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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/Sharing_images_with_friends_and_family_using_RSS_and_EXIF_XMP_metadata.html">Sharing images with friends and family using RSS and EXIF/XMP metadata</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28         31st July 2018
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>For a while now, I have looked for a sensible way to share images
  32 with my family using a self hosted solution, as it is unacceptable to
  33 place images from my personal life under the control of strangers
  34 working for data hoarders like Google or Dropbox.  The last few days I
  35 have drafted an approach that might work out, and I would like to
  36 share it with you.  I would like to publish images on a server under
  37 my control, and point some Internet connected display units using some
  38 free and open standard to the images I published.  As my primary
  39 language is not limited to ASCII, I need to store metadata using
  40 UTF-8.  Many years ago, I hoped to find a digital photo frame capable
  41 of reading a RSS feed with image references (aka using the
  42 &lt;enclosure&gt; RSS tag), but was unable to find a current supplier
  43 of such frames.  In the end I gave up that approach.</p>
  44
  45 <p>Some months ago, I discovered that
  46 <a href="https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/">XScreensaver</a> is able to
  47 read images from a RSS feed, and used it to set up a screen saver on
  48 my home info screen, showing images from the Daily images feed from
  49 NASA.  This proved to work well.  More recently I discovered that
  50 <a href="https://kodi.tv">Kodi</a> (both using
  51 <a href="https://www.openelec.tv/">OpenELEC</a> and
  52 <a href="https://libreelec.tv">LibreELEC</a>) provide the
  53 <a href="https://github.com/grinsted/script.screensaver.feedreader">Feedreader</a>
  54 screen saver capable of reading a RSS feed with images and news.  For
  55 fun, I used it this summer to test Kodi on my parents TV by hooking up
  56 a Raspberry PI unit with LibreELEC, and wanted to provide them with a
  57 screen saver showing selected pictures from my selection.</p>
  58
  59 <p>Armed with motivation and a test photo frame, I set out to generate
  60 a RSS feed for the Kodi instance.  I adjusted my <a
  61 href="https://freedombox.org/">Freedombox</a> instance, created
  62 /var/www/html/privatepictures/, wrote a small Perl script to extract
  63 title and description metadata from the photo files and generate the
  64 RSS file.  I ended up using Perl instead of python, as the
  65 libimage-exiftool-perl Debian package seemed to handle the EXIF/XMP
  66 tags I ended up using, while python3-exif did not.  The relevant EXIF
  67 tags only support ASCII, so I had to find better alternatives.  XMP
  68 seem to have the support I need.</p>
  69
  70 <p>I am a bit unsure which EXIF/XMP tags to use, as I would like to
  71 use tags that can be easily added/updated using normal free software
  72 photo managing software.  I ended up using the tags set using this
  73 exiftool command, as these tags can also be set using digiKam:</p>
  74
  75 <blockquote><pre>
  76 exiftool -headline='The RSS image title' \
  77   -description='The RSS image description.' \
  78   -subject+=for-family photo.jpeg
  79 </pre></blockquote>
  80
  81 <p>I initially tried the "-title" and "keyword" tags, but they were
  82 invisible in digiKam, so I changed to "-headline" and "-subject".  I
  83 use the keyword/subject 'for-family' to flag that the photo should be
  84 shared with my family.  Images with this keyword set are located and
  85 copied into my Freedombox for the RSS generating script to find.</p>
  86
  87 <p>Are there better ways to do this?  Get in touch if you have better
  88 suggestions.</p>
  89
  90 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
  91 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
  92 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
  93
  94       </div>
  95       <div class="tags">
  96
  97
  98         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>.
  99
 100
 101       </div>
 102     </div>
 103     <div class="padding"></div>
 104
 105     <div class="entry">
 106       <div class="title">
 107         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simple_streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_GStreamer_and_RTP.html">Simple streaming the Linux desktop to Kodi using GStreamer and RTP</a>
 108       </div>
 109       <div class="date">
 110         12th July 2018
 111       </div>
 112       <div class="body">
 113         <p>Last night, I wrote
 114 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html">a
 115 recipe to stream a Linux desktop using VLC to a instance of Kodi</a>.
 116 During the day I received valuable feedback, and thanks to the
 117 suggestions I have been able to rewrite the recipe into a much simpler
 118 approach requiring no setup at all.  It is a single script that take
 119 care of it all.</p>
 120
 121 <p>This new script uses GStreamer instead of VLC to capture the
 122 desktop and stream it to Kodi.  This fixed the video quality issue I
 123 saw initially.  It further removes the need to add a m3u file on the
 124 Kodi machine, as it instead connects to
 125 <a href="https://kodi.wiki/view/JSON-RPC_API/v8">the JSON-RPC API in
 126 Kodi</a> and simply ask Kodi to play from the stream created using
 127 GStreamer.  Streaming the desktop to Kodi now become trivial.  Copy
 128 the script below, run it with the DNS name or IP address of the kodi
 129 server to stream to as the only argument, and watch your screen show
 130 up on the Kodi screen.  Note, it depend on multicast on the local
 131 network, so if you need to stream outside the local network, the
 132 script must be modified.  Also note, I have no idea if audio work, as
 133 I only care about the picture part.</p>
 134
 135 <blockquote><pre>
 136 #!/bin/sh
 137 #
 138 # Stream the Linux desktop view to Kodi.  See
 139 # http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_VLC_and_RTSP.html
 140 # for backgorund information.
 141
 142 # Make sure the stream is stopped in Kodi and the gstreamer process is
 143 # killed if something go wrong (for example if curl is unable to find the
 144 # kodi server).  Do the same when interrupting this script.
 145 kodicmd() {
 146     host="$1"
 147     cmd="$2"
 148     params="$3"
 149     curl --silent --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
 150          --data-binary "{ \"id\": 1, \"jsonrpc\": \"2.0\", \"method\": \"$cmd\", \"params\": $params }" \
 151          "http://$host/jsonrpc"
 152 }
 153 cleanup() {
 154     if [ -n "$kodihost" ] ; then
 155         # Stop the playing when we end
 156         playerid=$(kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.GetActivePlayers "{}" |
 157                             jq .result[].playerid)
 158         kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.Stop "{ \"playerid\" : $playerid }" > /dev/null
 159     fi
 160     if [ "$gstpid" ] && kill -0 "$gstpid" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
 161         kill "$gstpid"
 162     fi
 163 }
 164 trap cleanup EXIT INT
 165
 166 if [ -n "$1" ]; then
 167     kodihost=$1
 168     shift
 169 else
 170     kodihost=kodi.local
 171 fi
 172
 173 mcast=239.255.0.1
 174 mcastport=1234
 175 mcastttl=1
 176
 177 pasrc=$(pactl list | grep -A2 'Source #' | grep 'Name: .*\.monitor$' | \
 178   cut -d" " -f2|head -1)
 179 gst-launch-1.0 ximagesrc use-damage=0 ! video/x-raw,framerate=30/1 ! \
 180   videoconvert ! queue2 ! \
 181   x264enc bitrate=8000 speed-preset=superfast tune=zerolatency qp-min=30 \
 182   key-int-max=15 bframes=2 ! video/x-h264,profile=high ! queue2 ! \
 183   mpegtsmux alignment=7 name=mux ! rndbuffersize max=1316 min=1316 ! \
 184   udpsink host=$mcast port=$mcastport ttl-mc=$mcastttl auto-multicast=1 sync=0 \
 185   pulsesrc device=$pasrc ! audioconvert ! queue2 ! avenc_aac ! queue2 ! mux. \
 186   > /dev/null 2>&1 &
 187 gstpid=$!
 188
 189 # Give stream a second to get going
 190 sleep 1
 191
 192 # Ask kodi to start streaming using its JSON-RPC API
 193 kodicmd "$kodihost" Player.Open \
 194         "{\"item\": { \"file\": \"udp://@$mcast:$mcastport\" } }" > /dev/null
 195
 196 # wait for gst to end
 197 wait "$gstpid"
 198 </pre></blockquote>
 199
 200 <p>I hope you find the approach useful.  I know I do.</p>
 201
 202 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 203 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 204 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 205
 206       </div>
 207       <div class="tags">
 208
 209
 210         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>.
 211
 212
 213       </div>
 214     </div>
 215     <div class="padding"></div>
 216
 217     <div class="entry">
 218       <div class="title">
 219         <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>
 220       </div>
 221       <div class="date">
 222         12th July 2018
 223       </div>
 224       <div class="body">
 225         <p>PS: See
 226 <ahref="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simple_streaming_the_Linux_desktop_to_Kodi_using_GStreamer_and_RTP.html">the
 227 followup post</a> for a even better approach.</p>
 228
 229 <p>A while back, I was asked by a friend how to stream the desktop to
 230 my projector connected to Kodi.  I sadly had to admit that I had no
 231 idea, as it was a task I never had tried.  Since then, I have been
 232 looking for a way to do so, preferable without much extra software to
 233 install on either side.  Today I found a way that seem to kind of
 234 work.  Not great, but it is a start.</p>
 235
 236 <p>I had a look at several approaches, for example
 237 <a href="https://github.com/mfoetsch/dlna_live_streaming">using uPnP
 238 DLNA as described in 2011</a>, but it required a uPnP server, fuse and
 239 local storage enough to store the stream locally.  This is not going
 240 to work well for me, lacking enough free space, and it would
 241 impossible for my friend to get working.</p>
 242
 243 <p>Next, it occurred to me that perhaps I could use VLC to create a
 244 video stream that Kodi could play.  Preferably using
 245 broadcast/multicast, to avoid having to change any setup on the Kodi
 246 side when starting such stream.  Unfortunately, the only recipe I
 247 could find using multicast used the rtp protocol, and this protocol
 248 seem to not be supported by Kodi.</p>
 249
 250 <p>On the other hand, the rtsp protocol is working!  Unfortunately I
 251 have to specify the IP address of the streaming machine in both the
 252 sending command and the file on the Kodi server.  But it is showing my
 253 desktop, and thus allow us to have a shared look on the big screen at
 254 the programs I work on.</p>
 255
 256 <p>I did not spend much time investigating codeces.  I combined the
 257 rtp and rtsp recipes from
 258 <a href="https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Streaming_HowTo/Command_Line_Examples/">the
 259 VLC Streaming HowTo/Command Line Examples</a>, and was able to get
 260 this working on the desktop/streaming end.</p>
 261
 262 <blockquote><pre>
 263 vlc screen:// --sout \
 264   '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{dst=projector.local,port=1234,sdp=rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/test.sdp}'
 265 </pre></blockquote>
 266
 267 <p>I ssh-ed into my Kodi box and created a file like this with the
 268 same IP address:</p>
 269
 270 <blockquote><pre>
 271 echo rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/test.sdp \
 272   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
 273 </pre></blockquote>
 274
 275 <p>Note the 192.168.11.4 IP address is my desktops IP address.  As far
 276 as I can tell the IP must be hardcoded for this to work.  In other
 277 words, if someone elses machine is going to do the steaming, you have
 278 to update screenstream.m3u on the Kodi machine and adjust the vlc
 279 recipe.  To get started, locate the file in Kodi and select the m3u
 280 file while the VLC stream is running.  The desktop then show up in my
 281 big screen. :)</p>
 282
 283 <p>When using the same technique to stream a video file with audio,
 284 the audio quality is really bad.  No idea if the problem is package
 285 loss or bad parameters for the transcode.  I do not know VLC nor Kodi
 286 enough to tell.</p>
 287
 288 <p><strong>Update 2018-07-12</strong>: Johannes Schauer send me a few
 289 succestions and reminded me about an important step.  The "screen:"
 290 input source is only available once the vlc-plugin-access-extra
 291 package is installed on Debian.  Without it, you will see this error
 292 message: "VLC is unable to open the MRL 'screen://'.  Check the log
 293 for details."  He further found that it is possible to drop some parts
 294 of the VLC command line to reduce the amount of hardcoded information.
 295 It is also useful to consider using cvlc to avoid having the VLC
 296 window in the desktop view.  In sum, this give us this command line on
 297 the source end
 298
 299 <blockquote><pre>
 300 cvlc screen:// --sout \
 301   '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{sdp=rtsp://:8080/}'
 302 </pre></blockquote>
 303
 304 <p>and this on the Kodi end<p>
 305
 306 <blockquote><pre>
 307 echo rtsp://192.168.11.4:8080/ \
 308   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
 309 </pre></blockquote>
 310
 311 <p>Still bad image quality, though.  But I did discover that streaming
 312 a DVD using dvdsimple:///dev/dvd as the source had excellent video and
 313 audio quality, so I guess the issue is in the input or transcoding
 314 parts, not the rtsp part.  I've tried to change the vb and ab
 315 parameters to use more bandwidth, but it did not make a
 316 difference.</p>
 317
 318 <p>I further received a suggestion from Einar Haraldseid to try using
 319 gstreamer instead of VLC, and this proved to work great!  He also
 320 provided me with the trick to get Kodi to use a multicast stream as
 321 its source.  By using this monstrous oneliner, I can stream my desktop
 322 with good video quality in reasonable framerate to the 239.255.0.1
 323 multicast address on port 1234:
 324
 325 <blockquote><pre>
 326 gst-launch-1.0 ximagesrc use-damage=0 ! video/x-raw,framerate=30/1 ! \
 327   videoconvert ! queue2 ! \
 328   x264enc bitrate=8000 speed-preset=superfast tune=zerolatency qp-min=30 \
 329   key-int-max=15 bframes=2 ! video/x-h264,profile=high ! queue2 ! \
 330   mpegtsmux alignment=7 name=mux ! rndbuffersize max=1316 min=1316 ! \
 331   udpsink host=239.255.0.1 port=1234 ttl-mc=1 auto-multicast=1 sync=0 \
 332   pulsesrc device=$(pactl list | grep -A2 'Source #' | \
 333     grep 'Name: .*\.monitor$' |  cut -d" " -f2|head -1) ! \
 334   audioconvert ! queue2 ! avenc_aac ! queue2 ! mux.
 335 </pre></blockquote>
 336
 337 <p>and this on the Kodi end<p>
 338
 339 <blockquote><pre>
 340 echo udp://@239.255.0.1:1234 \
 341   > /storage/videos/screenstream.m3u
 342 </pre></blockquote>
 343
 344 <p>Note the trick to pick a valid pulseaudio source.  It might not
 345 pick the one you need.  This approach will of course lead to trouble
 346 if more than one source uses the same multicast port and address.
 347 Note the ttl-mc=1 setting, which limit the multicast packages to the
 348 local network.  If the value is increased, your screen will be
 349 broadcasted further, one network "hop" for each increase (read up on
 350 multicast to learn more. :)!</p>
 351
 352 <p>Having cracked how to get Kodi to receive multicast streams, I
 353 could use this VLC command to stream to the same multicast address.
 354 The image quality is way better than the rtsp approach, but gstreamer
 355 seem to be doing a better job.</p>
 356
 357 <blockquote><pre>
 358 cvlc screen:// --sout '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:rtp{mux=ts,dst=239.255.0.1,port=1234,sdp=sap}'
 359 </pre></blockquote>
 360
 361 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 362 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 363 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 364
 365       </div>
 366       <div class="tags">
 367
 368
 369         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>.
 370
 371
 372       </div>
 373     </div>
 374     <div class="padding"></div>
 375
 376     <div class="entry">
 377       <div class="title">
 378         <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>
 379       </div>
 380       <div class="date">
 381          9th July 2018
 382       </div>
 383       <div class="body">
 384         <p>Five years ago,
 385 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">I
 386 measured what the most supported MIME type in Debian was</a>, by
 387 analysing the desktop files in all packages in the archive.  Since
 388 then, the DEP-11 AppStream system has been put into production, making
 389 the task a lot easier.  This made me want to repeat the measurement,
 390 to see how much things changed.  Here are the new numbers, for
 391 unstable only this time:
 392
 393 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
 394
 395 <pre>
 396   count MIME type
 397   ----- -----------------------
 398      56 image/jpeg
 399      55 image/png
 400      49 image/tiff
 401      48 image/gif
 402      39 image/bmp
 403      38 text/plain
 404      37 audio/mpeg
 405      34 application/ogg
 406      33 audio/x-flac
 407      32 audio/x-mp3
 408      30 audio/x-wav
 409      30 audio/x-vorbis+ogg
 410      29 image/x-portable-pixmap
 411      27 inode/directory
 412      27 image/x-portable-bitmap
 413      27 audio/x-mpeg
 414      26 application/x-ogg
 415      25 audio/x-mpegurl
 416      25 audio/ogg
 417      24 text/html
 418 </pre>
 419
 420 <p>The list was created like this using a sid chroot: "cat
 421 /var/lib/apt/lists/*sid*_dep11_Components-amd64.yml.gz| zcat | awk '/^
 422 - \S+\/\S+$/ {print $2 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20"</p>
 423
 424 <p>It is interesting to see how image formats have passed text/plain
 425 as the most announced supported MIME type.  These days, thanks to the
 426 AppStream system, if you run into a file format you do not know, and
 427 want to figure out which packages support the format, you can find the
 428 MIME type of the file using "file --mime &lt;filename&gt;", and then
 429 look up all packages announcing support for this format in their
 430 AppStream metadata (XML or .desktop file) using "appstreamcli
 431 what-provides mimetype &lt;mime-type&gt;.  For example if you, like
 432 me, want to know which packages support inode/directory, you can get a
 433 list like this:</p>
 434
 435 <p><blockquote><pre>
 436 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype inode/directory | grep Package: | sort
 437 Package: anjuta
 438 Package: audacious
 439 Package: baobab
 440 Package: cervisia
 441 Package: chirp
 442 Package: dolphin
 443 Package: doublecmd-common
 444 Package: easytag
 445 Package: enlightenment
 446 Package: ephoto
 447 Package: filelight
 448 Package: gwenview
 449 Package: k4dirstat
 450 Package: kaffeine
 451 Package: kdesvn
 452 Package: kid3
 453 Package: kid3-qt
 454 Package: nautilus
 455 Package: nemo
 456 Package: pcmanfm
 457 Package: pcmanfm-qt
 458 Package: qweborf
 459 Package: ranger
 460 Package: sirikali
 461 Package: spacefm
 462 Package: spacefm
 463 Package: vifm
 464 %
 465 </pre></blockquote></p>
 466
 467 <p>Using the same method, I can quickly discover that the Sketchup file
 468 format is not yet supported by any package in Debian:</p>
 469
 470 <p><blockquote><pre>
 471 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype  application/vnd.sketchup.skp
 472 Could not find component providing 'mimetype::application/vnd.sketchup.skp'.
 473 %
 474 </pre></blockquote></p>
 475
 476 <p>Yesterday I used it to figure out which packages support the STL 3D
 477 format:</p>
 478
 479 <p><blockquote><pre>
 480 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype  application/sla|grep Package
 481 Package: cura
 482 Package: meshlab
 483 Package: printrun
 484 %
 485 </pre></blockquote></p>
 486
 487 <p>PS: A new version of Cura was uploaded to Debian yesterday.</p>
 488
 489 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 490 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 491 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 492
 493       </div>
 494       <div class="tags">
 495
 496
 497         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>.
 498
 499
 500       </div>
 501     </div>
 502     <div class="padding"></div>
 503
 504     <div class="entry">
 505       <div class="title">
 506         <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>
 507       </div>
 508       <div class="date">
 509          8th July 2018
 510       </div>
 511       <div class="body">
 512         <p>Quite regularly, I let my Debian Sid/Unstable chroot stay untouch
 513 for a while, and when I need to update it there is not enough free
 514 space on the disk for apt to do a normal 'apt upgrade'.  I normally
 515 would resolve the issue by doing 'apt install &lt;somepackages&gt;' to
 516 upgrade only some of the packages in one batch, until the amount of
 517 packages to download fall below the amount of free space available.
 518 Today, I had about 500 packages to upgrade, and after a while I got
 519 tired of trying to install chunks of packages manually.  I concluded
 520 that I did not have the spare hours required to complete the task, and
 521 decided to see if I could automate it.  I came up with this small
 522 script which I call 'apt-in-chunks':</p>
 523
 524 <p><blockquote><pre>
 525 #!/bin/sh
 526 #
 527 # Upgrade packages when the disk is too full to upgrade every
 528 # upgradable package in one lump.  Fetching packages to upgrade using
 529 # apt, and then installing using dpkg, to avoid changing the package
 530 # flag for manual/automatic.
 531
 532 set -e
 533
 534 ignore() {
 535     if [ "$1" ]; then
 536         grep -v "$1"
 537     else
 538         cat
 539     fi
 540 }
 541
 542 for p in $(apt list --upgradable | ignore "$@" |cut -d/ -f1 | grep -v '^Listing...'); do
 543     echo "Upgrading $p"
 544     apt clean
 545     apt install --download-only -y $p
 546     for f in /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb; do
 547         if [ -e "$f" ]; then
 548             dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb
 549             break
 550         fi
 551     done
 552 done
 553 </pre></blockquote></p>
 554
 555 <p>The script will extract the list of packages to upgrade, try to
 556 download the packages needed to upgrade one package, install the
 557 downloaded packages using dpkg.  The idea is to upgrade packages
 558 without changing the APT mark for the package (ie the one recording of
 559 the package was manually requested or pulled in as a dependency).  To
 560 use it, simply run it as root from the command line.  If it fail, try
 561 'apt install -f' to clean up the mess and run the script again.  This
 562 might happen if the new packages conflict with one of the old
 563 packages.  dpkg is unable to remove, while apt can do this.</p>
 564
 565 <p>It take one option, a package to ignore in the list of packages to
 566 upgrade.  The option to ignore a package is there to be able to skip
 567 the packages that are simply too large to unpack.  Today this was
 568 'ghc', but I have run into other large packages causing similar
 569 problems earlier (like TeX).</p>
 570
 571 <p>Update 2018-07-08: Thanks to Paul Wise, I am aware of two
 572 alternative ways to handle this.  The "unattended-upgrades
 573 --minimal-upgrade-steps" option will try to calculate upgrade sets for
 574 each package to upgrade, and then upgrade them in order, smallest set
 575 first.  It might be a better option than my above mentioned script.
 576 Also, "aptutude upgrade" can upgrade single packages, thus avoiding
 577 the need for using "dpkg -i" in the script above.</p>
 578
 579 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 580 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 581 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 582
 583       </div>
 584       <div class="tags">
 585
 586
 587         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>.
 588
 589
 590       </div>
 591     </div>
 592     <div class="padding"></div>
 593
 594     <div class="entry">
 595       <div class="title">
 596         <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>
 597       </div>
 598       <div class="date">
 599         13th February 2018
 600       </div>
 601       <div class="body">
 602         <p>A new version of the
 603 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">3D printer slicer
 604 software Cura</a>, version 3.1.0, is now available in Debian Testing
 605 (aka Buster) and Debian Unstable (aka Sid).  I hope you find it
 606 useful.  It was uploaded the last few days, and the last update will
 607 enter testing tomorrow.  See the
 608 <a href="https://ultimaker.com/en/products/cura-software/release-notes">release
 609 notes</a> for the list of bug fixes and new features.  Version 3.2
 610 was announced 6 days ago.  We will try to get it into Debian as
 611 well.</p>
 612
 613 <p>More information related to 3D printing is available on the
 614 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3DPrinting">3D printing</a> and
 615 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3D-printer">3D printer</a> wiki pages
 616 in Debian.</p>
 617
 618 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 619 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 620 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 621
 622       </div>
 623       <div class="tags">
 624
 625
 626         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>.
 627
 628
 629       </div>
 630     </div>
 631     <div class="padding"></div>
 632
 633     <div class="entry">
 634       <div class="title">
 635         <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>
 636       </div>
 637       <div class="date">
 638         17th December 2017
 639       </div>
 640       <div class="body">
 641         <p>After several months of working and waiting, I am happy to report
 642 that the nice and user friendly 3D printer slicer software Cura just
 643 entered Debian Unstable.  It consist of five packages,
 644 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">cura</a>,
 645 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura-engine">cura-engine</a>,
 646 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libarcus">libarcus</a>,
 647 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fdm-materials">fdm-materials</a>,
 648 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libsavitar">libsavitar</a> and
 649 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/uranium">uranium</a>.  The last
 650 two, uranium and cura, entered Unstable yesterday.  This should make
 651 it easier for Debian users to print on at least the Ultimaker class of
 652 3D printers.  My nearest 3D printer is an Ultimaker 2+, so it will
 653 make life easier for at least me. :)</p>
 654
 655 <p>The work to make this happen was done by Gregor Riepl, and I was
 656 happy to assist him in sponsoring the packages.  With the introduction
 657 of Cura, Debian is up to three 3D printer slicers at your service,
 658 Cura, Slic3r and Slic3r Prusa.  If you own or have access to a 3D
 659 printer, give it a go. :)</p>
 660
 661 <p>The 3D printer software is maintained by the 3D printer Debian
 662 team, flocking together on the
 663 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/3dprinter-general">3dprinter-general</a>
 664 mailing list and the
 665 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-3dprinting">#debian-3dprinting</a>
 666 IRC channel.</p>
 667
 668 <p>The next step for Cura in Debian is to update the cura package to
 669 version 3.0.3 and then update the entire set of packages to version
 670 3.1.0 which showed up the last few days.</p>
 671
 672       </div>
 673       <div class="tags">
 674
 675
 676         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>.
 677
 678
 679       </div>
 680     </div>
 681     <div class="padding"></div>
 682
 683     <div class="entry">
 684       <div class="title">
 685         <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>
 686       </div>
 687       <div class="date">
 688          9th October 2017
 689       </div>
 690       <div class="body">
 691         <p>At my nearby maker space,
 692 <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Sonen</a>, I heard the story that it
 693 was easier to generate gcode files for theyr 3D printers (Ultimake 2+)
 694 on Windows and MacOS X than Linux, because the software involved had
 695 to be manually compiled and set up on Linux while premade packages
 696 worked out of the box on Windows and MacOS X.  I found this annoying,
 697 as the software involved,
 698 <a href="https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura">Cura</a>, is free software
 699 and should be trivial to get up and running on Linux if someone took
 700 the time to package it for the relevant distributions.  I even found
 701 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/706656">a request for adding into
 702 Debian</a> from 2013, which had seem some activity over the years but
 703 never resulted in the software showing up in Debian.  So a few days
 704 ago I offered my help to try to improve the situation.</p>
 705
 706 <p>Now I am very happy to see that all the packages required by a
 707 working Cura in Debian are uploaded into Debian and waiting in the NEW
 708 queue for the ftpmasters to have a look.  You can track the progress
 709 on
 710 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=3dprinter-general%40lists.alioth.debian.org">the
 711 status page for the 3D printer team</a>.</p>
 712
 713 <p>The uploaded packages are a bit behind upstream, and was uploaded
 714 now to get slots in <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW
 715 queue</a> while we work up updating the packages to the latest
 716 upstream version.</p>
 717
 718 <p>On a related note, two competitors for Cura, which I found harder
 719 to use and was unable to configure correctly for Ultimaker 2+ in the
 720 short time I spent on it, are already in Debian.  If you are looking
 721 for 3D printer "slicers" and want something already available in
 722 Debian, check out
 723 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r">slic3r</a> and
 724 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r-prusa">slic3r-prusa</a>.
 725 The latter is a fork of the former.</p>
 726
 727 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 728 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 729 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 730
 731       </div>
 732       <div class="tags">
 733
 734
 735         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>.
 736
 737
 738       </div>
 739     </div>
 740     <div class="padding"></div>
 741
 742     <div class="entry">
 743       <div class="title">
 744         <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>
 745       </div>
 746       <div class="date">
 747         29th September 2017
 748       </div>
 749       <div class="body">
 750         <p>Every mobile phone announce its existence over radio to the nearby
 751 mobile cell towers.  And this radio chatter is available for anyone
 752 with a radio receiver capable of receiving them.  Details about the
 753 mobile phones with very good accuracy is of course collected by the
 754 phone companies, but this is not the topic of this blog post.  The
 755 mobile phone radio chatter make it possible to figure out when a cell
 756 phone is nearby, as it include the SIM card ID (IMSI).  By paying
 757 attention over time, one can see when a phone arrive and when it leave
 758 an area.  I believe it would be nice to make this information more
 759 available to the general public, to make more people aware of how
 760 their phones are announcing their whereabouts to anyone that care to
 761 listen.</p>
 762
 763 <p>I am very happy to report that we managed to get something
 764 visualizing this information up and running for
 765 <a href="http://norwaymakers.org/osf17">Oslo Skaperfestival 2017</a>
 766 (Oslo Makers Festival) taking place today and tomorrow at Deichmanske
 767 library.  The solution is based on the
 768 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">simple
 769 recipe for listening to GSM chatter</a> I posted a few days ago, and
 770 will show up at the stand of <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Åpen
 771 Sone from the Computer Science department of the University of
 772 Oslo</a>.  The presentation will show the nearby mobile phones (aka
 773 IMSIs) as dots in a web browser graph, with lines to the dot
 774 representing mobile base station it is talking to. It was working in
 775 the lab yesterday, and was moved into place this morning.</p>
 776
 777 <p>We set up a fairly powerful desktop machine using Debian
 778 Buster/Testing with several (five, I believe) RTL2838 DVB-T receivers
 779 connected and visualize the visible cell phone towers using an
 780 <a href="https://github.com/marlow925/hopglass">English version of
 781 Hopglass</a>.  A fairly powerfull machine is needed as the
 782 grgsm_livemon_headless processes from
 783 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a> converting
 784 the radio signal to data packages is quite CPU intensive.</p>
 785
 786 <p>The frequencies to listen to, are identified using a slightly
 787 patched scan-and-livemon (to set the --args values for each receiver),
 788 and the Hopglass data is generated using the
 789 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/IMSI-catcher/tree/meshviewer-output">patches
 790 in my meshviewer-output branch</a>.  For some reason we could not get
 791 more than four SDRs working.  There is also a geographical map trying
 792 to show the location of the base stations, but I believe their
 793 coordinates are hardcoded to some random location in Germany, I
 794 believe.  The code should be replaced with code to look up location in
 795 a text file, a sqlite database or one of the online databases
 796 mentioned in
 797 <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher/issues/14">the github
 798 issue for the topic</a>.
 799
 800 <p>If this sound interesting, visit the stand at the festival!</p>
 801
 802       </div>
 803       <div class="tags">
 804
 805
 806         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>.
 807
 808
 809       </div>
 810     </div>
 811     <div class="padding"></div>
 812
 813     <div class="entry">
 814       <div class="title">
 815         <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>
 816       </div>
 817       <div class="date">
 818         24th September 2017
 819       </div>
 820       <div class="body">
 821         <p>A little more than a month ago I wrote
 822 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">how
 823 to observe the SIM card ID (aka IMSI number) of mobile phones talking
 824 to nearby mobile phone base stations using Debian GNU/Linux and a
 825 cheap USB software defined radio</a>, and thus being able to pinpoint
 826 the location of people and equipment (like cars and trains) with an
 827 accuracy of a few kilometer.  Since then we have worked to make the
 828 procedure even simpler, and it is now possible to do this without any
 829 manual frequency tuning and without building your own packages.</p>
 830
 831 <p>The <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a>
 832 package is now included in Debian testing and unstable, and the
 833 IMSI-catcher code no longer require root access to fetch and decode
 834 the GSM data collected using gr-gsm.</p>
 835
 836 <p>Here is an updated recipe, using packages built by Debian and a git
 837 clone of two python scripts:</p>
 838
 839 <ol>
 840
 841 <li>Start with a Debian machine running the Buster version (aka
 842   testing).</li>
 843
 844 <li>Run '<tt>apt install gr-gsm python-numpy python-scipy
 845   python-scapy</tt>' as root to install required packages.</li>
 846
 847 <li>Fetch the code decoding GSM packages using '<tt>git clone
 848   github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher.git</tt>'.</li>
 849
 850 <li>Insert USB software defined radio supported by GNU Radio.</li>
 851
 852 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
 853   scan-and-livemon</tt>' to locate the frequency of nearby base
 854   stations and start listening for GSM packages on one of them.</li>
 855
 856 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
 857   simple_IMSI-catcher.py</tt>' to display the collected information.</li>
 858
 859 </ol>
 860
 861 <p>Note, due to a bug somewhere the scan-and-livemon program (actually
 862 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/issues/336">its underlying
 863 program grgsm_scanner</a>) do not work with the HackRF radio.  It does
 864 work with RTL 8232 and other similar USB radio receivers you can get
 865 very cheaply
 866 (<a href="https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=rtl+2832">for example
 867 from ebay</a>), so for now the solution is to scan using the RTL radio
 868 and only use HackRF for fetching GSM data.</p>
 869
 870 <p>As far as I can tell, a cell phone only show up on one of the
 871 frequencies at the time, so if you are going to track and count every
 872 cell phone around you, you need to listen to all the frequencies used.
 873 To listen to several frequencies, use the --numrecv argument to
 874 scan-and-livemon to use several receivers.  Further, I am not sure if
 875 phones using 3G or 4G will show as talking GSM to base stations, so
 876 this approach might not see all phones around you.  I typically see
 877 0-400 IMSI numbers an hour when looking around where I live.</p>
 878
 879 <p>I've tried to run the scanner on a
 880 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi 2 and 3
 881 running Debian Buster</a>, but the grgsm_livemon_headless process seem
 882 to be too CPU intensive to keep up.  When GNU Radio print 'O' to
 883 stdout, I am told there it is caused by a buffer overflow between the
 884 radio and GNU Radio, caused by the program being unable to read the
 885 GSM data fast enough.  If you see a stream of 'O's from the terminal
 886 where you started scan-and-livemon, you need a give the process more
 887 CPU power.  Perhaps someone are able to optimize the code to a point
 888 where it become possible to set up RPi3 based GSM sniffers?  I tried
 889 using Raspbian instead of Debian, but there seem to be something wrong
 890 with GNU Radio on raspbian, causing glibc to abort().</p>
 891
 892       </div>
 893       <div class="tags">
 894
 895
 896         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>.
 897
 898
 899       </div>
 900     </div>
 901     <div class="padding"></div>
 902
 903     <div class="entry">
 904       <div class="title">
 905         <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>
 906       </div>
 907       <div class="date">
 908          9th August 2017
 909       </div>
 910       <div class="body">
 911         <p>On friday, I came across an interesting article in the Norwegian
 912 web based ICT news magazine digi.no on
 913 <a href="https://www.digi.no/artikler/sikkerhetsforsker-lagde-enkel-imsi-catcher-for-60-kroner-na-kan-mobiler-kartlegges-av-alle/398588">how
 914 to collect the IMSI numbers of nearby cell phones</a> using the cheap
 915 DVB-T software defined radios.  The article refered to instructions
 916 and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjwgNd_as30">a recipe by
 917 Keld Norman on Youtube on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher</a>, and I decided to test them out.</p>
 918
 919 <p>The instructions said to use Ubuntu, install pip using apt (to
 920 bypass apt), use pip to install pybombs (to bypass both apt and pip),
 921 and the ask pybombs to fetch and build everything you need from
 922 scratch.  I wanted to see if I could do the same on the most recent
 923 Debian packages, but this did not work because pybombs tried to build
 924 stuff that no longer build with the most recent openssl library or
 925 some other version skew problem.  While trying to get this recipe
 926 working, I learned that the apt->pip->pybombs route was a long detour,
 927 and the only piece of software dependency missing in Debian was the
 928 gr-gsm package.  I also found out that the lead upstream developer of
 929 gr-gsm (the name stand for GNU Radio GSM) project already had a set of
 930 Debian packages provided in an Ubuntu PPA repository.  All I needed to
 931 do was to dget the Debian source package and built it.</p>
 932
 933 <p>The IMSI collector is a python script listening for packages on the
 934 loopback network device and printing to the terminal some specific GSM
 935 packages with IMSI numbers in them.  The code is fairly short and easy
 936 to understand.  The reason this work is because gr-gsm include a tool
 937 to read GSM data from a software defined radio like a DVB-T USB stick
 938 and other software defined radios, decode them and inject them into a
 939 network device on your Linux machine (using the loopback device by
 940 default).  This proved to work just fine, and I've been testing the
 941 collector for a few days now.</p>
 942
 943 <p>The updated and simpler recipe is thus to</p>
 944
 945 <ol>
 946
 947 <li>start with a Debian machine running Stretch or newer,</li>
 948
 949 <li>build and install the gr-gsm package available from
 950 <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>
 951
 952 <li>clone the git repostory from <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher">https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher</a>,</li>
 953
 954 <li>run grgsm_livemon and adjust the frequency until the terminal
 955 where it was started is filled with a stream of text (meaning you
 956 found a GSM station).</li>
 957
 958 <li>go into the IMSI-catcher directory and run 'sudo python simple_IMSI-catcher.py' to extract the IMSI numbers.</li>
 959
 960 </ol>
 961
 962 <p>To make it even easier in the future to get this sniffer up and
 963 running, I decided to package
 964 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/">the gr-gsm project</a>
 965 for Debian (<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/871055">WNPP
 966 #871055</a>), and the package was uploaded into the NEW queue today.
 967 Luckily the gnuradio maintainer has promised to help me, as I do not
 968 know much about gnuradio stuff yet.</p>
 969
 970 <p>I doubt this "IMSI cacher" is anywhere near as powerfull as
 971 commercial tools like
 972 <a href="https://www.thespyphone.com/portable-imsi-imei-catcher/">The
 973 Spy Phone Portable IMSI / IMEI Catcher</a> or the
 974 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker">Harris
 975 Stingray</a>, but I hope the existance of cheap alternatives can make
 976 more people realise how their whereabouts when carrying a cell phone
 977 is easily tracked.  Seeing the data flow on the screen, realizing that
 978 I live close to a police station and knowing that the police is also
 979 wearing cell phones, I wonder how hard it would be for criminals to
 980 track the position of the police officers to discover when there are
 981 police near by, or for foreign military forces to track the location
 982 of the Norwegian military forces, or for anyone to track the location
 983 of government officials...</p>
 984
 985 <p>It is worth noting that the data reported by the IMSI-catcher
 986 script mentioned above is only a fraction of the data broadcasted on
 987 the GSM network.  It will only collect one frequency at the time,
 988 while a typical phone will be using several frequencies, and not all
 989 phones will be using the frequencies tracked by the grgsm_livemod
 990 program.  Also, there is a lot of radio chatter being ignored by the
 991 simple_IMSI-catcher script, which would be collected by extending the
 992 parser code.  I wonder if gr-gsm can be set up to listen to more than
 993 one frequency?</p>
 994
 995       </div>
 996       <div class="tags">
 997
 998
 999         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>.
1000
1001
1002       </div>
1003     </div>
1004     <div class="padding"></div>
1005
1006     <div class="entry">
1007       <div class="title">
1008         <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>
1009       </div>
1010       <div class="date">
1011         25th July 2017
1012       </div>
1013       <div class="body">
1014         <p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-07-25-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.png"/></p>
1015
1016 <p>I finally received a copy of the Norwegian Bokmål edition of
1017 "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
1018 Handbook</a>".  This test copy arrived in the mail a few days ago, and
1019 I am very happy to hold the result in my hand.   We spent around one and a half year translating it. This paperbook edition
1020 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian">is available
1021 from lulu.com</a>.  If you buy it quickly, you save 25% on the list
1022 price.  The book is also available for download in electronic form as
1023 PDF, EPUB and Mobipocket, as can be
1024 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/browse/nb-NO/stable/">read online
1025 as a web page</a>.</p>
1026
1027 <p>This is the second book I publish (the first was the book
1028 "<a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>" by Lawrence Lessig
1029 in
1030 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>,
1031 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">French</a>
1032 and
1033 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
1034 Bokmål</a>), and I am very excited to finally wrap up this
1035 project.  I hope
1036 "<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
1037 for Debian-administratoren</a>" will be well received.</p>
1038
1039       </div>
1040       <div class="tags">
1041
1042
1043         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>.
