[homepage.git] / blog / tags / debian / debian.rss

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version='2.0' xmlns:lj='http://www.livejournal.org/rss/lj/1.0/'>
        <channel>
                <title>Petter Reinholdtsen - Entries tagged debian</title>
                <description>Entries tagged debian</description>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>

        
        <item>
                <title>The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 5 Jul 2013 08:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html&quot;&gt;replacement
for my trusty old Thinkpad X41&lt;/a&gt;.  Unfortunately I did not have much
time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
ended up picking a
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230&quot;&gt;Thinkpad X230&lt;/a&gt;
with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
on that below.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
feature at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.prisjakt.no/&quot;&gt;Prisjakt&lt;/a&gt;, which
allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
get their impression on keyboards and robustness.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
needed a new laptop now. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
reported to Debian as &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/691427&quot;&gt;BTS
report #691427 2012-10-25&lt;/a&gt; (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
kernel developers as
&lt;a href=&quot;https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861&quot;&gt;Kernel bugzilla
report #51861 2012-12-20&lt;/a&gt; (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
(SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
Lenovo forums, both for
&lt;a href=&quot;http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549&quot;&gt;T430
2012-11-10&lt;/a&gt; and for
&lt;a href=&quot;http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/x230-SATA-errors-with-180GB-Intel-520-SSD-under-heavy-write-load/m-p/1068147&quot;&gt;X230
03-20-2013&lt;/a&gt;.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
There is even a
&lt;a href=&quot;https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git&quot;&gt;small C program
available&lt;/a&gt; that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
minutes by writing to a file.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I&#39;ve contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
fixed. :)&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Automatically locate and install required firmware packages on Debian (Isenkram 0.4)</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_locate_and_install_required_firmware_packages_on_Debian__Isenkram_0_4_.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_locate_and_install_required_firmware_packages_on_Debian__Isenkram_0_4_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 25 Jun 2013 11:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram&quot;&gt;Isenkram package&lt;/a&gt;
including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
# isenkram-autoinstall-firmware 
info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
firmware-ipw2x00
firmware-ipw2x00
Preconfiguring packages ...
Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
(Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
# 
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
printed instead:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
# isenkram-autoinstall-firmware 
info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
# 
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
me some time when setting up new machines. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
&lt;tt&gt;apt-get install&lt;/tt&gt;.  The end result is a slightly better working
machine.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
finally fix &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/655507&quot;&gt;BTS report
#655507&lt;/a&gt;.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
from the nearby Debian mirror.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Fixing the Linux black screen of death on machines with Intel HD video</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_the_Linux_black_screen_of_death_on_machines_with_Intel_HD_video.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_the_Linux_black_screen_of_death_on_machines_with_Intel_HD_video.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 11 Jun 2013 11:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
or on first boot from the hard disk.  I&#39;ve seen it once in a while the
last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I&#39;ve seen it
on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
i915 driver used by the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv&quot;&gt;Packard Bell
EasyNote LV&lt;/a&gt;, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
/etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
can be done by running these commands as root:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
update-initramfs -u -k all
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Since March 2012 there is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955&quot;&gt;a
mechanism in the Linux kernel&lt;/a&gt; to tell the i915 driver which
hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
&lt;a href=&quot;http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c&quot;&gt;the
intel_quirks array&lt;/a&gt; in the driver source
&lt;tt&gt;drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c&lt;/tt&gt; (look for &quot;&lt;tt&gt;static
struct intel_quirk intel_quirks&lt;/tt&gt;&quot;), specifying the PCI device
number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
number.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from &lt;tt&gt;lspci
-vvnn&lt;/tt&gt; for the video card in question:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
    3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
    (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
 Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
 Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
    ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
 Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast &gt;TAbort- \
    &lt;TAbort- &lt;MAbort-&gt;SERR- &lt;PERR- INTx-
 Latency: 0
 Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
 Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
 Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
 Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
 Expansion ROM at &lt;unassigned&gt; [disabled]
 Capabilities: &lt;access denied&gt;
 Kernel driver in use: i915
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
       ...
        /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
        { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
       ...
}
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
&lt;tt&gt;modinfo i915&lt;/tt&gt;), information about hardware needing the
invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel&quot;&gt;dri-devel
(at) lists.freedesktop.org&lt;/a&gt; mailing list to reach the kernel
developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
yet shown up in
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html&quot;&gt;the
web archive for the mailing list&lt;/a&gt;, so I suspect they do not accept
emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
the Debian bug tracking system instead as
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/710938&quot;&gt;BTS report #710938&lt;/a&gt;, to make
sure the patch is not lost.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
the screen during login.  I&#39;ve reported it to Debian as
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/711237&quot;&gt;BTS report #711237&lt;/a&gt;, and
have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
you do not know how to update BTS).&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>How to install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 27 May 2013 15:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Two days ago, I asked
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html&quot;&gt;how
I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
preinstalled with Windows 8&lt;/a&gt;.  I found a solution, but am horrified
with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
and Windows 8.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
enough to tell.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
to follow.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
it close to impossible for &quot;normal&quot; users to install Linux without
accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
without risking to loose the warranty?&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I&#39;ve updated the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv&quot;&gt;Linux Laptop
wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV&lt;/a&gt;, to ensure the next person
do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
machine.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>How can I install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 25 May 2013 18:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;I&#39;ve run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
instead of a BIOS to boot.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
to get it to boot the Linux installer.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv&quot;&gt;Packard Bell
EasyNote LV&lt;/a&gt; model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
page.  If I can&#39;t find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
using UEFI and &quot;secure boot&quot; by making it impossible to install Linux
on new Laptops?&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>How to transform a Debian based system to a Debian Edu installation</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_transform_a_Debian_based_system_to_a_Debian_Edu_installation.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_transform_a_Debian_based_system_to_a_Debian_Edu_installation.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 17 May 2013 11:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu / Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; is
an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html&quot;&gt;please
donate some money&lt;/a&gt;.

&lt;p&gt;A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn&#39;t very
hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
the Debian Edu installer.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The script,
&lt;a href=&quot;http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/branches/wheezy/debian-edu-config/share/debian-edu-config/tools/debian-edu-bless?view=markup&quot;&gt;debian-edu-bless&lt;a/&gt;
in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
into a Debian Edu Workstation:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ol&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Add skolelinux related APT sources.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
    our configuration.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
    /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
    according to the profile specified in the config above,
    overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
    that could not be done using preseeding.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ol&gt;

&lt;p&gt;There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
the needed packages.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
setting up &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.raspberrypi.org&quot;&gt;Raspberry Pi&lt;/a&gt; as a
Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎&quot;&gt;Raspbian&lt;/a&gt; installation and
transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
PROFILE=&quot;Roaming-Workstation&quot;
DESKTOP=&quot;lxde&quot;
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
boot.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian, the Linux distribution of choice for LEGO designers?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian__the_Linux_distribution_of_choice_for_LEGO_designers_.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian__the_Linux_distribution_of_choice_for_LEGO_designers_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 11 May 2013 20:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;P&gt;In January,
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html&quot;&gt;I
announced a&lt;/a&gt; new &lt;a href=&quot;irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego&quot;&gt;IRC
channel #debian-lego&lt;/a&gt;, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
community interested in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lego.com/&quot;&gt;LEGO&lt;/a&gt;, the
marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners&quot;&gt;a wiki page&lt;/a&gt; to have
a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
&lt;a href=&quot;http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego&quot;&gt;hardware::hobby:lego&lt;/a&gt;
tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
LEGO and &lt;a href=&quot;http://mindstorms.lego.com/&quot;&gt;Mindstorms&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;table&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/brickos&quot;&gt;brickos&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;alternative OS for LEGO Mindstorms RCX. Supports development in C/C++&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad&quot;&gt;leocad&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;virtual brick CAD software&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/libnxt&quot;&gt;libnxt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NX&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd&quot;&gt;lnpd&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc&quot;&gt;nbc&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc&quot;&gt;nqc&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/python-nxt&quot;&gt;python-nxt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/python-nxt-filer&quot;&gt;python-nxt-filer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;simple GUI to manage files on a LEGO Mindstorms NXT&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/scratch&quot;&gt;scratch&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;easy to use programming environment for ages 8 and up&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n&quot;&gt;t2n&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;td&gt;simple command-line tool for Lego NXT&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;/table&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
available in experimental.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
for LEGO designers.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian Wheezy is out - and Debian Edu / Skolelinux should soon follow! #newinwheezy</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Wheezy_is_out___and_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_should_soon_follow___newinwheezy.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Wheezy_is_out___and_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_should_soon_follow___newinwheezy.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 5 May 2013 07:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504&quot;&gt;release announcement
for Debian Wheezy&lt;/a&gt; was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
soon.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
&lt;a href=&quot;http://scratch.mit.edu/&quot;&gt;Scratch&lt;/a&gt; program, made famous by
the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.code.org/&quot;&gt;Teach kids code&lt;/a&gt; movement, is
included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
&lt;a href=&quot;http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/&quot;&gt;kturtle&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art&quot;&gt;turtleart&lt;/a&gt;,
it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
Edu.&lt;/a&gt;

