmuxd, viking,
1521 virtualbox-ose-guest-x11, w1retap, xawtv, xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse,
1522 xserver-xorg-input-wacom, xserver-xorg-video-qxl,
1523 xserver-xorg-video-vmware, yubikey-personalization and
1524 zd1211-firmware</p>
1525
1526 <p>If you know of other packages, please let me know with a wishlist
1527 bug report against the isenkram-cli package, and ask the package
1528 maintainer to
1529 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add AppStream
1530 metadata according to the guidelines</a> to provide the information
1531 for everyone.  In time, I hope to get rid of the isenkram specific
1532 hardware mapping and depend exclusively on AppStream.</p>
1533
1534 <p>Note, the AppStream metadata for broadcom-sta-dkms is matching too
1535 much hardware, and suggest that the package with with any ethernet
1536 card.  See <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/838735">bug #838735</a> for
1537 the details.  I hope the maintainer find time to address it soon.  In
1538 the mean time I provide an override in isenkram.</p>
1539
1540       </div>
1541       <div class="tags">
1542
1543
1544         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
1545
1546
1547       </div>
1548     </div>
1549     <div class="padding"></div>
1550
1551     <div class="entry">
1552       <div class="title">
1553         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oolite__a_life_in_space_as_vagabond_and_mercenary___nice_free_software.html">Oolite, a life in space as vagabond and mercenary - nice free software</a>
1554       </div>
1555       <div class="date">
1556         11th December 2016
1557       </div>
1558       <div class="body">
1559         <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-12-11-nice-oolite.png"/></p>
1560
1561 <p>In my early years, I played
1562 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Classic_Elite">the epic game
1563 Elite</a> on my PC.  I spent many months trading and fighting in
1564 space, and reached the 'elite' fighting status before I moved on.  The
1565 original Elite game was available on Commodore 64 and the IBM PC
1566 edition I played had a 64 KB executable.  I am still impressed today
1567 that the authors managed to squeeze both a 3D engine and details about
1568 more than 2000 planet systems across 7 galaxies into a binary so
1569 small.</p>
1570
1571 <p>I have known about <a href="http://www.oolite.org/">the free
1572 software game Oolite inspired by Elite</a> for a while, but did not
1573 really have time to test it properly until a few days ago.  It was
1574 great to discover that my old knowledge about trading routes were
1575 still valid.  But my fighting and flying abilities were gone, so I had
1576 to retrain to be able to dock on a space station.  And I am still not
1577 able to make much resistance when I am attacked by pirates, so I
1578 bougth and mounted the most powerful laser in the rear to be able to
1579 put up at least some resistance while fleeing for my life. :)</p>
1580
1581 <p>When playing Elite in the late eighties, I had to discover
1582 everything on my own, and I had long lists of prices seen on different
1583 planets to be able to decide where to trade what.  This time I had the
1584 advantages of the
1585 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Main_Page">Elite wiki</a>,
1586 where information about each planet is easily available with common
1587 price ranges and suggested trading routes.  This improved my ability
1588 to earn money and I have been able to earn enough to buy a lot of
1589 useful equipent in a few days.  I believe I originally played for
1590 months before I could get a docking computer, while now I could get it
1591 after less then a week.</p>
1592
1593 <p>If you like science fiction and dreamed of a life as a vagabond in
1594 space, you should try out Oolite.  It is available for Linux, MacOSX
1595 and Windows, and is included in Debian and derivatives since 2011.</p>
1596
1597 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1598 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1599 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1600
1601       </div>
1602       <div class="tags">
1603
1604
1605         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
1606
1607
1608       </div>
1609     </div>
1610     <div class="padding"></div>
1611
1612     <div class="entry">
1613       <div class="title">
1614         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_installations_using_eatmydata.html">Quicker Debian installations using eatmydata</a>
1615       </div>
1616       <div class="date">
1617         25th November 2016
1618       </div>
1619       <div class="body">
1620         <p>Two years ago, I did some experiments with eatmydata and the Debian
1621 installation system, observing how using
1622 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">eatmydata
1623 could speed up the installation</a> quite a bit.  My testing measured
1624 speedup around 20-40 percent for Debian Edu, where we install around
1625 1000 packages from within the installer.  The eatmydata package
1626 provide a way to disable/delay file system flushing.  This is a bit
1627 risky in the general case, as files that should be stored on disk will
1628 stay only in memory a bit longer than expected, causing problems if a
1629 machine crashes at an inconvenient time.  But for an installation, if
1630 the machine crashes during installation the process is normally
1631 restarted, and avoiding disk operations as much as possible to speed
1632 up the process make perfect sense.
1633
1634 <p>I added code in the Debian Edu specific installation code to enable
1635 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libeatmydata">eatmydata</a>,
1636 but did not have time to push it any further.  But a few months ago I
1637 picked it up again and worked with the libeatmydata package maintainer
1638 Mattia Rizzolo to make it easier for everyone to get this installation
1639 speedup in Debian.  Thanks to our cooperation There is now an
1640 eatmydata-udeb package in Debian testing and unstable, and simply
1641 enabling/installing it in debian-installer (d-i) is enough to get the
1642 quicker installations.  It can be enabled using preseeding.  The
1643 following untested kernel argument should do the trick:</p>
1644
1645 <blockquote><pre>
1646 preseed/early_command="anna-install eatmydata-udeb"
1647 </pre></blockquote>
1648
1649 <p>This should ask d-i to install the package inside the d-i
1650 environment early in the installation sequence.  Having it installed
1651 in d-i in turn will make sure the relevant scripts are called just
1652 after debootstrap filled /target/ with the freshly installed Debian
1653 system to configure apt to run dpkg with eatmydata.  This is enough to
1654 speed up the installation process.  There is a proposal to
1655 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/841153">extend the idea a bit further
1656 by using /etc/ld.so.preload instead of apt.conf</a>, but I have not
1657 tested its impact.</p>
1658
1659
1660       </div>
1661       <div class="tags">
1662
1663
1664         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1665
1666
1667       </div>
1668     </div>
1669     <div class="padding"></div>
1670
1671     <div class="entry">
1672       <div class="title">
1673         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oversette_bokm_l_til_nynorsk__enklere_enn_du_tror_takket_v_re_Apertium.html">Oversette bokmål til nynorsk, enklere enn du tror takket være Apertium</a>
1674       </div>
1675       <div class="date">
1676         24th November 2016
1677       </div>
1678       <div class="body">
1679         <p>I Norge er det mange som trenger å skrive både bokmål og nynorsk.
1680 Eksamensoppgaver, offentlige brev og nyheter er eksempler på tekster
1681 der det er krav om skriftspråk.  I tillegg til alle skoleoppgavene som
1682 elever over det ganske land skal levere inn hvert år.  Det mange ikke
1683 vet er at selv om de kommersielle alternativene
1684 <a href="https://translate.google.com/">Google Translate</a> og
1685 <a href="https://www.bing.com/translator/">Bing Translator</a> ikke kan
1686 bidra med å oversette mellom bokmål og nynorsk, så finnes det et
1687 utmerket fri programvarealternativ som kan.  Oversetterverktøyet
1688 Apertium har støtte for en rekke språkkombinasjoner, og takket være
1689 den utrettelige innsatsen til blant annet Kevin Brubeck Unhammer, kan
1690 en bruke webtjenesten til å fylle inn en tekst på bokmål eller
1691 nynorsk, og få den automatoversatt til det andre skriftspråket.
1692 Resultatet er ikke perfekt, men et svært godt utgangspunkt.  Av og til
1693 er resultatet så bra at det kan benyttes uten endringer.  Jeg vet
1694 f.eks. at store deler av Joomla ble oversatt til nynorsk ved hjelp
1695 Apertium.  Høres det ut som noe du kan ha bruk for?  Besøk i så fall
1696 <a href="https://www.apertium.org/">Apertium.org</a> og fyll inn
1697 teksten din i webskjemaet der.
1698
1699 <p>Hvis du trenger maskinell tilgang til den bakenforliggende
1700 teknologien kan du enten installere pakken
1701 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/apertium-nno-nob">apertium-nno-nob</a>
1702 på en Debian-maskin eller bruke web-API-et tilgjengelig fra
1703 api.apertium.org.  Se
1704 <a href="http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Apertium-apy">API-dokumentasjonen</a>
1705 for detaljer om web-API-et.  Her kan du se hvordan resultatet blir for
1706 denne teksten som ble skrevet på bokmål over maskinoversatt til
1707 nynorsk.</p>
1708
1709 <hr/>
1710
1711 <p>I Noreg er det mange som treng å skriva både bokmål og nynorsk.
1712 Eksamensoppgåver, offentlege brev og nyhende er døme på tekster der
1713 det er krav om skriftspråk.  I tillegg til alle skuleoppgåvene som
1714 elevar over det ganske land skal levera inn kvart år.  Det mange ikkje
1715 veit er at sjølv om dei kommersielle alternativa
1716 <a href="https://translate.google.com/">Google *Translate</a> og
1717 <a href="https://www.bing.com/translator/">Bing *Translator</a> ikkje
1718 kan bidra med å omsetja mellom bokmål og nynorsk, så finst det eit
1719 utmerka fri programvarealternativ som kan.  Omsetjarverktøyet
1720 *Apertium har støtte for ei rekkje språkkombinasjonar, og takka vera
1721 den utrøyttelege innsatsen til blant anna Kevin Brubeck Unhammer, kan
1722 ein bruka *webtjenesten til å fylla inn ei tekst på bokmål eller
1723 nynorsk, og få den *automatoversatt til det andre skriftspråket.
1724 Resultatet er ikkje perfekt, men eit svært godt utgangspunkt.  Av og
1725 til er resultatet så bra at det kan nyttast utan endringar.  Eg veit
1726 t.d. at store delar av *Joomla vart omsett til nynorsk ved hjelp
1727 *Apertium.  Høyrast det ut som noko du kan ha bruk for?  Besøk i så
1728 fall <a href="https://www.apertium.org/">*Apertium.org</a> og fyll inn
1729 teksta di i *webskjemaet der.
1730
1731 <p>Viss du treng *maskinell tilgjenge til den *bakenforliggende
1732 teknologien kan du anten installera pakken
1733 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/apertium-nno-nob">*apertium-*nno-*nob</a>
1734 på ein *Debian-maskin eller bruka *web-*API-eit tilgjengeleg frå
1735 *api.*apertium.org.  Sjå
1736 <a href="http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Apertium-apy">*API-dokumentasjonen</a>
1737 for detaljar om *web-*API-eit.  Her kan du sjå korleis resultatet vert
1738 for denne teksta som vart skreva på bokmål over *maskinoversatt til
1739 nynorsk.</p>
1740
1741       </div>
1742       <div class="tags">
1743
1744
1745         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll</a>.
1746
1747
1748       </div>
1749     </div>
1750     <div class="padding"></div>
1751
1752     <div class="entry">
1753       <div class="title">
1754         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_profiler_for_multi_threaded_software_is_now_in_Debian.html">Coz profiler for multi-threaded software is now in Debian</a>
1755       </div>
1756       <div class="date">
1757         13th November 2016
1758       </div>
1759       <div class="body">
1760         <p><a href="http://coz-profiler.org/">The Coz profiler</a>, a nice
1761 profiler able to run benchmarking experiments on the instrumented
1762 multi-threaded program, finally
1763 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/coz-profiler">made it into
1764 Debian unstable yesterday</A>.  Lluís Vilanova and I have spent many
1765 months since
1766 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">I
1767 blogged about the coz tool</a> in August working with upstream to make
1768 it suitable for Debian.  There are still issues with clang
1769 compatibility, inline assembly only working x86 and minimized
1770 JavaScript libraries.</p>
1771
1772 <p>To test it, install 'coz-profiler' using apt and run it like this:</p>
1773
1774 <p><blockquote>
1775 <tt>coz run --- /path/to/binary-with-debug-info</tt>
1776 </blockquote></p>
1777
1778 <p>This will produce a profile.coz file in the current working
1779 directory with the profiling information.  This is then given to a
1780 JavaScript application provided in the package and available from
1781 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">a project web page</a>.
1782 To start the local copy, invoke it in a browser like this:</p>
1783
1784 <p><blockquote>
1785 <tt>sensible-browser /usr/share/coz-profiler/viewer/index.htm</tt>
1786 </blockquote></p>
1787
1788 <p>See the project home page and the
1789 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">USENIX
1790 ;login: article on Coz</a> for more information on how it is
1791 working.</p>
1792
1793       </div>
1794       <div class="tags">
1795
1796
1797         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1798
1799
1800       </div>
1801     </div>
1802     <div class="padding"></div>
1803
1804     <div class="entry">
1805       <div class="title">
1806         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_own_self_balancing_Lego_Segway.html">My own self balancing Lego Segway</a>
1807       </div>
1808       <div class="date">
1809          4th November 2016
1810       </div>
1811       <div class="body">
1812         <p>A while back I received a Gyro sensor for the NXT
1813 <a href="mindstorms.lego.com">Mindstorms</a> controller as a birthday
1814 present.  It had been on my wishlist for a while, because I wanted to
1815 build a Segway like balancing lego robot.  I had already built
1816 <a href="http://www.nxtprograms.com/NXT2/segway/">a simple balancing
1817 robot</a> with the kids, using the light/color sensor included in the
1818 NXT kit as the balance sensor, but it was not working very well.  It
1819 could balance for a while, but was very sensitive to the light
1820 condition in the room and the reflective properties of the surface and
1821 would fall over after a short while.  I wanted something more robust,
1822 and had
1823 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=NGY1044">the
1824 gyro sensor from HiTechnic</a> I believed would solve it on my
1825 wishlist for some years before it suddenly showed up as a gift from my
1826 loved ones. :)</p>
1827
1828 <p>Unfortunately I have not had time to sit down and play with it
1829 since then.  But that changed some days ago, when I was searching for
1830 lego segway information and came across a recipe from HiTechnic for
1831 building
1832 <a href="http://www.hitechnic.com/blog/gyro-sensor/htway/">the
1833 HTWay</a>, a segway like balancing robot.  Build instructions and
1834 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/upload/786-HTWayC.nxc">source
1835 code</a> was included, so it was just a question of putting it all
1836 together.  And thanks to the great work of many Debian developers, the
1837 compiler needed to build the source for the NXT is already included in
1838 Debian, so I was read to go in less than an hour.  The resulting robot
1839 do not look very impressive in its simplicity:</p>
1840
1841 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-robot.jpeg"></p>
1842
1843 <p>Because I lack the infrared sensor used to control the robot in the
1844 design from HiTechnic, I had to comment out the last task
1845 (taskControl).  I simply placed /* and */ around it get the program
1846 working without that sensor present.  Now it balances just fine until
1847 the battery status run low:</p>
1848
1849 <p align="center"><video width="70%" controls="true">
1850    <source src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-balancing.ogv" type="video/ogg">
1851 </video></p>
1852
1853 <p>Now we would like to teach it how to follow a line and take remote
1854 control instructions using the included Bluetooth receiver in the NXT.</p>
1855
1856 <p>If you, like me, love LEGO and want to make sure we find the tools
1857 they need to work with LEGO in Debian and all our derivative
1858 distributions like Ubuntu, check out
1859 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the LEGO designers
1860 project page</a> and join the Debian LEGO team.  Personally I own a
1861 RCX and NXT controller (no EV3), and would like to make sure the
1862 Debian tools needed to program the systems I own work as they
1863 should.</p>
1864
1865       </div>
1866       <div class="tags">
1867
1868
1869         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
1870
1871
1872       </div>
1873     </div>
1874     <div class="padding"></div>
1875
1876     <div class="entry">
1877       <div class="title">
1878         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile phone</a>
1879       </div>
1880       <div class="date">
1881         10th October 2016
1882       </div>
1883       <div class="body">
1884         <p>In July
1885 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html">I
1886 wrote how to get the Signal Chrome/Chromium app working</a> without
1887 the ability to receive SMS messages (aka without a cell phone).  It is
1888 time to share some experiences and provide an updated setup.</p>
1889
1890 <p>The Signal app have worked fine for several months now, and I use
1891 it regularly to chat with my loved ones.  I had a major snag at the
1892 end of my summer vacation, when the the app completely forgot my
1893 setup, identity and keys.  The reason behind this major mess was
1894 running out of disk space.  To avoid that ever happening again I have
1895 started storing everything in <tt>userdata/</tt> in git, to be able to
1896 roll back to an earlier version if the files are wiped by mistake.  I
1897 had to use it once after introducing the git backup.  When rolling
1898 back to an earlier version, one need to use the 'reset session' option
1899 in Signal to get going, and notify the people you talk with about the
1900 problem.  I assume there is some sequence number tracking in the
1901 protocol to detect rollback attacks.  The git repository is rather big
1902 (674 MiB so far), but I have not tried to figure out if some of the
1903 content can be added to a .gitignore file due to lack of spare
1904 time.</p>
1905
1906 <p>I've also hit the 90 days timeout blocking, and noticed that this
1907 make it impossible to send messages using Signal.  I could still
1908 receive them, but had to patch the code with a new timestamp to send.
1909 I believe the timeout is added by the developers to force people to
1910 upgrade to the latest version of the app, even when there is no
1911 protocol changes, to reduce the version skew among the user base and
1912 thus try to keep the number of support requests down.</p>
1913
1914 <p>Since my original recipe, the Signal source code changed slightly,
1915 making the old patch fail to apply cleanly.  Below is an updated
1916 patch, including the shell wrapper I use to start Signal.  The
1917 original version required a new user to locate the JavaScript console
1918 and call a function from there.  I got help from a friend with more
1919 JavaScript knowledge than me to modify the code to provide a GUI
1920 button instead.  This mean that to get started you just need to run
1921 the wrapper and click the 'Register without mobile phone' to get going
1922 now.  I've also modified the timeout code to always set it to 90 days
1923 in the future, to avoid having to patch the code regularly.</p>
1924
1925 <p>So, the updated recipe for Debian Jessie:</p>
1926
1927 <ol>
1928
1929 <li>First, install required packages to get the source code and the
1930 browser you need.  Signal only work with Chrome/Chromium, as far as I
1931 know, so you need to install it.
1932
1933 <pre>
1934 apt install git tor chromium
1935 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
1936 </pre></li>
1937
1938 <li>Modify the source code using command listed in the the patch
1939 block below.</li>
1940
1941 <li>Start Signal using the run-signal-app wrapper (for example using
1942 <tt>`pwd`/run-signal-app</tt>).
1943
1944 <li>Click on the 'Register without mobile phone', will in a phone
1945 number you can receive calls to the next minute, receive the
1946 verification code and enter it into the form field and press
1947 'Register'.  Note, the phone number you use will be user Signal
1948 username, ie the way others can find you on Signal.</li>
1949
1950 <li>You can now use Signal to contact others.  Note, new contacts do
1951 not show up in the contact list until you restart Signal, and there is
1952 no way to assign names to Contacts.  There is also no way to create or
1953 update chat groups.  I suspect this is because the web app do not have
1954 a associated contact database.</li>
1955
1956 </ol>
1957
1958 <p>I am still a bit uneasy about using Signal, because of the way its
1959 main author moxie0 reject federation and accept dependencies to major
1960 corporations like Google (part of the code is fetched from Google) and
1961 Amazon (the central coordination point is owned by Amazon).  See for
1962 example
1963 <a href="https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37">the
1964 LibreSignal issue tracker</a> for a thread documenting the authors
1965 view on these issues.  But the network effect is strong in this case,
1966 and several of the people I want to communicate with already use
1967 Signal.  Perhaps we can all move to <a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a>
1968 once it <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/830265">work on my
1969 laptop</a>?  It already work on Windows and Android, and is included
1970 in <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ring">Debian</a> and
1971 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ring">Ubuntu</a>, but not
1972 working on Debian Stable.</p>
1973
1974 <p>Anyway, this is the patch I apply to the Signal code to get it
1975 working.  It switch to the production servers, disable to timeout,
1976 make registration easier and add the shell wrapper:</p>
1977
1978 <pre>
1979 cd Signal-Desktop; cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p1
1980 diff --git a/js/background.js b/js/background.js
1981 index 24b4c1d..579345f 100644
1982 --- a/js/background.js
1983 +++ b/js/background.js
1984 @@ -33,9 +33,9 @@
1985          });
1986      });
1987
1988 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
1989 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org';
1990      var SERVER_PORTS = [80, 4433, 8443];
1991 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
1992 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
1993      var messageReceiver;
1994      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
1995          if (messageReceiver) {
1996 diff --git a/js/expire.js b/js/expire.js
1997 index 639aeae..beb91c3 100644
1998 --- a/js/expire.js
1999 +++ b/js/expire.js
2000 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
2001  ;(function() {
2002      'use strict';
2003 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
2004 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = Date.now() + (90 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
2005
2006      window.extension = window.extension || {};
2007
2008 diff --git a/js/views/install_view.js b/js/views/install_view.js
2009 index 7816f4f..1d6233b 100644
2010 --- a/js/views/install_view.js
2011 +++ b/js/views/install_view.js
2012 @@ -38,7 +38,8 @@
2013              return {
2014                  'click .step1': this.selectStep.bind(this, 1),
2015                  'click .step2': this.selectStep.bind(this, 2),
2016 -                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3)
2017 +                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3),
2018 +                'click .callreg': function() { extension.install('standalone') },
2019              };
2020          },
2021          clearQR: function() {
2022 diff --git a/options.html b/options.html
2023 index dc0f28e..8d709f6 100644
2024 --- a/options.html
2025 +++ b/options.html
2026 @@ -14,7 +14,10 @@
2027          &lt;div class='nav'>
2028            &lt;h1>{{ installWelcome }}&lt;/h1>
2029            &lt;p>{{ installTagline }}&lt;/p>
2030 -          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a> &lt;/div>
2031 +          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a>
2032 +           &lt;br> &lt;a class="button callreg">Register without mobile phone&lt;/a>
2033 +
2034 +         &lt;/div>
2035            &lt;span class='dot step1 selected'>&lt;/span>
2036            &lt;span class='dot step2'>&lt;/span>
2037            &lt;span class='dot step3'>&lt;/span>
2038 --- /dev/null   2016-10-07 09:55:13.730181472 +0200
2039 +++ b/run-signal-app   2016-10-10 08:54:09.434172391 +0200
2040 @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
2041 +#!/bin/sh
2042 +set -e
2043 +cd $(dirname $0)
2044 +mkdir -p userdata
2045 +userdata="`pwd`/userdata"
2046 +if [ -d "$userdata" ] && [ ! -d "$userdata/.git" ] ; then
2047 +    (cd $userdata && git init)
2048 +fi
2049 +(cd $userdata && git add . && git commit -m "Current status." || true)
2050 +exec chromium \
2051 +  --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
2052 +  --user-data-dir=$userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
2053 EOF
2054 chmod a+rx run-signal-app
2055 </pre>
2056
2057 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2058 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2059 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2060
2061       </div>
2062       <div class="tags">
2063
2064
2065         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
2066
2067
2068       </div>
2069     </div>
2070     <div class="padding"></div>
2071
2072     <div class="entry">
2073       <div class="title">
2074         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram__Appstream_and_udev_make_life_as_a_LEGO_builder_easier.html">Isenkram, Appstream and udev make life as a LEGO builder easier</a>
2075       </div>
2076       <div class="date">
2077          7th October 2016
2078       </div>
2079       <div class="body">
2080         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
2081 system</a> provide a practical and easy way to figure out which
2082 packages support the hardware in a given machine.  The command line
2083 tool <tt>isenkram-lookup</tt> and the tasksel options provide a
2084 convenient way to list and install packages relevant for the current
2085 hardware during system installation, both user space packages and
2086 firmware packages. The GUI background daemon on the other hand provide
2087 a pop-up proposing to install packages when a new dongle is inserted
2088 while using the computer.  For example, if you plug in a smart card
2089 reader, the system will ask if you want to install <tt>pcscd</tt> if
2090 that package isn't already installed, and if you plug in a USB video
2091 camera the system will ask if you want to install <tt>cheese</tt> if
2092 cheese is currently missing.  This already work just fine.</p>
2093
2094 <p>But Isenkram depend on a database mapping from hardware IDs to
2095 package names.  When I started no such database existed in Debian, so
2096 I made my own data set and included it with the isenkram package and
2097 made isenkram fetch the latest version of this database from git using
2098 http.  This way the isenkram users would get updated package proposals
2099 as soon as I learned more about hardware related packages.</p>
2100
2101 <p>The hardware is identified using modalias strings.  The modalias
2102 design is from the Linux kernel where most hardware descriptors are
2103 made available as a strings that can be matched using filename style
2104 globbing.  It handle USB, PCI, DMI and a lot of other hardware related
2105 identifiers.</p>
2106
2107 <p>The downside to the Isenkram specific database is that there is no
2108 information about relevant distribution / Debian version, making
2109 isenkram propose obsolete packages too.  But along came AppStream, a
2110 cross distribution mechanism to store and collect metadata about
2111 software packages.  When I heard about the proposal, I contacted the
2112 people involved and suggested to add a hardware matching rule using
2113 modalias strings in the specification, to be able to use AppStream for
2114 mapping hardware to packages.  This idea was accepted and AppStream is
2115 now a great way for a package to announce the hardware it support in a
2116 distribution neutral way.  I wrote
2117 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">a
2118 recipe on how to add such meta-information</a> in a blog post last
2119 December.  If you have a hardware related package in Debian, please
2120 announce the relevant hardware IDs using AppStream.</p>
2121
2122 <p>In Debian, almost all packages that can talk to a LEGO Mindestorms
2123 RCX or NXT unit, announce this support using AppStream.  The effect is
2124 that when you insert such LEGO robot controller into your Debian
2125 machine, Isenkram will propose to install the packages needed to get
2126 it working.  The intention is that this should allow the local user to
2127 start programming his robot controller right away without having to
2128 guess what packages to use or which permissions to fix.</p>
2129
2130 <p>But when I sat down with my son the other day to program our NXT
2131 unit using his Debian Stretch computer, I discovered something
2132 annoying.  The local console user (ie my son) did not get access to
2133 the USB device for programming the unit.  This used to work, but no
2134 longer in Jessie and Stretch.  After some investigation and asking
2135 around on #debian-devel, I discovered that this was because udev had
2136 changed the mechanism used to grant access to local devices.  The
2137 ConsoleKit mechanism from <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>
2138 no longer applied, because LDAP users no longer was added to the
2139 plugdev group during login.  Michael Biebl told me that this method
2140 was obsolete and the new method used ACLs instead.  This was good
2141 news, as the plugdev mechanism is a mess when using a remote user
2142 directory like LDAP.  Using ACLs would make sure a user lost device
2143 access when she logged out, even if the user left behind a background
2144 process which would retain the plugdev membership with the ConsoleKit
2145 setup.  Armed with this knowledge I moved on to fix the access problem
2146 for the LEGO Mindstorms related packages.</p>
2147
2148 <p>The new system uses a udev tag, 'uaccess'.  It can either be
2149 applied directly for a device, or is applied in
2150 /lib/udev/rules.d/70-uaccess.rules for classes of devices.  As the
2151 LEGO Mindstorms udev rules did not have a class, I decided to add the
2152 tag directly in the udev rules files included in the packages.  Here
2153 is one example.  For the nqc C compiler for the RCX, the
2154 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/60-nqc.rules</tt> file now look like this:
2155
2156 <p><pre>
2157 SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="add", ATTR{idVendor}=="0694", ATTR{idProduct}=="0001", \
2158     SYMLINK+="rcx-%k", TAG+="uaccess"
2159 </pre></p>
2160
2161 <p>The key part is the 'TAG+="uaccess"' at the end.  I suspect all
2162 packages using plugdev in their /lib/udev/rules.d/ files should be
2163 changed to use this tag (either directly or indirectly via
2164 <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>).  Perhaps a lintian check should be created
2165 to detect this?</p>
2166
2167 <p>I've been unable to find good documentation on the uaccess feature.
2168 It is unclear to me if the uaccess tag is an internal implementation
2169 detail like the udev-acl tag used by
2170 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>.  If it is, I guess the
2171 indirect method is the preferred way.  Michael
2172 <a href="https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4288">asked for more
2173 documentation from the systemd project</a> and I hope it will make
2174 this clearer.  For now I use the generic classes when they exist and
2175 is already handled by <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>, and add the tag
2176 directly if no such class exist.</p>
2177
2178 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
2179 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
2180 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
2181
2182 <p>To help out making life for LEGO constructors in Debian easier,
2183 please join us on our IRC channel
2184 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> and join
2185 the <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/debian-lego/">Debian
2186 LEGO team</a> in the Alioth project we created yesterday.  A mailing
2187 list is not yet created, but we are working on it. :)</p>
2188
2189 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2190 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2191 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2192
2193       </div>
2194       <div class="tags">
2195
2196
2197         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>.
2198
2199
2200       </div>
2201     </div>
2202     <div class="padding"></div>
2203
2204     <div class="entry">
2205       <div class="title">
2206         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_draft_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_now_public.html">First draft Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook now public</a>
2207       </div>
2208       <div class="date">
2209         30th August 2016
2210       </div>
2211       <div class="body">
2212         <p>In April we
2213 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">started
2214 to work</a> on a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the "open access" book on
2215 how to set up and administrate a Debian system.  Today I am happy to
2216 report that the first draft is now publicly available.  You can find
2217 it on <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/">get the Debian
2218 Administrator's Handbook page</a> (under Other languages).  The first
2219 eight chapters have a first draft translation, and we are working on
2220 proofreading the content.  If you want to help out, please start
2221 contributing using
2222 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
2223 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
2224 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
2225 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
2226 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
2227 contributors</a>.  A good way to contribute is to proofread the text
2228 and update weblate if you find errors.</p>
2229
2230 <p>Our goal is still to make the Norwegian book available on paper as well as
2231 electronic form.</p>
2232
2233       </div>
2234       <div class="tags">
2235
2236
2237         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2238
2239
2240       </div>
2241     </div>
2242     <div class="padding"></div>
2243
2244     <div class="entry">
2245       <div class="title">
2246         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">Coz can help you find bottlenecks in multi-threaded software - nice free software</a>
2247       </div>
2248       <div class="date">
2249         11th August 2016
2250       </div>
2251       <div class="body">
2252         <p>This summer, I read a great article
2253 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">coz:
2254 This Is the Profiler You're Looking For</a>" in USENIX ;login: about
2255 how to profile multi-threaded programs.  It presented a system for
2256 profiling software by running experiences in the running program,
2257 testing how run time performance is affected by "speeding up" parts of
2258 the code to various degrees compared to a normal run.  It does this by
2259 slowing down parallel threads while the "faster up" code is running
2260 and measure how this affect processing time.  The processing time is
2261 measured using probes inserted into the code, either using progress
2262 counters (COZ_PROGRESS) or as latency meters (COZ_BEGIN/COZ_END).  It
2263 can also measure unmodified code by measuring complete the program
2264 runtime and running the program several times instead.</p>
2265
2266 <p>The project and presentation was so inspiring that I would like to
2267 get the system into Debian.  I
2268 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=830708">created
2269 a WNPP request for it</a> and contacted upstream to try to make the
2270 system ready for Debian by sending patches.  The build process need to
2271 be changed a bit to avoid running 'git clone' to get dependencies, and
2272 to include the JavaScript web page used to visualize the collected
2273 profiling information included in the source package.
