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  13  <h1>
  14      <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  15
  16  </h1>
  17
  18 </div>
  19
  20
  21     <h3>Entries tagged "english".</h3>
  22
  23     <div class="entry">
  24       <div class="title">
  25         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_want_the_courts_to_be_involved_before_the_police_can_hijack_a_news_site_DNS_domain___domstolkontroll_.html">I want the courts to be involved before the police can hijack a news site DNS domain (#domstolkontroll)</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28         19th May 2016
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>I just donated to the
  32 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">NUUG defence
  33 "fond"</a> to fund the effort in Norway to get the seizure of the news
  34 site popcorn-time.no tested in court.  I hope everyone that agree with
  35 me will do the same.</p>
  36
  37 <p>Would you be worried if you knew the police in your country could
  38 hijack DNS domains of news sites covering free software system without
  39 talking to a judge first?  I am.  What if the free software system
  40 combined search engine lookups, bittorrent downloads and video playout
  41 and was called Popcorn Time?  Would that affect your view?  It still
  42 make me worried.</p>
  43
  44 <p>In March 2016, the Norwegian police seized (as in forced NORID to
  45 change the IP address pointed to by it to one controlled by the
  46 police) the DNS domain popcorn-time.no, without any supervision from
  47 the courts.  I did not know about the web site back then, and assumed
  48 the courts had been involved, and was very surprised when I discovered
  49 that the police had hijacked the DNS domain without asking a judge for
  50 permission first.  I was even more surprised when I had a look at
  51 <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://popcorn-time.no">the web
  52 site content on the Internet Archive</A>, and only found news coverage
  53 about Popcorn Time, not any material published without the right
  54 holders permissions.</p>
  55
  56 <p>The seizure was widely covered in the Norwegian press (see for
  57 example <a href="http://www.hegnar.no/Nyheter/Naeringsliv/2016/03/Popcorn-time.no-beslaglagt-av-OEkokrim">Hegnar Online</a> and
  58 <a href="http://itavisen.no/2016/03/08/okokrim-har-beslaglagt-popcorn-time-no/">ITavisen<a/>
  59 and
  60 <a href="http://www.nrk.no/kultur/okokrim-gar-til-aksjon-mot-popcorn-time-1.12842452">NRK</a>),
  61 at first due to the press release sent out by Økokrim, but then based
  62 on
  63 <a href="http://blogg.torvund.net/2016/03/09/okokrims-beslag-i-domenet-popcorn-time-no/">protests
  64 from the law professor Olav Torvund</a> and
  65 <a href="http://www.klassekampen.no/article/20160311/ARTICLE/160319995">lawyer
  66 Jon Wessel-Aas</a>.  It even got some
  67 <a href="https://torrentfreak.com/norwegian-authorities-sued-over-popcorn-time-domain-seizure-160418/">coverage
  68 on TorrentFreak</a>.</p>
  69
  70 <p>I
  71 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html">
  72 wrote about the case a month ago</a>, when the
  73 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> (NUUG),
  74 where I am an active member, decided to ask the courts to test this seizure.
  75 The request was denied, but NUUG and its co-requestor EFN have not
  76 given up, and now they are rallying for support to get the seizure
  77 legally challenged.  They accept both bank and Bitcoin transfer for
  78 those that want to support the request.</p>
  79
  80 <p>If you as me believe news sites about free software should not be
  81 censored, even if the free software have both legal and illegal
  82 applications, and that DNS hijacking should be tested by the courts, I
  83 suggest you <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">show
  84 your support by donating to NUUG</a>.</a>
  85
  86       </div>
  87       <div class="tags">
  88
  89
  90         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
  91
  92
  93       </div>
  94     </div>
  95     <div class="padding"></div>
  96
  97     <div class="entry">
  98       <div class="title">
  99         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html">Debian now with ZFS on Linux included</a>
 100       </div>
 101       <div class="date">
 102         12th May 2016
 103       </div>
 104       <div class="body">
 105         <p>Today, after many years of hard work from many people,
 106 <a href="http://zfsonlinux.org/">ZFS for Linux</a> finally entered
 107 Debian.  The package status can be seen on
 108 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/zfs-linux">the package tracker
 109 for zfs-linux</a>.  and
 110 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
 111 team status page</a>. If you want to help out, please join us.
 112 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">The
 113 source code</a> is available via git on Alioth.  It would also be
 114 great if you could help out with
 115 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dkms">the dkms package</a>, as
 116 it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.</p>
 117
 118       </div>
 119       <div class="tags">
 120
 121
 122         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 123
 124
 125       </div>
 126     </div>
 127     <div class="padding"></div>
 128
 129     <div class="entry">
 130       <div class="title">
 131         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">What is the best multimedia player in Debian?</a>
 132       </div>
 133       <div class="date">
 134          8th May 2016
 135       </div>
 136       <div class="body">
 137         <p><strong>Where I set out to figure out which multimedia player in
 138 Debian claim support for most file formats.</strong></p>
 139
 140 <p>A few years ago, I had a look at the media support for Browser
 141 plugins in Debian, to get an idea which plugins to include in Debian
 142 Edu.  I created a script to extract the set of supported MIME types
 143 for each plugin, and used this to find out which multimedia browser
 144 plugin supported most file formats / media types.
 145 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">The
 146 result</a> can still be seen on the Debian wiki, even though it have
 147 not been updated for a while.  But browser plugins are less relevant
 148 these days, so I thought it was time to look at standalone
 149 players.</p>
 150
 151 <p>A few days ago I was tired of VLC not being listed as a viable
 152 player when I wanted to play videos from the Norwegian National
 153 Broadcasting Company, and decided to investigate why.  The cause is a
 154 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/822245">missing MIME type in the VLC
 155 desktop file</a>.  In the process I wrote a script to compare the set
 156 of MIME types announced in the desktop file and the browser plugin,
 157 only to discover that there is quite a large difference between the
 158 two for VLC.  This discovery made me dig up the script I used to
 159 compare browser plugins, and adjust it to compare desktop files
 160 instead, to try to figure out which multimedia player in Debian
 161 support most file formats.</p>
 162
 163 <p>The result can be seen on the Debian Wiki, as
 164 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">a
 165 table listing all MIME types supported by one of the packages included
 166 in the table</a>, with the package supporting most MIME types being
 167 listed first in the table.</p>
 168
 169 </p>The best multimedia player in Debian?  It is totem, followed by
 170 parole, kplayer, mpv, vlc, smplayer mplayer-gui gnome-mpv and
 171 kmplayer.  Time for the other players to update their announced MIME
 172 support?</p>
 173
 174       </div>
 175       <div class="tags">
 176
 177
 178         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
 179
 180
 181       </div>
 182     </div>
 183     <div class="padding"></div>
 184
 185     <div class="entry">
 186       <div class="title">
 187         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html">The Pyra - handheld computer with Debian preinstalled</a>
 188       </div>
 189       <div class="date">
 190          4th May 2016
 191       </div>
 192       <div class="body">
 193         A friend of mine made me aware of
 194 <a href="https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/">The Pyra</a>, a
 195 handheld computer which will be delivered with Debian preinstalled.  I
 196 would love to get one of those for my birthday. :)</p>
 197
 198 <p>The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB
 199 plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a 5"
 200 LCD touch screen.  The 6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole
 201 day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests
 202 confirming this.  The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the
 203 last I heard last night was that 22 more orders were needed before
 204 production started.</p>
 205
 206 <p>As far as I know, this is the first handheld preinstalled with
 207 Debian.  Please let me know if you know of any others.  Is it the
 208 first computer being sold with Debian preinstalled?</p>
 209
 210       </div>
 211       <div class="tags">
 212
 213
 214         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 215
 216
 217       </div>
 218     </div>
 219     <div class="padding"></div>
 220
 221     <div class="entry">
 222       <div class="title">
 223         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html">NUUG contests Norwegian police DNS seizure of popcorn-time.no</a>
 224       </div>
 225       <div class="date">
 226         18th April 2016
 227       </div>
 228       <div class="body">
 229         <p>It is days like today I am really happy to be a member of
 230 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User group</a>, a
 231 member association for those of us believing in free software, open
 232 standards and unix-like operating systems.  NUUG announced today it
 233 will
 234 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__NUUG_og_EFN_begj_rer_rettslig_pr_ving_for_DNS_domenebeslag_av_popcorn_time_no.shtml">try
 235 to bring the seizure of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no as
 236 unlawful</a>, to stand up for the principle that writing about a
 237 controversial topic is not infringing copyrights, and censuring web
 238 pages by hijacking DNS domain should be decided by the courts, not the
 239 police.  The DNS domain was seized by the Norwegian National Authority
 240 for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime
 241 a month ago.  I hope this bring more paying members to NUUG to give
 242 the association the financial muscle needed to bring this case as far
 243 as it must go to stop this kind of DNS hijacking.</p>
 244
 245       </div>
 246       <div class="tags">
 247
 248
 249         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
 250
 251
 252       </div>
 253     </div>
 254     <div class="padding"></div>
 255
 256     <div class="entry">
 257       <div class="title">
 258         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_F__Stone___an_inspiration_for_us_all.html">I.F. Stone - an inspiration for us all</a>
 259       </div>
 260       <div class="date">
 261         13th April 2016
 262       </div>
 263       <div class="body">
 264         <p>I first got to know I.F. Stone when I came across an article by Jon
 265 Schwarz on The Intercept
 266 <a href="https://theintercept.com/2015/05/07/new-documentary-legacy-f-stone/">about
 267 his extraordinary contribution to investigative journalism in
 268 USA</a>. The article is about a new documentary in two parts
 269 (<a href="https://vimeo.com/123974841">part one is 12 minutes</a> and
 270 <a href="https://vimeo.com/123974842">part two is 30 minutes</a>), and
 271 I found both truly fascinating.  It is amazing what he was able to
 272 find by digging up public sources and government papers.  He
 273 documented lots of government abuse and cover ups, and I find
 274 <a href="http://www.ifstone.org/weekly.php">his weekly news letters</a>
 275 inspiring to read even today.</p>
 276
 277 <p><blockquote>
 278 All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.
 279 <br>- I. F. Stone
 280 </blockquote></p>
 281
 282 <p>His starting point was that reporters should not assume governments
 283 and corporations are telling the truth, but verify all their claims as
 284 much as possible.  I wonder how many Norwegian reporters can be said
 285 to follow the principles of I. F. Stone.  They are definitely in short
 286 supply.  If you, like me half a year ago, have never heard of him,
 287 check him out.</p>
 288
 289       </div>
 290       <div class="tags">
 291
 292
 293         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>.
 294
 295
 296       </div>
 297     </div>
 298     <div class="padding"></div>
 299
 300     <div class="entry">
 301       <div class="title">
 302         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_French_paperback_edition_of_the_book_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig_is_now_available.html">A French paperback edition of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig is now available</a>
 303       </div>
 304       <div class="date">
 305         12th April 2016
 306       </div>
 307       <div class="body">
 308         <p>I'm happy to report that
 309 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">the
 310 French paperback edition</a> of
 311 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
 312 project to translate</a> the <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free
 313 Culture</a> book by Lawrence Lessig is now available for sale on
 314 Lulu.com.  Once I have formally verified my proof reading copy, which
 315 should be in the mail, the paperback edition should be available in
 316 book stores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble too.</p>
 317
 318 <p>This French edition, Culture Libre, is the work of the
 319 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a> developer Benoît
 320 Guillon, who created the PO file from the initial translation
 321 available from
 322 <a href="http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre">the Wikilivres
 323 wiki pages</a> and completed and corrected the translation to match
 324 the original docbook edition my project is using, as well as
 325 coordinated the proof reading of the final result.  I believe the end
 326 result look great, but I am biased and do not read French.  In
 327 addition to the paperback edition, the book is available in PDF, EPUB
 328 and Mobi format from the github project page linked to above.</p>
 329
 330 <p>When enabling book store distribution on Lulu.com, I had to nearly
 331 triple the price to allow the book stores some profit.  I also had to
 332 accept that I will get some revenue when a book is sold via Lulu.com.
 333 But because of the non-commercial clause in the book license
 334 (CC-BY-NC), this might be a problem.  To bypass the problem I
 335 discussed how to handle the revenue with the author, and we agreed
 336 that the revenue for these editions go to the
 337 <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons non-profit
 338 Corporation</a> who handle donations to the Creative Commons project.
 339 So far they have earned around USD 70 on sales of the
 340 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>
 341 and
 342 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
 343 Bokmål</a> editions, according to Lulu.com.  They will get the revenue
 344 for the French edition too.  Their revenue is higher if you buy the
 345 book directly from Lulu.com instead of via a book store, so I
 346 recommend you buy directly from Lulu.com.</p>
 347
 348 <p>Perhaps you would like to get the book published in your language?
 349 The translation is done using a web based translator service, so the
 350 technical bar to enter is fairly low.  Get in touch if you would like
 351 to make this happen.</p>
 352
 353       </div>
 354       <div class="tags">
 355
 356
 357         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
 358
 359
 360       </div>
 361     </div>
 362     <div class="padding"></div>
 363
 364     <div class="entry">
 365       <div class="title">
 366         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">Lets make a Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook</a>
 367       </div>
 368       <div class="date">
 369         10th April 2016
 370       </div>
 371       <div class="body">
 372         <p>During this weekends
 373 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Oslo__Takk_for_feilfiksingsfesten.shtml">bug
 374 squashing party and developer gathering</a>, we decided to do our part
 375 to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian
 376 Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the
 377 <a href="http://debian-handbook.info/">Debian Administrator's Handbook
 378 project</a> to get started.  If you want to help out, please start
 379 contributing using
 380 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
 381 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
 382 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
 383 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
 384 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
 385 contributors</a>.</p>
 386
 387 <p>The book is already available on paper in English, French and
 388 Japanese, and our goal is to get it available on paper in Norwegian
 389 Bokmål too.  In addition to the paper edition, there are also EPUB and
 390 Mobi versions available.  And there are incomplete translations
 391 available for many more languages.</p>
 392
 393       </div>
 394       <div class="tags">
 395
 396
 397         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 398
 399
 400       </div>
 401     </div>
 402     <div class="padding"></div>
 403
 404     <div class="entry">
 405       <div class="title">
 406         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_in_two_hundred_Debian_users_using_ZFS_on_Linux_.html">One in two hundred Debian users using ZFS on Linux?</a>