&lt;p&gt;And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html&quot;&gt;first
alpha release&lt;/a&gt; went out last week, and the next should soon
follow.&lt;p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Isenkram 0.2 finally in the Debian archive</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_0_2_finally_in_the_Debian_archive.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_0_2_finally_in_the_Debian_archive.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 3 Apr 2013 23:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Today the &lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram&quot;&gt;Isenkram
package&lt;/a&gt; finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
BTS. :)&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Bitcoin GUI now available from Debian/unstable (and Ubuntu/raring)</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 2 Feb 2013 09:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;My
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html&quot;&gt;last
bitcoin related blog post&lt;/a&gt; mentioned that the new
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin&quot;&gt;bitcoin package&lt;/a&gt; for
Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
version too.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
architectures (&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/672524&quot;&gt;BTS #672524&lt;/a&gt;).
We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
failing, please let us know via the BTS.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
if it run short on space (&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/696715&quot;&gt;BTS
#696715&lt;/a&gt;).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
it. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&amp;label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 22 Jan 2013 22:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, I
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html&quot;&gt;asked
for testers&lt;/a&gt; for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
pluggable hardware devices, which I
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html&quot;&gt;set
out to create&lt;/a&gt; earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
&lt;a href=&quot;http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git&quot;&gt;collab-maint&lt;/a&gt;
repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is &lt;strong&gt;Isenkram&lt;/strong&gt;.
To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
cd isenkram &amp;&amp; git-buildpackage -us -uc
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you wonder what &#39;isenkram&#39; is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
stuff, in other words.  I&#39;ve been told it is the Norwegian variant of
the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
word.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2013-01-26&lt;/strong&gt;: Added -us -us to build
instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
process.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2013-01-27&lt;/strong&gt;: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>First prototype ready making hardware easier to use in Debian</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 21 Jan 2013 12:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Early this month I set out to try to
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html&quot;&gt;improve
the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices&lt;/a&gt;.  Now my
prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
it, fetch the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/&quot;&gt;source
from the Debian Edu subversion repository&lt;/a&gt;, build and install the
package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
autostart script.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The design is simple:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
initially did.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
the APT database, a database
&lt;a href=&quot;http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup&quot;&gt;available
via HTTP&lt;/a&gt; and a database available as part of the package.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
isn&#39;t installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
package or packages.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;If the user click on the &#39;install package now&#39; button, ask
aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
package while showing progress information in a window.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png&quot;&gt;
&lt;br&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png&quot;&gt;
&lt;br&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png&quot;&gt;
&lt;br&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png&quot;&gt;
&lt;br&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png&quot; width=&quot;70%&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
storing such information in the package control file, but could be
changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
method.  I&#39;ve dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2013-01-21 16:50&lt;/strong&gt;: Due to popular demand,
here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
&#39;&lt;tt&gt;svn checkout
svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
hw-support-handler; debuild&lt;/tt&gt;&#39;.  If you lack debuild, install the
devscripts package.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2013-01-23 12:00&lt;/strong&gt;: The project is now
renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html&quot;&gt;build
instructions&lt;/a&gt; for details.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Thank you Thinkpad X41, for your long and trustworthy service</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 19 Jan 2013 09:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
not a durable solution.

&lt;p&gt;My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
  than A4).&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Internal WIFI network card.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Internal Twisted Pair network card.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12&quot; (A4 paper
size).&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
  X.org packages.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
  the time).

&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
Lenovo took over.  But I&#39;ve been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
still be useful.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
external keyboard?  I&#39;ll have to check the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linux-laptop.net/&quot;&gt;Linux Laptops site&lt;/a&gt; for
well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
of the vendors listed on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://linuxpreloaded.com/&quot;&gt;Linux
Pre-loaded site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>How to find a browser plugin supporting a given MIME type</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_find_a_browser_plugin_supporting_a_given_MIME_type.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_find_a_browser_plugin_supporting_a_given_MIME_type.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 18 Jan 2013 10:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins&quot;&gt;specifications
done by Ubuntu&lt;/a&gt; and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
import apt
def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
    cache = apt.Cache()
    cache.open(None)
    thepkgs = []
    for pkg in cache:
        version = pkg.candidate
        if version is None:
            version = pkg.installed
        if version is None:
            continue
        record = version.record
        if not record.has_key(&#39;Npp-MimeType&#39;):
            continue
        mime_types = record[&#39;Npp-MimeType&#39;].split(&#39;,&#39;)
        for t in mime_types:
            t = t.rstrip().strip()
            if t == mimetype:
                thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
    return thepkgs
mimetype = &quot;audio/ogg&quot;
if 1 &lt; len(sys.argv):
    mimetype = sys.argv[1]
print &quot;Browser plugin packages supporting %s:&quot; % mimetype
for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
    print &quot;  %s&quot; %pkg
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
% ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype 
Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
  gecko-mediaplayer
% ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
  browser-plugin-gnash
%
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
anyone working on adding it?&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2013-01-18 14:20&lt;/strong&gt;: The Debian BTS
request for icweasel support for this feature is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/484010&quot;&gt;#484010&lt;/a&gt; from 2008 (and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/698426&quot;&gt;#698426&lt;/a&gt; from today).  Lack
of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>What is the most supported MIME type in Debian?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 16 Jan 2013 10:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal&quot;&gt;DEP-11
proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive&lt;/a&gt;, is a
proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
downloaded by the browser.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
can be found on the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest&quot;&gt;Skolelinux FTP
site&lt;/a&gt;.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
The complete list is available from the link above.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Debian Stable:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
  count MIME type
  ----- -----------------------
     32 text/plain
     30 audio/mpeg
     29 image/png
     28 image/jpeg
     27 application/ogg
     26 audio/x-mp3
     25 image/tiff
     25 image/gif
     22 image/bmp
     22 audio/x-wav
     20 audio/x-flac
     19 audio/x-mpegurl
     18 video/x-ms-asf
     18 audio/x-musepack
     18 audio/x-mpeg
     18 application/x-ogg
     17 video/mpeg
     17 audio/x-scpls
     17 audio/ogg
     16 video/x-ms-wmv
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Debian Testing:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
  count MIME type
  ----- -----------------------
     33 text/plain
     32 image/png
     32 image/jpeg
     29 audio/mpeg
     27 image/gif
     26 image/tiff
     26 application/ogg
     25 audio/x-mp3
     22 image/bmp
     21 audio/x-wav
     19 audio/x-mpegurl
     19 audio/x-mpeg
     18 video/mpeg
     18 audio/x-scpls
     18 audio/x-flac
     18 application/x-ogg
     17 video/x-ms-asf
     17 text/html
     17 audio/x-musepack
     16 image/x-xbitmap
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Debian Unstable:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
  count MIME type
  ----- -----------------------
     31 text/plain
     31 image/png
     31 image/jpeg
     29 audio/mpeg
     28 application/ogg
     27 image/gif
     26 image/tiff
     26 audio/x-mp3
     23 audio/x-wav
     22 image/bmp
     21 audio/x-flac
     20 audio/x-mpegurl
     19 audio/x-mpeg
     18 video/x-ms-asf
     18 video/mpeg
     18 audio/x-scpls
     18 application/x-ogg
     17 audio/x-musepack
     16 video/x-ms-wmv
     16 video/x-msvideo
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
issues.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2013-01-16 13:35&lt;/strong&gt;: Updated numbers after
discovering a typo in my script.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Using modalias info to find packages handling my hardware</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_modalias_info_to_find_packages_handling_my_hardware.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_modalias_info_to_find_packages_handling_my_hardware.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 15 Jan 2013 08:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, I wrote about the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html&quot;&gt;modalias
values provided by the Linux kernel&lt;/a&gt; following my hope for
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html&quot;&gt;better
dongle support in Debian&lt;/a&gt;.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
packages.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
modalias.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
Package: package-name
&lt;br&gt;Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
for a given modalias value using this file.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
Package: cheese
&lt;br&gt;Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
Package: pcmciautils
&lt;br&gt;Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
Package: colorhug-client
&lt;br&gt;Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
to store their mappings from packages to hardware.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I&#39;ve
tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
Raring.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
try the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co&quot;&gt;hw-support-lookup&lt;/a&gt;
shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
repository where I currently work on my prototype.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
install yubikey-personalization:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
% ./hw-support-lookup
&lt;br&gt;yubikey-personalization
&lt;br&gt;%
&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
propose to install the pcmciautils package:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
% ./hw-support-lookup 
&lt;br&gt;pcmciautils
&lt;br&gt;%
&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
&lt;a href=&quot;http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co&quot;&gt;my
database&lt;/a&gt;, please tell me about it.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
/lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
see if it work.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
&lt;a href=&quot;irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel&quot;&gt;#debian-devel&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Modalias strings - a practical way to map &quot;stuff&quot; to hardware</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 14 Jan 2013 11:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
in
&lt;a href=&quot;http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/&quot;&gt;the
Debian Edu subversion repository&lt;/a&gt;:

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Modalias decoded&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
&amp;lt;URL: &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias&quot;&gt;https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias&lt;/a&gt; &amp;gt;,
&amp;lt;URL: &lt;a href=&quot;http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/26132/how-to-assign-usb-driver-to-device&quot;&gt;http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/26132/how-to-assign-usb-driver-to-device&lt;/a&gt; &amp;gt;,
&amp;lt;URL: &lt;a href=&quot;http://code.metager.de/source/history/linux/stable/scripts/mod/file2alias.c&quot;&gt;http://code.metager.de/source/history/linux/stable/scripts/mod/file2alias.c&lt;/a&gt; &amp;gt; and
&amp;lt;URL: &lt;a href=&quot;http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/dmidecode/dmidecode.c?root=dmidecode&amp;view=markup&quot;&gt;http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/dmidecode/dmidecode.c?root=dmidecode&amp;view=markup&lt;/a&gt; &amp;gt;.