2274 But I expect that should work out fairly soon.</p>
2275
2276 <p>The way the system work is fairly simple.  To run an coz experiment
2277 on a binary with debug symbols available, start the program like this:
2278
2279 <p><blockquote><pre>
2280 coz run --- program-to-run
2281 </pre></blockquote></p>
2282
2283 <p>This will create a text file profile.coz with the instrumentation
2284 information.  To show what part of the code affect the performance
2285 most, use a web browser and either point it to
2286 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/</a>
2287 or use the copy from git (in the gh-pages branch).  Check out this web
2288 site to have a look at several example profiling runs and get an idea what the end result from the profile runs look like.  To make the
2289 profiling more useful you include &lt;coz.h&gt; and insert the
2290 COZ_PROGRESS or COZ_BEGIN and COZ_END at appropriate places in the
2291 code, rebuild and run the profiler.  This allow coz to do more
2292 targeted experiments.</p>
2293
2294 <p>A video published by ACM
2295 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE0V-p1odPg">presenting the
2296 Coz profiler</a> is available from Youtube.  There is also a paper
2297 from the 25th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles available
2298 titled
2299 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/curtsinger">Coz:
2300 finding code that counts with causal profiling</a>.</p>
2301
2302 <p><a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz">The source code</a>
2303 for Coz is available from github.  It will only build with clang
2304 because it uses a
2305 <a href="https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=55606">C++
2306 feature missing in GCC</a>, but I've submitted
2307 <a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz/pull/67">a patch to solve
2308 it</a> and hope it will be included in the upstream source soon.</p>
2309
2310 <p>Please get in touch if you, like me, would like to see this piece
2311 of software in Debian.  I would very much like some help with the
2312 packaging effort, as I lack the in depth knowledge on how to package
2313 C++ libraries.</p>
2314
2315       </div>
2316       <div class="tags">
2317
2318
2319         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
2320
2321
2322       </div>
2323     </div>
2324     <div class="padding"></div>
2325
2326     <div class="entry">
2327       <div class="title">
2328         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlocking_HTC_Desire_HD_on_Linux_using_unruu_and_fastboot.html">Unlocking HTC Desire HD on Linux using unruu and fastboot</a>
2329       </div>
2330       <div class="date">
2331          7th July 2016
2332       </div>
2333       <div class="body">
2334         <p>Yesterday, I tried to unlock a HTC Desire HD phone, and it proved
2335 to be a slight challenge.  Here is the recipe if I ever need to do it
2336 again.  It all started by me wanting to try the recipe to set up
2337 <a href="https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardening-android-security-and-privacy">an
2338 hardened Android installation</a> from the Tor project blog on a
2339 device I had access to.  It is a old mobile phone with a broken
2340 microphone The initial idea had been to just
2341 <a href="http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_ace">install
2342 CyanogenMod on it</a>, but did not quite find time to start on it
2343 until a few days ago.</p>
2344
2345 <p>The unlock process is supposed to be simple: (1) Boot into the boot
2346 loader (press volume down and power at the same time), (2) select
2347 'fastboot' before (3) connecting the device via USB to a Linux
2348 machine, (4) request the device identifier token by running 'fastboot
2349 oem get_identifier_token', (5) request the device unlocking key using
2350 the <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader/">HTC developer web
2351 site</a> and unlock the phone using the key file emailed to you.</p>
2352
2353 <p>Unfortunately, this only work fi you have hboot version 2.00.0029
2354 or newer, and the device I was working on had 2.00.0027.  This
2355 apparently can be easily fixed by downloading a Windows program and
2356 running it on your Windows machine, if you accept the terms Microsoft
2357 require you to accept to use Windows - which I do not.  So I had to
2358 come up with a different approach.  I got a lot of help from AndyCap
2359 on #nuug, and would not have been able to get this working without
2360 him.</p>
2361
2362 <p>First I needed to extract the hboot firmware from
2363 <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/ruu/PD9810000_Ace_Sense30_S_hboot_2.00.0029.exe">the
2364 windows binary for HTC Desire HD</a> downloaded as 'the RUU' from HTC.
2365 For this there is is <a href="https://github.com/kmdm/unruu/">a github
2366 project named unruu</a> using libunshield.  The unshield tool did not
2367 recognise the file format, but unruu worked and extracted rom.zip,
2368 containing the new hboot firmware and a text file describing which
2369 devices it would work for.</p>
2370
2371 <p>Next, I needed to get the new firmware into the device.  For this I
2372 followed some instructions
2373 <a href="http://www.htc1guru.com/2013/09/new-ruu-zips-posted/">available
2374 from HTC1Guru.com</a>, and ran these commands as root on a Linux
2375 machine with Debian testing:</p>
2376
2377 <p><pre>
2378 adb reboot-bootloader
2379 fastboot oem rebootRUU
2380 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
2381 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
2382 fastboot reboot
2383 </pre></p>
2384
2385 <p>The flash command apparently need to be done twice to take effect,
2386 as the first is just preparations and the second one do the flashing.
2387 The adb command is just to get to the boot loader menu, so turning the
2388 device on while holding volume down and the power button should work
2389 too.</p>
2390
2391 <p>With the new hboot version in place I could start following the
2392 instructions on the HTC developer web site.  I got the device token
2393 like this:</p>
2394
2395 <p><pre>
2396 fastboot oem get_identifier_token 2>&1 | sed 's/(bootloader) //'
2397 </pre>
2398
2399 <p>And once I got the unlock code via email, I could use it like
2400 this:</p>
2401
2402 <p><pre>
2403 fastboot flash unlocktoken Unlock_code.bin
2404 </pre></p>
2405
2406 <p>And with that final step in place, the phone was unlocked and I
2407 could start stuffing the software of my own choosing into the device.
2408 So far I only inserted a replacement recovery image to wipe the phone
2409 before I start.  We will see what happen next.  Perhaps I should
2410 install <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> on it. :)</p>
2411
2412       </div>
2413       <div class="tags">
2414
2415
2416         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
2417
2418
2419       </div>
2420     </div>
2421     <div class="padding"></div>
2422
2423     <div class="entry">
2424       <div class="title">
2425         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html">How to use the Signal app if you only have a land line (ie no mobile phone)</a>
2426       </div>
2427       <div class="date">
2428          3rd July 2016
2429       </div>
2430       <div class="body">
2431         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to test
2432 <a href="https://whispersystems.org/">the Signal app</a>, as it is
2433 said to provide end to end encrypted communication and several of my
2434 friends and family are already using it.  As I by choice do not own a
2435 mobile phone, this proved to be harder than expected.  And I wanted to
2436 have the source of the client and know that it was the code used on my
2437 machine.  But yesterday I managed to get it working.  I used the
2438 Github source, compared it to the source in
2439 <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/signal-private-messenger/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk?hl=en-US">the
2440 Signal Chrome app</a> available from the Chrome web store, applied
2441 patches to use the production Signal servers, started the app and
2442 asked for the hidden "register without a smart phone" form.  Here is
2443 the recipe how I did it.</p>
2444
2445 <p>First, I fetched the Signal desktop source from Github, using
2446
2447 <pre>
2448 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
2449 </pre>
2450
2451 <p>Next, I patched the source to use the production servers, to be
2452 able to talk to other Signal users:</p>
2453
2454 <pre>
2455 cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p0
2456 diff -ur ./js/background.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js
2457 --- ./js/background.js  2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
2458 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js    2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
2459 @@ -47,8 +47,8 @@
2460          });
2461      });
2462
2463 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
2464 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
2465 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org:4433';
2466 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
2467      var messageReceiver;
2468      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
2469          if (messageReceiver) {
2470 diff -ur ./js/expire.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js
2471 --- ./js/expire.js      2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
2472 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
2473 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
2474  ;(function() {
2475      'use strict';
2476 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
2477 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 1474492690000;
2478
2479      window.extension = window.extension || {};
2480
2481 EOF
2482 </pre>
2483
2484 <p>The first part is changing the servers, and the second is updating
2485 an expiration timestamp.  This timestamp need to be updated regularly.
2486 It is set 90 days in the future by the build process (Gruntfile.js).
2487 The value is seconds since 1970 times 1000, as far as I can tell.</p>
2488
2489 <p>Based on a tip and good help from the #nuug IRC channel, I wrote a
2490 script to launch Signal in Chromium.</p>
2491
2492 <pre>
2493 #!/bin/sh
2494 cd $(dirname $0)
2495 mkdir -p userdata
2496 exec chromium \
2497   --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
2498   --user-data-dir=`pwd`/userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
2499 </pre>
2500
2501 <p> The script start the app and configure Chromium to use the Tor
2502 SOCKS5 proxy to make sure those controlling the Signal servers (today
2503 Amazon and Whisper Systems) as well as those listening on the lines
2504 will have a harder time location my laptop based on the Signal
2505 connections if they use source IP address.</p>
2506
2507 <p>When the script starts, one need to follow the instructions under
2508 "Standalone Registration" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the git
2509 repository.  I right clicked on the Signal window to get up the
2510 Chromium debugging tool, visited the 'Console' tab and wrote
2511 'extension.install("standalone")' on the console prompt to get the
2512 registration form.  Then I entered by land line phone number and
2513 pressed 'Call'.  5 seconds later the phone rang and a robot voice
2514 repeated the verification code three times.  After entering the number
2515 into the verification code field in the form, I could start using
2516 Signal from my laptop.
2517
2518 <p>As far as I can tell, The Signal app will leak who is talking to
2519 whom and thus who know who to those controlling the central server,
2520 but such leakage is hard to avoid with a centrally controlled server
2521 setup.  It is something to keep in mind when using Signal - the
2522 content of your chats are harder to intercept, but the meta data
2523 exposing your contact network is available to people you do not know.
2524 So better than many options, but not great.  And sadly the usage is
2525 connected to my land line, thus allowing those controlling the server
2526 to associate it to my home and person.  I would prefer it if only
2527 those I knew could tell who I was on Signal.  There are options
2528 avoiding such information leakage, but most of my friends are not
2529 using them, so I am stuck with Signal for now.</p>
2530
2531 <p><strong>Update 2017-01-10</strong>: There is an updated blog post
2532 on this topic in
2533 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience
2534 and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile
2535 phone</a>.</p>
2536
2537       </div>
2538       <div class="tags">
2539
2540
2541         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
2542
2543
2544       </div>
2545     </div>
2546     <div class="padding"></div>
2547
2548     <div class="entry">
2549       <div class="title">
2550         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?</a>
2551       </div>
2552       <div class="date">
2553          6th June 2016
2554       </div>
2555       <div class="body">
2556         <p>When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out
2557 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">which
2558 multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats /
2559 MIME types</a>, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types
2560 the various players claimed support for.  The range was from 55 to 130
2561 MIME types.  I suspect most media formats are supported by all
2562 players, but this is not really reflected in the MimeTypes values in
2563 their desktop files.  There are probably also some bogus MIME types
2564 listed, but it is hard to identify which one this is.</p>
2565
2566 <p>Anyway, in the mean time I got in touch with upstream for some of
2567 the players suggesting to add more MIME types to their desktop files,
2568 and decided to spend some time myself improving the situation for my
2569 favorite media player VLC.  The fixes for VLC entered Debian unstable
2570 yesterday. The complete list of MIME types can be seen on the
2571 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">Multimedia
2572 player MIME type support status</a> Debian wiki page.</p>
2573
2574 <p>The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?  It is VLC, followed by
2575 totem, parole, kplayer, gnome-mpv, mpv, smplayer, mplayer-gui and
2576 kmplayer.  I am sure some of the other players desktop files support
2577 several of the formats currently listed as working only with vlc,
2578 toten and parole.</p>
2579
2580 <p>A sad observation is that only 14 MIME types are listed as
2581 supported by all the tested multimedia players in Debian in their
2582 desktop files: audio/mpeg, audio/vnd.rn-realaudio, audio/x-mpegurl,
2583 audio/x-ms-wma, audio/x-scpls, audio/x-wav, video/mp4, video/mpeg,
2584 video/quicktime, video/vnd.rn-realvideo, video/x-matroska,
2585 video/x-ms-asf, video/x-ms-wmv and video/x-msvideo.  Personally I find
2586 it sad that video/ogg and video/webm is not supported by all the media
2587 players in Debian.  As far as I can tell, all of them can handle both
2588 formats.</p>
2589
2590       </div>
2591       <div class="tags">
2592
2593
2594         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2595
2596
2597       </div>
2598     </div>
2599     <div class="padding"></div>
2600
2601     <div class="entry">
2602       <div class="title">
2603         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_program_should_be_able_to_open_its_own_files_on_Linux.html">A program should be able to open its own files on Linux</a>
2604       </div>
2605       <div class="date">
2606          5th June 2016
2607       </div>
2608       <div class="body">
2609         <p>Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I
2610 decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a
2611 talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine.  I
2612 wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed
2613 the day before I would give the talk.  The next day I took a plane to
2614 the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I
2615 started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover
2616 that kpresenter refused to load its own data file.  I cursed a bit and
2617 started making the slides again from memory, to have something to
2618 present when I arrived.  I tested that the saved files could be
2619 loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued.  I continued to polish the
2620 slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer
2621 be loaded into kpresenter.  In the end I had to rewrite the slides
2622 three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and
2623 shorter.  After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem &ndash;
2624 kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand.
2625 Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great
2626 program to make slides.  The point I'm trying to make is that we
2627 expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is
2628 embarrassing to its developers if it can't.</p>
2629
2630 <p>Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data
2631 files from the desktop file browser?  It is not a uncommon problem.  A
2632 while back I discovered that the screencast recorder
2633 gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file
2634 browser would refuse to open.  No video player claimed to understand
2635 such file.  I tracked down the cause being <tt>file --mime-type</tt>
2636 returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had
2637 installed listed as a MIME type they would understand.  I asked for
2638 <a href="http://bugs.gw.com/view.php?id=382">file to change its
2639 behavour</a> and use the MIME type video/ogg instead.  I also asked
2640 several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give
2641 the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files.  After a
2642 while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the
2643 output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly.</p>
2644
2645 <p>But history repeats itself.  A few days ago I tested the music
2646 system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file
2647 browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files
2648 (*.rg).  I've reported <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/825993">the
2649 rosegarden problem to BTS</a> and a fix is commited to git and will be
2650 included in the next upload.  To increase the chance of me remembering
2651 how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files
2652 from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it.</p>
2653
2654 <p>The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types.
2655 There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file.  The output from
2656 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> mentioned above, and the content of the
2657 shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/).  The file MIME
2658 type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this
2659 information is collected from
2660 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/">the
2661 desktop files</a> available in /usr/share/applications/.  If there is
2662 one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is
2663 activated when asking to open a given file.  If there are more, one
2664 can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and
2665 selecting the wanted one using 'Open with' or similar.  In general
2666 this work well.  But it depend on each program picking a good MIME
2667 type (preferably
2668 <a href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">a
2669 MIME type registered with IANA</a>), file and/or the shared MIME
2670 registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME
2671 type in its list of supported MIME types.</p>
2672
2673 <p>The <tt>/usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml</tt> entry for
2674 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec">the
2675 Shared MIME database</a> look like this:</p>
2676
2677 <p><blockquote><pre>
2678 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
2679 &lt;mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info"&gt;
2680   &lt;mime-type type="audio/x-rosegarden"&gt;
2681     &lt;sub-class-of type="application/x-gzip"/&gt;
2682     &lt;comment&gt;Rosegarden project file&lt;/comment&gt;
2683     &lt;glob pattern="*.rg"/&gt;
2684   &lt;/mime-type&gt;
2685 &lt;/mime-info&gt;
2686 </pre></blockquote></p>
2687
2688 <p>This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip
2689 (it is a gzipped XML file).  Note, it is much better to use an
2690 official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own
2691 unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden.</p>
2692
2693 <p>The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list
2694 audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the
2695 file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:</p>
2696
2697 <p><blockquote><pre>
2698 % grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
2699 MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
2700 X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
2701 %
2702 </pre></blockquote></p>
2703
2704 <p>The fix was to add "audio/x-rosegarden;" at the end of the
2705 MimeType= line.</p>
2706
2707 <p>If you run into a file which fail to open the correct program when
2708 selected from the file browser, please check out the output from
2709 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> for the file, ensure the file ending and
2710 MIME type is registered somewhere under /usr/share/mime/ and check
2711 that some desktop file under /usr/share/applications/ is claiming
2712 support for this MIME type.  If not, please report a bug to have it
2713 fixed. :)</p>
2714
2715       </div>
2716       <div class="tags">
2717
2718
2719         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2720
2721
2722       </div>
2723     </div>
2724     <div class="padding"></div>
2725
2726     <div class="entry">
2727       <div class="title">
2728         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_with_PackageKit_support___new_version_0_23_available_in_Debian_unstable.html">Isenkram with PackageKit support - new version 0.23 available in Debian unstable</a>
2729       </div>
2730       <div class="date">
2731         25th May 2016
2732       </div>
2733       <div class="body">
2734         <p><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">The isenkram
2735 system</a> is a user-focused solution in Debian for handling hardware
2736 related packages.  The idea is to have a database of mappings between
2737 hardware and packages, and pop up a dialog suggesting for the user to
2738 install the packages to use a given hardware dongle.  Some use cases
2739 are when you insert a Yubikey, it proposes to install the software
2740 needed to control it; when you insert a braille reader list it
2741 proposes to install the packages needed to send text to the reader;
2742 and when you insert a ColorHug screen calibrator it suggests to
2743 install the driver for it.  The system work well, and even have a few
2744 command line tools to install firmware packages and packages for the
2745 hardware already in the machine (as opposed to hotpluggable hardware).</p>
2746
2747 <p>The system was initially written using aptdaemon, because I found
2748 good documentation and example code on how to use it.  But aptdaemon
2749 is going away and is generally being replaced by
2750 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/">PackageKit</a>,
2751 so Isenkram needed a rewrite.  And today, thanks to the great patch
2752 from my college Sunil Mohan Adapa in the FreedomBox project, the
2753 rewrite finally took place.  I've just uploaded a new version of
2754 Isenkram into Debian Unstable with the patch included, and the default
2755 for the background daemon is now to use PackageKit.  To check it out,
2756 install the <tt>isenkram</tt> package and insert some hardware dongle
2757 and see if it is recognised.</p>
2758
2759 <p>If you want to know what kind of packages isenkram would propose for
2760 the machine it is running on, you can check out the isenkram-lookup
2761 program.  This is what it look like on a Thinkpad X230:</p>
2762
2763 <p><blockquote><pre>
2764 % isenkram-lookup
2765 bluez
2766 cheese
2767 fprintd
2768 fprintd-demo
2769 gkrellm-thinkbat
2770 hdapsd
2771 libpam-fprintd
2772 pidgin-blinklight
2773 thinkfan
2774 tleds
2775 tp-smapi-dkms
2776 tp-smapi-source
2777 tpb
2778 %p
2779 </pre></blockquote></p>
2780
2781 <p>The hardware mappings come from several places.  The preferred way
2782 is for packages to announce their hardware support using
2783 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
2784 cross distribution appstream system</a>.
2785 See
2786 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">previous
2787 blog posts about isenkram</a> to learn how to do that.</p>
2788
2789       </div>
2790       <div class="tags">
2791
2792
2793         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
2794
2795
2796       </div>
2797     </div>
2798     <div class="padding"></div>
2799
2800     <div class="entry">
2801       <div class="title">
2802         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Discharge_rate_estimate_in_new_battery_statistics_collector_for_Debian.html">Discharge rate estimate in new battery statistics collector for Debian</a>
2803       </div>
2804       <div class="date">
2805         23rd May 2016
2806       </div>
2807       <div class="body">
2808         <p>Yesterday I updated the
2809 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats
2810 package in Debian</a> with a few patches sent to me by skilled and
2811 enterprising users.  There were some nice user and visible changes.
2812 First of all, both desktop menu entries now work.  A design flaw in
2813 one of the script made the history graph fail to show up (its PNG was
2814 dumped in ~/.xsession-errors) if no controlling TTY was available.
2815 The script worked when called from the command line, but not when
2816 called from the desktop menu.  I changed this to look for a DISPLAY
2817 variable or a TTY before deciding where to draw the graph, and now the
2818 graph window pop up as expected.</p>
2819
2820 <p>The next new feature is a discharge rate estimator in one of the
2821 graphs (the one showing the last few hours).  New is also the user of
2822 colours showing charging in blue and discharge in red.  The percentages
2823 of this graph is relative to last full charge, not battery design
2824 capacity.</p>
2825
2826 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-rate.png"/></p>
2827
2828 <p>The other graph show the entire history of the collected battery
2829 statistics, comparing it to the design capacity of the battery to
2830 visualise how the battery life time get shorter over time.  The red
2831 line in this graph is what the previous graph considers 100 percent:
2832
2833 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-history.png"/></p>
2834
2835 <p>In this graph you can see that I only charge the battery to 80
2836 percent of last full capacity, and how the capacity of the battery is
2837 shrinking. :(</p>
2838
2839 <p>The last new feature is in the collector, which now will handle
2840 more hardware models.  On some hardware, Linux power supply
2841 information is stored in /sys/class/power_supply/ACAD/, while the
2842 collector previously only looked in /sys/class/power_supply/AC/.  Now
2843 both are checked to figure if there is power connected to the
2844 machine.</p>
2845
2846 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
2847 check out the
2848 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
2849 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
2850 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from <a
2851 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
2852 Patches are very welcome.</p>
2853
2854 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2855 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2856 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2857
2858       </div>
2859       <div class="tags">
2860
2861
2862         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2863
2864
2865       </div>
2866     </div>
2867     <div class="padding"></div>
2868
2869     <div class="entry">
2870       <div class="title">
2871         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html">Debian now with ZFS on Linux included</a>
2872       </div>
2873       <div class="date">
2874         12th May 2016
2875       </div>
2876       <div class="body">
2877         <p>Today, after many years of hard work from many people,
2878 <a href="http://zfsonlinux.org/">ZFS for Linux</a> finally entered
2879 Debian.  The package status can be seen on
2880 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/zfs-linux">the package tracker
2881 for zfs-linux</a>.  and
2882 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
2883 team status page</a>. If you want to help out, please join us.
2884 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">The
2885 source code</a> is available via git on Alioth.  It would also be
2886 great if you could help out with
2887 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dkms">the dkms package</a>, as
2888 it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.</p>
2889
2890       </div>
2891       <div class="tags">
2892
2893
2894         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2895
2896
2897       </div>
2898     </div>
2899     <div class="padding"></div>
2900
2901     <div class="entry">
2902       <div class="title">
2903         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">What is the best multimedia player in Debian?</a>
2904       </div>
2905       <div class="date">
2906          8th May 2016
2907       </div>
2908       <div class="body">
2909         <p><strong>Where I set out to figure out which multimedia player in
2910 Debian claim support for most file formats.</strong></p>
2911
2912 <p>A few years ago, I had a look at the media support for Browser
2913 plugins in Debian, to get an idea which plugins to include in Debian
2914 Edu.  I created a script to extract the set of supported MIME types
2915 for each plugin, and used this to find out which multimedia browser
2916 plugin supported most file formats / media types.
2917 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">The
2918 result</a> can still be seen on the Debian wiki, even though it have
2919 not been updated for a while.  But browser plugins are less relevant
2920 these days, so I thought it was time to look at standalone
2921 players.</p>
2922
2923 <p>A few days ago I was tired of VLC not being listed as a viable
2924 player when I wanted to play videos from the Norwegian National
2925 Broadcasting Company, and decided to investigate why.  The cause is a
2926 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/822245">missing MIME type in the VLC
2927 desktop file</a>.  In the process I wrote a script to compare the set
2928 of MIME types announced in the desktop file and the browser plugin,
2929 only to discover that there is quite a large difference between the
2930 two for VLC.  This discovery made me dig up the script I used to
2931 compare browser plugins, and adjust it to compare desktop files
2932 instead, to try to figure out which multimedia player in Debian
2933 support most file formats.</p>
2934
2935 <p>The result can be seen on the Debian Wiki, as
2936 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">a
2937 table listing all MIME types supported by one of the packages included
2938 in the table</a>, with the package supporting most MIME types being
2939 listed first in the table.</p>
2940
2941 </p>The best multimedia player in Debian?  It is totem, followed by
2942 parole, kplayer, mpv, vlc, smplayer mplayer-gui gnome-mpv and
2943 kmplayer.  Time for the other players to update their announced MIME
2944 support?</p>
2945
2946       </div>
2947       <div class="tags">
2948
2949
2950         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2951
2952
2953       </div>
2954     </div>
2955     <div class="padding"></div>
2956
2957     <div class="entry">
2958       <div class="title">
2959         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html">The Pyra - handheld computer with Debian preinstalled</a>
2960       </div>
2961       <div class="date">
2962          4th May 2016
2963       </div>
2964       <div class="body">
2965         A friend of mine made me aware of
2966 <a href="https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/">The Pyra</a>, a
2967 handheld computer which will be delivered with Debian preinstalled.  I
2968 would love to get one of those for my birthday. :)</p>
2969
2970 <p>The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB
2971 plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a 5"
2972 LCD touch screen.  The 6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole
2973 day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests
2974 confirming this.  The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the
2975 last I heard last night was that 22 more orders were needed before
2976 production started.</p>
2977
2978 <p>As far as I know, this is the first handheld preinstalled with
2979 Debian.  Please let me know if you know of any others.  Is it the
2980 first computer being sold with Debian preinstalled?</p>
2981
2982       </div>
2983       <div class="tags">
2984
2985
2986         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2987
2988
2989       </div>
2990     </div>
2991     <div class="padding"></div>
2992
2993     <div class="entry">
2994       <div class="title">
2995         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">Lets make a Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook</a>
2996       </div>
2997       <div class="date">
2998         10th April 2016
2999       </div>
3000       <div class="body">
3001         <p>During this weekends
3002 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Oslo__Takk_for_feilfiksingsfesten.shtml">bug
3003 squashing party and developer gathering</a>, we decided to do our part
3004 to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian
3005 Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the
3006 <a href="http://debian-handbook.info/">Debian Administrator's Handbook
3007 project</a> to get started.  If you want to help out, please start
3008 contributing using
3009 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
3010 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
3011 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
3012 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
3013 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
3014 contributors</a>.</p>
3015
3016 <p>The book is already available on paper in English, French and
3017 Japanese, and our goal is to get it available on paper in Norwegian
3018 Bokmål too.  In addition to the paper edition, there are also EPUB and
3019 Mobi versions available.  And there are incomplete translations
3020 available for many more languages.</p>
3021
3022       </div>
3023       <div class="tags">
3024
3025
3026         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3027
3028
3029       </div>
3030     </div>
3031     <div class="padding"></div>
3032
3033     <div class="entry">
3034       <div class="title">
3035         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_in_two_hundred_Debian_users_using_ZFS_on_Linux_.html">One in two hundred Debian users using ZFS on Linux?</a>
3036       </div>
3037       <div class="date">
3038          7th April 2016
3039       </div>
3040       <div class="body">
3041         <p>Just for fun I had a look at the popcon number of ZFS related
3042 packages in Debian, and was quite surprised with what I found.  I use
3043 ZFS myself at home, but did not really expect many others to do so.
3044 But I might be wrong.</p>
3045
3046 <p>According to
3047 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=spl-linux">the popcon
3048 results for spl-linux</a>, there are 1019 Debian installations, or
3049 0.53% of the population, with the package installed.  As far as I know
3050 the only use of the spl-linux package is as a support library for ZFS
3051 on Linux, so I use it here as proxy for measuring the number of ZFS
3052 installation on Linux in Debian.  In the kFreeBSD variant of Debian
3053 the ZFS feature is already available, and there
3054 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=zfsutils">the popcon
3055 results for zfsutils</a> show 1625 Debian installations or 0.84% of
3056 the population.  So I guess I am not alone in using ZFS on Debian.</p>
3057
3058 <p>But even though the Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum
3059 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00006.html">announced
3060 in April 2015</a> that the legal obstacles blocking ZFS on Debian were
3061 cleared, the package is still not in Debian.  The package is again in
3062 the NEW queue.  Several uploads have been rejected so far because the
3063 debian/copyright file was incomplete or wrong, but there is no reason
3064 to give up.  The current status can be seen on
3065 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
3066 team status page</a>, and
3067 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">the
3068 source code</a> is available on Alioth.</p>
3069
3070 <p>As I want ZFS to be included in next version of Debian to make sure
3071 my home server can function in the future using only official Debian
3072 packages, and the current blocker is to get the debian/copyright file
3073 accepted by the FTP masters in Debian, I decided a while back to try
3074 to help out the team.  This was the background for my blog post about
3075 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">creating,
3076 updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>, and I
3077 used the techniques I explored there to try to find any errors in the
3078 copyright file.  It is not very easy to check every one of the around
3079 2000 files in the source package, but I hope we this time got it
3080 right.  If you want to help out, check out the git source and try to
3081 find missing entries in the debian/copyright file.</p>
3082
3083       </div>
3084       <div class="tags">
3085
3086
3087         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3088
3089
3090       </div>
3091     </div>
3092     <div class="padding"></div>
3093
3094     <div class="entry">
3095       <div class="title">
3096         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Full_battery_stats_collector_is_now_available_in_Debian.html">Full battery stats collector is now available in Debian</a>
3097       </div>
3098       <div class="date">
3099         23rd March 2016
3100       </div>
3101       <div class="body">
3102         <p>Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an
3103 extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for
3104 later processing and graphing.  The original collector store the
3105 battery level as percentage of last full level, while the new
3106 collector also record battery vendor, model, serial number, design
3107 full level, last full level and current battery level.  This make it
3108 possible to predict the lifetime of the battery as well as visualise
3109 the energy flow when the battery is charging or discharging.</p>
3110
3111 <p>The new tools are available in <tt>/usr/share/battery-stats/</tt>
3112 in the version 0.5.1 package in unstable.  Get the new battery level graph
3113 and lifetime prediction by running:
3114
3115 <p><pre>
3116 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph /var/log/battery-stats.csv
3117 </pre></p>
3118
3119 <p>Or select the 'Battery Level Graph' from your application menu.</p>
3120
3121 <p>The flow in/out of the battery can be seen by running (no menu
3122 entry yet):</p>
3123
3124 <p><pre>
3125 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph-flow
3126 </pre></p>
3127
3128 <p>I'm not quite happy with the way the data is visualised, at least
3129 when there are few data points.  The graphs look a bit better with a
3130 few years of data.</p>
3131
3132 <p>A while back one important feature I use in the battery stats
3133 collector broke in Debian.  The scripts in
3134 <tt>/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/</tt> were no longer executed.  I
3135 suspect it happened when Jessie started using systemd, but I do not
3136 know.  The issue is reported as
3137 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/818649">bug #818649</a> against
3138 pm-utils.  I managed to work around it by adding an udev rule to call
3139 the collector script every time the power connector is connected and
3140 disconnected.  With this fix in place it was finally time to make a
3141 new release of the package, and get it into Debian.</p>
3142
3143 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
3144 check out the
3145 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
3146 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
3147 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
3148 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
3149 As always, patches are very welcome.</p>
3150
3151       </div>
3152       <div class="tags">
3153
3154
3155         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3156
3157
3158       </div>
3159     </div>
3160     <div class="padding"></div>
3161
3162     <div class="entry">
3163       <div class="title">
3164         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_battery_measurements_a_little_easier_in_Debian.html">Making battery measurements a little easier in Debian</a>
3165       </div>
3166       <div class="date">
3167         15th March 2016
3168       </div>
3169       <div class="body">
3170         <p>Back in September, I blogged about
3171 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">the
3172 system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery</a>, and
3173 how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced).  I
3174 created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing,
3175 but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already
3176 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">a battery-stats
3177 package in Debian</a> that should do the same thing, and I did not see
3178 a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be
3179 fixed instead.  I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and
3180 hoped someone would step in and fix it.  But no-one did.</p>
3181
3182 <p>I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own
3183 hands.  The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of
3184 battery stats (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">available from github</a>) and part of the team maintaining
3185 battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally
3186 able to collect battery status using the <tt>/sys/class/power_supply/</tt>
3187 information provided by the Linux kernel.  If you install the
3188 battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a
3189 graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the
3190 status of the battery.  The source package build and work just fine in
3191 Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not
3192 tested).  The default graph you get for that system look like this:</p>
3193
3194 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-03-15-battery-stats-graph-example.png" width="70%" align="center"></p>
3195
3196 <p>My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
3197 battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
3198 about the battery.  The scripts are merged into the upstream
3199 battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
3200 yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way.  Will have to test a
3201 bit more before I make a new release.</p>
3202
3203 <p>I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
3204 suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
3205 impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
3206 and graphing.</p>
3207
3208 <p>If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
3209 battery, check out the battery-stats package in
3210 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">Debian</a> and
3211 on
3212 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
3213 I would love some help to improve the system further.</p>
3214
3215       </div>
3216       <div class="tags">
3217
3218
3219         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3220
3221
3222       </div>
3223     </div>
3224     <div class="padding"></div>
3225
3226     <div class="entry">
3227       <div class="title">
3228         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">Creating, updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>
3229       </div>
3230       <div class="date">
3231         19th February 2016
3232       </div>
3233       <div class="body">
3234         <p>Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to
3235 details.  And one of the details is the content of the
3236 debian/copyright file, which should list all relevant licenses used by
3237 the code in the package in question, preferably in
3238 <a href="https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/">machine
3239 readable DEP5 format</a>.</p>
3240
3241 <p>For large packages with lots of contributors it is hard to write
3242 and update this file manually, and if you get some detail wrong, the
3243 package is normally rejected by the ftpmasters.  So getting it right
3244 the first time around get the package into Debian faster, and save
3245 both you and the ftpmasters some work..  Today, while trying to figure
3246 out what was wrong with
3247 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=686447">the
3248 zfsonlinux copyright file</a>, I decided to spend some time on
3249 figuring out the options for doing this job automatically, or at least
3250 semi-automatically.</p>
3251
3252 <p>Lucikly, there are at least two tools available for generating the
3253 file based on the code in the source package,
3254 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debmake">debmake</a></tt>
3255 and <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cme">cme</a></tt>.  I'm
3256 not sure which one of them came first, but both seem to be able to
3257 create a sensible draft file.  As far as I can tell, none of them can
3258 be trusted to get the result just right, so the content need to be
3259 polished a bit before the file is OK to upload.  I found the debmake
3260 option in
3261 <a href="http://goofying-with-debian.blogspot.com/2014/07/debmake-checking-source-against-dep-5.html">a
3262 blog posts from 2014</a>.