 407       </div>
 408       <div class="date">
 409          7th April 2016
 410       </div>
 411       <div class="body">
 412         <p>Just for fun I had a look at the popcon number of ZFS related
 413 packages in Debian, and was quite surprised with what I found.  I use
 414 ZFS myself at home, but did not really expect many others to do so.
 415 But I might be wrong.</p>
 416
 417 <p>According to
 418 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=spl-linux">the popcon
 419 results for spl-linux</a>, there are 1019 Debian installations, or
 420 0.53% of the population, with the package installed.  As far as I know
 421 the only use of the spl-linux package is as a support library for ZFS
 422 on Linux, so I use it here as proxy for measuring the number of ZFS
 423 installation on Linux in Debian.  In the kFreeBSD variant of Debian
 424 the ZFS feature is already available, and there
 425 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=zfsutils">the popcon
 426 results for zfsutils</a> show 1625 Debian installations or 0.84% of
 427 the population.  So I guess I am not alone in using ZFS on Debian.</p>
 428
 429 <p>But even though the Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum
 430 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00006.html">announced
 431 in April 2015</a> that the legal obstacles blocking ZFS on Debian were
 432 cleared, the package is still not in Debian.  The package is again in
 433 the NEW queue.  Several uploads have been rejected so far because the
 434 debian/copyright file was incomplete or wrong, but there is no reason
 435 to give up.  The current status can be seen on
 436 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
 437 team status page</a>, and
 438 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">the
 439 source code</a> is available on Alioth.</p>
 440
 441 <p>As I want ZFS to be included in next version of Debian to make sure
 442 my home server can function in the future using only official Debian
 443 packages, and the current blocker is to get the debian/copyright file
 444 accepted by the FTP masters in Debian, I decided a while back to try
 445 to help out the team.  This was the background for my blog post about
 446 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">creating,
 447 updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>, and I
 448 used the techniques I explored there to try to find any errors in the
 449 copyright file.  It is not very easy to check every one of the around
 450 2000 files in the source package, but I hope we this time got it
 451 right.  If you want to help out, check out the git source and try to
 452 find missing entries in the debian/copyright file.</p>
 453
 454       </div>
 455       <div class="tags">
 456
 457
 458         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 459
 460
 461       </div>
 462     </div>
 463     <div class="padding"></div>
 464
 465     <div class="entry">
 466       <div class="title">
 467         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/syslog_trusted_timestamp___chain_of_trusted_timestamps_for_your_syslog.html">syslog-trusted-timestamp - chain of trusted timestamps for your syslog</a>
 468       </div>
 469       <div class="date">
 470          2nd April 2016
 471       </div>
 472       <div class="body">
 473         <p>Two years ago, I had
 474 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">a
 475 look at trusted timestamping options available</a>, and among
 476 other things noted a still open
 477 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/742553">bug in the tsget script</a>
 478 included in openssl that made it harder than necessary to use openssl
 479 as a trusted timestamping client.  A few days ago I was told
 480 <a href="https:/www.difi.no/">the Norwegian government office DIFI</a> is
 481 close to releasing their own trusted timestamp service, and in the
 482 process I was happy to learn about a replacement for the tsget script
 483 using only curl:</p>
 484
 485 <p><pre>
 486 openssl ts -query -data "/etc/shells" -cert -sha256 -no_nonce \
 487   | curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/timestamp-query" \
 488          --data-binary "@-" http://zeitstempel.dfn.de > etc-shells.tsr
 489 openssl ts -reply -text -in etc-shells.tsr
 490 </pre></p>
 491
 492 <p>This produces a binary timestamp file (etc-shells.tsr) which can be
 493 used to verify that the content of the file /etc/shell with the
 494 calculated sha256 hash existed at the point in time when the request
 495 was made.  The last command extract the content of the etc-shells.tsr
 496 in human readable form.  The idea behind such timestamp is to be able
 497 to prove using cryptography that the content of a file have not
 498 changed since the file was stamped.</p>
 499
 500 <p>To verify that the file on disk match the public key signature in
 501 the timestamp file, run the following commands.  It make sure you have
 502 the required certificate for the trusted timestamp service available
 503 and use it to compare the file content with the timestamp.  In
 504 production, one should of course use a better method to verify the
 505 service certificate.</p>
 506
 507 <p><pre>
 508 wget -O ca-cert.txt https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
 509 openssl ts -verify -data /etc/shells -in etc-shells.tsr -CAfile ca-cert.txt -text
 510 </pre></p>
 511
 512 <p>Wikipedia have a lot more information about
 513 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
 514 Timestamping</a> and
 515 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_timestamping">linked
 516 timestamping</a>, and there are several trusted timestamping services
 517 around, both as commercial services and as free and public services.
 518 Among the latter is
 519 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">the
 520 zeitstempel.dfn.de service</a> mentioned above and
 521 <a href="https://freetsa.org/">freetsa.org service</a> linked to from the
 522 wikipedia web site.  I believe the DIFI service should show up on
 523 https://tsa.difi.no, but it is not available to the public at the
 524 moment.  I hope this will change when it is into production.  The
 525 <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC 3161</a> trusted
 526 timestamping protocol standard is even implemented in LibreOffice,
 527 Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat, making it possible to verify when
 528 a document was created.</p>
 529
 530 <p>I would find it useful to be able to use such trusted timestamp
 531 service to make it possible to verify that my stored syslog files have
 532 not been tampered with.  This is not a new idea.  I found one example
 533 implemented on the Endian network appliances where
 534 <a href="http://help.endian.com/entries/21518508-Enabling-Timestamping-on-log-files-">the
 535 configuration of such feature was described in 2012</a>.</p>
 536
 537 <p>But I could not find any free implementation of such feature when I
 538 searched, so I decided to try to
 539 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp">build
 540 a prototype named syslog-trusted-timestamp</a>.  My idea is to
 541 generate a timestamp of the old log files after they are rotated, and
 542 store the timestamp in the new log file just after rotation.  This
 543 will form a chain that would make it possible to see if any old log
 544 files are tampered with.  But syslog is bad at handling kilobytes of
 545 binary data, so I decided to base64 encode the timestamp and add an ID
 546 and line sequence numbers to the base64 data to make it possible to
 547 reassemble the timestamp file again.  To use it, simply run it like
 548 this:
 549
 550 <p><pre>
 551 syslog-trusted-timestamp /path/to/list-of-log-files
 552 </pre></p>
 553
 554 <p>This will send a timestamp from one or more timestamp services (not
 555 yet decided nor implemented) for each listed file to the syslog using
 556 logger(1).  To verify the timestamp, the same program is used with the
 557 --verify option:</p>
 558
 559 <p><pre>
 560 syslog-trusted-timestamp --verify /path/to/log-file /path/to/log-with-timestamp
 561 </pre></p>
 562
 563 <p>The verification step is not yet well designed.  The current
 564 implementation depend on the file path being unique and unchanging,
 565 and this is not a solid assumption.  It also uses process number as
 566 timestamp ID, and this is bound to create ID collisions.  I hope to
 567 have time to come up with a better way to handle timestamp IDs and
 568 verification later.</p>
 569
 570 <p>Please check out
 571 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp">the
 572 prototype for syslog-trusted-timestamp on github</a> and send
 573 suggestions and improvement, or let me know if there already exist a
 574 similar system for timestamping logs already to allow me to join
 575 forces with others with the same interest.</p>
 576
 577 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 578 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 579 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 580
 581       </div>
 582       <div class="tags">
 583
 584
 585         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
 586
 587
 588       </div>
 589     </div>
 590     <div class="padding"></div>
 591
 592     <div class="entry">
 593       <div class="title">
 594         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Full_battery_stats_collector_is_now_available_in_Debian.html">Full battery stats collector is now available in Debian</a>
 595       </div>
 596       <div class="date">
 597         23rd March 2016
 598       </div>
 599       <div class="body">
 600         <p>Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an
 601 extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for
 602 later processing and graphing.  The original collector store the
 603 battery level as percentage of last full level, while the new
 604 collector also record battery vendor, model, serial number, design
 605 full level, last full level and current battery level.  This make it
 606 possible to predict the lifetime of the battery as well as visualise
 607 the energy flow when the battery is charging or discharging.</p>
 608
 609 <p>The new tools are available in <tt>/usr/share/battery-stats/</tt>
 610 in the version 0.5.1 package in unstable.  Get the new battery level graph
 611 and lifetime prediction by running:
 612
 613 <p><pre>
 614 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph /var/log/battery-stats.csv
 615 </pre></p>
 616
 617 <p>Or select the 'Battery Level Graph' from your application menu.</p>
 618
 619 <p>The flow in/out of the battery can be seen by running (no menu
 620 entry yet):</p>
 621
 622 <p><pre>
 623 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph-flow
 624 </pre></p>
 625
 626 <p>I'm not quite happy with the way the data is visualised, at least
 627 when there are few data points.  The graphs look a bit better with a
 628 few years of data.</p>
 629
 630 <p>A while back one important feature I use in the battery stats
 631 collector broke in Debian.  The scripts in
 632 <tt>/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/</tt> were no longer executed.  I
 633 suspect it happened when Jessie started using systemd, but I do not
 634 know.  The issue is reported as
 635 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/818649">bug #818649</a> against
 636 pm-utils.  I managed to work around it by adding an udev rule to call
 637 the collector script every time the power connector is connected and
 638 disconnected.  With this fix in place it was finally time to make a
 639 new release of the package, and get it into Debian.</p>
 640
 641 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
 642 check out the
 643 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
 644 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
 645 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
 646 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
 647 As always, patches are very welcome.</p>
 648
 649       </div>
 650       <div class="tags">
 651
 652
 653         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 654
 655
 656       </div>
 657     </div>
 658     <div class="padding"></div>
 659
 660     <div class="entry">
 661       <div class="title">
 662         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/UsingQR____Electronic__paper_invoices_using_JSON_and_QR_codes.html">UsingQR - "Electronic" paper invoices using JSON and QR codes</a>
 663       </div>
 664       <div class="date">
 665         19th March 2016
 666       </div>
 667       <div class="body">
 668         <p>Back in 2013 I proposed
 669 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html">a
 670 way to make paper and PDF invoices easier to process electronically by
 671 adding a QR code with the key information about the invoice</a>.  I
 672 suggested using vCard field definition, to get some standard format
 673 for name and address, but any format would work.  I did not do
 674 anything about the proposal, but hoped someone one day would make
 675 something like it.  It would make it possible to efficiently send
 676 machine readable invoices directly between seller and buyer.</p>
 677
 678 <p>This was the background when I came across a proposal and
 679 specification from the web based accounting and invoicing supplier
 680 <a href="http://www.visma.com/">Visma</a> in Sweden called
 681 <a href="http://usingqr.com/">UsingQR</a>.  Their PDF invoices contain
 682 a QR code with the key information of the invoice in JSON format.
 683 This is the typical content of a QR code following the UsingQR
 684 specification (based on a real world example, some numbers replaced to
 685 get a more bogus entry).  I've reformatted the JSON to make it easier
 686 to read.  Normally this is all on one long line:</p>
 687
 688 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-03-19-qr-invoice.png" align="right"><pre>
 689 {
 690  "vh":500.00,
 691  "vm":0,
 692  "vl":0,
 693  "uqr":1,
 694  "tp":1,
 695  "nme":"Din Leverandør",
 696  "cc":"NO",
 697  "cid":"997912345 MVA",
 698  "iref":"12300001",
 699  "idt":"20151022",
 700  "ddt":"20151105",
 701  "due":2500.0000,
 702  "cur":"NOK",
 703  "pt":"BBAN",
 704  "acc":"17202612345",
 705  "bc":"BIENNOK1",
 706  "adr":"0313 OSLO"
 707 }
 708 </pre></p>
 709
 710 </p>The interpretation of the fields can be found in the
 711 <a href="http://usingqr.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/UsingQR_specification1.pdf">format
 712 specification</a> (revision 2 from june 2014).  The format seem to
 713 have most of the information needed to handle accounting and payment
 714 of invoices, at least the fields I have needed so far here in
 715 Norway.</p>
 716
 717 <p>Unfortunately, the site and document do not mention anything about
 718 the patent, trademark and copyright status of the format and the
 719 specification.  Because of this, I asked the people behind it back in
 720 November to clarify.  Ann-Christine Savlid (ann-christine.savlid (at)
 721 visma.com) replied that Visma had not applied for patent or trademark
 722 protection for this format, and that there were no copyright based
 723 usage limitations for the format.  I urged her to make sure this was
 724 explicitly written on the web pages and in the specification, but
 725 unfortunately this has not happened yet.  So I guess if there is
 726 submarine patents, hidden trademarks or a will to sue for copyright
 727 infringements, those starting to use the UsingQR format might be at
 728 risk, but if this happen there is some legal defense in the fact that
 729 the people behind the format claimed it was safe to do so.  At least
 730 with patents, there is always
 731 <a href="http://www.paperspecs.com/paper-news/beware-the-qr-code-patent-trap/">a
 732 chance of getting sued...</a></p>
 733
 734 <p>I also asked if they planned to maintain the format in an
 735 independent standard organization to give others more confidence that
 736 they would participate in the standardization process on equal terms
 737 with Visma, but they had no immediate plans for this.  Their plan was
 738 to work with banks to try to get more users of the format, and
 739 evaluate the way forward if the format proved to be popular.  I hope
 740 they conclude that using an open standard organisation like
 741 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> is the correct place to
 742 maintain such specification.</p>
 743
 744 <p><strong>Update 2016-03-20</strong>: Via Twitter I became aware of
 745 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11319492">some comments
 746 about this blog post</a> that had several useful links and references to
 747 similar systems.  In the Czech republic, the Czech Banking Association
 748 standard #26, with short name SPAYD, uses QR codes with payment
 749 information.  More information is available from the Wikipedia page on
 750 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Payment_Descriptor">Short
 751 Payment Descriptor</a>.  And in Germany, there is a system named
 752 <a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/">BezahlCode</a>,
 753 (<a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/wp-content/uploads/BezahlCode_TechDok.pdf">specification
 754 v1.8 2013-12-05 available as PDF</a>), which uses QR codes with
 755 URL-like formatting using "bank:" as the URI schema/protocol to
 756 provide the payment information.  There is also the
 757 <a href="http://www.ferd-net.de/front_content.php?idcat=231">ZUGFeRD</a>
 758 file format that perhaps could be transfered using QR codes, but I am
 759 not sure if it is done already.  Last, in Bolivia there are reports
 760 that tax information since november 2014 need to be printed in QR
 761 format on invoices.  I have not been able to track down a
 762 specification for this format, because of my limited language skill
 763 sets.</p>
 764
 765       </div>
 766       <div class="tags">
 767
 768
 769         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
 770
 771
 772       </div>
 773     </div>
 774     <div class="padding"></div>
 775
 776     <div class="entry">
 777       <div class="title">
 778         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_battery_measurements_a_little_easier_in_Debian.html">Making battery measurements a little easier in Debian</a>
 779       </div>
 780       <div class="date">
 781         15th March 2016
 782       </div>
 783       <div class="body">
 784         <p>Back in September, I blogged about
 785 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">the
 786 system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery</a>, and
 787 how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced).  I
 788 created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing,
 789 but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already
 790 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">a battery-stats
 791 package in Debian</a> that should do the same thing, and I did not see
 792 a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be
 793 fixed instead.  I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and
 794 hoped someone would step in and fix it.  But no-one did.</p>
 795
 796 <p>I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own
 797 hands.  The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of
 798 battery stats (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">available from github</a>) and part of the team maintaining
 799 battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally
 800 able to collect battery status using the <tt>/sys/class/power_supply/</tt>
 801 information provided by the Linux kernel.  If you install the
 802 battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a
 803 graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the
 804 status of the battery.  The source package build and work just fine in
 805 Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not
 806 tested).  The default graph you get for that system look like this:</p>
 807
 808 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-03-15-battery-stats-graph-example.png" width="70%" align="center"></p>
 809
 810 <p>My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
 811 battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
 812 about the battery.  The scripts are merged into the upstream
 813 battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
 814 yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way.  Will have to test a
 815 bit more before I make a new release.</p>
 816
 817 <p>I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
 818 suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
 819 impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
 820 and graphing.</p>
 821
 822 <p>If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
 823 battery, check out the battery-stats package in
 824 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">Debian</a> and
 825 on
 826 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
 827 I would love some help to improve the system further.</p>
 828
 829       </div>
 830       <div class="tags">
 831
 832
 833         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 834
 835
 836       </div>
 837     </div>
 838     <div class="padding"></div>
 839
 840     <div class="entry">
 841       <div class="title">
 842         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">Creating, updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>
 843       </div>
 844       <div class="date">
 845         19th February 2016
 846       </div>
 847       <div class="body">
 848         <p>Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to
 849 details.  And one of the details is the content of the
 850 debian/copyright file, which should list all relevant licenses used by
 851 the code in the package in question, preferably in
 852 <a href="https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/">machine
 853 readable DEP5 format</a>.</p>
 854
 855 <p>For large packages with lots of contributors it is hard to write
 856 and update this file manually, and if you get some detail wrong, the
 857 package is normally rejected by the ftpmasters.  So getting it right
 858 the first time around get the package into Debian faster, and save
 859 both you and the ftpmasters some work..  Today, while trying to figure
 860 out what was wrong with
 861 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=686447">the
 862 zfsonlinux copyright file</a>, I decided to spend some time on
 863 figuring out the options for doing this job automatically, or at least
 864 semi-automatically.</p>
 865
 866 <p>Lucikly, there are at least two tools available for generating the
 867 file based on the code in the source package,
 868 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debmake">debmake</a></tt>
 869 and <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cme">cme</a></tt>.  I'm
 870 not sure which one of them came first, but both seem to be able to
 871 create a sensible draft file.  As far as I can tell, none of them can
 872 be trusted to get the result just right, so the content need to be
 873 polished a bit before the file is OK to upload.  I found the debmake
 874 option in
 875 <a href="http://goofying-with-debian.blogspot.com/2014/07/debmake-checking-source-against-dep-5.html">a
 876 blog posts from 2014</a>.