&lt;p&gt;The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
this shell script:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
using modinfo:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
% /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
%
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PCI subtype&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
Bridge memory controller:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This represent these values:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
 v   00008086  (vendor)
 d   00002770  (device)
 sv  00001028  (subvendor)
 sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
 bc  06        (bus class)
 sc  00        (bus subclass)
 i   00        (interface)
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from &#39;lspci
-n&#39; as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
means.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;USB subtype&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
USB hub in a laptop:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Here is the values included in this alias:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
 v    1D6B  (device vendor)
 p    0001  (device product)
 d    0206  (bcddevice)
 dc     09  (device class)
 dsc    00  (device subclass)
 dp     00  (device protocol)
 ic     09  (interface class)
 isc    00  (interface subclass)
 ip     00  (interface protocol)
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
these alias entries show up:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
&lt;br&gt;usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
&lt;br&gt;usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
&lt;br&gt;usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ACPI subtype&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
receiver in a Thinkpad X40:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The values between the colons are IDs.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DMI subtype&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
/sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The values present are&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
 bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
 bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
 bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
 svn  IBM            (system vendor)
 pn   2371H4G        (product name)
 pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
 rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
 rn   2371H4G        (board name)
 rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
 cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
 ct   10             (chassis type)
 cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
found in the dmidecode source:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
  3 Desktop
  4 Low Profile Desktop
  5 Pizza Box
  6 Mini Tower
  7 Tower
  8 Portable
  9 Laptop
 10 Notebook
 11 Hand Held
 12 Docking Station
 13 All In One
 14 Sub Notebook
 15 Space-saving
 16 Lunch Box
 17 Main Server Chassis
 18 Expansion Chassis
 19 Sub Chassis
 20 Bus Expansion Chassis
 21 Peripheral Chassis
 22 RAID Chassis
 23 Rack Mount Chassis
 24 Sealed-case PC
 25 Multi-system
 26 CompactPCI
 27 AdvancedTCA
 28 Blade
 29 Blade Enclosing
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
claim it is a desktop.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;SerIO subtype&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
test machine:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The values present are&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
  ty  01  (type)
  pr  00  (prototype)
  id  00  (id)
  ex  00  (extra)
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
the valid values are.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other subtypes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Looking up kernel modules using modalias values&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
one can use the following shell script:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
  for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
    echo &quot;$id&quot; ; \
    /sbin/modprobe --show-depends &quot;$id&quot;|sed &#39;s/^/  /&#39; ; \
  done
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
list is very long on my test machine):&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
  acpi:ACPI0003:
    insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko 
  acpi:device:
  FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
  acpi:IBM0068:
    insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko 
    insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko 
    insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko 
    insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko 
  acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
    insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko 
    insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko 
    insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko 
  [...]
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
&lt;a href=&quot;irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel&quot;&gt;#debian-devel&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2013-01-15:&lt;/strong&gt; Rewrite &quot;cat $(find ...)&quot; to
&quot;find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat&quot; to make sure it handle directories
in /sys/ with space in them.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Moved the pymissile Debian packaging to collab-maint</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 10 Jan 2013 20:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
Launcher and updated the Debian package
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile&quot;&gt;pymissile&lt;/a&gt; to make
sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
also added a &quot;Modaliases&quot; header to test it in the Debian archive and
hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
contribute.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/&quot;&gt;Upstream&lt;/a&gt;
is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git&quot;&gt;gitweb
view&lt;/a&gt; or use &quot;&lt;tt&gt;git clone
git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git&lt;/tt&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Lets make hardware dongles easier to use in Debian</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 9 Jan 2013 15:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
general, is that there is a great package management system with the
ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Some years ago, I proposed to
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html&quot;&gt;use
the discover subsystem to implement this&lt;/a&gt;.  The idea is fairly
simple:

&lt;ul&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
  starting when a user log in.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
  hardware is inserted into the computer.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
  database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
  packages.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
  package, and make it easy to install it.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
discover database to find packages and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.packagekit.org/&quot;&gt;PackageKit&lt;/a&gt; to install
packages.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
draft package is now checked into
&lt;a href=&quot;http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/&quot;&gt;the
Debian Edu subversion repository&lt;/a&gt;.  In the process, I updated the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html&quot;&gt;discover-data&lt;/a&gt;
package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current 
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html&quot;&gt;discover&lt;/a&gt;
package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
/proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn&#39;t upload it to unstable
because of the freeze).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
inserted):&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p align=&quot;center&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
install the proposed packages by pressing the &quot;Please install
program(s)&quot; button should to be implemented.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if &#39;discover-pkginstall -l&#39;
list the package you would like to have installed when a given
hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
reportbug if it isn&#39;t.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
such mapping, please let me know.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
not be installed?&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
please send me an email. :)&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>New IRC channel for LEGO designers using Debian</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 2 Jan 2013 15:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
&lt;a href=&quot;http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx&quot;&gt;LEGO Mindstorm
NXT&lt;/a&gt;.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
&lt;a href=&quot;irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego&quot;&gt;#debian-lego&lt;/a&gt; (server
irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2012-01-03: A
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners&quot;&gt;project page&lt;/a&gt;
including links to Lego related packages is now available.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>How to backport bitcoin-qt version 0.7.2-2 to Debian Squeeze</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 25 Dec 2012 20:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bitcoin.org/&quot;&gt;Bitcoin&lt;/a&gt;, the digital
decentralised &quot;currency&quot; that allow people to transfer bitcoins
between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.debian.org/&quot;&gt;Debian&lt;/a&gt; is about to improve a bit.
The &lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin&quot;&gt;new debian source
package&lt;/a&gt; (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
in &lt;a href=&quot;http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html&quot;&gt;the NEW queue&lt;/A&gt;
for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
name.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
using the following steps to get a set of working packages:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
cd bitcoin
DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
client will download the complete set of bitcoin &quot;blocks&quot;, which need
around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
not be able to get all the features out of the client.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&amp;label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>A word on bitcoin support in Debian</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 21 Dec 2012 23:59:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;It has been a while since I wrote about
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bitcoin.org/&quot;&gt;bitcoin&lt;/a&gt;, the decentralised
peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
state of &lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin&quot;&gt;bitcoin in
Debian&lt;/a&gt; again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
is now maintained by a
&lt;a href=&quot;https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/&quot;&gt;team of
people&lt;/a&gt;, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
Corallo in a
&lt;a href=&quot;https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin&quot;&gt;PPA for
Ubuntu&lt;/a&gt;, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
Debian package.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html&quot;&gt;a
patch to backport&lt;/a&gt; the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
new version to unstable.

&lt;p&gt;I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
that the major credit card companies can block legal money
transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
have not tested them.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html&quot;&gt;experiment
with bitcoins&lt;/a&gt; showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
years ago, as can be
&lt;a href=&quot;http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;seen
on the blockexplorer service&lt;/a&gt;.  Thank you everyone for your
donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
the same address as last time,
&lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&amp;label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Git repository for song book for Computer Scientists</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 7 Sep 2012 13:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;As I
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html&quot;&gt;mentioned
this summer&lt;/a&gt;, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
&lt;a href=&quot;https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook&quot;&gt;Gitorious
repository for the project&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
PostScript formats at
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/&quot;&gt;Petter&#39;s Computer
Science Songbook&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Gratulerer med 19-årsdagen, Debian!</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gratulerer_med_19__rsdagen__Debian_.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gratulerer_med_19__rsdagen__Debian_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 16 Aug 2012 11:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;I dag fyller
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120813&quot;&gt;Debian-prosjektet 19
år&lt;/a&gt;.  Jeg har fulgt det de siste 12 årene, og er veldig glad for å kunne
si gratulerer med dagen, Debian!&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Song book for Computer Scientists</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 24 Jun 2012 13:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uit.no/&quot;&gt;University of Tromsø&lt;/a&gt;, I started
collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
put it up on some public version control repository where others can
help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
missing in my book.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
Especially now that &lt;a href=&quot;http://debconf12.debconf.org/&quot;&gt;Debconf
12&lt;/a&gt; is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
out &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/&quot;&gt;Petter&#39;s
Computer Science Songbook&lt;/a&gt;.
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 21 Nov 2011 12:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
up to date.  If the firmware isn&#39;t the latest and greatest, the
vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
the tools to do so.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.&lt;/P&gt;

&lt;p&gt;On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
&lt;a href=&quot;ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz&quot;&gt;an XML file&lt;/a&gt;
with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
be activated on the first reboot.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
BEGIN {
    # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
    my %rhelmodules = (
        &#39;XML::Simple&#39; =&gt; &#39;perl-XML-Simple&#39;,
        );
    for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
        eval &quot;use $module;&quot;;
        if ($@) {
            my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
            system(&quot;yum install -y $pkg&quot;);
            eval &quot;use $module;&quot;;
        }
    }
}
my $errorsto = &#39;pere@hungry.com&#39;;

upgrade_dell();

exit 0;

sub run_firmware_script {
    my ($opts, $script) = @_;
    unless ($script) {
        print STDERR &quot;fail: missing script name\n&quot;;
        exit 1
    }
    print STDERR &quot;Running $script\n\n&quot;;

    if (0 == system(&quot;sh $script $opts&quot;)) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
        print STDERR &quot;success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n&quot;;
    } else {
        print STDERR &quot;fail: firmware script returned error\n&quot;;
    }
}

sub run_firmware_scripts {
    my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
    # Run firmware packages
    for my $dir (@dirs) {
        print STDERR &quot;info: Running scripts in $dir\n&quot;;
        opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die &quot;Unable to open directory $dir: $!&quot;;
        while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
            next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
            run_firmware_script($opts, &quot;$dir/$s&quot;);
        }
        closedir $dh;
    }
}

sub download {
    my $url = shift;
    print STDERR &quot;info: Downloading $url\n&quot;;
    system(&quot;wget --quiet \&quot;$url\&quot;&quot;);
}

sub upgrade_dell {
    my @dirs;
    my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
    chomp $product;

    if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {

        # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
        system(&#39;yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail&#39;);

        my $tmpdir = tempdir(
            CLEANUP =&gt; 1
            );
        chdir($tmpdir);
        fetch_dell_fw(&#39;catalog/Catalog.xml.gz&#39;);
        system(&#39;gunzip Catalog.xml.gz&#39;);
        my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list(&#39;Catalog.xml&#39;);
        # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
        my $fwopts = &quot;-q&quot;;
        if (@paths) {
            for my $url (@paths) {
                fetch_dell_fw($url);
            }
            run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
        } else {
            print STDERR &quot;error: Unsupported Dell model &#39;$product&#39;.\n&quot;;
            print STDERR &quot;error: Please report to $errorsto.\n&quot;;
        }
        chdir(&#39;/&#39;);
    } else {
        print STDERR &quot;error: Unsupported Dell model &#39;$product&#39;.\n&quot;;
        print STDERR &quot;error: Please report to $errorsto.\n&quot;;
    }
}

sub fetch_dell_fw {
    my $path = shift;
    my $url = &quot;ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path&quot;;
    download($url);
}

# Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
# firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
# machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
    my $filename = shift;

    my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
    chomp $product;
    my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);

    print STDERR &quot;Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n&quot;;

    my $xml = XMLin($filename);
    my @paths;
    for my $bundle (@{$xml-&gt;{SoftwareBundle}}) {
        my $brand = $bundle-&gt;{TargetSystems}-&gt;{Brand}-&gt;{Display}-&gt;{content};
        my $model = $bundle-&gt;{TargetSystems}-&gt;{Brand}-&gt;{Model}-&gt;{Display}-&gt;{content};
        my $oscode;
        if (&quot;ARRAY&quot; eq ref $bundle-&gt;{TargetOSes}-&gt;{OperatingSystem}) {
            $oscode = $bundle-&gt;{TargetOSes}-&gt;{OperatingSystem}[0]-&gt;{osCode};
        } else {
            $oscode = $bundle-&gt;{TargetOSes}-&gt;{OperatingSystem}-&gt;{osCode};
        }
        if ($mybrand eq $brand &amp;&amp; $mymodel eq $model &amp;&amp; &quot;LIN&quot; eq $oscode)
        {
            @paths = map { $_-&gt;{path} } @{$bundle-&gt;{Contents}-&gt;{Package}};
        }
    }
    for my $component (@{$xml-&gt;{SoftwareComponent}}) {
        my $componenttype = $component-&gt;{ComponentType}-&gt;{value};

        # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
        next if &#39;APAC&#39; eq $componenttype;

        my $cpath = $component-&gt;{path};
        for my $path (@paths) {
            if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
                push(@paths, $cpath);
            }
        }
    }
    return @paths;
}
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
outdated.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>How is booting into runlevel 1 different from single user boots?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 4 Aug 2011 12:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Wouter Verhelst have some
&lt;a href=&quot;http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot&quot;&gt;interesting
comments and opinions&lt;/a&gt; on my blog post on
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html&quot;&gt;the
need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian&lt;/a&gt; and my blog post about
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html&quot;&gt;the
default KDE desktop in Debian&lt;/a&gt;.  I only have time to address one
small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
misunderstanding he bring forward:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;
Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
single-user system (by adding &#39;single&#39; to the kernel command line;
this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn&#39;t the same as single user
mode.  I&#39;ll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
hard to explain.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
&quot;&lt;tt&gt;~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin&lt;/tt&gt;&quot;.  This means the only thing that is
executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
state &quot;between&quot; the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
runs &quot;init -t1 S&quot; to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
1.  It is confusing that the &#39;S&#39; (single user) init mode is not the
mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
mode).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
&quot;&lt;tt&gt;/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin&lt;/tt&gt;&quot;.  When booting into
runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: &quot;&lt;tt&gt;/etc/init.d/rc
S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin&lt;/tt&gt;&quot;.  A problem show up when
trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
after visiting single user mode.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not &lt;strong&gt;required&lt;/strong&gt; to get a
functioning single user mode during boot.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>What should start from /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian? - almost nothing</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 30 Jul 2011 14:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
is presented.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
find time to push this forward.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>What is missing in the Debian desktop, or why my parents use Kubuntu</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 29 Jul 2011 08:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
issues.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
do this in Debian we would have a source.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ol&gt;

&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.&lt;/strong&gt; When there
are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
Debian.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
plugins.&lt;/strong&gt; When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
not the browser for any missing features.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
handlers.&lt;/strong&gt; When the media players encounter a format or codec
it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Better browser handling of some MIME types.&lt;/strong&gt; When
displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
latter behaviour.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ol&gt; 

&lt;p&gt;There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
it do not matter much.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Perl modules used by FixMyStreet which are missing in Debian/Squeeze</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_modules_used_by_FixMyStreet_which_are_missing_in_Debian_Squeeze.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_modules_used_by_FixMyStreet_which_are_missing_in_Debian_Squeeze.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 26 Jul 2011 12:25:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The Norwegian &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fiksgatami.no/&quot;&gt;FiksGataMi&lt;/A&gt;
site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
security support for a few years.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
their own &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fixmystreet.com&quot;&gt;FixMyStreet&lt;/a&gt; clone
in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
missing in Debian/Squeeze isn&#39;t very long, and I hope the perl group
will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
easier in the future.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
installed on my server was a simple call to &#39;cpan2deb Module::Name&#39;
and &#39;dpkg -i&#39; to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
do not have time for.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>A Norwegian FixMyStreet have kept me busy the last few weeks</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 3 Apr 2011 22:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
update in English.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
of the British service
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fixmystreet.com/&quot;&gt;FixMyStreet&lt;/a&gt; up and running,
and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mysociety.org/&quot;&gt;mySociety&lt;/a&gt; on what to develop,
and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fiksgatami.no/&quot;&gt;FiksGataMi&lt;/a&gt; is using
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openstreetmap.org/&quot;&gt;OpenStreetmap&lt;/a&gt; as the map
source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
support for this had to be added/fixed.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
public infrastructure.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
such service?&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Using NVD and CPE to track CVEs in locally maintained software</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 28 Jan 2011 15:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
it should be possible to use the information about security issues
available on the Internet, and check our locally
maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
out which security holes were present in our free software
collection.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
solution.  Enter the &lt;a href=&quot;http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html&quot;&gt;Common
Platform Enumeration&lt;/a&gt; dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
mapped to CVEs in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.nvd.nist.gov/&quot;&gt;National
Vulnerability Database&lt;/a&gt;, allowing me to look up know security
issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
This is fairly trivial (I google for &#39;cve cpe $package&#39; and check the
NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
check out, one could look up
&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search?cpe=cpe%3A%2Fa%3Agnu%3Agzip:1.3.3&quot;&gt;cpe:/a:gnu:gzip:1.3.3
in NVD&lt;/a&gt; and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
The most recent one is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001&quot;&gt;CVE-2010-0001&lt;/a&gt;,
and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
list of affected versions is provided.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I&#39;ve written a
small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
security issues out.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
RHEL is providing
&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt&quot;&gt;a
map from CVE to CPE&lt;/a&gt;, indicating that they are using the CPE
information.  I&#39;m not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
established soon.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
for their packages.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Which module is loaded for a given PCI and USB device?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Which_module_is_loaded_for_a_given_PCI_and_USB_device_.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Which_module_is_loaded_for_a_given_PCI_and_USB_device_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 23 Jan 2011 00:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;In the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data&quot;&gt;discover-data&lt;/a&gt;
package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
about the running hardware for use when people report missing
information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
&lt;tt&gt;/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3&gt;&amp;1&lt;/tt&gt;.  The relevant output on
one of my machines like this:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
loaded modules:
10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
10de:03ec pata_amd
10de:03f6 sata_nv
1022:1103 k8temp
109e:036e bttv
109e:0878 snd_bt87x
11ab:4364 sky2
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
    echo loaded pci modules:
    (
        cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
        for address in * ; do
            if [ -d &quot;$address/driver/module&quot; ] ; then
                module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
                if grep -q &quot;^$module &quot; /proc/modules ; then
                    address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
                    id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk &#39;{print $3}&#39;`
                    echo &quot;$id $module&quot;
                fi
            fi
        done
    )
    echo
fi
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
mappings:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
    echo loaded usb modules:
    (
        cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
        for address in * ; do
            if [ -d &quot;$address/driver/module&quot; ] ; then
                module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
                if grep -q &quot;^$module &quot; /proc/modules ; then
                    address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
                    id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk &#39;{print $6}&#39;)
                    if [ &quot;$id&quot; ] ; then
                        echo &quot;$id $module&quot;
                    fi
                fi
            fi
        done
    )
    echo
fi
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
well.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>How to test if a laptop is working with Linux</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 22 Dec 2010 14:55:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The last few days I have spent at work here at the &lt;a
href=&quot;http://www.uio.no/&quot;&gt;University of Oslo&lt;/a&gt; testing if the new
batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
university.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
have the time to do this for all the problems I find.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
I perform on a new model.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Is PXE installation working?  I&#39;m testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
installation, X.org is working.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
reported by the program.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
normally test this by playing
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ &quot;&gt;a HTML5
video&lt;/a&gt; in Firefox/Iceweasel.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
picture from the v4l device show up.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
few.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
notice this.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I&#39;m testing if the
special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
resume.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
not.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
existence.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
for the HP machines I am testing.  I&#39;m not done yet, so I will report
the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Some thoughts on BitCoins</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 11 Dec 2010 15:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;As I continue to explore
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bitcoin.org/&quot;&gt;BitCoin&lt;/a&gt;, I&#39;ve starting to wonder
what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
all transactions.  There I can see that my address
&lt;a href=&quot;http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;
have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3&quot;&gt;1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3&lt;/a&gt;
address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
&lt;a href=&quot;http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt&quot;&gt;1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt&lt;/A&gt;
of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I&#39;m told
there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
If the Skolelinux foundation
(&lt;a href=&quot;http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html&quot;&gt;SLX
Debian Labs&lt;/a&gt;) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I&#39;m sure they
will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
currencies.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The &quot;winner&quot; get 50
BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
BitCoins.  Check out
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/&quot;&gt;BitCoin Pool&lt;/a&gt;
if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
yet.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2010-12-15: Found an &lt;a
href=&quot;http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi&quot;&gt;interesting
criticism&lt;/a&gt; of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Now accepting bitcoins - anonymous and distributed p2p crypto-money</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 10 Dec 2010 08:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;With this weeks lawless
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html&quot;&gt;governmental
attacks&lt;/a&gt; on Wikileak and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech&quot;&gt;free
speech&lt;/a&gt;, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
not be trusted to handle money transactions.
A blog post from
&lt;a href=&quot;http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/&quot;&gt;Simon
Phipps on bitcoin&lt;/a&gt; reminded me about a project that a friend of
mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon&#39;s example, and get
involved with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bitcoin.org/&quot;&gt;BitCoin&lt;/a&gt;.  I got
some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
for helping me remember BitCoin.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/578157&quot;&gt;will get the package into
Debian&lt;/a&gt; soon.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
There are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bitcoin.org/trade&quot;&gt;companies accepting
bitcoins&lt;/a&gt; when selling services and goods, and there are even
currency &quot;stock&quot; markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
you can even get
&lt;a href=&quot;https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/&quot;&gt;some for free&lt;/a&gt; (0.05
bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/&quot;&gt;BitcoinWatch&lt;/a&gt; to keep an eye
on the current exchange rates.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
donations to the address
&lt;b&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/b&gt;.  Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Why isn&#39;t Debian Edu using VLC?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 27 Nov 2010 11:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.&lt;p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
mplayer in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian
Edu/Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia&quot;&gt;last
tested the browser plugins&lt;/a&gt; available in Debian, the VLC plugin
failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.&lt;/P&gt;