3263
3264 <p>To generate using debmake, use the -cc option:
3265
3266 <p><pre>
3267 debmake -cc > debian/copyright
3268 </pre></p>
3269
3270 <p>Note there are some problems with python and non-ASCII names, so
3271 this might not be the best option.</p>
3272
3273 <p>The cme option is based on a config parsing library, and I found
3274 this approach in
3275 <a href="https://ddumont.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/improving-creation-of-debian-copyright-file/">a
3276 blog post from 2015</a>.  To generate using cme, use the 'update
3277 dpkg-copyright' option:
3278
3279 <p><pre>
3280 cme update dpkg-copyright
3281 </pre></p>
3282
3283 <p>This will create or update debian/copyright.  The cme tool seem to
3284 handle UTF-8 names better than debmake.</p>
3285
3286 <p>When the copyright file is created, I would also like some help to
3287 check if the file is correct.  For this I found two good options,
3288 <tt>debmake -k</tt> and <tt>license-reconcile</tt>.  The former seem
3289 to focus on license types and file matching, and is able to detect
3290 ineffective blocks in the copyright file.  The latter reports missing
3291 copyright holders and years, but was confused by inconsistent license
3292 names (like CDDL vs. CDDL-1.0).  I suspect it is good to use both and
3293 fix all issues reported by them before uploading.  But I do not know
3294 if the tools and the ftpmasters agree on what is important to fix in a
3295 copyright file, so the package might still be rejected.</p>
3296
3297 <p>The devscripts tool <tt>licensecheck</tt> deserve mentioning.  It
3298 will read through the source and try to find all copyright statements.
3299 It is not comparing the result to the content of debian/copyright, but
3300 can be useful when verifying the content of the copyright file.</p>
3301
3302 <p>Are you aware of better tools in Debian to create and update
3303 debian/copyright file.  Please let me know, or blog about it on
3304 planet.debian.org.</p>
3305
3306 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3307 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3308 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3309
3310 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-20</strong>: I got a tip from Mike Gabriel
3311 on how to use licensecheck and cdbs to create a draft copyright file
3312
3313 <p><pre>
3314 licensecheck --copyright -r `find * -type f` | \
3315   /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5 > debian/copyright.auto
3316 </pre></p>
3317
3318 <p>He mentioned that he normally check the generated file into the
3319 version control system to make it easier to discover license and
3320 copyright changes in the upstream source.  I will try to do the same
3321 with my packages in the future.</p>
3322
3323 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-21</strong>: The cme author recommended
3324 against using -quiet for new users, so I removed it from the proposed
3325 command line.</p>
3326
3327       </div>
3328       <div class="tags">
3329
3330
3331         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3332
3333
3334       </div>
3335     </div>
3336     <div class="padding"></div>
3337
3338     <div class="entry">
3339       <div class="title">
3340         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_in_Debian_to_locate_packages_with_firmware_and_mime_type_support.html">Using appstream in Debian to locate packages with firmware and mime type support</a>
3341       </div>
3342       <div class="date">
3343          4th February 2016
3344       </div>
3345       <div class="body">
3346         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">appstream system</a>
3347 is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very
3348 convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given
3349 firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it.  This can
3350 be done using apt-file too, but that is for someone else to blog
3351 about. :)</p>
3352
3353 <p>Here is a small recipe to find the package with a given firmware
3354 file, in this example I am looking for ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin, randomly
3355 picked from the set of firmware announced using appstream in Debian
3356 unstable.  In general you would be looking for the firmware requested
3357 by the kernel during kernel module loading.  To find the package
3358 providing the example file, do like this:</p>
3359
3360 <blockquote><pre>
3361 % apt install appstream
3362 [...]
3363 % apt update
3364 [...]
3365 % appstreamcli what-provides firmware:runtime ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin | \
3366   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
3367 firmware-qlogic
3368 %
3369 </pre></blockquote>
3370
3371 <p>See <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">the
3372 appstream wiki</a> page to learn how to embed the package metadata in
3373 a way appstream can use.</p>
3374
3375 <p>This same approach can be used to find any package supporting a
3376 given MIME type.  This is very useful when you get a file you do not
3377 know how to handle.  First find the mime type using <tt>file
3378 --mime-type</tt>, and next look up the package providing support for
3379 it.  Lets say you got an SVG file.  Its MIME type is image/svg+xml,
3380 and you can find all packages handling this type like this:</p>
3381
3382 <blockquote><pre>
3383 % apt install appstream
3384 [...]
3385 % apt update
3386 [...]
3387 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype image/svg+xml | \
3388   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
3389 bkchem
3390 phototonic
3391 inkscape
3392 shutter
3393 tetzle
3394 geeqie
3395 xia
3396 pinta
3397 gthumb
3398 karbon
3399 comix
3400 mirage
3401 viewnior
3402 postr
3403 ristretto
3404 kolourpaint4
3405 eog
3406 eom
3407 gimagereader
3408 midori
3409 %
3410 </pre></blockquote>
3411
3412 <p>I believe the MIME types are fetched from the desktop file for
3413 packages providing appstream metadata.</p>
3414
3415       </div>
3416       <div class="tags">
3417
3418
3419         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3420
3421
3422       </div>
3423     </div>
3424     <div class="padding"></div>
3425
3426     <div class="entry">
3427       <div class="title">
3428         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creepy__visualise_geotagged_social_media_information___nice_free_software.html">Creepy, visualise geotagged social media information - nice free software</a>
3429       </div>
3430       <div class="date">
3431         24th January 2016
3432       </div>
3433       <div class="body">
3434         <p>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
3435 with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
3436 position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
3437 time (like every time a SMS is received or sent).  And if their
3438 computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
3439 mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
3440 also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
3441 during installation).  And when these programs send out information to
3442 central collection points, the location is often included, unless
3443 extra care is taken to not send the location.  The provided
3444 information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
3445 good and bad, depend on your point of view).  What is certain, is that
3446 the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
3447 perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
3448 when they share their whereabouts with private and public
3449 entities.</p>
3450
3451 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-01-24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png"></p>
3452
3453 <p>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
3454 when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing.  It is
3455 unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
3456 officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
3457 unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information.  But the
3458 public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
3459 tool to do so is called
3460 <a href="http://www.geocreepy.com/">Creepy or Cree.py</a>.  I
3461 discovered it when I read
3462 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-7787884.html">an
3463 article about Creepy</a> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
3464 November 2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
3465 The python program was in Debian, but
3466 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy">the version in
3467 Debian</a> was completely broken and practically unmaintained.  I
3468 uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
3469 have time to fix it then.  This Christmas I decided to finally try to
3470 get Creepy operational in Debian.  Now a fixed version is available in
3471 Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
3472 are now included
3473 <a href="https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy">upstream</a>.</p>
3474
3475 <p>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
3476 Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
3477 complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
3478 given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
3479 these services.  Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
3480 least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
3481 days it is impossible.  This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
3482 configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
3483 information to them about your search interests.  This should be taken
3484 into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
3485 about yourself with the services.</p>
3486
3487 <p>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
3488 geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
3489 of Norway.  One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
3490 information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
3491 information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
3492 I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
3493 twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
3494 Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
3495 making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
3496 things.  A similar technique have been
3497 <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl">used
3498 to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine</a>, and it is both a powerful
3499 tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
3500 understand the value of the private information they provide to the
3501 public.</p>
3502
3503 <p>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
3504 it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
3505 least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
3506 python-requests-toolbelt).</p>
3507
3508 <p>(I have uploaded
3509 <a href="https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy">the image to
3510 screenshots.debian.net</a> and licensed it under the same terms as the
3511 Creepy program in Debian.)</p>
3512
3513       </div>
3514       <div class="tags">
3515
3516
3517         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
3518
3519
3520       </div>
3521     </div>
3522     <div class="padding"></div>
3523
3524     <div class="entry">
3525       <div class="title">
3526         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Always_download_Debian_packages_using_Tor___the_simple_recipe.html">Always download Debian packages using Tor - the simple recipe</a>
3527       </div>
3528       <div class="date">
3529         15th January 2016
3530       </div>
3531       <div class="body">
3532         <p>During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum
3533 <a href="https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/331/what-is-to-be-done/">observed
3534 that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to
3535 believe a computer have a given security hole</a> if it download a
3536 security fix from a Debian mirror.  This is a good reason to always
3537 use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those
3538 listening do not know which IP address to attack.  In August, Richard
3539 Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible
3540 to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that
3541 download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and
3542 <a href="http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2015/08/24-Tor-enabled_Debian_mirror/">proposed
3543 to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror</a>.  He
3544 was not the first to propose this, as the
3545 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/apt-transport-tor">apt-transport-tor</a></tt>
3546 package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt
3547 to use <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a>, but I was not
3548 aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.</p>
3549
3550 <p>Richard discussed the idea with Peter Palfrader, one of the Debian
3551 sysadmins, and he set up a Tor hidden service on one of the central
3552 Debian mirrors using the address vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion, thus making
3553 it possible to download packages directly between two tor nodes,
3554 making sure the network traffic always were encrypted.</p>
3555
3556 <p>Here is a short recipe for enabling this on your machine, by
3557 installing <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> and replacing http and https
3558 urls with tor+http and tor+https, and using the hidden service instead
3559 of the official Debian mirror site.  I recommend installing
3560 <tt>etckeeper</tt> before you start to have a history of the changes
3561 done in /etc/.</p>
3562
3563 <blockquote><pre>
3564 apt install apt-transport-tor
3565 sed -i 's% http://ftp.debian.org/% tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/%' /etc/apt/sources.list
3566 sed -i 's% http% tor+http%' /etc/apt/sources.list
3567 </pre></blockquote>
3568
3569 <p>If you have more sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, run
3570 the sed commands for these too.  The sed command is assuming your are
3571 using the ftp.debian.org Debian mirror.  Adjust the command (or just
3572 edit the file manually) to match your mirror.</p>
3573
3574 <p>This work in Debian Jessie and later.  Note that tools like
3575 <tt>apt-file</tt> only recently started using the apt transport
3576 system, and do not work with these tor+http URLs.  For
3577 <tt>apt-file</tt> you need the version currently in experimental,
3578 which need a recent apt version currently only in unstable.  So if you
3579 need a working <tt>apt-file</tt>, this is not for you.</p>
3580
3581 <p>Another advantage from this change is that your machine will start
3582 using Tor regularly and at fairly random intervals (every time you
3583 update the package lists or upgrade or install a new package), thus
3584 masking other Tor traffic done from the same machine.  Using Tor will
3585 become normal for the machine in question.</p>
3586
3587 <p>On <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox</a>, APT
3588 is set up by default to use <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> when Tor is
3589 enabled.  It would be great if it was the default on any Debian
3590 system.</p>
3591
3592       </div>
3593       <div class="tags">
3594
3595
3596         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
3597
3598
3599       </div>
3600     </div>
3601     <div class="padding"></div>
3602
3603     <div class="entry">
3604       <div class="title">
3605         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenALPR__find_car_license_plates_in_video_streams___nice_free_software.html">OpenALPR, find car license plates in video streams - nice free software</a>
3606       </div>
3607       <div class="date">
3608         23rd December 2015
3609       </div>
3610       <div class="body">
3611         <p>When I was a kid, we used to collect "car numbers", as we used to
3612 call the car license plate numbers in those days.  I would write the
3613 numbers down in my little book and compare notes with the other kids
3614 to see how many region codes we had seen and if we had seen some
3615 exotic or special region codes and numbers.  It was a fun game to pass
3616 time, as we kids have plenty of it.</p>
3617
3618 <p>A few days I came across
3619 <a href="https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr">the OpenALPR
3620 project</a>, a free software project to automatically discover and
3621 report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the
3622 "car numbers" in a machine readable format.  I've been looking for
3623 such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the
3624 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition">automatic
3625 number plate recognition</a> tool only is available in the hands of
3626 the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to
3627 even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance.  I
3628 discovered the developer
3629 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/747509">wanted to get the tool into
3630 Debian</a>, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to
3631 help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian
3632 archive.</p>
3633
3634 <p>Today we finally managed to get the package into shape and uploaded
3635 it into Debian, where it currently
3636 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org//new/openalpr_2.2.1-1.html">waits
3637 in the NEW queue</a> for review by the Debian ftpmasters.</p>
3638
3639 <p>I guess you are wondering why on earth such tool would be useful
3640 for the common folks, ie those not running a large government
3641 surveillance system?  Well, I plan to put it in a computer on my bike
3642 and in my car, tracking the cars nearby and allowing me to be notified
3643 when number plates on my watch list are discovered.  Another use case
3644 was suggested by a friend of mine, who wanted to set it up at his home
3645 to open the car port automatically when it discovered the plate on his
3646 car.  When I mentioned it perhaps was a bit foolhardy to allow anyone
3647 capable of placing his license plate number of a piece of cardboard to
3648 open his car port, men replied that it was always unlocked anyway.  I
3649 guess for such use case it make sense.  I am sure there are other use
3650 cases too, for those with imagination and a vision.</p>
3651
3652 <p>If you want to build your own version of the Debian package, check
3653 out the upstream git source and symlink ./distros/debian to ./debian/
3654 before running "debuild" to build the source.  Or wait a bit until the
3655 package show up in unstable.</p>
3656
3657       </div>
3658       <div class="tags">
3659
3660
3661         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
3662
3663
3664       </div>
3665     </div>
3666     <div class="padding"></div>
3667
3668     <div class="entry">
3669       <div class="title">
3670         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">Using appstream with isenkram to install hardware related packages in Debian</a>
3671       </div>
3672       <div class="date">
3673         20th December 2015
3674       </div>
3675       <div class="body">
3676         <p>Around three years ago, I created
3677 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the isenkram
3678 system</a> to get a more practical solution in Debian for handing
3679 hardware related packages.  A GUI system in the isenkram package will
3680 present a pop-up dialog when some hardware dongle supported by
3681 relevant packages in Debian is inserted into the machine.  The same
3682 lookup mechanism to detect packages is available as command line
3683 tools in the isenkram-cli package.  In addition to mapping hardware,
3684 it will also map kernel firmware files to packages and make it easy to
3685 install needed firmware packages automatically.  The key for this
3686 system to work is a good way to map hardware to packages, in other
3687 words, allow packages to announce what hardware they will work
3688 with.</p>
3689
3690 <p>I started by providing data files in the isenkram source, and
3691 adding code to download the latest version of these data files at run
3692 time, to ensure every user had the most up to date mapping available.
3693 I also added support for storing the mapping in the Packages file in
3694 the apt repositories, but did not push this approach because while I
3695 was trying to figure out how to best store hardware/package mappings,
3696 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
3697 appstream system</a> was announced.  I got in touch and suggested to
3698 add the hardware mapping into that data set to be able to use
3699 appstream as a data source, and this was accepted at least for the
3700 Debian version of appstream.</p>
3701
3702 <p>A few days ago using appstream in Debian for this became possible,
3703 and today I uploaded a new version 0.20 of isenkram adding support for
3704 appstream as a data source for mapping hardware to packages.  The only
3705 package so far using appstream to announce its hardware support is my
3706 pymissile package.  I got help from Matthias Klumpp with figuring out
3707 how do add the required
3708 <a href="https://appstream.debian.org/html/sid/main/metainfo/pymissile.html">metadata
3709 in pymissile</a>.  I added a file debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml with
3710 this content:</p>
3711
3712 <blockquote><pre>
3713 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
3714 &lt;component&gt;
3715   &lt;id&gt;pymissile&lt;/id&gt;
3716   &lt;metadata_license&gt;MIT&lt;/metadata_license&gt;
3717   &lt;name&gt;pymissile&lt;/name&gt;
3718   &lt;summary&gt;Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher&lt;/summary&gt;
3719   &lt;description&gt;
3720     &lt;p&gt;
3721       Pymissile provides a curses interface to control an original
3722       Marks and Spencer / Striker USB Missile Launcher, as well as a
3723       motion control script to allow a webcamera to control the
3724       launcher.
3725     &lt;/p&gt;
3726   &lt;/description&gt;
3727   &lt;provides&gt;
3728     &lt;modalias&gt;usb:v1130p0202d*&lt;/modalias&gt;
3729   &lt;/provides&gt;
3730 &lt;/component&gt;
3731 </pre></blockquote>
3732
3733 <p>The key for isenkram is the component/provides/modalias value,
3734 which is a glob style match rule for hardware specific strings
3735 (modalias strings) provided by the Linux kernel.  In this case, it
3736 will map to all USB devices with vendor code 1130 and product code
3737 0202.</p>
3738
3739 <p>Note, it is important that the license of all the metadata files
3740 are compatible to have permissions to aggregate them into archive wide
3741 appstream files.  Matthias suggested to use MIT or BSD licenses for
3742 these files.  A challenge is figuring out a good id for the data, as
3743 it is supposed to be globally unique and shared across distributions
3744 (in other words, best to coordinate with upstream what to use).  But
3745 it can be changed later or, so we went with the package name as
3746 upstream for this project is dormant.</p>
3747
3748 <p>To get the metadata file installed in the correct location for the
3749 mirror update scripts to pick it up and include its content the
3750 appstream data source, the file must be installed in the binary
3751 package under /usr/share/appdata/.  I did this by adding the following
3752 line to debian/pymissile.install:</p>
3753
3754 <blockquote><pre>
3755 debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml usr/share/appdata
3756 </pre></blockquote>
3757
3758 <p>With that in place, the command line tool isenkram-lookup will list
3759 all packages useful on the current computer automatically, and the GUI
3760 pop-up handler will propose to install the package not already
3761 installed if a hardware dongle is inserted into the machine in
3762 question.</p>
3763
3764 <p>Details of the modalias field in appstream is available from the
3765 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a> proposal.</p>
3766
3767 <p>To locate the modalias values of all hardware present in a machine,
3768 try running this command on the command line:</p>
3769
3770 <blockquote><pre>
3771 cat $(find /sys/devices/|grep modalias)
3772 </pre></blockquote>
3773
3774 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
3775 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
3776 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
3777
3778       </div>
3779       <div class="tags">
3780
3781
3782         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
3783
3784
3785       </div>
3786     </div>
3787     <div class="padding"></div>
3788
3789     <div class="entry">
3790       <div class="title">
3791         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_GNU_General_Public_License_is_not_magic_pixie_dust.html">The GNU General Public License is not magic pixie dust</a>
3792       </div>
3793       <div class="date">
3794         30th November 2015
3795       </div>
3796       <div class="body">
3797         <p>A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled
3798 "<a href="http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2015/11/27/sfc-supporter/">The
3799 GPL is not magic pixie dust</a>" explain the importance of making sure
3800 the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GPL</a> is enforced.
3801 I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:<p>
3802
3803 <blockquote>
3804
3805 <p><a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/"><img src="https://sfconservancy.org/img/supporter-badge.png" width="194" height="90" alt="Become a Software Freedom Conservancy Supporter!" align="right" border="0" /></a></p>
3806
3807 <blockquote>
3808 The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.<br/>
3809
3810 The first step is to choose a
3811 <a href="https://copyleft.org/">copyleft</a> license for your
3812 code.<br/>
3813
3814 The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license,
3815 <b>it must be enforced</b><br/>
3816
3817 and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of
3818 work<br/>
3819
3820 is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.
3821 </blockquote>
3822
3823 <p><small>-- <a href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/">Bradley Kuhn</a>, in
3824 <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in Freedom">FaiF</a>
3825 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode
3826 0x57</a></small></p>
3827
3828 <p>As the Debian Website
3829 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/794116">used</a>
3830 <a href="https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/intro/free.wml?r1=1.24&amp;r2=1.25">to</a>
3831 imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to
3832 the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful
3833 software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or
3834 software products.  Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created
3835 to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but
3836 such licenses are not enough.  With the ongoing adoption of Free
3837 Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's
3838 expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of
3839 ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always.  As Karen
3840 and Bradley explained in <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in
3841 Freedom">FaiF</a>
3842 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode 0x57</a>,
3843 copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court
3844 to protect it.  The reality of today's world is that legal
3845 representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming.  With
3846 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/">gpl-violations.org</a> in hiatus
3847 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/news/20151027-homepage-recovers/">until</a>
3848 some time in 2016, the <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/">Software
3849 Freedom Conservancy</a> (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender
3850 of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations.
3851 In March the SFC supported a
3852 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">lawsuit
3853 by Christoph Hellwig</a> against VMware for refusing to
3854 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html">comply
3855 with the GPL</a> in relation to their use of parts of the Linux
3856 kernel.  Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and
3857 conferences
3858 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">blocked
3859 or cancelled their talks</a>.  As a result they have decided to rely
3860 less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of
3861 individuals who support Free Software and copyleft.  So the SFC has
3862 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/23/2015fundraiser/">launched</a>
3863 a <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">campaign</a> to create
3864 a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by
3865 supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free
3866 Software.</p>
3867
3868 <p>If you support Free Software,
3869 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/26/like-what-I-do/">like</a>
3870 what the SFC do, agree with their
3871 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/principles.html">compliance
3872 principles</a>, are happy about their
3873 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">successes</a> in 2015,
3874 work on a project that is an SFC
3875 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/members/current/">member</a> and or
3876 just want to stand up for copyleft, please join
3877 <a href="https://identi.ca/cwebber/image/JQGPA4qbTyyp3-MY8QpvuA">Christopher
3878 Allan Webber</a>,
3879 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">Carol
3880 Smith</a>,
3881 <a href="http://www.jonobacon.org/2015/11/25/supporting-software-freedom-conservancy/">Jono
3882 Bacon</a>, myself and
3883 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/#supporters">others</a> in
3884 becoming a
3885 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">supporter</a>.  For the
3886 next week your donation will be
3887 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/27/black-friday/">matched</a>
3888 by an anonymous donor.  Please also consider asking your employer to
3889 match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC.  Don't forget to
3890 spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or
3891 social media accounts.</p>
3892
3893 </blockquote>
3894
3895 <p>I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter
3896 of Software Freedom Conservancy myself.  Perhaps you should be a
3897 supporter too?</p>
3898
3899       </div>
3900       <div class="tags">
3901
3902
3903         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
3904
3905
3906       </div>
3907     </div>
3908     <div class="padding"></div>
3909
3910     <div class="entry">
3911       <div class="title">
3912         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html">PGP key transition statement for key EE4E02F9</a>
3913       </div>
3914       <div class="date">
3915         17th November 2015
3916       </div>
3917       <div class="body">
3918         <p>I've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to
3919 set it up properly.  I wanted to generate it offline and have it
3920 available on <a href="http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/#openpgp">a OpenPGP
3921 smart card</a> for daily use, and learning how to do it and finding
3922 time to sit down with an offline machine almost took forever.  But
3923 finally I've been able to complete the process, and have now moved
3924 from my old GPG key to a new GPG key.  See
3925 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-11-17-new-gpg-key-transition.txt">the
3926 full transition statement, signed with both my old and new key</a> for
3927 the details.  This is my new key:</p>
3928
3929 <pre>
3930 pub   3936R/<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/111D6B29EE4E02F9.html">111D6B29EE4E02F9</a> 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-14]
3931       Key fingerprint = 3AC7 B2E3 ACA5 DF87 78F1  D827 111D 6B29 EE4E 02F9
3932 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@hungry.com&gt;
3933 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@debian.org&gt;
3934 sub   4096R/87BAFB0E 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
3935 sub   4096R/F91E6DE9 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
3936 sub   4096R/A0439BAB 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
3937 </pre>
3938
3939 <p>The key can be downloaded from the OpenPGP key servers, signed by
3940 my old key.</p>
3941
3942 <p>If you signed my old key
3943 (<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/DB4CCC4B2A30D729.html">DB4CCC4B2A30D729</a>),
3944 I'd very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and
3945 instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if
3946 you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.</p>
3947
3948       </div>
3949       <div class="tags">
3950
3951
3952         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
3953
3954
3955       </div>
3956     </div>
3957     <div class="padding"></div>
3958
3959     <div class="entry">
3960       <div class="title">
3961         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">The life and death of a laptop battery</a>
3962       </div>
3963       <div class="date">
3964         24th September 2015
3965       </div>
3966       <div class="body">
3967         <p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
3968 But this do not last.  The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
3969 within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
3970 and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
3971 all the time.  Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
3972 about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
3973 more hard facts when the battery started to fail.</p>
3974
3975 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
3976
3977 <p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
3978 battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
3979 by someone else.  I found
3980 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
3981 which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
3982 broken.  I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
3983 write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
3984 from him.  Via
3985 <a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
3986 blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
3987 discovered
3988 <a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
3989 available in Debian.</p>
3990
3991 <p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
3992 battery stats ever since. Now my
3993 /var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around 115,000
3994 measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
3995 when it is unable to charge above 7% of original capacity.  My
3996 collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:</p>
3997
3998 <pre>
3999 #!/bin/sh
4000 # Inspired by
4001 # http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
4002 # See also
4003 # http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2013/01/02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
4004 logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
4005
4006 files="manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
4007     energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status"
4008
4009 if [ ! -e "$logfile" ] ; then
4010     (
4011         printf "timestamp,"
4012         for f in $files; do
4013             printf "%s," $f
4014         done
4015         echo
4016     ) > "$logfile"
4017 fi
4018
4019 log_battery() {
4020     # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
4021     # when several log processes run in parallel.
4022     msg=$(printf "%s," $(date +%s); \
4023         for f in $files; do \
4024             printf "%s," $(cat $f); \
4025         done)
4026     echo "$msg"
4027 }
4028
4029 cd /sys/class/power_supply
4030
4031 for bat in BAT*; do
4032     (cd $bat && log_battery >> "$logfile")
4033 done
4034 </pre>
4035
4036 <p>The script is called when the power management system detect a
4037 change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
4038 and out of hibernation and suspend.  In addition, it collect a value
4039 every 10 minutes.  This make it possible for me know when the battery
4040 is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
4041 The code for the Debian package
4042 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
4043 available on github</a>.</p>
4044
4045 <p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
4046
4047 <pre>
4048 timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
4049 1376591133,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,62800000,62160000,39050000,0,Discharging,
4050 [...]
4051 1443090528,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
4052 1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
4053 </pre>
4054
4055 <p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
4056 over time.  This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
4057 battery.</p>
4058
4059 <p>But why is this happening?  Why are my laptop batteries always
4060 dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
4061 satellites keep working year after year.  If we are to believe
4062 <a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
4063 University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
4064 chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
4065 all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
4066 I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
4067 <a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
4068 the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
4069 100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
4070 like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
4071 story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
4072 Linux too.</p>
4073
4074 <p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
4075 stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
4076 preparation for a longer trip?  I found
4077 <a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
4078 recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
4079 80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
4080 load).</p>
4081
4082 <p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
4083 at the start.  I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
4084 times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
4085 back to design capacity.  And I wonder if the discharge and charge
4086 speed change over time, or if this stay the same.  I did not yet try
4087 to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
4088 level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
4089 those.</p>
4090
4091 <p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
4092 acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
4093 packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
4094 initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
4095 and stop.  I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
4096 and need to be replaced.  The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
4097 specific.</p>
4098
4099       </div>
4100       <div class="tags">
4101
4102
4103         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4104
4105
4106       </div>
4107     </div>
4108     <div class="padding"></div>
4109
4110     <div class="entry">
4111       <div class="title">
4112         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_laptop___some_more_clues_and_ideas_based_on_feedback.html">New laptop - some more clues and ideas based on feedback</a>
4113       </div>
4114       <div class="date">
4115          5th July 2015
4116       </div>
4117       <div class="body">
4118         <p>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
4119 need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback.  I wish to
4120 thank every one of these.  Several pointed me to the possibility of
4121 fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
4122 do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
4123 machine.  But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
4124 with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
4125 for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement.  If I did
4126 not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
4127 using <a href="http://www.francecrans.com/">FrancEcrans</a>, but it
4128 might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.</p>
4129
4130 <p>One tip I got was to use the
4131 <a href="https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb">Skinflint</a> web service to
4132 compare laptop models.  It seem to have more models available than
4133 prisjakt.no.  Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
4134 keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook 840 keyboard is not
4135 very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
4136 keyboards I tested.  Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
4137
4138 <p>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
4139 newest Thinkpad X model.  The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
4140 (which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
4141 Debian Sid/Unstable according to
4142 <a href="http://www.corsac.net/X250/">Corsac.net</a>.  The reports I
4143 got on the keyboard quality are not consistent.  Some say the keyboard
4144 is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
4145 Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
4146 keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
4147 keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
4148 replace it.  I'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
4149 activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230.  I'm
4150 also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
4151 noisy.  In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
4152 Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.</p>
4153
4154 <p>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
4155 <a href="http://pro-star.com">Pro-Star</a>, another was
4156 <a href="http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/">Libreboot</a>.