1044
1045
1046       </div>
1047     </div>
1048     <div class="padding"></div>
1049
1050     <div class="entry">
1051       <div class="title">
1052         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/N_r_nynorskoversettelsen_svikter_til_eksamen___.html">Når nynorskoversettelsen svikter til eksamen...</a>
1053       </div>
1054       <div class="date">
1055          3rd June 2017
1056       </div>
1057       <div class="body">
1058         <p><a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/norge/Krever-at-elever-ma-fa-annullert-eksamen-etter-rot-med-oppgavetekster-622459b.html">Aftenposten
1059 melder i dag</a> om feil i eksamensoppgavene for eksamen i politikk og
1060 menneskerettigheter, der teksten i bokmåls og nynorskutgaven ikke var
1061 like.  Oppgaveteksten er gjengitt i artikkelen, og jeg ble nysgjerring
1062 på om den fri oversetterløsningen
1063 <a href="https://www.apertium.org/">Apertium</a> ville gjort en bedre
1064 jobb enn Utdanningsdirektoratet.  Det kan se slik ut.</p>
1065
1066 <p>Her er bokmålsoppgaven fra eksamenen:</p>
1067
1068 <blockquote>
1069 <p>Drøft utfordringene knyttet til nasjonalstatenes og andre aktørers
1070 rolle og muligheter til å håndtere internasjonale utfordringer, som
1071 for eksempel flykningekrisen.</p>
1072
1073 <p>Vedlegge er eksempler på tekster som kan gi relevante perspektiver
1074 på temaet:</p>
1075 <ol>
1076 <li>Flykningeregnskapet 2016, UNHCR og IDMC
1077 <li>«Grenseløst Europa for fall» A-Magasinet, 26. november 2015
1078 </ol>
1079
1080 </blockquote>
1081
1082 <p>Dette oversetter Apertium slik:</p>
1083
1084 <blockquote>
1085 <p>Drøft utfordringane knytte til nasjonalstatane sine og rolla til
1086 andre aktørar og høve til å handtera internasjonale utfordringar, som
1087 til dømes *flykningekrisen.</p>
1088
1089 <p>Vedleggja er døme på tekster som kan gje relevante perspektiv på
1090 temaet:</p>
1091
1092 <ol>
1093 <li>*Flykningeregnskapet 2016, *UNHCR og *IDMC</li>
1094 <li>«*Grenseløst Europa for fall» A-Magasinet, 26. november 2015</li>
1095 </ol>
1096
1097 </blockquote>
1098
1099 <p>Ord som ikke ble forstått er markert med stjerne (*), og trenger
1100 ekstra språksjekk.  Men ingen ord er forsvunnet, slik det var i
1101 oppgaven elevene fikk presentert på eksamen.  Jeg mistenker dog at
1102 "andre aktørers rolle og muligheter til ..." burde vært oversatt til
1103 "rolla til andre aktørar og deira høve til ..." eller noe slikt, men
1104 det er kanskje flisespikking.  Det understreker vel bare at det alltid
1105 trengs korrekturlesning etter automatisk oversettelse.</p>
1106
1107       </div>
1108       <div class="tags">
1109
1110
1111         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>.
1112
1113
1114       </div>
1115     </div>
1116     <div class="padding"></div>
1117
1118     <div class="entry">
1119       <div class="title">
1120         <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>
1121       </div>
1122       <div class="date">
1123          9th March 2017
1124       </div>
1125       <div class="body">
1126         <p>Over the years, administrating thousand of NFS mounting linux
1127 computers at the time, I often needed a way to detect if the machine
1128 was experiencing NFS hang.  If you try to use <tt>df</tt> or look at a
1129 file or directory affected by the hang, the process (and possibly the
1130 shell) will hang too.  So you want to be able to detect this without
1131 risking the detection process getting stuck too.  It has not been
1132 obvious how to do this.  When the hang has lasted a while, it is
1133 possible to find messages like these in dmesg:</p>
1134
1135 <p><blockquote>
1136 nfs: server nfsserver not responding, still trying
1137 <br>nfs: server nfsserver OK
1138 </blockquote></p>
1139
1140 <p>It is hard to know if the hang is still going on, and it is hard to
1141 be sure looking in dmesg is going to work.  If there are lots of other
1142 messages in dmesg the lines might have rotated out of site before they
1143 are noticed.</p>
1144
1145 <p>While reading through the nfs client implementation in linux kernel
1146 code, I came across some statistics that seem to give a way to detect
1147 it.  The om_timeouts sunrpc value in the kernel will increase every
1148 time the above log entry is inserted into dmesg.  And after digging a
1149 bit further, I discovered that this value show up in
1150 /proc/self/mountstats on Linux.</p>
1151
1152 <p>The mountstats content seem to be shared between files using the
1153 same file system context, so it is enough to check one of the
1154 mountstats files to get the state of the mount point for the machine.
1155 I assume this will not show lazy umounted NFS points, nor NFS mount
1156 points in a different process context (ie with a different filesystem
1157 view), but that does not worry me.</p>
1158
1159 <p>The content for a NFS mount point look similar to this:</p>
1160
1161 <p><blockquote><pre>
1162 [...]
1163 device /dev/mapper/Debian-var mounted on /var with fstype ext3
1164 device nfsserver:/mnt/nfsserver/home0 mounted on /mnt/nfsserver/home0 with fstype nfs statvers=1.1
1165         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
1166         age:    7863311
1167         caps:   caps=0x3fe7,wtmult=4096,dtsize=8192,bsize=0,namlen=255
1168         sec:    flavor=1,pseudoflavor=1
1169         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
1170         bytes:  166253035039 219519120027 0 0 40783504807 185466229638 11677877 45561809
1171         RPC iostats version: 1.0  p/v: 100003/3 (nfs)
1172         xprt:   tcp 925 1 6810 0 0 111505412 111480497 109 2672418560317 0 248 53869103 22481820
1173         per-op statistics
1174                 NULL: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1175              GETATTR: 61063106 61063108 0 9621383060 6839064400 453650 77291321 78926132
1176              SETATTR: 463469 463470 0 92005440 66739536 63787 603235 687943
1177               LOOKUP: 17021657 17021657 0 3354097764 4013442928 57216 35125459 35566511
1178               ACCESS: 14281703 14290009 5 2318400592 1713803640 1709282 4865144 7130140
1179             READLINK: 125 125 0 20472 18620 0 1112 1118
1180                 READ: 4214236 4214237 0 715608524 41328653212 89884 22622768 22806693
1181                WRITE: 8479010 8494376 22 187695798568 1356087148 178264904 51506907 231671771
1182               CREATE: 171708 171708 0 38084748 46702272 873 1041833 1050398
1183                MKDIR: 3680 3680 0 773980 993920 26 23990 24245
1184              SYMLINK: 903 903 0 233428 245488 6 5865 5917
1185                MKNOD: 80 80 0 20148 21760 0 299 304
1186               REMOVE: 429921 429921 0 79796004 61908192 3313 2710416 2741636
1187                RMDIR: 3367 3367 0 645112 484848 22 5782 6002
1188               RENAME: 466201 466201 0 130026184 121212260 7075 5935207 5961288
1189                 LINK: 289155 289155 0 72775556 67083960 2199 2565060 2585579
1190              READDIR: 2933237 2933237 0 516506204 13973833412 10385 3190199 3297917
1191          READDIRPLUS: 1652839 1652839 0 298640972 6895997744 84735 14307895 14448937
1192               FSSTAT: 6144 6144 0 1010516 1032192 51 9654 10022
1193               FSINFO: 2 2 0 232 328 0 1 1
1194             PATHCONF: 1 1 0 116 140 0 0 0
1195               COMMIT: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1196
1197 device binfmt_misc mounted on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc with fstype binfmt_misc
1198 [...]
1199 </pre></blockquote></p>
1200
1201 <p>The key number to look at is the third number in the per-op list.
1202 It is the number of NFS timeouts experiences per file system
1203 operation.  Here 22 write timeouts and 5 access timeouts.  If these
1204 numbers are increasing, I believe the machine is experiencing NFS
1205 hang.  Unfortunately the timeout value do not start to increase right
1206 away.  The NFS operations need to time out first, and this can take a
1207 while.  The exact timeout value depend on the setup.  For example the
1208 defaults for TCP and UDP mount points are quite different, and the
1209 timeout value is affected by the soft, hard, timeo and retrans NFS
1210 mount options.</p>
1211
1212 <p>The only way I have been able to get working on Debian and RedHat
1213 Enterprise Linux for getting the timeout count is to peek in /proc/.
1214 But according to
1215 <ahref="http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/816-4555/netmonitor-12/index.html">Solaris
1216 10 System Administration Guide: Network Services</a>, the 'nfsstat -c'
1217 command can be used to get these timeout values.  But this do not work
1218 on Linux, as far as I can tell.  I
1219 <ahref="http://bugs.debian.org/857043">asked Debian about this</a>,
1220 but have not seen any replies yet.</p>
1221
1222 <p>Is there a better way to figure out if a Linux NFS client is
1223 experiencing NFS hangs?  Is there a way to detect which processes are
1224 affected?  Is there a way to get the NFS mount going quickly once the
1225 network problem causing the NFS hang has been cleared?  I would very
1226 much welcome some clues, as we regularly run into NFS hangs.</p>
1227
1228       </div>
1229       <div class="tags">
1230
1231
1232         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>.
1233
1234
1235       </div>
1236     </div>
1237     <div class="padding"></div>
1238
1239     <div class="entry">
1240       <div class="title">
1241         <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>
1242       </div>
1243       <div class="date">
1244          3rd March 2017
1245       </div>
1246       <div class="body">
1247         <p>For almost a year now, we have been working on making a Norwegian
1248 Bokmål edition of <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian
1249 Administrator's Handbook</a>.  Now, thanks to the tireless effort of
1250 Ole-Erik, Ingrid and Andreas, the initial translation is complete, and
1251 we are working on the proof reading to ensure consistent language and
1252 use of correct computer science terms.  The plan is to make the book
1253 available on paper, as well as in electronic form.  For that to
1254 happen, the proof reading must be completed and all the figures need
1255 to be translated.  If you want to help out, get in touch.</p>
1256
1257 <p><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-handbook/debian-handbook-nb-NO.pdf">A
1258
1259 fresh PDF edition</a> in A4 format (the final book will have smaller
1260 pages) of the book created every morning is available for
1261 proofreading.  If you find any errors, please
1262 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">visit
1263 Weblate and correct the error</a>.  The
1264 <a href="http://l.github.io/debian-handbook/stat/nb-NO/index.html">state
1265 of the translation including figures</a> is a useful source for those
1266 provide Norwegian bokmål screen shots and figures.</p>
1267
1268       </div>
1269       <div class="tags">
1270
1271
1272         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>.
1273
1274
1275       </div>
1276     </div>
1277     <div class="padding"></div>
1278
1279     <div class="entry">
1280       <div class="title">
1281         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlimited_randomness_with_the_ChaosKey_.html">Unlimited randomness with the ChaosKey?</a>
1282       </div>
1283       <div class="date">
1284          1st March 2017
1285       </div>
1286       <div class="body">
1287         <p>A few days ago I ordered a small batch of
1288 <a href="http://altusmetrum.org/ChaosKey/">the ChaosKey</a>, a small
1289 USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith
1290 Packard.  Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it
1291 work great!  According to its designers, to get it to work out of the
1292 box, you need the Linux kernel version 4.1 or later.  I tested on a
1293 Debian Stretch machine (kernel version 4.9), and there it worked just
1294 fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly.  I wrote a small
1295 test oneliner to test.  It first print the current entropy level,
1296 drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds.
1297 Here is the situation without the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
1298
1299 <blockquote><pre>
1300 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1301   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
1302   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
1303      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1304      sleep 1; \
1305   done
1306 300
1307 0+1 oppføringer inn
1308 0+1 oppføringer ut
1309 28 byte kopiert, 0,000264565 s, 106 kB/s
1310 4
1311 8
1312 12
1313 17
1314 21
1315 %
1316 </pre></blockquote>
1317
1318 <p>The entropy level increases by 3-4 every second.  In such case any
1319 application requiring random bits (like a HTTPS enabled web server)
1320 will halt and wait for more entrpy.  And here is the situation with
1321 the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
1322
1323 <blockquote><pre>
1324 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1325   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
1326   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
1327      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1328      sleep 1; \
1329   done
1330 1079
1331 0+1 oppføringer inn
1332 0+1 oppføringer ut
1333 104 byte kopiert, 0,000487647 s, 213 kB/s
1334 433
1335 1028
1336 1031
1337 1035
1338 1038
1339 %
1340 </pre></blockquote>
1341
1342 <p>Quite the difference. :) I bought a few more than I need, in case
1343 someone want to buy one here in Norway. :)</p>
1344
1345 <p>Update: The dongle was presented at Debconf last year.  You might
1346 find <a href="https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/94/">the talk
1347 recording illuminating</a>.  It explains exactly what the source of
1348 randomness is, if you are unable to spot it from the schema drawing
1349 available from the ChaosKey web site linked at the start of this blog
1350 post.</p>
1351
1352       </div>
1353       <div class="tags">
1354
1355
1356         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>.
1357
1358
1359       </div>
1360     </div>
1361     <div class="padding"></div>
1362
1363     <div class="entry">
1364       <div class="title">
1365         <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>
1366       </div>
1367       <div class="date">
1368          9th January 2017
1369       </div>
1370       <div class="body">
1371         <p>Did you ever wonder where the web trafic really flow to reach the
1372 web servers, and who own the network equipment it is flowing through?
1373 It is possible to get a glimpse of this from using traceroute, but it
1374 is hard to find all the details.  Many years ago, I wrote a system to
1375 map the Norwegian Internet (trying to figure out if our plans for a
1376 network game service would get low enough latency, and who we needed
1377 to talk to about setting up game servers close to the users.  Back
1378 then I used traceroute output from many locations (I asked my friends
1379 to run a script and send me their traceroute output) to create the
1380 graph and the map.  The output from traceroute typically look like
1381 this:
1382
1383 <p><pre>
1384 traceroute to www.stortinget.no (85.88.67.10), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1385  1  uio-gw10.uio.no (129.240.202.1)  0.447 ms  0.486 ms  0.621 ms
1386  2  uio-gw8.uio.no (129.240.24.229)  0.467 ms  0.578 ms  0.675 ms
1387  3  oslo-gw1.uninett.no (128.39.65.17)  0.385 ms  0.373 ms  0.358 ms
1388  4  te3-1-2.br1.fn3.as2116.net (193.156.90.3)  1.174 ms  1.172 ms  1.153 ms
1389  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
1390  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
1391  7  89.191.10.146 (89.191.10.146)  0.931 ms  0.917 ms  0.955 ms
1392  8  * * *
1393  9  * * *
1394 [...]
1395 </pre></p>
1396
1397 <p>This show the DNS names and IP addresses of (at least some of the)
1398 network equipment involved in getting the data traffic from me to the
1399 www.stortinget.no server, and how long it took in milliseconds for a
1400 package to reach the equipment and return to me.  Three packages are
1401 sent, and some times the packages do not follow the same path.  This
1402 is shown for hop 5, where three different IP addresses replied to the
1403 traceroute request.</p>
1404
1405 <p>There are many ways to measure trace routes.  Other good traceroute
1406 implementations I use are traceroute (using ICMP packages) mtr (can do
1407 both ICMP, UDP and TCP) and scapy (python library with ICMP, UDP, TCP
1408 traceroute and a lot of other capabilities).  All of them are easily
1409 available in <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>.</p>
1410
1411 <p>This time around, I wanted to know the geographic location of
1412 different route points, to visualize how visiting a web page spread
1413 information about the visit to a lot of servers around the globe.  The
1414 background is that a web site today often will ask the browser to get
1415 from many servers the parts (for example HTML, JSON, fonts,
1416 JavaScript, CSS, video) required to display the content.  This will
1417 leak information about the visit to those controlling these servers
1418 and anyone able to peek at the data traffic passing by (like your ISP,
1419 the ISPs backbone provider, FRA, GCHQ, NSA and others).</p>
1420
1421 <p>Lets pick an example, the Norwegian parliament web site
1422 www.stortinget.no.  It is read daily by all members of parliament and
1423 their staff, as well as political journalists, activits and many other
1424 citizens of Norway.  A visit to the www.stortinget.no web site will
1425 ask your browser to contact 8 other servers: ajax.googleapis.com,
1426 insights.hotjar.com, script.hotjar.com, static.hotjar.com,
1427 stats.g.doubleclick.net, www.google-analytics.com,
1428 www.googletagmanager.com and www.netigate.se.  I extracted this by
1429 asking <a href="http://phantomjs.org/">PhantomJS</a> to visit the
1430 Stortinget web page and tell me all the URLs PhantomJS downloaded to
1431 render the page (in HAR format using
1432 <a href="https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/blob/master/examples/netsniff.js">their
1433 netsniff example</a>.  I am very grateful to Gorm for showing me how
1434 to do this).  My goal is to visualize network traces to all IP
1435 addresses behind these DNS names, do show where visitors personal
1436 information is spread when visiting the page.</p>
1437
1438 <p align="center"><a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml"><img
1439 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>
1440
1441 <p>When I had a look around for options, I could not find any good
1442 free software tools to do this, and decided I needed my own traceroute
1443 wrapper outputting KML based on locations looked up using GeoIP.  KML
1444 is easy to work with and easy to generate, and understood by several
1445 of the GIS tools I have available.  I got good help from by NUUG
1446 colleague Anders Einar with this, and the result can be seen in
1447 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/kmltraceroute">my
1448 kmltraceroute git repository</a>.  Unfortunately, the quality of the
1449 free GeoIP databases I could find (and the for-pay databases my
1450 friends had access to) is not up to the task.  The IP addresses of
1451 central Internet infrastructure would typically be placed near the
1452 controlling companies main office, and not where the router is really
1453 located, as you can see from <a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml">the
1454 KML file I created</a> using the GeoLite City dataset from MaxMind.
1455
1456 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg"><img
1457 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>
1458
1459 <p>I also had a look at the visual traceroute graph created by
1460 <a href="http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/">the scrapy project</a>,
1461 showing IP network ownership (aka AS owner) for the IP address in
1462 question.
1463 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg">The
1464 graph display a lot of useful information about the traceroute in SVG
1465 format</a>, and give a good indication on who control the network
1466 equipment involved, but it do not include geolocation.  This graph
1467 make it possible to see the information is made available at least for
1468 UNINETT, Catchcom, Stortinget, Nordunet, Google, Amazon, Telia, Level
1469 3 Communications and NetDNA.</p>
1470
1471 <p align="center"><a href="https://geotraceroute.com/index.php?node=4&host=www.stortinget.no"><img
1472 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>
1473
1474 <p>In the process, I came across the
1475 <a href="https://geotraceroute.com/">web service GeoTraceroute</a> by
1476 Salim Gasmi.  Its methology of combining guesses based on DNS names,
1477 various location databases and finally use latecy times to rule out
1478 candidate locations seemed to do a very good job of guessing correct
1479 geolocation.  But it could only do one trace at the time, did not have
1480 a sensor in Norway and did not make the geolocations easily available
1481 for postprocessing.  So I contacted the developer and asked if he
1482 would be willing to share the code (he refused until he had time to
1483 clean it up), but he was interested in providing the geolocations in a
1484 machine readable format, and willing to set up a sensor in Norway.  So
1485 since yesterday, it is possible to run traces from Norway in this
1486 service thanks to a sensor node set up by
1487 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG assosiation</a>, and get the
1488 trace in KML format for further processing.</p>
1489
1490 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.kml"><img
1491 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>
1492
1493 <p>Here we can see a lot of trafic passes Sweden on its way to
1494 Denmark, Germany, Holland and Ireland.  Plenty of places where the
1495 Snowden confirmations verified the traffic is read by various actors
1496 without your best interest as their top priority.</p>
1497
1498 <p>Combining KML files is trivial using a text editor, so I could loop
1499 over all the hosts behind the urls imported by www.stortinget.no and
1500 ask for the KML file from GeoTraceroute, and create a combined KML
1501 file with all the traces (unfortunately only one of the IP addresses
1502 behind the DNS name is traced this time.  To get them all, one would
1503 have to request traces using IP number instead of DNS names from
1504 GeoTraceroute).  That might be the next step in this project.</p>
1505
1506 <p>Armed with these tools, I find it a lot easier to figure out where
1507 the IP traffic moves and who control the boxes involved in moving it.
1508 And every time the link crosses for example the Swedish border, we can
1509 be sure Swedish Signal Intelligence (FRA) is listening, as GCHQ do in
1510 Britain and NSA in USA and cables around the globe.  (Hm, what should
1511 we tell them? :) Keep that in mind if you ever send anything
1512 unencrypted over the Internet.</p>
1513
1514 <p>PS: KML files are drawn using
1515 <a href="http://ivanrublev.me/kml/">the KML viewer from Ivan
1516 Rublev<a/>, as it was less cluttered than the local Linux application
1517 Marble.  There are heaps of other options too.</p>
1518
1519 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1520 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1521 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1522
1523       </div>
1524       <div class="tags">
1525
1526
1527         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>.
1528
1529
1530       </div>
1531     </div>
1532     <div class="padding"></div>
1533
1534     <div class="entry">
1535       <div class="title">
1536         <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>
1537       </div>
1538       <div class="date">
1539         23rd December 2016
1540       </div>
1541       <div class="body">
1542         <p>I received a very nice Christmas present today.  As my regular
1543 readers probably know, I have been working on the
1544 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the Isenkram
1545 system</a> for many years.  The goal of the Isenkram system is to make
1546 it easier for users to figure out what to install to get a given piece
1547 of hardware to work in Debian, and a key part of this system is a way
1548 to map hardware to packages.  Isenkram have its own mapping database,
1549 and also uses data provided by each package using the AppStream
1550 metadata format.  And today,
1551 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/appstream">AppStream</a> in
1552 Debian learned to look up hardware the same way Isenkram is doing it,
1553 ie using fnmatch():</p>
1554
1555 <p><pre>
1556 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias \
1557   usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
1558 Identifier: pymissile [generic]
1559 Name: pymissile
1560 Summary: Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher
1561 Package: pymissile
1562 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias usb:v0694p0002d0000
1563 Identifier: libnxt [generic]
1564 Name: libnxt
1565 Summary: utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT brick
1566 Package: libnxt
1567 ---
1568 Identifier: t2n [generic]
1569 Name: t2n
1570 Summary: Simple command-line tool for Lego NXT
1571 Package: t2n
1572 ---
1573 Identifier: python-nxt [generic]
1574 Name: python-nxt
1575 Summary: Python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot
1576 Package: python-nxt
1577 ---
1578 Identifier: nbc [generic]
1579 Name: nbc
1580 Summary: C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
1581 Package: nbc
1582 %
1583 </pre></p>
1584
1585 <p>A similar query can be done using the combined AppStream and
1586 Isenkram databases using the isenkram-lookup tool:</p>
1587
1588 <p><pre>
1589 % isenkram-lookup usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
1590 pymissile
1591 % isenkram-lookup usb:v0694p0002d0000
1592 libnxt
1593 nbc
1594 python-nxt
1595 t2n
1596 %
1597 </pre></p>
1598
1599 <p>You can find modalias values relevant for your machine using
1600 <tt>cat $(find /sys/devices/ -name modalias)</tt>.
1601
1602 <p>If you want to make this system a success and help Debian users
1603 make the most of the hardware they have, please
1604 help<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add
1605 AppStream metadata for your package following the guidelines</a>
1606 documented in the wiki.  So far only 11 packages provide such
1607 information, among the several hundred hardware specific packages in
1608 Debian. The Isenkram database on the other hand contain 101 packages,
1609 mostly related to USB dongles.  Most of the packages with hardware
1610 mapping in AppStream are LEGO Mindstorms related, because I have, as
1611 part of my involvement in
1612 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the Debian LEGO
1613 team</a> given priority to making sure LEGO users get proposed the
1614 complete set of packages in Debian for that particular hardware.  The
1615 team also got a nice Christmas present today.  The
1616 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nxt-firmware">nxt-firmware
1617 package</a> made it into Debian.  With this package in place, it is
1618 now possible to use the LEGO Mindstorms NXT unit with only free
1619 software, as the nxt-firmware package contain the source and firmware
1620 binaries for the NXT brick.</p>
1621
1622 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1623 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1624 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1625
1626       </div>
1627       <div class="tags">
1628
1629
1630         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>.
1631
1632
1633       </div>
1634     </div>
1635     <div class="padding"></div>
1636
1637     <div class="entry">
1638       <div class="title">
1639         <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>
1640       </div>
1641       <div class="date">
1642         20th December 2016
1643       </div>
1644       <div class="body">
1645         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
1646 system</a> I wrote two years ago to make it easier in Debian to find
1647 and install packages to get your hardware dongles to work, is still
1648 going strong.  It is a system to look up the hardware present on or
1649 connected to the current system, and map the hardware to Debian
1650 packages.  It can either be done using the tools in isenkram-cli or
1651 using the user space daemon in the isenkram package.  The latter will
1652 notify you, when inserting new hardware, about what packages to
1653 install to get the dongle working.  It will even provide a button to
1654 click on to ask packagekit to install the packages.</p>
1655
1656 <p>Here is an command line example from my Thinkpad laptop:</p>
1657
1658 <p><pre>
1659 % isenkram-lookup
1660 bluez
1661 cheese
1662 ethtool
1663 fprintd
1664 fprintd-demo
1665 gkrellm-thinkbat
1666 hdapsd
1667 libpam-fprintd
1668 pidgin-blinklight
1669 thinkfan
1670 tlp
1671 tp-smapi-dkms
1672 tp-smapi-source
1673 tpb
1674 %
1675 </pre></p>
1676
1677 <p>It can also list the firware package providing firmware requested
1678 by the load kernel modules, which in my case is an empty list because
1679 I have all the firmware my machine need:
1680
1681 <p><pre>
1682 % /usr/sbin/isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
1683 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
1684 %
1685 </pre></p>
1686
1687 <p>The last few days I had a look at several of the around 250
1688 packages in Debian with udev rules.  These seem like good candidates
1689 to install when a given hardware dongle is inserted, and I found
1690 several that should be proposed by isenkram.  I have not had time to
1691 check all of them, but am happy to report that now there are 97
1692 packages packages mapped to hardware by Isenkram.  11 of these
1693 packages provide hardware mapping using AppStream, while the rest are
1694 listed in the modaliases file provided in isenkram.</p>
1695
1696 <p>These are the packages with hardware mappings at the moment.  The
1697 <strong>marked packages</strong> are also announcing their hardware
1698 support using AppStream, for everyone to use:</p>
1699
1700 <p>air-quality-sensor, alsa-firmware-loaders, argyll,
1701 <strong>array-info</strong>, avarice, avrdude, b43-fwcutter,
1702 bit-babbler, bluez, bluez-firmware, <strong>brltty</strong>,
1703 <strong>broadcom-sta-dkms</strong>, calibre, cgminer, cheese, colord,
1704 <strong>colorhug-client</strong>, dahdi-firmware-nonfree, dahdi-linux,
1705 dfu-util, dolphin-emu, ekeyd, ethtool, firmware-ipw2x00, fprintd,
1706 fprintd-demo, <strong>galileo</strong>, gkrellm-thinkbat, gphoto2,
1707 gpsbabel, gpsbabel-gui, gpsman, gpstrans, gqrx-sdr, gr-fcdproplus,
1708 gr-osmosdr, gtkpod, hackrf, hdapsd, hdmi2usb-udev, hpijs-ppds, hplip,
1709 ipw3945-source, ipw3945d, kde-config-tablet, kinect-audio-setup,
1710 <strong>libnxt</strong>, libpam-fprintd, <strong>lomoco</strong>,
1711 madwimax, minidisc-utils, mkgmap, msi-keyboard, mtkbabel,
1712 <strong>nbc</strong>, <strong>nqc</strong>, nut-hal-drivers, ola,
1713 open-vm-toolbox, open-vm-tools, openambit, pcgminer, pcmciautils,
1714 pcscd, pidgin-blinklight, printer-driver-splix,
1715 <strong>pymissile</strong>, python-nxt, qlandkartegt,
1716 qlandkartegt-garmin, rosegarden, rt2x00-source, sispmctl,
1717 soapysdr-module-hackrf, solaar, squeak-plugins-scratch, sunxi-tools,
1718 <strong>t2n</strong>, thinkfan, thinkfinger-tools, tlp, tp-smapi-dkms,
1719 tp-smapi-source, tpb, tucnak, uhd-host, usbmuxd, viking,
1720 virtualbox-ose-guest-x11, w1retap, xawtv, xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse,
1721 xserver-xorg-input-wacom, xserver-xorg-video-qxl,
1722 xserver-xorg-video-vmware, yubikey-personalization and
1723 zd1211-firmware</p>
1724
1725 <p>If you know of other packages, please let me know with a wishlist
1726 bug report against the isenkram-cli package, and ask the package
1727 maintainer to
1728 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add AppStream
1729 metadata according to the guidelines</a> to provide the information
1730 for everyone.  In time, I hope to get rid of the isenkram specific
1731 hardware mapping and depend exclusively on AppStream.</p>
1732
1733 <p>Note, the AppStream metadata for broadcom-sta-dkms is matching too
1734 much hardware, and suggest that the package with with any ethernet
1735 card.  See <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/838735">bug #838735</a> for
1736 the details.  I hope the maintainer find time to address it soon.  In
1737 the mean time I provide an override in isenkram.</p>
1738
1739       </div>
1740       <div class="tags">
1741
1742
1743         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>.
1744
1745
1746       </div>
1747     </div>
1748     <div class="padding"></div>
1749
1750     <div class="entry">
1751       <div class="title">
1752         <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>
1753       </div>
1754       <div class="date">
1755         11th December 2016
1756       </div>
1757       <div class="body">
1758         <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-12-11-nice-oolite.png"/></p>
1759
1760 <p>In my early years, I played
1761 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Classic_Elite">the epic game
1762 Elite</a> on my PC.  I spent many months trading and fighting in
1763 space, and reached the 'elite' fighting status before I moved on.  The
1764 original Elite game was available on Commodore 64 and the IBM PC
1765 edition I played had a 64 KB executable.  I am still impressed today
1766 that the authors managed to squeeze both a 3D engine and details about
1767 more than 2000 planet systems across 7 galaxies into a binary so
1768 small.</p>
1769
1770 <p>I have known about <a href="http://www.oolite.org/">the free
1771 software game Oolite inspired by Elite</a> for a while, but did not
1772 really have time to test it properly until a few days ago.  It was
1773 great to discover that my old knowledge about trading routes were
1774 still valid.  But my fighting and flying abilities were gone, so I had
1775 to retrain to be able to dock on a space station.  And I am still not
1776 able to make much resistance when I am attacked by pirates, so I
1777 bougth and mounted the most powerful laser in the rear to be able to
1778 put up at least some resistance while fleeing for my life. :)</p>
1779
1780 <p>When playing Elite in the late eighties, I had to discover
1781 everything on my own, and I had long lists of prices seen on different
1782 planets to be able to decide where to trade what.  This time I had the
1783 advantages of the
1784 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Main_Page">Elite wiki</a>,
1785 where information about each planet is easily available with common
1786 price ranges and suggested trading routes.  This improved my ability
1787 to earn money and I have been able to earn enough to buy a lot of
1788 useful equipent in a few days.  I believe I originally played for
1789 months before I could get a docking computer, while now I could get it
1790 after less then a week.</p>
1791
1792 <p>If you like science fiction and dreamed of a life as a vagabond in
1793 space, you should try out Oolite.  It is available for Linux, MacOSX
1794 and Windows, and is included in Debian and derivatives since 2011.</p>
1795
1796 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1797 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1798 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1799
1800       </div>
1801       <div class="tags">
1802
1803
1804         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>.
1805
1806
1807       </div>
1808     </div>
1809     <div class="padding"></div>
1810
1811     <div class="entry">
1812       <div class="title">
1813         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_installations_using_eatmydata.html">Quicker Debian installations using eatmydata</a>
1814       </div>
1815       <div class="date">
1816         25th November 2016
1817       </div>
1818       <div class="body">
1819         <p>Two years ago, I did some experiments with eatmydata and the Debian
1820 installation system, observing how using
1821 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">eatmydata
1822 could speed up the installation</a> quite a bit.  My testing measured
1823 speedup around 20-40 percent for Debian Edu, where we install around
1824 1000 packages from within the installer.  The eatmydata package
1825 provide a way to disable/delay file system flushing.  This is a bit
1826 risky in the general case, as files that should be stored on disk will
1827 stay only in memory a bit longer than expected, causing problems if a
1828 machine crashes at an inconvenient time.  But for an installation, if
1829 the machine crashes during installation the process is normally
1830 restarted, and avoiding disk operations as much as possible to speed
1831 up the process make perfect sense.
1832
1833 <p>I added code in the Debian Edu specific installation code to enable
1834 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libeatmydata">eatmydata</a>,
1835 but did not have time to push it any further.  But a few months ago I
1836 picked it up again and worked with the libeatmydata package maintainer
1837 Mattia Rizzolo to make it easier for everyone to get this installation
1838 speedup in Debian.  Thanks to our cooperation There is now an
1839 eatmydata-udeb package in Debian testing and unstable, and simply
1840 enabling/installing it in debian-installer (d-i) is enough to get the
1841 quicker installations.  It can be enabled using preseeding.  The
1842 following untested kernel argument should do the trick:</p>
1843
1844 <blockquote><pre>
1845 preseed/early_command="anna-install eatmydata-udeb"
1846 </pre></blockquote>
1847
1848 <p>This should ask d-i to install the package inside the d-i
1849 environment early in the installation sequence.  Having it installed
1850 in d-i in turn will make sure the relevant scripts are called just
1851 after debootstrap filled /target/ with the freshly installed Debian
1852 system to configure apt to run dpkg with eatmydata.  This is enough to
1853 speed up the installation process.  There is a proposal to
1854 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/841153">extend the idea a bit further
1855 by using /etc/ld.so.preload instead of apt.conf</a>, but I have not
1856 tested its impact.</p>
1857
1858
1859       </div>
1860       <div class="tags">
1861
1862
1863         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>.
1864
1865
1866       </div>
1867     </div>
1868     <div class="padding"></div>
1869
1870     <div class="entry">
1871       <div class="title">
1872         <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>
1873       </div>
1874       <div class="date">
1875         24th November 2016
1876       </div>
1877       <div class="body">
1878         <p>I Norge er det mange som trenger å skrive både bokmål og nynorsk.
1879 Eksamensoppgaver, offentlige brev og nyheter er eksempler på tekster
1880 der det er krav om skriftspråk.  I tillegg til alle skoleoppgavene som
1881 elever over det ganske land skal levere inn hvert år.  Det mange ikke
1882 vet er at selv om de kommersielle alternativene
1883 <a href="https://translate.google.com/">Google Translate</a> og
1884 <a href="https://www.bing.com/translator/">Bing Translator</a> ikke kan
1885 bidra med å oversette mellom bokmål og nynorsk, så finnes det et
1886 utmerket fri programvarealternativ som kan.  Oversetterverktøyet
1887 Apertium har støtte for en rekke språkkombinasjoner, og takket være
1888 den utrettelige innsatsen til blant annet Kevin Brubeck Unhammer, kan
1889 en bruke webtjenesten til å fylle inn en tekst på bokmål eller
1890 nynorsk, og få den automatoversatt til det andre skriftspråket.
1891 Resultatet er ikke perfekt, men et svært godt utgangspunkt.  Av og til
1892 er resultatet så bra at det kan benyttes uten endringer.  Jeg vet
1893 f.eks. at store deler av Joomla ble oversatt til nynorsk ved hjelp
1894 Apertium.  Høres det ut som noe du kan ha bruk for?  Besøk i så fall
1895 <a href="https://www.apertium.org/">Apertium.org</a> og fyll inn
1896 teksten din i webskjemaet der.
1897
1898 <p>Hvis du trenger maskinell tilgang til den bakenforliggende
1899 teknologien kan du enten installere pakken
1900 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/apertium-nno-nob">apertium-nno-nob</a>
1901 på en Debian-maskin eller bruke web-API-et tilgjengelig fra
1902 api.apertium.org.  Se
1903 <a href="http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Apertium-apy">API-dokumentasjonen</a>
1904 for detaljer om web-API-et.  Her kan du se hvordan resultatet blir for
1905 denne teksten som ble skrevet på bokmål over maskinoversatt til
1906 nynorsk.</p>
1907
1908 <hr/>
1909
1910 <p>I Noreg er det mange som treng å skriva både bokmål og nynorsk.
1911 Eksamensoppgåver, offentlege brev og nyhende er døme på tekster der
1912 det er krav om skriftspråk.  I tillegg til alle skuleoppgåvene som
1913 elevar over det ganske land skal levera inn kvart år.  Det mange ikkje
1914 veit er at sjølv om dei kommersielle alternativa
1915 <a href="https://translate.google.com/">Google *Translate</a> og
1916 <a href="https://www.bing.com/translator/">Bing *Translator</a> ikkje
1917 kan bidra med å omsetja mellom bokmål og nynorsk, så finst det eit
1918 utmerka fri programvarealternativ som kan.  Omsetjarverktøyet
1919 *Apertium har støtte for ei rekkje språkkombinasjonar, og takka vera
1920 den utrøyttelege innsatsen til blant anna Kevin Brubeck Unhammer, kan
1921 ein bruka *webtjenesten til å fylla inn ei tekst på bokmål eller
1922 nynorsk, og få den *automatoversatt til det andre skriftspråket.
1923 Resultatet er ikkje perfekt, men eit svært godt utgangspunkt.  Av og
1924 til er resultatet så bra at det kan nyttast utan endringar.  Eg veit
1925 t.d. at store delar av *Joomla vart omsett til nynorsk ved hjelp
1926 *Apertium.  Høyrast det ut som noko du kan ha bruk for?  Besøk i så
1927 fall <a href="https://www.apertium.org/">*Apertium.org</a> og fyll inn
1928 teksta di i *webskjemaet der.
1929
1930 <p>Viss du treng *maskinell tilgjenge til den *bakenforliggende
1931 teknologien kan du anten installera pakken
1932 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/apertium-nno-nob">*apertium-*nno-*nob</a>
1933 på ein *Debian-maskin eller bruka *web-*API-eit tilgjengeleg frå
1934 *api.*apertium.org.  Sjå
1935 <a href="http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Apertium-apy">*API-dokumentasjonen</a>
1936 for detaljar om *web-*API-eit.  Her kan du sjå korleis resultatet vert
1937 for denne teksta som vart skreva på bokmål over *maskinoversatt til
1938 nynorsk.</p>
1939
1940       </div>
1941       <div class="tags">
1942
1943
1944         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>.