&lt;p&gt;While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
what is going on.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Lenny-&gt;Squeeze upgrades of the Gnome and KDE desktop, now with apt-get autoremove</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades_of_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop__now_with_apt_get_autoremove.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades_of_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop__now_with_apt_get_autoremove.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 22 Nov 2010 14:15:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
upgrade testing of the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/&quot;&gt;Lenny
Gnome and KDE Desktop&lt;/a&gt; to do &lt;tt&gt;apt-get autoremove&lt;/tt&gt; when using apt-get.
This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
can now present the updated result from today:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This is for Gnome:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  apache2.2-bin
  aptdaemon
  baobab
  binfmt-support
  browser-plugin-gnash
  cheese-common
  cli-common
  cups-pk-helper
  dmz-cursor-theme
  empathy
  empathy-common
  freedesktop-sound-theme
  freeglut3
  gconf-defaults-service
  gdm-themes
  gedit-plugins
  geoclue
  geoclue-hostip
  geoclue-localnet
  geoclue-manual
  geoclue-yahoo
  gnash
  gnash-common
  gnome
  gnome-backgrounds
  gnome-cards-data
  gnome-codec-install
  gnome-core
  gnome-desktop-environment
  gnome-disk-utility
  gnome-screenshot
  gnome-search-tool
  gnome-session-canberra
  gnome-system-log
  gnome-themes-extras
  gnome-themes-more
  gnome-user-share
  gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
  gstreamer0.10-tools
  gtk2-engines
  gtk2-engines-pixbuf
  gtk2-engines-smooth
  hamster-applet
  libapache2-mod-dnssd
  libapr1
  libaprutil1
  libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
  libaprutil1-ldap
  libart2.0-cil
  libboost-date-time1.42.0
  libboost-python1.42.0
  libboost-thread1.42.0
  libchamplain-0.4-0
  libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
  libcheese-gtk18
  libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
  libcryptui0
  libdiscid0
  libelf1
  libepc-1.0-2
  libepc-common
  libepc-ui-1.0-2
  libfreerdp-plugins-standard
  libfreerdp0
  libgconf2.0-cil
  libgdata-common
  libgdata7
  libgdu-gtk0
  libgee2
  libgeoclue0
  libgexiv2-0
  libgif4
  libglade2.0-cil
  libglib2.0-cil
  libgmime2.4-cil
  libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
  libgnome2.24-cil
  libgnomepanel2.24-cil
  libgpod-common
  libgpod4
  libgtk2.0-cil
  libgtkglext1
  libgtksourceview2.0-common
  libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
  libmono-addins0.2-cil
  libmono-cairo2.0-cil
  libmono-corlib2.0-cil
  libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
  libmono-posix2.0-cil
  libmono-security2.0-cil
  libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
  libmono-system2.0-cil
  libmtp8
  libmusicbrainz3-6
  libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
  libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
  libopal3.6.8
  libpolkit-gtk-1-0
  libpt2.6.7
  libpython2.6
  librpm1
  librpmio1
  libsdl1.2debian
  libsrtp0
  libssh-4
  libtelepathy-farsight0
  libtelepathy-glib0
  libtidy-0.99-0
  media-player-info
  mesa-utils
  mono-2.0-gac
  mono-gac
  mono-runtime
  nautilus-sendto
  nautilus-sendto-empathy
  p7zip-full
  pkg-config
  python-aptdaemon
  python-aptdaemon-gtk
  python-axiom
  python-beautifulsoup
  python-bugbuddy
  python-clientform
  python-coherence
  python-configobj
  python-crypto
  python-cupshelpers
  python-elementtree
  python-epsilon
  python-evolution
  python-feedparser
  python-gdata
  python-gdbm
  python-gst0.10
  python-gtkglext1
  python-gtksourceview2
  python-httplib2
  python-louie
  python-mako
  python-markupsafe
  python-mechanize
  python-nevow
  python-notify
  python-opengl
  python-openssl
  python-pam
  python-pkg-resources
  python-pyasn1
  python-pysqlite2
  python-rdflib
  python-serial
  python-tagpy
  python-twisted-bin
  python-twisted-conch
  python-twisted-core
  python-twisted-web
  python-utidylib
  python-webkit
  python-xdg
  python-zope.interface
  remmina
  remmina-plugin-data
  remmina-plugin-rdp
  remmina-plugin-vnc
  rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
  rhythmbox-plugins
  rpm-common
  rpm2cpio
  seahorse-plugins
  shotwell
  software-center
  system-config-printer-udev
  telepathy-gabble
  telepathy-mission-control-5
  telepathy-salut
  tomboy
  totem
  totem-coherence
  totem-mozilla
  totem-plugins
  transmission-common
  xdg-user-dirs
  xdg-user-dirs-gtk
  xserver-xephyr
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  cheese
  ekiga
  eog
  epiphany-extensions
  evolution-exchange
  fast-user-switch-applet
  file-roller
  gcalctool
  gconf-editor
  gdm
  gedit
  gedit-common
  gnome-games
  gnome-games-data
  gnome-nettool
  gnome-system-tools
  gnome-themes
  gnuchess
  gucharmap
  guile-1.8-libs
  libavahi-ui0
  libdmx1
  libgalago3
  libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
  libgtksourceview2.0-0
  liblircclient0
  libsdl1.2debian-alsa
  libspeexdsp1
  libsvga1
  rhythmbox
  seahorse
  sound-juicer
  system-config-printer
  totem-common
  transmission-gtk
  vinagre
  vino
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
[nothing]
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This is for KDE:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  ksmserver
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  kwin
  network-manager-kde
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  arts
  dolphin
  freespacenotifier
  google-gadgets-gst
  google-gadgets-xul
  kappfinder
  kcalc
  kcharselect
  kde-core
  kde-plasma-desktop
  kde-standard
  kde-window-manager
  kdeartwork
  kdeartwork-emoticons
  kdeartwork-style
  kdeartwork-theme-icon
  kdebase
  kdebase-apps
  kdebase-workspace
  kdebase-workspace-bin
  kdebase-workspace-data
  kdeeject
  kdelibs
  kdeplasma-addons
  kdeutils
  kdewallpapers
  kdf
  kfloppy
  kgpg
  khelpcenter4
  kinfocenter
  konq-plugins-l10n
  konqueror-nsplugins
  kscreensaver
  kscreensaver-xsavers
  ktimer
  kwrite
  libgle3
  libkde4-ruby1.8
  libkonq5
  libkonq5-templates
  libnetpbm10
  libplasma-ruby
  libplasma-ruby1.8
  libqt4-ruby1.8
  marble-data
  marble-plugins
  netpbm
  nuvola-icon-theme
  plasma-dataengines-workspace
  plasma-desktop
  plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
  plasma-runners-addons
  plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
  plasma-scriptengine-python
  plasma-scriptengine-qedje
  plasma-scriptengine-ruby
  plasma-scriptengine-webkit
  plasma-scriptengines
  plasma-wallpapers-addons
  plasma-widget-folderview
  plasma-widget-networkmanagement
  ruby
  sweeper
  update-notifier-kde
  xscreensaver-data-extra
  xscreensaver-gl
  xscreensaver-gl-extra
  xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  ark
  google-gadgets-common
  google-gadgets-qt
  htdig
  kate
  kdebase-bin
  kdebase-data
  kdepasswd
  kfind
  klipper
  konq-plugins
  konqueror
  ksysguard
  ksysguardd
  libarchive1
  libcln6
  libeet1
  libeina-svn-06
  libggadget-1.0-0b
  libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
  libgps19
  libkdecorations4
  libkephal4
  libkonq4
  libkonqsidebarplugin4a
  libkscreensaver5
  libksgrd4
  libksignalplotter4
  libkunitconversion4
  libkwineffects1a
  libmarblewidget4
  libntrack-qt4-1
  libntrack0
  libplasma-geolocation-interface4
  libplasmaclock4a
  libplasmagenericshell4
  libprocesscore4a
  libprocessui4a
  libqalculate5
  libqedje0a
  libqtruby4shared2
  libqzion0a
  libruby1.8
  libscim8c2a
  libsmokekdecore4-3
  libsmokekdeui4-3
  libsmokekfile3
  libsmokekhtml3
  libsmokekio3
  libsmokeknewstuff2-3
  libsmokeknewstuff3-3
  libsmokekparts3
  libsmokektexteditor3
  libsmokekutils3
  libsmokenepomuk3
  libsmokephonon3
  libsmokeplasma3
  libsmokeqtcore4-3
  libsmokeqtdbus4-3
  libsmokeqtgui4-3
  libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
  libsmokeqtopengl4-3
  libsmokeqtscript4-3
  libsmokeqtsql4-3
  libsmokeqtsvg4-3
  libsmokeqttest4-3
  libsmokeqtuitools4-3
  libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
  libsmokeqtxml4-3
  libsmokesolid3
  libsmokesoprano3
  libtaskmanager4a
  libtidy-0.99-0
  libweather-ion4a
  libxklavier16
  libxxf86misc1
  okteta
  oxygencursors
  plasma-dataengines-addons
  plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
  plasma-widget-lancelot
  plasma-widgets-addons
  plasma-widgets-workspace
  polkit-kde-1
  ruby1.8
  systemsettings
  update-notifier-common
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Migrating Xen virtual machines using LVM to KVM using disk images</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 22 Nov 2010 11:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Most of the computers in use by the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu/Skolelinux project&lt;/a&gt;
are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I found
&lt;a href=&quot;http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM&quot;&gt;a
nice recipe&lt;/a&gt; to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
#!/bin/sh