4157 The latter look very attractive to me.</p>
4158
4159 <p>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback.  It help a lot
4160 as I keep looking for a replacement.</p>
4161
4162 <p>Update 2015-07-06: I was recommended to check out the
4163 <a href="">lapstore.de</a> web shop for used laptops.  They got several
4164 different
4165 <a href="http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/">old
4166 thinkpad X models</a>, and provide one year warranty.</p>
4167
4168       </div>
4169       <div class="tags">
4170
4171
4172         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4173
4174
4175       </div>
4176     </div>
4177     <div class="padding"></div>
4178
4179     <div class="entry">
4180       <div class="title">
4181         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_find_a_new_laptop__as_the_old_one_is_broken_after_only_two_years.html">Time to find a new laptop, as the old one is broken after only two years</a>
4182       </div>
4183       <div class="date">
4184          3rd July 2015
4185       </div>
4186       <div class="body">
4187         <p>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
4188 replacement soon.  The left 5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
4189 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
4190 cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
4191 flickering.</p>
4192
4193 <p>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
4194 still as
4195 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">I
4196 described them in 2013</a>.  The last time I bought a laptop, I had
4197 good help from
4198 <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=353">prisjakt.no</a>
4199 where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
4200 wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually.  Three button mouse
4201 and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
4202 laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook 820 G1 and
4203 G2) lack three mouse buttons).  It is also unclear to me how good the
4204 keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are.  I hope Lenovo have not messed up
4205 the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
4206 deteriorated since X41.</p>
4207
4208 <p>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
4209 seem sensible to me?  Are there better services around to search the
4210 set of available laptops for features?  Please send me an email if you
4211 have suggestions.</p>
4212
4213 <p>Update 2015-07-23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
4214 <a href="http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom">list
4215 of endorsed hardware</a>, which is useful background information.</p>
4216
4217       </div>
4218       <div class="tags">
4219
4220
4221         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4222
4223
4224       </div>
4225     </div>
4226     <div class="padding"></div>
4227
4228     <div class="entry">
4229       <div class="title">
4230         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_stay_with_sysvinit_in_Debian_Jessie.html">How to stay with sysvinit in Debian Jessie</a>
4231       </div>
4232       <div class="date">
4233         22nd November 2014
4234       </div>
4235       <div class="body">
4236         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
4237 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
4238 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
4239 courtesy of
4240 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
4241 Schubert</a> and
4242 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
4243 McVittie</a>.
4244
4245 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
4246 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
4247 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
4248 you upgrade:</p>
4249
4250 <p><blockquote><pre>
4251 Package: systemd-sysv
4252 Pin: release o=Debian
4253 Pin-Priority: -1
4254 </pre></blockquote><p>
4255
4256 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
4257 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
4258 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
4259 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
4260 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
4261
4262 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
4263 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
4264 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
4265 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
4266 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
4267 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
4268
4269 <p><blockquote><pre>
4270 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
4271 </pre></blockquote><p>
4272
4273 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
4274
4275 <p><blockquote><pre>
4276 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
4277 </pre></blockquote><p>
4278
4279 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
4280 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
4281
4282 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
4283 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
4284 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
4285 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
4286 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
4287 Jessie is released.</p>
4288
4289 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
4290 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
4291 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
4292 line.</p>
4293
4294       </div>
4295       <div class="tags">
4296
4297
4298         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4299
4300
4301       </div>
4302     </div>
4303     <div class="padding"></div>
4304
4305     <div class="entry">
4306       <div class="title">
4307         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Debian_package_for_SMTP_via_Tor__aka_SMTorP__using_exim4.html">A Debian package for SMTP via Tor (aka SMTorP) using exim4</a>
4308       </div>
4309       <div class="date">
4310         10th November 2014
4311       </div>
4312       <div class="body">
4313         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
4314 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
4315 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
4316
4317 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
4318 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
4319 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
4320 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
4321 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
4322 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
4323 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
4324 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
4325 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
4326 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
4327 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
4328 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
4329 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
4330 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
4331 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
4332
4333 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
4334 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
4335 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
4336 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
4337 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
4338 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
4339 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
4340 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
4341 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
4342 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
4343 were fairly easy, and
4344 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
4345 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
4346 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
4347 useful approach.</p>
4348
4349 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
4350 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
4351 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
4352 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
4353 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
4354 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
4355 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
4356 this:</p>
4357
4358 <p><blockquote><pre>
4359 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
4360   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
4361 </pre></blockquote></p>
4362
4363 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
4364 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
4365
4366 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
4367 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
4368 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
4369 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
4370 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
4371 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
4372 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
4373 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
4374 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
4375 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
4376 system.</p>
4377
4378 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
4379 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
4380 SMTorP. :)</p>
4381
4382       </div>
4383       <div class="tags">
4384
4385
4386         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
4387
4388
4389       </div>
4390     </div>
4391     <div class="padding"></div>
4392
4393     <div class="entry">
4394       <div class="title">
4395         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/listadmin__the_quick_way_to_moderate_mailman_lists___nice_free_software.html">listadmin, the quick way to moderate mailman lists - nice free software</a>
4396       </div>
4397       <div class="date">
4398         22nd October 2014
4399       </div>
4400       <div class="body">
4401         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
4402 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
4403 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
4404 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
4405 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
4406 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
4407 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
4408 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
4409 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
4410 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
4411 lists I recently took over:</p>
4412
4413 <p><blockquote><pre>
4414 % time listadmin xiph
4415 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
4416 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
4417
4418 real    0m1.709s
4419 user    0m0.232s
4420 sys     0m0.012s
4421 %
4422 </pre></blockquote></p>
4423
4424 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
4425 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
4426 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
4427 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
4428 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
4429 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
4430 program.</p>
4431
4432 <p>If you install
4433 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
4434 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
4435 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
4436
4437 <p><blockquote><pre>
4438 username username@example.org
4439 spamlevel 23
4440 default discard
4441 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
4442
4443 password secret
4444 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
4445 mailman-list@lists.example.com
4446
4447 password hidden
4448 other-list@otherserver.example.org
4449 </pre></blockquote></p>
4450
4451 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
4452 learn the details.</p>
4453
4454 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
4455 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
4456 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
4457 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
4458
4459 <p><blockquote><pre>
4460 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
4461 </pre></blockquote></p>
4462
4463 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
4464 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
4465 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
4466 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
4467 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
4468 email.</p>
4469
4470 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
4471 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
4472 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
4473 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
4474 software.</p>
4475
4476 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4477 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4478 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4479
4480 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
4481 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
4482 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
4483 sure why.</p>
4484
4485       </div>
4486       <div class="tags">
4487
4488
4489         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
4490
4491
4492       </div>
4493     </div>
4494     <div class="padding"></div>
4495
4496     <div class="entry">
4497       <div class="title">
4498         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
4499       </div>
4500       <div class="date">
4501         17th October 2014
4502       </div>
4503       <div class="body">
4504         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
4505 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
4506 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
4507 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
4508 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
4509 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
4510 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
4511
4512 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
4513 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
4514 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
4515 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
4516 of this story.)</p>
4517
4518 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
4519 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
4520 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
4521 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
4522 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
4523 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
4524 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
4525 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
4526 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
4527 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
4528
4529 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
4530 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
4531 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
4532 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
4533
4534 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
4535 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
4536
4537 <p><blockquote><pre>
4538 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
4539 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
4540 </pre></blockquote></p>
4541
4542 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
4543 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
4544 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
4545 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
4546 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
4547 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
4548 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
4549 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
4550
4551 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
4552 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
4553
4554 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
4555 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
4556 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
4557 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
4558 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
4559
4560 <p><blockquote><pre>
4561 Task: isenkram-packages
4562 Section: hardware
4563 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
4564  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
4565  proposed.
4566 Test-new-install: show show
4567 Relevance: 8
4568 Packages: for-current-hardware
4569
4570 Task: isenkram-firmware
4571 Section: hardware
4572 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
4573  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
4574  packages are proposed.
4575 Test-new-install: mark show
4576 Relevance: 8
4577 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
4578 </pre></blockquote></p>
4579
4580 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
4581 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
4582 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
4583 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
4584 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
4585
4586 <p><blockquote><pre>
4587 #!/bin/sh
4588 #
4589 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
4590 export PATH
4591 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
4592 </pre></blockquote></p>
4593
4594 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
4595 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
4596
4597 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
4598 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
4599 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
4600 install.</p>
4601
4602 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
4603 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
4604 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
4605
4606       </div>
4607       <div class="tags">
4608
4609
4610         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
4611
4612
4613       </div>
4614     </div>
4615     <div class="padding"></div>
4616
4617     <div class="entry">
4618       <div class="title">
4619         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ubuntu_used_to_show_the_bread_prizes_at_ICA_Storo.html">Ubuntu used to show the bread prizes at ICA Storo</a>
4620       </div>
4621       <div class="date">
4622          4th October 2014
4623       </div>
4624       <div class="body">
4625         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
4626 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
4627 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
4628 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
4629
4630 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
4631
4632 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
4633 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
4634 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
4635
4636       </div>
4637       <div class="tags">
4638
4639
4640         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4641
4642
4643       </div>
4644     </div>
4645     <div class="padding"></div>
4646
4647     <div class="entry">
4648       <div class="title">
4649         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_lsdvd_release_version_0_17_is_ready.html">New lsdvd release version 0.17 is ready</a>
4650       </div>
4651       <div class="date">
4652          4th October 2014
4653       </div>
4654       <div class="body">
4655         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
4656 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
4657 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
4658 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
4659 Dibb.</p>
4660
4661 <p>I just wrapped up
4662 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
4663 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
4664 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
4665 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
4666 0.17.</p>
4667
4668 <ul>
4669
4670  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
4671  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
4672    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
4673  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
4674  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
4675  <li>Fix include orders</li>
4676  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
4677  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
4678  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
4679    the palette size is the same.</li>
4680  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
4681  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
4682  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
4683  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
4684    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
4685
4686 </ul>
4687
4688 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
4689 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
4690 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
4691
4692       </div>
4693       <div class="tags">
4694
4695
4696         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
4697
4698
4699       </div>
4700     </div>
4701     <div class="padding"></div>
4702
4703     <div class="entry">
4704       <div class="title">
4705         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_Debian_Edu_Jessie_despite_some_fatal_problems_with_the_installer.html">How to test Debian Edu Jessie despite some fatal problems with the installer</a>
4706       </div>
4707       <div class="date">
4708         26th September 2014
4709       </div>
4710       <div class="body">
4711         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
4712 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
4713 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
4714 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
4715 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
4716 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
4717 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
4718 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
4719 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
4720 future.  The
4721 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
4722 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
4723 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
4724 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
4725 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
4726
4727 <p>First, download the test ISO via
4728 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
4729 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
4730 or rsync (use
4731 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
4732 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
4733 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
4734 install with some tweaking.</p>
4735
4736 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
4737 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
4738
4739 <p><blockquote><pre>
4740 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
4741 </pre></blockquote></p>
4742
4743 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
4744 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
4745 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
4746 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
4747
4748 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
4749 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
4750 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
4751 your need.</p>
4752
4753 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
4754 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
4755 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
4756 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
4757 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
4758 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
4759 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
4760 days.</p>
4761
4762 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
4763 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
4764 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
4765 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
4766 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
4767 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
4768 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
4769 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
4770 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
4771
4772 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
4773 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
4774 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
4775
4776       </div>
4777       <div class="tags">
4778
4779
4780         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4781
4782
4783       </div>
4784     </div>
4785     <div class="padding"></div>
4786
4787     <div class="entry">
4788       <div class="title">
4789         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Suddenly_I_am_the_new_upstream_of_the_lsdvd_command_line_tool.html">Suddenly I am the new upstream of the lsdvd command line tool</a>
4790       </div>
4791       <div class="date">
4792         25th September 2014
4793       </div>
4794       <div class="body">
4795         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
4796 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
4797 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
4798 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
4799 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
4800 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
4801 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
4802 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
4803 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
4804 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
4805 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
4806 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
4807 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
4808
4809 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
4810 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
4811 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
4812 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
4813 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
4814 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
4815 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
4816 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
4817 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
4818 list</a>. :)</p>
4819
4820       </div>
4821       <div class="tags">
4822
4823
4824         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
4825
4826
4827       </div>
4828     </div>
4829     <div class="padding"></div>
4830
4831     <div class="entry">
4832       <div class="title">
4833         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">Speeding up the Debian installer using eatmydata and dpkg-divert</a>
4834       </div>
4835       <div class="date">
4836         16th September 2014
4837       </div>
4838       <div class="body">
4839         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
4840 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
4841 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
4842 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
4843 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
4844 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
4845 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
4846 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
4847 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
4848 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
4849 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
4850 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
4851 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
4852 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
4853
4854 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
4855 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
4856 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
4857 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
4858 depend on the small and clever package
4859 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
4860 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
4861 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
4862 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
4863 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
4864 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
4865 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
4866 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
4867 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
4868 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
4869 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
4870
4871 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
4872 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
4873 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
4874 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
4875 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
4876 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
4877 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
4878 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
4879 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
4880 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
4881 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
4882 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
4883 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
4884 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
4885 dialog.</p>
4886
4887 <p><table>
4888
4889 <tr>
4890 <th>Machine/setup</th>
4891 <th>Original tasksel</th>
4892 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
4893 <th>Reduction</th>
4894 </tr>
4895
4896 <tr>
4897 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
4898 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
4899 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
4900 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
4901 </tr>
4902
4903 <tr>
4904 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
4905 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
4906 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
4907 <td>23 min 40%</td>
4908 </tr>
4909
4910 <tr>
4911 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
4912 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
4913 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
4914 <td>11 min 50%</td>
4915 </tr>
4916
4917 <tr>
4918 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
4919 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
4920 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
4921 <td>2 min 33%</td>
4922 </tr>
4923
4924 <tr>
4925 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
4926 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
4927 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
4928 <td>4 min 21%</td>
4929 </tr>
4930
4931 </table></p>
4932
4933 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
4934 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
4935 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
4936 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
4937 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
4938 installed.</p>
4939
4940 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
4941 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
4942 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
4943 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
4944 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
4945 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
4946 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
4947 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
4948 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
4949 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
4950 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
4951 for the entire installation.</p>
4952
4953 <p>I've implemented this in the
4954 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
4955 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
4956 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
4957 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
4958 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
4959
4960 <p><blockquote><pre>
4961 #!/bin/sh
4962 set -e
4963 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
4964 info() {
4965     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
4966 }
4967 error() {
4968     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
4969 }
4970 override_install() {
4971     apt-install eatmydata || true
4972     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
4973         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
4974             file=/usr/bin/$bin
4975             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
4976             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
4977                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
4978                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
4979                     > /target$file.edu
4980                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
4981                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
4982                     --rename --quiet --add $file
4983                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
4984             else
4985                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
4986             fi
4987         done
4988     else
4989         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
4990     fi
4991 }
4992
4993 override_install
4994 </pre></blockquote></p>
4995
4996 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
4997 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
4998
4999 <p><blockquote><pre>
5000 #! /bin/sh -e
5001 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
5002 error() {
5003     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
5004 }
5005 remove_install_override() {
5006     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
5007         file=/usr/bin/$bin
5008         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
5009             rm /target$file
5010             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
5011                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
5012             rm /target$file.edu
5013         else
5014             error "Missing divert for $file."
5015         fi
5016     done
5017     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
5018 }
5019
5020 remove_install_override
5021 </pre></blockquote></p>
5022
5023 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
5024 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
5025 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
5026
5027 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
5028 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
5029 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
5030 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
5031 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
5032 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
5033 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
5034 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
5035 everyone.</p>
5036
5037 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
5038 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
5039 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
5040 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
5041
5042 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
5043 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
5044 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
5045 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
5046 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
5047
5048 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
5049 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
5050 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
5051 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
5052 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
5053
5054       </div>
5055       <div class="tags">
5056
5057
5058         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5059
5060
5061       </div>
5062     </div>
5063     <div class="padding"></div>
5064
5065     <div class="entry">
5066       <div class="title">
5067         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_bye_subkeys_pgp_net__welcome_pool_sks_keyservers_net.html">Good bye subkeys.pgp.net, welcome pool.sks-keyservers.net</a>
5068       </div>
5069       <div class="date">
5070         10th September 2014
5071       </div>
5072       <div class="body">
5073         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
5074 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
5075 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
5076 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
5077 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
5078 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
5079 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
5080 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
5081 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
5082 those problems are gone now.</p>
5083
5084 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
5085 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
5086 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
5087 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
5088 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
5089
5090 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
5091 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
5092 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
5093
5094 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
5095 line:</p>
5096
5097 <p><blockquote><pre>
5098 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
5099 </pre></blockquote></p>
5100
5101 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
5102 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
5103 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
5104 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
5105
5106 <p><blockquote><pre>
5107 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
5108 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
5109 %
5110 </pre></blockquote></p>
5111
5112 <p>Now if only
5113 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
5114 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
5115 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
5116 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
5117 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
5118 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
5119 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
5120 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
5121 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
5122
5123       </div>
5124       <div class="tags">
5125
5126
5127         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
5128
5129
5130       </div>
5131     </div>
5132     <div class="padding"></div>
5133
5134     <div class="entry">
5135       <div class="title">
5136         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html">From English wiki to translated PDF and epub via Docbook</a>
5137       </div>
5138       <div class="date">
5139         17th June 2014
5140       </div>
5141       <div class="body">
5142         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
5143 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
5144 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
5145 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
5146 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
5147
5148 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
5149 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
5150 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
5151 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
5152 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
5153 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
5154 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
5155 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
5156 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
5157 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
5158 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
5159 goals.</p>
5160
5161 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
5162 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
5163 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
5164 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
5165 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
5166 chapters together into one large web page (aka
5167 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
5168 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
5169 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
5170 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
5171 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
5172 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
5173 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
5174 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
5175 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
5176 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
5177 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
5178 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
5179 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
5180 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
5181 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
5182 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
5183 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
5184 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
5185
5186 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
5187 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
5188 track the English original.  For this we use the
5189 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
5190 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
5191 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
5192 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
5193 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
5194 files), which the translations update with the native language
5195 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
5196 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
5197 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
5198 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
5199 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
5200 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
5201 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
5202 of the documentation.</p>
5203
5204 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
5205 recommend using
5206 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
5207 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
5208 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
5209 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
5210 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
5211 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
5212 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
5213 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
5214
5215 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
5216 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
5217 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
5218 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
5219 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
5220 translated images by storing translated versions in
5221 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
5222 package maintainers know more.</p>
5223
5224 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
5225 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
5226 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
5227 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
5228 PDF version</a> or the
5229 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
5230 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
5231 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
5232
5233 <p>To learn more, check out
5234 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
5235 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
5236 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
5237 manual on the wiki</a> and
5238 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
5239 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
5240
5241       </div>
5242       <div class="tags">
5243
5244
5245         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5246
5247
5248       </div>
5249     </div>
5250     <div class="padding"></div>
5251
5252     <div class="entry">
5253       <div class="title">
5254         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Install_hardware_dependent_packages_using_tasksel__Isenkram_0_7_.html">Install hardware dependent packages using tasksel (Isenkram 0.7)</a>
5255       </div>
5256       <div class="date">
5257         23rd April 2014
5258       </div>
5259       <div class="body">
5260         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
5261 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
5262 So I implemented one, using
5263 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
5264 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
5265 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
5266 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
5267 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
5268 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
5269
5270 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
5271 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
5272 packages to install.  The first part is in
5273 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
5274 this:</p>
5275
5276 <p><blockquote><pre>
5277 Task: isenkram
5278 Section: hardware
5279 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
5280  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
5281  proposed.
5282 Test-new-install: mark show
5283 Relevance: 8
5284 Packages: for-current-hardware
5285 </pre></blockquote></p>
5286
5287 <p>The second part is in
5288 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
5289 this:</p>
5290
5291 <p><blockquote><pre>
5292 #!/bin/sh
5293 #
5294 (
5295     isenkram-lookup
5296     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
5297 ) | sort -u
5298 </pre></blockquote></p>
5299
5300 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
5301 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
5302 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
5303 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
5304 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
5305 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
5306
5307 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
5308 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
5309 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
5310 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
5311 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
5312 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
5313 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
5314 the python-apt code (bug
5315 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
5316 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
5317 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
5318 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
5319 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
5320 unstable today.</p>
5321
5322 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
5323 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
5324 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
5325 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
5326 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
5327 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
5328 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
5329 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
5330 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
5331
5332 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
5333 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
5334 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
5335 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
5336 package.  See also
5337 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
5338 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
5339 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
5340 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
5341
5342       </div>
5343       <div class="tags">
5344
5345
5346         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
5347
5348
5349       </div>
5350     </div>
5351     <div class="padding"></div>
5352
5353     <div class="entry">
5354       <div class="title">
5355         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/FreedomBox_milestone___all_packages_now_in_Debian_Sid.html">FreedomBox milestone - all packages now in Debian Sid</a>
5356       </div>
5357       <div class="date">
5358         15th April 2014
5359       </div>
5360       <div class="body">
5361         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
5362 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
5363 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
5364 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
5365 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
5366 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
5367
5368 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
5369 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
5370 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
5371 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
5372 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
5373 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
5374 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
5375
5376 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
5377 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
5378 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
5379 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
5380 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
5381 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
5382 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
5383 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
5384 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
5385 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
5386 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
5387 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
5388
5389 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
5390 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
5391 become root:</p>
5392
5393 <p><pre>
5394 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
5395   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
5396   u-boot-tools
5397 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
5398   freedom-maker
5399 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
5400 </pre></p>
5401
5402 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
5403 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
5404 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
5405 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
5406 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
5407 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
5408 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
5409 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
5410
5411 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
5412 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
5413 the preseed values:</p>
5414
5415 <p><pre>
5416 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
5417 </pre></p>
5418
5419 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
5420 it still work.</p>
5421
5422 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
5423 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
5424 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
5425 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
5426 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
5427 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
5428 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
5429
5430 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
5431 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
5432 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
5433 irc.debian.org)</a> and
5434 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
5435 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
5436
5437       </div>
5438       <div class="tags">
5439
5440
5441         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
5442
5443
5444       </div>
5445     </div>
5446     <div class="padding"></div>
5447
5448     <div class="entry">
5449       <div class="title">
5450         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/S3QL__a_locally_mounted_cloud_file_system___nice_free_software.html">S3QL, a locally mounted cloud file system - nice free software</a>
5451       </div>
5452       <div class="date">
5453          9th April 2014
5454       </div>
5455       <div class="body">
5456         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
5457 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
5458 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
5459 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
5460 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
5461 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
5462 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
5463 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
5464 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
5465 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
5466 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
5467 have looked at a system called
5468 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
5469 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
5470
5471 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
5472 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
5473 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
5474 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
5475 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
5476 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
5477 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
5478 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
5479 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
5480 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
5481 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
5482 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
5483 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
5484
5485 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
5486 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
5487 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
5488 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
5489 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
5490 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
5491 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
5492 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
5493 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
5494 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
5495 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
5496 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
5497 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
5498 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
5499 account.</p>
5500
5501 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
5502 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
5503 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
5504 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
5505 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
5506 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
5507 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
5508
5509 <p><blockquote><pre>
5510 [s3c]
5511 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
5512 backend-login: API-login
5513 backend-password: API-password
5514 fs-passphrase: local-password
5515 </pre></blockquote></p>
5516
5517 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
5518 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
5519 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
5520 details and password to create it:</p>
5521
5522 <p><blockquote><pre>
5523 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
5524 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
5525   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
5526 Enter backend login:
5527 Enter backend password:
5528 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
5529 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
5530 Enter encryption password:
5531 Confirm encryption password:
5532 Generating random encryption key...
5533 Creating metadata tables...
5534 Dumping metadata...
5535 ..objects..
5536 ..blocks..
5537 ..inodes..
5538 ..inode_blocks..
5539 ..symlink_targets..
5540 ..names..
5541 ..contents..
5542 ..ext_attributes..
5543 Compressing and uploading metadata...
5544 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
5545 # </pre></blockquote></p>
5546
5547 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
5548
5549 <p><blockquote><pre>
5550 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
5551   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
5552 Using 4 upload threads.
5553 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
5554 Reading metadata...
5555 ..objects..
5556 ..blocks..
5557 ..inodes..
5558 ..inode_blocks..
5559 ..symlink_targets..
5560 ..names..
5561 ..contents..
5562 ..ext_attributes..
5563 Mounting filesystem...
5564 # df -h /s3ql
5565 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
5566 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
5567 #
5568 </pre></blockquote></p>
5569
5570 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
5571 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
5572 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
5573 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
5574 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
5575 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
5576
5577 <p><blockquote><pre>
5578 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
5579 #
5580 </pre></blockquote></p>
5581
5582 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
5583 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
5584 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
5585 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
5586 file system:</p>
5587
5588 <p><blockquote><pre>
5589 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
5590 Using cached metadata.
5591 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
5592 Checking DB integrity...
5593 Creating temporary extra indices...
5594 Checking lost+found...
5595 Checking cached objects...
5596 Checking names (refcounts)...
5597 Checking contents (names)...
5598 Checking contents (inodes)...
5599 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
5600 Checking objects (reference counts)...
5601 Checking objects (backend)...
5602 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
5603 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
5604 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
5605 Checking objects (sizes)...
5606 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
5607 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
5608 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
5609 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
5610 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
5611 Checking inodes (sizes)...
5612 Checking extended attributes (names)...
5613 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
5614 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
5615 Checking directory reachability...
5616 Checking unix conventions...
5617 Checking referential integrity...
5618 Dropping temporary indices...
5619 Backing up old metadata...
5620 Dumping metadata...
5621 ..objects..
5622 ..blocks..
5623 ..inodes..
5624 ..inode_blocks..
5625 ..symlink_targets..
5626 ..names..
5627 ..contents..
5628 ..ext_attributes..
5629 Compressing and uploading metadata...
5630 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
5631 #
5632 </pre></blockquote></p>
5633
5634 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
5635 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
5636 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
5637 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
5638 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
5639 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
5640 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
5641 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
5642 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
5643 working set.</p>
5644
5645 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
5646 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
5647 busy:</p>
5648
5649 <p><blockquote><pre>
5650 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
5651   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
5652 Using 8 upload threads.
5653 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
5654 #
5655 </pre></blockquote></p>
5656
5657 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
5658 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
5659 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
5660 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
5661 s3qlctrl:
5662
5663 <p><blockquote><pre>
5664 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
5665 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
5666 #
5667 </pre></blockquote></p>
5668
5669 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
5670 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
5671 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
5672 a report:</p>
5673
5674 <p><blockquote><pre>
5675 # s3qlstat /s3ql
5676 Directory entries:    9141
5677 Inodes:               9143
5678 Data blocks:          8851
5679 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
5680 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
5681 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
5682 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
5683 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
5684 #
5685 </pre></blockquote></p>
5686
5687 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
5688 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
5689 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
5690 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
5691 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
5692 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
5693 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
5694 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
5695 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
5696 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
5697 best.</p>
5698
5699 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
5700 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
5701 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
5702 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
5703 poster is titled
5704 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
5705 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
5706 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
5707 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
5708 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
5709
5710 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
5711 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
5712 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
5713 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
5714 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
5715 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
5716 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
5717 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
5718
5719 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
5720 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
5721 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
5722 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
5723 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
5724 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
5725 only read from it.</p>
5726
5727 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5728 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5729 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5730
5731       </div>
5732       <div class="tags">
5733
5734
5735         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
5736
5737
5738       </div>
5739     </div>
5740     <div class="padding"></div>
5741
5742     <div class="entry">
5743       <div class="title">
5744         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Freedombox_on_Dreamplug__Raspberry_Pi_and_virtual_x86_machine.html">Freedombox on Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and virtual x86 machine</a>
5745       </div>
5746       <div class="date">
5747         14th March 2014
5748       </div>
5749       <div class="body">
5750         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
5751 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
5752 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
5753 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
5754 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
5755 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
5756 release (0.2).</p>
5757
5758 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
5759 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
5760 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
5761 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
5762 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
5763 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
5764 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
5765 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
5766 and build using
5767 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
5768 with a user with sudo access to become root:
5769
5770 <pre>
5771 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
5772   freedom-maker
5773 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
5774   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
5775   u-boot-tools
5776 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
5777 </pre>
5778
5779 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
5780 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
5781 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
5782 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
5783 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
5784 kpartx call.</p>
5785
5786 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
5787 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
5788 the preseed values:</p>
5789
5790 <pre>
5791 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
5792 </pre>
5793
5794 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
5795 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
5796 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
5797 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
5798 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
5799 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
5800
5801 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
5802 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
5803 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
5804 irc.debian.org)</a> and
5805 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
5806 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
5807
5808       </div>
5809       <div class="tags">
5810
5811
5812         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
5813
5814
5815       </div>
5816     </div>
5817     <div class="padding"></div>
5818
5819     <div class="entry">
5820       <div class="title">
5821         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_home_and_release_1_0_for_netgroup_and_innetgr__aka_ng_utils_.html">New home and release 1.0 for netgroup and innetgr (aka ng-utils)</a>
5822       </div>
5823       <div class="date">
5824         22nd February 2014
5825       </div>
5826       <div class="body">
5827         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
5828 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
5829 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
5830 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
5831 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
5832 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
5833 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
5834 proper home since then.</p>
5835
5836 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
5837 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
5838 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
5839 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
5840 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
5841
5842 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
5843 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
5844 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
5845 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
5846 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
5847 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
5848 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
5849 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
5850 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
5851
5852       </div>
5853       <div class="tags">
5854
5855
5856         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5857
5858
5859       </div>
5860     </div>
5861     <div class="padding"></div>
5862
5863     <div class="entry">
5864       <div class="title">
5865         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
5866       </div>
5867       <div class="date">
5868          3rd February 2014
5869       </div>
5870       <div class="body">
5871         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
5872 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
5873 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
5874 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
5875 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
5876 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
5877 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
5878 <a href="http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz">http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz</a>,
5879 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
5880
5881 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
5882 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
5883 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
5884 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
5885 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
5886 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
5887
5888 <p><blockquote><pre>
5889 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
5890 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
5891 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
5892 dhclient /dev/eth0
5893 </pre></blockquote></p>
5894
5895 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
5896 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
5897 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
5898
5899 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
5900 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
5901 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
5902 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
5903 side.</p>
5904
5905 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
5906 stuff:</p>
5907
5908 <p><blockquote><pre>
5909 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
5910 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
5911 EOF
5912 apt-get update
5913 apt-get dist-upgrade
5914 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
5915     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
5916 update-alternatives --config runsystem
5917 </pre></blockquote></p>
5918
5919 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
5920 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
5921 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
5922 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
5923 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
5924 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
5925 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
5926 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
5927 ssh instead.
5928
5929 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
5930 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
5931 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
5932 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
5933 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
5934 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
5935
5936 <p><blockquote><pre>
5937 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
5938 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
5939 EOF
5940 </pre></blockquote></p>
5941
5942 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
5943 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
5944 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
5945 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
5946
5947 <p><blockquote><pre>
5948 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
5949 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
5950 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
5951 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
5952 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
5953 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
5954 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
5955 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
5956 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
5957 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
5958 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
5959 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
5960 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
5961 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
5962 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
5963 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
5964 #
5965 </pre></blockquote></p>
5966
5967 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
5968 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
5969 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
5970 command line stuff.<p>
5971
5972       </div>
5973       <div class="tags">
5974
5975
5976         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5977
5978
5979       </div>
5980     </div>
5981     <div class="padding"></div>
5982
5983     <div class="entry">
5984       <div class="title">
5985         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
5986       </div>
5987       <div class="date">
5988         14th January 2014
5989       </div>
5990       <div class="body">
5991         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
5992 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
5993 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
5994 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
5995 the source.  The company behind it provide
5996 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
5997 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
5998 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
5999 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
6000 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
6001 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
6002 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
6003 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
6004 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
6005 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
6006 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
6007 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
6008 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
6009 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
6010 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
6011 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
6012 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
6013 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
6014 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
6015
6016 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
6017
6018 <ul>
6019
6020   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
6021   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
6022   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
6023
6024 </ul>
6025
6026 <p>You can
6027 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
6028 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
6029 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
6030 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
6031 include a test suite check.</p>
6032
6033       </div>
6034       <div class="tags">
6035
6036
6037         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6038
6039
6040       </div>
6041     </div>
6042     <div class="padding"></div>
6043
6044     <div class="entry">
6045       <div class="title">
6046         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
6047       </div>
6048       <div class="date">
6049         24th November 2013
6050       </div>
6051       <div class="body">
6052         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
6053 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
6054 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
6055 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
6056 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
6057 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
6058 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
6059 is working on.  I checked the
6060 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
6061 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
6062 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
6063 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
6064 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
6065 These are the release notes:</p>
6066
6067 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
6068
6069 <ul>
6070
6071   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
6072    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
6073    up.</li>
6074
6075   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
6076
6077   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
6078    Matthias Klose.</li>
6079
6080   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
6081    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
6082
6083   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
6084    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
6085    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
6086
6087 </ul>
6088
6089 <p>You can
6090 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
6091 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
6092 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
6093 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
6094 include a testsuite check.</p>
6095
6096       </div>
6097       <div class="tags">
6098
6099
6100         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6101
6102
6103       </div>
6104     </div>
6105     <div class="padding"></div>
6106
6107     <div class="entry">
6108       <div class="title">
6109         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_init_d_boot_script_example_for_rsyslog.html">Debian init.d boot script example for rsyslog</a>
6110       </div>
6111       <div class="date">
6112          2nd November 2013
6113       </div>
6114       <div class="body">
6115         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
6116 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
6117 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
6118 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
6119 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
6120
6121 <p><pre>
6122 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
6123 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
6124 # Provides:          rsyslog
6125 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
6126 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
6127 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
6128 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
6129 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
6130 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
6131 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
6132 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
6133 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
6134 ### END INIT INFO
6135 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
6136 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
6137 </pre></p>
6138
6139 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
6140 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
6141 info/comments.</p>
6142
6143 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
6144 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
6145
6146 <p><pre>
6147 #!/bin/sh
6148
6149 # Define LSB log_* functions.
6150 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
6151 # and status_of_proc is working.
6152 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
6153
6154 #
6155 # Function that starts the daemon/service
6156
6157 #
6158 do_start()
6159 {
6160         # Return
6161         #   0 if daemon has been started
6162         #   1 if daemon was already running
6163         #   2 if daemon could not be started
6164         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
6165                 || return 1
6166         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
6167                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
6168                 || return 2
6169         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
6170         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
6171         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
6172 }
6173
6174 #
6175 # Function that stops the daemon/service
6176 #
6177 do_stop()
6178 {
6179         # Return
6180         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
6181         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
6182         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
6183         #   other if a failure occurred
6184         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
6185         RETVAL="$?"
6186         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
6187         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
6188         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
6189         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
6190         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
6191         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
6192         # sleep for some time.