1945
1946
1947       </div>
1948     </div>
1949     <div class="padding"></div>
1950
1951     <div class="entry">
1952       <div class="title">
1953         <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>
1954       </div>
1955       <div class="date">
1956         13th November 2016
1957       </div>
1958       <div class="body">
1959         <p><a href="http://coz-profiler.org/">The Coz profiler</a>, a nice
1960 profiler able to run benchmarking experiments on the instrumented
1961 multi-threaded program, finally
1962 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/coz-profiler">made it into
1963 Debian unstable yesterday</A>.  Lluís Vilanova and I have spent many
1964 months since
1965 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">I
1966 blogged about the coz tool</a> in August working with upstream to make
1967 it suitable for Debian.  There are still issues with clang
1968 compatibility, inline assembly only working x86 and minimized
1969 JavaScript libraries.</p>
1970
1971 <p>To test it, install 'coz-profiler' using apt and run it like this:</p>
1972
1973 <p><blockquote>
1974 <tt>coz run --- /path/to/binary-with-debug-info</tt>
1975 </blockquote></p>
1976
1977 <p>This will produce a profile.coz file in the current working
1978 directory with the profiling information.  This is then given to a
1979 JavaScript application provided in the package and available from
1980 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">a project web page</a>.
1981 To start the local copy, invoke it in a browser like this:</p>
1982
1983 <p><blockquote>
1984 <tt>sensible-browser /usr/share/coz-profiler/viewer/index.htm</tt>
1985 </blockquote></p>
1986
1987 <p>See the project home page and the
1988 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">USENIX
1989 ;login: article on Coz</a> for more information on how it is
1990 working.</p>
1991
1992       </div>
1993       <div class="tags">
1994
1995
1996         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>.
1997
1998
1999       </div>
2000     </div>
2001     <div class="padding"></div>
2002
2003     <div class="entry">
2004       <div class="title">
2005         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_own_self_balancing_Lego_Segway.html">My own self balancing Lego Segway</a>
2006       </div>
2007       <div class="date">
2008          4th November 2016
2009       </div>
2010       <div class="body">
2011         <p>A while back I received a Gyro sensor for the NXT
2012 <a href="mindstorms.lego.com">Mindstorms</a> controller as a birthday
2013 present.  It had been on my wishlist for a while, because I wanted to
2014 build a Segway like balancing lego robot.  I had already built
2015 <a href="http://www.nxtprograms.com/NXT2/segway/">a simple balancing
2016 robot</a> with the kids, using the light/color sensor included in the
2017 NXT kit as the balance sensor, but it was not working very well.  It
2018 could balance for a while, but was very sensitive to the light
2019 condition in the room and the reflective properties of the surface and
2020 would fall over after a short while.  I wanted something more robust,
2021 and had
2022 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=NGY1044">the
2023 gyro sensor from HiTechnic</a> I believed would solve it on my
2024 wishlist for some years before it suddenly showed up as a gift from my
2025 loved ones. :)</p>
2026
2027 <p>Unfortunately I have not had time to sit down and play with it
2028 since then.  But that changed some days ago, when I was searching for
2029 lego segway information and came across a recipe from HiTechnic for
2030 building
2031 <a href="http://www.hitechnic.com/blog/gyro-sensor/htway/">the
2032 HTWay</a>, a segway like balancing robot.  Build instructions and
2033 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/upload/786-HTWayC.nxc">source
2034 code</a> was included, so it was just a question of putting it all
2035 together.  And thanks to the great work of many Debian developers, the
2036 compiler needed to build the source for the NXT is already included in
2037 Debian, so I was read to go in less than an hour.  The resulting robot
2038 do not look very impressive in its simplicity:</p>
2039
2040 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-robot.jpeg"></p>
2041
2042 <p>Because I lack the infrared sensor used to control the robot in the
2043 design from HiTechnic, I had to comment out the last task
2044 (taskControl).  I simply placed /* and */ around it get the program
2045 working without that sensor present.  Now it balances just fine until
2046 the battery status run low:</p>
2047
2048 <p align="center"><video width="70%" controls="true">
2049    <source src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-balancing.ogv" type="video/ogg">
2050 </video></p>
2051
2052 <p>Now we would like to teach it how to follow a line and take remote
2053 control instructions using the included Bluetooth receiver in the NXT.</p>
2054
2055 <p>If you, like me, love LEGO and want to make sure we find the tools
2056 they need to work with LEGO in Debian and all our derivative
2057 distributions like Ubuntu, check out
2058 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the LEGO designers
2059 project page</a> and join the Debian LEGO team.  Personally I own a
2060 RCX and NXT controller (no EV3), and would like to make sure the
2061 Debian tools needed to program the systems I own work as they
2062 should.</p>
2063
2064       </div>
2065       <div class="tags">
2066
2067
2068         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>.
2069
2070
2071       </div>
2072     </div>
2073     <div class="padding"></div>
2074
2075     <div class="entry">
2076       <div class="title">
2077         <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>
2078       </div>
2079       <div class="date">
2080         10th October 2016
2081       </div>
2082       <div class="body">
2083         <p>In July
2084 <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
2085 wrote how to get the Signal Chrome/Chromium app working</a> without
2086 the ability to receive SMS messages (aka without a cell phone).  It is
2087 time to share some experiences and provide an updated setup.</p>
2088
2089 <p>The Signal app have worked fine for several months now, and I use
2090 it regularly to chat with my loved ones.  I had a major snag at the
2091 end of my summer vacation, when the the app completely forgot my
2092 setup, identity and keys.  The reason behind this major mess was
2093 running out of disk space.  To avoid that ever happening again I have
2094 started storing everything in <tt>userdata/</tt> in git, to be able to
2095 roll back to an earlier version if the files are wiped by mistake.  I
2096 had to use it once after introducing the git backup.  When rolling
2097 back to an earlier version, one need to use the 'reset session' option
2098 in Signal to get going, and notify the people you talk with about the
2099 problem.  I assume there is some sequence number tracking in the
2100 protocol to detect rollback attacks.  The git repository is rather big
2101 (674 MiB so far), but I have not tried to figure out if some of the
2102 content can be added to a .gitignore file due to lack of spare
2103 time.</p>
2104
2105 <p>I've also hit the 90 days timeout blocking, and noticed that this
2106 make it impossible to send messages using Signal.  I could still
2107 receive them, but had to patch the code with a new timestamp to send.
2108 I believe the timeout is added by the developers to force people to
2109 upgrade to the latest version of the app, even when there is no
2110 protocol changes, to reduce the version skew among the user base and
2111 thus try to keep the number of support requests down.</p>
2112
2113 <p>Since my original recipe, the Signal source code changed slightly,
2114 making the old patch fail to apply cleanly.  Below is an updated
2115 patch, including the shell wrapper I use to start Signal.  The
2116 original version required a new user to locate the JavaScript console
2117 and call a function from there.  I got help from a friend with more
2118 JavaScript knowledge than me to modify the code to provide a GUI
2119 button instead.  This mean that to get started you just need to run
2120 the wrapper and click the 'Register without mobile phone' to get going
2121 now.  I've also modified the timeout code to always set it to 90 days
2122 in the future, to avoid having to patch the code regularly.</p>
2123
2124 <p>So, the updated recipe for Debian Jessie:</p>
2125
2126 <ol>
2127
2128 <li>First, install required packages to get the source code and the
2129 browser you need.  Signal only work with Chrome/Chromium, as far as I
2130 know, so you need to install it.
2131
2132 <pre>
2133 apt install git tor chromium
2134 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
2135 </pre></li>
2136
2137 <li>Modify the source code using command listed in the the patch
2138 block below.</li>
2139
2140 <li>Start Signal using the run-signal-app wrapper (for example using
2141 <tt>`pwd`/run-signal-app</tt>).
2142
2143 <li>Click on the 'Register without mobile phone', will in a phone
2144 number you can receive calls to the next minute, receive the
2145 verification code and enter it into the form field and press
2146 'Register'.  Note, the phone number you use will be user Signal
2147 username, ie the way others can find you on Signal.</li>
2148
2149 <li>You can now use Signal to contact others.  Note, new contacts do
2150 not show up in the contact list until you restart Signal, and there is
2151 no way to assign names to Contacts.  There is also no way to create or
2152 update chat groups.  I suspect this is because the web app do not have
2153 a associated contact database.</li>
2154
2155 </ol>
2156
2157 <p>I am still a bit uneasy about using Signal, because of the way its
2158 main author moxie0 reject federation and accept dependencies to major
2159 corporations like Google (part of the code is fetched from Google) and
2160 Amazon (the central coordination point is owned by Amazon).  See for
2161 example
2162 <a href="https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37">the
2163 LibreSignal issue tracker</a> for a thread documenting the authors
2164 view on these issues.  But the network effect is strong in this case,
2165 and several of the people I want to communicate with already use
2166 Signal.  Perhaps we can all move to <a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a>
2167 once it <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/830265">work on my
2168 laptop</a>?  It already work on Windows and Android, and is included
2169 in <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ring">Debian</a> and
2170 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ring">Ubuntu</a>, but not
2171 working on Debian Stable.</p>
2172
2173 <p>Anyway, this is the patch I apply to the Signal code to get it
2174 working.  It switch to the production servers, disable to timeout,
2175 make registration easier and add the shell wrapper:</p>
2176
2177 <pre>
2178 cd Signal-Desktop; cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p1
2179 diff --git a/js/background.js b/js/background.js
2180 index 24b4c1d..579345f 100644
2181 --- a/js/background.js
2182 +++ b/js/background.js
2183 @@ -33,9 +33,9 @@
2184          });
2185      });
2186
2187 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
2188 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org';
2189      var SERVER_PORTS = [80, 4433, 8443];
2190 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
2191 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
2192      var messageReceiver;
2193      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
2194          if (messageReceiver) {
2195 diff --git a/js/expire.js b/js/expire.js
2196 index 639aeae..beb91c3 100644
2197 --- a/js/expire.js
2198 +++ b/js/expire.js
2199 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
2200  ;(function() {
2201      'use strict';
2202 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
2203 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = Date.now() + (90 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
2204
2205      window.extension = window.extension || {};
2206
2207 diff --git a/js/views/install_view.js b/js/views/install_view.js
2208 index 7816f4f..1d6233b 100644
2209 --- a/js/views/install_view.js
2210 +++ b/js/views/install_view.js
2211 @@ -38,7 +38,8 @@
2212              return {
2213                  'click .step1': this.selectStep.bind(this, 1),
2214                  'click .step2': this.selectStep.bind(this, 2),
2215 -                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3)
2216 +                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3),
2217 +                'click .callreg': function() { extension.install('standalone') },
2218              };
2219          },
2220          clearQR: function() {
2221 diff --git a/options.html b/options.html
2222 index dc0f28e..8d709f6 100644
2223 --- a/options.html
2224 +++ b/options.html
2225 @@ -14,7 +14,10 @@
2226          &lt;div class='nav'>
2227            &lt;h1>{{ installWelcome }}&lt;/h1>
2228            &lt;p>{{ installTagline }}&lt;/p>
2229 -          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a> &lt;/div>
2230 +          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a>
2231 +           &lt;br> &lt;a class="button callreg">Register without mobile phone&lt;/a>
2232 +
2233 +         &lt;/div>
2234            &lt;span class='dot step1 selected'>&lt;/span>
2235            &lt;span class='dot step2'>&lt;/span>
2236            &lt;span class='dot step3'>&lt;/span>
2237 --- /dev/null   2016-10-07 09:55:13.730181472 +0200
2238 +++ b/run-signal-app   2016-10-10 08:54:09.434172391 +0200
2239 @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
2240 +#!/bin/sh
2241 +set -e
2242 +cd $(dirname $0)
2243 +mkdir -p userdata
2244 +userdata="`pwd`/userdata"
2245 +if [ -d "$userdata" ] && [ ! -d "$userdata/.git" ] ; then
2246 +    (cd $userdata && git init)
2247 +fi
2248 +(cd $userdata && git add . && git commit -m "Current status." || true)
2249 +exec chromium \
2250 +  --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
2251 +  --user-data-dir=$userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
2252 EOF
2253 chmod a+rx run-signal-app
2254 </pre>
2255
2256 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2257 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2258 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2259
2260       </div>
2261       <div class="tags">
2262
2263
2264         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>.
2265
2266
2267       </div>
2268     </div>
2269     <div class="padding"></div>
2270
2271     <div class="entry">
2272       <div class="title">
2273         <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>
2274       </div>
2275       <div class="date">
2276          7th October 2016
2277       </div>
2278       <div class="body">
2279         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
2280 system</a> provide a practical and easy way to figure out which
2281 packages support the hardware in a given machine.  The command line
2282 tool <tt>isenkram-lookup</tt> and the tasksel options provide a
2283 convenient way to list and install packages relevant for the current
2284 hardware during system installation, both user space packages and
2285 firmware packages. The GUI background daemon on the other hand provide
2286 a pop-up proposing to install packages when a new dongle is inserted
2287 while using the computer.  For example, if you plug in a smart card
2288 reader, the system will ask if you want to install <tt>pcscd</tt> if
2289 that package isn't already installed, and if you plug in a USB video
2290 camera the system will ask if you want to install <tt>cheese</tt> if
2291 cheese is currently missing.  This already work just fine.</p>
2292
2293 <p>But Isenkram depend on a database mapping from hardware IDs to
2294 package names.  When I started no such database existed in Debian, so
2295 I made my own data set and included it with the isenkram package and
2296 made isenkram fetch the latest version of this database from git using
2297 http.  This way the isenkram users would get updated package proposals
2298 as soon as I learned more about hardware related packages.</p>
2299
2300 <p>The hardware is identified using modalias strings.  The modalias
2301 design is from the Linux kernel where most hardware descriptors are
2302 made available as a strings that can be matched using filename style
2303 globbing.  It handle USB, PCI, DMI and a lot of other hardware related
2304 identifiers.</p>
2305
2306 <p>The downside to the Isenkram specific database is that there is no
2307 information about relevant distribution / Debian version, making
2308 isenkram propose obsolete packages too.  But along came AppStream, a
2309 cross distribution mechanism to store and collect metadata about
2310 software packages.  When I heard about the proposal, I contacted the
2311 people involved and suggested to add a hardware matching rule using
2312 modalias strings in the specification, to be able to use AppStream for
2313 mapping hardware to packages.  This idea was accepted and AppStream is
2314 now a great way for a package to announce the hardware it support in a
2315 distribution neutral way.  I wrote
2316 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">a
2317 recipe on how to add such meta-information</a> in a blog post last
2318 December.  If you have a hardware related package in Debian, please
2319 announce the relevant hardware IDs using AppStream.</p>
2320
2321 <p>In Debian, almost all packages that can talk to a LEGO Mindestorms
2322 RCX or NXT unit, announce this support using AppStream.  The effect is
2323 that when you insert such LEGO robot controller into your Debian
2324 machine, Isenkram will propose to install the packages needed to get
2325 it working.  The intention is that this should allow the local user to
2326 start programming his robot controller right away without having to
2327 guess what packages to use or which permissions to fix.</p>
2328
2329 <p>But when I sat down with my son the other day to program our NXT
2330 unit using his Debian Stretch computer, I discovered something
2331 annoying.  The local console user (ie my son) did not get access to
2332 the USB device for programming the unit.  This used to work, but no
2333 longer in Jessie and Stretch.  After some investigation and asking
2334 around on #debian-devel, I discovered that this was because udev had
2335 changed the mechanism used to grant access to local devices.  The
2336 ConsoleKit mechanism from <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>
2337 no longer applied, because LDAP users no longer was added to the
2338 plugdev group during login.  Michael Biebl told me that this method
2339 was obsolete and the new method used ACLs instead.  This was good
2340 news, as the plugdev mechanism is a mess when using a remote user
2341 directory like LDAP.  Using ACLs would make sure a user lost device
2342 access when she logged out, even if the user left behind a background
2343 process which would retain the plugdev membership with the ConsoleKit
2344 setup.  Armed with this knowledge I moved on to fix the access problem
2345 for the LEGO Mindstorms related packages.</p>
2346
2347 <p>The new system uses a udev tag, 'uaccess'.  It can either be
2348 applied directly for a device, or is applied in
2349 /lib/udev/rules.d/70-uaccess.rules for classes of devices.  As the
2350 LEGO Mindstorms udev rules did not have a class, I decided to add the
2351 tag directly in the udev rules files included in the packages.  Here
2352 is one example.  For the nqc C compiler for the RCX, the
2353 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/60-nqc.rules</tt> file now look like this:
2354
2355 <p><pre>
2356 SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="add", ATTR{idVendor}=="0694", ATTR{idProduct}=="0001", \
2357     SYMLINK+="rcx-%k", TAG+="uaccess"
2358 </pre></p>
2359
2360 <p>The key part is the 'TAG+="uaccess"' at the end.  I suspect all
2361 packages using plugdev in their /lib/udev/rules.d/ files should be
2362 changed to use this tag (either directly or indirectly via
2363 <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>).  Perhaps a lintian check should be created
2364 to detect this?</p>
2365
2366 <p>I've been unable to find good documentation on the uaccess feature.
2367 It is unclear to me if the uaccess tag is an internal implementation
2368 detail like the udev-acl tag used by
2369 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>.  If it is, I guess the
2370 indirect method is the preferred way.  Michael
2371 <a href="https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4288">asked for more
2372 documentation from the systemd project</a> and I hope it will make
2373 this clearer.  For now I use the generic classes when they exist and
2374 is already handled by <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>, and add the tag
2375 directly if no such class exist.</p>
2376
2377 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
2378 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
2379 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
2380
2381 <p>To help out making life for LEGO constructors in Debian easier,
2382 please join us on our IRC channel
2383 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> and join
2384 the <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/debian-lego/">Debian
2385 LEGO team</a> in the Alioth project we created yesterday.  A mailing
2386 list is not yet created, but we are working on it. :)</p>
2387
2388 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2389 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2390 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2391
2392       </div>
2393       <div class="tags">
2394
2395
2396         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>.
2397
2398
2399       </div>
2400     </div>
2401     <div class="padding"></div>
2402
2403     <div class="entry">
2404       <div class="title">
2405         <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>
2406       </div>
2407       <div class="date">
2408         30th August 2016
2409       </div>
2410       <div class="body">
2411         <p>In April we
2412 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">started
2413 to work</a> on a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the "open access" book on
2414 how to set up and administrate a Debian system.  Today I am happy to
2415 report that the first draft is now publicly available.  You can find
2416 it on <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/">get the Debian
2417 Administrator's Handbook page</a> (under Other languages).  The first
2418 eight chapters have a first draft translation, and we are working on
2419 proofreading the content.  If you want to help out, please start
2420 contributing using
2421 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
2422 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
2423 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
2424 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
2425 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
2426 contributors</a>.  A good way to contribute is to proofread the text
2427 and update weblate if you find errors.</p>
2428
2429 <p>Our goal is still to make the Norwegian book available on paper as well as
2430 electronic form.</p>
2431
2432       </div>
2433       <div class="tags">
2434
2435
2436         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>.
2437
2438
2439       </div>
2440     </div>
2441     <div class="padding"></div>
2442
2443     <div class="entry">
2444       <div class="title">
2445         <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>
2446       </div>
2447       <div class="date">
2448         11th August 2016
2449       </div>
2450       <div class="body">
2451         <p>This summer, I read a great article
2452 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">coz:
2453 This Is the Profiler You're Looking For</a>" in USENIX ;login: about
2454 how to profile multi-threaded programs.  It presented a system for
2455 profiling software by running experiences in the running program,
2456 testing how run time performance is affected by "speeding up" parts of
2457 the code to various degrees compared to a normal run.  It does this by
2458 slowing down parallel threads while the "faster up" code is running
2459 and measure how this affect processing time.  The processing time is
2460 measured using probes inserted into the code, either using progress
2461 counters (COZ_PROGRESS) or as latency meters (COZ_BEGIN/COZ_END).  It
2462 can also measure unmodified code by measuring complete the program
2463 runtime and running the program several times instead.</p>
2464
2465 <p>The project and presentation was so inspiring that I would like to
2466 get the system into Debian.  I
2467 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=830708">created
2468 a WNPP request for it</a> and contacted upstream to try to make the
2469 system ready for Debian by sending patches.  The build process need to
2470 be changed a bit to avoid running 'git clone' to get dependencies, and
2471 to include the JavaScript web page used to visualize the collected
2472 profiling information included in the source package.
2473 But I expect that should work out fairly soon.</p>
2474
2475 <p>The way the system work is fairly simple.  To run an coz experiment
2476 on a binary with debug symbols available, start the program like this:
2477
2478 <p><blockquote><pre>
2479 coz run --- program-to-run
2480 </pre></blockquote></p>
2481
2482 <p>This will create a text file profile.coz with the instrumentation
2483 information.  To show what part of the code affect the performance
2484 most, use a web browser and either point it to
2485 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/</a>
2486 or use the copy from git (in the gh-pages branch).  Check out this web
2487 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
2488 profiling more useful you include &lt;coz.h&gt; and insert the
2489 COZ_PROGRESS or COZ_BEGIN and COZ_END at appropriate places in the
2490 code, rebuild and run the profiler.  This allow coz to do more
2491 targeted experiments.</p>
2492
2493 <p>A video published by ACM
2494 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE0V-p1odPg">presenting the
2495 Coz profiler</a> is available from Youtube.  There is also a paper
2496 from the 25th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles available
2497 titled
2498 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/curtsinger">Coz:
2499 finding code that counts with causal profiling</a>.</p>
2500
2501 <p><a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz">The source code</a>
2502 for Coz is available from github.  It will only build with clang
2503 because it uses a
2504 <a href="https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=55606">C++
2505 feature missing in GCC</a>, but I've submitted
2506 <a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz/pull/67">a patch to solve
2507 it</a> and hope it will be included in the upstream source soon.</p>
2508
2509 <p>Please get in touch if you, like me, would like to see this piece
2510 of software in Debian.  I would very much like some help with the
2511 packaging effort, as I lack the in depth knowledge on how to package
2512 C++ libraries.</p>
2513
2514       </div>
2515       <div class="tags">
2516
2517
2518         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>.
2519
2520
2521       </div>
2522     </div>
2523     <div class="padding"></div>
2524
2525     <div class="entry">
2526       <div class="title">
2527         <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>
2528       </div>
2529       <div class="date">
2530          7th July 2016
2531       </div>
2532       <div class="body">
2533         <p>Yesterday, I tried to unlock a HTC Desire HD phone, and it proved
2534 to be a slight challenge.  Here is the recipe if I ever need to do it
2535 again.  It all started by me wanting to try the recipe to set up
2536 <a href="https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardening-android-security-and-privacy">an
2537 hardened Android installation</a> from the Tor project blog on a
2538 device I had access to.  It is a old mobile phone with a broken
2539 microphone The initial idea had been to just
2540 <a href="http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_ace">install
2541 CyanogenMod on it</a>, but did not quite find time to start on it
2542 until a few days ago.</p>
2543
2544 <p>The unlock process is supposed to be simple: (1) Boot into the boot
2545 loader (press volume down and power at the same time), (2) select
2546 'fastboot' before (3) connecting the device via USB to a Linux
2547 machine, (4) request the device identifier token by running 'fastboot
2548 oem get_identifier_token', (5) request the device unlocking key using
2549 the <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader/">HTC developer web
2550 site</a> and unlock the phone using the key file emailed to you.</p>
2551
2552 <p>Unfortunately, this only work fi you have hboot version 2.00.0029
2553 or newer, and the device I was working on had 2.00.0027.  This
2554 apparently can be easily fixed by downloading a Windows program and
2555 running it on your Windows machine, if you accept the terms Microsoft
2556 require you to accept to use Windows - which I do not.  So I had to
2557 come up with a different approach.  I got a lot of help from AndyCap
2558 on #nuug, and would not have been able to get this working without
2559 him.</p>
2560
2561 <p>First I needed to extract the hboot firmware from
2562 <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/ruu/PD9810000_Ace_Sense30_S_hboot_2.00.0029.exe">the
2563 windows binary for HTC Desire HD</a> downloaded as 'the RUU' from HTC.
2564 For this there is is <a href="https://github.com/kmdm/unruu/">a github
2565 project named unruu</a> using libunshield.  The unshield tool did not
2566 recognise the file format, but unruu worked and extracted rom.zip,
2567 containing the new hboot firmware and a text file describing which
2568 devices it would work for.</p>
2569
2570 <p>Next, I needed to get the new firmware into the device.  For this I
2571 followed some instructions
2572 <a href="http://www.htc1guru.com/2013/09/new-ruu-zips-posted/">available
2573 from HTC1Guru.com</a>, and ran these commands as root on a Linux
2574 machine with Debian testing:</p>
2575
2576 <p><pre>
2577 adb reboot-bootloader
2578 fastboot oem rebootRUU
2579 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
2580 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
2581 fastboot reboot
2582 </pre></p>
2583
2584 <p>The flash command apparently need to be done twice to take effect,
2585 as the first is just preparations and the second one do the flashing.
2586 The adb command is just to get to the boot loader menu, so turning the
2587 device on while holding volume down and the power button should work
2588 too.</p>
2589
2590 <p>With the new hboot version in place I could start following the
2591 instructions on the HTC developer web site.  I got the device token
2592 like this:</p>
2593
2594 <p><pre>
2595 fastboot oem get_identifier_token 2>&1 | sed 's/(bootloader) //'
2596 </pre>
2597
2598 <p>And once I got the unlock code via email, I could use it like
2599 this:</p>
2600
2601 <p><pre>
2602 fastboot flash unlocktoken Unlock_code.bin
2603 </pre></p>
2604
2605 <p>And with that final step in place, the phone was unlocked and I
2606 could start stuffing the software of my own choosing into the device.
2607 So far I only inserted a replacement recovery image to wipe the phone
2608 before I start.  We will see what happen next.  Perhaps I should
2609 install <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> on it. :)</p>
2610
2611       </div>
2612       <div class="tags">
2613
2614
2615         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>.
2616
2617
2618       </div>
2619     </div>
2620     <div class="padding"></div>
2621
2622     <div class="entry">
2623       <div class="title">
2624         <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>
2625       </div>
2626       <div class="date">
2627          3rd July 2016
2628       </div>
2629       <div class="body">
2630         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to test
2631 <a href="https://whispersystems.org/">the Signal app</a>, as it is
2632 said to provide end to end encrypted communication and several of my
2633 friends and family are already using it.  As I by choice do not own a
2634 mobile phone, this proved to be harder than expected.  And I wanted to
2635 have the source of the client and know that it was the code used on my
2636 machine.  But yesterday I managed to get it working.  I used the
2637 Github source, compared it to the source in
2638 <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/signal-private-messenger/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk?hl=en-US">the
2639 Signal Chrome app</a> available from the Chrome web store, applied
2640 patches to use the production Signal servers, started the app and
2641 asked for the hidden "register without a smart phone" form.  Here is
2642 the recipe how I did it.</p>
2643
2644 <p>First, I fetched the Signal desktop source from Github, using
2645
2646 <pre>
2647 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
2648 </pre>
2649
2650 <p>Next, I patched the source to use the production servers, to be
2651 able to talk to other Signal users:</p>
2652
2653 <pre>
2654 cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p0
2655 diff -ur ./js/background.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js
2656 --- ./js/background.js  2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
2657 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js    2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
2658 @@ -47,8 +47,8 @@
2659          });
2660      });
2661
2662 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
2663 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
2664 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org:4433';
2665 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
2666      var messageReceiver;
2667      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
2668          if (messageReceiver) {
2669 diff -ur ./js/expire.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js
2670 --- ./js/expire.js      2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
2671 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
2672 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
2673  ;(function() {
2674      'use strict';
2675 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
2676 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 1474492690000;
2677
2678      window.extension = window.extension || {};
2679
2680 EOF
2681 </pre>
2682
2683 <p>The first part is changing the servers, and the second is updating
2684 an expiration timestamp.  This timestamp need to be updated regularly.
2685 It is set 90 days in the future by the build process (Gruntfile.js).
2686 The value is seconds since 1970 times 1000, as far as I can tell.</p>
2687
2688 <p>Based on a tip and good help from the #nuug IRC channel, I wrote a
2689 script to launch Signal in Chromium.</p>
2690
2691 <pre>
2692 #!/bin/sh
2693 cd $(dirname $0)
2694 mkdir -p userdata
2695 exec chromium \
2696   --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
2697   --user-data-dir=`pwd`/userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
2698 </pre>
2699
2700 <p> The script start the app and configure Chromium to use the Tor
2701 SOCKS5 proxy to make sure those controlling the Signal servers (today
2702 Amazon and Whisper Systems) as well as those listening on the lines
2703 will have a harder time location my laptop based on the Signal
2704 connections if they use source IP address.</p>
2705
2706 <p>When the script starts, one need to follow the instructions under
2707 "Standalone Registration" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the git
2708 repository.  I right clicked on the Signal window to get up the
2709 Chromium debugging tool, visited the 'Console' tab and wrote
2710 'extension.install("standalone")' on the console prompt to get the
2711 registration form.  Then I entered by land line phone number and
2712 pressed 'Call'.  5 seconds later the phone rang and a robot voice
2713 repeated the verification code three times.  After entering the number
2714 into the verification code field in the form, I could start using
2715 Signal from my laptop.
2716
2717 <p>As far as I can tell, The Signal app will leak who is talking to
2718 whom and thus who know who to those controlling the central server,
2719 but such leakage is hard to avoid with a centrally controlled server
2720 setup.  It is something to keep in mind when using Signal - the
2721 content of your chats are harder to intercept, but the meta data
2722 exposing your contact network is available to people you do not know.
2723 So better than many options, but not great.  And sadly the usage is
2724 connected to my land line, thus allowing those controlling the server
2725 to associate it to my home and person.  I would prefer it if only
2726 those I knew could tell who I was on Signal.  There are options
2727 avoiding such information leakage, but most of my friends are not
2728 using them, so I am stuck with Signal for now.</p>
2729
2730 <p><strong>Update 2017-01-10</strong>: There is an updated blog post
2731 on this topic in
2732 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience
2733 and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile
2734 phone</a>.</p>
2735
2736       </div>
2737       <div class="tags">
2738
2739
2740         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>.
2741
2742
2743       </div>
2744     </div>
2745     <div class="padding"></div>
2746
2747     <div class="entry">
2748       <div class="title">
2749         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?</a>
2750       </div>
2751       <div class="date">
2752          6th June 2016
2753       </div>
2754       <div class="body">
2755         <p>When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out
2756 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">which
2757 multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats /
2758 MIME types</a>, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types
2759 the various players claimed support for.  The range was from 55 to 130
2760 MIME types.  I suspect most media formats are supported by all
2761 players, but this is not really reflected in the MimeTypes values in
2762 their desktop files.  There are probably also some bogus MIME types
2763 listed, but it is hard to identify which one this is.</p>
2764
2765 <p>Anyway, in the mean time I got in touch with upstream for some of
2766 the players suggesting to add more MIME types to their desktop files,
2767 and decided to spend some time myself improving the situation for my
2768 favorite media player VLC.  The fixes for VLC entered Debian unstable
2769 yesterday. The complete list of MIME types can be seen on the
2770 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">Multimedia
2771 player MIME type support status</a> Debian wiki page.</p>
2772
2773 <p>The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?  It is VLC, followed by
2774 totem, parole, kplayer, gnome-mpv, mpv, smplayer, mplayer-gui and
2775 kmplayer.  I am sure some of the other players desktop files support
2776 several of the formats currently listed as working only with vlc,
2777 toten and parole.</p>
2778
2779 <p>A sad observation is that only 14 MIME types are listed as
2780 supported by all the tested multimedia players in Debian in their
2781 desktop files: audio/mpeg, audio/vnd.rn-realaudio, audio/x-mpegurl,
2782 audio/x-ms-wma, audio/x-scpls, audio/x-wav, video/mp4, video/mpeg,
2783 video/quicktime, video/vnd.rn-realvideo, video/x-matroska,
2784 video/x-ms-asf, video/x-ms-wmv and video/x-msvideo.  Personally I find
2785 it sad that video/ogg and video/webm is not supported by all the media
2786 players in Debian.  As far as I can tell, all of them can handle both
2787 formats.</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/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>.
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/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>
2803       </div>
2804       <div class="date">
2805          5th June 2016
2806       </div>
2807       <div class="body">
2808         <p>Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I
2809 decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a
2810 talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine.  I
2811 wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed
2812 the day before I would give the talk.  The next day I took a plane to
2813 the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I
2814 started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover
2815 that kpresenter refused to load its own data file.  I cursed a bit and
2816 started making the slides again from memory, to have something to
2817 present when I arrived.  I tested that the saved files could be
2818 loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued.  I continued to polish the
2819 slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer
2820 be loaded into kpresenter.  In the end I had to rewrite the slides
2821 three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and
2822 shorter.  After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem &ndash;
2823 kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand.
2824 Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great
2825 program to make slides.  The point I'm trying to make is that we
2826 expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is
2827 embarrassing to its developers if it can't.</p>
2828
2829 <p>Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data
2830 files from the desktop file browser?  It is not a uncommon problem.  A
2831 while back I discovered that the screencast recorder
2832 gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file
2833 browser would refuse to open.  No video player claimed to understand
2834 such file.  I tracked down the cause being <tt>file --mime-type</tt>
2835 returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had
2836 installed listed as a MIME type they would understand.  I asked for
2837 <a href="http://bugs.gw.com/view.php?id=382">file to change its
2838 behavour</a> and use the MIME type video/ogg instead.  I also asked
2839 several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give
2840 the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files.  After a
2841 while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the
2842 output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly.</p>
2843
2844 <p>But history repeats itself.  A few days ago I tested the music
2845 system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file
2846 browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files
2847 (*.rg).  I've reported <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/825993">the
2848 rosegarden problem to BTS</a> and a fix is commited to git and will be
2849 included in the next upload.  To increase the chance of me remembering
2850 how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files
2851 from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it.</p>
2852
2853 <p>The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types.
2854 There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file.  The output from
2855 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> mentioned above, and the content of the
2856 shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/).  The file MIME
2857 type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this
2858 information is collected from
2859 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/">the
2860 desktop files</a> available in /usr/share/applications/.  If there is
2861 one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is
2862 activated when asking to open a given file.  If there are more, one
2863 can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and
2864 selecting the wanted one using 'Open with' or similar.  In general
2865 this work well.  But it depend on each program picking a good MIME
2866 type (preferably
2867 <a href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">a
2868 MIME type registered with IANA</a>), file and/or the shared MIME
2869 registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME
2870 type in its list of supported MIME types.</p>
2871
2872 <p>The <tt>/usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml</tt> entry for
2873 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec">the
2874 Shared MIME database</a> look like this:</p>
2875
2876 <p><blockquote><pre>
2877 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
2878 &lt;mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info"&gt;
2879   &lt;mime-type type="audio/x-rosegarden"&gt;
2880     &lt;sub-class-of type="application/x-gzip"/&gt;
2881     &lt;comment&gt;Rosegarden project file&lt;/comment&gt;
2882     &lt;glob pattern="*.rg"/&gt;
2883   &lt;/mime-type&gt;
2884 &lt;/mime-info&gt;
2885 </pre></blockquote></p>
2886
2887 <p>This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip
2888 (it is a gzipped XML file).  Note, it is much better to use an
2889 official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own
2890 unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden.</p>
2891
2892 <p>The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list
2893 audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the
2894 file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:</p>
2895
2896 <p><blockquote><pre>
2897 % grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
2898 MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
2899 X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
2900 %
2901 </pre></blockquote></p>
2902
2903 <p>The fix was to add "audio/x-rosegarden;" at the end of the
2904 MimeType= line.</p>
2905
2906 <p>If you run into a file which fail to open the correct program when
2907 selected from the file browser, please check out the output from
2908 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> for the file, ensure the file ending and
2909 MIME type is registered somewhere under /usr/share/mime/ and check
2910 that some desktop file under /usr/share/applications/ is claiming
2911 support for this MIME type.  If not, please report a bug to have it
2912 fixed. :)</p>
2913
2914       </div>
2915       <div class="tags">
2916
2917
2918         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>.
2919
2920
2921       </div>
2922     </div>
2923     <div class="padding"></div>
2924
2925     <div class="entry">
2926       <div class="title">
2927         <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>
2928       </div>
2929       <div class="date">
2930         25th May 2016
2931       </div>
2932       <div class="body">
2933         <p><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">The isenkram
2934 system</a> is a user-focused solution in Debian for handling hardware
2935 related packages.  The idea is to have a database of mappings between
2936 hardware and packages, and pop up a dialog suggesting for the user to
2937 install the packages to use a given hardware dongle.  Some use cases
2938 are when you insert a Yubikey, it proposes to install the software
2939 needed to control it; when you insert a braille reader list it
2940 proposes to install the packages needed to send text to the reader;
2941 and when you insert a ColorHug screen calibrator it suggests to
2942 install the driver for it.  The system work well, and even have a few
2943 command line tools to install firmware packages and packages for the
2944 hardware already in the machine (as opposed to hotpluggable hardware).</p>
2945
2946 <p>The system was initially written using aptdaemon, because I found
2947 good documentation and example code on how to use it.  But aptdaemon
2948 is going away and is generally being replaced by
2949 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/">PackageKit</a>,
2950 so Isenkram needed a rewrite.  And today, thanks to the great patch
2951 from my college Sunil Mohan Adapa in the FreedomBox project, the
2952 rewrite finally took place.  I've just uploaded a new version of
2953 Isenkram into Debian Unstable with the patch included, and the default
2954 for the background daemon is now to use PackageKit.  To check it out,
2955 install the <tt>isenkram</tt> package and insert some hardware dongle
2956 and see if it is recognised.</p>
2957
2958 <p>If you want to know what kind of packages isenkram would propose for
2959 the machine it is running on, you can check out the isenkram-lookup
2960 program.  This is what it look like on a Thinkpad X230:</p>
2961
2962 <p><blockquote><pre>
2963 % isenkram-lookup
2964 bluez
2965 cheese
2966 fprintd
2967 fprintd-demo
2968 gkrellm-thinkbat
2969 hdapsd
2970 libpam-fprintd
2971 pidgin-blinklight
2972 thinkfan
2973 tleds
2974 tp-smapi-dkms
2975 tp-smapi-source
2976 tpb
2977 %p
2978 </pre></blockquote></p>
2979
2980 <p>The hardware mappings come from several places.  The preferred way
2981 is for packages to announce their hardware support using
2982 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
2983 cross distribution appstream system</a>.
2984 See
2985 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">previous
2986 blog posts about isenkram</a> to learn how to do that.</p>
2987
2988       </div>
2989       <div class="tags">
2990
2991
2992         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>.
2993
2994
2995       </div>
2996     </div>
2997     <div class="padding"></div>
2998
2999     <div class="entry">
3000       <div class="title">
3001         <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>
3002       </div>
3003       <div class="date">
3004         23rd May 2016
3005       </div>
3006       <div class="body">
3007         <p>Yesterday I updated the
3008 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats
3009 package in Debian</a> with a few patches sent to me by skilled and
3010 enterprising users.  There were some nice user and visible changes.
3011 First of all, both desktop menu entries now work.  A design flaw in
3012 one of the script made the history graph fail to show up (its PNG was
3013 dumped in ~/.xsession-errors) if no controlling TTY was available.