# Based on
# http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM

set -e
set -x

if [ -z &quot;$1&quot; ] ; then
    echo &quot;Usage: $0 &amp;lt;hostname&amp;gt;&quot;
    exit 1
else
    host=&quot;$1&quot;
fi

if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
    echo &quot;error: unable to find LVM volume for $host&quot;
    exit 1
fi

# Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk &#39;{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }&#39;)
swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk &#39;{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }&#39;)
totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))

img=$host.img
#dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD

parted $img mklabel msdos
parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
parted $img set 1 boot on

modprobe dm-mod
losetup /dev/loop0 $img
kpartx -a /dev/loop0

dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2

kpartx -d /dev/loop0
losetup -d /dev/loop0
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
seem to work just fine.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Lenny-&gt;Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome and KDE desktop</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 20 Nov 2010 22:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m still running upgrade testing of the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/&quot;&gt;Lenny
Gnome and KDE Desktop&lt;/a&gt;, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
can see if anything should be changed.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This is for Gnome:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
  browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
  dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
  freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
  gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
  geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
  gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
  gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
  gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
  gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
  gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
  gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
  gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
  libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
  libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
  libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
  libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
  libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
  libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
  libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
  libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
  libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
  libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
  libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
  libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
  libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
  libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
  libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
  libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
  libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
  libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
  libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
  libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
  libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
  libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
  libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
  mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
  nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
  openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
  python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
  python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
  python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
  python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
  python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
  python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
  python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
  python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
  python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
  python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
  python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
  python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
  python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
  remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
  rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
  software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
  telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
  totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
  transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
  zip
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
  epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
  fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
  gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
  gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
  gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
  guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
  libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
  libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
  libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
  libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
  libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
  libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
  libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
  libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
  libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
  libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
  libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
  libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
  libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
  libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
  libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
  libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
  libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
  libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
  libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
  libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
  sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
  totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
[nothing]
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This is for KDE:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
  edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
  ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
  gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
  kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
  kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
  kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
  kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
  kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
  kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
  kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
  kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
  killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
  kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
  ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
  libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
  libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
  libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
  libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
  libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
  libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
  libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
  libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
  libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
  lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
  openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
  parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
  pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
  speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
  ttf-sazanami-gothic
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
  dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
  kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
  kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
  keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
  kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
  kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
  klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
  kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
  kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
  kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
  ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
  ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
  kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
  kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
  libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
  libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
  libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
  libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
  libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
  libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
  libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
  libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
  libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
  libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
  libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
  libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
  libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
  libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
  libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
  mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
  texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
  ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
  kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
  kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
  kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
  netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
  xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
  xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 20 Nov 2010 07:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Answering
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html&quot;&gt;the
call from the Gnash project&lt;/a&gt; for
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnashdev.org:8010&quot;&gt;buildbot&lt;/a&gt; slaves to test the
current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
releases out more often.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
I have considered setting up a &lt;a
href=&quot;http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/&quot;&gt;Debian/kfreebsd&lt;/a&gt;
machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian in 3D</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 9 Nov 2010 16:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
3D linked in from
&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/&quot;&gt;the
thingiverse blog&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Software updates 2010-10-24</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 24 Oct 2010 22:45:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Some updates.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2&quot;&gt;gnash pledge&lt;/a&gt; to
raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
:)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
It is called
&lt;a href=&quot;http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html&quot;&gt;kcov&lt;/a&gt;,
and can be used using &lt;tt&gt;kcov &amp;lt;directory&amp;gt; &amp;lt;binary&amp;gt;&lt;/tt&gt;.
It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for &lt;a
href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html&quot;&gt;a
new alpha release of Debian Edu&lt;/a&gt;, and just published the second
alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;
release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
clients to get a Linux desktop on request.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Some notes on Flash in Debian and Debian Edu</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 4 Sep 2010 10:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote&quot;&gt;Debian
popularity-contest numbers&lt;/a&gt;, the adobe-flashplugin package the
second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
installed.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
(«&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&amp;do=view&amp;target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf&quot;&gt;Skolelinux
i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs&lt;/a&gt;»), one of the most important problems
schools experienced with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian
Edu/Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
good reason to stay with Windows.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
pages they want to visit.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
accept the new package into Squeeze.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 27 Jul 2010 23:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;I discovered this while doing
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html&quot;&gt;automated
testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze&lt;/a&gt;.  A few packages
in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;An example is from todays
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt&quot;&gt;upgrade
of KDE using aptitude&lt;/a&gt;.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
because its dependencies are unavailable.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
 perl-modules depends on perl (&gt;= 5.10.1-1); however:
  Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/527917&quot;&gt;reported as a bug&lt;/a&gt;, and will
hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
of dependency loops.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Thanks to
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html&quot;&gt;the
tireless effort by Bill Allombert&lt;/a&gt;, the number of circular
dependencies
&lt;a href=&quot;http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html&quot;&gt;left in Debian
is dropping&lt;/a&gt;, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Todays testing also exposed a bug in
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/590605&quot;&gt;update-notifier&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/590604&quot;&gt;different behaviour&lt;/a&gt; between
apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
it.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>What are they searching for - PowerDNS and ISC DHCP in LDAP</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 17 Jul 2010 21:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;This is a
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html&quot;&gt;followup&lt;/a&gt;
on my
&lt;a href=&quot;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&quot;&gt;previous
work&lt;/a&gt; on
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html&quot;&gt;merging
all&lt;/a&gt; the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.&lt;/p&gt;

To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;powerdns&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend&quot;&gt;Clues
on how to&lt;/a&gt; set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
the web.

&lt;p&gt;PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
One &quot;strict&quot; mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
using the same LDAP objects, and a &quot;tree&quot; mode where the forward and
reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
base, and uses a &quot;base&quot; scoped search for the DNS name by adding
&quot;dc=tjener,dc=intern,&quot; to the base with a filter for
&quot;(associateddomain=tjener.intern)&quot; for the forward entry and
&quot;dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,&quot; with a filter for
&quot;(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)&quot; for the reverse entry.  For
forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
ldapsearch commands could look like this:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
ldapsearch -h ldap \
  -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
  -s base -x &#39;(associateddomain=tjener.intern)&#39; dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
  cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
  rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
  nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
  rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp

ldapsearch -h ldap \
  -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
  -s base -x &#39;(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)&#39;
  dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
  hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
  srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
also exist.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
objectclass: top
objectclass: dnsdomain
objectclass: domainrelatedobject
dc: tjener
arecord: 10.0.2.2
associateddomain: tjener.intern

dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
objectclass: top
objectclass: dnsdomain2
objectclass: domainrelatedobject
dc: 2
ptrrecord: tjener.intern
associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
forward DNS entries, it is doing a &quot;subtree&quot; scoped search with the
same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
&quot;(associateddomain=tjener.intern)&quot; and requests the attributes dnsttl,
arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
subtree scoped search but this time the filter is &quot;(arecord=10.0.2.2)&quot;
and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
instead.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
like this:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
  &#39;(associateddomain=tjener.intern)&#39; dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
  cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
  rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
  nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
  rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp

ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
  &#39;(arecord=10.0.2.2)&#39; associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
reverse lookups.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
objectclass that provide the needed attributes.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
classes with the object classes used by DHCP.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
(zonename and relativedomainname).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
objectclass ( some-oid NAME &#39;dnsDomainAux&#39;
    SUP top
    AUXILIARY
    MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
          DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
          TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
          NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
          A6Record $ DNAMERecord
    ))
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I&#39;ve sent an email to the PowerDNS
developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ISC dhcp&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
what is needed without having to read the source code.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
stored.  These are the relevant entries from
/etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
ldap-base-dn &quot;dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no&quot;;
ldap-dhcp-server-cn &quot;dhcp&quot;;
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
configuration it need.  The cn &quot;dhcp&quot; is located using the given LDAP
base and the filter &quot;(&amp;(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))&quot;.  The
search result is this entry:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
cn: dhcp
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpServer
dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
is located using a base scope search with base &quot;cn=DHCP
Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no&quot; and filter
&quot;(&amp;(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))&quot;.
The search result is this entry:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
cn: DHCP Config
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpService
objectClass: dhcpOptions
dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
dhcpStatements: authoritative
dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
related computer objects.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
scoped search with &quot;cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no&quot; as
the base and &quot;(&amp;(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
00:00:00:00:00:00))&quot; as the filter.  This is what a host object look
like:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
cn: hostname
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpHost
dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
structural object class.

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its &quot;tree&quot; mode is rigid when it
come to the the LDAP structure, the &quot;strict&quot; mode is very flexible,
allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
in the configuration.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
structure.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
this might work for Debian Edu:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
ou=services
  cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
    cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
    cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
      cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
        cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
    cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
      cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
        cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
    ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
      cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;P&gt;This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
like this:&lt;/p&gt;
    
&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
dc: hostname
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpHost
objectclass: domainrelatedobject
objectclass: dnsDomainAux
associateddomain: hostname.intern
arecord: 10.11.12.13
dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;/p&gt;One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
auxiliary object class.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 14 Jul 2010 23:45:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I&#39;ve looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
information finally found a solution that seem to work.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
to a slave DNS server.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
I&#39;ve written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
seem to work.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
this:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
  dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
  cn: hostname
  objectClass: dhcphost
  objectclass: domainrelatedobject
  objectclass: dnsdomainaux
  associateddomain: hostname.intern
  arecord: 10.11.12.13
  dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
  dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
  ldapconfigsound: Y
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
outside the &quot;DHCP Config&quot; subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
that.  If I can&#39;t figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
(which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
might be a good place to put it.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 11 Jul 2010 22:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
LTSP clients.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
in a &quot;computer&quot; LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
# Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
#
# Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
#
# Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
# the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
# ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
#
# This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
# existence of attribute names.
#
# The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
# ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
# To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
#
# Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
# configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
# 
# objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME &#39;ltspClientAux&#39;
#     SUP top
#     AUXILIARY
#     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )

LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
if [ &quot;$LDAPSERVER&quot; ] ; then
    LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
    for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk &#39;{print $5}&#39;|sort -u) ; do
        filter=&quot;(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))&quot;
        ldapsearch -h &quot;$LDAPSERVER&quot; -b &quot;$LDAPBASE&quot; -v -x &quot;$filter&quot; | \
            grep &#39;^ltspConfig&#39; | while read attr value ; do
            # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
            attr=$(echo $attr | sed &#39;s/^ltspConfig//i&#39; | tr a-z A-Z)
            # bass value on to clients
            eval &quot;$attr=$value; export $attr&quot;
        done
    done
fi
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html&quot;&gt;PC
Xperience, Inc., 2000&lt;/a&gt;.  I found its
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/&quot;&gt;files&lt;/a&gt; on a
personal home page over at redhat.com.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 9 Jul 2010 12:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Since
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html&quot;&gt;my
last post&lt;/a&gt; about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
&lt;a href=&quot;http://jxplorer.org/&quot;&gt;jXplorer&lt;/a&gt; is claimed to be capable of
moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html&quot;&gt;available in
Debian&lt;/a&gt; testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Lenny-&gt;Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome desktop</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 3 Jul 2010 23:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Here is a short update on my &lt;a
href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/&quot;&gt;my
Debian Lenny-&gt;Squeeze upgrade testing&lt;/a&gt;.  Here is a summary of the
difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I&#39;m
not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
aptitude try because of missing conflicts
(&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/584861&quot;&gt;#584861&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/585716&quot;&gt;#585716&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
publish the difference.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
  libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
  libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
  libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
  libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
  libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
  python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
  python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
  gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
  libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
  libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
  libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
  libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
  libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
  libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
  libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
  libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
  libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
  libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
  libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
  libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
  libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
  libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
  libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
  libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
  libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
  mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
  python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
  xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
  xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
  xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
  xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
  xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
  xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
  xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
  xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
  xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
  xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
  xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
  xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
  xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
  xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
  xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
  xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
  xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
  xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
  xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;
  deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
  xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
  xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
&lt;a href=&quot;http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120&quot;&gt;changed
in git&lt;/a&gt; today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
the difference somewhat.
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://luma.sourceforge.net/&quot;&gt;LUMA&lt;/a&gt;, which has proved to
be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
released.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/&quot;&gt;ldapvi&lt;/a&gt; for that.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html&quot;&gt;gq&lt;/a&gt; package as a
useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Idea for a change to LDAP schemas allowing DNS and DHCP info to be combined into one object</title>
                <link>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</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">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</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 24 Jun 2010 00:35:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;A while back, I
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html&quot;&gt;complained
about the fact&lt;/a&gt; that it is not possible with the provided schemas
for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
Debian Edu.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00&quot;&gt;DHCP
schema&lt;/a&gt; to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
available today from IETF.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;pre&gt;
--- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
+++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
@@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
 objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
        NAME &#39;dhcpHost&#39;
        DESC &#39;This represents information about a particular client&#39;
-       SUP top
+       SUP top AUXILIARY
        MUST cn
        MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
        X-NDS_CONTAINMENT (&#39;dhcpService&#39; &#39;dhcpSubnet&#39; &#39;dhcpGroup&#39;) )
&lt;/pre&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Calling tasksel like the installer, while still getting useful output</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
this:

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
tasksel --new-install
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
any output what so ever.

Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
code like this:

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
cmd=&quot;$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed &#39;s/debconf-apt-progress -- //&#39;)&quot;
$cmd
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The content of $cmd is typically something like &quot;&lt;tt&gt;aptitude -q
--without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
~pimportant&lt;/tt&gt;&quot;, which will install the gnome desktop task, the
laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
important, just like tasksel would have done it during
installation.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
like this.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Lenny-&gt;Squeeze upgrades, removals by apt and aptitude</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 13 Jun 2010 09:05:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;My
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html&quot;&gt;testing
of Debian upgrades&lt;/a&gt; from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I&#39;ve
finally made the upgrade logs available from
&lt;a href=&quot;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/&quot;&gt;http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/&lt;/a&gt;.
I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
I will only focus on their removal plans.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
too surprising.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
&#39;&lt;tt&gt;echo &gt;&gt; /proc/&lt;em&gt;pidofdpkg&lt;/em&gt;/fd/0&lt;/tt&gt;&#39; to tell dpkg to
continue.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;apt-get gnome 72&lt;/b&gt;
&lt;br&gt;bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
  gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
  iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
  libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
  nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
  serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
  xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
  xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
  xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
  xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
  xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
  xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
  xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
  xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
  xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
  xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
  xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
  xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
  xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
  xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
  xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
  xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
  xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
  xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
  xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
  xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
  xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
  xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
  xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;aptitude gnome 129&lt;/b&gt;

&lt;br&gt;bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
  djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
  gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
  gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
  libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
  libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
  libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
  libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
  libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
  libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
  libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
  libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
  libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
  libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
  libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
  libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
  libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
  libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
  libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
  libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
  libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
  libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
  libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
  libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
  openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
  python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
  python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
  python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
  swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
  xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
  xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
  zip&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;apt-get kde 82&lt;/b&gt;

&lt;br&gt;cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
  kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
  kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
  kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
  kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
  libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
  xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
  xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
  xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
  xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
  xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
  xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
  xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
  xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
  xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
  xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
  xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
  xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
  xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
  xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
  xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
  xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
  xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
  xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
  xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
  xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
  xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
  xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;aptitude kde 192&lt;/b&gt;
&lt;br&gt;bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
  djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
  ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
  kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
  kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
  kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
  kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
  kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
  kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
  kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
  kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
  klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
  kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
  krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
  ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
  kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
  kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
  libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
  libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
  libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
  libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
  libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
  libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
  libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
  libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
  libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
  libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
  libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
  libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
  libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
  libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
  openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
  superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
  texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
  xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
  xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
  xulrunner-1.9&lt;/p&gt;

</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 11 Jun 2010 22:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
have been discovered and reported in the process
(&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/585410&quot;&gt;#585410&lt;/a&gt; in nagios3-cgi,
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/584879&quot;&gt;#584879&lt;/a&gt; already fixed in
enscript and &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/584861&quot;&gt;#584861&lt;/a&gt; in
kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
am working on a script to automate the test.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
(only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
is created.  The bug report
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/566000&quot;&gt;#566000&lt;/a&gt; make me suspect
this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/&quot;&gt;known
issue&lt;/a&gt; and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
Debian Squeeze.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
script, which I call &lt;tt&gt;upgrade-test&lt;/tt&gt; for now, is doing the
trick:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
#!/bin/sh
set -ex

if [ &quot;$1&quot; ] ; then
    desktop=$1
else
    desktop=gnome
fi

from=lenny
to=squeeze

exec &amp;lt; /dev/null
unset LANG
mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
fuser -mv .
debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
cat &gt; $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &amp;lt;&amp;lt;EOF
#!/bin/sh
exit 101
EOF
chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
exit_cleanup() {
    umount $tmpdir/proc
}
mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
# Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT

chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils

# Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
# to return the correct answers.
echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
    chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections

# Include the desktop and laptop task
for test in desktop laptop ; do
    echo &gt; $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &amp;lt;&amp;lt;EOF
#!/bin/sh
exit 2
EOF
    chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
done

DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install

echo deb $mirror $to main &gt; $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
fuser -mv
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
kdebase-workspace-data&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
(KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
packages.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Upstart or sysvinit - as init.d scripts see it</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 6 Jun 2010 23:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
script is running under upstart, and when it is not.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
COLUMNS):&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
previous=N
PREVLEVEL=
RUNLEVEL=
runlevel=S
UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
UPSTART_INSTANCE=
UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
script.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
previous=N
PREVLEVEL=N
RUNLEVEL=S
runlevel=S
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
choice.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>A manual for standards wars...</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 6 Jun 2010 14:15:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Via the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html&quot;&gt;blog
of Rob Weir&lt;/a&gt; I came across the very interesting essay named
&lt;a href=&quot;http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf&quot;&gt;The Art of
Standards Wars&lt;/a&gt; (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
following the standards wars of today.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Sitesummary tip: Listing computer hardware models used at site</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 3 Jun 2010 12:05:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
the Skolelinux build servers:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
  vendor                    count
  Dell Computer Corporation     1
    PowerEdge 1750              1
  IBM                           1
    eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
  Intel                         2
  [no-dmi-info]                 3
maintainer:~#
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
option to list the individual machines.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A larger list is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/&quot;&gt;available from the the
city of Narvik&lt;/a&gt;, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
collector.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>KDM fail at boot with NVidia cards - and no one try to fix it?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 1 Jun 2010 17:05:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
wait.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I came across two bugs related to this issue,
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/583312&quot;&gt;#583312&lt;/a&gt; initially filed
against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/524751&quot;&gt;#524751&lt;/a&gt; initially filed against
kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Parallellized boot seem to hold up well in Debian/testing</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 27 May 2010 23:55:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
issues are known and should be solved:

&lt;p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The wicd package seen to
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/508289&quot;&gt;break NFS mounting&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/581586&quot;&gt;network setup&lt;/a&gt; when
parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
seem to be on the case.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The nvidia X driver seem to
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/583312&quot;&gt;have a race condition&lt;/a&gt;
triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
maintainer is on the case.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/575080&quot;&gt;try to switch back&lt;/a&gt; to
sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
/etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
sysv-rc get a working shutdown.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org&quot;&gt;the
list of usertagged bugs related to this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 22 May 2010 21:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
definitely helped freeing some time.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
/cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
going to work.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
&quot;external&quot; media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
/cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
Edu.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Parallellized boot is now the default in Debian/unstable</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 14 May 2010 22:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
expected, if I am to believe the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html&quot;&gt;input
on debian-devel@&lt;/a&gt;, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
version.&lt;/p&gt;