6193         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
6194         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
6195         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
6196         rm -f $PIDFILE
6197         return "$RETVAL"
6198 }
6199
6200 #
6201 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
6202 #
6203 do_reload() {
6204         #
6205         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
6206         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
6207         # then implement that here.
6208         #
6209         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
6210         return 0
6211 }
6212
6213 SCRIPTNAME=$1
6214 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
6215 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
6216 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
6217     script="$1"
6218     shift
6219     . $script
6220 else
6221     exit 0
6222 fi
6223
6224 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
6225 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
6226
6227 # Exit if the package is not installed
6228 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
6229
6230 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
6231 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
6232
6233 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
6234 . /lib/init/vars.sh
6235
6236 case "$1" in
6237   start)
6238         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
6239         do_start
6240         case "$?" in
6241                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
6242                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
6243         esac
6244         ;;
6245   stop)
6246         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
6247         do_stop
6248         case "$?" in
6249                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
6250                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
6251         esac
6252         ;;
6253   status)
6254         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
6255         ;;
6256   #reload|force-reload)
6257         #
6258         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
6259         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
6260         #
6261         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
6262         #do_reload
6263         #log_end_msg $?
6264         #;;
6265   restart|force-reload)
6266         #
6267         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
6268         # 'force-reload' alias
6269         #
6270         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
6271         do_stop
6272         case "$?" in
6273           0|1)
6274                 do_start
6275                 case "$?" in
6276                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
6277                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
6278                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
6279                 esac
6280                 ;;
6281           *)
6282                 # Failed to stop
6283                 log_end_msg 1
6284                 ;;
6285         esac
6286         ;;
6287   *)
6288         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
6289         exit 3
6290         ;;
6291 esac
6292
6293 :
6294 </pre></p>
6295
6296 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
6297 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
6298 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
6299 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
6300
6301 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
6302 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
6303 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
6304 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
6305 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
6306
6307       </div>
6308       <div class="tags">
6309
6310
6311         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6312
6313
6314       </div>
6315     </div>
6316     <div class="padding"></div>
6317
6318     <div class="entry">
6319       <div class="title">
6320         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Browser_plugin_for_SPICE__spice_xpi__uploaded_to_Debian.html">Browser plugin for SPICE (spice-xpi) uploaded to Debian</a>
6321       </div>
6322       <div class="date">
6323          1st November 2013
6324       </div>
6325       <div class="body">
6326         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
6327 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
6328 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
6329 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
6330 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
6331 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
6332 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
6333 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
6334 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
6335 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
6336 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
6337 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
6338
6339 <p>The source is now available from
6340 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/spice-xpi.git;a=summary">http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/spice-xpi.git;a=summary</a>.</p>
6341
6342       </div>
6343       <div class="tags">
6344
6345
6346         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6347
6348
6349       </div>
6350     </div>
6351     <div class="padding"></div>
6352
6353     <div class="entry">
6354       <div class="title">
6355         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Teaching_vmdebootstrap_to_create_Raspberry_Pi_SD_card_images.html">Teaching vmdebootstrap to create Raspberry Pi SD card images</a>
6356       </div>
6357       <div class="date">
6358         27th October 2013
6359       </div>
6360       <div class="body">
6361         <p>The
6362 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
6363 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
6364 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
6365 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
6366 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
6367 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
6368 of a plan to simplify the build system for
6369 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
6370 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
6371 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
6372 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
6373 Raspberry Pi.</p>
6374
6375 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
6376 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
6377 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
6378 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
6379 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
6380 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
6381 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
6382 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
6383 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
6384 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
6385 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
6386 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
6387 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
6388 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
6389 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
6390 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
6391 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
6392 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
6393 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
6394 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
6395 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
6396 available from
6397 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
6398 upstream project page</a>.</p>
6399
6400 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
6401 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
6402 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
6403 list:</p>
6404
6405 <p><pre>
6406 #!/bin/sh
6407 set -e # Exit on first error
6408 rootdir="$1"
6409 cd "$rootdir"
6410 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
6411 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
6412 EOF
6413 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
6414 # install a kernel somewhere too.
6415 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
6416     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
6417 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
6418 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
6419 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
6420 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
6421 </pre></p>
6422
6423 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
6424 to build the image:</p>
6425
6426 <pre>
6427 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
6428     --variant minbase \
6429     --arch armel \
6430     --distribution jessie \
6431     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
6432     --image test.img \
6433     --size 600M \
6434     --bootsize 64M \
6435     --boottype vfat \
6436     --log-level debug \
6437     --verbose \
6438     --no-kernel \
6439     --no-extlinux \
6440     --root-password raspberry \
6441     --hostname raspberrypi \
6442     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
6443     --customize `pwd`/customize \
6444     --package netbase \
6445     --package git-core \
6446     --package binutils \
6447     --package ca-certificates \
6448     --package wget \
6449     --package kmod
6450 </pre></p>
6451
6452 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
6453 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
6454 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
6455 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
6456 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
6457 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
6458 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
6459
6460 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
6461 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
6462 build dependency list.</p>
6463
6464 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
6465 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
6466 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
6467 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
6468
6469       </div>
6470       <div class="tags">
6471
6472
6473         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>.
6474
6475
6476       </div>
6477     </div>
6478     <div class="padding"></div>
6479
6480     <div class="entry">
6481       <div class="title">
6482         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_causes__Debian_Outreach_Program_for_Women__EFF_documenting_the_spying_and_Open_access_in_Norway.html">Good causes: Debian Outreach Program for Women, EFF documenting the spying and Open access in Norway</a>
6483       </div>
6484       <div class="date">
6485         15th October 2013
6486       </div>
6487       <div class="body">
6488         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
6489 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
6490 these. :)</p>
6491
6492 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
6493 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
6494 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
6495 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
6496 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
6497 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
6498 hope you will to. :)</p>
6499
6500 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
6501 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
6502 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
6503 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
6504 donated.  Are you next?</p>
6505
6506 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
6507 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
6508 statement under the heading
6509 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
6510 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
6511 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
6512 too.</p>
6513
6514       </div>
6515       <div class="tags">
6516
6517
6518         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
6519
6520
6521       </div>
6522     </div>
6523     <div class="padding"></div>
6524
6525     <div class="entry">
6526       <div class="title">
6527         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Videos_about_the_Freedombox_project___for_inspiration_and_learning.html">Videos about the Freedombox project - for inspiration and learning</a>
6528       </div>
6529       <div class="date">
6530         27th September 2013
6531       </div>
6532       <div class="body">
6533         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
6534 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
6535 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
6536 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
6537
6538 <ul>
6539
6540 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
6541 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
6542
6543 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
6544 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
6545
6546 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
6547 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
6548 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
6549 (Youtube)</li>
6550
6551 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
6552 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
6553
6554 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
6555 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
6556
6557 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
6558 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
6559 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
6560
6561 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
6562 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
6563 (Youtube)</li>
6564
6565 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
6566 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
6567
6568 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
6569 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
6570
6571 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
6572 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
6573 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
6574
6575 </ul>
6576
6577 <p>A larger list is available from
6578 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
6579 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
6580
6581 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
6582 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
6583 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
6584 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
6585 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
6586 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
6587 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
6588 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
6589 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
6590 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
6591 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
6592
6593       </div>
6594       <div class="tags">
6595
6596
6597         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
6598
6599
6600       </div>
6601     </div>
6602     <div class="padding"></div>
6603
6604     <div class="entry">
6605       <div class="title">
6606         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recipe_to_test_the_Freedombox_project_on_amd64_or_Raspberry_Pi.html">Recipe to test the Freedombox project on amd64 or Raspberry Pi</a>
6607       </div>
6608       <div class="date">
6609         10th September 2013
6610       </div>
6611       <div class="body">
6612         <p>I was introduced to the
6613 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
6614 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
6615 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
6616 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
6617 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
6618 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
6619 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
6620 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
6621
6622 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
6623 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
6624 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
6625 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
6626 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
6627
6628 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
6629 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
6630 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
6631 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
6632 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
6633 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
6634 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
6635 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
6636 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
6637 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
6638 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
6639 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
6640 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
6641 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
6642 missing in Debian).</p>
6643
6644 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
6645 scripts
6646 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
6647 and a administrative web interface
6648 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
6649 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
6650 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
6651 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
6652 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
6653 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
6654 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
6655 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
6656 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
6657 this is really working yet, see
6658 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
6659 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
6660 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
6661 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
6662 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
6663 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
6664 with lots of half baked features.</p>
6665
6666 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
6667 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
6668 at.</p>
6669
6670 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
6671
6672 <ol>
6673
6674 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
6675 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
6676 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
6677 to the Debian installer:<p>
6678 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
6679
6680 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
6681 install on.</li>
6682
6683 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
6684 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
6685
6686 </ol>
6687
6688 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
6689
6690 <ol>
6691
6692 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
6693 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
6694 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
6695 <pre>
6696 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
6697 </pre></li>
6698 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
6699 <pre>
6700 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
6701    apt-key add -
6702 apt-get update
6703 apt-get install freedombox-setup
6704 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
6705 </pre></li>
6706 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
6707
6708 </ol>
6709
6710 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
6711 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
6712 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
6713 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
6714 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
6715
6716 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
6717 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
6718 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
6719 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
6720
6721 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
6722 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
6723 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
6724 irc.debian.org and the
6725 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
6726 mailing list</a>.</p>
6727
6728 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
6729 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
6730 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
6731 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
6732 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
6733 default password is 'secret'.</p>
6734
6735       </div>
6736       <div class="tags">
6737
6738
6739         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
6740
6741
6742       </div>
6743     </div>
6744     <div class="padding"></div>
6745
6746     <div class="entry">
6747       <div class="title">
6748         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_180_SSD_disk_with_Lenovo_firmware_can_not_use_Intel_firmware.html">Intel 180 SSD disk with Lenovo firmware can not use Intel firmware</a>
6749       </div>
6750       <div class="date">
6751         18th August 2013
6752       </div>
6753       <div class="body">
6754         <p>Earlier, I reported about
6755 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
6756 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
6757 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
6758 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
6759 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
6760 currently on the disk.</p>
6761
6762 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
6763 <a href="https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=3472&DwnldID=18363&ProductFamily=Solid-State+Drives+and+Caching&ProductLine=Intel%c2%ae+High+Performance+Solid-State+Drive&ProductProduct=Intel%c2%ae+SSD+520+Series+(180GB%2c+2.5in+SATA+6Gb%2fs%2c+25nm%2c+MLC)&lang=eng">issdfut_2.0.4.iso</a>
6764 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
6765 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
6766 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
6767 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
6768 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
6769 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
6770 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
6771 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
6772 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
6773 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
6774 the broken disks.</p>
6775
6776       </div>
6777       <div class="tags">
6778
6779
6780         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6781
6782
6783       </div>
6784     </div>
6785     <div class="padding"></div>
6786
6787     <div class="entry">
6788       <div class="title">
6789         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">How to fix a Thinkpad X230 with a broken 180 GB SSD disk</a>
6790       </div>
6791       <div class="date">
6792         17th July 2013
6793       </div>
6794       <div class="body">
6795         <p>Today I switched to
6796 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
6797 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
6798 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
6799 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html">180
6800 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
6801 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
6802 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
6803 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
6804 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
6805 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
6806 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
6807 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
6808 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
6809 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
6810 station from now on.</p>
6811
6812 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
6813 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
6814 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
6815 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
6816 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
6817 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
6818 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
6819 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
6820 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
6821 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
6822 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
6823 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
6824
6825 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
6826 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
6827 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
6828 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
6829 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
6830 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
6831 parameters are tuned:</p>
6832
6833 <ul>
6834
6835 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
6836     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
6837
6838 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
6839     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
6840     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
6841
6842 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
6843     systems.</li>
6844
6845 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
6846     /etc/fstab.</li>
6847
6848 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
6849
6850 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
6851     cron.daily).</li>
6852
6853 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
6854     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
6855
6856 </ul>
6857
6858 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
6859 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
6860 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
6861 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
6862 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
6863 from getting the data on the disk (see
6864 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
6865 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
6866 right thing to do.</p>
6867
6868 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
6869 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
6870 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
6871
6872 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
6873 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
6874 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
6875 instead of during my work.</p>
6876
6877 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
6878 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
6879
6880 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
6881 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
6882 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
6883
6884 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
6885 there.</p>
6886
6887 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
6888 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
6889 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
6890 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
6891 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
6892 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
6893 back.</p>
6894
6895       </div>
6896       <div class="tags">
6897
6898
6899         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6900
6901
6902       </div>
6903     </div>
6904     <div class="padding"></div>
6905
6906     <div class="entry">
6907       <div class="title">
6908         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html">Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB with Lenovo firmware still lock up from sustained writes</a>
6909       </div>
6910       <div class="date">
6911         10th July 2013
6912       </div>
6913       <div class="body">
6914         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
6915 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
6916 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
6917 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
6918 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
6919 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
6920 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
6921 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
6922
6923 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
6924 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
6925 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
6926 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
6927 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
6928 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
6929 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
6930 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
6931 lock up when I download a new
6932 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
6933 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
6934 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
6935
6936 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
6937 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
6938 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
6939 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
6940 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
6941 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
6942
6943 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
6944 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
6945 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
6946 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
6947 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
6948 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
6949
6950 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
6951 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
6952 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
6953 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
6954 exist).</p>
6955
6956       </div>
6957       <div class="tags">
6958
6959
6960         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6961
6962
6963       </div>
6964     </div>
6965     <div class="padding"></div>
6966
6967     <div class="entry">
6968       <div class="title">
6969         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/July_13th__Debian_Ubuntu_BSP_and_Skolelinux_Debian_Edu_developer_gathering_in_Oslo.html">July 13th: Debian/Ubuntu BSP and Skolelinux/Debian Edu developer gathering in Oslo</a>
6970       </div>
6971       <div class="date">
6972          9th July 2013
6973       </div>
6974       <div class="body">
6975         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
6976 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
6977 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
6978 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
6979 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
6980 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
6981 Bitraf</a>.</p>
6982
6983 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
6984 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
6985 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
6986 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
6987 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
6988
6989       </div>
6990       <div class="tags">
6991
6992
6993         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
6994
6995
6996       </div>
6997     </div>
6998     <div class="padding"></div>
6999
7000     <div class="entry">
7001       <div class="title">
7002         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230?</a>
7003       </div>
7004       <div class="date">
7005          5th July 2013
7006       </div>
7007       <div class="body">
7008         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
7009 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
7010 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
7011 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
7012 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
7013 ended up picking a
7014 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
7015 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
7016 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
7017 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
7018 on that below.</p>
7019
7020 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
7021 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
7022 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
7023 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
7024 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
7025 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
7026 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
7027 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
7028 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
7029
7030 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
7031 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
7032 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
7033 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
7034 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
7035 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
7036 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
7037
7038 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
7039 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
7040
7041 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
7042 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
7043 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
7044 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
7045 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
7046 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
7047 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
7048 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
7049 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
7050 kernel developers as
7051 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
7052 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
7053 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
7054 Lenovo forums, both for
7055 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
7056 2012-11-10</a> and for
7057 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/x230-SATA-errors-with-180GB-Intel-520-SSD-under-heavy-write-load/m-p/1068147">X230
7058 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
7059 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
7060 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
7061 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
7062 There is even a
7063 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
7064 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
7065 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
7066
7067 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
7068 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
7069 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
7070 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
7071 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
7072 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
7073 fixed. :)</p>
7074
7075       </div>
7076       <div class="tags">
7077
7078
7079         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7080
7081
7082       </div>
7083     </div>
7084     <div class="padding"></div>
7085
7086     <div class="entry">
7087       <div class="title">
7088         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230</a>
7089       </div>
7090       <div class="date">
7091          4th July 2013
7092       </div>
7093       <div class="body">
7094         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
7095 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
7096 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
7097 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
7098 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
7099 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
7100 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
7101 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
7102 with an expencive door stop.</p>
7103
7104 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
7105 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
7106 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
7107 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
7108 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
7109 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
7110 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
7111
7112 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
7113 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
7114 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
7115 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
7116 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
7117 new laptop now. :)</p>
7118
7119 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
7120
7121       </div>
7122       <div class="tags">
7123
7124
7125         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7126
7127
7128       </div>
7129     </div>
7130     <div class="padding"></div>
7131
7132     <div class="entry">
7133       <div class="title">
7134         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_locate_and_install_required_firmware_packages_on_Debian__Isenkram_0_4_.html">Automatically locate and install required firmware packages on Debian (Isenkram 0.4)</a>
7135       </div>
7136       <div class="date">
7137         25th June 2013
7138       </div>
7139       <div class="body">
7140         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
7141 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
7142 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
7143 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
7144 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
7145 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
7146 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
7147 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
7148 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
7149 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
7150 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
7151
7152 <p><pre>
7153 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
7154 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
7155 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
7156 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
7157 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
7158 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
7159 firmware-ipw2x00
7160 firmware-ipw2x00
7161 Preconfiguring packages ...
7162 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
7163 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
7164 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
7165 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
7166 #
7167 </pre></p>
7168
7169 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
7170 printed instead:</p>
7171
7172 <p><pre>
7173 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
7174 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
7175 #
7176 </pre></p>
7177
7178 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
7179 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
7180
7181 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
7182 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
7183 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
7184 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
7185 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
7186 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
7187 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
7188 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
7189 machine.</p>
7190
7191 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
7192 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
7193 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
7194 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
7195 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
7196 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
7197
7198       </div>
7199       <div class="tags">
7200
7201
7202         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
7203
7204
7205       </div>
7206     </div>
7207     <div class="padding"></div>
7208
7209     <div class="entry">
7210       <div class="title">
7211         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_the_Linux_black_screen_of_death_on_machines_with_Intel_HD_video.html">Fixing the Linux black screen of death on machines with Intel HD video</a>
7212       </div>
7213       <div class="date">
7214         11th June 2013
7215       </div>
7216       <div class="body">
7217         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
7218 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
7219 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
7220 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
7221 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
7222 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
7223 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
7224 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
7225 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
7226 i915 driver used by the
7227 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
7228 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
7229
7230 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
7231 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
7232 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
7233 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
7234 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
7235
7236 <pre>
7237 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
7238 update-initramfs -u -k all
7239 </pre>
7240
7241 <p>Since March 2012 there is
7242 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
7243 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
7244 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
7245 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
7246 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
7247 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
7248 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
7249 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
7250 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
7251 number.</p>
7252
7253 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
7254 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
7255
7256 <p><pre>
7257 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
7258     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
7259     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
7260  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
7261  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
7262     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
7263  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
7264     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
7265  Latency: 0
7266  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
7267  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
7268  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
7269  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
7270  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
7271  Capabilities: <access denied>
7272  Kernel driver in use: i915
7273 </pre></p>
7274
7275 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
7276
7277 <p><pre>
7278 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
7279        ...
7280         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
7281         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
7282        ...
7283 }
7284 </pre></p>
7285
7286 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
7287 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
7288 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
7289 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
7290 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
7291 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
7292 yet shown up in
7293 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
7294 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
7295 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
7296 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
7297 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
7298 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
7299
7300 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
7301 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
7302 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
7303 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
7304 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
7305 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
7306 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
7307 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
7308 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
7309 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
7310 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
7311 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
7312
7313 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
7314 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
7315 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
7316 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
7317 backlight.</p>
7318
7319       </div>
7320       <div class="tags">
7321
7322
7323         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7324
7325
7326       </div>
7327     </div>
7328     <div class="padding"></div>
7329
7330     <div class="entry">
7331       <div class="title">
7332         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8.html">How to install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8</a>
7333       </div>
7334       <div class="date">
7335         27th May 2013
7336       </div>
7337       <div class="body">
7338         <p>Two days ago, I asked
7339 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html">how
7340 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
7341 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
7342 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
7343 and Windows 8.</p>
7344
7345 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
7346 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
7347 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
7348 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
7349 enough to tell.</p>
7350
7351 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
7352 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
7353 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
7354 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
7355 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
7356 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
7357 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
7358 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
7359 to follow.</p>
7360
7361 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
7362 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
7363 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
7364 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
7365 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
7366 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
7367 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
7368 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
7369
7370 <p>I've updated the
7371 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
7372 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
7373 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
7374 machine.</p>
7375
7376 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
7377 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
7378
7379       </div>
7380       <div class="tags">
7381
7382
7383         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7384
7385
7386       </div>
7387     </div>
7388     <div class="padding"></div>
7389
7390     <div class="entry">
7391       <div class="title">
7392         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html">How can I install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8?</a>
7393       </div>
7394       <div class="date">
7395         25th May 2013
7396       </div>
7397       <div class="body">
7398         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
7399 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
7400 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
7401 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
7402 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
7403 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
7404
7405 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
7406 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
7407 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
7408 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
7409 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
7410 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
7411 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
7412 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
7413 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
7414 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
7415
7416 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
7417 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
7418 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
7419 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
7420 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
7421 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
7422
7423 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
7424 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
7425 on new Laptops?</p>
7426
7427       </div>
7428       <div class="tags">
7429
7430
7431         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7432
7433
7434       </div>
7435     </div>
7436     <div class="padding"></div>
7437
7438     <div class="entry">
7439       <div class="title">
7440         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_transform_a_Debian_based_system_to_a_Debian_Edu_installation.html">How to transform a Debian based system to a Debian Edu installation</a>
7441       </div>
7442       <div class="date">
7443         17th May 2013
7444       </div>
7445       <div class="body">
7446         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
7447 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
7448 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
7449 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
7450 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
7451 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
7452 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
7453 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
7454 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
7455 donate some money</a>.
7456
7457 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
7458 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
7459 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
7460 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
7461 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
7462
7463 <p>The script,
7464 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/branches/wheezy/debian-edu-config/share/debian-edu-config/tools/debian-edu-bless?view=markup">debian-edu-bless<a/>
7465 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
7466 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
7467 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
7468
7469 <ol>
7470
7471 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
7472 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
7473 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
7474     our configuration.</li>
7475 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
7476     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
7477     according to the profile specified in the config above,
7478     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
7479 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
7480     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
7481 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
7482
7483 </ol>
7484
7485 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
7486 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
7487 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
7488 the needed packages.</p>
7489
7490 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
7491 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
7492 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
7493 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
7494 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
7495 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
7496
7497 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
7498 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
7499 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
7500
7501 <p><pre>
7502 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
7503 DESKTOP="lxde"
7504 </pre></p>
7505
7506 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
7507 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
7508 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
7509 boot.</p>
7510
7511       </div>
7512       <div class="tags">
7513
7514
7515         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7516
7517
7518       </div>
7519     </div>
7520     <div class="padding"></div>
7521
7522     <div class="entry">
7523       <div class="title">
7524         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian__the_Linux_distribution_of_choice_for_LEGO_designers_.html">Debian, the Linux distribution of choice for LEGO designers?</a>
7525       </div>
7526       <div class="date">
7527         11th May 2013
7528       </div>
7529       <div class="body">
7530         <P>In January,
7531 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
7532 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
7533 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
7534 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
7535 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
7536 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
7537 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
7538 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
7539 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
7540 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
7541 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
7542 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
7543
7544 <p><table>
7545 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/brickos">brickos</a></td><td>alternative OS for LEGO Mindstorms RCX. Supports development in C/C++</td></tr>
7546 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
7547 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libnxt">libnxt</a></td><td>utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NX</td></tr>
7548 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
7549 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
7550 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
7551 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/python-nxt">python-nxt</a></td><td>python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot</td></tr>
7552 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/python-nxt-filer">python-nxt-filer</a></td><td>simple GUI to manage files on a LEGO Mindstorms NXT</td></tr>
7553 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/scratch">scratch</a></td><td>easy to use programming environment for ages 8 and up</td></tr>
7554 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
7555 </table></p>
7556
7557 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
7558 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
7559 available in experimental.</p>
7560
7561 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
7562 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
7563 for LEGO designers.</p>
7564
7565       </div>
7566       <div class="tags">
7567
7568
7569         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
7570
7571
7572       </div>
7573     </div>
7574     <div class="padding"></div>
7575
7576     <div class="entry">
7577       <div class="title">
7578         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Wheezy_is_out___and_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_should_soon_follow___newinwheezy.html">Debian Wheezy is out - and Debian Edu / Skolelinux should soon follow! #newinwheezy</a>
7579       </div>
7580       <div class="date">
7581          5th May 2013
7582       </div>
7583       <div class="body">
7584         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
7585 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
7586 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
7587 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
7588 soon.</p>
7589
7590 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
7591 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
7592 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
7593 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
7594 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
7595 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
7596 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
7597 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
7598 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
7599 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
7600 Edu.</a>
7601
7602 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
7603 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
7604 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
7605 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
7606 follow.<p>
7607
7608       </div>
7609       <div class="tags">
7610
7611
7612         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7613
7614
7615       </div>
7616     </div>
7617     <div class="padding"></div>
7618
7619     <div class="entry">
7620       <div class="title">
7621         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_0_2_finally_in_the_Debian_archive.html">Isenkram 0.2 finally in the Debian archive</a>
7622       </div>
7623       <div class="date">
7624          3rd April 2013
7625       </div>
7626       <div class="body">
7627         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
7628 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
7629 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
7630 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
7631
7632 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
7633 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
7634 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
7635 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
7636 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
7637 BTS. :)</p>
7638
7639       </div>
7640       <div class="tags">
7641
7642
7643         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
7644
7645
7646       </div>
7647     </div>
7648     <div class="padding"></div>
7649
7650     <div class="entry">
7651       <div class="title">
7652         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html">Bitcoin GUI now available from Debian/unstable (and Ubuntu/raring)</a>
7653       </div>
7654       <div class="date">
7655          2nd February 2013
7656       </div>
7657       <div class="body">
7658         <p>My
7659 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
7660 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
7661 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
7662 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
7663 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
7664 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
7665 version too.</p>
7666
7667 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
7668 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
7669 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
7670 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
7671 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
7672 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
7673 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
7674 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
7675
7676 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
7677 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
7678 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
7679 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
7680 it. :)</p>
7681
7682 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
7683 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
7684 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
7685
7686       </div>
7687       <div class="tags">
7688
7689
7690         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7691
7692
7693       </div>
7694     </div>
7695     <div class="padding"></div>
7696
7697     <div class="entry">
7698       <div class="title">
7699         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
7700       </div>
7701       <div class="date">
7702         22nd January 2013
7703       </div>
7704       <div class="body">
7705         <p>Yesterday, I
7706 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
7707 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
7708 pluggable hardware devices, which I
7709 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
7710 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
7711 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
7712 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
7713 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
7714 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
7715 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
7716 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
7717 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
7718 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
7719
7720 <pre>
7721 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
7722 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
7723 </pre>
7724
7725 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
7726 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
7727 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
7728 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
7729
7730 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
7731 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
7732 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
7733 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
7734 word.</p>
7735
7736 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
7737 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
7738 process.</p>
7739
7740 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
7741 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
7742
7743       </div>
7744       <div class="tags">
7745
7746
7747         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
7748
7749
7750       </div>
7751     </div>
7752     <div class="padding"></div>
7753
7754     <div class="entry">
7755       <div class="title">
7756         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">First prototype ready making hardware easier to use in Debian</a>
7757       </div>
7758       <div class="date">
7759         21st January 2013
7760       </div>
7761       <div class="body">
7762         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
7763 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
7764 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
7765 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
7766 it, fetch the
7767 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
7768 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
7769 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
7770 autostart script.</p>
7771
7772 <p>The design is simple:</p>
7773
7774 <ul>
7775
7776 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
7777 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
7778
7779 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
7780 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
7781 initially did.</li>
7782
7783 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
7784 the APT database, a database
7785 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
7786 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
7787
7788 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
7789 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
7790 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
7791 package or packages.</li>
7792
7793 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
7794 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
7795
7796 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
7797 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
7798
7799 </ul>
7800
7801 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
7802 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
7803 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
7804 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
7805
7806 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
7807 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
7808 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
7809 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
7810 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
7811
7812 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
7813 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
7814 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
7815 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
7816 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
7817 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
7818 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
7819 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
7820
7821 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
7822 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
7823 '<tt>svn checkout
7824 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
7825 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
7826 devscripts package.</p>
7827
7828 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
7829 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
7830 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
7831 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
7832 instructions</a> for details.</p>
7833
7834       </div>
7835       <div class="tags">
7836
7837
7838         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
7839
7840
7841       </div>
7842     </div>
7843     <div class="padding"></div>
7844
7845     <div class="entry">
7846       <div class="title">
7847         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">Thank you Thinkpad X41, for your long and trustworthy service</a>
7848       </div>
7849       <div class="date">
7850         19th January 2013
7851       </div>
7852       <div class="body">
7853         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
7854 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
7855 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
7856 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
7857 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
7858 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
7859 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
7860 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
7861 not a durable solution.
7862
7863 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
7864 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
7865
7866 <ul>
7867
7868 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
7869   than A4).</li>
7870 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
7871 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
7872 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
7873 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
7874 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
7875 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
7876 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
7877 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
7878 size).</li>
7879 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
7880   X.org packages.</li>
7881 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
7882   the time).