 877
 878 <p>To generate using debmake, use the -cc option:
 879
 880 <p><pre>
 881 debmake -cc > debian/copyright
 882 </pre></p>
 883
 884 <p>Note there are some problems with python and non-ASCII names, so
 885 this might not be the best option.</p>
 886
 887 <p>The cme option is based on a config parsing library, and I found
 888 this approach in
 889 <a href="https://ddumont.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/improving-creation-of-debian-copyright-file/">a
 890 blog post from 2015</a>.  To generate using cme, use the 'update
 891 dpkg-copyright' option:
 892
 893 <p><pre>
 894 cme update dpkg-copyright
 895 </pre></p>
 896
 897 <p>This will create or update debian/copyright.  The cme tool seem to
 898 handle UTF-8 names better than debmake.</p>
 899
 900 <p>When the copyright file is created, I would also like some help to
 901 check if the file is correct.  For this I found two good options,
 902 <tt>debmake -k</tt> and <tt>license-reconcile</tt>.  The former seem
 903 to focus on license types and file matching, and is able to detect
 904 ineffective blocks in the copyright file.  The latter reports missing
 905 copyright holders and years, but was confused by inconsistent license
 906 names (like CDDL vs. CDDL-1.0).  I suspect it is good to use both and
 907 fix all issues reported by them before uploading.  But I do not know
 908 if the tools and the ftpmasters agree on what is important to fix in a
 909 copyright file, so the package might still be rejected.</p>
 910
 911 <p>The devscripts tool <tt>licensecheck</tt> deserve mentioning.  It
 912 will read through the source and try to find all copyright statements.
 913 It is not comparing the result to the content of debian/copyright, but
 914 can be useful when verifying the content of the copyright file.</p>
 915
 916 <p>Are you aware of better tools in Debian to create and update
 917 debian/copyright file.  Please let me know, or blog about it on
 918 planet.debian.org.</p>
 919
 920 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 921 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 922 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 923
 924 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-20</strong>: I got a tip from Mike Gabriel
 925 on how to use licensecheck and cdbs to create a draft copyright file
 926
 927 <p><pre>
 928 licensecheck --copyright -r `find * -type f` | \
 929   /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5 > debian/copyright.auto
 930 </pre></p>
 931
 932 <p>He mentioned that he normally check the generated file into the
 933 version control system to make it easier to discover license and
 934 copyright changes in the upstream source.  I will try to do the same
 935 with my packages in the future.</p>
 936
 937 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-21</strong>: The cme author recommended
 938 against using -quiet for new users, so I removed it from the proposed
 939 command line.</p>
 940
 941       </div>
 942       <div class="tags">
 943
 944
 945         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 946
 947
 948       </div>
 949     </div>
 950     <div class="padding"></div>
 951
 952     <div class="entry">
 953       <div class="title">
 954         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_in_Debian_to_locate_packages_with_firmware_and_mime_type_support.html">Using appstream in Debian to locate packages with firmware and mime type support</a>
 955       </div>
 956       <div class="date">
 957          4th February 2016
 958       </div>
 959       <div class="body">
 960         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">appstream system</a>
 961 is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very
 962 convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given
 963 firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it.  This can
 964 be done using apt-file too, but that is for someone else to blog
 965 about. :)</p>
 966
 967 <p>Here is a small recipe to find the package with a given firmware
 968 file, in this example I am looking for ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin, randomly
 969 picked from the set of firmware announced using appstream in Debian
 970 unstable.  In general you would be looking for the firmware requested
 971 by the kernel during kernel module loading.  To find the package
 972 providing the example file, do like this:</p>
 973
 974 <blockquote><pre>
 975 % apt install appstream
 976 [...]
 977 % apt update
 978 [...]
 979 % appstreamcli what-provides firmware:runtime ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin | \
 980   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
 981 firmware-qlogic
 982 %
 983 </pre></blockquote>
 984
 985 <p>See <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">the
 986 appstream wiki</a> page to learn how to embed the package metadata in
 987 a way appstream can use.</p>
 988
 989 <p>This same approach can be used to find any package supporting a
 990 given MIME type.  This is very useful when you get a file you do not
 991 know how to handle.  First find the mime type using <tt>file
 992 --mime-type</tt>, and next look up the package providing support for
 993 it.  Lets say you got an SVG file.  Its MIME type is image/svg+xml,
 994 and you can find all packages handling this type like this:</p>
 995
 996 <blockquote><pre>
 997 % apt install appstream
 998 [...]
 999 % apt update
1000 [...]
1001 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype image/svg+xml | \
1002   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
1003 bkchem
1004 phototonic
1005 inkscape
1006 shutter
1007 tetzle
1008 geeqie
1009 xia
1010 pinta
1011 gthumb
1012 karbon
1013 comix
1014 mirage
1015 viewnior
1016 postr
1017 ristretto
1018 kolourpaint4
1019 eog
1020 eom
1021 gimagereader
1022 midori
1023 %
1024 </pre></blockquote>
1025
1026 <p>I believe the MIME types are fetched from the desktop file for
1027 packages providing appstream metadata.</p>
1028
1029       </div>
1030       <div class="tags">
1031
1032
1033         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1034
1035
1036       </div>
1037     </div>
1038     <div class="padding"></div>
1039
1040     <div class="entry">
1041       <div class="title">
1042         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creepy__visualise_geotagged_social_media_information___nice_free_software.html">Creepy, visualise geotagged social media information - nice free software</a>
1043       </div>
1044       <div class="date">
1045         24th January 2016
1046       </div>
1047       <div class="body">
1048         <p>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
1049 with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
1050 position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
1051 time (like every time a SMS is received or sent).  And if their
1052 computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
1053 mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
1054 also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
1055 during installation).  And when these programs send out information to
1056 central collection points, the location is often included, unless
1057 extra care is taken to not send the location.  The provided
1058 information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
1059 good and bad, depend on your point of view).  What is certain, is that
1060 the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
1061 perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
1062 when they share their whereabouts with private and public
1063 entities.</p>
1064
1065 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-01-24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png"></p>
1066
1067 <p>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
1068 when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing.  It is
1069 unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
1070 officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
1071 unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information.  But the
1072 public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
1073 tool to do so is called
1074 <a href="http://www.geocreepy.com/">Creepy or Cree.py</a>.  I
1075 discovered it when I read
1076 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-7787884.html">an
1077 article about Creepy</a> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
1078 November 2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
1079 The python program was in Debian, but
1080 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy">the version in
1081 Debian</a> was completely broken and practically unmaintained.  I
1082 uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
1083 have time to fix it then.  This Christmas I decided to finally try to
1084 get Creepy operational in Debian.  Now a fixed version is available in
1085 Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
1086 are now included
1087 <a href="https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy">upstream</a>.</p>
1088
1089 <p>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
1090 Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
1091 complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
1092 given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
1093 these services.  Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
1094 least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
1095 days it is impossible.  This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
1096 configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
1097 information to them about your search interests.  This should be taken
1098 into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
1099 about yourself with the services.</p>
1100
1101 <p>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
1102 geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
1103 of Norway.  One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
1104 information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
1105 information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
1106 I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
1107 twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
1108 Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
1109 making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
1110 things.  A similar technique have been
1111 <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl">used
1112 to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine</a>, and it is both a powerful
1113 tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
1114 understand the value of the private information they provide to the
1115 public.</p>
1116
1117 <p>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
1118 it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
1119 least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
1120 python-requests-toolbelt).</p>
1121
1122 <p>(I have uploaded
1123 <a href="https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy">the image to
1124 screenshots.debian.net</a> and licensed it under the same terms as the
1125 Creepy program in Debian.)</p>
1126
1127       </div>
1128       <div class="tags">
1129
1130
1131         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
1132
1133
1134       </div>
1135     </div>
1136     <div class="padding"></div>
1137
1138     <div class="entry">
1139       <div class="title">
1140         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Always_download_Debian_packages_using_Tor___the_simple_recipe.html">Always download Debian packages using Tor - the simple recipe</a>
1141       </div>
1142       <div class="date">
1143         15th January 2016
1144       </div>
1145       <div class="body">
1146         <p>During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum
1147 <a href="https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/331/what-is-to-be-done/">observed
1148 that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to
1149 believe a computer have a given security hole</a> if it download a
1150 security fix from a Debian mirror.  This is a good reason to always
1151 use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those
1152 listening do not know which IP address to attack.  In August, Richard
1153 Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible
1154 to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that
1155 download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and
1156 <a href="http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2015/08/24-Tor-enabled_Debian_mirror/">proposed
1157 to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror</a>.  He
1158 was not the first to propose this, as the
1159 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/apt-transport-tor">apt-transport-tor</a></tt>
1160 package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt
1161 to use <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a>, but I was not
1162 aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.</p>
1163
1164 <p>Richard discussed the idea with Peter Palfrader, one of the Debian
1165 sysadmins, and he set up a Tor hidden service on one of the central
1166 Debian mirrors using the address vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion, thus making
1167 it possible to download packages directly between two tor nodes,
1168 making sure the network traffic always were encrypted.</p>
1169
1170 <p>Here is a short recipe for enabling this on your machine, by
1171 installing <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> and replacing http and https
1172 urls with tor+http and tor+https, and using the hidden service instead
1173 of the official Debian mirror site.  I recommend installing
1174 <tt>etckeeper</tt> before you start to have a history of the changes
1175 done in /etc/.</p>
1176
1177 <blockquote><pre>
1178 apt install apt-transport-tor
1179 sed -i 's% http://ftp.debian.org/% tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/%' /etc/apt/sources.list
1180 sed -i 's% http% tor+http%' /etc/apt/sources.list
1181 </pre></blockquote>
1182
1183 <p>If you have more sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, run
1184 the sed commands for these too.  The sed command is assuming your are
1185 using the ftp.debian.org Debian mirror.  Adjust the command (or just
1186 edit the file manually) to match your mirror.</p>
1187
1188 <p>This work in Debian Jessie and later.  Note that tools like
1189 <tt>apt-file</tt> only recently started using the apt transport
1190 system, and do not work with these tor+http URLs.  For
1191 <tt>apt-file</tt> you need the version currently in experimental,
1192 which need a recent apt version currently only in unstable.  So if you
1193 need a working <tt>apt-file</tt>, this is not for you.</p>
1194
1195 <p>Another advantage from this change is that your machine will start
1196 using Tor regularly and at fairly random intervals (every time you
1197 update the package lists or upgrade or install a new package), thus
1198 masking other Tor traffic done from the same machine.  Using Tor will
1199 become normal for the machine in question.</p>
1200
1201 <p>On <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox</a>, APT
1202 is set up by default to use <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> when Tor is
1203 enabled.  It would be great if it was the default on any Debian
1204 system.</p>
1205
1206       </div>
1207       <div class="tags">
1208
1209
1210         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
1211
1212
1213       </div>
1214     </div>
1215     <div class="padding"></div>
1216
1217     <div class="entry">
1218       <div class="title">
1219         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenALPR__find_car_license_plates_in_video_streams___nice_free_software.html">OpenALPR, find car license plates in video streams - nice free software</a>
1220       </div>
1221       <div class="date">
1222         23rd December 2015
1223       </div>
1224       <div class="body">
1225         <p>When I was a kid, we used to collect "car numbers", as we used to
1226 call the car license plate numbers in those days.  I would write the
1227 numbers down in my little book and compare notes with the other kids
1228 to see how many region codes we had seen and if we had seen some
1229 exotic or special region codes and numbers.  It was a fun game to pass
1230 time, as we kids have plenty of it.</p>
1231
1232 <p>A few days I came across
1233 <a href="https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr">the OpenALPR
1234 project</a>, a free software project to automatically discover and
1235 report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the
1236 "car numbers" in a machine readable format.  I've been looking for
1237 such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the
1238 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition">automatic
1239 number plate recognition</a> tool only is available in the hands of
1240 the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to
1241 even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance.  I
1242 discovered the developer
1243 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/747509">wanted to get the tool into
1244 Debian</a>, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to
1245 help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian
1246 archive.</p>
1247
1248 <p>Today we finally managed to get the package into shape and uploaded
1249 it into Debian, where it currently
1250 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org//new/openalpr_2.2.1-1.html">waits
1251 in the NEW queue</a> for review by the Debian ftpmasters.</p>
1252
1253 <p>I guess you are wondering why on earth such tool would be useful
1254 for the common folks, ie those not running a large government
1255 surveillance system?  Well, I plan to put it in a computer on my bike
1256 and in my car, tracking the cars nearby and allowing me to be notified
1257 when number plates on my watch list are discovered.  Another use case
1258 was suggested by a friend of mine, who wanted to set it up at his home
1259 to open the car port automatically when it discovered the plate on his
1260 car.  When I mentioned it perhaps was a bit foolhardy to allow anyone
1261 capable of placing his license plate number of a piece of cardboard to
1262 open his car port, men replied that it was always unlocked anyway.  I
1263 guess for such use case it make sense.  I am sure there are other use
1264 cases too, for those with imagination and a vision.</p>
1265
1266 <p>If you want to build your own version of the Debian package, check
1267 out the upstream git source and symlink ./distros/debian to ./debian/
1268 before running "debuild" to build the source.  Or wait a bit until the
1269 package show up in unstable.</p>
1270
1271       </div>
1272       <div class="tags">
1273
1274
1275         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
1276
1277
1278       </div>
1279     </div>
1280     <div class="padding"></div>
1281
1282     <div class="entry">
1283       <div class="title">
1284         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">Using appstream with isenkram to install hardware related packages in Debian</a>
1285       </div>
1286       <div class="date">
1287         20th December 2015
1288       </div>
1289       <div class="body">
1290         <p>Around three years ago, I created
1291 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the isenkram
1292 system</a> to get a more practical solution in Debian for handing
1293 hardware related packages.  A GUI system in the isenkram package will
1294 present a pop-up dialog when some hardware dongle supported by
1295 relevant packages in Debian is inserted into the machine.  The same
1296 lookup mechanism to detect packages is available as command line
1297 tools in the isenkram-cli package.  In addition to mapping hardware,
1298 it will also map kernel firmware files to packages and make it easy to
1299 install needed firmware packages automatically.  The key for this
1300 system to work is a good way to map hardware to packages, in other
1301 words, allow packages to announce what hardware they will work
1302 with.</p>
1303
1304 <p>I started by providing data files in the isenkram source, and
1305 adding code to download the latest version of these data files at run
1306 time, to ensure every user had the most up to date mapping available.
1307 I also added support for storing the mapping in the Packages file in
1308 the apt repositories, but did not push this approach because while I
1309 was trying to figure out how to best store hardware/package mappings,
1310 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
1311 appstream system</a> was announced.  I got in touch and suggested to
1312 add the hardware mapping into that data set to be able to use
1313 appstream as a data source, and this was accepted at least for the
1314 Debian version of appstream.</p>
1315
1316 <p>A few days ago using appstream in Debian for this became possible,
1317 and today I uploaded a new version 0.20 of isenkram adding support for
1318 appstream as a data source for mapping hardware to packages.  The only
1319 package so far using appstream to announce its hardware support is my
1320 pymissile package.  I got help from Matthias Klumpp with figuring out
1321 how do add the required
1322 <a href="https://appstream.debian.org/html/sid/main/metainfo/pymissile.html">metadata
1323 in pymissile</a>.  I added a file debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml with
1324 this content:</p>
1325
1326 <blockquote><pre>
1327 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
1328 &lt;component&gt;
1329   &lt;id&gt;pymissile&lt;/id&gt;
1330   &lt;metadata_license&gt;MIT&lt;/metadata_license&gt;
1331   &lt;name&gt;pymissile&lt;/name&gt;
1332   &lt;summary&gt;Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher&lt;/summary&gt;
1333   &lt;description&gt;
1334     &lt;p&gt;
1335       Pymissile provides a curses interface to control an original
1336       Marks and Spencer / Striker USB Missile Launcher, as well as a
1337       motion control script to allow a webcamera to control the
1338       launcher.