3014 The script worked when called from the command line, but not when
3015 called from the desktop menu.  I changed this to look for a DISPLAY
3016 variable or a TTY before deciding where to draw the graph, and now the
3017 graph window pop up as expected.</p>
3018
3019 <p>The next new feature is a discharge rate estimator in one of the
3020 graphs (the one showing the last few hours).  New is also the user of
3021 colours showing charging in blue and discharge in red.  The percentages
3022 of this graph is relative to last full charge, not battery design
3023 capacity.</p>
3024
3025 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-rate.png"/></p>
3026
3027 <p>The other graph show the entire history of the collected battery
3028 statistics, comparing it to the design capacity of the battery to
3029 visualise how the battery life time get shorter over time.  The red
3030 line in this graph is what the previous graph considers 100 percent:
3031
3032 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-history.png"/></p>
3033
3034 <p>In this graph you can see that I only charge the battery to 80
3035 percent of last full capacity, and how the capacity of the battery is
3036 shrinking. :(</p>
3037
3038 <p>The last new feature is in the collector, which now will handle
3039 more hardware models.  On some hardware, Linux power supply
3040 information is stored in /sys/class/power_supply/ACAD/, while the
3041 collector previously only looked in /sys/class/power_supply/AC/.  Now
3042 both are checked to figure if there is power connected to the
3043 machine.</p>
3044
3045 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
3046 check out the
3047 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
3048 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
3049 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from <a
3050 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
3051 Patches are very welcome.</p>
3052
3053 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3054 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3055 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3056
3057       </div>
3058       <div class="tags">
3059
3060
3061         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>.
3062
3063
3064       </div>
3065     </div>
3066     <div class="padding"></div>
3067
3068     <div class="entry">
3069       <div class="title">
3070         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html">Debian now with ZFS on Linux included</a>
3071       </div>
3072       <div class="date">
3073         12th May 2016
3074       </div>
3075       <div class="body">
3076         <p>Today, after many years of hard work from many people,
3077 <a href="http://zfsonlinux.org/">ZFS for Linux</a> finally entered
3078 Debian.  The package status can be seen on
3079 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/zfs-linux">the package tracker
3080 for zfs-linux</a>.  and
3081 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
3082 team status page</a>. If you want to help out, please join us.
3083 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">The
3084 source code</a> is available via git on Alioth.  It would also be
3085 great if you could help out with
3086 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dkms">the dkms package</a>, as
3087 it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.</p>
3088
3089       </div>
3090       <div class="tags">
3091
3092
3093         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>.
3094
3095
3096       </div>
3097     </div>
3098     <div class="padding"></div>
3099
3100     <div class="entry">
3101       <div class="title">
3102         <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>
3103       </div>
3104       <div class="date">
3105          8th May 2016
3106       </div>
3107       <div class="body">
3108         <p><strong>Where I set out to figure out which multimedia player in
3109 Debian claim support for most file formats.</strong></p>
3110
3111 <p>A few years ago, I had a look at the media support for Browser
3112 plugins in Debian, to get an idea which plugins to include in Debian
3113 Edu.  I created a script to extract the set of supported MIME types
3114 for each plugin, and used this to find out which multimedia browser
3115 plugin supported most file formats / media types.
3116 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">The
3117 result</a> can still be seen on the Debian wiki, even though it have
3118 not been updated for a while.  But browser plugins are less relevant
3119 these days, so I thought it was time to look at standalone
3120 players.</p>
3121
3122 <p>A few days ago I was tired of VLC not being listed as a viable
3123 player when I wanted to play videos from the Norwegian National
3124 Broadcasting Company, and decided to investigate why.  The cause is a
3125 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/822245">missing MIME type in the VLC
3126 desktop file</a>.  In the process I wrote a script to compare the set
3127 of MIME types announced in the desktop file and the browser plugin,
3128 only to discover that there is quite a large difference between the
3129 two for VLC.  This discovery made me dig up the script I used to
3130 compare browser plugins, and adjust it to compare desktop files
3131 instead, to try to figure out which multimedia player in Debian
3132 support most file formats.</p>
3133
3134 <p>The result can be seen on the Debian Wiki, as
3135 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">a
3136 table listing all MIME types supported by one of the packages included
3137 in the table</a>, with the package supporting most MIME types being
3138 listed first in the table.</p>
3139
3140 </p>The best multimedia player in Debian?  It is totem, followed by
3141 parole, kplayer, mpv, vlc, smplayer mplayer-gui gnome-mpv and
3142 kmplayer.  Time for the other players to update their announced MIME
3143 support?</p>
3144
3145       </div>
3146       <div class="tags">
3147
3148
3149         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>.
3150
3151
3152       </div>
3153     </div>
3154     <div class="padding"></div>
3155
3156     <div class="entry">
3157       <div class="title">
3158         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html">The Pyra - handheld computer with Debian preinstalled</a>
3159       </div>
3160       <div class="date">
3161          4th May 2016
3162       </div>
3163       <div class="body">
3164         A friend of mine made me aware of
3165 <a href="https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/">The Pyra</a>, a
3166 handheld computer which will be delivered with Debian preinstalled.  I
3167 would love to get one of those for my birthday. :)</p>
3168
3169 <p>The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB
3170 plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a 5"
3171 LCD touch screen.  The 6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole
3172 day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests
3173 confirming this.  The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the
3174 last I heard last night was that 22 more orders were needed before
3175 production started.</p>
3176
3177 <p>As far as I know, this is the first handheld preinstalled with
3178 Debian.  Please let me know if you know of any others.  Is it the
3179 first computer being sold with Debian preinstalled?</p>
3180
3181       </div>
3182       <div class="tags">
3183
3184
3185         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>.
3186
3187
3188       </div>
3189     </div>
3190     <div class="padding"></div>
3191
3192     <div class="entry">
3193       <div class="title">
3194         <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>
3195       </div>
3196       <div class="date">
3197         10th April 2016
3198       </div>
3199       <div class="body">
3200         <p>During this weekends
3201 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Oslo__Takk_for_feilfiksingsfesten.shtml">bug
3202 squashing party and developer gathering</a>, we decided to do our part
3203 to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian
3204 Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the
3205 <a href="http://debian-handbook.info/">Debian Administrator's Handbook
3206 project</a> to get started.  If you want to help out, please start
3207 contributing using
3208 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
3209 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
3210 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
3211 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
3212 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
3213 contributors</a>.</p>
3214
3215 <p>The book is already available on paper in English, French and
3216 Japanese, and our goal is to get it available on paper in Norwegian
3217 Bokmål too.  In addition to the paper edition, there are also EPUB and
3218 Mobi versions available.  And there are incomplete translations
3219 available for many more languages.</p>
3220
3221       </div>
3222       <div class="tags">
3223
3224
3225         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>.
3226
3227
3228       </div>
3229     </div>
3230     <div class="padding"></div>
3231
3232     <div class="entry">
3233       <div class="title">
3234         <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>
3235       </div>
3236       <div class="date">
3237          7th April 2016
3238       </div>
3239       <div class="body">
3240         <p>Just for fun I had a look at the popcon number of ZFS related
3241 packages in Debian, and was quite surprised with what I found.  I use
3242 ZFS myself at home, but did not really expect many others to do so.
3243 But I might be wrong.</p>
3244
3245 <p>According to
3246 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=spl-linux">the popcon
3247 results for spl-linux</a>, there are 1019 Debian installations, or
3248 0.53% of the population, with the package installed.  As far as I know
3249 the only use of the spl-linux package is as a support library for ZFS
3250 on Linux, so I use it here as proxy for measuring the number of ZFS
3251 installation on Linux in Debian.  In the kFreeBSD variant of Debian
3252 the ZFS feature is already available, and there
3253 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=zfsutils">the popcon
3254 results for zfsutils</a> show 1625 Debian installations or 0.84% of
3255 the population.  So I guess I am not alone in using ZFS on Debian.</p>
3256
3257 <p>But even though the Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum
3258 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00006.html">announced
3259 in April 2015</a> that the legal obstacles blocking ZFS on Debian were
3260 cleared, the package is still not in Debian.  The package is again in
3261 the NEW queue.  Several uploads have been rejected so far because the
3262 debian/copyright file was incomplete or wrong, but there is no reason
3263 to give up.  The current status can be seen on
3264 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
3265 team status page</a>, and
3266 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">the
3267 source code</a> is available on Alioth.</p>
3268
3269 <p>As I want ZFS to be included in next version of Debian to make sure
3270 my home server can function in the future using only official Debian
3271 packages, and the current blocker is to get the debian/copyright file
3272 accepted by the FTP masters in Debian, I decided a while back to try
3273 to help out the team.  This was the background for my blog post about
3274 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">creating,
3275 updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>, and I
3276 used the techniques I explored there to try to find any errors in the
3277 copyright file.  It is not very easy to check every one of the around
3278 2000 files in the source package, but I hope we this time got it
3279 right.  If you want to help out, check out the git source and try to
3280 find missing entries in the debian/copyright file.</p>
3281
3282       </div>
3283       <div class="tags">
3284
3285
3286         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>.
3287
3288
3289       </div>
3290     </div>
3291     <div class="padding"></div>
3292
3293     <div class="entry">
3294       <div class="title">
3295         <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>
3296       </div>
3297       <div class="date">
3298         23rd March 2016
3299       </div>
3300       <div class="body">
3301         <p>Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an
3302 extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for
3303 later processing and graphing.  The original collector store the
3304 battery level as percentage of last full level, while the new
3305 collector also record battery vendor, model, serial number, design
3306 full level, last full level and current battery level.  This make it
3307 possible to predict the lifetime of the battery as well as visualise
3308 the energy flow when the battery is charging or discharging.</p>
3309
3310 <p>The new tools are available in <tt>/usr/share/battery-stats/</tt>
3311 in the version 0.5.1 package in unstable.  Get the new battery level graph
3312 and lifetime prediction by running:
3313
3314 <p><pre>
3315 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph /var/log/battery-stats.csv
3316 </pre></p>
3317
3318 <p>Or select the 'Battery Level Graph' from your application menu.</p>
3319
3320 <p>The flow in/out of the battery can be seen by running (no menu
3321 entry yet):</p>
3322
3323 <p><pre>
3324 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph-flow
3325 </pre></p>
3326
3327 <p>I'm not quite happy with the way the data is visualised, at least
3328 when there are few data points.  The graphs look a bit better with a
3329 few years of data.</p>
3330
3331 <p>A while back one important feature I use in the battery stats
3332 collector broke in Debian.  The scripts in
3333 <tt>/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/</tt> were no longer executed.  I
3334 suspect it happened when Jessie started using systemd, but I do not
3335 know.  The issue is reported as
3336 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/818649">bug #818649</a> against
3337 pm-utils.  I managed to work around it by adding an udev rule to call
3338 the collector script every time the power connector is connected and
3339 disconnected.  With this fix in place it was finally time to make a
3340 new release of the package, and get it into Debian.</p>
3341
3342 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
3343 check out the
3344 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
3345 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
3346 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
3347 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
3348 As always, patches are very welcome.</p>
3349
3350       </div>
3351       <div class="tags">
3352
3353
3354         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>.
3355
3356
3357       </div>
3358     </div>
3359     <div class="padding"></div>
3360
3361     <div class="entry">
3362       <div class="title">
3363         <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>
3364       </div>
3365       <div class="date">
3366         15th March 2016
3367       </div>
3368       <div class="body">
3369         <p>Back in September, I blogged about
3370 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">the
3371 system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery</a>, and
3372 how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced).  I
3373 created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing,
3374 but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already
3375 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">a battery-stats
3376 package in Debian</a> that should do the same thing, and I did not see
3377 a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be
3378 fixed instead.  I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and
3379 hoped someone would step in and fix it.  But no-one did.</p>
3380
3381 <p>I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own
3382 hands.  The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of
3383 battery stats (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">available from github</a>) and part of the team maintaining
3384 battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally
3385 able to collect battery status using the <tt>/sys/class/power_supply/</tt>
3386 information provided by the Linux kernel.  If you install the
3387 battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a
3388 graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the
3389 status of the battery.  The source package build and work just fine in
3390 Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not
3391 tested).  The default graph you get for that system look like this:</p>
3392
3393 <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>
3394
3395 <p>My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
3396 battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
3397 about the battery.  The scripts are merged into the upstream
3398 battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
3399 yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way.  Will have to test a
3400 bit more before I make a new release.</p>
3401
3402 <p>I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
3403 suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
3404 impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
3405 and graphing.</p>
3406
3407 <p>If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
3408 battery, check out the battery-stats package in
3409 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">Debian</a> and
3410 on
3411 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
3412 I would love some help to improve the system further.</p>
3413
3414       </div>
3415       <div class="tags">
3416
3417
3418         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>.
3419
3420
3421       </div>
3422     </div>
3423     <div class="padding"></div>
3424
3425     <div class="entry">
3426       <div class="title">
3427         <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>
3428       </div>
3429       <div class="date">
3430         19th February 2016
3431       </div>
3432       <div class="body">
3433         <p>Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to
3434 details.  And one of the details is the content of the
3435 debian/copyright file, which should list all relevant licenses used by
3436 the code in the package in question, preferably in
3437 <a href="https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/">machine
3438 readable DEP5 format</a>.</p>
3439
3440 <p>For large packages with lots of contributors it is hard to write
3441 and update this file manually, and if you get some detail wrong, the
3442 package is normally rejected by the ftpmasters.  So getting it right
3443 the first time around get the package into Debian faster, and save
3444 both you and the ftpmasters some work..  Today, while trying to figure
3445 out what was wrong with
3446 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=686447">the
3447 zfsonlinux copyright file</a>, I decided to spend some time on
3448 figuring out the options for doing this job automatically, or at least
3449 semi-automatically.</p>
3450
3451 <p>Lucikly, there are at least two tools available for generating the
3452 file based on the code in the source package,
3453 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debmake">debmake</a></tt>
3454 and <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cme">cme</a></tt>.  I'm
3455 not sure which one of them came first, but both seem to be able to
3456 create a sensible draft file.  As far as I can tell, none of them can
3457 be trusted to get the result just right, so the content need to be
3458 polished a bit before the file is OK to upload.  I found the debmake
3459 option in
3460 <a href="http://goofying-with-debian.blogspot.com/2014/07/debmake-checking-source-against-dep-5.html">a
3461 blog posts from 2014</a>.
3462
3463 <p>To generate using debmake, use the -cc option:
3464
3465 <p><pre>
3466 debmake -cc > debian/copyright
3467 </pre></p>
3468
3469 <p>Note there are some problems with python and non-ASCII names, so
3470 this might not be the best option.</p>
3471
3472 <p>The cme option is based on a config parsing library, and I found
3473 this approach in
3474 <a href="https://ddumont.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/improving-creation-of-debian-copyright-file/">a
3475 blog post from 2015</a>.  To generate using cme, use the 'update
3476 dpkg-copyright' option:
3477
3478 <p><pre>
3479 cme update dpkg-copyright
3480 </pre></p>
3481
3482 <p>This will create or update debian/copyright.  The cme tool seem to
3483 handle UTF-8 names better than debmake.</p>
3484
3485 <p>When the copyright file is created, I would also like some help to
3486 check if the file is correct.  For this I found two good options,
3487 <tt>debmake -k</tt> and <tt>license-reconcile</tt>.  The former seem
3488 to focus on license types and file matching, and is able to detect
3489 ineffective blocks in the copyright file.  The latter reports missing
3490 copyright holders and years, but was confused by inconsistent license
3491 names (like CDDL vs. CDDL-1.0).  I suspect it is good to use both and
3492 fix all issues reported by them before uploading.  But I do not know
3493 if the tools and the ftpmasters agree on what is important to fix in a
3494 copyright file, so the package might still be rejected.</p>
3495
3496 <p>The devscripts tool <tt>licensecheck</tt> deserve mentioning.  It
3497 will read through the source and try to find all copyright statements.
3498 It is not comparing the result to the content of debian/copyright, but
3499 can be useful when verifying the content of the copyright file.</p>
3500
3501 <p>Are you aware of better tools in Debian to create and update
3502 debian/copyright file.  Please let me know, or blog about it on
3503 planet.debian.org.</p>
3504
3505 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3506 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3507 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3508
3509 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-20</strong>: I got a tip from Mike Gabriel
3510 on how to use licensecheck and cdbs to create a draft copyright file
3511
3512 <p><pre>
3513 licensecheck --copyright -r `find * -type f` | \
3514   /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5 > debian/copyright.auto
3515 </pre></p>
3516
3517 <p>He mentioned that he normally check the generated file into the
3518 version control system to make it easier to discover license and
3519 copyright changes in the upstream source.  I will try to do the same
3520 with my packages in the future.</p>
3521
3522 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-21</strong>: The cme author recommended
3523 against using -quiet for new users, so I removed it from the proposed
3524 command line.</p>
3525
3526       </div>
3527       <div class="tags">
3528
3529
3530         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>.
3531
3532
3533       </div>
3534     </div>
3535     <div class="padding"></div>
3536
3537     <div class="entry">
3538       <div class="title">
3539         <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>
3540       </div>
3541       <div class="date">
3542          4th February 2016
3543       </div>
3544       <div class="body">
3545         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">appstream system</a>
3546 is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very
3547 convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given
3548 firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it.  This can
3549 be done using apt-file too, but that is for someone else to blog
3550 about. :)</p>
3551
3552 <p>Here is a small recipe to find the package with a given firmware
3553 file, in this example I am looking for ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin, randomly
3554 picked from the set of firmware announced using appstream in Debian
3555 unstable.  In general you would be looking for the firmware requested
3556 by the kernel during kernel module loading.  To find the package
3557 providing the example file, do like this:</p>
3558
3559 <blockquote><pre>
3560 % apt install appstream
3561 [...]
3562 % apt update
3563 [...]
3564 % appstreamcli what-provides firmware:runtime ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin | \
3565   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
3566 firmware-qlogic
3567 %
3568 </pre></blockquote>
3569
3570 <p>See <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">the
3571 appstream wiki</a> page to learn how to embed the package metadata in
3572 a way appstream can use.</p>
3573
3574 <p>This same approach can be used to find any package supporting a
3575 given MIME type.  This is very useful when you get a file you do not
3576 know how to handle.  First find the mime type using <tt>file
3577 --mime-type</tt>, and next look up the package providing support for
3578 it.  Lets say you got an SVG file.  Its MIME type is image/svg+xml,
3579 and you can find all packages handling this type like this:</p>
3580
3581 <blockquote><pre>
3582 % apt install appstream
3583 [...]
3584 % apt update
3585 [...]
3586 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype image/svg+xml | \
3587   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
3588 bkchem
3589 phototonic
3590 inkscape
3591 shutter
3592 tetzle
3593 geeqie
3594 xia
3595 pinta
3596 gthumb
3597 karbon
3598 comix
3599 mirage
3600 viewnior
3601 postr
3602 ristretto
3603 kolourpaint4
3604 eog
3605 eom
3606 gimagereader
3607 midori
3608 %
3609 </pre></blockquote>
3610
3611 <p>I believe the MIME types are fetched from the desktop file for
3612 packages providing appstream metadata.</p>
3613
3614       </div>
3615       <div class="tags">
3616
3617
3618         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>.
3619
3620
3621       </div>
3622     </div>
3623     <div class="padding"></div>
3624
3625     <div class="entry">
3626       <div class="title">
3627         <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>
3628       </div>
3629       <div class="date">
3630         24th January 2016
3631       </div>
3632       <div class="body">
3633         <p>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
3634 with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
3635 position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
3636 time (like every time a SMS is received or sent).  And if their
3637 computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
3638 mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
3639 also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
3640 during installation).  And when these programs send out information to
3641 central collection points, the location is often included, unless
3642 extra care is taken to not send the location.  The provided
3643 information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
3644 good and bad, depend on your point of view).  What is certain, is that
3645 the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
3646 perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
3647 when they share their whereabouts with private and public
3648 entities.</p>
3649
3650 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-01-24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png"></p>
3651
3652 <p>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
3653 when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing.  It is
3654 unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
3655 officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
3656 unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information.  But the
3657 public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
3658 tool to do so is called
3659 <a href="http://www.geocreepy.com/">Creepy or Cree.py</a>.  I
3660 discovered it when I read
3661 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-7787884.html">an
3662 article about Creepy</a> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
3663 November 2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
3664 The python program was in Debian, but
3665 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy">the version in
3666 Debian</a> was completely broken and practically unmaintained.  I
3667 uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
3668 have time to fix it then.  This Christmas I decided to finally try to
3669 get Creepy operational in Debian.  Now a fixed version is available in
3670 Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
3671 are now included
3672 <a href="https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy">upstream</a>.</p>
3673
3674 <p>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
3675 Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
3676 complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
3677 given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
3678 these services.  Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
3679 least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
3680 days it is impossible.  This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
3681 configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
3682 information to them about your search interests.  This should be taken
3683 into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
3684 about yourself with the services.</p>
3685
3686 <p>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
3687 geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
3688 of Norway.  One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
3689 information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
3690 information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
3691 I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
3692 twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
3693 Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
3694 making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
3695 things.  A similar technique have been
3696 <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl">used
3697 to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine</a>, and it is both a powerful
3698 tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
3699 understand the value of the private information they provide to the
3700 public.</p>
3701
3702 <p>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
3703 it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
3704 least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
3705 python-requests-toolbelt).</p>
3706
3707 <p>(I have uploaded
3708 <a href="https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy">the image to
3709 screenshots.debian.net</a> and licensed it under the same terms as the
3710 Creepy program in Debian.)</p>
3711
3712       </div>
3713       <div class="tags">
3714
3715
3716         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>.
3717
3718
3719       </div>
3720     </div>
3721     <div class="padding"></div>
3722
3723     <div class="entry">
3724       <div class="title">
3725         <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>
3726       </div>
3727       <div class="date">
3728         15th January 2016
3729       </div>
3730       <div class="body">
3731         <p>During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum
3732 <a href="https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/331/what-is-to-be-done/">observed
3733 that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to
3734 believe a computer have a given security hole</a> if it download a
3735 security fix from a Debian mirror.  This is a good reason to always
3736 use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those
3737 listening do not know which IP address to attack.  In August, Richard
3738 Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible
3739 to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that
3740 download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and
3741 <a href="http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2015/08/24-Tor-enabled_Debian_mirror/">proposed
3742 to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror</a>.  He
3743 was not the first to propose this, as the
3744 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/apt-transport-tor">apt-transport-tor</a></tt>
3745 package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt
3746 to use <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a>, but I was not
3747 aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.</p>
3748
3749 <p>Richard discussed the idea with Peter Palfrader, one of the Debian
3750 sysadmins, and he set up a Tor hidden service on one of the central
3751 Debian mirrors using the address vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion, thus making
3752 it possible to download packages directly between two tor nodes,
3753 making sure the network traffic always were encrypted.</p>
3754
3755 <p>Here is a short recipe for enabling this on your machine, by
3756 installing <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> and replacing http and https
3757 urls with tor+http and tor+https, and using the hidden service instead
3758 of the official Debian mirror site.  I recommend installing
3759 <tt>etckeeper</tt> before you start to have a history of the changes
3760 done in /etc/.</p>
3761
3762 <blockquote><pre>
3763 apt install apt-transport-tor
3764 sed -i 's% http://ftp.debian.org/% tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/%' /etc/apt/sources.list
3765 sed -i 's% http% tor+http%' /etc/apt/sources.list
3766 </pre></blockquote>
3767
3768 <p>If you have more sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, run
3769 the sed commands for these too.  The sed command is assuming your are
3770 using the ftp.debian.org Debian mirror.  Adjust the command (or just
3771 edit the file manually) to match your mirror.</p>
3772
3773 <p>This work in Debian Jessie and later.  Note that tools like
3774 <tt>apt-file</tt> only recently started using the apt transport
3775 system, and do not work with these tor+http URLs.  For
3776 <tt>apt-file</tt> you need the version currently in experimental,
3777 which need a recent apt version currently only in unstable.  So if you
3778 need a working <tt>apt-file</tt>, this is not for you.</p>
3779
3780 <p>Another advantage from this change is that your machine will start
3781 using Tor regularly and at fairly random intervals (every time you
3782 update the package lists or upgrade or install a new package), thus
3783 masking other Tor traffic done from the same machine.  Using Tor will
3784 become normal for the machine in question.</p>
3785
3786 <p>On <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox</a>, APT
3787 is set up by default to use <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> when Tor is
3788 enabled.  It would be great if it was the default on any Debian
3789 system.</p>
3790
3791       </div>
3792       <div class="tags">
3793
3794
3795         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>.
3796
3797
3798       </div>
3799     </div>
3800     <div class="padding"></div>
3801
3802     <div class="entry">
3803       <div class="title">
3804         <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>
3805       </div>
3806       <div class="date">
3807         23rd December 2015
3808       </div>
3809       <div class="body">
3810         <p>When I was a kid, we used to collect "car numbers", as we used to
3811 call the car license plate numbers in those days.  I would write the
3812 numbers down in my little book and compare notes with the other kids
3813 to see how many region codes we had seen and if we had seen some
3814 exotic or special region codes and numbers.  It was a fun game to pass
3815 time, as we kids have plenty of it.</p>
3816
3817 <p>A few days I came across
3818 <a href="https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr">the OpenALPR
3819 project</a>, a free software project to automatically discover and
3820 report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the
3821 "car numbers" in a machine readable format.  I've been looking for
3822 such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the
3823 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition">automatic
3824 number plate recognition</a> tool only is available in the hands of
3825 the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to
3826 even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance.  I
3827 discovered the developer
3828 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/747509">wanted to get the tool into
3829 Debian</a>, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to
3830 help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian
3831 archive.</p>
3832
3833 <p>Today we finally managed to get the package into shape and uploaded
3834 it into Debian, where it currently
3835 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org//new/openalpr_2.2.1-1.html">waits
3836 in the NEW queue</a> for review by the Debian ftpmasters.</p>
3837
3838 <p>I guess you are wondering why on earth such tool would be useful
3839 for the common folks, ie those not running a large government
3840 surveillance system?  Well, I plan to put it in a computer on my bike
3841 and in my car, tracking the cars nearby and allowing me to be notified
3842 when number plates on my watch list are discovered.  Another use case
3843 was suggested by a friend of mine, who wanted to set it up at his home
3844 to open the car port automatically when it discovered the plate on his
3845 car.  When I mentioned it perhaps was a bit foolhardy to allow anyone
3846 capable of placing his license plate number of a piece of cardboard to
3847 open his car port, men replied that it was always unlocked anyway.  I
3848 guess for such use case it make sense.  I am sure there are other use
3849 cases too, for those with imagination and a vision.</p>
3850
3851 <p>If you want to build your own version of the Debian package, check
3852 out the upstream git source and symlink ./distros/debian to ./debian/
3853 before running "debuild" to build the source.  Or wait a bit until the
3854 package show up in unstable.</p>
3855
3856       </div>
3857       <div class="tags">
3858
3859
3860         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>.
3861
3862
3863       </div>
3864     </div>
3865     <div class="padding"></div>
3866
3867     <div class="entry">
3868       <div class="title">
3869         <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>
3870       </div>
3871       <div class="date">
3872         20th December 2015
3873       </div>
3874       <div class="body">
3875         <p>Around three years ago, I created
3876 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the isenkram
3877 system</a> to get a more practical solution in Debian for handing
3878 hardware related packages.  A GUI system in the isenkram package will
3879 present a pop-up dialog when some hardware dongle supported by
3880 relevant packages in Debian is inserted into the machine.  The same
3881 lookup mechanism to detect packages is available as command line
3882 tools in the isenkram-cli package.  In addition to mapping hardware,
3883 it will also map kernel firmware files to packages and make it easy to
3884 install needed firmware packages automatically.  The key for this
3885 system to work is a good way to map hardware to packages, in other
3886 words, allow packages to announce what hardware they will work
3887 with.</p>
3888
3889 <p>I started by providing data files in the isenkram source, and
3890 adding code to download the latest version of these data files at run
3891 time, to ensure every user had the most up to date mapping available.
3892 I also added support for storing the mapping in the Packages file in
3893 the apt repositories, but did not push this approach because while I
3894 was trying to figure out how to best store hardware/package mappings,
3895 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
3896 appstream system</a> was announced.  I got in touch and suggested to
3897 add the hardware mapping into that data set to be able to use
3898 appstream as a data source, and this was accepted at least for the
3899 Debian version of appstream.</p>
3900
3901 <p>A few days ago using appstream in Debian for this became possible,
3902 and today I uploaded a new version 0.20 of isenkram adding support for
3903 appstream as a data source for mapping hardware to packages.  The only
3904 package so far using appstream to announce its hardware support is my
3905 pymissile package.  I got help from Matthias Klumpp with figuring out
3906 how do add the required
3907 <a href="https://appstream.debian.org/html/sid/main/metainfo/pymissile.html">metadata
3908 in pymissile</a>.  I added a file debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml with
3909 this content:</p>
3910
3911 <blockquote><pre>
3912 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
3913 &lt;component&gt;
3914   &lt;id&gt;pymissile&lt;/id&gt;
3915   &lt;metadata_license&gt;MIT&lt;/metadata_license&gt;
3916   &lt;name&gt;pymissile&lt;/name&gt;
3917   &lt;summary&gt;Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher&lt;/summary&gt;
3918   &lt;description&gt;
3919     &lt;p&gt;
3920       Pymissile provides a curses interface to control an original
3921       Marks and Spencer / Striker USB Missile Launcher, as well as a
3922       motion control script to allow a webcamera to control the
3923       launcher.
3924     &lt;/p&gt;
3925   &lt;/description&gt;
3926   &lt;provides&gt;
3927     &lt;modalias&gt;usb:v1130p0202d*&lt;/modalias&gt;
3928   &lt;/provides&gt;
3929 &lt;/component&gt;
3930 </pre></blockquote>
3931
3932 <p>The key for isenkram is the component/provides/modalias value,
3933 which is a glob style match rule for hardware specific strings
3934 (modalias strings) provided by the Linux kernel.  In this case, it
3935 will map to all USB devices with vendor code 1130 and product code
3936 0202.</p>
3937
3938 <p>Note, it is important that the license of all the metadata files
3939 are compatible to have permissions to aggregate them into archive wide
3940 appstream files.  Matthias suggested to use MIT or BSD licenses for
3941 these files.  A challenge is figuring out a good id for the data, as
3942 it is supposed to be globally unique and shared across distributions
3943 (in other words, best to coordinate with upstream what to use).  But
3944 it can be changed later or, so we went with the package name as
3945 upstream for this project is dormant.</p>
3946
3947 <p>To get the metadata file installed in the correct location for the
3948 mirror update scripts to pick it up and include its content the
3949 appstream data source, the file must be installed in the binary
3950 package under /usr/share/appdata/.  I did this by adding the following
3951 line to debian/pymissile.install:</p>
3952
3953 <blockquote><pre>
3954 debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml usr/share/appdata
3955 </pre></blockquote>
3956
3957 <p>With that in place, the command line tool isenkram-lookup will list
3958 all packages useful on the current computer automatically, and the GUI
3959 pop-up handler will propose to install the package not already
3960 installed if a hardware dongle is inserted into the machine in
3961 question.</p>
3962
3963 <p>Details of the modalias field in appstream is available from the
3964 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a> proposal.</p>
3965
3966 <p>To locate the modalias values of all hardware present in a machine,
3967 try running this command on the command line:</p>
3968
3969 <blockquote><pre>
3970 cat $(find /sys/devices/|grep modalias)
3971 </pre></blockquote>
3972
3973 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
3974 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
3975 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
3976
3977       </div>
3978       <div class="tags">
3979
3980
3981         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>.
3982
3983
3984       </div>
3985     </div>
3986     <div class="padding"></div>
3987
3988     <div class="entry">
3989       <div class="title">
3990         <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>
3991       </div>
3992       <div class="date">
3993         30th November 2015
3994       </div>
3995       <div class="body">
3996         <p>A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled
3997 "<a href="http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2015/11/27/sfc-supporter/">The
3998 GPL is not magic pixie dust</a>" explain the importance of making sure
3999 the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GPL</a> is enforced.
4000 I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:<p>
4001
4002 <blockquote>
4003
4004 <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>
4005
4006 <blockquote>
4007 The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.<br/>
4008
4009 The first step is to choose a
4010 <a href="https://copyleft.org/">copyleft</a> license for your
4011 code.<br/>
4012
4013 The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license,
4014 <b>it must be enforced</b><br/>
4015
4016 and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of
4017 work<br/>
4018
4019 is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.
4020 </blockquote>
4021
4022 <p><small>-- <a href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/">Bradley Kuhn</a>, in
4023 <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in Freedom">FaiF</a>
4024 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode
4025 0x57</a></small></p>
4026
4027 <p>As the Debian Website
4028 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/794116">used</a>
4029 <a href="https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/intro/free.wml?r1=1.24&amp;r2=1.25">to</a>
4030 imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to
4031 the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful
4032 software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or
4033 software products.  Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created
4034 to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but
4035 such licenses are not enough.  With the ongoing adoption of Free
4036 Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's
4037 expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of
4038 ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always.  As Karen
4039 and Bradley explained in <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in
4040 Freedom">FaiF</a>
4041 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode 0x57</a>,
4042 copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court
4043 to protect it.  The reality of today's world is that legal
4044 representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming.  With
4045 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/">gpl-violations.org</a> in hiatus
4046 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/news/20151027-homepage-recovers/">until</a>
4047 some time in 2016, the <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/">Software
4048 Freedom Conservancy</a> (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender
4049 of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations.
4050 In March the SFC supported a
4051 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">lawsuit
4052 by Christoph Hellwig</a> against VMware for refusing to
4053 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html">comply
4054 with the GPL</a> in relation to their use of parts of the Linux
4055 kernel.  Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and
4056 conferences
4057 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">blocked
4058 or cancelled their talks</a>.  As a result they have decided to rely
4059 less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of
4060 individuals who support Free Software and copyleft.  So the SFC has
4061 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/23/2015fundraiser/">launched</a>
4062 a <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">campaign</a> to create
4063 a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by
4064 supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free
4065 Software.</p>
4066
4067 <p>If you support Free Software,
4068 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/26/like-what-I-do/">like</a>
4069 what the SFC do, agree with their
4070 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/principles.html">compliance
4071 principles</a>, are happy about their
4072 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">successes</a> in 2015,
4073 work on a project that is an SFC
4074 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/members/current/">member</a> and or
4075 just want to stand up for copyleft, please join
4076 <a href="https://identi.ca/cwebber/image/JQGPA4qbTyyp3-MY8QpvuA">Christopher
4077 Allan Webber</a>,
4078 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">Carol
4079 Smith</a>,
4080 <a href="http://www.jonobacon.org/2015/11/25/supporting-software-freedom-conservancy/">Jono
4081 Bacon</a>, myself and
4082 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/#supporters">others</a> in
4083 becoming a
4084 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">supporter</a>.  For the
4085 next week your donation will be
4086 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/27/black-friday/">matched</a>
4087 by an anonymous donor.  Please also consider asking your employer to
4088 match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC.  Don't forget to
4089 spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or
4090 social media accounts.</p>
4091
4092 </blockquote>
4093
4094 <p>I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter
4095 of Software Freedom Conservancy myself.  Perhaps you should be a
4096 supporter too?</p>
4097
4098       </div>
4099       <div class="tags">
4100
4101
4102         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>.
4103
4104
4105       </div>
4106     </div>
4107     <div class="padding"></div>
4108
4109     <div class="entry">
4110       <div class="title">
4111         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html">PGP key transition statement for key EE4E02F9</a>
4112       </div>
4113       <div class="date">
4114         17th November 2015
4115       </div>
4116       <div class="body">
4117         <p>I've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to
4118 set it up properly.  I wanted to generate it offline and have it
4119 available on <a href="http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/#openpgp">a OpenPGP
4120 smart card</a> for daily use, and learning how to do it and finding
4121 time to sit down with an offline machine almost took forever.  But
4122 finally I've been able to complete the process, and have now moved
4123 from my old GPG key to a new GPG key.  See
4124 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-11-17-new-gpg-key-transition.txt">the
4125 full transition statement, signed with both my old and new key</a> for
4126 the details.  This is my new key:</p>
4127
4128 <pre>
4129 pub   3936R/<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/111D6B29EE4E02F9.html">111D6B29EE4E02F9</a> 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-14]
4130       Key fingerprint = 3AC7 B2E3 ACA5 DF87 78F1  D827 111D 6B29 EE4E 02F9
4131 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@hungry.com&gt;
4132 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@debian.org&gt;
4133 sub   4096R/87BAFB0E 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
4134 sub   4096R/F91E6DE9 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
4135 sub   4096R/A0439BAB 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
4136 </pre>
4137
4138 <p>The key can be downloaded from the OpenPGP key servers, signed by
4139 my old key.</p>
4140
4141 <p>If you signed my old key
4142 (<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/DB4CCC4B2A30D729.html">DB4CCC4B2A30D729</a>),
4143 I'd very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and
4144 instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if
4145 you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.</p>
4146
4147       </div>
4148       <div class="tags">
4149
4150
4151         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>.
4152
4153
4154       </div>
4155     </div>
4156     <div class="padding"></div>
4157
4158     <div class="entry">
4159       <div class="title">
4160         <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>
4161       </div>
4162       <div class="date">
4163         24th September 2015
4164       </div>
4165       <div class="body">
4166         <p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
4167 But this do not last.  The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
4168 within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
4169 and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
4170 all the time.  Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
4171 about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
4172 more hard facts when the battery started to fail.</p>
4173
4174 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
4175
4176 <p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
4177 battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
4178 by someone else.  I found
4179 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
4180 which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
4181 broken.  I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
4182 write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
4183 from him.  Via
4184 <a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
4185 blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
4186 discovered
4187 <a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
4188 available in Debian.</p>
4189
4190 <p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
4191 battery stats ever since. Now my
4192 /var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around 115,000
4193 measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
4194 when it is unable to charge above 7% of original capacity.  My
4195 collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:</p>
4196
4197 <pre>
4198 #!/bin/sh
4199 # Inspired by
4200 # http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
4201 # See also
4202 # http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2013/01/02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
4203 logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
4204
4205 files="manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
4206     energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status"
4207
4208 if [ ! -e "$logfile" ] ; then
4209     (
4210         printf "timestamp,"
4211         for f in $files; do
4212             printf "%s," $f
4213         done
4214         echo
4215     ) > "$logfile"
4216 fi
4217
4218 log_battery() {
4219     # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
4220     # when several log processes run in parallel.
4221     msg=$(printf "%s," $(date +%s); \
4222         for f in $files; do \
4223             printf "%s," $(cat $f); \
4224         done)
4225     echo "$msg"
4226 }
4227
4228 cd /sys/class/power_supply
4229
4230 for bat in BAT*; do
4231     (cd $bat && log_battery >> "$logfile")
4232 done
4233 </pre>
4234
4235 <p>The script is called when the power management system detect a
4236 change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
4237 and out of hibernation and suspend.  In addition, it collect a value
4238 every 10 minutes.  This make it possible for me know when the battery
4239 is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
4240 The code for the Debian package
4241 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
4242 available on github</a>.</p>
4243
4244 <p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
4245
4246 <pre>
4247 timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
4248 1376591133,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,62800000,62160000,39050000,0,Discharging,
4249 [...]