7883
7884 </ul>
7885
7886 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
7887 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
7888 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
7889 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
7890 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
7891 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
7892 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
7893 still be useful.</p>
7894
7895 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
7896 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
7897 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
7898 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
7899 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
7900 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
7901
7902       </div>
7903       <div class="tags">
7904
7905
7906         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7907
7908
7909       </div>
7910     </div>
7911     <div class="padding"></div>
7912
7913     <div class="entry">
7914       <div class="title">
7915         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_find_a_browser_plugin_supporting_a_given_MIME_type.html">How to find a browser plugin supporting a given MIME type</a>
7916       </div>
7917       <div class="date">
7918         18th January 2013
7919       </div>
7920       <div class="body">
7921         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
7922 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
7923 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
7924 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
7925 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
7926 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
7927 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
7928
7929 <pre>
7930 #!/usr/bin/python
7931 import sys
7932 import apt
7933 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
7934     cache = apt.Cache()
7935     cache.open(None)
7936     thepkgs = []
7937     for pkg in cache:
7938         version = pkg.candidate
7939         if version is None:
7940             version = pkg.installed
7941         if version is None:
7942             continue
7943         record = version.record
7944         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
7945             continue
7946         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
7947         for t in mime_types:
7948             t = t.rstrip().strip()
7949             if t == mimetype:
7950                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
7951     return thepkgs
7952 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
7953 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
7954     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
7955 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
7956 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
7957     print "  %s" %pkg
7958 </pre>
7959
7960 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
7961
7962 <pre>
7963 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
7964 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
7965   gecko-mediaplayer
7966 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
7967 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
7968   browser-plugin-gnash
7969 %
7970 </pre>
7971
7972 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
7973 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
7974 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
7975 anyone working on adding it?</p>
7976
7977 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
7978 request for icweasel support for this feature is
7979 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
7980 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
7981 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
7982 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
7983
7984       </div>
7985       <div class="tags">
7986
7987
7988         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7989
7990
7991       </div>
7992     </div>
7993     <div class="padding"></div>
7994
7995     <div class="entry">
7996       <div class="title">
7997         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">What is the most supported MIME type in Debian?</a>
7998       </div>
7999       <div class="date">
8000         16th January 2013
8001       </div>
8002       <div class="body">
8003         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
8004 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
8005 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
8006 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
8007 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
8008 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
8009 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
8010 downloaded by the browser.</p>
8011
8012 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
8013 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
8014 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
8015 can be found on the
8016 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
8017 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
8018 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
8019 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
8020 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
8021
8022 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
8023
8024 <pre>
8025   count MIME type
8026   ----- -----------------------
8027      32 text/plain
8028      30 audio/mpeg
8029      29 image/png
8030      28 image/jpeg
8031      27 application/ogg
8032      26 audio/x-mp3
8033      25 image/tiff
8034      25 image/gif
8035      22 image/bmp
8036      22 audio/x-wav
8037      20 audio/x-flac
8038      19 audio/x-mpegurl
8039      18 video/x-ms-asf
8040      18 audio/x-musepack
8041      18 audio/x-mpeg
8042      18 application/x-ogg
8043      17 video/mpeg
8044      17 audio/x-scpls
8045      17 audio/ogg
8046      16 video/x-ms-wmv
8047 </pre>
8048
8049 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
8050
8051 <pre>
8052   count MIME type
8053   ----- -----------------------
8054      33 text/plain
8055      32 image/png
8056      32 image/jpeg
8057      29 audio/mpeg
8058      27 image/gif
8059      26 image/tiff
8060      26 application/ogg
8061      25 audio/x-mp3
8062      22 image/bmp
8063      21 audio/x-wav
8064      19 audio/x-mpegurl
8065      19 audio/x-mpeg
8066      18 video/mpeg
8067      18 audio/x-scpls
8068      18 audio/x-flac
8069      18 application/x-ogg
8070      17 video/x-ms-asf
8071      17 text/html
8072      17 audio/x-musepack
8073      16 image/x-xbitmap
8074 </pre>
8075
8076 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
8077
8078 <pre>
8079   count MIME type
8080   ----- -----------------------
8081      31 text/plain
8082      31 image/png
8083      31 image/jpeg
8084      29 audio/mpeg
8085      28 application/ogg
8086      27 image/gif
8087      26 image/tiff
8088      26 audio/x-mp3
8089      23 audio/x-wav
8090      22 image/bmp
8091      21 audio/x-flac
8092      20 audio/x-mpegurl
8093      19 audio/x-mpeg
8094      18 video/x-ms-asf
8095      18 video/mpeg
8096      18 audio/x-scpls
8097      18 application/x-ogg
8098      17 audio/x-musepack
8099      16 video/x-ms-wmv
8100      16 video/x-msvideo
8101 </pre>
8102
8103 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
8104 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
8105 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
8106 issues.</p>
8107
8108 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
8109 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
8110
8111       </div>
8112       <div class="tags">
8113
8114
8115         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8116
8117
8118       </div>
8119     </div>
8120     <div class="padding"></div>
8121
8122     <div class="entry">
8123       <div class="title">
8124         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_modalias_info_to_find_packages_handling_my_hardware.html">Using modalias info to find packages handling my hardware</a>
8125       </div>
8126       <div class="date">
8127         15th January 2013
8128       </div>
8129       <div class="body">
8130         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
8131 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
8132 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
8133 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
8134 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
8135 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
8136 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
8137 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
8138 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
8139 packages.</p>
8140
8141 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
8142 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
8143 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
8144 modalias.</p>
8145
8146 <p><blockquote>
8147 Package: package-name
8148 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
8149 </blockquote></p>
8150
8151 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
8152 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
8153
8154 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
8155 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
8156
8157 <p><blockquote>
8158 Package: cheese
8159 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
8160 </blockquote></p>
8161
8162 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
8163 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
8164
8165 <p><blockquote>
8166 Package: pcmciautils
8167 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
8168 </blockquote></p>
8169
8170 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
8171 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
8172
8173 <p><blockquote>
8174 Package: colorhug-client
8175 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
8176 </blockquote></p>
8177
8178 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
8179 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
8180 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
8181
8182 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
8183 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
8184 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
8185 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
8186 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
8187 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
8188 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
8189 Raring.</p>
8190
8191 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
8192 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
8193 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
8194 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
8195 try the
8196 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
8197 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
8198 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
8199 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
8200
8201 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
8202 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
8203
8204 <p><blockquote>
8205 % ./hw-support-lookup
8206 <br>yubikey-personalization
8207 <br>%
8208 </blockquote></p>
8209
8210 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
8211 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
8212
8213 <p><blockquote>
8214 % ./hw-support-lookup
8215 <br>pcmciautils
8216 <br>%
8217 </blockquote></p>
8218
8219 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
8220 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
8221 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
8222
8223 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
8224 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
8225 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
8226 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
8227 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
8228 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
8229 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
8230 see if it work.</p>
8231
8232 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
8233 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
8234 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
8235 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
8236
8237       </div>
8238       <div class="tags">
8239
8240
8241         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
8242
8243
8244       </div>
8245     </div>
8246     <div class="padding"></div>
8247
8248     <div class="entry">
8249       <div class="title">
8250         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">Modalias strings - a practical way to map "stuff" to hardware</a>
8251       </div>
8252       <div class="date">
8253         14th January 2013
8254       </div>
8255       <div class="body">
8256         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
8257 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
8258 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
8259 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
8260 in
8261 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
8262 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
8263
8264 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
8265
8266 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
8267 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
8268 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
8269 &lt;URL: <a href="http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/26132/how-to-assign-usb-driver-to-device">http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/26132/how-to-assign-usb-driver-to-device</a> &gt;,
8270 &lt;URL: <a href="http://code.metager.de/source/history/linux/stable/scripts/mod/file2alias.c">http://code.metager.de/source/history/linux/stable/scripts/mod/file2alias.c</a> &gt; and
8271 &lt;URL: <a href="http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/dmidecode/dmidecode.c?root=dmidecode&view=markup">http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/dmidecode/dmidecode.c?root=dmidecode&view=markup</a> &gt;.
8272
8273 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
8274 this shell script:</p>
8275
8276 <pre>
8277 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
8278 </pre>
8279
8280 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
8281 using modinfo:</p>
8282
8283 <pre>
8284 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
8285 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
8286 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
8287 %
8288 </pre>
8289
8290 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
8291
8292 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
8293 Bridge memory controller:</p>
8294
8295 <p><blockquote>
8296 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
8297 </blockquote></p>
8298
8299 <p>This represent these values:</p>
8300
8301 <pre>
8302  v   00008086  (vendor)
8303  d   00002770  (device)
8304  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
8305  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
8306  bc  06        (bus class)
8307  sc  00        (bus subclass)
8308  i   00        (interface)
8309 </pre>
8310
8311 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
8312 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
8313 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
8314 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
8315
8316 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
8317 means.</p>
8318
8319 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
8320
8321 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
8322 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
8323
8324 <p><blockquote>
8325 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
8326 </blockquote></p>
8327
8328 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
8329
8330 <pre>
8331  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
8332  p    0001  (device product)
8333  d    0206  (bcddevice)
8334  dc     09  (device class)
8335  dsc    00  (device subclass)
8336  dp     00  (device protocol)
8337  ic     09  (interface class)
8338  isc    00  (interface subclass)
8339  ip     00  (interface protocol)
8340 </pre>
8341
8342 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
8343 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
8344 these alias entries show up:</p>
8345
8346 <p><blockquote>
8347 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
8348 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
8349 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
8350 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
8351 </blockquote></p>
8352
8353 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
8354 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
8355 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
8356
8357 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
8358
8359 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
8360 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
8361
8362 <p><blockquote>
8363 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
8364 </blockquote></p>
8365
8366 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
8367
8368 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
8369
8370 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
8371 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
8372 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
8373
8374 <p><blockquote>
8375 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
8376 </blockquote></p>
8377
8378 <p>The values present are</p>
8379
8380 <pre>
8381  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
8382  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
8383  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
8384  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
8385  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
8386  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
8387  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
8388  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
8389  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
8390  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
8391  ct   10             (chassis type)
8392  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
8393 </pre>
8394
8395 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
8396 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
8397
8398 <pre>
8399   3 Desktop
8400   4 Low Profile Desktop
8401   5 Pizza Box
8402   6 Mini Tower
8403   7 Tower
8404   8 Portable
8405   9 Laptop
8406  10 Notebook
8407  11 Hand Held
8408  12 Docking Station
8409  13 All In One
8410  14 Sub Notebook
8411  15 Space-saving
8412  16 Lunch Box
8413  17 Main Server Chassis
8414  18 Expansion Chassis
8415  19 Sub Chassis
8416  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
8417  21 Peripheral Chassis
8418  22 RAID Chassis
8419  23 Rack Mount Chassis
8420  24 Sealed-case PC
8421  25 Multi-system
8422  26 CompactPCI
8423  27 AdvancedTCA
8424  28 Blade
8425  29 Blade Enclosing
8426 </pre>
8427
8428 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
8429 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
8430 claim it is a desktop.</p>
8431
8432 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
8433
8434 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
8435 test machine:</p>
8436
8437 <p><blockquote>
8438 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
8439 </blockquote></p>
8440
8441 <p>The values present are</p>
8442
8443 <pre>
8444   ty  01  (type)
8445   pr  00  (prototype)
8446   id  00  (id)
8447   ex  00  (extra)
8448 </pre>
8449
8450 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
8451 the valid values are.</p>
8452
8453 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
8454
8455 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
8456 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
8457 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
8458 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
8459 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
8460 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
8461 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
8462
8463 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
8464
8465 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
8466 one can use the following shell script:</p>
8467
8468 <pre>
8469   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
8470     echo "$id" ; \
8471     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
8472   done
8473 </pre>
8474
8475 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
8476 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
8477
8478 <pre>
8479   acpi:ACPI0003:
8480     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
8481   acpi:device:
8482   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
8483   acpi:IBM0068:
8484     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
8485     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
8486     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
8487     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
8488   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
8489     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
8490     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
8491     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
8492   [...]
8493 </pre>
8494
8495 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
8496 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
8497 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
8498 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
8499
8500 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
8501 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
8502 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
8503
8504       </div>
8505       <div class="tags">
8506
8507
8508         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
8509
8510
8511       </div>
8512     </div>
8513     <div class="padding"></div>
8514
8515     <div class="entry">
8516       <div class="title">
8517         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html">Moved the pymissile Debian packaging to collab-maint</a>
8518       </div>
8519       <div class="date">
8520         10th January 2013
8521       </div>
8522       <div class="body">
8523         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
8524 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
8525 Launcher and updated the Debian package
8526 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
8527 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
8528 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
8529 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
8530 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
8531 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
8532 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
8533 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
8534 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
8535 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
8536 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
8537 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
8538 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
8539 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
8540 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
8541
8542       </div>
8543       <div class="tags">
8544
8545
8546         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
8547
8548
8549       </div>
8550     </div>
8551     <div class="padding"></div>
8552
8553     <div class="entry">
8554       <div class="title">
8555         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">Lets make hardware dongles easier to use in Debian</a>
8556       </div>
8557       <div class="date">
8558          9th January 2013
8559       </div>
8560       <div class="body">
8561         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
8562 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
8563 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
8564 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
8565 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
8566 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
8567 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
8568 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
8569 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
8570 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
8571 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
8572
8573 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
8574 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
8575 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
8576 simple:
8577
8578 <ul>
8579
8580 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
8581   starting when a user log in.</li>
8582
8583 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
8584   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
8585
8586 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
8587   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
8588   packages.</li>
8589
8590 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
8591   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
8592
8593 </ul>
8594
8595 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
8596 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
8597 discover database to find packages and
8598 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
8599 packages.</p>
8600
8601 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
8602 draft package is now checked into
8603 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
8604 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
8605 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
8606 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
8607 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
8608 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
8609 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
8610 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
8611 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
8612 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
8613 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
8614 because of the freeze).</p>
8615
8616 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
8617 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
8618 inserted):</p>
8619
8620 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
8621
8622 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
8623 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
8624 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
8625
8626 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
8627 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
8628 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
8629 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
8630 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
8631 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
8632 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
8633
8634 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
8635 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
8636 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
8637 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
8638 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
8639 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
8640 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
8641 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
8642 not be installed?</p>
8643
8644 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
8645 please send me an email. :)</p>
8646
8647       </div>
8648       <div class="tags">
8649
8650
8651         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
8652
8653
8654       </div>
8655     </div>
8656     <div class="padding"></div>
8657
8658     <div class="entry">
8659       <div class="title">
8660         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">New IRC channel for LEGO designers using Debian</a>
8661       </div>
8662       <div class="date">
8663          2nd January 2013
8664       </div>
8665       <div class="body">
8666         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
8667 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
8668 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
8669 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
8670 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
8671 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
8672 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
8673 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
8674 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
8675 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
8676
8677 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
8678 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
8679 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
8680
8681       </div>
8682       <div class="tags">
8683
8684
8685         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
8686
8687
8688       </div>
8689     </div>
8690     <div class="padding"></div>
8691
8692     <div class="entry">
8693       <div class="title">
8694         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">How to backport bitcoin-qt version 0.7.2-2 to Debian Squeeze</a>
8695       </div>
8696       <div class="date">
8697         25th December 2012
8698       </div>
8699       <div class="body">
8700         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
8701 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
8702
8703 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
8704 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
8705 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
8706 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
8707 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
8708 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
8709 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
8710 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
8711 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
8712 name.</p>
8713
8714 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
8715 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
8716 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
8717
8718 <blockquote><pre>
8719 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
8720 cd bitcoin
8721 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
8722 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
8723 </pre></blockquote>
8724
8725 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
8726 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
8727 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
8728 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
8729 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
8730 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
8731 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
8732 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
8733 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
8734
8735 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
8736 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
8737 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
8738
8739       </div>
8740       <div class="tags">
8741
8742
8743         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8744
8745
8746       </div>
8747     </div>
8748     <div class="padding"></div>
8749
8750     <div class="entry">
8751       <div class="title">
8752         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
8753       </div>
8754       <div class="date">
8755         21st December 2012
8756       </div>
8757       <div class="body">
8758         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
8759 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
8760 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
8761 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
8762 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
8763 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
8764 is now maintained by a
8765 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
8766 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
8767 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
8768 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
8769 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
8770 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
8771 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
8772 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
8773 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
8774 Corallo in a
8775 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
8776 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
8777 Debian package.</p>
8778
8779 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
8780 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
8781 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
8782 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
8783 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
8784 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
8785 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
8786 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
8787 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
8788 new version to unstable.
8789
8790 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
8791 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
8792 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
8793 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
8794 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
8795 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
8796 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
8797 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
8798 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
8799 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
8800 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
8801 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
8802 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
8803 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
8804 have not tested them.</p>
8805
8806 <p>My
8807 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
8808 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
8809 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
8810 years ago, as can be
8811 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
8812 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
8813 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
8814 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
8815 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
8816 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
8817 the same address as last time,
8818 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
8819
8820       </div>
8821       <div class="tags">
8822
8823
8824         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8825
8826
8827       </div>
8828     </div>
8829     <div class="padding"></div>
8830
8831     <div class="entry">
8832       <div class="title">
8833         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Git repository for song book for Computer Scientists</a>
8834       </div>
8835       <div class="date">
8836          7th September 2012
8837       </div>
8838       <div class="body">
8839         <p>As I
8840 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
8841 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
8842 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
8843 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
8844 repository for the project</a>.</p>
8845
8846 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
8847 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
8848 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
8849 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
8850
8851 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
8852 PostScript formats at
8853 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
8854 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
8855
8856       </div>
8857       <div class="tags">
8858
8859
8860         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
8861
8862
8863       </div>
8864     </div>
8865     <div class="padding"></div>
8866
8867     <div class="entry">
8868       <div class="title">
8869         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gratulerer_med_19__rsdagen__Debian_.html">Gratulerer med 19-årsdagen, Debian!</a>
8870       </div>
8871       <div class="date">
8872         16th August 2012
8873       </div>
8874       <div class="body">
8875         <p>I dag fyller
8876 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120813">Debian-prosjektet 19
8877 år</a>.  Jeg har fulgt det de siste 12 årene, og er veldig glad for å kunne
8878 si gratulerer med dagen, Debian!</p>
8879
8880       </div>
8881       <div class="tags">
8882
8883
8884         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
8885
8886
8887       </div>
8888     </div>
8889     <div class="padding"></div>
8890
8891     <div class="entry">
8892       <div class="title">
8893         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
8894       </div>
8895       <div class="date">
8896         24th June 2012
8897       </div>
8898       <div class="body">
8899         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
8900 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
8901 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
8902 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
8903 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
8904 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
8905 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
8906 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
8907 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
8908 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
8909 missing in my book.</p>
8910
8911 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
8912 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
8913 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
8914 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
8915 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
8916 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
8917 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
8918
8919       </div>
8920       <div class="tags">
8921
8922
8923         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
8924
8925
8926       </div>
8927     </div>
8928     <div class="padding"></div>
8929
8930     <div class="entry">
8931       <div class="title">
8932         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
8933       </div>
8934       <div class="date">
8935         21st November 2011
8936       </div>
8937       <div class="body">
8938         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
8939 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
8940 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
8941 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
8942 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
8943 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
8944 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
8945 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
8946 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
8947 the tools to do so.</p>
8948
8949 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
8950 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
8951 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
8952 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
8953
8954 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
8955 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
8956 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
8957 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
8958 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
8959 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
8960 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
8961 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
8962
8963 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
8964 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
8965 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
8966
8967 <p><pre>
8968 #!/usr/bin/perl
8969 use strict;
8970 use warnings;
8971 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
8972 BEGIN {
8973     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
8974     my %rhelmodules = (
8975         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
8976         );
8977     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
8978         eval "use $module;";
8979         if ($@) {
8980             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
8981             system("yum install -y $pkg");
8982             eval "use $module;";
8983         }
8984     }
8985 }
8986 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
8987
8988 upgrade_dell();
8989
8990 exit 0;
8991
8992 sub run_firmware_script {
8993     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
8994     unless ($script) {
8995         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
8996         exit 1
8997     }
8998     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
8999
9000     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
9001         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
9002     } else {
9003         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
9004     }
9005 }
9006
9007 sub run_firmware_scripts {
9008     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
9009     # Run firmware packages
9010     for my $dir (@dirs) {
9011         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
9012         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
9013         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
9014             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
9015             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
9016         }
9017         closedir $dh;
9018     }
9019 }
9020
9021 sub download {
9022     my $url = shift;
9023     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
9024     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
9025 }
9026
9027 sub upgrade_dell {
9028     my @dirs;
9029     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
9030     chomp $product;
9031
9032     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
9033
9034         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
9035         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
9036
9037         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
9038             CLEANUP => 1
9039             );
9040         chdir($tmpdir);
9041         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
9042         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
9043         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
9044         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
9045         my $fwopts = "-q";
9046         if (@paths) {
9047             for my $url (@paths) {
9048                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
9049             }
9050             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
9051         } else {
9052             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
9053             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
9054         }
9055         chdir('/');
9056     } else {
9057         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
9058         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
9059     }
9060 }
9061
9062 sub fetch_dell_fw {
9063     my $path = shift;
9064     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
9065     download($url);
9066 }
9067
9068 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
9069 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
9070 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
9071 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
9072     my $filename = shift;
9073
9074     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
9075     chomp $product;
9076     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
9077
9078     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
9079
9080     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
9081     my @paths;
9082     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
9083         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
9084         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
9085         my $oscode;
9086         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
9087             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
9088         } else {
9089             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
9090         }
9091         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
9092         {
9093             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
9094         }
9095     }
9096     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
9097         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
9098
9099         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
9100         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
9101
9102         my $cpath = $component->{path};
9103         for my $path (@paths) {
9104             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
9105                 push(@paths, $cpath);
9106             }
9107         }
9108     }
9109     return @paths;
9110 }
9111 </pre>
9112
9113 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
9114 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
9115 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
9116 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
9117 outdated.</p>
9118
9119       </div>
9120       <div class="tags">
9121
9122
9123         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9124
9125
9126       </div>
9127     </div>
9128     <div class="padding"></div>
9129
9130     <div class="entry">
9131       <div class="title">
9132         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html">How is booting into runlevel 1 different from single user boots?</a>
9133       </div>
9134       <div class="date">
9135          4th August 2011
9136       </div>
9137       <div class="body">
9138         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
9139 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
9140 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
9141 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
9142 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
9143 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
9144 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
9145 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
9146 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
9147
9148 <p><blockquote>
9149 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
9150 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
9151 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
9152 </blockquote></p>
9153
9154 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
9155 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
9156 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
9157 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
9158 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
9159 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
9160 hard to explain.</p>
9161
9162 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
9163 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
9164 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
9165 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
9166 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
9167 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
9168 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
9169 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
9170 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
9171 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
9172 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
9173 mode).</p>
9174
9175 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
9176 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
9177 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
9178 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
9179 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
9180 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
9181 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
9182 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
9183 after visiting single user mode.</p>
9184
9185 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
9186 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
9187 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
9188 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
9189 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
9190 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
9191 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
9192 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
9193
9194 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
9195 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
9196 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
9197
9198       </div>
9199       <div class="tags">
9200
9201
9202         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9203
9204
9205       </div>
9206     </div>
9207     <div class="padding"></div>
9208
9209     <div class="entry">
9210       <div class="title">
9211         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">What should start from /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian? - almost nothing</a>
9212       </div>
9213       <div class="date">
9214         30th July 2011
9215       </div>
9216       <div class="body">
9217         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
9218 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
9219 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
9220 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
9221 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
9222 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
9223 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
9224 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
9225 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
9226 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
9227 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
9228 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
9229 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
9230
9231 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
9232 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
9233 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
9234 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
9235 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
9236 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
9237 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
9238 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
9239 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
9240
9241 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
9242 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
9243 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
9244 is presented.</p>
9245
9246 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
9247 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
9248 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
9249 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
9250 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
9251 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
9252 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
9253 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
9254 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
9255 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
9256 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
9257 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
9258 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
9259 find time to push this forward.</p>
9260
9261       </div>
9262       <div class="tags">
9263
9264
9265         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9266
9267
9268       </div>
9269     </div>
9270     <div class="padding"></div>
9271
9272     <div class="entry">
9273       <div class="title">
9274         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">What is missing in the Debian desktop, or why my parents use Kubuntu</a>
9275       </div>
9276       <div class="date">
9277         29th July 2011
9278       </div>
9279       <div class="body">
9280         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
9281 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
9282 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
9283 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
9284 issues.</p>
9285
9286 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
9287 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
9288 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
9289
9290 <ol>
9291
9292 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
9293 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
9294 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
9295 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
9296 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
9297 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
9298 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
9299 Debian.</li>
9300
9301 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
9302 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
9303 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
9304 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
9305 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
9306 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
9307 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
9308 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
9309 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
9310 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
9311 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
9312 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
9313 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
9314
9315 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
9316 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
9317 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
9318 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
9319 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
9320 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
9321 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
9322 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
9323 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
9324 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
9325
9326 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
9327 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
9328 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
9329 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
9330 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
9331 latter behaviour.</li>
9332
9333 </ol>
9334
9335 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
9336 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
9337 it do not matter much.</p>
9338
9339 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
9340 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
9341 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
9342
9343       </div>
9344       <div class="tags">
9345
9346
9347         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
9348
9349
9350       </div>
9351     </div>
9352     <div class="padding"></div>
9353
9354     <div class="entry">
9355       <div class="title">
9356         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_modules_used_by_FixMyStreet_which_are_missing_in_Debian_Squeeze.html">Perl modules used by FixMyStreet which are missing in Debian/Squeeze</a>
9357       </div>
9358       <div class="date">
9359         26th July 2011
9360       </div>
9361       <div class="body">
9362         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
9363 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
9364 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
9365 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
9366 security support for a few years.</p>
9367
9368 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
9369 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
9370 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
9371 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
9372 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
9373 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
9374 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
9375 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
9376 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
9377 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
9378 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
9379 easier in the future.</p>
9380
9381 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
9382 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
9383 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
9384 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
9385 do not have time for.</p>
9386
9387       </div>
9388       <div class="tags">
9389
9390
9391         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>.
9392
9393
9394       </div>
9395     </div>
9396     <div class="padding"></div>
9397
9398     <div class="entry">
9399       <div class="title">
9400         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html">A Norwegian FixMyStreet have kept me busy the last few weeks</a>
9401       </div>
9402       <div class="date">
9403          3rd April 2011
9404       </div>
9405       <div class="body">
9406         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
9407 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
9408 update in English.</p>
9409
9410 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
9411 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
9412 of the British service
9413 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
9414 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
9415 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
9416 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
9417 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
9418 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
9419 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
9420 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
9421 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
9422 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
9423 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
9424 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
9425 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
9426
9427 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
9428 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
9429 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
9430 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
9431 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
9432 public infrastructure.</p>
9433
9434 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
9435 such service?</p>
9436
9437       </div>
9438       <div class="tags">
9439
9440
9441         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>.