1339     &lt;/p&gt;
1340   &lt;/description&gt;
1341   &lt;provides&gt;
1342     &lt;modalias&gt;usb:v1130p0202d*&lt;/modalias&gt;
1343   &lt;/provides&gt;
1344 &lt;/component&gt;
1345 </pre></blockquote>
1346
1347 <p>The key for isenkram is the component/provides/modalias value,
1348 which is a glob style match rule for hardware specific strings
1349 (modalias strings) provided by the Linux kernel.  In this case, it
1350 will map to all USB devices with vendor code 1130 and product code
1351 0202.</p>
1352
1353 <p>Note, it is important that the license of all the metadata files
1354 are compatible to have permissions to aggregate them into archive wide
1355 appstream files.  Matthias suggested to use MIT or BSD licenses for
1356 these files.  A challenge is figuring out a good id for the data, as
1357 it is supposed to be globally unique and shared across distributions
1358 (in other words, best to coordinate with upstream what to use).  But
1359 it can be changed later or, so we went with the package name as
1360 upstream for this project is dormant.</p>
1361
1362 <p>To get the metadata file installed in the correct location for the
1363 mirror update scripts to pick it up and include its content the
1364 appstream data source, the file must be installed in the binary
1365 package under /usr/share/appdata/.  I did this by adding the following
1366 line to debian/pymissile.install:</p>
1367
1368 <blockquote><pre>
1369 debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml usr/share/appdata
1370 </pre></blockquote>
1371
1372 <p>With that in place, the command line tool isenkram-lookup will list
1373 all packages useful on the current computer automatically, and the GUI
1374 pop-up handler will propose to install the package not already
1375 installed if a hardware dongle is inserted into the machine in
1376 question.</p>
1377
1378 <p>Details of the modalias field in appstream is available from the
1379 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a> proposal.</p>
1380
1381 <p>To locate the modalias values of all hardware present in a machine,
1382 try running this command on the command line:</p>
1383
1384 <blockquote><pre>
1385 cat $(find /sys/devices/|grep modalias)
1386 </pre></blockquote>
1387
1388 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
1389 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
1390 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
1391
1392       </div>
1393       <div class="tags">
1394
1395
1396         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
1397
1398
1399       </div>
1400     </div>
1401     <div class="padding"></div>
1402
1403     <div class="entry">
1404       <div class="title">
1405         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_GNU_General_Public_License_is_not_magic_pixie_dust.html">The GNU General Public License is not magic pixie dust</a>
1406       </div>
1407       <div class="date">
1408         30th November 2015
1409       </div>
1410       <div class="body">
1411         <p>A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled
1412 "<a href="http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2015/11/27/sfc-supporter/">The
1413 GPL is not magic pixie dust</a>" explain the importance of making sure
1414 the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GPL</a> is enforced.
1415 I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:<p>
1416
1417 <blockquote>
1418
1419 <p><a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/"><img src="https://sfconservancy.org/img/supporter-badge.png" width="194" height="90" alt="Become a Software Freedom Conservancy Supporter!" align="right" border="0" /></a></p>
1420
1421 <blockquote>
1422 The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.<br/>
1423
1424 The first step is to choose a
1425 <a href="https://copyleft.org/">copyleft</a> license for your
1426 code.<br/>
1427
1428 The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license,
1429 <b>it must be enforced</b><br/>
1430
1431 and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of
1432 work<br/>
1433
1434 is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.
1435 </blockquote>
1436
1437 <p><small>-- <a href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/">Bradley Kuhn</a>, in
1438 <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in Freedom">FaiF</a>
1439 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode
1440 0x57</a></small></p>
1441
1442 <p>As the Debian Website
1443 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/794116">used</a>
1444 <a href="https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/intro/free.wml?r1=1.24&amp;r2=1.25">to</a>
1445 imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to
1446 the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful
1447 software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or
1448 software products.  Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created
1449 to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but
1450 such licenses are not enough.  With the ongoing adoption of Free
1451 Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's
1452 expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of
1453 ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always.  As Karen
1454 and Bradley explained in <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in
1455 Freedom">FaiF</a>
1456 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode 0x57</a>,
1457 copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court
1458 to protect it.  The reality of today's world is that legal
1459 representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming.  With
1460 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/">gpl-violations.org</a> in hiatus
1461 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/news/20151027-homepage-recovers/">until</a>
1462 some time in 2016, the <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/">Software
1463 Freedom Conservancy</a> (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender
1464 of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations.
1465 In March the SFC supported a
1466 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">lawsuit
1467 by Christoph Hellwig</a> against VMware for refusing to
1468 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html">comply
1469 with the GPL</a> in relation to their use of parts of the Linux
1470 kernel.  Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and
1471 conferences
1472 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">blocked
1473 or cancelled their talks</a>.  As a result they have decided to rely
1474 less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of
1475 individuals who support Free Software and copyleft.  So the SFC has
1476 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/23/2015fundraiser/">launched</a>
1477 a <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">campaign</a> to create
1478 a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by
1479 supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free
1480 Software.</p>
1481
1482 <p>If you support Free Software,
1483 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/26/like-what-I-do/">like</a>
1484 what the SFC do, agree with their
1485 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/principles.html">compliance
1486 principles</a>, are happy about their
1487 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">successes</a> in 2015,
1488 work on a project that is an SFC
1489 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/members/current/">member</a> and or
1490 just want to stand up for copyleft, please join
1491 <a href="https://identi.ca/cwebber/image/JQGPA4qbTyyp3-MY8QpvuA">Christopher
1492 Allan Webber</a>,
1493 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">Carol
1494 Smith</a>,
1495 <a href="http://www.jonobacon.org/2015/11/25/supporting-software-freedom-conservancy/">Jono
1496 Bacon</a>, myself and
1497 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/#supporters">others</a> in
1498 becoming a
1499 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">supporter</a>.  For the
1500 next week your donation will be
1501 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/27/black-friday/">matched</a>
1502 by an anonymous donor.  Please also consider asking your employer to
1503 match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC.  Don't forget to
1504 spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or
1505 social media accounts.</p>
1506
1507 </blockquote>
1508
1509 <p>I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter
1510 of Software Freedom Conservancy myself.  Perhaps you should be a
1511 supporter too?</p>
1512
1513       </div>
1514       <div class="tags">
1515
1516
1517         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
1518
1519
1520       </div>
1521     </div>
1522     <div class="padding"></div>
1523
1524     <div class="entry">
1525       <div class="title">
1526         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html">PGP key transition statement for key EE4E02F9</a>
1527       </div>
1528       <div class="date">
1529         17th November 2015
1530       </div>
1531       <div class="body">
1532         <p>I've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to
1533 set it up properly.  I wanted to generate it offline and have it
1534 available on <a href="http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/#openpgp">a OpenPGP
1535 smart card</a> for daily use, and learning how to do it and finding
1536 time to sit down with an offline machine almost took forever.  But
1537 finally I've been able to complete the process, and have now moved
1538 from my old GPG key to a new GPG key.  See
1539 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-11-17-new-gpg-key-transition.txt">the
1540 full transition statement, signed with both my old and new key</a> for
1541 the details.  This is my new key:</p>
1542
1543 <pre>
1544 pub   3936R/<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/111D6B29EE4E02F9.html">111D6B29EE4E02F9</a> 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-14]
1545       Key fingerprint = 3AC7 B2E3 ACA5 DF87 78F1  D827 111D 6B29 EE4E 02F9
1546 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@hungry.com&gt;
1547 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@debian.org&gt;
1548 sub   4096R/87BAFB0E 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
1549 sub   4096R/F91E6DE9 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
1550 sub   4096R/A0439BAB 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
1551 </pre>
1552
1553 <p>The key can be downloaded from the OpenPGP key servers, signed by
1554 my old key.</p>
1555
1556 <p>If you signed my old key
1557 (<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/DB4CCC4B2A30D729.html">DB4CCC4B2A30D729</a>),
1558 I'd very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and
1559 instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if
1560 you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.</p>
1561
1562       </div>
1563       <div class="tags">
1564
1565
1566         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
1567
1568
1569       </div>
1570     </div>
1571     <div class="padding"></div>
1572
1573     <div class="entry">
1574       <div class="title">
1575         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Pentagon_deciding_the_Norwegian_negotiating_position_on_Internet_governance_.html">Is Pentagon deciding the Norwegian negotiating position on Internet governance?</a>
1576       </div>
1577       <div class="date">
1578          3rd November 2015
1579       </div>
1580       <div class="body">
1581         <p>In Norway, all government offices are required by law to keep a
1582 list of every document or letter arriving and leaving their offices.
1583 Internal notes should also be documented.  The document list (called a mail
1584 journal - "postjournal" in Norwegian) is public information and thanks
1585 to the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (Offentleglova) the mail
1586 journal is available for everyone.  Most offices even publish the mail
1587 journal on their web pages, as PDFs or tables in web pages.  The state-level offices even have a shared web based search service (called
1588 <a href="https://www.oep.no/">Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal -
1589 OEP</a>) to make it possible to search the entries in the list.  Not
1590 all journal entries show up on OEP, and the search service is hard to
1591 use, but OEP does make it easier to find at least some interesting
1592 journal entries .</p>
1593
1594 <p>In 2012 I came across a document in the mail journal for the
1595 Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications on OEP that
1596 piqued my interest.  The title of the document was
1597 "<a href="https://www.oep.no/search/resultSingle.html?journalPostId=4192362">Internet
1598 Governance and how it affects national security</a>" (Norwegian:
1599 "Internet Governance og påvirkning på nasjonal sikkerhet").  The
1600 document date was 2012-05-22, and it was said to be sent from the
1601 "Permanent Mission of Norway to the United Nations".  I asked for a
1602 copy, but my request was rejected with a reference to a legal clause said to authorize them to reject it
1603 (<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20,
1604 letter c</a>) and an explanation that the document was exempt because
1605 of foreign policy interests as it contained information related to the
1606 Norwegian negotiating position, negotiating strategies or similar.  I
1607 was told the information in the document related to the ongoing
1608 negotiation in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).  The
1609 explanation made sense to me in early January 2013, as a ITU
1610 conference in Dubay discussing Internet Governance
1611 (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunication_Union#World_Conference_on_International_Telecommunications_2012_.28WCIT-12.29">World
1612 Conference on International Telecommunications - WCIT-12</a>) had just
1613 ended,
1614 <a href="http://www.digi.no/kommentarer/2012/12/18/tvil-om-usas-rolle-pa-teletoppmote">reportedly
1615 in chaos</a> when USA walked out of the negotiations and 25 countries
1616 including Norway refused to sign the new treaty.  It seemed
1617 reasonable to believe talks were still going on a few weeks later.
1618 Norway was represented at the ITU meeting by two authorities, the
1619 <a href="http://www.nkom.no/">Norwegian Communications Authority</a>
1620 and the <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dep/sd/">Ministry of
1621 Transport and Communications</a>.  This might be the reason the letter
1622 was sent to the ministry.  As I was unable to find the document in the
1623 mail journal of any Norwegian UN mission, I asked the ministry who had
1624 sent the document to the ministry, and was told that it was the Deputy
1625 Permanent Representative with the Permanent Mission of Norway in
1626 Geneva.</p>
1627
1628 <p>Three years later, I was still curious about the content of that
1629 document, and again asked for a copy, believing the negotiation was
1630 over now.  This time
1631 <a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/kopi_av_dokumenter_i_sak_2012914">I
1632 asked both the Ministry of Transport and Communications as the
1633 receiver</a> and
1634 <a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/brev_om_internet_governance_og_p">asked
1635 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva as the sender</a> for a
1636 copy, to see if they both agreed that it should be withheld from the
1637 public.  The ministry upheld its rejection quoting the same law
1638 reference as before, while the permanent mission rejected it quoting a
1639 different clause
1640 (<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20
1641 letter b</a>), claiming that they were required to keep the
1642 content of the document from the public because it contained
1643 information given to Norway with the expressed or implied expectation
1644 that the information should not be made public.  I asked the permanent
1645 mission for an explanation, and was told that the document contained
1646 an account from a meeting held in the Pentagon for a limited group of NATO
1647 nations where the organiser of the meeting did not intend the content
1648 of the meeting to be publicly known.  They explained that giving me a
1649 copy might cause Norway to not get access to similar information in
1650 the future and thus hurt the future foreign interests of Norway.  They
1651 also explained that the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was not
1652 the author of the document, they only got a copy of it, and because of
1653 this had not listed it in their mail journal.</p>
1654
1655 <p>Armed with this
1656 knowledge I asked the Ministry to reconsider and asked who was the
1657 author of the document, now realising that it was not same as the
1658 "sender" according to Ministry of Transport and Communications.  The
1659 ministry upheld its rejection but told me the name of the author of
1660 the document.  According to
1661 <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/unga69_rapport1/id2001204/">a
1662 government report</a> the author was with the Permanent Mission of
1663 Norway in New York a bit more than a year later (2014-09-22), so I
1664 guessed that might be the office responsible for writing and sending
1665 the report initially and
1666 <a href="https://www.mimesbronn.no/request/mote_2012_i_pentagon_om_itu">asked
1667 them for a copy</a> but I was obviously wrong as I was told that the
1668 document was unknown to them and that the author did not work there
1669 when the document was written.  Next, I asked the Permanent Mission of
1670 Norway in Geneva and the Foreign Ministry to reconsider and at least
1671 tell me who sent the document to Deputy Permanent Representative with
1672 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva.  The Foreign Ministry also
1673 upheld its rejection, but told me that the person sending the document
1674 to Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was the defence attaché with
1675 the Norwegian Embassy in Washington.  I do not know if this is the
1676 same person as the author of the document.</p>
1677
1678 <p>If I understand the situation correctly, someone capable of
1679 inviting selected NATO nations to a meeting in Pentagon organised a
1680 meeting where someone representing the Norwegian defence attaché in
1681 Washington attended, and the account from this meeting is interpreted
1682 by the Ministry of Transport and Communications to expose Norways
1683 negotiating position, negotiating strategies and similar regarding the
1684 ITU negotiations on Internet Governance.  It is truly amazing what can
1685 be derived from mere meta-data.</p>
1686
1687 <p>I wonder which NATO countries besides Norway attended this meeting?