4250 1443090528,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
4251 1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
4252 </pre>
4253
4254 <p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
4255 over time.  This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
4256 battery.</p>
4257
4258 <p>But why is this happening?  Why are my laptop batteries always
4259 dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
4260 satellites keep working year after year.  If we are to believe
4261 <a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
4262 University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
4263 chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
4264 all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
4265 I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
4266 <a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
4267 the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
4268 100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
4269 like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
4270 story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
4271 Linux too.</p>
4272
4273 <p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
4274 stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
4275 preparation for a longer trip?  I found
4276 <a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
4277 recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
4278 80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
4279 load).</p>
4280
4281 <p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
4282 at the start.  I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
4283 times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
4284 back to design capacity.  And I wonder if the discharge and charge
4285 speed change over time, or if this stay the same.  I did not yet try
4286 to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
4287 level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
4288 those.</p>
4289
4290 <p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
4291 acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
4292 packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
4293 initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
4294 and stop.  I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
4295 and need to be replaced.  The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
4296 specific.</p>
4297
4298       </div>
4299       <div class="tags">
4300
4301
4302         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>.
4303
4304
4305       </div>
4306     </div>
4307     <div class="padding"></div>
4308
4309     <div class="entry">
4310       <div class="title">
4311         <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>
4312       </div>
4313       <div class="date">
4314          5th July 2015
4315       </div>
4316       <div class="body">
4317         <p>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
4318 need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback.  I wish to
4319 thank every one of these.  Several pointed me to the possibility of
4320 fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
4321 do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
4322 machine.  But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
4323 with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
4324 for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement.  If I did
4325 not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
4326 using <a href="http://www.francecrans.com/">FrancEcrans</a>, but it
4327 might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.</p>
4328
4329 <p>One tip I got was to use the
4330 <a href="https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb">Skinflint</a> web service to
4331 compare laptop models.  It seem to have more models available than
4332 prisjakt.no.  Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
4333 keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook 840 keyboard is not
4334 very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
4335 keyboards I tested.  Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
4336
4337 <p>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
4338 newest Thinkpad X model.  The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
4339 (which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
4340 Debian Sid/Unstable according to
4341 <a href="http://www.corsac.net/X250/">Corsac.net</a>.  The reports I
4342 got on the keyboard quality are not consistent.  Some say the keyboard
4343 is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
4344 Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
4345 keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
4346 keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
4347 replace it.  I'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
4348 activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230.  I'm
4349 also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
4350 noisy.  In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
4351 Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.</p>
4352
4353 <p>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
4354 <a href="http://pro-star.com">Pro-Star</a>, another was
4355 <a href="http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/">Libreboot</a>.
4356 The latter look very attractive to me.</p>
4357
4358 <p>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback.  It help a lot
4359 as I keep looking for a replacement.</p>
4360
4361 <p>Update 2015-07-06: I was recommended to check out the
4362 <a href="">lapstore.de</a> web shop for used laptops.  They got several
4363 different
4364 <a href="http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/">old
4365 thinkpad X models</a>, and provide one year warranty.</p>
4366
4367       </div>
4368       <div class="tags">
4369
4370
4371         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>.
4372
4373
4374       </div>
4375     </div>
4376     <div class="padding"></div>
4377
4378     <div class="entry">
4379       <div class="title">
4380         <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>
4381       </div>
4382       <div class="date">
4383          3rd July 2015
4384       </div>
4385       <div class="body">
4386         <p>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
4387 replacement soon.  The left 5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
4388 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
4389 cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
4390 flickering.</p>
4391
4392 <p>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
4393 still as
4394 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">I
4395 described them in 2013</a>.  The last time I bought a laptop, I had
4396 good help from
4397 <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=353">prisjakt.no</a>
4398 where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
4399 wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually.  Three button mouse
4400 and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
4401 laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook 820 G1 and
4402 G2) lack three mouse buttons).  It is also unclear to me how good the
4403 keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are.  I hope Lenovo have not messed up
4404 the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
4405 deteriorated since X41.</p>
4406
4407 <p>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
4408 seem sensible to me?  Are there better services around to search the
4409 set of available laptops for features?  Please send me an email if you
4410 have suggestions.</p>
4411
4412 <p>Update 2015-07-23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
4413 <a href="http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom">list
4414 of endorsed hardware</a>, which is useful background information.</p>
4415
4416       </div>
4417       <div class="tags">
4418
4419
4420         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>.
4421
4422
4423       </div>
4424     </div>
4425     <div class="padding"></div>
4426
4427     <div class="entry">
4428       <div class="title">
4429         <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>
4430       </div>
4431       <div class="date">
4432         22nd November 2014
4433       </div>
4434       <div class="body">
4435         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
4436 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
4437 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
4438 courtesy of
4439 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
4440 Schubert</a> and
4441 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
4442 McVittie</a>.
4443
4444 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
4445 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
4446 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
4447 you upgrade:</p>
4448
4449 <p><blockquote><pre>
4450 Package: systemd-sysv
4451 Pin: release o=Debian
4452 Pin-Priority: -1
4453 </pre></blockquote><p>
4454
4455 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
4456 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
4457 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
4458 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
4459 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
4460
4461 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
4462 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
4463 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
4464 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
4465 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
4466 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
4467
4468 <p><blockquote><pre>
4469 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
4470 </pre></blockquote><p>
4471
4472 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
4473
4474 <p><blockquote><pre>
4475 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
4476 </pre></blockquote><p>
4477
4478 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
4479 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
4480
4481 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
4482 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
4483 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
4484 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
4485 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
4486 Jessie is released.</p>
4487
4488 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
4489 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
4490 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
4491 line.</p>
4492
4493       </div>
4494       <div class="tags">
4495
4496
4497         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>.
4498
4499
4500       </div>
4501     </div>
4502     <div class="padding"></div>
4503
4504     <div class="entry">
4505       <div class="title">
4506         <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>
4507       </div>
4508       <div class="date">
4509         10th November 2014
4510       </div>
4511       <div class="body">
4512         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
4513 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
4514 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
4515
4516 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
4517 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
4518 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
4519 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
4520 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
4521 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
4522 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
4523 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
4524 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
4525 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
4526 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
4527 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
4528 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
4529 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
4530 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
4531
4532 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
4533 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
4534 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
4535 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
4536 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
4537 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
4538 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
4539 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
4540 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
4541 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
4542 were fairly easy, and
4543 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
4544 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
4545 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
4546 useful approach.</p>
4547
4548 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
4549 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
4550 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
4551 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
4552 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
4553 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
4554 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
4555 this:</p>
4556
4557 <p><blockquote><pre>
4558 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
4559   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
4560 </pre></blockquote></p>
4561
4562 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
4563 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
4564
4565 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
4566 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
4567 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
4568 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
4569 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
4570 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
4571 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
4572 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
4573 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
4574 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
4575 system.</p>
4576
4577 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
4578 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
4579 SMTorP. :)</p>
4580
4581       </div>
4582       <div class="tags">
4583
4584
4585         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>.
4586
4587
4588       </div>
4589     </div>
4590     <div class="padding"></div>
4591
4592     <div class="entry">
4593       <div class="title">
4594         <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>
4595       </div>
4596       <div class="date">
4597         22nd October 2014
4598       </div>
4599       <div class="body">
4600         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
4601 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
4602 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
4603 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
4604 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
4605 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
4606 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
4607 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
4608 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
4609 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
4610 lists I recently took over:</p>
4611
4612 <p><blockquote><pre>
4613 % time listadmin xiph
4614 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
4615 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
4616
4617 real    0m1.709s
4618 user    0m0.232s
4619 sys     0m0.012s
4620 %
4621 </pre></blockquote></p>
4622
4623 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
4624 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
4625 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
4626 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
4627 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
4628 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
4629 program.</p>
4630
4631 <p>If you install
4632 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
4633 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
4634 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
4635
4636 <p><blockquote><pre>
4637 username username@example.org
4638 spamlevel 23
4639 default discard
4640 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
4641
4642 password secret
4643 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
4644 mailman-list@lists.example.com
4645
4646 password hidden
4647 other-list@otherserver.example.org
4648 </pre></blockquote></p>
4649
4650 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
4651 learn the details.</p>
4652
4653 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
4654 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
4655 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
4656 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
4657
4658 <p><blockquote><pre>
4659 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
4660 </pre></blockquote></p>
4661
4662 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
4663 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
4664 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
4665 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
4666 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
4667 email.</p>
4668
4669 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
4670 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
4671 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
4672 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
4673 software.</p>
4674
4675 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4676 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4677 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4678
4679 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
4680 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
4681 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
4682 sure why.</p>
4683
4684       </div>
4685       <div class="tags">
4686
4687
4688         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>.
4689
4690
4691       </div>
4692     </div>
4693     <div class="padding"></div>
4694
4695     <div class="entry">
4696       <div class="title">
4697         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
4698       </div>
4699       <div class="date">
4700         17th October 2014
4701       </div>
4702       <div class="body">
4703         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
4704 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
4705 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
4706 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
4707 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
4708 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
4709 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
4710
4711 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
4712 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
4713 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
4714 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
4715 of this story.)</p>
4716
4717 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
4718 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
4719 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
4720 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
4721 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
4722 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
4723 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
4724 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
4725 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
4726 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
4727
4728 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
4729 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
4730 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
4731 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
4732
4733 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
4734 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
4735
4736 <p><blockquote><pre>
4737 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
4738 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
4739 </pre></blockquote></p>
4740
4741 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
4742 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
4743 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
4744 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
4745 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
4746 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
4747 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
4748 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
4749
4750 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
4751 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
4752
4753 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
4754 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
4755 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
4756 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
4757 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
4758
4759 <p><blockquote><pre>
4760 Task: isenkram-packages
4761 Section: hardware
4762 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
4763  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
4764  proposed.
4765 Test-new-install: show show
4766 Relevance: 8
4767 Packages: for-current-hardware
4768
4769 Task: isenkram-firmware
4770 Section: hardware
4771 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
4772  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
4773  packages are proposed.
4774 Test-new-install: mark show
4775 Relevance: 8
4776 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
4777 </pre></blockquote></p>
4778
4779 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
4780 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
4781 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
4782 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
4783 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
4784
4785 <p><blockquote><pre>
4786 #!/bin/sh
4787 #
4788 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
4789 export PATH
4790 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
4791 </pre></blockquote></p>
4792
4793 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
4794 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
4795
4796 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
4797 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
4798 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
4799 install.</p>
4800
4801 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
4802 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
4803 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
4804
4805       </div>
4806       <div class="tags">
4807
4808
4809         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>.
4810
4811
4812       </div>
4813     </div>
4814     <div class="padding"></div>
4815
4816     <div class="entry">
4817       <div class="title">
4818         <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>
4819       </div>
4820       <div class="date">
4821          4th October 2014
4822       </div>
4823       <div class="body">
4824         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
4825 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
4826 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
4827 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
4828
4829 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
4830
4831 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
4832 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
4833 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
4834
4835       </div>
4836       <div class="tags">
4837
4838
4839         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>.
4840
4841
4842       </div>
4843     </div>
4844     <div class="padding"></div>
4845
4846     <div class="entry">
4847       <div class="title">
4848         <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>
4849       </div>
4850       <div class="date">
4851          4th October 2014
4852       </div>
4853       <div class="body">
4854         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
4855 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
4856 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
4857 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
4858 Dibb.</p>
4859
4860 <p>I just wrapped up
4861 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
4862 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
4863 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
4864 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
4865 0.17.</p>
4866
4867 <ul>
4868
4869  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
4870  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
4871    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
4872  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
4873  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
4874  <li>Fix include orders</li>
4875  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
4876  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
4877  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
4878    the palette size is the same.</li>
4879  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
4880  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
4881  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
4882  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
4883    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
4884
4885 </ul>
4886
4887 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
4888 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
4889 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
4890
4891       </div>
4892       <div class="tags">
4893
4894
4895         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>.
4896
4897
4898       </div>
4899     </div>
4900     <div class="padding"></div>
4901
4902     <div class="entry">
4903       <div class="title">
4904         <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>
4905       </div>
4906       <div class="date">
4907         26th September 2014
4908       </div>
4909       <div class="body">
4910         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
4911 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
4912 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
4913 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
4914 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
4915 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
4916 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
4917 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
4918 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
4919 future.  The
4920 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
4921 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
4922 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
4923 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
4924 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
4925
4926 <p>First, download the test ISO via
4927 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
4928 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
4929 or rsync (use
4930 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
4931 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
4932 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
4933 install with some tweaking.</p>
4934
4935 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
4936 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
4937
4938 <p><blockquote><pre>
4939 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
4940 </pre></blockquote></p>
4941
4942 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
4943 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
4944 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
4945 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
4946
4947 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
4948 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
4949 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
4950 your need.</p>
4951
4952 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
4953 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
4954 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
4955 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
4956 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
4957 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
4958 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
4959 days.</p>
4960
4961 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
4962 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
4963 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
4964 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
4965 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
4966 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
4967 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
4968 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
4969 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
4970
4971 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
4972 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
4973 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
4974
4975       </div>
4976       <div class="tags">
4977
4978
4979         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>.
4980
4981
4982       </div>
4983     </div>
4984     <div class="padding"></div>
4985
4986     <div class="entry">
4987       <div class="title">
4988         <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>
4989       </div>
4990       <div class="date">
4991         25th September 2014
4992       </div>
4993       <div class="body">
4994         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
4995 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
4996 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
4997 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
4998 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
4999 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
5000 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
5001 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
5002 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
5003 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
5004 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
5005 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
5006 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
5007
5008 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
5009 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
5010 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
5011 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
5012 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
5013 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
5014 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
5015 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
5016 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
5017 list</a>. :)</p>
5018
5019       </div>
5020       <div class="tags">
5021
5022
5023         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>.
5024
5025
5026       </div>
5027     </div>
5028     <div class="padding"></div>
5029
5030     <div class="entry">
5031       <div class="title">
5032         <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>
5033       </div>
5034       <div class="date">
5035         16th September 2014
5036       </div>
5037       <div class="body">
5038         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
5039 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
5040 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
5041 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
5042 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
5043 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
5044 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
5045 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
5046 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
5047 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
5048 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
5049 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
5050 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
5051 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
5052
5053 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
5054 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
5055 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
5056 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
5057 depend on the small and clever package
5058 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
5059 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
5060 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
5061 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
5062 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
5063 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
5064 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
5065 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
5066 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
5067 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
5068 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
5069
5070 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
5071 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
5072 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
5073 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
5074 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
5075 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
5076 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
5077 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
5078 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
5079 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
5080 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
5081 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
5082 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
5083 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
5084 dialog.</p>
5085
5086 <p><table>
5087
5088 <tr>
5089 <th>Machine/setup</th>
5090 <th>Original tasksel</th>
5091 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
5092 <th>Reduction</th>
5093 </tr>
5094
5095 <tr>
5096 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
5097 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
5098 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
5099 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
5100 </tr>
5101
5102 <tr>
5103 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
5104 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
5105 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
5106 <td>23 min 40%</td>
5107 </tr>
5108
5109 <tr>
5110 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
5111 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
5112 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
5113 <td>11 min 50%</td>
5114 </tr>
5115
5116 <tr>
5117 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
5118 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
5119 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
5120 <td>2 min 33%</td>
5121 </tr>
5122
5123 <tr>
5124 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
5125 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
5126 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
5127 <td>4 min 21%</td>
5128 </tr>
5129
5130 </table></p>
5131
5132 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
5133 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
5134 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
5135 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
5136 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
5137 installed.</p>
5138
5139 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
5140 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
5141 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
5142 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
5143 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
5144 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
5145 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
5146 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
5147 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
5148 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
5149 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
5150 for the entire installation.</p>
5151
5152 <p>I've implemented this in the
5153 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
5154 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
5155 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
5156 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
5157 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
5158
5159 <p><blockquote><pre>
5160 #!/bin/sh
5161 set -e
5162 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
5163 info() {
5164     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
5165 }
5166 error() {
5167     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
5168 }
5169 override_install() {
5170     apt-install eatmydata || true
5171     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
5172         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
5173             file=/usr/bin/$bin
5174             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
5175             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
5176                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
5177                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
5178                     > /target$file.edu
5179                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
5180                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
5181                     --rename --quiet --add $file
5182                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
5183             else
5184                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
5185             fi
5186         done
5187     else
5188         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
5189     fi
5190 }
5191
5192 override_install
5193 </pre></blockquote></p>
5194
5195 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
5196 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
5197
5198 <p><blockquote><pre>
5199 #! /bin/sh -e
5200 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
5201 error() {
5202     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
5203 }
5204 remove_install_override() {
5205     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
5206         file=/usr/bin/$bin
5207         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
5208             rm /target$file
5209             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
5210                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
5211             rm /target$file.edu
5212         else
5213             error "Missing divert for $file."
5214         fi
5215     done
5216     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
5217 }
5218
5219 remove_install_override
5220 </pre></blockquote></p>
5221
5222 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
5223 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
5224 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
5225
5226 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
5227 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
5228 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
5229 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
5230 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
5231 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
5232 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
5233 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
5234 everyone.</p>
5235
5236 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
5237 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
5238 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
5239 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
5240
5241 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
5242 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
5243 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
5244 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
5245 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
5246
5247 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
5248 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
5249 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
5250 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
5251 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
5252
5253       </div>
5254       <div class="tags">
5255
5256
5257         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>.
5258
5259
5260       </div>
5261     </div>
5262     <div class="padding"></div>
5263
5264     <div class="entry">
5265       <div class="title">
5266         <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>
5267       </div>
5268       <div class="date">
5269         10th September 2014
5270       </div>
5271       <div class="body">
5272         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
5273 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
5274 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
5275 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
5276 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
5277 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
5278 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
5279 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
5280 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
5281 those problems are gone now.</p>
5282
5283 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
5284 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
5285 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
5286 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
5287 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
5288
5289 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
5290 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
5291 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
5292
5293 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
5294 line:</p>
5295
5296 <p><blockquote><pre>
5297 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
5298 </pre></blockquote></p>
5299
5300 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
5301 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
5302 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
5303 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
5304
5305 <p><blockquote><pre>
5306 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
5307 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
5308 %
5309 </pre></blockquote></p>
5310
5311 <p>Now if only
5312 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
5313 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
5314 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
5315 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
5316 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
5317 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
5318 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
5319 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
5320 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
5321
5322       </div>
5323       <div class="tags">
5324
5325
5326         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>.
5327
5328
5329       </div>
5330     </div>
5331     <div class="padding"></div>
5332
5333     <div class="entry">
5334       <div class="title">
5335         <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>
5336       </div>
5337       <div class="date">
5338         17th June 2014
5339       </div>
5340       <div class="body">
5341         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
5342 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
5343 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
5344 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
5345 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
5346
5347 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
5348 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
5349 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
5350 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
5351 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
5352 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
5353 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
5354 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
5355 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
5356 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
5357 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
5358 goals.</p>
5359
5360 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
5361 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
5362 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
5363 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
5364 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
5365 chapters together into one large web page (aka
5366 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
5367 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
5368 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
5369 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
5370 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
5371 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
5372 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
5373 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
5374 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
5375 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
5376 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
5377 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
5378 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
5379 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
5380 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
5381 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
5382 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
5383 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
5384
5385 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
5386 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
5387 track the English original.  For this we use the
5388 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
5389 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
5390 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
5391 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
5392 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
5393 files), which the translations update with the native language
5394 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
5395 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
5396 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
5397 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
5398 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
5399 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
5400 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
5401 of the documentation.</p>
5402
5403 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
5404 recommend using
5405 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
5406 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
5407 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
5408 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
5409 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
5410 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
5411 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
5412 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
5413
5414 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
5415 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
5416 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
5417 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
5418 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
5419 translated images by storing translated versions in
5420 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
5421 package maintainers know more.</p>
5422
5423 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
5424 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
5425 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
5426 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
5427 PDF version</a> or the
5428 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
5429 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
5430 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
5431
5432 <p>To learn more, check out
5433 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
5434 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
5435 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
5436 manual on the wiki</a> and
5437 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
5438 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
5439
5440       </div>
5441       <div class="tags">
5442
5443
5444         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>.
5445
5446
5447       </div>
5448     </div>
5449     <div class="padding"></div>
5450
5451     <div class="entry">
5452       <div class="title">
5453         <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>
5454       </div>
5455       <div class="date">
5456         23rd April 2014
5457       </div>
5458       <div class="body">
5459         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
5460 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
5461 So I implemented one, using
5462 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
5463 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
5464 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
5465 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
5466 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
5467 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
5468
5469 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
5470 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
5471 packages to install.  The first part is in
5472 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
5473 this:</p>
5474
5475 <p><blockquote><pre>
5476 Task: isenkram
5477 Section: hardware
5478 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
5479  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
5480  proposed.
5481 Test-new-install: mark show
5482 Relevance: 8
5483 Packages: for-current-hardware
5484 </pre></blockquote></p>
5485
5486 <p>The second part is in
5487 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
5488 this:</p>
5489
5490 <p><blockquote><pre>
5491 #!/bin/sh
5492 #
5493 (
5494     isenkram-lookup
5495     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
5496 ) | sort -u
5497 </pre></blockquote></p>
5498
5499 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
5500 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
5501 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
5502 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
5503 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
5504 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
5505
5506 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
5507 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
5508 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
5509 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
5510 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
5511 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
5512 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
5513 the python-apt code (bug
5514 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
5515 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
5516 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
5517 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
5518 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
5519 unstable today.</p>
5520
5521 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
5522 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
5523 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
5524 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
5525 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
5526 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
5527 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
5528 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
5529 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
5530
5531 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
5532 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
5533 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
5534 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
5535 package.  See also
5536 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
5537 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
5538 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
5539 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
5540
5541       </div>
5542       <div class="tags">
5543
5544
5545         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>.
5546
5547
5548       </div>
5549     </div>
5550     <div class="padding"></div>
5551
5552     <div class="entry">
5553       <div class="title">
5554         <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>
5555       </div>
5556       <div class="date">
5557         15th April 2014
5558       </div>
5559       <div class="body">
5560         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
5561 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
5562 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
5563 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
5564 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
5565 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
5566
5567 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
5568 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
5569 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
5570 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
5571 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
5572 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
5573 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
5574
5575 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
5576 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
5577 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
5578 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
5579 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
5580 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
5581 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
5582 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
5583 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
5584 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
5585 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
5586 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
5587
5588 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
5589 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
5590 become root:</p>
5591
5592 <p><pre>
5593 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
5594   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
5595   u-boot-tools
5596 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
5597   freedom-maker
5598 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
5599 </pre></p>
5600
5601 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
5602 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
5603 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
5604 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
5605 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
5606 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
5607 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
5608 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
5609
5610 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
5611 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
5612 the preseed values:</p>
5613
5614 <p><pre>
5615 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
5616 </pre></p>
5617
5618 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
5619 it still work.</p>
5620
5621 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
5622 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
5623 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
5624 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
5625 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
5626 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
5627 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
5628
5629 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
5630 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
5631 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
5632 irc.debian.org)</a> and
5633 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
5634 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
5635
5636       </div>
5637       <div class="tags">
5638
5639
5640         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>.
5641
5642
5643       </div>
5644     </div>
5645     <div class="padding"></div>
5646
5647     <div class="entry">
5648       <div class="title">
5649         <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>
5650       </div>
5651       <div class="date">
5652          9th April 2014
5653       </div>
5654       <div class="body">
5655         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
5656 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
5657 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
5658 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
5659 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
5660 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
5661 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
5662 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
5663 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
5664 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
5665 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
5666 have looked at a system called
5667 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
5668 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
5669
5670 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
5671 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
5672 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
5673 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
5674 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
5675 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
5676 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
5677 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
5678 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
5679 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
5680 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
5681 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
5682 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
5683
5684 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
5685 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
5686 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
5687 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
5688 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
5689 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
5690 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
5691 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
5692 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
5693 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
5694 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
5695 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
5696 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
5697 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
5698 account.</p>
5699
5700 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
5701 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
5702 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
5703 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
5704 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
5705 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
5706 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
5707
5708 <p><blockquote><pre>
5709 [s3c]
5710 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
5711 backend-login: API-login
5712 backend-password: API-password
5713 fs-passphrase: local-password
5714 </pre></blockquote></p>
5715
5716 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
5717 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
5718 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
5719 details and password to create it:</p>
5720
5721 <p><blockquote><pre>
5722 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
5723 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
5724   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
5725 Enter backend login:
5726 Enter backend password:
5727 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
5728 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
5729 Enter encryption password:
5730 Confirm encryption password:
5731 Generating random encryption key...
5732 Creating metadata tables...
5733 Dumping metadata...
5734 ..objects..
5735 ..blocks..
5736 ..inodes..
5737 ..inode_blocks..
5738 ..symlink_targets..
5739 ..names..
5740 ..contents..
5741 ..ext_attributes..
5742 Compressing and uploading metadata...
5743 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
5744 # </pre></blockquote></p>
5745
5746 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
5747
5748 <p><blockquote><pre>
5749 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
5750   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
5751 Using 4 upload threads.
5752 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
5753 Reading metadata...
5754 ..objects..
5755 ..blocks..
5756 ..inodes..
5757 ..inode_blocks..
5758 ..symlink_targets..
5759 ..names..
5760 ..contents..
5761 ..ext_attributes..
5762 Mounting filesystem...
5763 # df -h /s3ql
5764 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
5765 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
5766 #
5767 </pre></blockquote></p>
5768
5769 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
5770 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
5771 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
5772 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
5773 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
5774 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
5775
5776 <p><blockquote><pre>
5777 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
5778 #
5779 </pre></blockquote></p>
5780
5781 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
5782 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
5783 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
5784 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
5785 file system:</p>
5786
5787 <p><blockquote><pre>
5788 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
5789 Using cached metadata.
5790 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
5791 Checking DB integrity...
5792 Creating temporary extra indices...
5793 Checking lost+found...
5794 Checking cached objects...
5795 Checking names (refcounts)...
5796 Checking contents (names)...
5797 Checking contents (inodes)...
5798 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
5799 Checking objects (reference counts)...
5800 Checking objects (backend)...
5801 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
5802 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
5803 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
5804 Checking objects (sizes)...
5805 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
5806 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
5807 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
5808 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
5809 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
5810 Checking inodes (sizes)...
5811 Checking extended attributes (names)...
5812 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
5813 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
5814 Checking directory reachability...
5815 Checking unix conventions...
5816 Checking referential integrity...
5817 Dropping temporary indices...
5818 Backing up old metadata...
5819 Dumping metadata...
5820 ..objects..
5821 ..blocks..
5822 ..inodes..
5823 ..inode_blocks..
5824 ..symlink_targets..
5825 ..names..
5826 ..contents..
5827 ..ext_attributes..
5828 Compressing and uploading metadata...
5829 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
5830 #
5831 </pre></blockquote></p>
5832
5833 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
5834 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
5835 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
5836 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
5837 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
5838 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
5839 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
5840 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
5841 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
5842 working set.</p>
5843
5844 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
5845 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
5846 busy:</p>
5847
5848 <p><blockquote><pre>
5849 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
5850   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
5851 Using 8 upload threads.
5852 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
5853 #
5854 </pre></blockquote></p>
5855
5856 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
5857 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
5858 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
5859 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
5860 s3qlctrl:
5861
5862 <p><blockquote><pre>
5863 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
5864 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
5865 #
5866 </pre></blockquote></p>
5867
5868 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
5869 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
5870 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
5871 a report:</p>
5872
5873 <p><blockquote><pre>
5874 # s3qlstat /s3ql
5875 Directory entries:    9141
5876 Inodes:               9143
5877 Data blocks:          8851
5878 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
5879 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
5880 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
5881 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
5882 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
5883 #
5884 </pre></blockquote></p>
5885
5886 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
5887 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
5888 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
5889 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
5890 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
5891 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
5892 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
5893 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
5894 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
5895 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
5896 best.</p>
5897
5898 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
5899 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
5900 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
5901 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
5902 poster is titled
5903 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
5904 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
5905 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
5906 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
5907 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
5908
5909 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
5910 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
5911 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
5912 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
5913 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
5914 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
5915 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
5916 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
5917
5918 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
5919 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
5920 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
5921 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
5922 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
5923 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
5924 only read from it.</p>
5925
5926 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5927 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5928 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5929
5930       </div>
5931       <div class="tags">
5932
5933
5934         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>.
5935
5936
5937       </div>
5938     </div>
5939     <div class="padding"></div>
5940
5941     <div class="entry">
5942       <div class="title">
5943         <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>
5944       </div>
5945       <div class="date">
5946         14th March 2014
5947       </div>
5948       <div class="body">
5949         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
5950 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
5951 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
5952 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
5953 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
5954 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
5955 release (0.2).</p>
5956
5957 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
5958 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
5959 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
5960 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
5961 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
5962 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
5963 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
5964 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
5965 and build using
5966 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
5967 with a user with sudo access to become root:
5968
5969 <pre>
5970 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
5971   freedom-maker
5972 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
5973   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
5974   u-boot-tools
5975 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
5976 </pre>
5977
5978 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
5979 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
5980 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
5981 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
5982 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
5983 kpartx call.</p>
5984
5985 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
5986 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
5987 the preseed values:</p>
5988
5989 <pre>
5990 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
5991 </pre>
5992
5993 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
5994 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
5995 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
5996 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
5997 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
5998 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
5999
6000 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
6001 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
6002 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
6003 irc.debian.org)</a> and
6004 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
6005 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
6006
6007       </div>
6008       <div class="tags">
6009
6010
6011         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>.
6012
6013
6014       </div>
6015     </div>
6016     <div class="padding"></div>
6017
6018     <div class="entry">
6019       <div class="title">
6020         <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>
6021       </div>
6022       <div class="date">
6023         22nd February 2014
6024       </div>
6025       <div class="body">
6026         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
6027 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
6028 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
6029 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
6030 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
6031 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
6032 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
6033 proper home since then.</p>
6034
6035 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
6036 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
6037 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
6038 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
6039 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
6040
6041 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
6042 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
6043 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
6044 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
6045 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
6046 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
6047 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
6048 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
6049 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
6050
6051       </div>
6052       <div class="tags">
6053
6054
6055         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>.
6056
6057
6058       </div>
6059     </div>
6060     <div class="padding"></div>
6061
6062     <div class="entry">
6063       <div class="title">
6064         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
6065       </div>
6066       <div class="date">
6067          3rd February 2014
6068       </div>
6069       <div class="body">
6070         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
6071 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
6072 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
6073 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
6074 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
6075 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
6076 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
6077 <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>,
6078 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
6079
6080 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
6081 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
6082 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
6083 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
6084 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
6085 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
6086
6087 <p><blockquote><pre>
6088 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
6089 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
6090 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
6091 dhclient /dev/eth0
6092 </pre></blockquote></p>
6093
6094 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
6095 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
6096 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
6097
6098 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
6099 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
6100 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
6101 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
6102 side.</p>
6103
6104 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
6105 stuff:</p>
6106
6107 <p><blockquote><pre>
6108 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
6109 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
6110 EOF
6111 apt-get update
6112 apt-get dist-upgrade
6113 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
6114     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
6115 update-alternatives --config runsystem
6116 </pre></blockquote></p>
6117
6118 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
6119 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
6120 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
6121 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
6122 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
6123 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
6124 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
6125 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
6126 ssh instead.
6127
6128 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
6129 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
6130 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
6131 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
6132 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
6133 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
6134
6135 <p><blockquote><pre>
6136 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
6137 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
6138 EOF
6139 </pre></blockquote></p>
6140
6141 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
6142 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
6143 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
6144 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
6145
6146 <p><blockquote><pre>
6147 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
6148 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
6149 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
6150 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
6151 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
6152 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
6153 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
6154 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
6155 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
6156 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
6157 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
6158 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
6159 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
6160 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
6161 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
6162 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
6163 #
6164 </pre></blockquote></p>
6165
6166 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
6167 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
6168 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
6169 command line stuff.<p>
6170
6171       </div>
6172       <div class="tags">
6173
6174
6175         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>.
6176
6177
6178       </div>
6179     </div>
6180     <div class="padding"></div>
6181
6182     <div class="entry">
6183       <div class="title">
6184         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
6185       </div>
6186       <div class="date">
6187         14th January 2014
6188       </div>
6189       <div class="body">
6190         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
6191 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
6192 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
6193 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
6194 the source.  The company behind it provide
6195 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
6196 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
6197 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
6198 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
6199 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
6200 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
6201 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
6202 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
6203 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
6204 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
6205 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
6206 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
6207 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
6208 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
6209 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
6210 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
6211 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
6212 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
6213 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
6214
6215 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
6216
6217 <ul>
6218
6219   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
6220   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
6221   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
6222
6223 </ul>
6224
6225 <p>You can
6226 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
6227 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
6228 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
6229 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
6230 include a test suite check.</p>
6231
6232       </div>
6233       <div class="tags">
6234
6235
6236         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>.
6237
6238
6239       </div>
6240     </div>
6241     <div class="padding"></div>
6242
6243     <div class="entry">
6244       <div class="title">
6245         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
6246       </div>
6247       <div class="date">
6248         24th November 2013
6249       </div>
6250       <div class="body">
6251         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
6252 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
6253 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
6254 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
6255 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
6256 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
6257 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
6258 is working on.  I checked the
6259 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
6260 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
6261 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
6262 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
6263 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
6264 These are the release notes:</p>
6265
6266 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
6267
6268 <ul>
6269
6270   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
6271    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
6272    up.</li>
6273
6274   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
6275
6276   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
6277    Matthias Klose.</li>
6278
6279   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
6280    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
6281
6282   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
6283    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
6284    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
6285
6286 </ul>
6287
6288 <p>You can
6289 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
6290 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
6291 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
6292 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
6293 include a testsuite check.</p>
6294
6295       </div>
6296       <div class="tags">
6297
6298
6299         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>.
6300
6301
6302       </div>
6303     </div>
6304     <div class="padding"></div>
6305
6306     <div class="entry">
6307       <div class="title">
6308         <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>
6309       </div>
6310       <div class="date">
6311          2nd November 2013
6312       </div>
6313       <div class="body">
6314         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
6315 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
6316 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
6317 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
6318 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
6319
6320 <p><pre>
6321 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
6322 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
6323 # Provides:          rsyslog
6324 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
6325 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
6326 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
6327 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
6328 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
6329 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
6330 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
6331 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
6332 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
6333 ### END INIT INFO
6334 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
6335 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
6336 </pre></p>
6337
6338 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
6339 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
6340 info/comments.</p>
6341
6342 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
6343 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
6344
6345 <p><pre>
6346 #!/bin/sh
6347
6348 # Define LSB log_* functions.
6349 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
6350 # and status_of_proc is working.
6351 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
6352
6353 #
6354 # Function that starts the daemon/service
6355
6356 #
6357 do_start()
6358 {
6359         # Return
6360         #   0 if daemon has been started
6361         #   1 if daemon was already running
6362         #   2 if daemon could not be started
6363         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
6364                 || return 1
6365         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
6366                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
6367                 || return 2
6368         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
6369         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
6370         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
6371 }
6372
6373 #
6374 # Function that stops the daemon/service
6375 #
6376 do_stop()
6377 {
6378         # Return
6379         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
6380         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
6381         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
6382         #   other if a failure occurred
6383         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
6384         RETVAL="$?"
6385         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
6386         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
6387         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
6388         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
6389         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
6390         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
6391         # sleep for some time.
6392         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
6393         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
6394         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
6395         rm -f $PIDFILE
6396         return "$RETVAL"
6397 }
6398
6399 #
6400 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
6401 #
6402 do_reload() {
6403         #
6404         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
6405         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
6406         # then implement that here.
6407         #
6408         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
6409         return 0
6410 }
6411
6412 SCRIPTNAME=$1
6413 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
6414 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
6415 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
6416     script="$1"
6417     shift
6418     . $script
6419 else
6420     exit 0
6421 fi
6422
6423 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
6424 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
6425
6426 # Exit if the package is not installed
6427 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
6428
6429 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
6430 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
6431
6432 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
6433 . /lib/init/vars.sh
6434
6435 case "$1" in
6436   start)
6437         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
6438         do_start
6439         case "$?" in
6440                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
6441                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
6442         esac
6443         ;;
6444   stop)
6445         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
6446         do_stop
6447         case "$?" in
6448                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
6449                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
6450         esac
6451         ;;
6452   status)
6453         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
6454         ;;
6455   #reload|force-reload)
6456         #
6457         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
6458         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
6459         #
6460         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
6461         #do_reload
6462         #log_end_msg $?
6463         #;;
6464   restart|force-reload)
6465         #
6466         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
6467         # 'force-reload' alias
6468         #
6469         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
6470         do_stop
6471         case "$?" in
6472           0|1)
6473                 do_start
6474                 case "$?" in
6475                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
6476                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
6477                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
6478                 esac
6479                 ;;
6480           *)
6481                 # Failed to stop
6482                 log_end_msg 1
6483                 ;;
6484         esac
6485         ;;
6486   *)
6487         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
6488         exit 3
6489         ;;
6490 esac
6491
6492 :
6493 </pre></p>
6494
6495 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
6496 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
6497 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
6498 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
6499
6500 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
6501 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
6502 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
6503 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
6504 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
6505
6506       </div>
6507       <div class="tags">
6508
6509
6510         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>.
6511
6512
6513       </div>
6514     </div>
6515     <div class="padding"></div>
6516
6517     <div class="entry">
6518       <div class="title">
6519         <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>
6520       </div>
6521       <div class="date">
6522          1st November 2013
6523       </div>
6524       <div class="body">
6525         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
6526 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
6527 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
6528 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
6529 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
6530 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
6531 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
6532 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
6533 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
6534 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
6535 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
6536 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
6537
6538 <p>The source is now available from
6539 <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>
6540
6541       </div>
6542       <div class="tags">
6543
6544
6545         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>.
6546
6547
6548       </div>
6549     </div>
6550     <div class="padding"></div>
6551
6552     <div class="entry">
6553       <div class="title">
6554         <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>
6555       </div>
6556       <div class="date">
6557         27th October 2013
6558       </div>
6559       <div class="body">
6560         <p>The
6561 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
6562 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
6563 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
6564 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
6565 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
6566 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
6567 of a plan to simplify the build system for
6568 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
6569 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
6570 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
6571 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
6572 Raspberry Pi.</p>
6573
6574 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
6575 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
6576 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
6577 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
6578 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
6579 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
6580 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
6581 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
6582 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
6583 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
6584 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
6585 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
6586 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
6587 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
6588 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
6589 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
6590 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
6591 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
6592 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
6593 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
6594 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
6595 available from
6596 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
6597 upstream project page</a>.</p>
6598
6599 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
6600 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
6601 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
6602 list:</p>
6603
6604 <p><pre>
6605 #!/bin/sh
6606 set -e # Exit on first error
6607 rootdir="$1"
6608 cd "$rootdir"
6609 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
6610 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
6611 EOF
6612 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
6613 # install a kernel somewhere too.
6614 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
6615     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
6616 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
6617 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
6618 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
6619 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
6620 </pre></p>
6621
6622 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
6623 to build the image:</p>
6624
6625 <pre>
6626 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
6627     --variant minbase \
6628     --arch armel \
6629     --distribution jessie \
6630     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
6631     --image test.img \
6632     --size 600M \
6633     --bootsize 64M \
6634     --boottype vfat \
6635     --log-level debug \
6636     --verbose \
6637     --no-kernel \
6638     --no-extlinux \
6639     --root-password raspberry \
6640     --hostname raspberrypi \
6641     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
6642     --customize `pwd`/customize \
6643     --package netbase \
6644     --package git-core \
6645     --package binutils \
6646     --package ca-certificates \
6647     --package wget \
6648     --package kmod
6649 </pre></p>
6650
6651 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
6652 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
6653 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
6654 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
6655 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
6656 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
6657 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
6658
6659 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
6660 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
6661 build dependency list.</p>
6662
6663 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
6664 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
6665 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
6666 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
6667
6668       </div>
6669       <div class="tags">
6670
6671
6672         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>.