More information about
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot&quot;&gt;dependency
based boot sequencing&lt;/a&gt; is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
CONCURRENCY=none
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org&quot;&gt;the
list of usertagged bugs related to this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 14 May 2010 21:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary&quot;&gt;sitesummary
system&lt;/a&gt; is used to keep track of the machines in the school
network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
to update the DHCP configuration.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
this on the collector host:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
perl -MSiteSummary -e &#39;for_all_hosts(sub { print join(&quot; &quot;, get_macaddresses(shift)), &quot;\n&quot;; });&#39;
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
written yet.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 13 May 2010 22:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The last few days a new boot system called
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd&quot;&gt;systemd&lt;/a&gt;
has been
&lt;a href=&quot;http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html&quot;&gt;introduced&lt;/a&gt;

to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
&lt;a href=&quot;http://upstart.ubuntu.com/&quot;&gt;upstart&lt;/a&gt;, and might prove to be
a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
based boot system.  Tollef is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/580814&quot;&gt;in the process&lt;/a&gt; of getting
systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
at the moment do not.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
way forward.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In the mean time, based on the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html&quot;&gt;input
on debian-devel@&lt;/a&gt; regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
with parallel booting enabled by default.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Parallellizing the boot in Debian Squeeze - ready for wider testing</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 6 May 2010 23:25:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
to test your Squeeze system, make sure
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot&quot;&gt;dependency
based boot sequencing&lt;/a&gt; is enabled, and add this line to
/etc/default/rcS:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
CONCURRENCY=makefile
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
/etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
/etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
make this happen.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
the package maintainers to fix it. :)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
fix the remaining issues.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
&lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org&quot;&gt;the
list of usertagged bugs related to this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian has switched to dependency based boot sequencing</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 27 Jul 2009 23:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
non-predictable kernel in the early boot.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Taking over sysvinit development</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 22 Jul 2009 23:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
the package up to date.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
upstream project at &lt;a href=&quot;http://savannah.nongnu.org/&quot;&gt;Savannah&lt;/a&gt;, and continue
development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
working on the future release.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Debian boots quicker and quicker</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
funded
&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint&quot;&gt;developer
gathering&lt;/a&gt;. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
boot:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Use dash as /bin/sh.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
   clock is in UTC.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;Install and activate the insserv package to enable
   &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot&quot;&gt;dependency
   based boot sequencing&lt;/a&gt;, and enable concurrent booting.&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;/ul&gt;

These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
&lt;a href=&quot;http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/&quot;&gt;Carlos
Villegas&lt;/a&gt;.

&lt;p&gt;Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
using this.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
this would be to enable insserv and run &#39;mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
insserv&#39;.  Will need to test if that work. :)&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>BSAs påstander om piratkopiering møter motstand</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/BSAs_p_stander_om_piratkopiering_m_ter_motstand.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/BSAs_p_stander_om_piratkopiering_m_ter_motstand.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 17 May 2009 23:05:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Hvert år de siste årene har BSA, lobbyfronten til de store
programvareselskapene som Microsoft og Apple, publisert en rapport der
de gjetter på hvor mye piratkopiering påfører i tapte inntekter i
ulike land rundt om i verden.  Resultatene er tendensiøse.  For noen
dager siden kom
&lt;a href=&quot;http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/studies/globalpiracy2008.pdf&quot;&gt;siste
rapport&lt;/a&gt;, og det er flere kritiske kommentarer publisert de siste
dagene.  Et spesielt interessant kommentar fra Sverige,
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.229795/bsa-hoftade-sverigesiffror&quot;&gt;BSA
höftade Sverigesiffror&lt;/a&gt;, oppsummeres slik:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;
I sin senaste rapport slår BSA fast att 25 procent av all mjukvara i
Sverige är piratkopierad. Det utan att ha pratat med ett enda svenskt
företag. &quot;Man bör nog kanske inte se de här siffrorna som helt
exakta&quot;, säger BSAs Sverigechef John Hugosson.
&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Mon tro om de er like metodiske når de gjetter på andelen piratkopiering i Norge?  To andre kommentarer er &lt;a
href=&quot;http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/comment/2242134/bsa-piracy-figures-shot-reality&quot;&gt;BSA
piracy figures need a shot of reality&lt;/a&gt; og &lt;a
href=&quot;http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3958/125/&quot;&gt;Does The WIPO
Copyright Treaty Work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Fant lenkene via &lt;a
href=&quot;http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/17/1632242&quot;&gt;oppslag
på Slashdot&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>IDG mener linux i servermarkedet vil vokse med 21% i 2009</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IDG_mener_linux_i_servermarkedet_vil_vokse_med_21__i_2009.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IDG_mener_linux_i_servermarkedet_vil_vokse_med_21__i_2009.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 7 May 2009 22:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Kom over
&lt;a href=&quot;http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10216873-16.html&quot;&gt;interessante
tall&lt;/a&gt; fra IDG om utviklingen av linuxservermarkedet.  Fikk meg til
å tenke på antall tjenermaskiner ved Universitetet i Oslo der jeg
jobber til daglig.  En rask opptelling forteller meg at vi har 490
(61%) fysiske unix-tjener (mest linux men også noen solaris) og 196
(25%) windowstjenere, samt 112 (14%) virtuelle unix-tjenere.  Med den
bakgrunnskunnskapen kan jeg godt tro at IDG er inne på noe.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Kryptert harddisk - naturligvis</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kryptert_harddisk___naturligvis.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kryptert_harddisk___naturligvis.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 2 May 2009 15:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dagensit.no/trender/article1658676.ece&quot;&gt;Dagens
IT melder&lt;/a&gt; at Intel hevder at det er dyrt å miste en datamaskin,
når en tar tap av arbeidstid, fortrolige dokumenter,
personopplysninger og alt annet det innebærer.  Det er ingen tvil om
at det er en kostbar affære å miste sin datamaskin, og det er årsaken
til at jeg har kryptert harddisken på både kontormaskinen og min
bærbare.  Begge inneholder personopplysninger jeg ikke ønsker skal
komme på avveie, den første informasjon relatert til jobben min ved
Universitetet i Oslo, og den andre relatert til blant annet
foreningsarbeide.  Kryptering av diskene gjør at det er lite
sannsynlig at dophoder som kan finne på å rappe maskinene får noe ut
av dem.  Maskinene låses automatisk etter noen minutter uten bruk,
og en reboot vil gjøre at de ber om passord før de vil starte opp.
Jeg bruker Debian på begge maskinene, og installasjonssystemet der
gjør det trivielt å sette opp krypterte disker.  Jeg har LVM på toppen
av krypterte partisjoner, slik at alt av datapartisjoner er kryptert.
Jeg anbefaler alle å kryptere diskene på sine bærbare.  Kostnaden når
det er gjort slik jeg gjør det er minimale, og gevinstene er
betydelige.  En bør dog passe på passordet.  Hvis det går tapt, må
maskinen reinstalleres og alt er tapt.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Krypteringen vil ikke stoppe kompetente angripere som f.eks. kjøler
ned minnebrikkene før maskinen rebootes med programvare for å hente ut
krypteringsnøklene.  Kostnaden med å forsvare seg mot slike angripere
er for min del høyere enn gevinsten.  Jeg tror oddsene for at
f.eks. etteretningsorganisasjoner har glede av å titte på mine
maskiner er minimale, og ulempene jeg ville oppnå ved å forsøke å
gjøre det vanskeligere for angripere med kompetanse og ressurser er
betydelige.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Two projects that have improved the quality of free software a lot</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sat, 2 May 2009 15:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
do not yet know them.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The first one is &lt;a href=&quot;http://valgrind.org/&quot;&gt;valgrind&lt;/a&gt;, a
tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run &#39;valgrind program&#39;,
and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
to report the source file name and line number where the problem
occurs.  It can report things like &#39;reading past memory block in file
X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M&#39;, and
&#39;using uninitialised value in control logic&#39;.  This tool has made it
trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.

&lt;p&gt;The second one is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity&quot;&gt;Coverity&lt;/a&gt; which is
a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
and the company behind it is running
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scan.coverity.com/&quot;&gt;a community service&lt;/a&gt; for the
free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like &#39;lock L taken in file
X line N is never released if exiting in line M&#39;, or &#39;the code in file
Y lines O to P can never be executed&#39;.  The projects included in the
community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
reliability problems thanks to Coverity.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
surrounded by today.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>No patch is not better than a useless patch</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2009 09:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Julien Blache
&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214&quot;&gt;claim that no
patch is better than a useless patch&lt;/a&gt;.  I completely disagree, as a
patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
properties.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
application.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
blocked from doing so.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
requirements change.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 29 Mar 2009 21:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
now. :)&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Time for new  LDAP schemas replacing RFC 2307?</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 29 Mar 2009 20:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu/Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt;,
we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
specifications to cleam up this mess.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
(mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
new IETF work group?&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Endelig er Debian Lenny gitt ut</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Endelig_er_Debian_Lenny_gitt_ut.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Endelig_er_Debian_Lenny_gitt_ut.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 15 Feb 2009 11:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Endelig er &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.debian.org/&quot;&gt;Debian&lt;/a&gt;
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214&quot;&gt;Lenny&lt;/a&gt; gitt ut.
Et langt steg videre for Debian-prosjektet, og en rekke nye
programpakker blir nå tilgjengelig for de av oss som bruker den
stabile utgaven av Debian.  Neste steg er nå å få
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; /
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu&lt;/a&gt; ferdig
oppdatert for den nye utgaven, slik at en oppdatert versjon kan
slippes løs på skolene.  Takk til alle debian-utviklerne som har
gjort dette mulig.  Endelig er f.eks. fungerende avhengighetsstyrt
bootsekvens tilgjengelig i stabil utgave, vha pakken
&lt;tt&gt;insserv&lt;/tt&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Devcamp brought us closer to the Lenny based Debian Edu release</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Sun, 7 Dec 2008 12:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
finish it before the weekend was up.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
of these cards.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>The sorry state of multimedia browser plugins in Debian</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html</link>
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2008 00:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
notes are available on
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia&quot;&gt;the
Debian wiki&lt;/a&gt;.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn&#39;t supported by the
totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
be the only one fitting our needs. :/&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        </channel>
</rss>