1688 And what exactly was said and done at the meeting?  Anyone know?</p>
1689
1690       </div>
1691       <div class="tags">
1692
1693
1694         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
1695
1696
1697       </div>
1698     </div>
1699     <div class="padding"></div>
1700
1701     <div class="entry">
1702       <div class="title">
1703         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_book___Fri_kultur__by__lessig__a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of__Free_Culture__from_2004.html">New book, "Fri kultur" by @lessig, a Norwegian Bokmål translation of "Free Culture" from 2004</a>
1704       </div>
1705       <div class="date">
1706         31st October 2015
1707       </div>
1708       <div class="body">
1709         <p>People keep asking me where to get the various forms of the book I
1710 published last week, the Norwegian Bokmål edition of Lawrence Lessigs
1711 book <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>.  It was
1712 published on paper via lulu.com, and is also available in PDF, ePub
1713 and MOBI format.  I currently sell the paper edition for self cost
1714 from lulu.com, but might extend the distribution to book stores like
1715 Amazon and Barnes & Noble later.  This will double the price and force
1716 me to make a profit from selling the book.  Anyway, here are links to
1717 get the book in different formats:</p>
1718
1719 <ul>
1720
1721   <li><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22406445.html">Buy
1722     paper edition from lulu.com</a></li>
1723
1724   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf">Download
1725     PDF, size 7.9 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
1726
1727   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub">Download
1728     ePub, size 11 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
1729
1730   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.mobi">Download
1731     MOBI, size 3.8 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
1732
1733 </ul>
1734
1735 <p>Note that the MOBI version have problems with the table of content,
1736 at least with the viewers I have been able to test.  And the ePub file
1737 have several problems according to
1738 <a href="https://github.com/IDPF/epubcheck">epubcheck</a>, but seem
1739 to display fine in the viewers I have tested.  All the files needed to
1740 create the book in various forms are available from
1741 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">the
1742 github project page</a>.</p>
1743
1744 <p>The project got press coverage from the Norwegian IT news site
1745 digi.no.  Check out the article
1746 "<a href="http://www.digi.no/juss_og_samfunn/2015/10/29/vil-apne-politikernes-oyne-for-creative-commons">Vil
1747 åpne politikernes øyne for Creative Commons</a>".</li>
1748
1749 <p>I've <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">blogged
1750 about the project</a> as it moved along.  The blogs document the translation
1751 progress and insights I had along the way.</p>
1752
1753       </div>
1754       <div class="tags">
1755
1756
1757         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
1758
1759
1760       </div>
1761     </div>
1762     <div class="padding"></div>
1763
1764     <div class="entry">
1765       <div class="title">
1766         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Free_Culture__by__lessig___The_background_story_for_Creative_Commons___new_edition_available.html">"Free Culture" by @lessig - The background story for Creative Commons - new edition available</a>
1767       </div>
1768       <div class="date">
1769         23rd October 2015
1770       </div>
1771       <div class="body">
1772         <p><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">Click
1773 here to buy the book</a>.</p>
1774
1775 <p>In 2004, as the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons
1776 movement</a> gained momentum, its creator Lawrence Lessig wrote the
1777 book <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)">Free
1778 Culture</a> to explain the problems with increasing copyright
1779 regulation and suggest some solutions.  I read the book back then and
1780 was very moved by it.  Reading the book inspired me and changed the
1781 way I looked on copyright law, and I would love it if more people
1782 would read it too.</p>
1783
1784 <p>Because of this, I decided in the summer of 2012 to translate it to
1785 Norwegian Bokmål and publish it for those of my friends and family
1786 that prefer to read books in Norwegian.  I translated the book using
1787 docbook and a gettext PO file, and a byproduct of this process is a
1788 new edition of the English original.  I've been in touch with the
1789 author during by work, and he said it was fine with him if I also
1790 published an English version.  So I decided to do so.  Today, I made
1791 this edition
1792 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">available
1793 for sale on Lulu.com</a>, for those interested in a paper book.  This
1794 is the cover:
1795
1796 <p align="center"><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-10-23-free-culture-english-published-cover.png"/></a></p>
1797
1798 <p>The Norwegian Bokmål version will be available for purchase in a
1799 few days.  I also plan to publish a French version in a few weeks or
1800 months, depending on the amount of people with knowledge of French to
1801 join the translation project.  So far there is only one active
1802 person, but the French book is almost completely translated but
1803 need some proof reading.</p>
1804
1805 <p>The book is also available in PDF, ePub and MOBI formats from
1806 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
1807 github project page</a>.  Note the ePub and MOBI versions have some
1808 formatting problems I believe is due to bugs in the docbook tool
1809 dbtoepub (Debian BTS issues
1810 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=795842">#795842</a>
1811 and
1812 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=796871">#796871</a>),
1813 but I have not taken the time to investigate.  I recommend the PDF and
1814 ePub version for now, as they seem to show up fine in the viewers I
1815 have available.</p>
1816
1817 <p>After the translation to Norwegian Bokmål was complete, I was able
1818 to secure some sponsoring from
1819 <a href="http://www.nuugfoundation.no/">the NUUG Foundation</a> to
1820 print the book.  This is the reason their logo is located on the back
1821 cover. I am very grateful for their contribution, and will use it to
1822 give a copy of the Norwegian edition to members of the Norwegian
1823 Parliament and other decision makers here in Norway.</p>
1824
1825       </div>
1826       <div class="tags">
1827
1828
1829         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
1830
1831
1832       </div>
1833     </div>
1834     <div class="padding"></div>
1835
1836     <div class="entry">
1837       <div class="title">
1838         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lawrence_Lessig_interviewed_Edward_Snowden_a_year_ago.html">Lawrence Lessig interviewed Edward Snowden a year ago</a>
1839       </div>
1840       <div class="date">
1841         19th October 2015
1842       </div>
1843       <div class="body">
1844         <p>Last year, <a href="https://lessig2016.us/">US president candidate
1845 in the Democratic Party</a> Lawrence interviewed Edward Snowden.  The
1846 one hour interview was
1847 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Sr96TFQQE">published by
1848 Harvard Law School 2014-10-23 on Youtube</a>, and the meeting took
1849 place 2014-10-20.</p>
1850
1851 <p>The questions are very good, and there is lots of useful
1852 information to be learned and very interesting issues to think about
1853 being raised.  Please check it out.</p>
1854
1855 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/o_Sr96TFQQE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
1856
1857 <p>I find it especially interesting to hear again that Snowden did try
1858 to bring up his reservations through the official channels without any
1859 luck.  It is in sharp contrast to the answers made 2013-11-06 by the
1860 Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg to the Norwegian Parliament,
1861 <a href="https://tale.holderdeord.no/speeches/s131106/68">claiming
1862 Snowden is no Whistle-Blower</a> because he should have taken up his
1863 concerns internally and using official channels.  It make me sad
1864 that this is the political leadership we have here in Norway.</p>
1865
1866       </div>
1867       <div class="tags">
1868
1869
1870         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
1871
1872
1873       </div>
1874     </div>
1875     <div class="padding"></div>
1876
1877     <div class="entry">
1878       <div class="title">
1879         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Story_of_Aaron_Swartz___Let_us_all_weep_.html">The Story of Aaron Swartz - Let us all weep!</a>
1880       </div>
1881       <div class="date">
1882          8th October 2015
1883       </div>
1884       <div class="body">
1885         <p>The movie "<a href="http://www.takepart.com/internets-own-boy">The
1886 Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz</a>" is both inspiring
1887 and depressing at the same time.  The work of Aaron Swartz has
1888 inspired me in my work, and I am grateful of all the improvements he
1889 was able to initiate or complete.  I wish I am able to do as much good
1890 in my life as he did in his.  Every minute of this 1:45 long movie is
1891 inspiring in documenting how much impact a single person can have on
1892 improving the society and this world.  And it is depressing in
1893 documenting how the law enforcement of USA (and other countries) is
1894 corrupted to a point where they can push a bright kid to his death for
1895 downloading too many scientific articles.  Aaron is dead.  Let us all
1896 weep.</p>
1897
1898 <p>The movie is also available on
1899 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXr-2hwTk58">Youtube</a>.  I
1900 wish there were Norwegian subtitles available, so I could show it to
1901 my parents.</p>
1902
1903       </div>
1904       <div class="tags">
1905
1906
1907         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
1908
1909
1910       </div>
1911     </div>
1912     <div class="padding"></div>
1913
1914     <div class="entry">
1915       <div class="title">
1916         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/French_Docbook_PDF_EPUB_MOBI_edition_of_the_Free_Culture_book.html">French Docbook/PDF/EPUB/MOBI edition of the Free Culture book</a>
1917       </div>
1918       <div class="date">
1919          1st October 2015
1920       </div>
1921       <div class="body">
1922         <p>As I wrap up the Norwegian version of
1923 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
1924 Culture</a> book by Lawrence Lessig (still waiting for my final proof
1925 reading copy to arrive in the mail), my great
1926 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a> helper and
1927 developer of the dblatex docbook processor, Benoît Guillon, decided a
1928 to try to create a French version of the book.  He started with the
1929 French translation available from the
1930 <a href="http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre">Wikilivres wiki
1931 pages</a>, and wrote a program to convert it into a PO file, allowing
1932 the translation to be integrated into the po4a based framework I use
1933 to create the Norwegian translation from the English edition.  We meet
1934 on the <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23dblatex">#dblatex IRC
1935 channel</a> to discuss the work.  If you want to help create a French
1936 edition, check out
1937 <a href="https://github.com/marsgui/free-culture-lessig">his git
1938 repository</a> and join us on IRC.  If the French edition look good,
1939 we might publish it as a paper book on lulu.com.  A French version of
1940 the drawings and the cover need to be provided for this to happen.</p>
1941
1942       </div>
1943       <div class="tags">
1944
1945
1946         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
1947
1948
1949       </div>
1950     </div>
1951     <div class="padding"></div>
1952
1953     <div class="entry">
1954       <div class="title">
1955         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">The life and death of a laptop battery</a>
1956       </div>
1957       <div class="date">
1958         24th September 2015
1959       </div>
1960       <div class="body">
1961         <p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
1962 But this do not last.  The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
1963 within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
1964 and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
1965 all the time.  Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
1966 about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
1967 more hard facts when the battery started to fail.</p>
1968
1969 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
1970
1971 <p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
1972 battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
1973 by someone else.  I found
1974 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
1975 which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
1976 broken.  I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
1977 write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
1978 from him.  Via
1979 <a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
1980 blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
1981 discovered
1982 <a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
1983 available in Debian.</p>
1984
1985 <p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
1986 battery stats ever since. Now my
1987 /var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around 115,000
1988 measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
1989 when it is unable to charge above 7% of original capacity.  My
1990 collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:</p>
1991
1992 <pre>
1993 #!/bin/sh
1994 # Inspired by
1995 # http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
1996 # See also
1997 # http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2013/01/02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
1998 logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
1999
2000 files="manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
2001     energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status"
2002
2003 if [ ! -e "$logfile" ] ; then
2004     (
2005         printf "timestamp,"
2006         for f in $files; do
2007             printf "%s," $f
2008         done
2009         echo
2010     ) > "$logfile"
2011 fi
2012
2013 log_battery() {
2014     # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
2015     # when several log processes run in parallel.
2016     msg=$(printf "%s," $(date +%s); \
2017         for f in $files; do \
2018             printf "%s," $(cat $f); \
2019         done)
2020     echo "$msg"
2021 }
2022
2023 cd /sys/class/power_supply
2024
2025 for bat in BAT*; do
2026     (cd $bat && log_battery >> "$logfile")
2027 done
2028 </pre>
2029
2030 <p>The script is called when the power management system detect a
2031 change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
2032 and out of hibernation and suspend.  In addition, it collect a value
2033 every 10 minutes.  This make it possible for me know when the battery
2034 is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
2035 The code for the Debian package
2036 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
2037 available on github</a>.</p>
2038
2039 <p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
2040
2041 <pre>
2042 timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
2043 1376591133,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,62800000,62160000,39050000,0,Discharging,
2044 [...]
2045 1443090528,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
2046 1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
2047 </pre>
2048
2049 <p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
2050 over time.  This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
2051 battery.</p>
2052
2053 <p>But why is this happening?  Why are my laptop batteries always
2054 dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
2055 satellites keep working year after year.  If we are to believe
2056 <a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
2057 University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
2058 chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
2059 all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
2060 I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
2061 <a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
2062 the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
2063 100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
2064 like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
2065 story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
2066 Linux too.</p>
2067
2068 <p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
2069 stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
2070 preparation for a longer trip?  I found
2071 <a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
2072 recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
2073 80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
2074 load).</p>
2075
2076 <p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
2077 at the start.  I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
2078 times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
2079 back to design capacity.  And I wonder if the discharge and charge
2080 speed change over time, or if this stay the same.  I did not yet try
2081 to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
2082 level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
2083 those.</p>
2084
2085 <p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
2086 acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
2087 packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
2088 initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
2089 and stop.  I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
2090 and need to be replaced.  The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
2091 specific.</p>
2092
2093       </div>
2094       <div class="tags">
2095
2096
2097         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2098
2099
2100       </div>
2101     </div>
2102     <div class="padding"></div>
2103
2104     <div class="entry">
2105       <div class="title">
2106         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Book_cover_for_the_Free_Culture_book_finally_done.html">Book cover for the Free Culture book finally done</a>
2107       </div>
2108       <div class="date">
2109          3rd September 2015
2110       </div>
2111       <div class="body">
2112         <p>Creating a good looking book cover proved harder than I expected.
2113 I wanted to create a cover looking similar to the original cover of
2114 the
2115 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
2116 Culture</a> book we are translating to Norwegian, and I wanted it in
2117 vector format for high resolution printing.  But my inkscape knowledge
2118 were not nearly good enough to pull that off.
2119
2120 <p>But thanks to the great inkscape community, I was able to wrap up
2121 the cover yesterday evening.  I asked on the
2122 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23inkscape">#inkscape IRC channel</a>
2123 on Freenode for help and clues, and Marc Jeanmougin (Mc-) volunteered
2124 to try to recreate it based on the PDF of the cover from the HTML
2125 version.  Not only did he create a
2126 <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/copy1.svg ">SVG document with
2127 the original and his vector version side by side</a>, he even provided
2128 an <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/out-1.ogv">instruction
2129 video</a> explaining how he did it</a>.  But the instruction video is
2130 not easy to follow for an untrained inkscape user. The video is a
2131 recording on how he did it, and he is obviously very experienced as
2132 the menu selections are very quick and he mentioned on IRC that he did
2133 use some keyboard shortcuts that can't be seen on the video, but it
2134 give a good idea about the inkscape operations to use to create the
2135 stripes with the embossed copyright sign in the center.</p>
2136
2137 <p>I took his SVG file, copied the vector image and re-sized it to fit
2138 on the cover I was drawing.  I am happy with the end result, and the
2139 current english version look like this:</p>
2140
2141 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-03-free-culture-cover.png" width="70%" align="center"/>
2142
2143 <p>I am not quite sure about the text on the back, but guess it will
2144 do.  I picked three quotes from the official site for the book, and
2145 hope it will work to trigger the interest of potential readers.  The
2146 Norwegian cover will look the same, but with the texts and bar code
2147 replaced with the Norwegian version.</p>
2148
2149 <p>The book is very close to being ready for publication, and I expect
2150 to upload the final draft to Lulu in the next few days and order a
2151 final proof reading copy to verify that everything look like it should
2152 before allowing everyone to order their own copy of Free Culture, in
2153 English or Norwegian Bokmål.  I'm waiting to give the the productive
2154 proof readers a chance to complete their work.</p>
2155
2156       </div>
2157       <div class="tags">
2158
2159
2160         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
2161
2162
2163       </div>
2164     </div>
2165     <div class="padding"></div>
2166
2167     <div class="entry">
2168       <div class="title">
2169         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/In_my_hand__a_pocket_book_edition_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_.html">In my hand, a pocket book edition of the Norwegian Free Culture book!</a>
2170       </div>
2171       <div class="date">
2172         19th August 2015
2173       </div>
2174       <div class="body">
2175         <p>Today, finally, my first printed draft edition of the Norwegian
2176 translation of Free Culture I have been working on for the last few
2177 years arrived in the mail.  I had to fake a cover to get the interior
2178 printed, and the exterior of the book look awful, but that is
2179 irrelevant at this point.  I asked for a printed pocket book version
2180 to get an idea about the font sizes and paper format as well as how
2181 good the figures and images look in print, but also to test what the
2182 pocket book version would look like.  After receiving the 500 page
2183 pocket book, it became obvious to me that that pocket book size is too
2184 small for this book.  I believe the book is too thick, and several
2185 tables and figures do not look good in the size they get with that
2186 small page sizes.  I believe I will go with the 5.5x8.5 inch size
2187 instead.  A surprise discovery from the paper version was how bad the
2188 URLs look in print.  They are very hard to read in the colophon page.
2189 The URLs are red in the PDF, but light gray on paper.  I need to
2190 change the color of links somehow to look better.  But there is a
2191 printed book in my hand, and it feels great. :)</p>
2192
2193 <p>Now I only need to fix the cover, wrap up the postscript with the
2194 store behind the book, and collect the last corrections from the proof
2195 readers before the book is ready for proper printing.  Cover artists
2196 willing to work for free and create a Creative Commons licensed vector
2197 file looking similar to the original is most welcome, as my skills as
2198 a graphics designer are mostly missing.</p>
2199
2200       </div>
2201       <div class="tags">
2202
2203
2204         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
2205
2206
2207       </div>
2208     </div>
2209     <div class="padding"></div>
2210
2211     <div class="entry">
2212       <div class="title">
2213         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_paper_version_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_heading_my_way.html">First paper version of the Norwegian Free Culture book heading my way</a>
2214       </div>
2215       <div class="date">
2216          9th August 2015
2217       </div>
2218       <div class="body">
2219         <p>Typesetting a book is harder than I hoped.  As the translation is
2220 mostly done, and a volunteer proof reader was going to check the text
2221 on paper, it was time this summer to focus on formatting my translated
2222 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> based version of the
2223 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> book by Lawrence
2224 Lessig.  I've been trying to get both docboox-xsl+fop and dblatex to
2225 give me a good looking PDF, but in the end I went with dblatex, because
2226 its Debian maintainer and upstream developer were responsive and very
2227 helpful in solving my formatting challenges.</p>
2228
2229 <p>Last night, I finally managed to create a PDF that no longer made
2230 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/">Lulu.com</a> complain after uploading,
2231 and I ordered a text version of the book on paper.  It is lacking a
2232 proper book cover and is not tagged with the correct ISBN number, but
2233 should give me an idea what the finished book will look like.</p>
2234
2235 <p>Instead of using Lulu, I did consider printing the book using
2236 <a href="http://www.createspace.com/">CreateSpace</a>, but ended up
2237 using Lulu because it had smaller book size options (CreateSpace seem
2238 to lack pocket book with extended distribution).  I looked for a
2239 similar service in Norway, but have not seen anything so far.  Please
2240 let me know if I am missing out on something here.</p>
2241
2242 <p>But I still struggle to decide the book size.  Should I go for
2243 pocket book (4.25x6.875 inches / 10.8x17.5 cm) with 556 pages, Digest
2244 (5.5x8.5 inches / 14x21.6 cm) with 323 pages or US Trade (6x8 inches /
2245 15.3x22.9 cm) with 280 pages?  Fewer pager give a cheaper book, and a
2246 smaller book is easier to carry around.  The test book I ordered was
2247 pocket book sized, to give me an idea how well that fit in my hand,
2248 but I suspect I will end up using a digest sized book in the end to
2249 bring the prize down further.</p>
2250
2251 <p>My biggest challenge at the moment is making nice cover art.  My
2252 inkscape skills are not yet up to the task of replicating the original
2253 cover in SVG format.  I also need to figure out what to write about
2254 the book on the back (will most likely use the same text as the
2255 description on web based book stores).  I would love help with this,
2256 if you are willing to license the art source and final version using
2257 the same CC license as the book.  My artistic skills are not really up
2258 to the task.</p>
2259
2260 <p>I plan to publish the book in both English and Norwegian and on
2261 paper, in PDF form as well as EPUB and MOBI format.  The current
2262 status can as usual be found on
2263 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
2264 in the archive/ directory.  So far I have spent all time on making the
2265 PDF version look good.  Someone should probably do the same with the
2266 dbtoepub generated e-book.  Help is definitely needed here, as I
2267 expect to run out of steem before I find time to improve the epub
2268 formatting.</p>
2269
2270 <p>Please let me know via github if you find typos in the book or
2271 discover translations that should be improved.  The final proof
2272 reading is being done right now, and I expect to publish the finished
2273 result in a few months.</p>
2274
2275       </div>
2276       <div class="tags">
2277
2278
2279         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
2280
2281
2282       </div>
2283     </div>
2284     <div class="padding"></div>
2285
2286     <div class="entry">
2287       <div class="title">
2288         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_DocBook_footnotes_as_endnotes_with_dblatex.html">Typesetting DocBook footnotes as endnotes with dblatex</a>