9442
9443
9444       </div>
9445     </div>
9446     <div class="padding"></div>
9447
9448     <div class="entry">
9449       <div class="title">
9450         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html">Using NVD and CPE to track CVEs in locally maintained software</a>
9451       </div>
9452       <div class="date">
9453         28th January 2011
9454       </div>
9455       <div class="body">
9456         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
9457 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
9458 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
9459 available on the Internet, and check our locally
9460 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
9461 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
9462 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
9463 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
9464 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
9465 out which security holes were present in our free software
9466 collection.</p>
9467
9468 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
9469 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
9470 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
9471 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
9472 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
9473 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
9474 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
9475 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
9476 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
9477 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
9478 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
9479 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
9480 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
9481 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
9482 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
9483 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
9484
9485 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
9486 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
9487 check out, one could look up
9488 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search?cpe=cpe%3A%2Fa%3Agnu%3Agzip:1.3.3">cpe:/a:gnu:gzip:1.3.3
9489 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
9490 The most recent one is
9491 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
9492 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
9493 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
9494
9495 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
9496 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
9497 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
9498 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
9499 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
9500 security issues out.</p>
9501
9502 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
9503 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
9504 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
9505 RHEL is providing
9506 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
9507 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
9508 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
9509
9510 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
9511 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
9512 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
9513 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
9514 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
9515 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
9516 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
9517 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
9518 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
9519 established soon.</p>
9520
9521 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
9522 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
9523 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
9524 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
9525 for their packages.</p>
9526
9527       </div>
9528       <div class="tags">
9529
9530
9531         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
9532
9533
9534       </div>
9535     </div>
9536     <div class="padding"></div>
9537
9538     <div class="entry">
9539       <div class="title">
9540         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Which_module_is_loaded_for_a_given_PCI_and_USB_device_.html">Which module is loaded for a given PCI and USB device?</a>
9541       </div>
9542       <div class="date">
9543         23rd January 2011
9544       </div>
9545       <div class="body">
9546         <p>In the
9547 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
9548 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
9549 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
9550 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
9551 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
9552 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
9553 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
9554 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
9555 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
9556 one of my machines like this:</p>
9557
9558 <pre>
9559 loaded modules:
9560 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
9561 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
9562 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
9563 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
9564 10de:03ec pata_amd
9565 10de:03f6 sata_nv
9566 1022:1103 k8temp
9567 109e:036e bttv
9568 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
9569 11ab:4364 sky2
9570 </pre>
9571
9572 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
9573 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
9574
9575 <pre>
9576 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
9577     echo loaded pci modules:
9578     (
9579         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
9580         for address in * ; do
9581             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
9582                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
9583                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
9584                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
9585                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
9586                     echo "$id $module"
9587                 fi
9588             fi
9589         done
9590     )
9591     echo
9592 fi
9593 </pre>
9594
9595 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
9596 mappings:</p>
9597
9598 <pre>
9599 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
9600     echo loaded usb modules:
9601     (
9602         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
9603         for address in * ; do
9604             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
9605                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
9606                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
9607                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
9608                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
9609                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
9610                         echo "$id $module"
9611                     fi
9612                 fi
9613             fi
9614         done
9615     )
9616     echo
9617 fi
9618 </pre>
9619
9620 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
9621 well.</p>
9622
9623       </div>
9624       <div class="tags">
9625
9626
9627         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9628
9629
9630       </div>
9631     </div>
9632     <div class="padding"></div>
9633
9634     <div class="entry">
9635       <div class="title">
9636         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html">How to test if a laptop is working with Linux</a>
9637       </div>
9638       <div class="date">
9639         22nd December 2010
9640       </div>
9641       <div class="body">
9642         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
9643 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
9644 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
9645 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
9646 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
9647 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
9648 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
9649 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
9650 university.</p>
9651
9652 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
9653 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
9654 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
9655 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
9656 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
9657 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
9658 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
9659 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
9660
9661 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
9662 I perform on a new model.</p>
9663
9664 <ul>
9665
9666 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
9667 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
9668 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
9669
9670 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
9671 installation, X.org is working.</li>
9672
9673 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
9674 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
9675 reported by the program.</li>
9676
9677 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
9678 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
9679 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
9680 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
9681 normally test this by playing
9682 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
9683 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
9684
9685 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
9686 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
9687
9688 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
9689 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
9690
9691 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
9692 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
9693
9694 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
9695 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
9696 few.</li>
9697
9698 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
9699 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
9700 notice this.</li>
9701
9702 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
9703 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
9704 resume.</li>
9705
9706 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
9707 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
9708 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
9709 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
9710 not.</li>
9711
9712 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
9713 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
9714 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
9715 existence.</li>
9716
9717 </ul>
9718
9719 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
9720 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
9721 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
9722 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
9723 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
9724 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
9725 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
9726 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
9727
9728       </div>
9729       <div class="tags">
9730
9731
9732         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9733
9734
9735       </div>
9736     </div>
9737     <div class="padding"></div>
9738
9739     <div class="entry">
9740       <div class="title">
9741         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
9742       </div>
9743       <div class="date">
9744         11th December 2010
9745       </div>
9746       <div class="body">
9747         <p>As I continue to explore
9748 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
9749 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
9750 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
9751
9752 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
9753 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
9754 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
9755 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
9756 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
9757 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
9758 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
9759 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
9760 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
9761 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
9762 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
9763 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
9764 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
9765 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
9766 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
9767 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
9768 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
9769 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
9770 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
9771 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
9772
9773 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
9774 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
9775 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
9776 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
9777 If the Skolelinux foundation
9778 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
9779 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
9780 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
9781 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
9782 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
9783 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
9784 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
9785 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
9786
9787 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
9788 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
9789 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
9790 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
9791 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
9792 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
9793 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
9794 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
9795 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
9796 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
9797 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
9798 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
9799 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
9800 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
9801 currencies.</p>
9802
9803 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
9804 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
9805 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
9806 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
9807 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
9808 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
9809 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
9810 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
9811 BitCoins.  Check out
9812 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
9813 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
9814 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
9815 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
9816 yet.</p>
9817
9818 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
9819 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
9820 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
9821 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
9822 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
9823
9824       </div>
9825       <div class="tags">
9826
9827
9828         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
9829
9830
9831       </div>
9832     </div>
9833     <div class="padding"></div>
9834
9835     <div class="entry">
9836       <div class="title">
9837         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">Now accepting bitcoins - anonymous and distributed p2p crypto-money</a>
9838       </div>
9839       <div class="date">
9840         10th December 2010
9841       </div>
9842       <div class="body">
9843         <p>With this weeks lawless
9844 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
9845 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
9846 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
9847 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
9848 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
9849 A blog post from
9850 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
9851 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
9852 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
9853 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
9854 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
9855 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
9856 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
9857
9858 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
9859 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
9860 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
9861 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
9862 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
9863 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
9864 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
9865 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
9866 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
9867 Debian</a> soon.</p>
9868
9869 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
9870 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
9871 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
9872 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
9873 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
9874 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
9875 you can even get
9876 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
9877 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
9878 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
9879 on the current exchange rates.</p>
9880
9881 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
9882 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
9883 donations to the address
9884 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
9885
9886       </div>
9887       <div class="tags">
9888
9889
9890         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
9891
9892
9893       </div>
9894     </div>
9895     <div class="padding"></div>
9896
9897     <div class="entry">
9898       <div class="title">
9899         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
9900       </div>
9901       <div class="date">
9902         27th November 2010
9903       </div>
9904       <div class="body">
9905         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
9906 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
9907 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
9908 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
9909 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
9910 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
9911 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
9912 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
9913
9914 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
9915 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
9916 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
9917 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
9918 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
9919 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
9920 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
9921 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
9922 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
9923 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
9924 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
9925
9926 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
9927 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
9928 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
9929 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
9930 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
9931 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
9932 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
9933 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
9934 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
9935 what is going on.</p>
9936
9937       </div>
9938       <div class="tags">
9939
9940
9941         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
9942
9943
9944       </div>
9945     </div>
9946     <div class="padding"></div>
9947
9948     <div class="entry">
9949       <div class="title">
9950         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades_of_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop__now_with_apt_get_autoremove.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades of the Gnome and KDE desktop, now with apt-get autoremove</a>
9951       </div>
9952       <div class="date">
9953         22nd November 2010
9954       </div>
9955       <div class="body">
9956         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
9957 upgrade testing of the
9958 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
9959 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
9960 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
9961 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
9962
9963 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
9964
9965 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
9966
9967 <blockquote><p>
9968   apache2.2-bin
9969   aptdaemon
9970   baobab
9971   binfmt-support
9972   browser-plugin-gnash
9973   cheese-common
9974   cli-common
9975   cups-pk-helper
9976   dmz-cursor-theme
9977   empathy
9978   empathy-common
9979   freedesktop-sound-theme
9980   freeglut3
9981   gconf-defaults-service
9982   gdm-themes
9983   gedit-plugins
9984   geoclue
9985   geoclue-hostip
9986   geoclue-localnet
9987   geoclue-manual
9988   geoclue-yahoo
9989   gnash
9990   gnash-common
9991   gnome
9992   gnome-backgrounds
9993   gnome-cards-data
9994   gnome-codec-install
9995   gnome-core
9996   gnome-desktop-environment
9997   gnome-disk-utility
9998   gnome-screenshot
9999   gnome-search-tool
10000   gnome-session-canberra
10001   gnome-system-log
10002   gnome-themes-extras
10003   gnome-themes-more
10004   gnome-user-share
10005   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
10006   gstreamer0.10-tools
10007   gtk2-engines
10008   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
10009   gtk2-engines-smooth
10010   hamster-applet
10011   libapache2-mod-dnssd
10012   libapr1
10013   libaprutil1
10014   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
10015   libaprutil1-ldap
10016   libart2.0-cil
10017   libboost-date-time1.42.0
10018   libboost-python1.42.0
10019   libboost-thread1.42.0
10020   libchamplain-0.4-0
10021   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
10022   libcheese-gtk18
10023   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
10024   libcryptui0
10025   libdiscid0
10026   libelf1
10027   libepc-1.0-2
10028   libepc-common
10029   libepc-ui-1.0-2
10030   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
10031   libfreerdp0
10032   libgconf2.0-cil
10033   libgdata-common
10034   libgdata7
10035   libgdu-gtk0
10036   libgee2
10037   libgeoclue0
10038   libgexiv2-0
10039   libgif4
10040   libglade2.0-cil
10041   libglib2.0-cil
10042   libgmime2.4-cil
10043   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
10044   libgnome2.24-cil
10045   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
10046   libgpod-common
10047   libgpod4
10048   libgtk2.0-cil
10049   libgtkglext1
10050   libgtksourceview2.0-common
10051   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
10052   libmono-addins0.2-cil
10053   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
10054   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
10055   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
10056   libmono-posix2.0-cil
10057   libmono-security2.0-cil
10058   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
10059   libmono-system2.0-cil
10060   libmtp8
10061   libmusicbrainz3-6
10062   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
10063   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
10064   libopal3.6.8
10065   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
10066   libpt2.6.7
10067   libpython2.6
10068   librpm1
10069   librpmio1
10070   libsdl1.2debian
10071   libsrtp0
10072   libssh-4
10073   libtelepathy-farsight0
10074   libtelepathy-glib0
10075   libtidy-0.99-0
10076   media-player-info
10077   mesa-utils
10078   mono-2.0-gac
10079   mono-gac
10080   mono-runtime
10081   nautilus-sendto
10082   nautilus-sendto-empathy
10083   p7zip-full
10084   pkg-config
10085   python-aptdaemon
10086   python-aptdaemon-gtk
10087   python-axiom
10088   python-beautifulsoup
10089   python-bugbuddy
10090   python-clientform
10091   python-coherence
10092   python-configobj
10093   python-crypto
10094   python-cupshelpers
10095   python-elementtree
10096   python-epsilon
10097   python-evolution
10098   python-feedparser
10099   python-gdata
10100   python-gdbm
10101   python-gst0.10
10102   python-gtkglext1
10103   python-gtksourceview2
10104   python-httplib2
10105   python-louie
10106   python-mako
10107   python-markupsafe
10108   python-mechanize
10109   python-nevow
10110   python-notify
10111   python-opengl
10112   python-openssl
10113   python-pam
10114   python-pkg-resources
10115   python-pyasn1
10116   python-pysqlite2
10117   python-rdflib
10118   python-serial
10119   python-tagpy
10120   python-twisted-bin
10121   python-twisted-conch
10122   python-twisted-core
10123   python-twisted-web
10124   python-utidylib
10125   python-webkit
10126   python-xdg
10127   python-zope.interface
10128   remmina
10129   remmina-plugin-data
10130   remmina-plugin-rdp
10131   remmina-plugin-vnc
10132   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
10133   rhythmbox-plugins
10134   rpm-common
10135   rpm2cpio
10136   seahorse-plugins
10137   shotwell
10138   software-center
10139   system-config-printer-udev
10140   telepathy-gabble
10141   telepathy-mission-control-5
10142   telepathy-salut
10143   tomboy
10144   totem
10145   totem-coherence
10146   totem-mozilla
10147   totem-plugins
10148   transmission-common
10149   xdg-user-dirs
10150   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
10151   xserver-xephyr
10152 </p></blockquote>
10153
10154 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
10155
10156 <blockquote><p>
10157   cheese
10158   ekiga
10159   eog
10160   epiphany-extensions
10161   evolution-exchange
10162   fast-user-switch-applet
10163   file-roller
10164   gcalctool
10165   gconf-editor
10166   gdm
10167   gedit
10168   gedit-common
10169   gnome-games
10170   gnome-games-data
10171   gnome-nettool
10172   gnome-system-tools
10173   gnome-themes
10174   gnuchess
10175   gucharmap
10176   guile-1.8-libs
10177   libavahi-ui0
10178   libdmx1
10179   libgalago3
10180   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
10181   libgtksourceview2.0-0
10182   liblircclient0
10183   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
10184   libspeexdsp1
10185   libsvga1
10186   rhythmbox
10187   seahorse
10188   sound-juicer
10189   system-config-printer
10190   totem-common
10191   transmission-gtk
10192   vinagre
10193   vino
10194 </p></blockquote>
10195
10196 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
10197
10198 <blockquote><p>
10199   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
10200 </p></blockquote>
10201
10202 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
10203
10204 <blockquote><p>
10205 [nothing]
10206 </p></blockquote>
10207
10208 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
10209
10210 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
10211
10212 <blockquote><p>
10213   ksmserver
10214 </p></blockquote>
10215
10216 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
10217
10218 <blockquote><p>
10219   kwin
10220   network-manager-kde
10221 </p></blockquote>
10222
10223 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
10224
10225 <blockquote><p>
10226   arts
10227   dolphin
10228   freespacenotifier
10229   google-gadgets-gst
10230   google-gadgets-xul
10231   kappfinder
10232   kcalc
10233   kcharselect
10234   kde-core
10235   kde-plasma-desktop
10236   kde-standard
10237   kde-window-manager
10238   kdeartwork
10239   kdeartwork-emoticons
10240   kdeartwork-style
10241   kdeartwork-theme-icon
10242   kdebase
10243   kdebase-apps
10244   kdebase-workspace
10245   kdebase-workspace-bin
10246   kdebase-workspace-data
10247   kdeeject
10248   kdelibs
10249   kdeplasma-addons
10250   kdeutils
10251   kdewallpapers
10252   kdf
10253   kfloppy
10254   kgpg
10255   khelpcenter4
10256   kinfocenter
10257   konq-plugins-l10n
10258   konqueror-nsplugins
10259   kscreensaver
10260   kscreensaver-xsavers
10261   ktimer
10262   kwrite
10263   libgle3
10264   libkde4-ruby1.8
10265   libkonq5
10266   libkonq5-templates
10267   libnetpbm10
10268   libplasma-ruby
10269   libplasma-ruby1.8
10270   libqt4-ruby1.8
10271   marble-data
10272   marble-plugins
10273   netpbm
10274   nuvola-icon-theme
10275   plasma-dataengines-workspace
10276   plasma-desktop
10277   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
10278   plasma-runners-addons
10279   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
10280   plasma-scriptengine-python
10281   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
10282   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
10283   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
10284   plasma-scriptengines
10285   plasma-wallpapers-addons
10286   plasma-widget-folderview
10287   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
10288   ruby
10289   sweeper
10290   update-notifier-kde
10291   xscreensaver-data-extra
10292   xscreensaver-gl
10293   xscreensaver-gl-extra
10294   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
10295 </p></blockquote>
10296
10297 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
10298
10299 <blockquote><p>
10300   ark
10301   google-gadgets-common
10302   google-gadgets-qt
10303   htdig
10304   kate
10305   kdebase-bin
10306   kdebase-data
10307   kdepasswd
10308   kfind
10309   klipper
10310   konq-plugins
10311   konqueror
10312   ksysguard
10313   ksysguardd
10314   libarchive1
10315   libcln6
10316   libeet1
10317   libeina-svn-06
10318   libggadget-1.0-0b
10319   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
10320   libgps19
10321   libkdecorations4
10322   libkephal4
10323   libkonq4
10324   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
10325   libkscreensaver5
10326   libksgrd4
10327   libksignalplotter4
10328   libkunitconversion4
10329   libkwineffects1a
10330   libmarblewidget4
10331   libntrack-qt4-1
10332   libntrack0
10333   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
10334   libplasmaclock4a
10335   libplasmagenericshell4
10336   libprocesscore4a
10337   libprocessui4a
10338   libqalculate5
10339   libqedje0a
10340   libqtruby4shared2
10341   libqzion0a
10342   libruby1.8
10343   libscim8c2a
10344   libsmokekdecore4-3
10345   libsmokekdeui4-3
10346   libsmokekfile3
10347   libsmokekhtml3
10348   libsmokekio3
10349   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
10350   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
10351   libsmokekparts3
10352   libsmokektexteditor3
10353   libsmokekutils3
10354   libsmokenepomuk3
10355   libsmokephonon3
10356   libsmokeplasma3
10357   libsmokeqtcore4-3
10358   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
10359   libsmokeqtgui4-3
10360   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
10361   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
10362   libsmokeqtscript4-3
10363   libsmokeqtsql4-3
10364   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
10365   libsmokeqttest4-3
10366   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
10367   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
10368   libsmokeqtxml4-3
10369   libsmokesolid3
10370   libsmokesoprano3
10371   libtaskmanager4a
10372   libtidy-0.99-0
10373   libweather-ion4a
10374   libxklavier16
10375   libxxf86misc1
10376   okteta
10377   oxygencursors
10378   plasma-dataengines-addons
10379   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
10380   plasma-widget-lancelot
10381   plasma-widgets-addons
10382   plasma-widgets-workspace
10383   polkit-kde-1
10384   ruby1.8
10385   systemsettings
10386   update-notifier-common
10387 </p></blockquote>
10388
10389 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
10390 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
10391 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
10392 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
10393
10394       </div>
10395       <div class="tags">
10396
10397
10398         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10399
10400
10401       </div>
10402     </div>
10403     <div class="padding"></div>
10404
10405     <div class="entry">
10406       <div class="title">
10407         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html">Migrating Xen virtual machines using LVM to KVM using disk images</a>
10408       </div>
10409       <div class="date">
10410         22nd November 2010
10411       </div>
10412       <div class="body">
10413         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
10414 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
10415 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
10416 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
10417 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
10418 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
10419 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
10420 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
10421 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
10422
10423 <p>I found
10424 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
10425 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
10426 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
10427 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
10428 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
10429 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
10430
10431 <pre>
10432 #!/bin/sh
10433
10434 # Based on
10435 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
10436
10437 set -e
10438 set -x
10439
10440 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
10441     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
10442     exit 1
10443 else
10444     host="$1"
10445 fi
10446
10447 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
10448     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
10449     exit 1
10450 fi
10451
10452 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
10453 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
10454 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
10455 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
10456
10457 img=$host.img
10458 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
10459 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
10460
10461 parted $img mklabel msdos
10462 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
10463 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
10464 parted $img set 1 boot on
10465
10466 modprobe dm-mod
10467 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
10468 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
10469
10470 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
10471 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
10472 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
10473
10474 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
10475 losetup -d /dev/loop0
10476 </pre>
10477
10478 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
10479 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
10480
10481 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
10482 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
10483 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
10484 seem to work just fine.</p>
10485
10486       </div>
10487       <div class="tags">
10488
10489
10490         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10491
10492
10493       </div>
10494     </div>
10495     <div class="padding"></div>
10496
10497     <div class="entry">
10498       <div class="title">
10499         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome and KDE desktop</a>
10500       </div>
10501       <div class="date">
10502         20th November 2010
10503       </div>
10504       <div class="body">
10505         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
10506 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
10507 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
10508 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
10509
10510 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
10511 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
10512 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
10513
10514 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
10515
10516 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
10517
10518 <blockquote><p>
10519   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
10520   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
10521   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
10522   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
10523   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
10524   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
10525   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
10526   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
10527   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
10528   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
10529   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
10530   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
10531   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
10532   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
10533   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
10534   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
10535   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
10536   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
10537   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
10538   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
10539   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
10540   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
10541   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
10542   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
10543   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
10544   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
10545   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
10546   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
10547   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
10548   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
10549   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
10550   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
10551   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
10552   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
10553   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
10554   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
10555   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
10556   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
10557   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
10558   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
10559   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
10560   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
10561   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
10562   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
10563   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
10564   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
10565   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
10566   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
10567   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
10568   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
10569   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
10570   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
10571   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
10572   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
10573   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
10574   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
10575   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
10576   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
10577   zip
10578 </p></blockquote>
10579
10580 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
10581
10582 <blockquote><p>
10583   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
10584   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
10585   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
10586   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
10587   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
10588   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
10589   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
10590   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
10591   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
10592   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
10593   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
10594   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
10595   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
10596   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
10597   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
10598   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
10599   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
10600   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
10601   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
10602   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
10603   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
10604   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
10605   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
10606   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
10607   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
10608   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
10609   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
10610   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
10611   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
10612 </p></blockquote>
10613
10614 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
10615
10616 <blockquote><p>
10617   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
10618 </p></blockquote>
10619
10620 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
10621
10622 <blockquote><p>
10623 [nothing]
10624 </p></blockquote>
10625
10626 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
10627
10628 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
10629
10630 <blockquote><p>
10631   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
10632   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
10633   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
10634   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
10635   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
10636   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
10637   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
10638   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
10639   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
10640   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
10641   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
10642   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
10643   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
10644   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
10645   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
10646   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
10647   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
10648   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
10649   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
10650   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
10651   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
10652   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
10653   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
10654   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
10655   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
10656   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
10657   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
10658   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
10659   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
10660   ttf-sazanami-gothic
10661 </p></blockquote>
10662
10663 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
10664
10665 <blockquote><p>
10666   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
10667   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
10668   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
10669   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
10670   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
10671   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
10672   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
10673   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
10674   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
10675   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
10676   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
10677   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
10678   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
10679   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
10680   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
10681   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
10682   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
10683   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
10684   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
10685   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
10686   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
10687   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
10688   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
10689   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
10690   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
10691   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
10692   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
10693   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
10694   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
10695   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
10696   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
10697   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
10698   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
10699 </p></blockquote>
10700
10701 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
10702
10703 <blockquote><p>
10704   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
10705   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
10706   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
10707   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
10708   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
10709   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
10710   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
10711 </p></blockquote>
10712
10713 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
10714
10715 <blockquote><p>
10716   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
10717 </p></blockquote>
10718
10719       </div>
10720       <div class="tags">
10721
10722
10723         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10724
10725
10726       </div>
10727     </div>
10728     <div class="padding"></div>
10729
10730     <div class="entry">
10731       <div class="title">
10732         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
10733       </div>
10734       <div class="date">
10735         20th November 2010
10736       </div>
10737       <div class="body">
10738         <p>Answering
10739 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
10740 call from the Gnash project</a> for
10741 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
10742 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
10743 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
10744 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
10745 releases out more often.</p>
10746
10747 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
10748 I have considered setting up a <a
10749 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
10750 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
10751 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
10752 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
10753 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
10754 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
10755 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
10756 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
10757 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
10758 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
10759 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
10760 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
10761
10762       </div>
10763       <div class="tags">
10764
10765
10766         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
10767
10768
10769       </div>
10770     </div>
10771     <div class="padding"></div>
10772
10773     <div class="entry">
10774       <div class="title">
10775         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
10776       </div>
10777       <div class="date">
10778          9th November 2010
10779       </div>
10780       <div class="body">
10781         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
10782
10783 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
10784 3D linked in from
10785 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
10786 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
10787
10788       </div>
10789       <div class="tags">
10790
10791
10792         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10793
10794
10795       </div>
10796     </div>
10797     <div class="padding"></div>
10798
10799     <div class="entry">
10800       <div class="title">
10801         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
10802       </div>
10803       <div class="date">
10804         24th October 2010
10805       </div>
10806       <div class="body">
10807         <p>Some updates.</p>
10808
10809 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
10810 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
10811 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
10812 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
10813 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
10814 :)</p>
10815
10816 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
10817 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
10818 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
10819 It is called
10820 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
10821 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
10822 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
10823 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
10824 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
10825 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
10826
10827 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
10828 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
10829 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
10830 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
10831 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
10832 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
10833 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
10834 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
10835 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
10836 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
10837
10838       </div>
10839       <div class="tags">
10840
10841
10842         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
10843
10844
10845       </div>
10846     </div>
10847     <div class="padding"></div>
10848
10849     <div class="entry">
10850       <div class="title">
10851         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html">Some notes on Flash in Debian and Debian Edu</a>
10852       </div>
10853       <div class="date">
10854          4th September 2010
10855       </div>
10856       <div class="body">
10857         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
10858 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
10859 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
10860 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
10861 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
10862 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
10863 installed.</p>
10864
10865 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
10866 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
10867 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
10868 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
10869 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
10870 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
10871 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
10872 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
10873 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
10874
10875 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
10876 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
10877 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
10878 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
10879 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
10880 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
10881 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
10882 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
10883 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
10884 pages they want to visit.</p>
10885
10886 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
10887 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
10888 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
10889 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
10890 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
10891 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
10892 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
10893 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
10894 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
10895 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
10896 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
10897
10898       </div>
10899       <div class="tags">
10900
10901
10902         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
10903
10904
10905       </div>
10906     </div>
10907     <div class="padding"></div>
10908
10909     <div class="entry">
10910       <div class="title">
10911         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
10912       </div>
10913       <div class="date">
10914         27th July 2010
10915       </div>
10916       <div class="body">
10917         <p>I discovered this while doing
10918 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
10919 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
10920 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
10921 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
10922 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
10923
10924 <p>An example is from todays
10925 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
10926 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
10927 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
10928 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
10929 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
10930 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
10931 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
10932
10933 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
10934
10935 <blockquote><pre>
10936 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
10937  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
10938   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
10939 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
10940  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
10941 </pre></blockquote>
10942
10943 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
10944 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
10945 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
10946 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
10947 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
10948 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
10949 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
10950 of dependency loops.</p>
10951
10952 <p>Thanks to
10953 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
10954 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
10955 dependencies
10956 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
10957 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
10958
10959 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
10960 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
10961 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
10962 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
10963 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
10964 it.</p>
10965
10966       </div>
10967       <div class="tags">
10968
10969
10970         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
10971
10972
10973       </div>
10974     </div>
10975     <div class="padding"></div>
10976
10977     <div class="entry">
10978       <div class="title">
10979         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html">What are they searching for - PowerDNS and ISC DHCP in LDAP</a>
10980       </div>
10981       <div class="date">
10982         17th July 2010
10983       </div>
10984       <div class="body">
10985         <p>This is a
10986 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
10987 on my
10988 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_a_change_to_LDAP_schemas_allowing_DNS_and_DHCP_info_to_be_combined_into_one_object.html">previous
10989 work</a> on
10990 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
10991 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
10992
10993 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
10994 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
10995 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
10996 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
10997
10998 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
10999 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
11000 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
11001
11002 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
11003
11004 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
11005 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
11006 the web.
11007
11008 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
11009 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
11010 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
11011 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
11012 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
11013 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
11014
11015 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
11016 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
11017 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
11018 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
11019 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
11020 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
11021 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
11022 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
11023 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
11024 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
11025 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
11026 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
11027 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
11028 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
11029 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
11030 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
11031
11032 <blockquote><pre>
11033 ldapsearch -h ldap \
11034   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
11035   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
11036   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
11037   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
11038   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
11039   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
11040
11041 ldapsearch -h ldap \
11042   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
11043   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
11044   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
11045   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
11046   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
11047 </pre></blockquote>
11048
11049 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
11050 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
11051 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
11052 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11053 also exist.</p>
11054
11055 <blockquote><pre>
11056 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11057 objectclass: top
11058 objectclass: dnsdomain
11059 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
11060 dc: tjener
11061 arecord: 10.0.2.2
11062 associateddomain: tjener.intern
11063
11064 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11065 objectclass: top
11066 objectclass: dnsdomain2
11067 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
11068 dc: 2
11069 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
11070 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
11071 </pre></blockquote>
11072
11073 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
11074 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
11075 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
11076 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
11077 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
11078 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
11079 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
11080 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
11081 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
11082 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
11083 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
11084 instead.</p>
11085
11086 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
11087 like this:</p>
11088
11089 <blockquote><pre>
11090 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
11091   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
11092   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
11093   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
11094   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
11095   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
11096
11097 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
11098   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
11099 </pre></blockquote>
11100
11101 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
11102 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
11103 reverse lookups.</p>
11104
11105 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
11106 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
11107 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
11108 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
11109
11110 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
11111 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
11112 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
11113
11114 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
11115 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
11116 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
11117 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
11118 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
11119
11120 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
11121 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
11122 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
11123 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
11124 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
11125
11126 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
11127 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
11128 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
11129 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
11130 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
11131 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
11132
11133 <blockquote><pre>
11134 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
11135     SUP top
11136     AUXILIARY
11137     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
11138           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
11139           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
11140           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
11141           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
11142     ))
11143 </pre></blockquote>
11144
11145 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
11146 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
11147 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
11148 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
11149 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
11150 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
11151
11152 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
11153
11154 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
11155 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
11156 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
11157 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
11158 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
11159
11160 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
11161 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
11162 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
11163 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
11164
11165 <blockquote><pre>
11166 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
11167 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
11168 </pre></blockquote>
11169
11170 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
11171 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
11172 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
11173 search result is this entry:</p>
11174
11175 <blockquote><pre>
11176 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11177 cn: dhcp
11178 objectClass: top
11179 objectClass: dhcpServer
11180 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11181 </pre></blockquote>
11182
11183 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
11184 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
11185 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
11186 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
11187 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
11188 The search result is this entry:</p>
11189
11190 <blockquote><pre>
11191 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11192 cn: DHCP Config
11193 objectClass: top
11194 objectClass: dhcpService
11195 objectClass: dhcpOptions
11196 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11197 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
11198 dhcpStatements: authoritative
11199 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
11200 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
11201 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
11202 </pre></blockquote>
11203
11204 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
11205 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
11206 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
11207 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
11208 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
11209 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
11210 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
11211 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
11212 related computer objects.</p>
11213
11214 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
11215 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
11216 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
11217 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
11218 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
11219 like:</p>
11220
11221 <blockquote><pre>
11222 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11223 cn: hostname
11224 objectClass: top
11225 objectClass: dhcpHost
11226 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
11227 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
11228 </pre></blockquote>
11229
11230 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
11231 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
11232 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
11233 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
11234 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
11235 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
11236 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
11237 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
11238 structural object class.
11239
11240 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
11241
11242 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
11243 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
11244 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
11245 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
11246 in the configuration.</p>
11247
11248 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
11249 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
11250 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
11251 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
11252 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
11253 structure.</p>
11254
11255 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
11256 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
11257
11258 <blockquote><pre>
11259 ou=services
11260   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
11261     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
11262     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
11263       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
11264         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
11265     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
11266       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
11267         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
11268     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
11269       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
11270 </pre></blockquote>
11271
11272 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
11273 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
11274 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
11275 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
11276
11277 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
11278 like this:</p>
11279
11280 <blockquote><pre>
11281 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11282 dc: hostname
11283 objectClass: top
11284 objectClass: dhcpHost
11285 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
11286 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
11287 associateddomain: hostname.intern
11288 arecord: 10.11.12.13
11289 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
11290 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
11291 </pre></blockquote>
11292
11293 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
11294 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
11295 auxiliary object class.</p>
11296
11297       </div>
11298       <div class="tags">
11299
11300
11301         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11302
11303
11304       </div>
11305     </div>
11306     <div class="padding"></div>
11307
11308     <div class="entry">
11309       <div class="title">
11310         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
11311       </div>
11312       <div class="date">
11313         14th July 2010
11314       </div>
11315       <div class="body">
11316         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
11317 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
11318 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
11319 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
11320 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
11321
11322 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
11323 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
11324
11325 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
11326 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
11327 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
11328 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
11329 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
11330 to a slave DNS server.</p>
11331
11332 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
11333 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
11334 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
11335 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
11336 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
11337 seem to work.</p>
11338
11339 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
11340 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
11341 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
11342 this:</p>
11343
11344 <blockquote><pre>
11345   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11346   cn: hostname
11347   objectClass: dhcphost
11348   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
11349   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
11350   associateddomain: hostname.intern
11351   arecord: 10.11.12.13
11352   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
11353   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
11354   ldapconfigsound: Y
11355 </pre></blockquote>
11356
11357 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
11358 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
11359 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
11360 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
11361
11362 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
11363 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
11364 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
11365 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
11366 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
11367 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
11368 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
11369 might be a good place to put it.</p>
11370
11371 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
11372 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
11373
11374       </div>
11375       <div class="tags">
11376
11377
11378         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11379
11380
11381       </div>
11382     </div>
11383     <div class="padding"></div>
11384
11385     <div class="entry">
11386       <div class="title">
11387         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
11388       </div>
11389       <div class="date">
11390         11th July 2010
11391       </div>
11392       <div class="body">
11393         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
11394 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
11395 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
11396 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
11397
11398 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
11399 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
11400 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
11401 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
11402 LTSP clients.</p>
11403
11404 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
11405 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
11406 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
11407
11408 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
11409 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
11410 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
11411
11412 <blockquote><pre>
11413 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
11414 #
11415 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
11416 #
11417 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
11418 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
11419 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
11420 #
11421 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
11422 # existence of attribute names.
11423 #
11424 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
11425 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
11426 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
11427 #
11428 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
11429 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
11430 #
11431 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
11432 #     SUP top
11433 #     AUXILIARY
11434 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
11435
11436 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
11437 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
11438     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
11439     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
11440         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
11441         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
11442             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
11443             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
11444             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
11445             # bass value on to clients
11446             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
11447         done
11448     done
11449 fi
11450 </pre></blockquote>
11451
11452 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
11453 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
11454 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
11455 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
11456 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
11457
11458 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
11459 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
11460
11461 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
11462 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
11463 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
11464 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
11465 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
11466 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
11467
11468       </div>
11469       <div class="tags">
11470
11471
11472         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11473
11474
11475       </div>
11476     </div>
11477     <div class="padding"></div>
11478
11479     <div class="entry">
11480       <div class="title">
11481         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
11482       </div>
11483       <div class="date">
11484          9th July 2010
11485       </div>
11486       <div class="body">
11487         <p>Since
11488 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
11489 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
11490 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
11491 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
11492 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
11493 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
11494 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
11495 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
11496 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
11497 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
11498 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
11499 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
11500 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
11501
11502       </div>
11503       <div class="tags">
11504
11505
11506         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11507
11508
11509       </div>
11510     </div>
11511     <div class="padding"></div>
11512
11513     <div class="entry">
11514       <div class="title">
11515         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome desktop</a>
11516       </div>
11517       <div class="date">
11518          3rd July 2010
11519       </div>
11520       <div class="body">
11521         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
11522 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
11523 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
11524 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
11525 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
11526 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
11527 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
11528 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
11529
11530 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
11531 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
11532 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
11533 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
11534 publish the difference.</p>
11535
11536 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
11537
11538 <blockquote><p>
11539   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
11540   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
11541   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
11542   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
11543   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
11544   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
11545   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
11546   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
11547 </p></blockquote>
11548
11549 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
11550
11551 <blockquote><p>
11552   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
11553   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
11554   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
11555   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
11556   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
11557   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
11558   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
11559   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
11560   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
11561   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
11562   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
11563   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
11564   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
11565   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
11566   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
11567   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
11568   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
11569   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
11570   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
11571   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
11572 </p></blockquote>
11573
11574 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
11575
11576 <blockquote><p>
11577   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
11578   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
11579   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
11580   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
11581   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
11582   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
11583   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
11584   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
11585   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
11586   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
11587   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
11588   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
11589   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
11590   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
11591   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
11592   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
11593   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
11594   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
11595   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
11596   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
11597   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
11598 </p></blockquote>
11599
11600 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
11601
11602 <blockquote><p>
11603   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
11604   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
11605   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
11606 </p></blockquote>
11607
11608 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
11609 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
11610 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
11611 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
11612 the difference somewhat.
11613
11614       </div>
11615       <div class="tags">
11616
11617
11618         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11619
11620
11621       </div>
11622     </div>
11623     <div class="padding"></div>
11624
11625     <div class="entry">
11626       <div class="title">
11627         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
11628       </div>
11629       <div class="date">
11630         28th June 2010
11631       </div>
11632       <div class="body">
11633         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
11634 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
11635 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
11636 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
11637 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
11638 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
11639 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
11640 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
11641 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
11642 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
11643
11644 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
11645 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
11646 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
11647 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
11648 released.</p>
11649
11650 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
11651 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
11652 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
11653 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
11654
11655 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
11656 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
11657
11658 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
11659 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
11660 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
11661 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
11662 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
11663
11664       </div>
11665       <div class="tags">
11666
11667
11668         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11669
11670
11671       </div>
11672     </div>
11673     <div class="padding"></div>
11674
11675     <div class="entry">
11676       <div class="title">
11677         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_a_change_to_LDAP_schemas_allowing_DNS_and_DHCP_info_to_be_combined_into_one_object.html">Idea for a change to LDAP schemas allowing DNS and DHCP info to be combined into one object</a>
11678       </div>
11679       <div class="date">
11680         24th June 2010
11681       </div>
11682       <div class="body">
11683         <p>A while back, I
11684 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
11685 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
11686 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
11687 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
11688
11689 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
11690 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
11691 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
11692 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
11693
11694 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
11695 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
11696 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
11697 Debian Edu.</p>
11698
11699 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
11700 the
11701 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
11702 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
11703 available today from IETF.</p>
11704
11705 <pre>
11706 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
11707 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
11708 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
11709  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
11710         NAME 'dhcpHost'
11711         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
11712 -       SUP top
11713 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
11714         MUST cn
11715         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
11716         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
11717 </pre>
11718
11719 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
11720 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
11721 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
11722
11723 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
11724 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
11725
11726       </div>
11727       <div class="tags">
11728
11729
11730         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11731
11732
11733       </div>
11734     </div>
11735     <div class="padding"></div>
11736
11737     <div class="entry">
11738       <div class="title">
11739         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html">Calling tasksel like the installer, while still getting useful output</a>
11740       </div>
11741       <div class="date">
11742         16th June 2010
11743       </div>
11744       <div class="body">
11745         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
11746 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
11747 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
11748 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
11749 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
11750 this:
11751
11752 <blockquote><pre>
11753 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
11754 tasksel --new-install
11755 </pre></blockquote>
11756
11757 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
11758 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
11759 any output what so ever.