6673
6674
6675       </div>
6676     </div>
6677     <div class="padding"></div>
6678
6679     <div class="entry">
6680       <div class="title">
6681         <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>
6682       </div>
6683       <div class="date">
6684         15th October 2013
6685       </div>
6686       <div class="body">
6687         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
6688 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
6689 these. :)</p>
6690
6691 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
6692 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
6693 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
6694 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
6695 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
6696 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
6697 hope you will to. :)</p>
6698
6699 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
6700 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
6701 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
6702 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
6703 donated.  Are you next?</p>
6704
6705 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
6706 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
6707 statement under the heading
6708 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
6709 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
6710 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
6711 too.</p>
6712
6713       </div>
6714       <div class="tags">
6715
6716
6717         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>.
6718
6719
6720       </div>
6721     </div>
6722     <div class="padding"></div>
6723
6724     <div class="entry">
6725       <div class="title">
6726         <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>
6727       </div>
6728       <div class="date">
6729         27th September 2013
6730       </div>
6731       <div class="body">
6732         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
6733 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
6734 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
6735 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
6736
6737 <ul>
6738
6739 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
6740 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
6741
6742 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
6743 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
6744
6745 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
6746 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
6747 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
6748 (Youtube)</li>
6749
6750 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
6751 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
6752
6753 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
6754 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
6755
6756 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
6757 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
6758 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
6759
6760 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
6761 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
6762 (Youtube)</li>
6763
6764 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
6765 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
6766
6767 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
6768 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
6769
6770 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
6771 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
6772 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
6773
6774 </ul>
6775
6776 <p>A larger list is available from
6777 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
6778 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
6779
6780 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
6781 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
6782 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
6783 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
6784 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
6785 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
6786 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
6787 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
6788 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
6789 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
6790 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
6791
6792       </div>
6793       <div class="tags">
6794
6795
6796         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>.
6797
6798
6799       </div>
6800     </div>
6801     <div class="padding"></div>
6802
6803     <div class="entry">
6804       <div class="title">
6805         <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>
6806       </div>
6807       <div class="date">
6808         10th September 2013
6809       </div>
6810       <div class="body">
6811         <p>I was introduced to the
6812 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
6813 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
6814 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
6815 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
6816 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
6817 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
6818 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
6819 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
6820
6821 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
6822 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
6823 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
6824 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
6825 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
6826
6827 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
6828 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
6829 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
6830 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
6831 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
6832 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
6833 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
6834 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
6835 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
6836 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
6837 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
6838 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
6839 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
6840 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
6841 missing in Debian).</p>
6842
6843 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
6844 scripts
6845 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
6846 and a administrative web interface
6847 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
6848 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
6849 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
6850 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
6851 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
6852 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
6853 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
6854 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
6855 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
6856 this is really working yet, see
6857 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
6858 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
6859 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
6860 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
6861 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
6862 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
6863 with lots of half baked features.</p>
6864
6865 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
6866 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
6867 at.</p>
6868
6869 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
6870
6871 <ol>
6872
6873 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
6874 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
6875 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
6876 to the Debian installer:<p>
6877 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
6878
6879 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
6880 install on.</li>
6881
6882 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
6883 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
6884
6885 </ol>
6886
6887 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
6888
6889 <ol>
6890
6891 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
6892 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
6893 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
6894 <pre>
6895 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
6896 </pre></li>
6897 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
6898 <pre>
6899 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
6900    apt-key add -
6901 apt-get update
6902 apt-get install freedombox-setup
6903 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
6904 </pre></li>
6905 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
6906
6907 </ol>
6908
6909 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
6910 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
6911 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
6912 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
6913 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
6914
6915 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
6916 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
6917 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
6918 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
6919
6920 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
6921 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
6922 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
6923 irc.debian.org and the
6924 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
6925 mailing list</a>.</p>
6926
6927 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
6928 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
6929 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
6930 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
6931 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
6932 default password is 'secret'.</p>
6933
6934       </div>
6935       <div class="tags">
6936
6937
6938         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>.
6939
6940
6941       </div>
6942     </div>
6943     <div class="padding"></div>
6944
6945     <div class="entry">
6946       <div class="title">
6947         <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>
6948       </div>
6949       <div class="date">
6950         18th August 2013
6951       </div>
6952       <div class="body">
6953         <p>Earlier, I reported about
6954 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
6955 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
6956 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
6957 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
6958 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
6959 currently on the disk.</p>
6960
6961 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
6962 <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>
6963 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
6964 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
6965 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
6966 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
6967 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
6968 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
6969 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
6970 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
6971 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
6972 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
6973 the broken disks.</p>
6974
6975       </div>
6976       <div class="tags">
6977
6978
6979         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>.
6980
6981
6982       </div>
6983     </div>
6984     <div class="padding"></div>
6985
6986     <div class="entry">
6987       <div class="title">
6988         <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>
6989       </div>
6990       <div class="date">
6991         17th July 2013
6992       </div>
6993       <div class="body">
6994         <p>Today I switched to
6995 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
6996 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
6997 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
6998 <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
6999 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
7000 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
7001 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
7002 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
7003 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
7004 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
7005 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
7006 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
7007 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
7008 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
7009 station from now on.</p>
7010
7011 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
7012 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
7013 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
7014 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
7015 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
7016 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
7017 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
7018 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
7019 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
7020 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
7021 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
7022 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
7023
7024 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
7025 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
7026 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
7027 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
7028 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
7029 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
7030 parameters are tuned:</p>
7031
7032 <ul>
7033
7034 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
7035     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
7036
7037 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
7038     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
7039     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
7040
7041 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
7042     systems.</li>
7043
7044 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
7045     /etc/fstab.</li>
7046
7047 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
7048
7049 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
7050     cron.daily).</li>
7051
7052 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
7053     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
7054
7055 </ul>
7056
7057 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
7058 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
7059 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
7060 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
7061 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
7062 from getting the data on the disk (see
7063 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
7064 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
7065 right thing to do.</p>
7066
7067 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
7068 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
7069 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
7070
7071 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
7072 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
7073 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
7074 instead of during my work.</p>
7075
7076 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
7077 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
7078
7079 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
7080 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
7081 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
7082
7083 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
7084 there.</p>
7085
7086 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
7087 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
7088 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
7089 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
7090 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
7091 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
7092 back.</p>
7093
7094       </div>
7095       <div class="tags">
7096
7097
7098         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>.
7099
7100
7101       </div>
7102     </div>
7103     <div class="padding"></div>
7104
7105     <div class="entry">
7106       <div class="title">
7107         <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>
7108       </div>
7109       <div class="date">
7110         10th July 2013
7111       </div>
7112       <div class="body">
7113         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
7114 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
7115 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
7116 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
7117 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
7118 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
7119 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
7120 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
7121
7122 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
7123 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
7124 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
7125 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
7126 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
7127 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
7128 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
7129 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
7130 lock up when I download a new
7131 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
7132 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
7133 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
7134
7135 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
7136 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
7137 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
7138 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
7139 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
7140 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
7141
7142 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
7143 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
7144 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
7145 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
7146 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
7147 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
7148
7149 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
7150 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
7151 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
7152 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
7153 exist).</p>
7154
7155       </div>
7156       <div class="tags">
7157
7158
7159         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>.
7160
7161
7162       </div>
7163     </div>
7164     <div class="padding"></div>
7165
7166     <div class="entry">
7167       <div class="title">
7168         <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>
7169       </div>
7170       <div class="date">
7171          9th July 2013
7172       </div>
7173       <div class="body">
7174         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
7175 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
7176 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
7177 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
7178 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7179 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
7180 Bitraf</a>.</p>
7181
7182 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
7183 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
7184 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
7185 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
7186 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
7187
7188       </div>
7189       <div class="tags">
7190
7191
7192         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>.
7193
7194
7195       </div>
7196     </div>
7197     <div class="padding"></div>
7198
7199     <div class="entry">
7200       <div class="title">
7201         <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>
7202       </div>
7203       <div class="date">
7204          5th July 2013
7205       </div>
7206       <div class="body">
7207         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
7208 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
7209 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
7210 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
7211 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
7212 ended up picking a
7213 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
7214 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
7215 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
7216 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
7217 on that below.</p>
7218
7219 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
7220 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
7221 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
7222 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
7223 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
7224 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
7225 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
7226 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
7227 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
7228
7229 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
7230 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
7231 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
7232 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
7233 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
7234 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
7235 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
7236
7237 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
7238 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
7239
7240 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
7241 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
7242 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
7243 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
7244 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
7245 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
7246 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
7247 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
7248 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
7249 kernel developers as
7250 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
7251 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
7252 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
7253 Lenovo forums, both for
7254 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
7255 2012-11-10</a> and for
7256 <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
7257 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
7258 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
7259 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
7260 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
7261 There is even a
7262 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
7263 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
7264 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
7265
7266 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
7267 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
7268 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
7269 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
7270 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
7271 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
7272 fixed. :)</p>
7273
7274       </div>
7275       <div class="tags">
7276
7277
7278         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>.
7279
7280
7281       </div>
7282     </div>
7283     <div class="padding"></div>
7284
7285     <div class="entry">
7286       <div class="title">
7287         <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>
7288       </div>
7289       <div class="date">
7290          4th July 2013
7291       </div>
7292       <div class="body">
7293         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
7294 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
7295 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
7296 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
7297 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
7298 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
7299 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
7300 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
7301 with an expencive door stop.</p>
7302
7303 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
7304 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
7305 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
7306 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
7307 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
7308 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
7309 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
7310
7311 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
7312 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
7313 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
7314 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
7315 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
7316 new laptop now. :)</p>
7317
7318 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
7319
7320       </div>
7321       <div class="tags">
7322
7323
7324         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>.
7325
7326
7327       </div>
7328     </div>
7329     <div class="padding"></div>
7330
7331     <div class="entry">
7332       <div class="title">
7333         <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>
7334       </div>
7335       <div class="date">
7336         25th June 2013
7337       </div>
7338       <div class="body">
7339         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
7340 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
7341 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
7342 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
7343 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
7344 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
7345 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
7346 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
7347 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
7348 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
7349 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
7350
7351 <p><pre>
7352 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
7353 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
7354 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
7355 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
7356 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
7357 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
7358 firmware-ipw2x00
7359 firmware-ipw2x00
7360 Preconfiguring packages ...
7361 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
7362 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
7363 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
7364 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
7365 #
7366 </pre></p>
7367
7368 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
7369 printed instead:</p>
7370
7371 <p><pre>
7372 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
7373 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
7374 #
7375 </pre></p>
7376
7377 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
7378 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
7379
7380 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
7381 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
7382 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
7383 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
7384 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
7385 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
7386 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
7387 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
7388 machine.</p>
7389
7390 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
7391 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
7392 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
7393 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
7394 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
7395 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
7396
7397       </div>
7398       <div class="tags">
7399
7400
7401         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>.
7402
7403
7404       </div>
7405     </div>
7406     <div class="padding"></div>
7407
7408     <div class="entry">
7409       <div class="title">
7410         <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>
7411       </div>
7412       <div class="date">
7413         11th June 2013
7414       </div>
7415       <div class="body">
7416         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
7417 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
7418 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
7419 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
7420 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
7421 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
7422 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
7423 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
7424 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
7425 i915 driver used by the
7426 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
7427 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
7428
7429 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
7430 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
7431 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
7432 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
7433 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
7434
7435 <pre>
7436 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
7437 update-initramfs -u -k all
7438 </pre>
7439
7440 <p>Since March 2012 there is
7441 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
7442 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
7443 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
7444 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
7445 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
7446 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
7447 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
7448 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
7449 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
7450 number.</p>
7451
7452 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
7453 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
7454
7455 <p><pre>
7456 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
7457     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
7458     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
7459  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
7460  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
7461     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
7462  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
7463     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
7464  Latency: 0
7465  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
7466  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
7467  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
7468  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
7469  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
7470  Capabilities: <access denied>
7471  Kernel driver in use: i915
7472 </pre></p>
7473
7474 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
7475
7476 <p><pre>
7477 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
7478        ...
7479         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
7480         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
7481        ...
7482 }
7483 </pre></p>
7484
7485 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
7486 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
7487 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
7488 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
7489 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
7490 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
7491 yet shown up in
7492 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
7493 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
7494 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
7495 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
7496 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
7497 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
7498
7499 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
7500 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
7501 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
7502 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
7503 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
7504 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
7505 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
7506 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
7507 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
7508 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
7509 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
7510 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
7511
7512 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
7513 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
7514 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
7515 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
7516 backlight.</p>
7517
7518       </div>
7519       <div class="tags">
7520
7521
7522         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>.
7523
7524
7525       </div>
7526     </div>
7527     <div class="padding"></div>
7528
7529     <div class="entry">
7530       <div class="title">
7531         <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>
7532       </div>
7533       <div class="date">
7534         27th May 2013
7535       </div>
7536       <div class="body">
7537         <p>Two days ago, I asked
7538 <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
7539 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
7540 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
7541 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
7542 and Windows 8.</p>
7543
7544 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
7545 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
7546 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
7547 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
7548 enough to tell.</p>
7549
7550 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
7551 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
7552 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
7553 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
7554 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
7555 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
7556 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
7557 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
7558 to follow.</p>
7559
7560 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
7561 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
7562 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
7563 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
7564 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
7565 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
7566 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
7567 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
7568
7569 <p>I've updated the
7570 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
7571 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
7572 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
7573 machine.</p>
7574
7575 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
7576 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
7577
7578       </div>
7579       <div class="tags">
7580
7581
7582         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>.
7583
7584
7585       </div>
7586     </div>
7587     <div class="padding"></div>
7588
7589     <div class="entry">
7590       <div class="title">
7591         <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>
7592       </div>
7593       <div class="date">
7594         25th May 2013
7595       </div>
7596       <div class="body">
7597         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
7598 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
7599 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
7600 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
7601 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
7602 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
7603
7604 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
7605 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
7606 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
7607 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
7608 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
7609 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
7610 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
7611 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
7612 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
7613 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
7614
7615 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
7616 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
7617 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
7618 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
7619 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
7620 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
7621
7622 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
7623 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
7624 on new Laptops?</p>
7625
7626       </div>
7627       <div class="tags">
7628
7629
7630         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>.
7631
7632
7633       </div>
7634     </div>
7635     <div class="padding"></div>
7636
7637     <div class="entry">
7638       <div class="title">
7639         <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>
7640       </div>
7641       <div class="date">
7642         17th May 2013
7643       </div>
7644       <div class="body">
7645         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
7646 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
7647 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
7648 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
7649 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
7650 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
7651 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
7652 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
7653 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
7654 donate some money</a>.
7655
7656 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
7657 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
7658 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
7659 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
7660 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
7661
7662 <p>The script,
7663 <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/>
7664 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
7665 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
7666 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
7667
7668 <ol>
7669
7670 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
7671 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
7672 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
7673     our configuration.</li>
7674 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
7675     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
7676     according to the profile specified in the config above,
7677     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
7678 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
7679     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
7680 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
7681
7682 </ol>
7683
7684 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
7685 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
7686 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
7687 the needed packages.</p>
7688
7689 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
7690 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
7691 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
7692 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
7693 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
7694 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
7695
7696 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
7697 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
7698 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
7699
7700 <p><pre>
7701 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
7702 DESKTOP="lxde"
7703 </pre></p>
7704
7705 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
7706 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
7707 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
7708 boot.</p>
7709
7710       </div>
7711       <div class="tags">
7712
7713
7714         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>.
7715
7716
7717       </div>
7718     </div>
7719     <div class="padding"></div>
7720
7721     <div class="entry">
7722       <div class="title">
7723         <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>
7724       </div>
7725       <div class="date">
7726         11th May 2013
7727       </div>
7728       <div class="body">
7729         <P>In January,
7730 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
7731 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
7732 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
7733 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
7734 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
7735 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
7736 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
7737 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
7738 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
7739 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
7740 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
7741 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
7742
7743 <p><table>
7744 <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>
7745 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
7746 <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>
7747 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
7748 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
7749 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
7750 <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>
7751 <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>
7752 <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>
7753 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
7754 </table></p>
7755
7756 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
7757 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
7758 available in experimental.</p>
7759
7760 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
7761 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
7762 for LEGO designers.</p>
7763
7764       </div>
7765       <div class="tags">
7766
7767
7768         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>.
7769
7770
7771       </div>
7772     </div>
7773     <div class="padding"></div>
7774
7775     <div class="entry">
7776       <div class="title">
7777         <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>
7778       </div>
7779       <div class="date">
7780          5th May 2013
7781       </div>
7782       <div class="body">
7783         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
7784 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
7785 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
7786 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
7787 soon.</p>
7788
7789 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
7790 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
7791 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
7792 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
7793 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
7794 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
7795 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
7796 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
7797 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
7798 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
7799 Edu.</a>
7800
7801 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
7802 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
7803 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
7804 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
7805 follow.<p>
7806
7807       </div>
7808       <div class="tags">
7809
7810
7811         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>.
7812
7813
7814       </div>
7815     </div>
7816     <div class="padding"></div>
7817
7818     <div class="entry">
7819       <div class="title">
7820         <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>
7821       </div>
7822       <div class="date">
7823          3rd April 2013
7824       </div>
7825       <div class="body">
7826         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
7827 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
7828 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
7829 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
7830
7831 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
7832 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
7833 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
7834 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
7835 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
7836 BTS. :)</p>
7837
7838       </div>
7839       <div class="tags">
7840
7841
7842         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>.
7843
7844
7845       </div>
7846     </div>
7847     <div class="padding"></div>
7848
7849     <div class="entry">
7850       <div class="title">
7851         <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>
7852       </div>
7853       <div class="date">
7854          2nd February 2013
7855       </div>
7856       <div class="body">
7857         <p>My
7858 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
7859 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
7860 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
7861 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
7862 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
7863 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
7864 version too.</p>
7865
7866 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
7867 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
7868 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
7869 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
7870 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
7871 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
7872 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
7873 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
7874
7875 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
7876 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
7877 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
7878 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
7879 it. :)</p>
7880
7881 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
7882 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
7883 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
7884
7885       </div>
7886       <div class="tags">
7887
7888
7889         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>.
7890
7891
7892       </div>
7893     </div>
7894     <div class="padding"></div>
7895
7896     <div class="entry">
7897       <div class="title">
7898         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
7899       </div>
7900       <div class="date">
7901         22nd January 2013
7902       </div>
7903       <div class="body">
7904         <p>Yesterday, I
7905 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
7906 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
7907 pluggable hardware devices, which I
7908 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
7909 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
7910 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
7911 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
7912 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
7913 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
7914 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
7915 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
7916 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
7917 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
7918
7919 <pre>
7920 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
7921 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
7922 </pre>
7923
7924 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
7925 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
7926 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
7927 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
7928
7929 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
7930 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
7931 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
7932 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
7933 word.</p>
7934
7935 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
7936 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
7937 process.</p>
7938
7939 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
7940 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
7941
7942       </div>
7943       <div class="tags">
7944
7945
7946         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>.
7947
7948
7949       </div>
7950     </div>
7951     <div class="padding"></div>
7952
7953     <div class="entry">
7954       <div class="title">
7955         <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>
7956       </div>
7957       <div class="date">
7958         21st January 2013
7959       </div>
7960       <div class="body">
7961         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
7962 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
7963 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
7964 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
7965 it, fetch the
7966 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
7967 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
7968 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
7969 autostart script.</p>
7970
7971 <p>The design is simple:</p>
7972
7973 <ul>
7974
7975 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
7976 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
7977
7978 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
7979 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
7980 initially did.</li>
7981
7982 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
7983 the APT database, a database
7984 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
7985 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
7986
7987 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
7988 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
7989 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
7990 package or packages.</li>
7991
7992 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
7993 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
7994
7995 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
7996 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
7997
7998 </ul>
7999
8000 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
8001 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
8002 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
8003 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
8004
8005 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
8006 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
8007 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
8008 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
8009 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
8010
8011 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
8012 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
8013 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
8014 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
8015 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
8016 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
8017 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
8018 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
8019
8020 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
8021 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
8022 '<tt>svn checkout
8023 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
8024 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
8025 devscripts package.</p>
8026
8027 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
8028 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
8029 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
8030 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
8031 instructions</a> for details.</p>
8032
8033       </div>
8034       <div class="tags">
8035
8036
8037         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>.
8038
8039
8040       </div>
8041     </div>
8042     <div class="padding"></div>
8043
8044     <div class="entry">
8045       <div class="title">
8046         <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>
8047       </div>
8048       <div class="date">
8049         19th January 2013
8050       </div>
8051       <div class="body">
8052         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
8053 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
8054 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
8055 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
8056 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
8057 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
8058 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
8059 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
8060 not a durable solution.
8061
8062 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
8063 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
8064
8065 <ul>
8066
8067 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
8068   than A4).</li>
8069 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
8070 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
8071 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
8072 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
8073 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
8074 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
8075 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
8076 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
8077 size).</li>
8078 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
8079   X.org packages.</li>
8080 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
8081   the time).
8082
8083 </ul>
8084
8085 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
8086 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
8087 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
8088 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
8089 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
8090 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
8091 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
8092 still be useful.</p>
8093
8094 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
8095 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
8096 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
8097 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
8098 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
8099 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
8100
8101       </div>
8102       <div class="tags">
8103
8104
8105         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>.
8106
8107
8108       </div>
8109     </div>
8110     <div class="padding"></div>
8111
8112     <div class="entry">
8113       <div class="title">
8114         <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>
8115       </div>
8116       <div class="date">
8117         18th January 2013
8118       </div>
8119       <div class="body">
8120         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
8121 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
8122 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
8123 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
8124 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
8125 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
8126 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
8127
8128 <pre>
8129 #!/usr/bin/python
8130 import sys
8131 import apt
8132 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
8133     cache = apt.Cache()
8134     cache.open(None)
8135     thepkgs = []
8136     for pkg in cache:
8137         version = pkg.candidate
8138         if version is None:
8139             version = pkg.installed
8140         if version is None:
8141             continue
8142         record = version.record
8143         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
8144             continue
8145         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
8146         for t in mime_types:
8147             t = t.rstrip().strip()
8148             if t == mimetype:
8149                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
8150     return thepkgs
8151 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
8152 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
8153     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
8154 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
8155 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
8156     print "  %s" %pkg
8157 </pre>
8158
8159 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
8160
8161 <pre>
8162 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
8163 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
8164   gecko-mediaplayer
8165 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
8166 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
8167   browser-plugin-gnash
8168 %
8169 </pre>
8170
8171 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
8172 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
8173 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
8174 anyone working on adding it?</p>
8175
8176 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
8177 request for icweasel support for this feature is
8178 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
8179 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
8180 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
8181 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
8182
8183       </div>
8184       <div class="tags">
8185
8186
8187         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>.
8188
8189
8190       </div>
8191     </div>
8192     <div class="padding"></div>
8193
8194     <div class="entry">
8195       <div class="title">
8196         <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>
8197       </div>
8198       <div class="date">
8199         16th January 2013
8200       </div>
8201       <div class="body">
8202         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
8203 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
8204 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
8205 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
8206 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
8207 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
8208 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
8209 downloaded by the browser.</p>
8210
8211 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
8212 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
8213 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
8214 can be found on the
8215 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
8216 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
8217 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
8218 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
8219 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
8220
8221 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
8222
8223 <pre>
8224   count MIME type
8225   ----- -----------------------
8226      32 text/plain
8227      30 audio/mpeg
8228      29 image/png
8229      28 image/jpeg
8230      27 application/ogg
8231      26 audio/x-mp3
8232      25 image/tiff
8233      25 image/gif
8234      22 image/bmp
8235      22 audio/x-wav
8236      20 audio/x-flac
8237      19 audio/x-mpegurl
8238      18 video/x-ms-asf
8239      18 audio/x-musepack
8240      18 audio/x-mpeg
8241      18 application/x-ogg
8242      17 video/mpeg
8243      17 audio/x-scpls
8244      17 audio/ogg
8245      16 video/x-ms-wmv
8246 </pre>
8247
8248 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
8249
8250 <pre>
8251   count MIME type
8252   ----- -----------------------
8253      33 text/plain
8254      32 image/png
8255      32 image/jpeg
8256      29 audio/mpeg
8257      27 image/gif
8258      26 image/tiff
8259      26 application/ogg
8260      25 audio/x-mp3
8261      22 image/bmp
8262      21 audio/x-wav
8263      19 audio/x-mpegurl
8264      19 audio/x-mpeg
8265      18 video/mpeg
8266      18 audio/x-scpls
8267      18 audio/x-flac
8268      18 application/x-ogg
8269      17 video/x-ms-asf
8270      17 text/html
8271      17 audio/x-musepack
8272      16 image/x-xbitmap
8273 </pre>
8274
8275 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
8276
8277 <pre>
8278   count MIME type
8279   ----- -----------------------
8280      31 text/plain
8281      31 image/png
8282      31 image/jpeg
8283      29 audio/mpeg
8284      28 application/ogg
8285      27 image/gif
8286      26 image/tiff
8287      26 audio/x-mp3
8288      23 audio/x-wav
8289      22 image/bmp
8290      21 audio/x-flac
8291      20 audio/x-mpegurl
8292      19 audio/x-mpeg
8293      18 video/x-ms-asf
8294      18 video/mpeg
8295      18 audio/x-scpls
8296      18 application/x-ogg
8297      17 audio/x-musepack
8298      16 video/x-ms-wmv
8299      16 video/x-msvideo
8300 </pre>
8301
8302 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
8303 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
8304 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
8305 issues.</p>
8306
8307 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
8308 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
8309
8310       </div>
8311       <div class="tags">
8312
8313
8314         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>.
8315
8316
8317       </div>
8318     </div>
8319     <div class="padding"></div>
8320
8321     <div class="entry">
8322       <div class="title">
8323         <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>
8324       </div>
8325       <div class="date">
8326         15th January 2013
8327       </div>
8328       <div class="body">
8329         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
8330 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
8331 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
8332 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
8333 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
8334 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
8335 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
8336 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
8337 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
8338 packages.</p>
8339
8340 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
8341 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
8342 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
8343 modalias.</p>
8344
8345 <p><blockquote>
8346 Package: package-name
8347 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
8348 </blockquote></p>
8349
8350 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
8351 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
8352
8353 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
8354 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
8355
8356 <p><blockquote>
8357 Package: cheese
8358 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
8359 </blockquote></p>
8360
8361 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
8362 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
8363
8364 <p><blockquote>
8365 Package: pcmciautils
8366 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
8367 </blockquote></p>
8368
8369 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
8370 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
8371
8372 <p><blockquote>
8373 Package: colorhug-client
8374 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
8375 </blockquote></p>
8376
8377 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
8378 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
8379 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
8380
8381 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
8382 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
8383 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
8384 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
8385 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
8386 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
8387 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
8388 Raring.</p>
8389
8390 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
8391 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
8392 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
8393 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
8394 try the
8395 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
8396 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
8397 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
8398 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
8399
8400 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
8401 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
8402
8403 <p><blockquote>
8404 % ./hw-support-lookup
8405 <br>yubikey-personalization
8406 <br>%
8407 </blockquote></p>
8408
8409 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
8410 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
8411
8412 <p><blockquote>
8413 % ./hw-support-lookup
8414 <br>pcmciautils
8415 <br>%
8416 </blockquote></p>
8417
8418 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
8419 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
8420 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
8421
8422 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
8423 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
8424 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
8425 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
8426 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
8427 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
8428 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
8429 see if it work.</p>
8430
8431 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
8432 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
8433 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
8434 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
8435
8436       </div>
8437       <div class="tags">
8438
8439
8440         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>.
8441
8442
8443       </div>
8444     </div>
8445     <div class="padding"></div>
8446
8447     <div class="entry">
8448       <div class="title">
8449         <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>
8450       </div>
8451       <div class="date">
8452         14th January 2013
8453       </div>
8454       <div class="body">
8455         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
8456 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
8457 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
8458 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
8459 in
8460 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
8461 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
8462
8463 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
8464
8465 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
8466 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
8467 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
8468 &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;,
8469 &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
8470 &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;.
8471
8472 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
8473 this shell script:</p>
8474
8475 <pre>
8476 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
8477 </pre>
8478
8479 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
8480 using modinfo:</p>
8481
8482 <pre>
8483 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
8484 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
8485 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
8486 %
8487 </pre>
8488
8489 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
8490
8491 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
8492 Bridge memory controller:</p>
8493
8494 <p><blockquote>
8495 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
8496 </blockquote></p>
8497
8498 <p>This represent these values:</p>
8499
8500 <pre>
8501  v   00008086  (vendor)
8502  d   00002770  (device)
8503  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
8504  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
8505  bc  06        (bus class)
8506  sc  00        (bus subclass)
8507  i   00        (interface)
8508 </pre>
8509
8510 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
8511 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
8512 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
8513 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
8514
8515 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
8516 means.</p>
8517
8518 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
8519
8520 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
8521 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
8522
8523 <p><blockquote>
8524 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
8525 </blockquote></p>
8526
8527 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
8528
8529 <pre>
8530  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
8531  p    0001  (device product)
8532  d    0206  (bcddevice)
8533  dc     09  (device class)
8534  dsc    00  (device subclass)
8535  dp     00  (device protocol)
8536  ic     09  (interface class)
8537  isc    00  (interface subclass)
8538  ip     00  (interface protocol)
8539 </pre>
8540
8541 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
8542 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
8543 these alias entries show up:</p>
8544
8545 <p><blockquote>
8546 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
8547 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
8548 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
8549 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
8550 </blockquote></p>
8551
8552 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
8553 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
8554 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
8555
8556 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
8557
8558 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
8559 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
8560
8561 <p><blockquote>
8562 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
8563 </blockquote></p>
8564
8565 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
8566
8567 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
8568
8569 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
8570 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
8571 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
8572
8573 <p><blockquote>
8574 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
8575 </blockquote></p>
8576
8577 <p>The values present are</p>
8578
8579 <pre>
8580  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
8581  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
8582  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
8583  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
8584  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
8585  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
8586  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
8587  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
8588  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
8589  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
8590  ct   10             (chassis type)
8591  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
8592 </pre>
8593
8594 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
8595 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
8596
8597 <pre>
8598   3 Desktop
8599   4 Low Profile Desktop
8600   5 Pizza Box
8601   6 Mini Tower
8602   7 Tower
8603   8 Portable
8604   9 Laptop
8605  10 Notebook
8606  11 Hand Held
8607  12 Docking Station
8608  13 All In One
8609  14 Sub Notebook
8610  15 Space-saving
8611  16 Lunch Box
8612  17 Main Server Chassis
8613  18 Expansion Chassis
8614  19 Sub Chassis
8615  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
8616  21 Peripheral Chassis
8617  22 RAID Chassis
8618  23 Rack Mount Chassis
8619  24 Sealed-case PC
8620  25 Multi-system
8621  26 CompactPCI
8622  27 AdvancedTCA
8623  28 Blade
8624  29 Blade Enclosing
8625 </pre>
8626
8627 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
8628 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
8629 claim it is a desktop.</p>
8630
8631 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
8632
8633 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
8634 test machine:</p>
8635
8636 <p><blockquote>
8637 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
8638 </blockquote></p>
8639
8640 <p>The values present are</p>
8641
8642 <pre>
8643   ty  01  (type)
8644   pr  00  (prototype)
8645   id  00  (id)
8646   ex  00  (extra)
8647 </pre>
8648
8649 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
8650 the valid values are.</p>
8651
8652 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
8653
8654 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
8655 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
8656 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
8657 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
8658 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
8659 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
8660 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
8661
8662 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
8663
8664 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
8665 one can use the following shell script:</p>
8666
8667 <pre>
8668   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
8669     echo "$id" ; \
8670     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
8671   done
8672 </pre>
8673
8674 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
8675 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
8676
8677 <pre>
8678   acpi:ACPI0003:
8679     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
8680   acpi:device:
8681   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
8682   acpi:IBM0068:
8683     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
8684     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
8685     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
8686     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
8687   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
8688     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
8689     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
8690     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
8691   [...]
8692 </pre>
8693
8694 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
8695 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
8696 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
8697 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
8698
8699 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
8700 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
8701 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
8702
8703       </div>
8704       <div class="tags">
8705
8706
8707         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>.
8708
8709
8710       </div>
8711     </div>
8712     <div class="padding"></div>
8713
8714     <div class="entry">
8715       <div class="title">
8716         <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>
8717       </div>
8718       <div class="date">
8719         10th January 2013
8720       </div>
8721       <div class="body">
8722         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
8723 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
8724 Launcher and updated the Debian package
8725 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
8726 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
8727 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
8728 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
8729 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
8730 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
8731 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
8732 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
8733 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
8734 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
8735 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
8736 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
8737 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
8738 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
8739 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
8740
8741       </div>
8742       <div class="tags">
8743
8744
8745         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>.
8746
8747
8748       </div>
8749     </div>
8750     <div class="padding"></div>
8751
8752     <div class="entry">
8753       <div class="title">
8754         <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>
8755       </div>
8756       <div class="date">
8757          9th January 2013
8758       </div>
8759       <div class="body">
8760         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
8761 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
8762 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
8763 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
8764 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
8765 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
8766 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
8767 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
8768 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
8769 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
8770 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
8771
8772 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
8773 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
8774 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
8775 simple:
8776
8777 <ul>
8778
8779 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
8780   starting when a user log in.</li>
8781
8782 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
8783   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
8784
8785 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
8786   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
8787   packages.</li>
8788
8789 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
8790   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
8791
8792 </ul>
8793
8794 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
8795 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
8796 discover database to find packages and
8797 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
8798 packages.</p>
8799
8800 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
8801 draft package is now checked into
8802 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
8803 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
8804 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
8805 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
8806 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
8807 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
8808 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
8809 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
8810 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
8811 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
8812 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
8813 because of the freeze).</p>
8814
8815 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
8816 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
8817 inserted):</p>
8818
8819 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
8820
8821 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
8822 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
8823 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
8824
8825 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
8826 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
8827 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
8828 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
8829 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
8830 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
8831 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
8832
8833 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
8834 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
8835 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
8836 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
8837 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
8838 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
8839 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
8840 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
8841 not be installed?</p>
8842
8843 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
8844 please send me an email. :)</p>
8845
8846       </div>
8847       <div class="tags">
8848
8849
8850         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>.
8851
8852
8853       </div>
8854     </div>
8855     <div class="padding"></div>
8856
8857     <div class="entry">
8858       <div class="title">
8859         <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>
8860       </div>
8861       <div class="date">
8862          2nd January 2013
8863       </div>
8864       <div class="body">
8865         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
8866 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
8867 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
8868 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
8869 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
8870 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
8871 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
8872 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
8873 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
8874 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
8875
8876 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
8877 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
8878 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</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/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>.
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/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>
8894       </div>
8895       <div class="date">
8896         25th December 2012
8897       </div>
8898       <div class="body">
8899         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
8900 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
8901
8902 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
8903 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
8904 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
8905 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
8906 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
8907 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
8908 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
8909 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
8910 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
8911 name.</p>
8912
8913 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
8914 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
8915 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
8916
8917 <blockquote><pre>
8918 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
8919 cd bitcoin
8920 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
8921 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
8922 </pre></blockquote>
8923
8924 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
8925 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
8926 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
8927 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
8928 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
8929 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
8930 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
8931 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
8932 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
8933
8934 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
8935 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
8936 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
8937
8938       </div>
8939       <div class="tags">
8940
8941
8942         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>.
8943
8944
8945       </div>
8946     </div>
8947     <div class="padding"></div>
8948
8949     <div class="entry">
8950       <div class="title">
8951         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
8952       </div>
8953       <div class="date">
8954         21st December 2012
8955       </div>
8956       <div class="body">
8957         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
8958 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
8959 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
8960 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
8961 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
8962 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
8963 is now maintained by a
8964 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
8965 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
8966 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
8967 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
8968 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
8969 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
8970 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
8971 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
8972 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
8973 Corallo in a
8974 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
8975 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
8976 Debian package.</p>
8977
8978 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
8979 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
8980 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
8981 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
8982 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
8983 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
8984 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
8985 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
8986 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
8987 new version to unstable.
8988
8989 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
8990 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
8991 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
8992 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
8993 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
8994 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
8995 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
8996 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
8997 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
8998 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
8999 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
9000 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
9001 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
9002 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
9003 have not tested them.</p>
9004
9005 <p>My
9006 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
9007 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
9008 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
9009 years ago, as can be
9010 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
9011 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
9012 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
9013 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
9014 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
9015 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
9016 the same address as last time,
9017 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
9018
9019       </div>
9020       <div class="tags">
9021
9022
9023         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>.
9024
9025
9026       </div>
9027     </div>
9028     <div class="padding"></div>
9029
9030     <div class="entry">
9031       <div class="title">
9032         <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>
9033       </div>
9034       <div class="date">
9035          7th September 2012
9036       </div>
9037       <div class="body">
9038         <p>As I
9039 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
9040 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
9041 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
9042 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
9043 repository for the project</a>.</p>
9044
9045 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
9046 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
9047 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
9048 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
9049
9050 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
9051 PostScript formats at
9052 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
9053 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
9054
9055       </div>
9056       <div class="tags">
9057
9058
9059         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>.
9060
9061
9062       </div>
9063     </div>
9064     <div class="padding"></div>
9065
9066     <div class="entry">
9067       <div class="title">
9068         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gratulerer_med_19__rsdagen__Debian_.html">Gratulerer med 19-årsdagen, Debian!</a>
9069       </div>
9070       <div class="date">
9071         16th August 2012
9072       </div>
9073       <div class="body">
9074         <p>I dag fyller
9075 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120813">Debian-prosjektet 19
9076 år</a>.  Jeg har fulgt det de siste 12 årene, og er veldig glad for å kunne
9077 si gratulerer med dagen, Debian!</p>
9078
9079       </div>
9080       <div class="tags">
9081
9082
9083         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>.
9084
9085
9086       </div>
9087     </div>
9088     <div class="padding"></div>
9089
9090     <div class="entry">
9091       <div class="title">
9092         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
9093       </div>
9094       <div class="date">
9095         24th June 2012
9096       </div>
9097       <div class="body">
9098         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
9099 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
9100 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
9101 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
9102 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
9103 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
9104 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
9105 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
9106 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
9107 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
9108 missing in my book.</p>
9109
9110 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
9111 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
9112 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
9113 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
9114 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
9115 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
9116 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
9117
9118       </div>
9119       <div class="tags">
9120
9121
9122         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>.