2289       </div>
2290       <div class="date">
2291         16th July 2015
2292       </div>
2293       <div class="body">
2294         <p>I'm still working on the Norwegian version of the
2295 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture book by Lawrence
2296 Lessig</a>, and is now working on the final typesetting and layout.
2297 One of the features I want to get the structure similar to the
2298 original book is to typeset the footnotes as endnotes in the notes
2299 chapter.  Based on the
2300 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/685063">feedback from the Debian
2301 maintainer and the dblatex developer</a>, I came up with this recipe I
2302 would like to share with you.  The proposal was to create a new LaTeX
2303 class file and add the LaTeX code there, but this is not always
2304 practical, when I want to be able to replace the class using a make
2305 file variable.  So my proposal misuses the latex.begindocument XSL
2306 parameter value, to get a small fragment into the correct location in
2307 the generated LaTeX File.</p>
2308
2309 <p>First, decide where in the DocBook document to place the endnotes,
2310 and add this text there:</p>
2311
2312 <pre>
2313 &lt;?latex \theendnotes ?&gt;
2314 </pre>
2315
2316 <p>Next, create a xsl stylesheet file dblatex-endnotes.xsl to add the
2317 code needed to add the endnote instructions in the preamble of the
2318 generated LaTeX document, with content like this:</p>
2319
2320 <pre>
2321 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
2322 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
2323   &lt;xsl:param name="latex.begindocument"&gt;
2324     &lt;xsl:text&gt;
2325 \usepackage{endnotes}
2326 \let\footnote=\endnote
2327 \def\enoteheading{\mbox{}\par\vskip-\baselineskip }
2328 \begin{document}
2329     &lt;/xsl:text&gt;
2330   &lt;/xsl:param&gt;
2331 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
2332 </pre>
2333
2334 <p>Finally, load this xsl file when running dblatex, for example like
2335 this:</p>
2336
2337 <pre>
2338 dblatex --xsl-user=dblatex-endnotes.xsl freeculture.nb.xml
2339 </pre>
2340
2341 <p>The end result can be seen on github, where
2342 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
2343 book project</a> is located.</p>
2344
2345       </div>
2346       <div class="tags">
2347
2348
2349         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
2350
2351
2352       </div>
2353     </div>
2354     <div class="padding"></div>
2355
2356     <div class="entry">
2357       <div class="title">
2358         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MPEG_LA_on__Internet_Broadcast_AVC_Video__licensing_and_non_private_use.html">MPEG LA on "Internet Broadcast AVC Video" licensing and non-private use</a>
2359       </div>
2360       <div class="date">
2361          7th July 2015
2362       </div>
2363       <div class="body">
2364         <p>After asking the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK)
2365 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Hva_gj_r_at_NRK_kan_distribuere_H_264_video_uten_patentavtale_med_MPEG_LA_.html">why
2366 they can broadcast and stream H.264 video without an agreement with
2367 the MPEG LA</a>, I was wiser, but still confused.  So I asked MPEG LA
2368 if their understanding matched that of NRK.  As far as I can tell, it
2369 does not.</p>
2370
2371 <p>I started by asking for more information about the various
2372 licensing classes and what exactly is covered by the "Internet
2373 Broadcast AVC Video" class that NRK pointed me at to explain why NRK
2374 did not need a license for streaming H.264 video:
2375
2376 <p><blockquote>
2377
2378 <p>According to
2379 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/226/n-10-02-02.pdf">a
2380 MPEG LA press release dated 2010-02-02</a>, there is no charge when
2381 using MPEG AVC/H.264 according to the terms of "Internet Broadcast AVC
2382 Video".  I am trying to understand exactly what the terms of "Internet
2383 Broadcast AVC Video" is, and wondered if you could help me.  What
2384 exactly is covered by these terms, and what is not?</p>
2385
2386 <p>The only source of more information I have been able to find is a
2387 PDF named
2388 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avcweb.pdf">AVC
2389 Patent Portfolio License Briefing</a>, which states this about the
2390 fees:</p>
2391
2392 <ul>
2393  <li>Where End User pays for AVC Video
2394   <ul>
2395    <li>Subscription (not limited by title) – 100,000 or fewer
2396      subscribers/yr = no royalty; &gt; 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers/yr =
2397      $25,000; &gt;250,000 to 500,000 subscribers/yr = $50,000; &gt;500,000 to
2398      1M subscribers/yr = $75,000; &gt;1M subscribers/yr = $100,000</li>
2399
2400    <li>Title-by-Title - 12 minutes or less = no royalty; &gt;12 minutes in
2401      length = lower of (a) 2% or (b) $0.02 per title</li>
2402   </ul></li>
2403
2404  <li>Where remuneration is from other sources
2405   <ul>
2406    <li>Free Television - (a) one-time $2,500 per transmission encoder or
2407      (b) annual fee starting at $2,500 for &gt; 100,000 HH rising to
2408      maximum $10,000 for &gt;1,000,000 HH</li>
2409
2410    <li>Internet Broadcast AVC Video (not title-by-title, not subscription)
2411      – no royalty for life of the AVC Patent Portfolio License</li>
2412   </ul></li>
2413 </ul>
2414
2415 <p>Am I correct in assuming that the four categories listed is the
2416 categories used when selecting licensing terms, and that "Internet
2417 Broadcast AVC Video" is the category for things that do not fall into
2418 one of the other three categories?  Can you point me to a good source
2419 explaining what is ment by "title-by-title" and "Free Television" in
2420 the license terms for AVC/H.264?</p>
2421
2422 <p>Will a web service providing H.264 encoded video content in a
2423 "video on demand" fashing similar to Youtube and Vimeo, where no
2424 subscription is required and no payment is required from end users to
2425 get access to the videos, fall under the terms of the "Internet
2426 Broadcast AVC Video", ie no royalty for life of the AVC Patent
2427 Portfolio license?  Does it matter if some users are subscribed to get
2428 access to personalized services?</p>
2429
2430 <p>Note, this request and all answers will be published on the
2431 Internet.</p>
2432 </blockquote></p>
2433
2434 <p>The answer came quickly from Benjamin J. Myers, Licensing Associate
2435 with the MPEG LA:</p>
2436
2437 <p><blockquote>
2438 <p>Thank you for your message and for your interest in MPEG LA.  We
2439 appreciate hearing from you and I will be happy to assist you.</p>
2440
2441 <p>As you are aware, MPEG LA offers our AVC Patent Portfolio License
2442 which provides coverage under patents that are essential for use of
2443 the AVC/H.264 Standard (MPEG-4 Part 10).  Specifically, coverage is
2444 provided for end products and video content that make use of AVC/H.264
2445 technology.  Accordingly, the party offering such end products and
2446 video to End Users concludes the AVC License and is responsible for
2447 paying the applicable royalties.</p>
2448
2449 <p>Regarding Internet Broadcast AVC Video, the AVC License generally
2450 defines such content to be video that is distributed to End Users over
2451 the Internet free-of-charge.  Therefore, if a party offers a service
2452 which allows users to upload AVC/H.264 video to its website, and such
2453 AVC Video is delivered to End Users for free, then such video would
2454 receive coverage under the sublicense for Internet Broadcast AVC
2455 Video, which is not subject to any royalties for the life of the AVC
2456 License.  This would also apply in the scenario where a user creates a
2457 free online account in order to receive a customized offering of free
2458 AVC Video content.  In other words, as long as the End User is given
2459 access to or views AVC Video content at no cost to the End User, then
2460 no royalties would be payable under our AVC License.</p>
2461
2462 <p>On the other hand, if End Users pay for access to AVC Video for a
2463 specific period of time (e.g., one month, one year, etc.), then such
2464 video would constitute Subscription AVC Video.  In cases where AVC
2465 Video is delivered to End Users on a pay-per-view basis, then such
2466 content would constitute Title-by-Title AVC Video.  If a party offers
2467 Subscription or Title-by-Title AVC Video to End Users, then they would
2468 be responsible for paying the applicable royalties you noted below.</p>
2469
2470 <p>Finally, in the case where AVC Video is distributed for free
2471 through an "over-the-air, satellite and/or cable transmission", then
2472 such content would constitute Free Television AVC Video and would be
2473 subject to the applicable royalties.</p>
2474
2475 <p>For your reference, I have attached
2476 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-07-07-mpegla.pdf">a
2477 .pdf copy of the AVC License</a>. You will find the relevant
2478 sublicense information regarding AVC Video in Sections 2.2 through
2479 2.5, and the corresponding royalties in Section 3.1.2 through 3.1.4.
2480 You will also find the definitions of Title-by-Title AVC Video,
2481 Subscription AVC Video, Free Television AVC Video, and Internet
2482 Broadcast AVC Video in Section 1 of the License.  Please note that the
2483 electronic copy is provided for informational purposes only and cannot
2484 be used for execution.</p>
2485
2486 <p>I hope the above information is helpful.  If you have additional
2487 questions or need further assistance with the AVC License, please feel
2488 free to contact me directly.</p>
2489 </blockquote></p>
2490
2491 <p>Having a fresh copy of the license text was useful, and knowing
2492 that the definition of Title-by-Title required payment per title made
2493 me aware that my earlier understanding of that phrase had been wrong.
2494 But I still had a few questions:</p>
2495
2496 <p><blockquote>
2497 <p>I have a small followup question.  Would it be possible for me to get
2498 a license with MPEG LA even if there are no royalties to be paid?  The
2499 reason I ask, is that some video related products have a copyright
2500 clause limiting their use without a license with MPEG LA.  The clauses
2501 typically look similar to this:
2502
2503 <p><blockquote>
2504   This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
2505   the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer to (a) encode
2506   video in compliance with the AVC standard ("AVC video") and/or (b)
2507   decode AVC video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a
2508   personal and non-commercial activity and/or AVC video that was
2509   obtained from a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No
2510   license is granted or shall be implied for any other use. additional
2511   information may be obtained from MPEG LA L.L.C.
2512 </blockquote></p>
2513
2514 <p>It is unclear to me if this clause mean that I need to enter into
2515 an agreement with MPEG LA to use the product in question, even if
2516 there are no royalties to be paid to MPEG LA.  I suspect it will
2517 differ depending on the jurisdiction, and mine is Norway.  What is
2518 MPEG LAs view on this?</p>
2519 </blockquote></p>
2520
2521 <p>According to the answer, MPEG LA believe those using such tools for
2522 non-personal or commercial use need a license with them:</p>
2523
2524 <p><blockquote>
2525
2526 <p>With regard to the Notice to Customers, I would like to begin by
2527 clarifying that the Notice from Section 7.1 of the AVC License
2528 reads:</p>
2529
2530 <p>THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR
2531 THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT
2532 RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC
2533 STANDARD ("AVC VIDEO") AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED
2534 BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM
2535 A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED
2536 OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE
2537 OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM</p>
2538
2539 <p>The Notice to Customers is intended to inform End Users of the
2540 personal usage rights (for example, to watch video content) included
2541 with the product they purchased, and to encourage any party using the
2542 product for commercial purposes to contact MPEG LA in order to become
2543 licensed for such use (for example, when they use an AVC Product to
2544 deliver Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free Television or Internet
2545 Broadcast AVC Video to End Users, or to re-Sell a third party's AVC
2546 Product as their own branded AVC Product).</p>
2547
2548 <p>Therefore, if a party is to be licensed for its use of an AVC
2549 Product to Sell AVC Video on a Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free
2550 Television or Internet Broadcast basis, that party would need to
2551 conclude the AVC License, even in the case where no royalties were
2552 payable under the License.  On the other hand, if that party (either a
2553 Consumer or business customer) simply uses an AVC Product for their
2554 own internal purposes and not for the commercial purposes referenced
2555 above, then such use would be included in the royalty paid for the AVC
2556 Products by the licensed supplier.</p>
2557
2558 <p>Finally, I note that our AVC License provides worldwide coverage in
2559 countries that have AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, including
2560 Norway.</p>
2561
2562 <p>I hope this clarification is helpful.  If I may be of any further
2563 assistance, just let me know.</p>
2564 </blockquote></p>
2565
2566 <p>The mentioning of Norwegian patents made me a bit confused, so I
2567 asked for more information:</p>
2568
2569 <p><blockquote>
2570
2571 <p>But one minor question at the end.  If I understand you correctly,
2572 you state in the quote above that there are patents in the AVC Patent
2573 Portfolio that are valid in Norway.  This make me believe I read the
2574 list available from &lt;URL:
2575 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx">http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx</a>
2576 &gt; incorrectly, as I believed the "NO" prefix in front of patents
2577 were Norwegian patents, and the only one I could find under Mitsubishi
2578 Electric Corporation expired in 2012.  Which patents are you referring
2579 to that are relevant for Norway?</p>
2580
2581 </blockquote></p>
2582
2583 <p>Again, the quick answer explained how to read the list of patents
2584 in that list:</p>
2585
2586 <p><blockquote>
2587
2588 <p>Your understanding is correct that the last AVC Patent Portfolio
2589 Patent in Norway expired on 21 October 2012.  Therefore, where AVC
2590 Video is both made and Sold in Norway after that date, then no
2591 royalties would be payable for such AVC Video under the AVC License.