11760
11761 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
11762 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
11763 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
11764 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
11765 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
11766 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
11767 code like this:
11768
11769 <blockquote><pre>
11770 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
11771 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
11772 $cmd
11773 </pre></blockquote>
11774
11775 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
11776 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
11777 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
11778 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
11779 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
11780 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
11781 installation.</p>
11782
11783 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
11784 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
11785 like this.</p>
11786
11787       </div>
11788       <div class="tags">
11789
11790
11791         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
11792
11793
11794       </div>
11795     </div>
11796     <div class="padding"></div>
11797
11798     <div class="entry">
11799       <div class="title">
11800         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, removals by apt and aptitude</a>
11801       </div>
11802       <div class="date">
11803         13th June 2010
11804       </div>
11805       <div class="body">
11806         <p>My
11807 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
11808 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
11809 finally made the upgrade logs available from
11810 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
11811 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
11812 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
11813 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
11814
11815 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
11816 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
11817 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
11818 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
11819 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
11820 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
11821 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
11822 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
11823
11824 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
11825 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
11826 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
11827 too surprising.</p>
11828
11829 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
11830 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
11831 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
11832 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
11833 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
11834 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
11835 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
11836 continue.</p>
11837
11838 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
11839 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
11840   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
11841   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
11842   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
11843   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
11844   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
11845   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
11846   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
11847   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
11848   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
11849   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
11850   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
11851   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
11852   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
11853   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
11854   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
11855   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
11856   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
11857   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
11858   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
11859   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
11860   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
11861   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
11862   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
11863   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
11864   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
11865   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
11866   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
11867   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
11868
11869 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
11870
11871 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
11872   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
11873   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
11874   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
11875   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
11876   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
11877   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
11878   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
11879   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
11880   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
11881   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
11882   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
11883   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
11884   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
11885   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
11886   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
11887   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
11888   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
11889   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
11890   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
11891   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
11892   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
11893   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
11894   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
11895   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
11896   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
11897   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
11898   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
11899   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
11900   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
11901   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
11902   zip</p>
11903
11904 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
11905
11906 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
11907   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
11908   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
11909   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
11910   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
11911   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
11912   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
11913   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
11914   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
11915   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
11916   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
11917   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
11918   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
11919   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
11920   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
11921   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
11922   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
11923   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
11924   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
11925   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
11926   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
11927   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
11928   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
11929   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
11930   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
11931   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
11932   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
11933   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
11934
11935 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
11936 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
11937   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
11938   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
11939   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
11940   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
11941   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
11942   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
11943   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
11944   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
11945   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
11946   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
11947   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
11948   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
11949   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
11950   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
11951   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
11952   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
11953   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
11954   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
11955   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
11956   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
11957   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
11958   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
11959   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
11960   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
11961   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
11962   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
11963   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
11964   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
11965   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
11966   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
11967   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
11968   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
11969   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
11970   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
11971   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
11972   xulrunner-1.9</p>
11973
11974
11975       </div>
11976       <div class="tags">
11977
11978
11979         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11980
11981
11982       </div>
11983     </div>
11984     <div class="padding"></div>
11985
11986     <div class="entry">
11987       <div class="title">
11988         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
11989       </div>
11990       <div class="date">
11991         11th June 2010
11992       </div>
11993       <div class="body">
11994         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
11995 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
11996 have been discovered and reported in the process
11997 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
11998 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
11999 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
12000 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
12001 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
12002
12003 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
12004 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
12005 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
12006 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
12007 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
12008 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
12009
12010 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
12011 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
12012 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
12013 is created.  The bug report
12014 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
12015 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
12016 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
12017 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
12018 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
12019 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
12020 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
12021 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
12022 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
12023 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
12024 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
12025 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
12026 Debian Squeeze.</p>
12027
12028 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
12029 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
12030 trick:</p>
12031
12032 <blockquote><pre>
12033 #!/bin/sh
12034 set -ex
12035
12036 if [ "$1" ] ; then
12037     desktop=$1
12038 else
12039     desktop=gnome
12040 fi
12041
12042 from=lenny
12043 to=squeeze
12044
12045 exec &lt; /dev/null
12046 unset LANG
12047 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
12048 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
12049 fuser -mv .
12050 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
12051 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
12052 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
12053 #!/bin/sh
12054 exit 101
12055 EOF
12056 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
12057 exit_cleanup() {
12058     umount $tmpdir/proc
12059 }
12060 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
12061 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
12062 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
12063
12064 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
12065
12066 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
12067 # to return the correct answers.
12068 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
12069     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
12070
12071 # Include the desktop and laptop task
12072 for test in desktop laptop ; do
12073     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
12074 #!/bin/sh
12075 exit 2
12076 EOF
12077     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
12078 done
12079
12080 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
12081 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
12082 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
12083 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
12084
12085 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
12086 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
12087 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
12088 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
12089 fuser -mv
12090 </pre></blockquote>
12091
12092 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
12093 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
12094 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
12095 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
12096 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
12097 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
12098
12099 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
12100 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
12101 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
12102 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
12103 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
12104 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
12105 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
12106
12107 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
12108 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
12109 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
12110 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
12111 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
12112 packages.</p>
12113
12114       </div>
12115       <div class="tags">
12116
12117
12118         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12119
12120
12121       </div>
12122     </div>
12123     <div class="padding"></div>
12124
12125     <div class="entry">
12126       <div class="title">
12127         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html">Upstart or sysvinit - as init.d scripts see it</a>
12128       </div>
12129       <div class="date">
12130          6th June 2010
12131       </div>
12132       <div class="body">
12133         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
12134 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
12135 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
12136 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
12137 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
12138 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
12139 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
12140
12141 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
12142 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
12143 COLUMNS):</p>
12144
12145 <blockquote><pre>
12146 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
12147 previous=N
12148 PREVLEVEL=
12149 RUNLEVEL=
12150 runlevel=S
12151 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
12152 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
12153 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
12154 </pre></blockquote>
12155
12156 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
12157 script.</p>
12158
12159 <blockquote><pre>
12160 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
12161 previous=N
12162 PREVLEVEL=N
12163 RUNLEVEL=S
12164 runlevel=S
12165 </pre></blockquote>
12166
12167 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
12168 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
12169 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
12170
12171 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
12172 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
12173 choice.</p>
12174
12175       </div>
12176       <div class="tags">
12177
12178
12179         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12180
12181
12182       </div>
12183     </div>
12184     <div class="padding"></div>
12185
12186     <div class="entry">
12187       <div class="title">
12188         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
12189       </div>
12190       <div class="date">
12191          6th June 2010
12192       </div>
12193       <div class="body">
12194         <p>Via the
12195 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
12196 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
12197 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
12198 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
12199 following the standards wars of today.</p>
12200
12201       </div>
12202       <div class="tags">
12203
12204
12205         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
12206
12207
12208       </div>
12209     </div>
12210     <div class="padding"></div>
12211
12212     <div class="entry">
12213       <div class="title">
12214         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing computer hardware models used at site</a>
12215       </div>
12216       <div class="date">
12217          3rd June 2010
12218       </div>
12219       <div class="body">
12220         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
12221 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
12222 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
12223 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
12224 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
12225
12226 <blockquote><pre>
12227 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
12228   vendor                    count
12229   Dell Computer Corporation     1
12230     PowerEdge 1750              1
12231   IBM                           1
12232     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
12233   Intel                         2
12234   [no-dmi-info]                 3
12235 maintainer:~#
12236 </pre></blockquote>
12237
12238 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
12239 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
12240 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
12241 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
12242 option to list the individual machines.</p>
12243
12244 <p>A larger list is
12245 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
12246 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
12247 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
12248 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
12249 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
12250 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
12251 collector.</p>
12252
12253       </div>
12254       <div class="tags">
12255
12256
12257         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
12258
12259
12260       </div>
12261     </div>
12262     <div class="padding"></div>
12263
12264     <div class="entry">
12265       <div class="title">
12266         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html">KDM fail at boot with NVidia cards - and no one try to fix it?</a>
12267       </div>
12268       <div class="date">
12269          1st June 2010
12270       </div>
12271       <div class="body">
12272         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
12273 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
12274 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
12275 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
12276 wait.</p>
12277
12278 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
12279 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
12280 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
12281 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
12282 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
12283 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
12284
12285 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
12286 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
12287 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
12288 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
12289 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
12290 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
12291 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
12292 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
12293
12294 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
12295
12296       </div>
12297       <div class="tags">
12298
12299
12300         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12301
12302
12303       </div>
12304     </div>
12305     <div class="padding"></div>
12306
12307     <div class="entry">
12308       <div class="title">
12309         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html">Parallellized boot seem to hold up well in Debian/testing</a>
12310       </div>
12311       <div class="date">
12312         27th May 2010
12313       </div>
12314       <div class="body">
12315         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
12316 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
12317 issues are known and should be solved:
12318
12319 <p><ul>
12320
12321 <li>The wicd package seen to
12322 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
12323 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
12324 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
12325 seem to be on the case.</li>
12326
12327 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
12328 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
12329 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
12330 maintainer is on the case.</li>
12331
12332 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
12333 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
12334 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
12335 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
12336 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
12337 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
12338 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
12339 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
12340
12341 </ul></p>
12342
12343 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
12344 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
12345 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
12346 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
12347
12348 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
12349 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
12350 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
12351 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
12352
12353 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
12354
12355       </div>
12356       <div class="tags">
12357
12358
12359         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12360
12361
12362       </div>
12363     </div>
12364     <div class="padding"></div>
12365
12366     <div class="entry">
12367       <div class="title">
12368         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
12369       </div>
12370       <div class="date">
12371         22nd May 2010
12372       </div>
12373       <div class="body">
12374         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
12375 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
12376 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
12377 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
12378
12379 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
12380 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
12381 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
12382 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
12383 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
12384 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
12385 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
12386 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
12387 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
12388 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
12389 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
12390 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
12391 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
12392 going to work.</p>
12393
12394 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
12395 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
12396 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
12397 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
12398 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
12399 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
12400 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
12401 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
12402 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
12403 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
12404 Edu.</p>
12405
12406 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
12407 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
12408 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
12409 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
12410 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
12411 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
12412
12413 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
12414 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
12415
12416       </div>
12417       <div class="tags">
12418
12419
12420         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12421
12422
12423       </div>
12424     </div>
12425     <div class="padding"></div>
12426
12427     <div class="entry">
12428       <div class="title">
12429         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html">Parallellized boot is now the default in Debian/unstable</a>
12430       </div>
12431       <div class="date">
12432         14th May 2010
12433       </div>
12434       <div class="body">
12435         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
12436 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
12437 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
12438 expected, if I am to believe the
12439 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
12440 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
12441 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
12442 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
12443 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
12444 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
12445 version.</p>
12446
12447 More information about
12448 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
12449 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
12450 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
12451 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
12452
12453 <blockquote><pre>
12454 CONCURRENCY=none
12455 </pre></blockquote>
12456
12457 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
12458 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
12459 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
12460 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
12461
12462       </div>
12463       <div class="tags">
12464
12465
12466         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12467
12468
12469       </div>
12470     </div>
12471     <div class="padding"></div>
12472
12473     <div class="entry">
12474       <div class="title">
12475         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients</a>
12476       </div>
12477       <div class="date">
12478         14th May 2010
12479       </div>
12480       <div class="body">
12481         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
12482 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
12483 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
12484 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
12485 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
12486 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
12487 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
12488 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
12489
12490 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
12491 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
12492 this on the collector host:</p>
12493
12494 <blockquote><pre>
12495 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
12496 </pre></blockquote>
12497
12498 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
12499 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
12500
12501 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
12502 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
12503 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
12504 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
12505 written yet.</p>
12506
12507       </div>
12508       <div class="tags">
12509
12510
12511         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
12512
12513
12514       </div>
12515     </div>
12516     <div class="padding"></div>
12517
12518     <div class="entry">
12519       <div class="title">
12520         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
12521       </div>
12522       <div class="date">
12523         13th May 2010
12524       </div>
12525       <div class="body">
12526         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
12527 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
12528 has been
12529 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
12530
12531 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
12532 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
12533 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
12534 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
12535 based boot system.  Tollef is
12536 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
12537 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
12538 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
12539 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
12540 at the moment do not.</p>
12541
12542 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
12543 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
12544 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
12545 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
12546 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
12547 way forward.</p>
12548
12549 <p>In the mean time, based on the
12550 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
12551 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
12552 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
12553 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
12554 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
12555 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
12556 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
12557 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
12558
12559       </div>
12560       <div class="tags">
12561
12562
12563         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
12564
12565
12566       </div>
12567     </div>
12568     <div class="padding"></div>
12569
12570     <div class="entry">
12571       <div class="title">
12572         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html">Parallellizing the boot in Debian Squeeze - ready for wider testing</a>
12573       </div>
12574       <div class="date">
12575          6th May 2010
12576       </div>
12577       <div class="body">
12578         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
12579 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
12580 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
12581 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
12582 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
12583 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
12584 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
12585
12586 <blockquote><pre>
12587 CONCURRENCY=makefile
12588 </pre></blockquote>
12589
12590 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
12591 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
12592 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
12593 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
12594 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
12595 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
12596 make this happen.</p>
12597
12598 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
12599 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
12600 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
12601 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
12602 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
12603
12604 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
12605 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
12606 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
12607 fix the remaining issues.</p>
12608
12609 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
12610 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
12611 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
12612 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
12613
12614       </div>
12615       <div class="tags">
12616
12617
12618         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12619
12620
12621       </div>
12622     </div>
12623     <div class="padding"></div>
12624
12625     <div class="entry">
12626       <div class="title">
12627         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html">Debian has switched to dependency based boot sequencing</a>
12628       </div>
12629       <div class="date">
12630         27th July 2009
12631       </div>
12632       <div class="body">
12633         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
12634 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
12635 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
12636 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
12637 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
12638 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
12639 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
12640
12641 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
12642 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
12643 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
12644
12645       </div>
12646       <div class="tags">
12647
12648
12649         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
12650
12651
12652       </div>
12653     </div>
12654     <div class="padding"></div>
12655
12656     <div class="entry">
12657       <div class="title">
12658         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
12659       </div>
12660       <div class="date">
12661         22nd July 2009
12662       </div>
12663       <div class="body">
12664         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
12665 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
12666 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
12667 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
12668 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
12669 the package up to date.</p>
12670
12671 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
12672 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
12673 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
12674 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
12675 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
12676 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
12677 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
12678 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
12679 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
12680 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
12681 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
12682 working on the future release.</p>
12683
12684 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
12685 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
12686
12687       </div>
12688       <div class="tags">
12689
12690
12691         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
12692
12693
12694       </div>
12695     </div>
12696     <div class="padding"></div>
12697
12698     <div class="entry">
12699       <div class="title">
12700         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
12701       </div>
12702       <div class="date">
12703         24th June 2009
12704       </div>
12705       <div class="body">
12706         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
12707 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
12708 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
12709 funded
12710 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
12711 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
12712 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
12713 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
12714 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
12715 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
12716
12717 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
12718 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
12719 boot:</p>
12720
12721 <ul>
12722
12723 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
12724
12725 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
12726    clock is in UTC.</li>
12727
12728 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
12729    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
12730    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
12731
12732 </ul>
12733
12734 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
12735 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
12736 Villegas</a>.
12737
12738 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
12739 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
12740 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
12741 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
12742 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
12743 using this.</p>
12744
12745 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
12746 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
12747 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
12748 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
12749 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
12750 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
12751 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
12752
12753       </div>
12754       <div class="tags">
12755
12756
12757         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12758
12759
12760       </div>
12761     </div>
12762     <div class="padding"></div>
12763
12764     <div class="entry">
12765       <div class="title">
12766         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/BSAs_p_stander_om_piratkopiering_m_ter_motstand.html">BSAs påstander om piratkopiering møter motstand</a>
12767       </div>
12768       <div class="date">
12769         17th May 2009
12770       </div>
12771       <div class="body">
12772         <p>Hvert år de siste årene har BSA, lobbyfronten til de store
12773 programvareselskapene som Microsoft og Apple, publisert en rapport der
12774 de gjetter på hvor mye piratkopiering påfører i tapte inntekter i
12775 ulike land rundt om i verden.  Resultatene er tendensiøse.  For noen
12776 dager siden kom
12777 <a href="http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/studies/globalpiracy2008.pdf">siste
12778 rapport</a>, og det er flere kritiske kommentarer publisert de siste
12779 dagene.  Et spesielt interessant kommentar fra Sverige,
12780 <a href="http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.229795/bsa-hoftade-sverigesiffror">BSA
12781 höftade Sverigesiffror</a>, oppsummeres slik:</p>
12782
12783 <blockquote>
12784 I sin senaste rapport slår BSA fast att 25 procent av all mjukvara i
12785 Sverige är piratkopierad. Det utan att ha pratat med ett enda svenskt
12786 företag. "Man bör nog kanske inte se de här siffrorna som helt
12787 exakta", säger BSAs Sverigechef John Hugosson.
12788 </blockquote>
12789
12790 <p>Mon tro om de er like metodiske når de gjetter på andelen piratkopiering i Norge?  To andre kommentarer er <a
12791 href="http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/comment/2242134/bsa-piracy-figures-shot-reality">BSA
12792 piracy figures need a shot of reality</a> og <a
12793 href="http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3958/125/">Does The WIPO
12794 Copyright Treaty Work?</a></p>
12795
12796 <p>Fant lenkene via <a
12797 href="http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/17/1632242">oppslag
12798 på Slashdot</a>.</p>
12799
12800       </div>
12801       <div class="tags">
12802
12803
12804         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
12805
12806
12807       </div>
12808     </div>
12809     <div class="padding"></div>
12810
12811     <div class="entry">
12812       <div class="title">
12813         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IDG_mener_linux_i_servermarkedet_vil_vokse_med_21__i_2009.html">IDG mener linux i servermarkedet vil vokse med 21% i 2009</a>
12814       </div>
12815       <div class="date">
12816          7th May 2009
12817       </div>
12818       <div class="body">
12819         <p>Kom over
12820 <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10216873-16.html">interessante
12821 tall</a> fra IDG om utviklingen av linuxservermarkedet.  Fikk meg til
12822 å tenke på antall tjenermaskiner ved Universitetet i Oslo der jeg
12823 jobber til daglig.  En rask opptelling forteller meg at vi har 490
12824 (61%) fysiske unix-tjener (mest linux men også noen solaris) og 196
12825 (25%) windowstjenere, samt 112 (14%) virtuelle unix-tjenere.  Med den
12826 bakgrunnskunnskapen kan jeg godt tro at IDG er inne på noe.</p>
12827
12828       </div>
12829       <div class="tags">
12830
12831
12832         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
12833
12834
12835       </div>
12836     </div>
12837     <div class="padding"></div>
12838
12839     <div class="entry">
12840       <div class="title">
12841         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kryptert_harddisk___naturligvis.html">Kryptert harddisk - naturligvis</a>
12842       </div>
12843       <div class="date">
12844          2nd May 2009
12845       </div>
12846       <div class="body">
12847         <p><a href="http://www.dagensit.no/trender/article1658676.ece">Dagens
12848 IT melder</a> at Intel hevder at det er dyrt å miste en datamaskin,
12849 når en tar tap av arbeidstid, fortrolige dokumenter,
12850 personopplysninger og alt annet det innebærer.  Det er ingen tvil om
12851 at det er en kostbar affære å miste sin datamaskin, og det er årsaken
12852 til at jeg har kryptert harddisken på både kontormaskinen og min
12853 bærbare.  Begge inneholder personopplysninger jeg ikke ønsker skal
12854 komme på avveie, den første informasjon relatert til jobben min ved
12855 Universitetet i Oslo, og den andre relatert til blant annet
12856 foreningsarbeide.  Kryptering av diskene gjør at det er lite
12857 sannsynlig at dophoder som kan finne på å rappe maskinene får noe ut
12858 av dem.  Maskinene låses automatisk etter noen minutter uten bruk,
12859 og en reboot vil gjøre at de ber om passord før de vil starte opp.
12860 Jeg bruker Debian på begge maskinene, og installasjonssystemet der
12861 gjør det trivielt å sette opp krypterte disker.  Jeg har LVM på toppen
12862 av krypterte partisjoner, slik at alt av datapartisjoner er kryptert.
12863 Jeg anbefaler alle å kryptere diskene på sine bærbare.  Kostnaden når
12864 det er gjort slik jeg gjør det er minimale, og gevinstene er
12865 betydelige.  En bør dog passe på passordet.  Hvis det går tapt, må
12866 maskinen reinstalleres og alt er tapt.</p>
12867
12868 <p>Krypteringen vil ikke stoppe kompetente angripere som f.eks. kjøler
12869 ned minnebrikkene før maskinen rebootes med programvare for å hente ut
12870 krypteringsnøklene.  Kostnaden med å forsvare seg mot slike angripere
12871 er for min del høyere enn gevinsten.  Jeg tror oddsene for at
12872 f.eks. etteretningsorganisasjoner har glede av å titte på mine
12873 maskiner er minimale, og ulempene jeg ville oppnå ved å forsøke å
12874 gjøre det vanskeligere for angripere med kompetanse og ressurser er
12875 betydelige.</p>
12876
12877       </div>
12878       <div class="tags">
12879
12880
12881         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
12882
12883
12884       </div>
12885     </div>
12886     <div class="padding"></div>
12887
12888     <div class="entry">
12889       <div class="title">
12890         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html">Two projects that have improved the quality of free software a lot</a>
12891       </div>
12892       <div class="date">
12893          2nd May 2009
12894       </div>
12895       <div class="body">
12896         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
12897 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
12898 do not yet know them.</p>
12899
12900 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
12901 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
12902 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
12903 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
12904 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
12905 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
12906 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
12907 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
12908 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
12909 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
12910 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
12911
12912 <p>The second one is
12913 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
12914 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
12915 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
12916 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
12917 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
12918 and the company behind it is running
12919 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
12920 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
12921 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
12922 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
12923 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
12924 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
12925 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
12926 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
12927
12928 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
12929 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
12930 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
12931 surrounded by today.</p>
12932
12933       </div>
12934       <div class="tags">
12935
12936
12937         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12938
12939
12940       </div>
12941     </div>
12942     <div class="padding"></div>
12943
12944     <div class="entry">
12945       <div class="title">
12946         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html">No patch is not better than a useless patch</a>
12947       </div>
12948       <div class="date">
12949         28th April 2009
12950       </div>
12951       <div class="body">
12952         <p>Julien Blache
12953 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
12954 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
12955 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
12956 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
12957 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
12958 properties.</p>
12959
12960       </div>
12961       <div class="tags">
12962
12963
12964         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
12965
12966
12967       </div>
12968     </div>
12969     <div class="padding"></div>
12970
12971     <div class="entry">
12972       <div class="title">
12973         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html">Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications</a>
12974       </div>
12975       <div class="date">
12976         30th March 2009
12977       </div>
12978       <div class="body">
12979         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
12980 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
12981 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
12982 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
12983 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
12984 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
12985 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
12986 application.</p>
12987
12988 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
12989 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
12990 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
12991 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
12992 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
12993 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
12994 blocked from doing so.</p>
12995
12996 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
12997 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
12998 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
12999 requirements change.</p>
13000
13001 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
13002 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
13003 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
13004
13005       </div>
13006       <div class="tags">
13007
13008
13009         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
13010
13011
13012       </div>
13013     </div>
13014     <div class="padding"></div>
13015
13016     <div class="entry">
13017       <div class="title">
13018         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
13019       </div>
13020       <div class="date">
13021         29th March 2009
13022       </div>
13023       <div class="body">
13024         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
13025 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
13026 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
13027 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
13028 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
13029 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
13030 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
13031 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
13032 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
13033 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
13034 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
13035 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
13036 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
13037 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
13038 now. :)</p>
13039
13040       </div>
13041       <div class="tags">
13042
13043
13044         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
13045
13046
13047       </div>
13048     </div>
13049     <div class="padding"></div>
13050
13051     <div class="entry">
13052       <div class="title">
13053         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">Time for new  LDAP schemas replacing RFC 2307?</a>
13054       </div>
13055       <div class="date">
13056         29th March 2009
13057       </div>
13058       <div class="body">
13059         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
13060 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
13061 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
13062 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
13063 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
13064 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
13065
13066 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
13067 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
13068 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
13069 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
13070 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
13071 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
13072 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
13073 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
13074 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
13075 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
13076 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
13077 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
13078 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
13079
13080 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
13081 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
13082 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
13083 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
13084
13085 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
13086 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
13087
13088 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
13089 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
13090 new IETF work group?</p>
13091
13092       </div>
13093       <div class="tags">
13094
13095
13096         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
13097
13098
13099       </div>
13100     </div>
13101     <div class="padding"></div>
13102
13103     <div class="entry">
13104       <div class="title">
13105         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Endelig_er_Debian_Lenny_gitt_ut.html">Endelig er Debian Lenny gitt ut</a>
13106       </div>
13107       <div class="date">
13108         15th February 2009
13109       </div>
13110       <div class="body">
13111         <p>Endelig er <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>
13112 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214">Lenny</a> gitt ut.
13113 Et langt steg videre for Debian-prosjektet, og en rekke nye
13114 programpakker blir nå tilgjengelig for de av oss som bruker den
13115 stabile utgaven av Debian.  Neste steg er nå å få
13116 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> /
13117 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> ferdig
13118 oppdatert for den nye utgaven, slik at en oppdatert versjon kan
13119 slippes løs på skolene.  Takk til alle debian-utviklerne som har
13120 gjort dette mulig.  Endelig er f.eks. fungerende avhengighetsstyrt
13121 bootsekvens tilgjengelig i stabil utgave, vha pakken
13122 <tt>insserv</tt>.</p>
13123
13124       </div>
13125       <div class="tags">
13126
13127
13128         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
13129
13130
13131       </div>
13132     </div>
13133     <div class="padding"></div>
13134
13135     <div class="entry">
13136       <div class="title">
13137         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html">Devcamp brought us closer to the Lenny based Debian Edu release</a>
13138       </div>
13139       <div class="date">
13140          7th December 2008
13141       </div>
13142       <div class="body">
13143         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
13144 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
13145 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
13146 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
13147 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
13148 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
13149 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
13150 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
13151
13152 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
13153 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
13154 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
13155 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
13156 of these cards.</p>
13157
13158       </div>
13159       <div class="tags">
13160
13161
13162         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp</a>.
13163
13164
13165       </div>
13166     </div>
13167     <div class="padding"></div>
13168
13169     <div class="entry">
13170       <div class="title">
13171         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html">The sorry state of multimedia browser plugins in Debian</a>
13172       </div>
13173       <div class="date">
13174         25th November 2008
13175       </div>
13176       <div class="body">
13177         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
13178 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
13179 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
13180 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
13181 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
13182 notes are available on
13183 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
13184 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
13185 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
13186 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
13187 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
13188 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
13189 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
13190 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
13191 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
13192
13193 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
13194 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
13195
13196       </div>
13197       <div class="tags">
13198
13199
13200         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
13201
13202
13203       </div>
13204     </div>
13205     <div class="padding"></div>
13206
13207     <p style="text-align: right;"><a href="debian.rss"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/xml.gif" alt="RSS Feed" width="36" height="14" /></a></p>
13208     <div id="sidebar">
13209
13210
13211
13212 <h2>Archive</h2>
13213 <ul>
13214
13215 <li>2018
13216 <ul>
13217
13218 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/01/">January (1)</a></li>
13219
13220 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/02/">February (5)</a></li>
13221
13222 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/03/">March (5)</a></li>
13223
13224 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/04/">April (3)</a></li>
13225
13226 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/06/">June (2)</a></li>
13227
13228 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/07/">July (3)</a></li>
13229
13230 </ul></li>
13231
13232 <li>2017
13233 <ul>
13234
13235 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/01/">January (4)</a></li>
13236
13237 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/02/">February (3)</a></li>
13238
13239 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/03/">March (5)</a></li>
13240
13241 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/04/">April (2)</a></li>
13242
13243 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/06/">June (5)</a></li>
13244
13245 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/07/">July (1)</a></li>
13246
13247 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/08/">August (1)</a></li>
13248
13249 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/09/">September (3)</a></li>
13250
13251 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/10/">October (5)</a></li>
13252
13253 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/11/">November (3)</a></li>
13254
13255 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/12/">December (4)</a></li>
13256
13257 </ul></li>
13258
13259 <li>2016
13260 <ul>
13261
13262 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/01/">January (3)</a></li>
13263
13264 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/02/">February (2)</a></li>
13265
13266 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/03/">March (3)</a></li>
13267
13268 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/04/">April (8)</a></li>
13269
13270 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/05/">May (8)</a></li>
13271
13272 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/06/">June (2)</a></li>
13273
13274 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/07/">July (2)</a></li>
13275
13276 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/08/">August (5)</a></li>
13277
13278 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/09/">September (2)</a></li>
13279
13280 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/10/">October (3)</a></li>
13281
13282 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/11/">November (8)</a></li>
13283
13284 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/12/">December (5)</a></li>
13285
13286 </ul></li>
13287
13288 <li>2015
13289 <ul>
13290
13291 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
13292
13293 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (6)</a></li>
13294
13295 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/03/">March (1)</a></li>
13296
13297 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/04/">April (4)</a></li>
13298
13299 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/05/">May (3)</a></li>
13300
13301 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/06/">June (4)</a></li>
13302
13303 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/07/">July (6)</a></li>
13304
13305 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/08/">August (2)</a></li>
13306
13307 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/09/">September (2)</a></li>
13308
13309 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/10/">October (9)</a></li>
13310
13311 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/11/">November (6)</a></li>
13312
13313 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/12/">December (3)</a></li>
13314
13315 </ul></li>
13316
13317 <li>2014
13318 <ul>
13319
13320 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
13321
13322 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
13323
13324 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
13325
13326 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
13327
13328 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
13329
13330 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
13331
13332 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
13333
13334 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
13335
13336 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
13337
13338 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
13339
13340 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
13341
13342 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
13343
13344 </ul></li>
13345
13346 <li>2013
13347 <ul>
13348
13349 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
13350
13351 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
13352
13353 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
13354
13355 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
13356
13357 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
13358
13359 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
13360
13361 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
13362
13363 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
13364
13365 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
13366
13367 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
13368
13369 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
13370
13371 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
13372
13373 </ul></li>
13374
13375 <li>2012
13376 <ul>
13377
13378 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
13379
13380 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
13381
13382 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
13383
13384 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
13385
13386 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
13387
13388 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
13389
13390 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
13391
13392 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
13393
13394 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
13395
13396 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
13397
13398 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
13399
13400 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
13401
13402 </ul></li>
13403
13404 <li>2011
13405 <ul>
13406
13407 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
13408
13409 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
13410
13411 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
13412
13413 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
13414
13415 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
13416
13417 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
13418
13419 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
13420
13421 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
13422
13423 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
13424
13425 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
13426
13427 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
13428
13429 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
13430
13431 </ul></li>
13432
13433 <li>2010
13434 <ul>
13435
13436 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
13437
13438 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
13439
13440 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
13441
13442 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
13443
13444 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
13445
13446 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
13447
13448 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
13449
13450 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
13451
13452 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
13453
13454 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
13455
13456 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
13457
13458 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
13459
13460 </ul></li>
13461
13462 <li>2009
13463 <ul>
13464
13465 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
13466
13467 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
13468
13469 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
13470
13471 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
13472
13473 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
13474
13475 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
13476
13477 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
13478
13479 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
13480
13481 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
13482
13483 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
13484
13485 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
13486
13487 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
13488
13489 </ul></li>
13490
13491 <li>2008
13492 <ul>
13493
13494 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
13495
13496 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
13497
13498 </ul></li>
13499
13500 </ul>
13501
13502
13503
13504 <h2>Tags</h2>
13505 <ul>
13506
13507  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (16)</a></li>
13508
13509  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
13510
13511  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
13512
13513  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
13514
13515  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (9)</a></li>
13516
13517  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (17)</a></li>
13518
13519  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
13520
13521  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
13522
13523  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (159)</a></li>
13524
13525  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (158)</a></li>
13526
13527  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook (4)</a></li>
13528
13529  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (10)</a></li>
13530
13531  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (17)</a></li>
13532
13533  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (25)</a></li>
13534
13535  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
13536
13537  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (377)</a></li>
13538
13539  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (23)</a></li>
13540
13541  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (13)</a></li>
13542
13543  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (32)</a></li>
13544
13545  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
13546
13547  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (18)</a></li>
13548
13549  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264 (20)</a></li>
13550
13551  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (42)</a></li>
13552
13553  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (16)</a></li>
13554
13555  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (20)</a></li>
13556
13557  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
13558
13559  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego (4)</a></li>
13560
13561  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
13562
13563  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
13564
13565  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
13566
13567  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
13568
13569  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (41)</a></li>
13570
13571  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software (10)</a></li>
13572
13573  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (299)</a></li>
13574
13575  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (190)</a></li>
13576
13577  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (33)</a></li>
13578
13579  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
13580
13581  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (71)</a></li>
13582
13583  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (107)</a></li>
13584
13585  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (2)</a></li>
13586
13587  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
13588
13589  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
13590
13591  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
13592
13593  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (10)</a></li>
13594
13595  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
13596
13597  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (6)</a></li>
13598
13599  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
13600
13601  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (54)</a></li>
13602
13603  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
13604
13605  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (5)</a></li>
13606
13607  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (55)</a></li>
13608
13609  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (6)</a></li>
13610
13611  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (12)</a></li>
13612
13613  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (55)</a></li>
13614
13615  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (4)</a></li>
13616
13617  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
13618
13619  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (9)</a></li>
13620
13621  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri (11)</a></li>
13622
13623  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (65)</a></li>
13624
13625  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
13626
13627  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (41)</a></li>
13628
13629 </ul>
13630
13631
13632     </div>
13633     <p style="text-align: right">
13634  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
13635 </p>
13636
13637   </body>
13638 </html>