9123
9124
9125       </div>
9126     </div>
9127     <div class="padding"></div>
9128
9129     <div class="entry">
9130       <div class="title">
9131         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
9132       </div>
9133       <div class="date">
9134         21st November 2011
9135       </div>
9136       <div class="body">
9137         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
9138 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
9139 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
9140 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
9141 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
9142 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
9143 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
9144 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
9145 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
9146 the tools to do so.</p>
9147
9148 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
9149 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
9150 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
9151 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
9152
9153 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
9154 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
9155 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
9156 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
9157 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
9158 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
9159 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
9160 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
9161
9162 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
9163 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
9164 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
9165
9166 <p><pre>
9167 #!/usr/bin/perl
9168 use strict;
9169 use warnings;
9170 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
9171 BEGIN {
9172     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
9173     my %rhelmodules = (
9174         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
9175         );
9176     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
9177         eval "use $module;";
9178         if ($@) {
9179             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
9180             system("yum install -y $pkg");
9181             eval "use $module;";
9182         }
9183     }
9184 }
9185 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
9186
9187 upgrade_dell();
9188
9189 exit 0;
9190
9191 sub run_firmware_script {
9192     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
9193     unless ($script) {
9194         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
9195         exit 1
9196     }
9197     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
9198
9199     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
9200         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
9201     } else {
9202         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
9203     }
9204 }
9205
9206 sub run_firmware_scripts {
9207     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
9208     # Run firmware packages
9209     for my $dir (@dirs) {
9210         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
9211         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
9212         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
9213             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
9214             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
9215         }
9216         closedir $dh;
9217     }
9218 }
9219
9220 sub download {
9221     my $url = shift;
9222     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
9223     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
9224 }
9225
9226 sub upgrade_dell {
9227     my @dirs;
9228     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
9229     chomp $product;
9230
9231     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
9232
9233         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
9234         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
9235
9236         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
9237             CLEANUP => 1
9238             );
9239         chdir($tmpdir);
9240         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
9241         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
9242         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
9243         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
9244         my $fwopts = "-q";
9245         if (@paths) {
9246             for my $url (@paths) {
9247                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
9248             }
9249             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
9250         } else {
9251             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
9252             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
9253         }
9254         chdir('/');
9255     } else {
9256         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
9257         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
9258     }
9259 }
9260
9261 sub fetch_dell_fw {
9262     my $path = shift;
9263     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
9264     download($url);
9265 }
9266
9267 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
9268 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
9269 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
9270 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
9271     my $filename = shift;
9272
9273     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
9274     chomp $product;
9275     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
9276
9277     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
9278
9279     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
9280     my @paths;
9281     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
9282         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
9283         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
9284         my $oscode;
9285         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
9286             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
9287         } else {
9288             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
9289         }
9290         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
9291         {
9292             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
9293         }
9294     }
9295     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
9296         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
9297
9298         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
9299         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
9300
9301         my $cpath = $component->{path};
9302         for my $path (@paths) {
9303             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
9304                 push(@paths, $cpath);
9305             }
9306         }
9307     }
9308     return @paths;
9309 }
9310 </pre>
9311
9312 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
9313 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
9314 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
9315 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
9316 outdated.</p>
9317
9318       </div>
9319       <div class="tags">
9320
9321
9322         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>.
9323
9324
9325       </div>
9326     </div>
9327     <div class="padding"></div>
9328
9329     <div class="entry">
9330       <div class="title">
9331         <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>
9332       </div>
9333       <div class="date">
9334          4th August 2011
9335       </div>
9336       <div class="body">
9337         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
9338 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
9339 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
9340 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
9341 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
9342 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
9343 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
9344 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
9345 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
9346
9347 <p><blockquote>
9348 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
9349 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
9350 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
9351 </blockquote></p>
9352
9353 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
9354 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
9355 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
9356 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
9357 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
9358 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
9359 hard to explain.</p>
9360
9361 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
9362 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
9363 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
9364 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
9365 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
9366 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
9367 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
9368 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
9369 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
9370 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
9371 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
9372 mode).</p>
9373
9374 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
9375 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
9376 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
9377 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
9378 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
9379 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
9380 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
9381 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
9382 after visiting single user mode.</p>
9383
9384 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
9385 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
9386 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
9387 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
9388 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
9389 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
9390 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
9391 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
9392
9393 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
9394 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
9395 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
9396
9397       </div>
9398       <div class="tags">
9399
9400
9401         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>.
9402
9403
9404       </div>
9405     </div>
9406     <div class="padding"></div>
9407
9408     <div class="entry">
9409       <div class="title">
9410         <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>
9411       </div>
9412       <div class="date">
9413         30th July 2011
9414       </div>
9415       <div class="body">
9416         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
9417 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
9418 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
9419 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
9420 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
9421 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
9422 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
9423 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
9424 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
9425 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
9426 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
9427 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
9428 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
9429
9430 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
9431 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
9432 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
9433 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
9434 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
9435 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
9436 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
9437 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
9438 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
9439
9440 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
9441 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
9442 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
9443 is presented.</p>
9444
9445 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
9446 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
9447 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
9448 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
9449 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
9450 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
9451 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
9452 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
9453 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
9454 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
9455 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
9456 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
9457 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
9458 find time to push this forward.</p>
9459
9460       </div>
9461       <div class="tags">
9462
9463
9464         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>.
9465
9466
9467       </div>
9468     </div>
9469     <div class="padding"></div>
9470
9471     <div class="entry">
9472       <div class="title">
9473         <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>
9474       </div>
9475       <div class="date">
9476         29th July 2011
9477       </div>
9478       <div class="body">
9479         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
9480 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
9481 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
9482 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
9483 issues.</p>
9484
9485 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
9486 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
9487 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
9488
9489 <ol>
9490
9491 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
9492 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
9493 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
9494 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
9495 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
9496 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
9497 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
9498 Debian.</li>
9499
9500 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
9501 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
9502 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
9503 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
9504 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
9505 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
9506 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
9507 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
9508 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
9509 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
9510 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
9511 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
9512 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
9513
9514 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
9515 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
9516 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
9517 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
9518 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
9519 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
9520 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
9521 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
9522 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
9523 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
9524
9525 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
9526 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
9527 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
9528 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
9529 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
9530 latter behaviour.</li>
9531
9532 </ol>
9533
9534 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
9535 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
9536 it do not matter much.</p>
9537
9538 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
9539 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
9540 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
9541
9542       </div>
9543       <div class="tags">
9544
9545
9546         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>.
9547
9548
9549       </div>
9550     </div>
9551     <div class="padding"></div>
9552
9553     <div class="entry">
9554       <div class="title">
9555         <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>
9556       </div>
9557       <div class="date">
9558         26th July 2011
9559       </div>
9560       <div class="body">
9561         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
9562 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
9563 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
9564 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
9565 security support for a few years.</p>
9566
9567 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
9568 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
9569 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
9570 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
9571 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
9572 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
9573 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
9574 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
9575 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
9576 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
9577 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
9578 easier in the future.</p>
9579
9580 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
9581 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
9582 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
9583 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
9584 do not have time for.</p>
9585
9586       </div>
9587       <div class="tags">
9588
9589
9590         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>.
9591
9592
9593       </div>
9594     </div>
9595     <div class="padding"></div>
9596
9597     <div class="entry">
9598       <div class="title">
9599         <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>
9600       </div>
9601       <div class="date">
9602          3rd April 2011
9603       </div>
9604       <div class="body">
9605         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
9606 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
9607 update in English.</p>
9608
9609 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
9610 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
9611 of the British service
9612 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
9613 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
9614 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
9615 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
9616 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
9617 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
9618 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
9619 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
9620 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
9621 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
9622 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
9623 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
9624 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
9625
9626 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
9627 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
9628 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
9629 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
9630 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
9631 public infrastructure.</p>
9632
9633 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
9634 such service?</p>
9635
9636       </div>
9637       <div class="tags">
9638
9639
9640         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>.
9641
9642
9643       </div>
9644     </div>
9645     <div class="padding"></div>
9646
9647     <div class="entry">
9648       <div class="title">
9649         <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>
9650       </div>
9651       <div class="date">
9652         28th January 2011
9653       </div>
9654       <div class="body">
9655         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
9656 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
9657 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
9658 available on the Internet, and check our locally
9659 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
9660 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
9661 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
9662 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
9663 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
9664 out which security holes were present in our free software
9665 collection.</p>
9666
9667 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
9668 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
9669 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
9670 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
9671 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
9672 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
9673 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
9674 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
9675 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
9676 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
9677 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
9678 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
9679 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
9680 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
9681 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
9682 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
9683
9684 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
9685 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
9686 check out, one could look up
9687 <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
9688 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
9689 The most recent one is
9690 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
9691 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
9692 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
9693
9694 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
9695 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
9696 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
9697 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
9698 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
9699 security issues out.</p>
9700
9701 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
9702 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
9703 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
9704 RHEL is providing
9705 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
9706 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
9707 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
9708
9709 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
9710 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
9711 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
9712 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
9713 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
9714 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
9715 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
9716 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
9717 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
9718 established soon.</p>
9719
9720 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
9721 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
9722 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
9723 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
9724 for their packages.</p>
9725
9726       </div>
9727       <div class="tags">
9728
9729
9730         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>.
9731
9732
9733       </div>
9734     </div>
9735     <div class="padding"></div>
9736
9737     <div class="entry">
9738       <div class="title">
9739         <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>
9740       </div>
9741       <div class="date">
9742         23rd January 2011
9743       </div>
9744       <div class="body">
9745         <p>In the
9746 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
9747 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
9748 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
9749 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
9750 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
9751 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
9752 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
9753 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
9754 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
9755 one of my machines like this:</p>
9756
9757 <pre>
9758 loaded modules:
9759 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
9760 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
9761 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
9762 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
9763 10de:03ec pata_amd
9764 10de:03f6 sata_nv
9765 1022:1103 k8temp
9766 109e:036e bttv
9767 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
9768 11ab:4364 sky2
9769 </pre>
9770
9771 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
9772 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
9773
9774 <pre>
9775 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
9776     echo loaded pci modules:
9777     (
9778         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
9779         for address in * ; do
9780             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
9781                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
9782                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
9783                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
9784                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
9785                     echo "$id $module"
9786                 fi
9787             fi
9788         done
9789     )
9790     echo
9791 fi
9792 </pre>
9793
9794 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
9795 mappings:</p>
9796
9797 <pre>
9798 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
9799     echo loaded usb modules:
9800     (
9801         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
9802         for address in * ; do
9803             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
9804                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
9805                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
9806                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
9807                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
9808                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
9809                         echo "$id $module"
9810                     fi
9811                 fi
9812             fi
9813         done
9814     )
9815     echo
9816 fi
9817 </pre>
9818
9819 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
9820 well.</p>
9821
9822       </div>
9823       <div class="tags">
9824
9825
9826         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>.
9827
9828
9829       </div>
9830     </div>
9831     <div class="padding"></div>
9832
9833     <div class="entry">
9834       <div class="title">
9835         <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>
9836       </div>
9837       <div class="date">
9838         22nd December 2010
9839       </div>
9840       <div class="body">
9841         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
9842 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
9843 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
9844 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
9845 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
9846 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
9847 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
9848 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
9849 university.</p>
9850
9851 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
9852 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
9853 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
9854 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
9855 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
9856 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
9857 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
9858 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
9859
9860 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
9861 I perform on a new model.</p>
9862
9863 <ul>
9864
9865 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
9866 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
9867 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
9868
9869 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
9870 installation, X.org is working.</li>
9871
9872 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
9873 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
9874 reported by the program.</li>
9875
9876 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
9877 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
9878 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
9879 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
9880 normally test this by playing
9881 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
9882 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
9883
9884 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
9885 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
9886
9887 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
9888 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
9889
9890 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
9891 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
9892
9893 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
9894 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
9895 few.</li>
9896
9897 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
9898 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
9899 notice this.</li>
9900
9901 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
9902 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
9903 resume.</li>
9904
9905 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
9906 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
9907 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
9908 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
9909 not.</li>
9910
9911 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
9912 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
9913 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
9914 existence.</li>
9915
9916 </ul>
9917
9918 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
9919 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
9920 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
9921 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
9922 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
9923 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
9924 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
9925 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
9926
9927       </div>
9928       <div class="tags">
9929
9930
9931         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>.
9932
9933
9934       </div>
9935     </div>
9936     <div class="padding"></div>
9937
9938     <div class="entry">
9939       <div class="title">
9940         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
9941       </div>
9942       <div class="date">
9943         11th December 2010
9944       </div>
9945       <div class="body">
9946         <p>As I continue to explore
9947 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
9948 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
9949 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
9950
9951 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
9952 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
9953 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
9954 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
9955 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
9956 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
9957 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
9958 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
9959 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
9960 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
9961 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
9962 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
9963 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
9964 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
9965 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
9966 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
9967 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
9968 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
9969 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
9970 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
9971
9972 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
9973 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
9974 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
9975 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
9976 If the Skolelinux foundation
9977 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
9978 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
9979 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
9980 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
9981 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
9982 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
9983 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
9984 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
9985
9986 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
9987 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
9988 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
9989 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
9990 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
9991 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
9992 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
9993 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
9994 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
9995 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
9996 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
9997 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
9998 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
9999 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
10000 currencies.</p>
10001
10002 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
10003 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
10004 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
10005 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
10006 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
10007 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
10008 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
10009 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
10010 BitCoins.  Check out
10011 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
10012 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
10013 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
10014 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
10015 yet.</p>
10016
10017 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
10018 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
10019 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
10020 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
10021 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
10022
10023       </div>
10024       <div class="tags">
10025
10026
10027         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>.
10028
10029
10030       </div>
10031     </div>
10032     <div class="padding"></div>
10033
10034     <div class="entry">
10035       <div class="title">
10036         <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>
10037       </div>
10038       <div class="date">
10039         10th December 2010
10040       </div>
10041       <div class="body">
10042         <p>With this weeks lawless
10043 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
10044 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
10045 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
10046 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
10047 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
10048 A blog post from
10049 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
10050 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
10051 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
10052 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
10053 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
10054 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
10055 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
10056
10057 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
10058 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
10059 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
10060 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
10061 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
10062 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
10063 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
10064 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
10065 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
10066 Debian</a> soon.</p>
10067
10068 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
10069 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
10070 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
10071 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
10072 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
10073 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
10074 you can even get
10075 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
10076 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
10077 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
10078 on the current exchange rates.</p>
10079
10080 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
10081 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
10082 donations to the address
10083 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
10084
10085       </div>
10086       <div class="tags">
10087
10088
10089         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>.
10090
10091
10092       </div>
10093     </div>
10094     <div class="padding"></div>
10095
10096     <div class="entry">
10097       <div class="title">
10098         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
10099       </div>
10100       <div class="date">
10101         27th November 2010
10102       </div>
10103       <div class="body">
10104         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
10105 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
10106 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
10107 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
10108 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
10109 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
10110 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
10111 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
10112
10113 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
10114 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
10115 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
10116 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
10117 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
10118 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
10119 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
10120 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
10121 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
10122 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
10123 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
10124
10125 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
10126 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
10127 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
10128 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
10129 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
10130 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
10131 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
10132 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
10133 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
10134 what is going on.</p>
10135
10136       </div>
10137       <div class="tags">
10138
10139
10140         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>.
10141
10142
10143       </div>
10144     </div>
10145     <div class="padding"></div>
10146
10147     <div class="entry">
10148       <div class="title">
10149         <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>
10150       </div>
10151       <div class="date">
10152         22nd November 2010
10153       </div>
10154       <div class="body">
10155         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
10156 upgrade testing of the
10157 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
10158 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
10159 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
10160 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
10161
10162 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
10163
10164 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
10165
10166 <blockquote><p>
10167   apache2.2-bin
10168   aptdaemon
10169   baobab
10170   binfmt-support
10171   browser-plugin-gnash
10172   cheese-common
10173   cli-common
10174   cups-pk-helper
10175   dmz-cursor-theme
10176   empathy
10177   empathy-common
10178   freedesktop-sound-theme
10179   freeglut3
10180   gconf-defaults-service
10181   gdm-themes
10182   gedit-plugins
10183   geoclue
10184   geoclue-hostip
10185   geoclue-localnet
10186   geoclue-manual
10187   geoclue-yahoo
10188   gnash
10189   gnash-common
10190   gnome
10191   gnome-backgrounds
10192   gnome-cards-data
10193   gnome-codec-install
10194   gnome-core
10195   gnome-desktop-environment
10196   gnome-disk-utility
10197   gnome-screenshot
10198   gnome-search-tool
10199   gnome-session-canberra
10200   gnome-system-log
10201   gnome-themes-extras
10202   gnome-themes-more
10203   gnome-user-share
10204   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
10205   gstreamer0.10-tools
10206   gtk2-engines
10207   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
10208   gtk2-engines-smooth
10209   hamster-applet
10210   libapache2-mod-dnssd
10211   libapr1
10212   libaprutil1
10213   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
10214   libaprutil1-ldap
10215   libart2.0-cil
10216   libboost-date-time1.42.0
10217   libboost-python1.42.0
10218   libboost-thread1.42.0
10219   libchamplain-0.4-0
10220   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
10221   libcheese-gtk18
10222   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
10223   libcryptui0
10224   libdiscid0
10225   libelf1
10226   libepc-1.0-2
10227   libepc-common
10228   libepc-ui-1.0-2
10229   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
10230   libfreerdp0
10231   libgconf2.0-cil
10232   libgdata-common
10233   libgdata7
10234   libgdu-gtk0
10235   libgee2
10236   libgeoclue0
10237   libgexiv2-0
10238   libgif4
10239   libglade2.0-cil
10240   libglib2.0-cil
10241   libgmime2.4-cil
10242   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
10243   libgnome2.24-cil
10244   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
10245   libgpod-common
10246   libgpod4
10247   libgtk2.0-cil
10248   libgtkglext1
10249   libgtksourceview2.0-common
10250   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
10251   libmono-addins0.2-cil
10252   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
10253   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
10254   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
10255   libmono-posix2.0-cil
10256   libmono-security2.0-cil
10257   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
10258   libmono-system2.0-cil
10259   libmtp8
10260   libmusicbrainz3-6
10261   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
10262   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
10263   libopal3.6.8
10264   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
10265   libpt2.6.7
10266   libpython2.6
10267   librpm1
10268   librpmio1
10269   libsdl1.2debian
10270   libsrtp0
10271   libssh-4
10272   libtelepathy-farsight0
10273   libtelepathy-glib0
10274   libtidy-0.99-0
10275   media-player-info
10276   mesa-utils
10277   mono-2.0-gac
10278   mono-gac
10279   mono-runtime
10280   nautilus-sendto
10281   nautilus-sendto-empathy
10282   p7zip-full
10283   pkg-config
10284   python-aptdaemon
10285   python-aptdaemon-gtk
10286   python-axiom
10287   python-beautifulsoup
10288   python-bugbuddy
10289   python-clientform
10290   python-coherence
10291   python-configobj
10292   python-crypto
10293   python-cupshelpers
10294   python-elementtree
10295   python-epsilon
10296   python-evolution
10297   python-feedparser
10298   python-gdata
10299   python-gdbm
10300   python-gst0.10
10301   python-gtkglext1
10302   python-gtksourceview2
10303   python-httplib2
10304   python-louie
10305   python-mako
10306   python-markupsafe
10307   python-mechanize
10308   python-nevow
10309   python-notify
10310   python-opengl
10311   python-openssl
10312   python-pam
10313   python-pkg-resources
10314   python-pyasn1
10315   python-pysqlite2
10316   python-rdflib
10317   python-serial
10318   python-tagpy
10319   python-twisted-bin
10320   python-twisted-conch
10321   python-twisted-core
10322   python-twisted-web
10323   python-utidylib
10324   python-webkit
10325   python-xdg
10326   python-zope.interface
10327   remmina
10328   remmina-plugin-data
10329   remmina-plugin-rdp
10330   remmina-plugin-vnc
10331   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
10332   rhythmbox-plugins
10333   rpm-common
10334   rpm2cpio
10335   seahorse-plugins
10336   shotwell
10337   software-center
10338   system-config-printer-udev
10339   telepathy-gabble
10340   telepathy-mission-control-5
10341   telepathy-salut
10342   tomboy
10343   totem
10344   totem-coherence
10345   totem-mozilla
10346   totem-plugins
10347   transmission-common
10348   xdg-user-dirs
10349   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
10350   xserver-xephyr
10351 </p></blockquote>
10352
10353 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
10354
10355 <blockquote><p>
10356   cheese
10357   ekiga
10358   eog
10359   epiphany-extensions
10360   evolution-exchange
10361   fast-user-switch-applet
10362   file-roller
10363   gcalctool
10364   gconf-editor
10365   gdm
10366   gedit
10367   gedit-common
10368   gnome-games
10369   gnome-games-data
10370   gnome-nettool
10371   gnome-system-tools
10372   gnome-themes
10373   gnuchess
10374   gucharmap
10375   guile-1.8-libs
10376   libavahi-ui0
10377   libdmx1
10378   libgalago3
10379   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
10380   libgtksourceview2.0-0
10381   liblircclient0
10382   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
10383   libspeexdsp1
10384   libsvga1
10385   rhythmbox
10386   seahorse
10387   sound-juicer
10388   system-config-printer
10389   totem-common
10390   transmission-gtk
10391   vinagre
10392   vino
10393 </p></blockquote>
10394
10395 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
10396
10397 <blockquote><p>
10398   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
10399 </p></blockquote>
10400
10401 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
10402
10403 <blockquote><p>
10404 [nothing]
10405 </p></blockquote>
10406
10407 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
10408
10409 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
10410
10411 <blockquote><p>
10412   ksmserver
10413 </p></blockquote>
10414
10415 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
10416
10417 <blockquote><p>
10418   kwin
10419   network-manager-kde
10420 </p></blockquote>
10421
10422 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
10423
10424 <blockquote><p>
10425   arts
10426   dolphin
10427   freespacenotifier
10428   google-gadgets-gst
10429   google-gadgets-xul
10430   kappfinder
10431   kcalc
10432   kcharselect
10433   kde-core
10434   kde-plasma-desktop
10435   kde-standard
10436   kde-window-manager
10437   kdeartwork
10438   kdeartwork-emoticons
10439   kdeartwork-style
10440   kdeartwork-theme-icon
10441   kdebase
10442   kdebase-apps
10443   kdebase-workspace
10444   kdebase-workspace-bin
10445   kdebase-workspace-data
10446   kdeeject
10447   kdelibs
10448   kdeplasma-addons
10449   kdeutils
10450   kdewallpapers
10451   kdf
10452   kfloppy
10453   kgpg
10454   khelpcenter4
10455   kinfocenter
10456   konq-plugins-l10n
10457   konqueror-nsplugins
10458   kscreensaver
10459   kscreensaver-xsavers
10460   ktimer
10461   kwrite
10462   libgle3
10463   libkde4-ruby1.8
10464   libkonq5
10465   libkonq5-templates
10466   libnetpbm10
10467   libplasma-ruby
10468   libplasma-ruby1.8
10469   libqt4-ruby1.8
10470   marble-data
10471   marble-plugins
10472   netpbm
10473   nuvola-icon-theme
10474   plasma-dataengines-workspace
10475   plasma-desktop
10476   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
10477   plasma-runners-addons
10478   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
10479   plasma-scriptengine-python
10480   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
10481   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
10482   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
10483   plasma-scriptengines
10484   plasma-wallpapers-addons
10485   plasma-widget-folderview
10486   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
10487   ruby
10488   sweeper
10489   update-notifier-kde
10490   xscreensaver-data-extra
10491   xscreensaver-gl
10492   xscreensaver-gl-extra
10493   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
10494 </p></blockquote>
10495
10496 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
10497
10498 <blockquote><p>
10499   ark
10500   google-gadgets-common
10501   google-gadgets-qt
10502   htdig
10503   kate
10504   kdebase-bin
10505   kdebase-data
10506   kdepasswd
10507   kfind
10508   klipper
10509   konq-plugins
10510   konqueror
10511   ksysguard
10512   ksysguardd
10513   libarchive1
10514   libcln6
10515   libeet1
10516   libeina-svn-06
10517   libggadget-1.0-0b
10518   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
10519   libgps19
10520   libkdecorations4
10521   libkephal4
10522   libkonq4
10523   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
10524   libkscreensaver5
10525   libksgrd4
10526   libksignalplotter4
10527   libkunitconversion4
10528   libkwineffects1a
10529   libmarblewidget4
10530   libntrack-qt4-1
10531   libntrack0
10532   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
10533   libplasmaclock4a
10534   libplasmagenericshell4
10535   libprocesscore4a
10536   libprocessui4a
10537   libqalculate5
10538   libqedje0a
10539   libqtruby4shared2
10540   libqzion0a
10541   libruby1.8
10542   libscim8c2a
10543   libsmokekdecore4-3
10544   libsmokekdeui4-3
10545   libsmokekfile3
10546   libsmokekhtml3
10547   libsmokekio3
10548   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
10549   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
10550   libsmokekparts3
10551   libsmokektexteditor3
10552   libsmokekutils3
10553   libsmokenepomuk3
10554   libsmokephonon3
10555   libsmokeplasma3
10556   libsmokeqtcore4-3
10557   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
10558   libsmokeqtgui4-3
10559   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
10560   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
10561   libsmokeqtscript4-3
10562   libsmokeqtsql4-3
10563   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
10564   libsmokeqttest4-3
10565   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
10566   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
10567   libsmokeqtxml4-3
10568   libsmokesolid3
10569   libsmokesoprano3
10570   libtaskmanager4a
10571   libtidy-0.99-0
10572   libweather-ion4a
10573   libxklavier16
10574   libxxf86misc1
10575   okteta
10576   oxygencursors
10577   plasma-dataengines-addons
10578   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
10579   plasma-widget-lancelot
10580   plasma-widgets-addons
10581   plasma-widgets-workspace
10582   polkit-kde-1
10583   ruby1.8
10584   systemsettings
10585   update-notifier-common
10586 </p></blockquote>
10587
10588 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
10589 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
10590 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
10591 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
10592
10593       </div>
10594       <div class="tags">
10595
10596
10597         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>.
10598
10599
10600       </div>
10601     </div>
10602     <div class="padding"></div>
10603
10604     <div class="entry">
10605       <div class="title">
10606         <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>
10607       </div>
10608       <div class="date">
10609         22nd November 2010
10610       </div>
10611       <div class="body">
10612         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
10613 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
10614 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
10615 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
10616 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
10617 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
10618 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
10619 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
10620 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
10621
10622 <p>I found
10623 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
10624 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
10625 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
10626 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
10627 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
10628 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
10629
10630 <pre>
10631 #!/bin/sh
10632
10633 # Based on
10634 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
10635
10636 set -e
10637 set -x
10638
10639 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
10640     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
10641     exit 1
10642 else
10643     host="$1"
10644 fi
10645
10646 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
10647     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
10648     exit 1
10649 fi
10650
10651 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
10652 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
10653 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
10654 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
10655
10656 img=$host.img
10657 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
10658 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
10659
10660 parted $img mklabel msdos
10661 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
10662 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
10663 parted $img set 1 boot on
10664
10665 modprobe dm-mod
10666 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
10667 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
10668
10669 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
10670 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
10671 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
10672
10673 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
10674 losetup -d /dev/loop0
10675 </pre>
10676
10677 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
10678 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
10679
10680 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
10681 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
10682 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
10683 seem to work just fine.</p>
10684
10685       </div>
10686       <div class="tags">
10687
10688
10689         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>.
10690
10691
10692       </div>
10693     </div>
10694     <div class="padding"></div>
10695
10696     <div class="entry">
10697       <div class="title">
10698         <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>
10699       </div>
10700       <div class="date">
10701         20th November 2010
10702       </div>
10703       <div class="body">
10704         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
10705 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
10706 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
10707 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
10708
10709 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
10710 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
10711 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
10712
10713 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
10714
10715 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
10716
10717 <blockquote><p>
10718   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
10719   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
10720   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
10721   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
10722   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
10723   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
10724   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
10725   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
10726   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
10727   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
10728   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
10729   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
10730   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
10731   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
10732   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
10733   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
10734   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
10735   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
10736   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
10737   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
10738   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
10739   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
10740   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
10741   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
10742   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
10743   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
10744   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
10745   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
10746   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
10747   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
10748   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
10749   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
10750   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
10751   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
10752   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
10753   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
10754   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
10755   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
10756   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
10757   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
10758   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
10759   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
10760   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
10761   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
10762   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
10763   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
10764   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
10765   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
10766   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
10767   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
10768   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
10769   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
10770   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
10771   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
10772   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
10773   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
10774   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
10775   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
10776   zip
10777 </p></blockquote>
10778
10779 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
10780
10781 <blockquote><p>
10782   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
10783   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
10784   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
10785   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
10786   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
10787   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
10788   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
10789   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
10790   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
10791   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
10792   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
10793   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
10794   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
10795   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
10796   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
10797   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
10798   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
10799   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
10800   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
10801   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
10802   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
10803   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
10804   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
10805   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
10806   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
10807   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
10808   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
10809   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
10810   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
10811 </p></blockquote>
10812
10813 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
10814
10815 <blockquote><p>
10816   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
10817 </p></blockquote>
10818
10819 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
10820
10821 <blockquote><p>
10822 [nothing]
10823 </p></blockquote>
10824
10825 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
10826
10827 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
10828
10829 <blockquote><p>
10830   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
10831   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
10832   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
10833   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
10834   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
10835   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
10836   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
10837   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
10838   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
10839   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
10840   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
10841   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
10842   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
10843   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
10844   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
10845   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
10846   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
10847   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
10848   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
10849   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
10850   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
10851   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
10852   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
10853   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
10854   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
10855   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
10856   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
10857   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
10858   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
10859   ttf-sazanami-gothic
10860 </p></blockquote>
10861
10862 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
10863
10864 <blockquote><p>
10865   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
10866   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
10867   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
10868   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
10869   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
10870   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
10871   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
10872   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
10873   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
10874   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
10875   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
10876   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
10877   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
10878   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
10879   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
10880   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
10881   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
10882   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
10883   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
10884   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
10885   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
10886   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
10887   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
10888   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
10889   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
10890   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
10891   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
10892   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
10893   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
10894   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
10895   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
10896   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
10897   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
10898 </p></blockquote>
10899
10900 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
10901
10902 <blockquote><p>
10903   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
10904   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
10905   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
10906   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
10907   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
10908   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
10909   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
10910 </p></blockquote>
10911
10912 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
10913
10914 <blockquote><p>
10915   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
10916 </p></blockquote>
10917
10918       </div>
10919       <div class="tags">
10920
10921
10922         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>.
10923
10924
10925       </div>
10926     </div>
10927     <div class="padding"></div>
10928
10929     <div class="entry">
10930       <div class="title">
10931         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
10932       </div>
10933       <div class="date">
10934         20th November 2010
10935       </div>
10936       <div class="body">
10937         <p>Answering
10938 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
10939 call from the Gnash project</a> for
10940 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
10941 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
10942 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
10943 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
10944 releases out more often.</p>
10945
10946 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
10947 I have considered setting up a <a
10948 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
10949 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
10950 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
10951 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
10952 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
10953 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
10954 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
10955 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
10956 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
10957 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
10958 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
10959 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
10960
10961       </div>
10962       <div class="tags">
10963
10964
10965         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>.
10966
10967
10968       </div>
10969     </div>
10970     <div class="padding"></div>
10971
10972     <div class="entry">
10973       <div class="title">
10974         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
10975       </div>
10976       <div class="date">
10977          9th November 2010
10978       </div>
10979       <div class="body">
10980         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
10981
10982 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
10983 3D linked in from
10984 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
10985 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
10986
10987       </div>
10988       <div class="tags">
10989
10990
10991         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>.
10992
10993
10994       </div>
10995     </div>
10996     <div class="padding"></div>
10997
10998     <div class="entry">
10999       <div class="title">
11000         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
11001       </div>
11002       <div class="date">
11003         24th October 2010
11004       </div>
11005       <div class="body">
11006         <p>Some updates.</p>
11007
11008 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
11009 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
11010 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
11011 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
11012 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
11013 :)</p>
11014
11015 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
11016 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
11017 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
11018 It is called
11019 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
11020 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
11021 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
11022 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
11023 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
11024 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
11025
11026 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
11027 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
11028 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
11029 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
11030 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
11031 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
11032 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
11033 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
11034 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
11035 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
11036
11037       </div>
11038       <div class="tags">
11039
11040
11041         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>.
11042
11043
11044       </div>
11045     </div>
11046     <div class="padding"></div>
11047
11048     <div class="entry">
11049       <div class="title">
11050         <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>
11051       </div>
11052       <div class="date">
11053          4th September 2010
11054       </div>
11055       <div class="body">
11056         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
11057 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
11058 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
11059 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
11060 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
11061 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
11062 installed.</p>
11063
11064 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
11065 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
11066 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
11067 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
11068 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
11069 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
11070 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
11071 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
11072 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
11073
11074 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
11075 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
11076 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
11077 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
11078 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
11079 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
11080 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
11081 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
11082 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
11083 pages they want to visit.</p>
11084
11085 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
11086 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
11087 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
11088 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
11089 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
11090 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
11091 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
11092 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
11093 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
11094 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
11095 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
11096
11097       </div>
11098       <div class="tags">
11099
11100
11101         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>.
11102
11103
11104       </div>
11105     </div>
11106     <div class="padding"></div>
11107
11108     <div class="entry">
11109       <div class="title">
11110         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
11111       </div>
11112       <div class="date">
11113         27th July 2010
11114       </div>
11115       <div class="body">
11116         <p>I discovered this while doing
11117 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
11118 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
11119 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
11120 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
11121 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
11122
11123 <p>An example is from todays
11124 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
11125 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
11126 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
11127 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
11128 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
11129 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
11130 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
11131
11132 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
11133
11134 <blockquote><pre>
11135 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
11136  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
11137   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
11138 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
11139  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
11140 </pre></blockquote>
11141
11142 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
11143 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
11144 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
11145 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
11146 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
11147 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
11148 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
11149 of dependency loops.</p>
11150
11151 <p>Thanks to
11152 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
11153 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
11154 dependencies
11155 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
11156 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
11157
11158 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
11159 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
11160 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
11161 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
11162 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
11163 it.</p>
11164
11165       </div>
11166       <div class="tags">
11167
11168
11169         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>.
11170
11171
11172       </div>
11173     </div>
11174     <div class="padding"></div>
11175
11176     <div class="entry">
11177       <div class="title">
11178         <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>
11179       </div>
11180       <div class="date">
11181         17th July 2010
11182       </div>
11183       <div class="body">
11184         <p>This is a
11185 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
11186 on my
11187 <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
11188 work</a> on
11189 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
11190 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
11191
11192 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
11193 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
11194 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
11195 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
11196
11197 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
11198 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
11199 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
11200
11201 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
11202
11203 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
11204 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
11205 the web.
11206
11207 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
11208 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
11209 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
11210 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
11211 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
11212 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
11213
11214 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
11215 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
11216 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
11217 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
11218 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
11219 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
11220 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
11221 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
11222 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
11223 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
11224 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
11225 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
11226 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
11227 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
11228 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
11229 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
11230
11231 <blockquote><pre>
11232 ldapsearch -h ldap \
11233   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
11234   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
11235   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
11236   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
11237   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
11238   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
11239
11240 ldapsearch -h ldap \
11241   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
11242   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
11243   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
11244   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
11245   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
11246 </pre></blockquote>
11247
11248 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
11249 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
11250 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
11251 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11252 also exist.</p>
11253
11254 <blockquote><pre>
11255 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11256 objectclass: top
11257 objectclass: dnsdomain
11258 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
11259 dc: tjener
11260 arecord: 10.0.2.2
11261 associateddomain: tjener.intern
11262
11263 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11264 objectclass: top
11265 objectclass: dnsdomain2
11266 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
11267 dc: 2
11268 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
11269 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
11270 </pre></blockquote>
11271
11272 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
11273 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
11274 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
11275 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
11276 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
11277 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
11278 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
11279 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
11280 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
11281 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
11282 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
11283 instead.</p>
11284
11285 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
11286 like this:</p>
11287
11288 <blockquote><pre>
11289 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
11290   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
11291   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
11292   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
11293   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
11294   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
11295
11296 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
11297   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
11298 </pre></blockquote>
11299
11300 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
11301 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
11302 reverse lookups.</p>
11303
11304 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
11305 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
11306 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
11307 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
11308
11309 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
11310 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
11311 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
11312
11313 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
11314 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
11315 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
11316 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
11317 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
11318
11319 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
11320 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
11321 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
11322 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
11323 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
11324
11325 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
11326 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
11327 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
11328 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
11329 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
11330 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
11331
11332 <blockquote><pre>
11333 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
11334     SUP top
11335     AUXILIARY
11336     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
11337           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
11338           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
11339           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
11340           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
11341     ))
11342 </pre></blockquote>
11343
11344 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
11345 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
11346 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
11347 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
11348 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
11349 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
11350
11351 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
11352
11353 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
11354 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
11355 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
11356 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
11357 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
11358
11359 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
11360 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
11361 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
11362 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
11363
11364 <blockquote><pre>
11365 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
11366 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
11367 </pre></blockquote>
11368
11369 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
11370 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
11371 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
11372 search result is this entry:</p>
11373
11374 <blockquote><pre>
11375 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11376 cn: dhcp
11377 objectClass: top
11378 objectClass: dhcpServer
11379 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11380 </pre></blockquote>
11381
11382 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
11383 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
11384 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
11385 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
11386 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
11387 The search result is this entry:</p>
11388
11389 <blockquote><pre>
11390 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11391 cn: DHCP Config
11392 objectClass: top
11393 objectClass: dhcpService
11394 objectClass: dhcpOptions
11395 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11396 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
11397 dhcpStatements: authoritative
11398 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
11399 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
11400 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
11401 </pre></blockquote>
11402
11403 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
11404 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
11405 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
11406 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
11407 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
11408 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
11409 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
11410 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
11411 related computer objects.</p>
11412
11413 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
11414 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
11415 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
11416 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
11417 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
11418 like:</p>
11419
11420 <blockquote><pre>
11421 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11422 cn: hostname
11423 objectClass: top
11424 objectClass: dhcpHost
11425 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
11426 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
11427 </pre></blockquote>
11428
11429 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
11430 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
11431 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
11432 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
11433 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
11434 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
11435 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
11436 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
11437 structural object class.
11438
11439 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
11440
11441 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
11442 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
11443 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
11444 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
11445 in the configuration.</p>
11446
11447 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
11448 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
11449 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
11450 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
11451 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
11452 structure.</p>
11453
11454 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
11455 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
11456
11457 <blockquote><pre>
11458 ou=services
11459   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
11460     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
11461     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
11462       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
11463         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
11464     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
11465       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
11466         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
11467     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
11468       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
11469 </pre></blockquote>
11470
11471 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
11472 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
11473 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
11474 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
11475
11476 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
11477 like this:</p>
11478
11479 <blockquote><pre>
11480 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11481 dc: hostname
11482 objectClass: top
11483 objectClass: dhcpHost
11484 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
11485 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
11486 associateddomain: hostname.intern
11487 arecord: 10.11.12.13
11488 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
11489 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
11490 </pre></blockquote>
11491
11492 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
11493 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
11494 auxiliary object class.</p>
11495
11496       </div>
11497       <div class="tags">
11498
11499
11500         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>.