2592 With that said, our AVC License provides historic coverage for AVC
2593 Products and AVC Video that may have been manufactured or Sold before
2594 the last Norwegian AVC patent expired.  I would also like to clarify
2595 that coverage is provided for the country of manufacture and the
2596 country of Sale that has active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents.</p>
2597
2598 <p>Therefore, if a party offers AVC Products or AVC Video for Sale in
2599 a country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents (for example,
2600 Sweden, Denmark, Finland, etc.), then that party would still need
2601 coverage under the AVC License even if such products or video are
2602 initially made in a country without active AVC Patent Portfolio
2603 Patents (for example, Norway).  Similarly, a party would need to
2604 conclude the AVC License if they make AVC Products or AVC Video in a
2605 country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, but eventually Sell
2606 such AVC Products or AVC Video in a country without active AVC Patent
2607 Portfolio Patents.</p>
2608 </blockquote></p>
2609
2610 <p>As far as I understand it, MPEG LA believe anyone using Adobe
2611 Premiere and other video related software with a H.264 distribution
2612 license need a license agreement with MPEG LA to use such tools for
2613 anything non-private or commercial, while it is OK to set up a
2614 Youtube-like service as long as no-one pays to get access to the
2615 content.  I still have no clear idea how this applies to Norway, where
2616 none of the patents MPEG LA is licensing are valid.  Will the
2617 copyright terms take precedence or can those terms be ignored because
2618 the patents are not valid in Norway?</p>
2619
2620       </div>
2621       <div class="tags">
2622
2623
2624         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
2625
2626
2627       </div>
2628     </div>
2629     <div class="padding"></div>
2630
2631     <div class="entry">
2632       <div class="title">
2633         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_laptop___some_more_clues_and_ideas_based_on_feedback.html">New laptop - some more clues and ideas based on feedback</a>
2634       </div>
2635       <div class="date">
2636          5th July 2015
2637       </div>
2638       <div class="body">
2639         <p>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
2640 need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback.  I wish to
2641 thank every one of these.  Several pointed me to the possibility of
2642 fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
2643 do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
2644 machine.  But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
2645 with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
2646 for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement.  If I did
2647 not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
2648 using <a href="http://www.francecrans.com/">FrancEcrans</a>, but it
2649 might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.</p>
2650
2651 <p>One tip I got was to use the
2652 <a href="https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb">Skinflint</a> web service to
2653 compare laptop models.  It seem to have more models available than
2654 prisjakt.no.  Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
2655 keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook 840 keyboard is not
2656 very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
2657 keyboards I tested.  Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
2658
2659 <p>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
2660 newest Thinkpad X model.  The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
2661 (which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
2662 Debian Sid/Unstable according to
2663 <a href="http://www.corsac.net/X250/">Corsac.net</a>.  The reports I
2664 got on the keyboard quality are not consistent.  Some say the keyboard
2665 is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
2666 Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
2667 keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
2668 keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
2669 replace it.  I'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
2670 activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230.  I'm
2671 also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
2672 noisy.  In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
2673 Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.</p>
2674
2675 <p>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
2676 <a href="http://pro-star.com">Pro-Star</a>, another was
2677 <a href="http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/">Libreboot</a>.
2678 The latter look very attractive to me.</p>
2679
2680 <p>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback.  It help a lot
2681 as I keep looking for a replacement.</p>
2682
2683 <p>Update 2015-07-06: I was recommended to check out the
2684 <a href="">lapstore.de</a> web shop for used laptops.  They got several
2685 different
2686 <a href="http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/">old
2687 thinkpad X models</a>, and provide one year warranty.</p>
2688
2689       </div>
2690       <div class="tags">
2691
2692
2693         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2694
2695
2696       </div>
2697     </div>
2698     <div class="padding"></div>
2699
2700     <div class="entry">
2701       <div class="title">
2702         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_find_a_new_laptop__as_the_old_one_is_broken_after_only_two_years.html">Time to find a new laptop, as the old one is broken after only two years</a>
2703       </div>
2704       <div class="date">
2705          3rd July 2015
2706       </div>
2707       <div class="body">
2708         <p>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
2709 replacement soon.  The left 5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
2710 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
2711 cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
2712 flickering.</p>
2713
2714 <p>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
2715 still as
2716 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">I
2717 described them in 2013</a>.  The last time I bought a laptop, I had
2718 good help from
2719 <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=353">prisjakt.no</a>
2720 where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
2721 wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually.  Three button mouse
2722 and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
2723 laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook 820 G1 and
2724 G2) lack three mouse buttons).  It is also unclear to me how good the
2725 keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are.  I hope Lenovo have not messed up
2726 the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
2727 deteriorated since X41.</p>
2728
2729 <p>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
2730 seem sensible to me?  Are there better services around to search the
2731 set of available laptops for features?  Please send me an email if you
2732 have suggestions.</p>
2733
2734 <p>Update 2015-07-23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
2735 <a href="http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom">list
2736 of endorsed hardware</a>, which is useful background information.</p>
2737
2738       </div>
2739       <div class="tags">
2740
2741
2742         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2743
2744
2745       </div>
2746     </div>
2747     <div class="padding"></div>
2748
2749     <div class="entry">
2750       <div class="title">
2751         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MakerCon_Nordic_videos_now_available_on_Frikanalen.html">MakerCon Nordic videos now available on Frikanalen</a>
2752       </div>
2753       <div class="date">
2754          2nd July 2015
2755       </div>
2756       <div class="body">
2757         <p>Last oktober I was involved on behalf of
2758 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> with recording the talks at
2759 <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">MakerCon Nordic</a>, a conference for
2760 the Maker movement.  Since then it has been the plan to publish the
2761 recordings on <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, which
2762 finally happened the last few days.  A few talks are missing because
2763 the speakers asked the organizers to not publish them, but most of the
2764 talks are available.  The talks are being broadcasted on RiksTV
2765 channel 50 and using multicast on Uninett, as well as being available
2766 from the Frikanalen web site.  The unedited recordings are
2767 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">available on
2768 Youtube too</a>.</p>
2769
2770 <p>This is the list of talks available at the moment.  Visit the
2771 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/?q=makercon">Frikanalen video
2772 pages</a> to view them.</p>
2773
2774 <ul>
2775
2776   <li>Evolutionary algorithms as a design tool - from art
2777       to robotics (Kyrre Glette)</li>
2778
2779   <li>Make and break (Hans Gerhard Meier)</li>
2780
2781   <li>Making a one year school course for young makers
2782       (Olav Helland)</li>
2783
2784   <li>Innovation Inspiration - IPR Databases as a Source of
2785       Inspiration (Hege Langlo)</li>
2786
2787   <li>Making a toy for makers (Erik Torstensson)</li>
2788
2789   <li>How to make 3D printer electronics (Elias Bakken)</li>
2790
2791   <li>Hovering Clouds: Looking at online tool offerings for Product
2792       Design and 3D Printing (William Kempton)</li>
2793
2794   <li>Travelling maker stories (Øyvind Nydal Dahl)</li>
2795
2796   <li>Making the first Maker Faire in Sweden (Nils Olander)</li>
2797
2798   <li>Breaking the mold: Printing 1000’s of parts (Espen Sivertsen)</li>
2799
2800   <li>Ultimaker — and open source 3D printing (Erik de Bruijn)</li>
2801
2802   <li>Autodesk’s 3D Printing Platform: Sparking innovation (Hilde
2803       Sevens)</li>
2804
2805   <li>How Making is Changing the World – and How You Can Too!
2806       (Jennifer Turliuk)</li>
2807
2808   <li>Open-Source Adventuring: OpenROV, OpenExplorer and the Future of
2809       Connected Exploration (David Lang)</li>
2810
2811   <li>Making in Norway (Haakon Karlsen Jr., Graham Hayward and Jens
2812       Dyvik)</li>
2813
2814   <li>The Impact of the Maker Movement (Mike Senese)</li>
2815
2816 </ul>
2817
2818 <p>Part of the reason this took so long was that the scripts NUUG had
2819 to prepare a recording for publication were five years old and no
2820 longer worked with the current video processing tools (command line
2821 argument changes).  In addition, we needed better audio normalization,
2822 which sent me on a detour to
2823 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html">package
2824 bs1770gain for Debian</a>.  Now this is in place and it became a lot
2825 easier to publish NUUG videos on Frikanalen.</p>
2826
2827       </div>
2828       <div class="tags">
2829
2830
2831         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2832
2833
2834       </div>
2835     </div>
2836     <div class="padding"></div>
2837
2838     <div class="entry">
2839       <div class="title">
2840         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Graphing_the_Norwegian_company_ownership_structure.html">Graphing the Norwegian company ownership structure</a>
2841       </div>
2842       <div class="date">
2843         15th June 2015
2844       </div>
2845       <div class="body">
2846         <p>It is a bit work to figure out the ownership structure of companies
2847 in Norway.  The information is publicly available, but one need to
2848 recursively look up ownership for all owners to figure out the complete
2849 ownership graph of a given set of companies.  To save me the work in
2850 the future, I wrote a script to do this automatically, outputting the
2851 ownership structure using the Graphviz/dotty format.  The data source
2852 is web scraping from <a href="http://www.proff.no/">Proff</a>, because
2853 I failed to find a useful source directly from the official keepers of
2854 the ownership data, <a href="http://www.brreg.no/">Brønnøysundsregistrene</a>.</p>
2855
2856 <p>To get an ownership graph for a set of companies, fetch
2857 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/brreg-norway-ownership-graph">the code from git</a> and run it using the organisation number.  I'm
2858 using the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet as an example here, as its
2859 ownership structure is very simple:</p>
2860
2861 <pre>
2862 % time ./bin/eierskap-dotty 958033540 > dagbladet.dot
2863
2864 real    0m2.841s
2865 user    0m0.184s
2866 sys     0m0.036s
2867 %
2868 </pre>
2869
2870 <p>The script accept several organisation numbers on the command line,
2871 allowing a cluster of companies to be graphed in the same image.  The
2872 resulting dot file for the example above look like this.  The edges
2873 are labeled with the ownership percentage, and the nodes uses the
2874 organisation number as their name and the name as the label:</p>
2875
2876 <pre>
2877 digraph ownership {
2878 rankdir = LR;
2879 "Aller Holding A/s" -> "910119877" [label="100%"]
2880 "910119877" -> "998689015" [label="100%"]
2881 "998689015" -> "958033540" [label="99%"]
2882 "974530600" -> "958033540" [label="1%"]
2883 "958033540" [label="AS DAGBLADET"]
2884 "998689015" [label="Berner Media Holding AS"]
2885 "974530600" [label="Dagbladets Stiftelse"]
2886 "910119877" [label="Aller Media AS"]
2887 }
2888 </pre>
2889
2890 <p>To view the ownership graph, run "<tt>dotty dagbladet.dot</tt>" or
2891 convert it to a PNG using "<tt>dot -T png dagbladet.dot >
2892 dagbladet.png</tt>".  The result can be seen below:</p>
2893
2894 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-06-15-ownership-graphs-norway-dagbladet.png" width="80%">
2895
2896 <p>Note that I suspect the "Aller Holding A/S" entry to be incorrect
2897 data in the official ownership register, as that name is not
2898 registered in the official company register for Norway.  The ownership
2899 register is sensitive to typos and there seem to be no strict checking
2900 of the ownership links.</p>
2901
2902 <p>Let me know if you improve the script or find better data sources.
2903 The code is licensed according to GPL 2 or newer.</p>
2904
2905 <p>Update 2015-06-15: Since the initial post I've been told that
2906 "<a href="http://www.proff.dk/firma/carl-allers-etablissement-aktieselskab/københavn-v/hovedkontorer/13624518-3/">Aller
2907 Holding A/S</a>" is a Danish company, which explain why it did not
2908 have a Norwegian organisation number.  I've also been told that there
2909 is a <a href="http://www.brreg.no/automatiske/webservices/">web
2910 services API available</a> from Brønnøysundsregistrene, for those
2911 willing to accept the terms or pay the price.</p>
2912
2913       </div>
2914       <div class="tags">
2915
2916
2917         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>.
2918
2919
2920       </div>
2921     </div>
2922     <div class="padding"></div>
2923
2924     <div class="entry">
2925       <div class="title">
2926         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html">Measuring and adjusting the loudness of a TV channel using bs1770gain</a>
2927       </div>
2928       <div class="date">
2929         11th June 2015
2930       </div>
2931       <div class="body">
2932         <p>Television loudness is the source of frustration for viewers
2933 everywhere.  Some channels are very load, others are less loud, and
2934 ads tend to shout very high to get the attention of the viewers, and
2935 the viewers do not like this.  This fact is well known to the TV
2936 channels.  See for example the BBC white paper
2937 "<a href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp-pdf-files/WHP202.pdf">Terminology
2938 for loudness and level dBTP, LU, and all that</a>" from 2011 for a
2939 summary of the problem domain.  To better address the need for even
2940 loadness, the TV channels got together several years ago to agree on a
2941 new way to measure loudness in digital files as one step in
2942 standardizing loudness.  From this came the ITU-R standard BS.1770,
2943 "<a href="http://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-BS.1770/en">Algorithms to
2944 measure audio programme loudness and true-peak audio level</a>".</p>
2945
2946 <p>The ITU-R BS.1770 specification describe an algorithm to measure
2947 loadness in LUFS (Loudness Units, referenced to Full Scale). But
2948 having a way to measure is not enough.  To get the same loudness
2949 across TV channels, one also need to decide which value to standardize
2950 on.  For European TV channels, this was done in the EBU Recommondaton
2951 R128, "<a href="https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf">Loudness
2952 normalisation and permitted maximum level of audio signals</a>", which
2953 specifies a recommended level of -23 LUFS.  In Norway, I have been
2954 told that NRK, TV2, MTG and SBS have decided among themselves to
2955 follow the R128 recommondation for playout from 2016-03-01.</p>
2956
2957 <p>There are free software available to measure and adjust the loudness
2958 level using the LUFS.  In Debian, I am aware of a library named
2959 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libebur128">libebur128</a>
2960 able to measure the loudness and since yesterday morning a new binary
2961 named <a href="http://bs1770gain.sourceforge.net">bs1770gain</a>
2962 capable of both measuring and adjusting was uploaded and is waiting
2963 for NEW processing.  I plan to maintain the latter in Debian under the
2964 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=pkg-multimedia-maintainers%40lists.alioth.debian.org">Debian
2965 multimedia</a> umbrella.</p>
2966
2967 <p>The free software based TV channel I am involved in,
2968 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, plan to follow the
2969 R128 recommondation ourself as soon as we can adjust the software to
2970 do so, and the bs1770gain tool seem like a good fit for that part of
2971 the puzzle to measure loudness on new video uploaded to Frikanalen.
2972 Personally, I plan to use bs1770gain to adjust the loudness of videos
2973 I upload to Frikanalen on behalf of <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
2974 NUUG member organisation</a>.  The program seem to be able to measure
2975 the LUFS value of any media file handled by ffmpeg, but I've only
2976 successfully adjusted the LUFS value of WAV files.  I suspect it
2977 should be able to adjust it for all the formats handled by ffmpeg.</p>
2978
2979       </div>
2980       <div class="tags">
2981
2982
2983         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2984
2985
2986       </div>
2987     </div>
2988     <div class="padding"></div>
2989
2990     <div class="entry">
2991       <div class="title">
2992         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_citizens_now_required_by_law_to_give_their_fingerprint_to_the_police.html">Norwegian citizens now required by law to give their fingerprint to the police</a>
2993       </div>
2994       <div class="date">
2995         10th May 2015
2996       </div>
2997       <div class="body">
2998         <p>5 days ago, the Norwegian Parliament decided, unanimously, that all
2999 citizens of Norway, no matter if they are suspected of something
3000 criminal or not, are
3001 <a href="https://www.holderdeord.no/votes/1430838871e">required to
3002 give fingerprints to the police</a> (vote details from Holder de
3003 ord).  The law make it sound like it will be optional, but in a few
3004 years there will be no option any more.  The ID will be required to
3005 vote, to get a bank account, a bank card, to change address on the
3006 post office, to receive an electronic ID or to get a drivers license
3007 and many other tasks required to function in Norway.  The banks plan
3008 to stop providing their own ID on the bank cards when this new
3009 national ID is introduced, and the national road authorities plan to
3010 change the drivers license to no longer be usable as identity cards.
3011 In effect, to function as a citizen in Norway a national ID card will
3012 be required, and to get it one need to provide the fingerprints to
3013 the police.</p>
3014
3015 <p>In addition to handing the fingerprint to the police (which
3016 promised to not make a copy of the fingerprint image at that point in
3017 time, but say nothing about doing it later), a picture of the
3018 fingerprint will be stored on the RFID chip, along with a picture of
3019 the face and other information about the person.  Some of the
3020 information will be encrypted, but the encryption will be the same
3021 system as currently used in the passports.  The codes to decrypt will
3022 be available to a lot of government offices and their suppliers around
3023 the globe, but for those that do not know anyone in those circles it
3024 is good to know that
3025 <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/nov/17/news.homeaffairs">the
3026 encryption is already broken</a>.  And they
3027 <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/article/2215057/wireless/bad-guys-could-read-rfid-passports-at-217-feet--maybe-a-lot-more.html">can
3028 be read from 70 meters away</a>.  This can be mitigated a bit by
3029 keeping it in a Faraday cage (metal box or metal wire container), but
3030 one will be required to take it out of there often enough to expose
3031 ones private and personal information to a lot of people that have no
3032 business getting access to that information.</p>
3033
3034 <p>The new Norwegian national IDs are a vehicle for identity theft,
3035 and I feel sorry for us all having politicians accepting such invasion
3036 of privacy without any objections.  So are the Norwegian passports,
3037 but it has been possible to function in Norway without those so far.