11501
11502
11503       </div>
11504     </div>
11505     <div class="padding"></div>
11506
11507     <div class="entry">
11508       <div class="title">
11509         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
11510       </div>
11511       <div class="date">
11512         14th July 2010
11513       </div>
11514       <div class="body">
11515         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
11516 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
11517 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
11518 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
11519 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
11520
11521 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
11522 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
11523
11524 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
11525 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
11526 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
11527 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
11528 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
11529 to a slave DNS server.</p>
11530
11531 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
11532 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
11533 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
11534 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
11535 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
11536 seem to work.</p>
11537
11538 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
11539 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
11540 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
11541 this:</p>
11542
11543 <blockquote><pre>
11544   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11545   cn: hostname
11546   objectClass: dhcphost
11547   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
11548   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
11549   associateddomain: hostname.intern
11550   arecord: 10.11.12.13
11551   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
11552   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
11553   ldapconfigsound: Y
11554 </pre></blockquote>
11555
11556 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
11557 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
11558 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
11559 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
11560
11561 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
11562 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
11563 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
11564 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
11565 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
11566 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
11567 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
11568 might be a good place to put it.</p>
11569
11570 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
11571 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
11572
11573       </div>
11574       <div class="tags">
11575
11576
11577         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>.
11578
11579
11580       </div>
11581     </div>
11582     <div class="padding"></div>
11583
11584     <div class="entry">
11585       <div class="title">
11586         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
11587       </div>
11588       <div class="date">
11589         11th July 2010
11590       </div>
11591       <div class="body">
11592         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
11593 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
11594 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
11595 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
11596
11597 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
11598 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
11599 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
11600 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
11601 LTSP clients.</p>
11602
11603 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
11604 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
11605 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
11606
11607 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
11608 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
11609 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
11610
11611 <blockquote><pre>
11612 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
11613 #
11614 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
11615 #
11616 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
11617 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
11618 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
11619 #
11620 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
11621 # existence of attribute names.
11622 #
11623 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
11624 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
11625 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
11626 #
11627 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
11628 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
11629 #
11630 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
11631 #     SUP top
11632 #     AUXILIARY
11633 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
11634
11635 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
11636 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
11637     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
11638     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
11639         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
11640         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
11641             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
11642             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
11643             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
11644             # bass value on to clients
11645             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
11646         done
11647     done
11648 fi
11649 </pre></blockquote>
11650
11651 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
11652 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
11653 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
11654 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
11655 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
11656
11657 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
11658 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
11659
11660 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
11661 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
11662 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
11663 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
11664 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
11665 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
11666
11667       </div>
11668       <div class="tags">
11669
11670
11671         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>.
11672
11673
11674       </div>
11675     </div>
11676     <div class="padding"></div>
11677
11678     <div class="entry">
11679       <div class="title">
11680         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
11681       </div>
11682       <div class="date">
11683          9th July 2010
11684       </div>
11685       <div class="body">
11686         <p>Since
11687 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
11688 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
11689 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
11690 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
11691 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
11692 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
11693 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
11694 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
11695 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
11696 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
11697 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
11698 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
11699 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
11700
11701       </div>
11702       <div class="tags">
11703
11704
11705         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>.
11706
11707
11708       </div>
11709     </div>
11710     <div class="padding"></div>
11711
11712     <div class="entry">
11713       <div class="title">
11714         <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>
11715       </div>
11716       <div class="date">
11717          3rd July 2010
11718       </div>
11719       <div class="body">
11720         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
11721 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
11722 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
11723 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
11724 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
11725 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
11726 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
11727 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
11728
11729 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
11730 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
11731 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
11732 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
11733 publish the difference.</p>
11734
11735 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
11736
11737 <blockquote><p>
11738   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
11739   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
11740   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
11741   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
11742   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
11743   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
11744   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
11745   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
11746 </p></blockquote>
11747
11748 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
11749
11750 <blockquote><p>
11751   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
11752   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
11753   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
11754   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
11755   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
11756   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
11757   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
11758   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
11759   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
11760   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
11761   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
11762   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
11763   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
11764   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
11765   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
11766   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
11767   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
11768   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
11769   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
11770   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
11771 </p></blockquote>
11772
11773 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
11774
11775 <blockquote><p>
11776   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
11777   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
11778   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
11779   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
11780   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
11781   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
11782   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
11783   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
11784   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
11785   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
11786   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
11787   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
11788   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
11789   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
11790   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
11791   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
11792   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
11793   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
11794   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
11795   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
11796   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
11797 </p></blockquote>
11798
11799 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
11800
11801 <blockquote><p>
11802   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
11803   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
11804   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
11805 </p></blockquote>
11806
11807 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
11808 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
11809 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
11810 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
11811 the difference somewhat.
11812
11813       </div>
11814       <div class="tags">
11815
11816
11817         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>.
11818
11819
11820       </div>
11821     </div>
11822     <div class="padding"></div>
11823
11824     <div class="entry">
11825       <div class="title">
11826         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
11827       </div>
11828       <div class="date">
11829         28th June 2010
11830       </div>
11831       <div class="body">
11832         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
11833 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
11834 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
11835 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
11836 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
11837 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
11838 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
11839 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
11840 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
11841 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
11842
11843 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
11844 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
11845 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
11846 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
11847 released.</p>
11848
11849 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
11850 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
11851 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
11852 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
11853
11854 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
11855 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
11856
11857 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
11858 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
11859 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
11860 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
11861 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
11862
11863       </div>
11864       <div class="tags">
11865
11866
11867         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>.
11868
11869
11870       </div>
11871     </div>
11872     <div class="padding"></div>
11873
11874     <div class="entry">
11875       <div class="title">
11876         <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>
11877       </div>
11878       <div class="date">
11879         24th June 2010
11880       </div>
11881       <div class="body">
11882         <p>A while back, I
11883 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
11884 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
11885 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
11886 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
11887
11888 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
11889 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
11890 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
11891 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
11892
11893 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
11894 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
11895 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
11896 Debian Edu.</p>
11897
11898 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
11899 the
11900 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
11901 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
11902 available today from IETF.</p>
11903
11904 <pre>
11905 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
11906 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
11907 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
11908  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
11909         NAME 'dhcpHost'
11910         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
11911 -       SUP top
11912 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
11913         MUST cn
11914         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
11915         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
11916 </pre>
11917
11918 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
11919 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
11920 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
11921
11922 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
11923 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
11924
11925       </div>
11926       <div class="tags">
11927
11928
11929         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>.
11930
11931
11932       </div>
11933     </div>
11934     <div class="padding"></div>
11935
11936     <div class="entry">
11937       <div class="title">
11938         <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>
11939       </div>
11940       <div class="date">
11941         16th June 2010
11942       </div>
11943       <div class="body">
11944         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
11945 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
11946 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
11947 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
11948 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
11949 this:
11950
11951 <blockquote><pre>
11952 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
11953 tasksel --new-install
11954 </pre></blockquote>
11955
11956 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
11957 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
11958 any output what so ever.
11959
11960 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
11961 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
11962 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
11963 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
11964 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
11965 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
11966 code like this:
11967
11968 <blockquote><pre>
11969 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
11970 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
11971 $cmd
11972 </pre></blockquote>
11973
11974 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
11975 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
11976 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
11977 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
11978 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
11979 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
11980 installation.</p>
11981
11982 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
11983 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
11984 like this.</p>
11985
11986       </div>
11987       <div class="tags">
11988
11989
11990         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>.
11991
11992
11993       </div>
11994     </div>
11995     <div class="padding"></div>
11996
11997     <div class="entry">
11998       <div class="title">
11999         <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>
12000       </div>
12001       <div class="date">
12002         13th June 2010
12003       </div>
12004       <div class="body">
12005         <p>My
12006 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
12007 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
12008 finally made the upgrade logs available from
12009 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
12010 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
12011 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
12012 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
12013
12014 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
12015 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
12016 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
12017 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
12018 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
12019 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
12020 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
12021 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
12022
12023 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
12024 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
12025 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
12026 too surprising.</p>
12027
12028 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
12029 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
12030 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
12031 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
12032 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
12033 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
12034 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
12035 continue.</p>
12036
12037 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
12038 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
12039   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
12040   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
12041   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
12042   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
12043   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
12044   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
12045   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
12046   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
12047   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
12048   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
12049   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
12050   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
12051   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
12052   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
12053   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
12054   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
12055   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
12056   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
12057   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
12058   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
12059   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
12060   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
12061   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
12062   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
12063   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
12064   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
12065   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
12066   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
12067
12068 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
12069
12070 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
12071   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
12072   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
12073   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
12074   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
12075   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
12076   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
12077   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
12078   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
12079   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
12080   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
12081   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
12082   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
12083   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
12084   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
12085   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
12086   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
12087   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
12088   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
12089   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
12090   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
12091   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
12092   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
12093   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
12094   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
12095   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
12096   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
12097   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
12098   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
12099   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
12100   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
12101   zip</p>
12102
12103 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
12104
12105 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
12106   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
12107   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
12108   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
12109   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
12110   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
12111   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
12112   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
12113   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
12114   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
12115   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
12116   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
12117   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
12118   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
12119   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
12120   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
12121   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
12122   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
12123   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
12124   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
12125   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
12126   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
12127   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
12128   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
12129   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
12130   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
12131   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
12132   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
12133
12134 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
12135 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
12136   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
12137   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
12138   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
12139   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
12140   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
12141   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
12142   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
12143   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
12144   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
12145   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
12146   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
12147   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
12148   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
12149   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
12150   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
12151   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
12152   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
12153   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
12154   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
12155   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
12156   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
12157   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
12158   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
12159   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
12160   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
12161   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
12162   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
12163   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
12164   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
12165   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
12166   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
12167   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
12168   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
12169   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
12170   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
12171   xulrunner-1.9</p>
12172
12173
12174       </div>
12175       <div class="tags">
12176
12177
12178         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>.
12179
12180
12181       </div>
12182     </div>
12183     <div class="padding"></div>
12184
12185     <div class="entry">
12186       <div class="title">
12187         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
12188       </div>
12189       <div class="date">
12190         11th June 2010
12191       </div>
12192       <div class="body">
12193         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
12194 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
12195 have been discovered and reported in the process
12196 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
12197 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
12198 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
12199 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
12200 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
12201
12202 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
12203 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
12204 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
12205 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
12206 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
12207 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
12208
12209 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
12210 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
12211 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
12212 is created.  The bug report
12213 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
12214 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
12215 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
12216 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
12217 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
12218 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
12219 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
12220 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
12221 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
12222 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
12223 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
12224 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
12225 Debian Squeeze.</p>
12226
12227 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
12228 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
12229 trick:</p>
12230
12231 <blockquote><pre>
12232 #!/bin/sh
12233 set -ex
12234
12235 if [ "$1" ] ; then
12236     desktop=$1
12237 else
12238     desktop=gnome
12239 fi
12240
12241 from=lenny
12242 to=squeeze
12243
12244 exec &lt; /dev/null
12245 unset LANG
12246 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
12247 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
12248 fuser -mv .
12249 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
12250 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
12251 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
12252 #!/bin/sh
12253 exit 101
12254 EOF
12255 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
12256 exit_cleanup() {
12257     umount $tmpdir/proc
12258 }
12259 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
12260 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
12261 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
12262
12263 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
12264
12265 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
12266 # to return the correct answers.
12267 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
12268     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
12269
12270 # Include the desktop and laptop task
12271 for test in desktop laptop ; do
12272     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
12273 #!/bin/sh
12274 exit 2
12275 EOF
12276     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
12277 done
12278
12279 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
12280 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
12281 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
12282 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
12283
12284 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
12285 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
12286 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
12287 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
12288 fuser -mv
12289 </pre></blockquote>
12290
12291 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
12292 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
12293 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
12294 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
12295 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
12296 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
12297
12298 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
12299 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
12300 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
12301 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
12302 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
12303 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
12304 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
12305
12306 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
12307 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
12308 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
12309 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
12310 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
12311 packages.</p>
12312
12313       </div>
12314       <div class="tags">
12315
12316
12317         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>.
12318
12319
12320       </div>
12321     </div>
12322     <div class="padding"></div>
12323
12324     <div class="entry">
12325       <div class="title">
12326         <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>
12327       </div>
12328       <div class="date">
12329          6th June 2010
12330       </div>
12331       <div class="body">
12332         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
12333 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
12334 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
12335 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
12336 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
12337 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
12338 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
12339
12340 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
12341 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
12342 COLUMNS):</p>
12343
12344 <blockquote><pre>
12345 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
12346 previous=N
12347 PREVLEVEL=
12348 RUNLEVEL=
12349 runlevel=S
12350 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
12351 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
12352 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
12353 </pre></blockquote>
12354
12355 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
12356 script.</p>
12357
12358 <blockquote><pre>
12359 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
12360 previous=N
12361 PREVLEVEL=N
12362 RUNLEVEL=S
12363 runlevel=S
12364 </pre></blockquote>
12365
12366 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
12367 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
12368 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
12369
12370 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
12371 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
12372 choice.</p>
12373
12374       </div>
12375       <div class="tags">
12376
12377
12378         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>.
12379
12380
12381       </div>
12382     </div>
12383     <div class="padding"></div>
12384
12385     <div class="entry">
12386       <div class="title">
12387         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
12388       </div>
12389       <div class="date">
12390          6th June 2010
12391       </div>
12392       <div class="body">
12393         <p>Via the
12394 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
12395 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
12396 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
12397 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
12398 following the standards wars of today.</p>
12399
12400       </div>
12401       <div class="tags">
12402
12403
12404         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>.
12405
12406
12407       </div>
12408     </div>
12409     <div class="padding"></div>
12410
12411     <div class="entry">
12412       <div class="title">
12413         <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>
12414       </div>
12415       <div class="date">
12416          3rd June 2010
12417       </div>
12418       <div class="body">
12419         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
12420 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
12421 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
12422 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
12423 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
12424
12425 <blockquote><pre>
12426 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
12427   vendor                    count
12428   Dell Computer Corporation     1
12429     PowerEdge 1750              1
12430   IBM                           1
12431     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
12432   Intel                         2
12433   [no-dmi-info]                 3
12434 maintainer:~#
12435 </pre></blockquote>
12436
12437 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
12438 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
12439 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
12440 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
12441 option to list the individual machines.</p>
12442
12443 <p>A larger list is
12444 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
12445 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
12446 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
12447 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
12448 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
12449 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
12450 collector.</p>
12451
12452       </div>
12453       <div class="tags">
12454
12455
12456         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>.
12457
12458
12459       </div>
12460     </div>
12461     <div class="padding"></div>
12462
12463     <div class="entry">
12464       <div class="title">
12465         <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>
12466       </div>
12467       <div class="date">
12468          1st June 2010
12469       </div>
12470       <div class="body">
12471         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
12472 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
12473 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
12474 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
12475 wait.</p>
12476
12477 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
12478 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
12479 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
12480 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
12481 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
12482 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
12483
12484 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
12485 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
12486 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
12487 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
12488 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
12489 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
12490 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
12491 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
12492
12493 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
12494
12495       </div>
12496       <div class="tags">
12497
12498
12499         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>.
12500
12501
12502       </div>
12503     </div>
12504     <div class="padding"></div>
12505
12506     <div class="entry">
12507       <div class="title">
12508         <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>
12509       </div>
12510       <div class="date">
12511         27th May 2010
12512       </div>
12513       <div class="body">
12514         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
12515 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
12516 issues are known and should be solved:
12517
12518 <p><ul>
12519
12520 <li>The wicd package seen to
12521 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
12522 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
12523 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
12524 seem to be on the case.</li>
12525
12526 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
12527 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
12528 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
12529 maintainer is on the case.</li>
12530
12531 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
12532 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
12533 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
12534 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
12535 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
12536 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
12537 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
12538 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
12539
12540 </ul></p>
12541
12542 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
12543 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
12544 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
12545 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
12546
12547 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
12548 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
12549 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
12550 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
12551
12552 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
12553
12554       </div>
12555       <div class="tags">
12556
12557
12558         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>.
12559
12560
12561       </div>
12562     </div>
12563     <div class="padding"></div>
12564
12565     <div class="entry">
12566       <div class="title">
12567         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
12568       </div>
12569       <div class="date">
12570         22nd May 2010
12571       </div>
12572       <div class="body">
12573         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
12574 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
12575 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
12576 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
12577
12578 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
12579 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
12580 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
12581 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
12582 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
12583 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
12584 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
12585 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
12586 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
12587 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
12588 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
12589 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
12590 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
12591 going to work.</p>
12592
12593 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
12594 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
12595 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
12596 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
12597 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
12598 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
12599 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
12600 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
12601 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
12602 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
12603 Edu.</p>
12604
12605 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
12606 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
12607 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
12608 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
12609 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
12610 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
12611
12612 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
12613 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
12614
12615       </div>
12616       <div class="tags">
12617
12618
12619         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>.
12620
12621
12622       </div>
12623     </div>
12624     <div class="padding"></div>
12625
12626     <div class="entry">
12627       <div class="title">
12628         <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>
12629       </div>
12630       <div class="date">
12631         14th May 2010
12632       </div>
12633       <div class="body">
12634         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
12635 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
12636 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
12637 expected, if I am to believe the
12638 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
12639 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
12640 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
12641 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
12642 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
12643 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
12644 version.</p>
12645
12646 More information about
12647 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
12648 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
12649 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
12650 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
12651
12652 <blockquote><pre>
12653 CONCURRENCY=none
12654 </pre></blockquote>
12655
12656 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
12657 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
12658 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
12659 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
12660
12661       </div>
12662       <div class="tags">
12663
12664
12665         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>.
12666
12667
12668       </div>
12669     </div>
12670     <div class="padding"></div>
12671
12672     <div class="entry">
12673       <div class="title">
12674         <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>
12675       </div>
12676       <div class="date">
12677         14th May 2010
12678       </div>
12679       <div class="body">
12680         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
12681 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
12682 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
12683 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
12684 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
12685 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
12686 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
12687 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
12688
12689 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
12690 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
12691 this on the collector host:</p>
12692
12693 <blockquote><pre>
12694 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
12695 </pre></blockquote>
12696
12697 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
12698 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
12699
12700 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
12701 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
12702 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
12703 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
12704 written yet.</p>
12705
12706       </div>
12707       <div class="tags">
12708
12709
12710         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>.
12711
12712
12713       </div>
12714     </div>
12715     <div class="padding"></div>
12716
12717     <div class="entry">
12718       <div class="title">
12719         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
12720       </div>
12721       <div class="date">
12722         13th May 2010
12723       </div>
12724       <div class="body">
12725         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
12726 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
12727 has been
12728 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
12729
12730 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
12731 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
12732 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
12733 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
12734 based boot system.  Tollef is
12735 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
12736 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
12737 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
12738 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
12739 at the moment do not.</p>
12740
12741 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
12742 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
12743 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
12744 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
12745 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
12746 way forward.</p>
12747
12748 <p>In the mean time, based on the
12749 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
12750 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
12751 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
12752 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
12753 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
12754 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
12755 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
12756 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
12757
12758       </div>
12759       <div class="tags">
12760
12761
12762         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>.
12763
12764
12765       </div>
12766     </div>
12767     <div class="padding"></div>
12768
12769     <div class="entry">
12770       <div class="title">
12771         <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>
12772       </div>
12773       <div class="date">
12774          6th May 2010
12775       </div>
12776       <div class="body">
12777         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
12778 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
12779 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
12780 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
12781 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
12782 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
12783 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
12784
12785 <blockquote><pre>
12786 CONCURRENCY=makefile
12787 </pre></blockquote>
12788
12789 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
12790 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
12791 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
12792 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
12793 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
12794 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
12795 make this happen.</p>
12796
12797 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
12798 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
12799 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
12800 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
12801 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
12802
12803 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
12804 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
12805 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
12806 fix the remaining issues.</p>
12807
12808 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
12809 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
12810 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
12811 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
12812
12813       </div>
12814       <div class="tags">
12815
12816
12817         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>.
12818
12819
12820       </div>
12821     </div>
12822     <div class="padding"></div>
12823
12824     <div class="entry">
12825       <div class="title">
12826         <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>
12827       </div>
12828       <div class="date">
12829         27th July 2009
12830       </div>
12831       <div class="body">
12832         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
12833 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
12834 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
12835 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
12836 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
12837 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
12838 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
12839
12840 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
12841 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
12842 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
12843
12844       </div>
12845       <div class="tags">
12846
12847
12848         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>.
12849
12850
12851       </div>
12852     </div>
12853     <div class="padding"></div>
12854
12855     <div class="entry">
12856       <div class="title">
12857         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
12858       </div>
12859       <div class="date">
12860         22nd July 2009
12861       </div>
12862       <div class="body">
12863         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
12864 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
12865 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
12866 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
12867 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
12868 the package up to date.</p>
12869
12870 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
12871 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
12872 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
12873 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
12874 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
12875 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
12876 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
12877 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
12878 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
12879 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
12880 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
12881 working on the future release.</p>
12882
12883 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
12884 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
12885
12886       </div>
12887       <div class="tags">
12888
12889
12890         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>.
12891
12892
12893       </div>
12894     </div>
12895     <div class="padding"></div>
12896
12897     <div class="entry">
12898       <div class="title">
12899         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
12900       </div>
12901       <div class="date">
12902         24th June 2009
12903       </div>
12904       <div class="body">
12905         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
12906 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
12907 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
12908 funded
12909 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
12910 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
12911 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
12912 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
12913 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
12914 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
12915
12916 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
12917 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
12918 boot:</p>
12919
12920 <ul>
12921
12922 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
12923
12924 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
12925    clock is in UTC.</li>
12926
12927 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
12928    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
12929    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
12930
12931 </ul>
12932
12933 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
12934 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
12935 Villegas</a>.
12936
12937 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
12938 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
12939 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
12940 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
12941 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
12942 using this.</p>
12943
12944 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
12945 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
12946 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
12947 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
12948 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
12949 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
12950 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
12951
12952       </div>
12953       <div class="tags">
12954
12955
12956         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>.
12957
12958
12959       </div>
12960     </div>
12961     <div class="padding"></div>
12962
12963     <div class="entry">
12964       <div class="title">
12965         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/BSAs_p_stander_om_piratkopiering_m_ter_motstand.html">BSAs påstander om piratkopiering møter motstand</a>
12966       </div>
12967       <div class="date">
12968         17th May 2009
12969       </div>
12970       <div class="body">
12971         <p>Hvert år de siste årene har BSA, lobbyfronten til de store
12972 programvareselskapene som Microsoft og Apple, publisert en rapport der
12973 de gjetter på hvor mye piratkopiering påfører i tapte inntekter i
12974 ulike land rundt om i verden.  Resultatene er tendensiøse.  For noen
12975 dager siden kom
12976 <a href="http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/studies/globalpiracy2008.pdf">siste
12977 rapport</a>, og det er flere kritiske kommentarer publisert de siste
12978 dagene.  Et spesielt interessant kommentar fra Sverige,
12979 <a href="http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.229795/bsa-hoftade-sverigesiffror">BSA
12980 höftade Sverigesiffror</a>, oppsummeres slik:</p>
12981
12982 <blockquote>
12983 I sin senaste rapport slår BSA fast att 25 procent av all mjukvara i
12984 Sverige är piratkopierad. Det utan att ha pratat med ett enda svenskt
12985 företag. "Man bör nog kanske inte se de här siffrorna som helt
12986 exakta", säger BSAs Sverigechef John Hugosson.
12987 </blockquote>
12988
12989 <p>Mon tro om de er like metodiske når de gjetter på andelen piratkopiering i Norge?  To andre kommentarer er <a
12990 href="http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/comment/2242134/bsa-piracy-figures-shot-reality">BSA
12991 piracy figures need a shot of reality</a> og <a
12992 href="http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3958/125/">Does The WIPO
12993 Copyright Treaty Work?</a></p>
12994
12995 <p>Fant lenkene via <a
12996 href="http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/17/1632242">oppslag
12997 på Slashdot</a>.</p>
12998
12999       </div>
13000       <div class="tags">
13001
13002
13003         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>.
13004
13005
13006       </div>
13007     </div>
13008     <div class="padding"></div>
13009
13010     <div class="entry">
13011       <div class="title">
13012         <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>
13013       </div>
13014       <div class="date">
13015          7th May 2009
13016       </div>
13017       <div class="body">
13018         <p>Kom over
13019 <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10216873-16.html">interessante
13020 tall</a> fra IDG om utviklingen av linuxservermarkedet.  Fikk meg til
13021 å tenke på antall tjenermaskiner ved Universitetet i Oslo der jeg
13022 jobber til daglig.  En rask opptelling forteller meg at vi har 490
13023 (61%) fysiske unix-tjener (mest linux men også noen solaris) og 196
13024 (25%) windowstjenere, samt 112 (14%) virtuelle unix-tjenere.  Med den
13025 bakgrunnskunnskapen kan jeg godt tro at IDG er inne på noe.</p>
13026
13027       </div>
13028       <div class="tags">
13029
13030
13031         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>.
13032
13033
13034       </div>
13035     </div>
13036     <div class="padding"></div>
13037
13038     <div class="entry">
13039       <div class="title">
13040         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kryptert_harddisk___naturligvis.html">Kryptert harddisk - naturligvis</a>
13041       </div>
13042       <div class="date">
13043          2nd May 2009
13044       </div>
13045       <div class="body">
13046         <p><a href="http://www.dagensit.no/trender/article1658676.ece">Dagens
13047 IT melder</a> at Intel hevder at det er dyrt å miste en datamaskin,
13048 når en tar tap av arbeidstid, fortrolige dokumenter,
13049 personopplysninger og alt annet det innebærer.  Det er ingen tvil om
13050 at det er en kostbar affære å miste sin datamaskin, og det er årsaken
13051 til at jeg har kryptert harddisken på både kontormaskinen og min
13052 bærbare.  Begge inneholder personopplysninger jeg ikke ønsker skal
13053 komme på avveie, den første informasjon relatert til jobben min ved
13054 Universitetet i Oslo, og den andre relatert til blant annet
13055 foreningsarbeide.  Kryptering av diskene gjør at det er lite
13056 sannsynlig at dophoder som kan finne på å rappe maskinene får noe ut
13057 av dem.  Maskinene låses automatisk etter noen minutter uten bruk,
13058 og en reboot vil gjøre at de ber om passord før de vil starte opp.
13059 Jeg bruker Debian på begge maskinene, og installasjonssystemet der
13060 gjør det trivielt å sette opp krypterte disker.  Jeg har LVM på toppen
13061 av krypterte partisjoner, slik at alt av datapartisjoner er kryptert.
13062 Jeg anbefaler alle å kryptere diskene på sine bærbare.  Kostnaden når
13063 det er gjort slik jeg gjør det er minimale, og gevinstene er
13064 betydelige.  En bør dog passe på passordet.  Hvis det går tapt, må
13065 maskinen reinstalleres og alt er tapt.</p>
13066
13067 <p>Krypteringen vil ikke stoppe kompetente angripere som f.eks. kjøler
13068 ned minnebrikkene før maskinen rebootes med programvare for å hente ut
13069 krypteringsnøklene.  Kostnaden med å forsvare seg mot slike angripere
13070 er for min del høyere enn gevinsten.  Jeg tror oddsene for at
13071 f.eks. etteretningsorganisasjoner har glede av å titte på mine
13072 maskiner er minimale, og ulempene jeg ville oppnå ved å forsøke å
13073 gjøre det vanskeligere for angripere med kompetanse og ressurser er
13074 betydelige.</p>
13075
13076       </div>
13077       <div class="tags">
13078
13079
13080         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>.
13081
13082
13083       </div>
13084     </div>
13085     <div class="padding"></div>
13086
13087     <div class="entry">
13088       <div class="title">
13089         <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>
13090       </div>
13091       <div class="date">
13092          2nd May 2009
13093       </div>
13094       <div class="body">
13095         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
13096 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
13097 do not yet know them.</p>
13098
13099 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
13100 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
13101 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
13102 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
13103 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
13104 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
13105 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
13106 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
13107 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
13108 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
13109 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
13110
13111 <p>The second one is
13112 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
13113 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
13114 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
13115 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
13116 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
13117 and the company behind it is running
13118 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
13119 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
13120 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
13121 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
13122 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
13123 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
13124 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
13125 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
13126
13127 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
13128 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
13129 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
13130 surrounded by today.</p>
13131
13132       </div>
13133       <div class="tags">
13134
13135
13136         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>.
13137
13138
13139       </div>
13140     </div>
13141     <div class="padding"></div>
13142
13143     <div class="entry">
13144       <div class="title">
13145         <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>
13146       </div>
13147       <div class="date">
13148         28th April 2009
13149       </div>
13150       <div class="body">
13151         <p>Julien Blache
13152 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
13153 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
13154 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
13155 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
13156 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
13157 properties.</p>
13158
13159       </div>
13160       <div class="tags">
13161
13162
13163         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>.
13164
13165
13166       </div>
13167     </div>
13168     <div class="padding"></div>
13169
13170     <div class="entry">
13171       <div class="title">
13172         <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>
13173       </div>
13174       <div class="date">
13175         30th March 2009
13176       </div>
13177       <div class="body">
13178         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
13179 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
13180 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
13181 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
13182 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
13183 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
13184 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
13185 application.</p>
13186
13187 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
13188 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
13189 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
13190 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
13191 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
13192 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
13193 blocked from doing so.</p>
13194
13195 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
13196 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
13197 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
13198 requirements change.</p>
13199
13200 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
13201 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
13202 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
13203
13204       </div>
13205       <div class="tags">
13206
13207
13208         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>.
13209
13210
13211       </div>
13212     </div>
13213     <div class="padding"></div>
13214
13215     <div class="entry">
13216       <div class="title">
13217         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
13218       </div>
13219       <div class="date">
13220         29th March 2009
13221       </div>
13222       <div class="body">
13223         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
13224 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
13225 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
13226 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
13227 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
13228 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
13229 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
13230 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
13231 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
13232 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
13233 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
13234 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
13235 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
13236 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
13237 now. :)</p>
13238
13239       </div>
13240       <div class="tags">
13241
13242
13243         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>.
13244
13245
13246       </div>
13247     </div>
13248     <div class="padding"></div>
13249
13250     <div class="entry">
13251       <div class="title">
13252         <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>
13253       </div>
13254       <div class="date">
13255         29th March 2009
13256       </div>
13257       <div class="body">
13258         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
13259 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
13260 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
13261 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
13262 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
13263 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
13264
13265 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
13266 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
13267 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
13268 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
13269 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
13270 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
13271 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
13272 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
13273 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
13274 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
13275 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
13276 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
13277 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
13278
13279 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
13280 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
13281 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
13282 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
13283
13284 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
13285 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
13286
13287 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
13288 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
13289 new IETF work group?</p>
13290
13291       </div>
13292       <div class="tags">
13293
13294
13295         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>.
13296
13297
13298       </div>
13299     </div>
13300     <div class="padding"></div>
13301
13302     <div class="entry">
13303       <div class="title">
13304         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Endelig_er_Debian_Lenny_gitt_ut.html">Endelig er Debian Lenny gitt ut</a>
13305       </div>
13306       <div class="date">
13307         15th February 2009
13308       </div>
13309       <div class="body">
13310         <p>Endelig er <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>
13311 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214">Lenny</a> gitt ut.
13312 Et langt steg videre for Debian-prosjektet, og en rekke nye
13313 programpakker blir nå tilgjengelig for de av oss som bruker den
13314 stabile utgaven av Debian.  Neste steg er nå å få
13315 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> /
13316 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> ferdig
13317 oppdatert for den nye utgaven, slik at en oppdatert versjon kan
13318 slippes løs på skolene.  Takk til alle debian-utviklerne som har
13319 gjort dette mulig.  Endelig er f.eks. fungerende avhengighetsstyrt
13320 bootsekvens tilgjengelig i stabil utgave, vha pakken
13321 <tt>insserv</tt>.</p>
13322
13323       </div>
13324       <div class="tags">
13325
13326
13327         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>.
13328
13329
13330       </div>
13331     </div>
13332     <div class="padding"></div>
13333
13334     <div class="entry">
13335       <div class="title">
13336         <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>
13337       </div>
13338       <div class="date">
13339          7th December 2008
13340       </div>
13341       <div class="body">
13342         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
13343 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
13344 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
13345 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
13346 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
13347 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
13348 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
13349 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
13350
13351 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
13352 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
13353 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
13354 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
13355 of these cards.</p>
13356
13357       </div>
13358       <div class="tags">
13359
13360
13361         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>.
13362
13363
13364       </div>
13365     </div>
13366     <div class="padding"></div>
13367
13368     <div class="entry">
13369       <div class="title">
13370         <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>
13371       </div>
13372       <div class="date">
13373         25th November 2008
13374       </div>
13375       <div class="body">
13376         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
13377 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
13378 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
13379 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
13380 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
13381 notes are available on
13382 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
13383 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
13384 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
13385 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
13386 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
13387 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
13388 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
13389 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
13390 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
13391
13392 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
13393 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
13394
13395       </div>
13396       <div class="tags">
13397
13398
13399         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>.
13400
13401
13402       </div>
13403     </div>
13404     <div class="padding"></div>
13405
13406     <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>
13407     <div id="sidebar">
13408
13409
13410
13411 <h2>Archive</h2>
13412 <ul>
13413
13414 <li>2018
13415 <ul>
13416
13417 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/01/">January (1)</a></li>
13418
13419 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/02/">February (5)</a></li>
13420
13421 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/03/">March (5)</a></li>
13422
13423 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/04/">April (3)</a></li>
13424
13425 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/06/">June (2)</a></li>
13426
13427 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/07/">July (5)</a></li>
13428
13429 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/08/">August (1)</a></li>
13430
13431 </ul></li>
13432
13433 <li>2017
13434 <ul>
13435
13436 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/01/">January (4)</a></li>
13437
13438 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/02/">February (3)</a></li>
13439
13440 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/03/">March (5)</a></li>
13441
13442 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/04/">April (2)</a></li>
13443
13444 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/06/">June (5)</a></li>
13445
13446 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/07/">July (1)</a></li>
13447
13448 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/08/">August (1)</a></li>
13449
13450 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/09/">September (3)</a></li>
13451
13452 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/10/">October (5)</a></li>
13453
13454 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/11/">November (3)</a></li>
13455
13456 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/12/">December (4)</a></li>
13457
13458 </ul></li>
13459
13460 <li>2016
13461 <ul>
13462
13463 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/01/">January (3)</a></li>
13464
13465 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/02/">February (2)</a></li>
13466
13467 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/03/">March (3)</a></li>
13468
13469 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/04/">April (8)</a></li>
13470
13471 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/05/">May (8)</a></li>
13472
13473 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/06/">June (2)</a></li>
13474
13475 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/07/">July (2)</a></li>
13476
13477 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/08/">August (5)</a></li>
13478
13479 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/09/">September (2)</a></li>
13480
13481 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/10/">October (3)</a></li>
13482
13483 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/11/">November (8)</a></li>
13484
13485 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/12/">December (5)</a></li>
13486
13487 </ul></li>
13488
13489 <li>2015
13490 <ul>
13491
13492 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
13493
13494 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (6)</a></li>
13495
13496 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/03/">March (1)</a></li>
13497
13498 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/04/">April (4)</a></li>
13499
13500 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/05/">May (3)</a></li>
13501
13502 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/06/">June (4)</a></li>
13503
13504 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/07/">July (6)</a></li>
13505
13506 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/08/">August (2)</a></li>
13507
13508 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/09/">September (2)</a></li>
13509
13510 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/10/">October (9)</a></li>
13511
13512 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/11/">November (6)</a></li>
13513
13514 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/12/">December (3)</a></li>
13515
13516 </ul></li>
13517
13518 <li>2014
13519 <ul>
13520
13521 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
13522
13523 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
13524
13525 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
13526
13527 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
13528
13529 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
13530
13531 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
13532
13533 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
13534
13535 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
13536
13537 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
13538
13539 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
13540
13541 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
13542
13543 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
13544
13545 </ul></li>
13546
13547 <li>2013
13548 <ul>
13549
13550 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
13551
13552 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
13553
13554 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
13555
13556 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
13557
13558 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
13559
13560 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
13561
13562 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
13563
13564 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
13565
13566 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
13567
13568 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
13569
13570 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
13571
13572 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
13573
13574 </ul></li>
13575
13576 <li>2012
13577 <ul>
13578
13579 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
13580
13581 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
13582
13583 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
13584
13585 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
13586
13587 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
13588
13589 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
13590
13591 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
13592
13593 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
13594
13595 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
13596
13597 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
13598
13599 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
13600
13601 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
13602
13603 </ul></li>
13604
13605 <li>2011
13606 <ul>
13607
13608 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
13609
13610 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
13611
13612 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
13613
13614 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
13615
13616 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
13617
13618 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
13619
13620 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
13621
13622 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
13623
13624 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
13625
13626 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
13627
13628 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
13629
13630 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
13631
13632 </ul></li>
13633
13634 <li>2010
13635 <ul>
13636
13637 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
13638
13639 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
13640
13641 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
13642
13643 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
13644
13645 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
13646
13647 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
13648
13649 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
13650
13651 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
13652
13653 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
13654
13655 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
13656
13657 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
13658
13659 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
13660
13661 </ul></li>
13662
13663 <li>2009
13664 <ul>
13665
13666 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
13667
13668 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
13669
13670 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
13671
13672 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
13673
13674 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
13675
13676 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
13677
13678 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
13679
13680 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
13681
13682 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
13683
13684 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
13685
13686 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
13687
13688 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
13689
13690 </ul></li>
13691
13692 <li>2008
13693 <ul>
13694
13695 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
13696
13697 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
13698
13699 </ul></li>
13700
13701 </ul>
13702
13703
13704
13705 <h2>Tags</h2>
13706 <ul>
13707
13708  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (16)</a></li>
13709
13710  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
13711
13712  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
13713
13714  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
13715
13716  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (9)</a></li>
13717
13718  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (17)</a></li>
13719
13720  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
13721
13722  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
13723
13724  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (161)</a></li>
13725
13726  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (158)</a></li>
13727
13728  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook (4)</a></li>
13729
13730  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (10)</a></li>
13731
13732  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (17)</a></li>
13733
13734  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (25)</a></li>
13735
13736  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
13737
13738  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (380)</a></li>
13739
13740  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (23)</a></li>
13741
13742  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (13)</a></li>
13743
13744  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (32)</a></li>
13745
13746  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
13747
13748  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (18)</a></li>
13749
13750  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264 (20)</a></li>
13751
13752  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (42)</a></li>
13753
13754  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (16)</a></li>
13755
13756  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (20)</a></li>
13757
13758  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
13759
13760  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego (4)</a></li>
13761
13762  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
13763
13764  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
13765
13766  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
13767
13768  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
13769
13770  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (41)</a></li>
13771
13772  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software (10)</a></li>
13773
13774  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (299)</a></li>
13775
13776  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (190)</a></li>
13777
13778  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (33)</a></li>
13779
13780  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
13781
13782  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (71)</a></li>
13783
13784  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (107)</a></li>
13785
13786  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (2)</a></li>
13787
13788  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
13789
13790  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
13791
13792  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
13793
13794  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (10)</a></li>
13795
13796  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
13797
13798  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (6)</a></li>
13799
13800  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
13801
13802  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (54)</a></li>
13803
13804  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
13805
13806  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (5)</a></li>
13807
13808  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (55)</a></li>
13809
13810  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (6)</a></li>
13811
13812  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (12)</a></li>
13813
13814  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (55)</a></li>
13815
13816  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (4)</a></li>
13817
13818  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
13819
13820  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (9)</a></li>
13821
13822  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri (11)</a></li>
13823
13824  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (66)</a></li>
13825
13826  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
13827
13828  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (41)</a></li>
13829
13830 </ul>
13831
13832
13833     </div>
13834     <p style="text-align: right">
13835  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
13836 </p>
13837
13838   </body>
13839 </html>