3038 That option is going away with the passing of the new law.  In this, I
3039 envy the Germans, because for them it is optional how much biometric
3040 information is stored in their national ID.</p>
3041
3042 <p>And if forced collection of fingerprints was not bad enough, the
3043 information collected in the national ID card register can be handed
3044 over to foreign intelligence services and police authorities, "when
3045 extradition is not considered disproportionate".</p>
3046
3047 <p>Update 2015-05-12: For those unable to believe that the Parliament
3048 really could make such decision, I wrote
3049 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Blir_det_virkelig_krav_om_fingeravtrykk_i_nasjonale_ID_kort_.html">a
3050 summary of the sources I have</a> for concluding the way I do
3051 (Norwegian Only, as the sources are all in Norwegian).</p>
3052
3053       </div>
3054       <div class="tags">
3055
3056
3057         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
3058
3059
3060       </div>
3061     </div>
3062     <div class="padding"></div>
3063
3064     <div class="entry">
3065       <div class="title">
3066         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_would_it_cost_to_store_all_phone_calls_in_Norway_.html">What would it cost to store all phone calls in Norway?</a>
3067       </div>
3068       <div class="date">
3069          1st May 2015
3070       </div>
3071       <div class="body">
3072         <p>Many years ago, a friend of mine calculated how much it would cost
3073 to store the sound of all phone calls in Norway, and came up with the
3074 cost of around 20 million NOK (2.4 mill EUR) for all the calls in a
3075 year.  I got curious and wondered what the same calculation would look
3076 like today.  To do so one need an idea of how much data storage is
3077 needed for each minute of sound, how many minutes all the calls in
3078 Norway sums up to, and the cost of data storage.</p>
3079
3080 <p>The 2005 numbers are from
3081 <a href="http://www.digi.no/analyser/2005/10/04/vi-prater-stadig-mindre-i-roret">digi.no</a>,
3082 the 2012 numbers are from
3083 <a href="http://www.nkom.no/aktuelt/nyheter/fortsatt-vekst-i-det-norske-ekommarkedet">a
3084 NKOM report</a>, and I got the 2013 numbers after asking NKOM via
3085 email.  I was told the numbers for 2014 will be presented May 20th,
3086 and decided not to wait for those, as I doubt they will be very
3087 different from the numbers from 2013.</p>
3088
3089 <p>The amount of data storage per minute sound depend on the wanted
3090 quality, and for phone calls it is generally believed that 8 Kbit/s is
3091 enough.  See for example a
3092 <a href="http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/voice/voice-quality/7934-bwidth-consume.html#topic1">summary
3093 on voice quality from Cisco</a> for some alternatives.  8 Kbit/s is 60
3094 Kbytes/min, and this can be multiplied with the number of call minutes
3095 to get the storage requirements.</p>
3096
3097 <p>Storage prices varies a lot, depending on speed, backup strategies,
3098 availability requirements etc.  But a simple way to calculate can be
3099 to use the price of a TiB-disk (around 1000 NOK / 120 EUR) and double
3100 it to take space, power and redundancy into account.  It could be much
3101 higher with high speed and good redundancy requirements.</p>
3102
3103 <p>But back to the question, What would it cost to store all phone
3104 calls in Norway?  Not much.  Here is a small table showing the
3105 estimated cost, which is within the budget constraint of most medium
3106 and large organisations:</p>
3107
3108 <table border="1">
3109 <tr><th>Year</th><th>Call minutes</th><th>Size</th><th>Price in NOK / EUR</th></tr>
3110 <tr><td>2005</td><td align="right">24 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.3 PiB</td><td align="right">3 mill / 358 000</td></tr>
3111 <tr><td>2012</td><td align="right">18 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.0 PiB</td><td align="right">2.2 mill / 262 000</td></tr>
3112 <tr><td>2013</td><td align="right">17 000 000 000</td><td align="right">950 TiB</td><td align="right">2.1 mill / 250 000</td></tr>
3113 </table>
3114
3115 <p>This is the cost of buying the storage.  Maintenance need to be
3116 taken into account too, but calculating that is left as an exercise
3117 for the reader.  But it is obvious to me from those numbers that
3118 recording the sound of all phone calls in Norway is not going to be
3119 stopped because it is too expensive.  I wonder if someone already is
3120 collecting the data?</p>
3121
3122       </div>
3123       <div class="tags">
3124
3125
3126         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
3127
3128
3129       </div>
3130     </div>
3131     <div class="padding"></div>
3132
3133     <div class="entry">
3134       <div class="title">
3135         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_beta_release.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu beta release</a>
3136       </div>
3137       <div class="date">
3138         26th April 2015
3139       </div>
3140       <div class="body">
3141         <p>I am happy to report that the Debian Edu team sent out
3142 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2015/04/msg00000.html">this
3143 announcement today</a>:</p>
3144
3145 <pre>
3146 the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is pleased to announce the first
3147 *beta* release of Debian Edu "Jessie" 8.0+edu0~b1, which for the first
3148 time is composed entirely of packages from the current Debian stable
3149 release, Debian 8 "Jessie".
3150
3151 (As most reading this will know, Debian "Jessie" hasn't actually been
3152 released by now. The release is still in progress but should finish
3153 later today ;)
3154
3155 We expect to make a final release of Debian Edu "Jessie" in the coming
3156 weeks, timed with the first point release of Debian Jessie. Upgrades
3157 from this beta release of Debian Edu Jessie to the final release will
3158 be possible and encouraged!
3159
3160 Please report feedback to debian-edu@lists.debian.org and/or submit
3161 bugs: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
3162
3163 Debian Edu - sometimes also known as "Skolelinux" - is a complete
3164 operating system for schools, universities and other
3165 organisations. Through its pre- prepared installation profiles
3166 administrators can install servers, workstations and laptops which
3167 will work in harmony on the school network.  With Debian Edu, the
3168 teachers themselves or their technical support staff can roll out a
3169 complete multi-user, multi-machine study environment within hours or
3170 days.
3171
3172 Debian Edu is already in use at several hundred schools all over the
3173 world, particularly in Germany, Spain and Norway. Installations come
3174 with hundreds of applications pre-installed, plus the whole Debian
3175 archive of thousands of compatible packages within easy reach.
3176
3177 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
3178 installation instructions are available, including detailed
3179 instructions in the manual explaining the first steps, such as setting
3180 up a network or adding users.  Please note that the password for the
3181 user your prompted for during installation must have a length of at
3182 least 5 characters!
3183
3184 == Where to download ==
3185
3186 A multi-architecture CD / usbstick image (649 MiB) for network booting
3187 can be downloaded at the following locations:
3188
3189     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso
3190     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso .
3191
3192 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 54a524d16246cddd8d2cfd6ea52f2dd78c47ee0a
3193
3194 Alternatively an extended DVD / usbstick image (4.9 GiB) is also
3195 available, with more software included (saving additional download
3196 time):
3197
3198     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
3199     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
3200
3201 The SHA1SUM of this image is: fb1f1504a490c077a48653898f9d6a461cb3c636
3202
3203 Sources are available from the Debian archive, see
3204 http://ftp.debian.org/debian-cd/8.0.0/source/ for some download
3205 options.
3206
3207 == Debian Edu Jessie manual in seven languages ==
3208
3209 Please see https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/ for
3210 the English version of the Debian Edu jessie manual.
3211
3212 This manual has been fully translated to German, French, Italian,
3213 Danish, Dutch and Norwegian Bokmål. A partly translated version exists
3214 for Spanish.  See http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/ for
3215 online version of the translated manual.
3216
3217 More information about Debian 8 "Jessie" itself is provided in the
3218 release notes and the installation manual:
3219 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes
3220 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual
3221
3222
3223 == Errata / known problems ==
3224
3225     It takes up to 15 minutes for a changed hostname to be updated via
3226     DHCP (#780461).
3227
3228     The hostname script fails to update LTSP server hostname (#783087).
3229
3230 Workaround: run update-hostname-from-ip on the client to update the
3231 hostname immediately.
3232
3233 Check https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie for a possibly
3234 more current and complete list.
3235
3236 == Some more details about Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~b1 Codename Jessie released 2015-04-25 ==
3237
3238 === Software updates ===
3239
3240 Everything which is new in Debian 8 Jessie, e.g.:
3241
3242  * Linux kernel 3.16.7-ctk9; for the i386 architecture, support for
3243    i486 processors has been dropped; oldest supported ones: i586 (like
3244    Intel Pentium and AMD K5).
3245
3246  * Desktop environments KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11.13, GNOME 3.14,
3247    Xfce 4.12, LXDE 0.5.6
3248    * new optional desktop environment: MATE 1.8
3249    * KDE Plasma Workspaces is installed by default; to choose one of
3250      the others see the manual.
3251  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 41
3252  * LibreOffice 4.3.3
3253  * GOsa 2.7.4
3254  * LTSP 5.5.4
3255  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
3256  * new boot framework: systemd
3257  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.12
3258  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
3259  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
3260  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.1
3261  * golearn 0.9
3262  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
3263  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
3264  * Debian Jessie includes about 43000 packages available for installation.
3265  * More information about Debian 8 Jessie is provided in its release
3266    notes and the installation manual, see the link above.
3267
3268 === Installation changes ===
3269
3270     Installations done via PXE now also install firmware automatically
3271     for the hardware present.
3272
3273 === Fixed bugs ===
3274
3275 A number of bugs have been fixed in this release; the most noticeable
3276 from a user perspective:
3277
3278  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
3279    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
3280    information is corrected (710362)
3281
3282  * shutdown-at-night now shuts the system down if gdm3 is used (775608).
3283
3284 === Sugar desktop removed ===
3285
3286 As the Sugar desktop was removed from Debian Jessie, it is also not
3287 available in Debian Edu jessie.
3288
3289
3290 == About Debian Edu / Skolelinux ==
3291
3292 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on
3293 Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
3294 configured school network. Directly after installation a school server
3295 running all services needed for a school network is set up just
3296 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
3297 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
3298 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
3299 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
3300 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
3301 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
3302 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
3303 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
3304 can choose between KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
3305 environment.
3306
3307 == About Debian ==
3308
3309 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
3310 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
3311 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
3312 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
3313 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
3314 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
3315 operating system.
3316
3317 == Thanks ==
3318
3319 Thanks to everyone making Debian and Debian Edu / Skolelinux happen!
3320 You rock.
3321 </pre>
3322
3323       </div>
3324       <div class="tags">
3325
3326
3327         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3328
3329
3330       </div>
3331     </div>
3332     <div class="padding"></div>
3333
3334     <div class="entry">
3335       <div class="title">
3336         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Shirish_Agarwal.html">Debian Edu interview: Shirish Agarwal</a>
3337       </div>
3338       <div class="date">
3339         15th April 2015
3340       </div>
3341       <div class="body">
3342         <p>It was a surprise to me to learn that project to create a complete
3343 computer system for schools I've involved in,
3344 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, was
3345 being used in India.  But apparently it is, and I managed to get an
3346 interview with one of the friends of the project there, Shirish
3347 Agarwal.</p>
3348
3349 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
3350
3351 <p>My name is Shirish Agarwal. Based out of the educational and
3352 historical city of Pune, from the western state of Maharashtra, India.
3353 My bread comes from giving training, giving policy tips,
3354 installations on free software to mom and pop shops in different
3355 fields from Desktop publishing to retail shops as well as work with
3356 few software start-ups as well.</p>
3357
3358 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
3359 project?</strong></p>
3360
3361 <p>It started innocently enough. I have been using Debian for a few
3362 years and in one local minidebconf / debutsav I was asked if there was
3363 anything for schools or education. I had worked / played with free
3364 educational softwares such as Gcompris and Stellarium for my many
3365 nieces and nephews so researched and found Debian Edu or Skolelinux as
3366 it was known then.  Since then I have started using the various
3367 education meta-packages provided by the project.</p>
3368
3369 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
3370 Edu?</strong></p>
3371
3372 <p>It's closest I have seen where a package full of educational
3373 software are packed, which are free and open (both literally and
3374 figuratively).  Even if I take the simplest software which is
3375 gcompris, the number of activities therein are amazing. Another one of
3376 the softwares that I have liked for a long time is stellarium. Even
3377 pysycache is cool except for couple of issues I encountered
3378 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781841">#781841</a> and
3379 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781842">#781842</a>.</p>
3380
3381 <p>I prefer software installed on the system over web based solutions,
3382 as a web site can disappear any time but the software on disk has the
3383 possibility of a larger life span.  Of course with both it's more a
3384 question if it has enough users who make it fun or sustainable or both
3385 for the developer per-se.</p>
3386
3387 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
3388 Edu?</strong></p>
3389
3390 <p>I do see that the Debian Edu team seems to be short-handed and I
3391 think more efforts should be made to make it popular and ask and take
3392 help from people and the larger community wherever possible.</p>
3393
3394 <p>I don't see any disadvantage to use Skolelinux apart from the fact
3395 that most apps. are generic which is good or bad how you see it.
3396 However, saying that I do acknowledge the fact that the canvas is
3397 pretty big and there are lot of interesting ideas that could be done
3398 but for reasons not known not done or if done I don't know about them.
3399 Let me share some of the ideas (these are more upstream based but
3400 still) I have had for a long time :</p>
3401
3402 <p>1. Classical maths question of two trains in opposing directions
3403 each running @x kmph/mph at y distance, when they will meet and how
3404 far would each travel and similar questions like these.
3405
3406 <p>The computer is a fantastic system where questions like these can
3407 be drawn, animated and the methodology and answers teased out in
3408 interactive manner. While sites such as the
3409 <a href="http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.two.trains.html">Ask
3410 Dr. Math FAQ on The Two Trains problem</a> (as an example or point of
3411 inspiration) can be used there is lot more that can be done.  I dunno
3412 if there is a free software which does something like this.  The idea
3413 being a blend of objects + animation + interaction which does
3414 this. The whole interaction could be gamified with points or sounds or
3415 colourful celebration whenever the user gets even part of the question
3416 or/and methodology right. That would help reinforce good behaviour.
3417 This understanding could be used to share/showcase everything from how
3418 the first wheel came to be, to evolution to how astronomy started,
3419 psychics and everything in-between.</p>
3420
3421 <p>One specific idea in the train part was having the Linux mascot on
3422 one train and the BSD or GNU mascot on the other train and they
3423 meeting somewhere in-between. Characters from blender movies could
3424 also be used.</p>
3425
3426 <p>2. Loads of crossword-puzzles with reference to subjects: We have
3427 enormous data sets in Wikipedia and Wikitionary.  I don't think it
3428 should be a big job to design crossword puzzles. Using categories and
3429 sub-categories it should be doable to have Q&A single word answers
3430 from the existing data-sets. What would make it easy or hard could be
3431 the length of the word + existence of many or few vowels depending on
3432 the user's input.</p>
3433
3434 <p>3. Jigsaw puzzles - We already have a great software called
3435 palapeli with number of slicers making it pretty interesting. What
3436 needs to be done is to download large number of public domain and
3437 copyleft images, tease and use IPTC tags to categorise them into
3438 nature, history etc.  and let it loose. This could turn to be really
3439 huge collection of images. One source could be taken from
3440 commons.wikimedia.org, others could be huge collection of royalty-free
3441 stock photos. Potential is immense.</p>
3442
3443 <p>Apart from this, free software suffers in two directions, we lag
3444 both in development (of using new features per-se) and maintenance a
3445 lot.  This is more so in educational software as these applications
3446 need to be timely and the opportunity cost of missing deadlines is
3447 immense. If we are able to solve issues of funding for development and
3448 maintenance of such software I don't see any big difficulties. I know
3449 of few start-ups in and around India who would love to develop and
3450 maintain such software if funding issues could be solved.</p>
3451
3452 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
3453
3454 <p>That would be huge list. Some of the softwares are obviously apt,
3455 aptitude, debdelta, leafpad, the shell of course (zsh nowadays),
3456 quassel for IRC. In games I use shisen-sho while card-games are evenly
3457 between kpat and Aiselriot.  In desktops it's a tie between
3458 gnome-flashback and mate.</p>
3459
3460 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
3461 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
3462
3463 <p>I think it should first start with using specific FOSS apps. in
3464 whatever environment they are. If it's MS-Windows or Mac so be it.
3465 Once they are habitual with the apps. and there is buy-in from the
3466 school management then it could be installed anywhere. Most of the
3467 people now understand the concept of a repository because of the
3468 various online stores so it isn't hard to convince on that front.</p>
3469
3470 <p>What is harder is having enough people with technical skills and
3471 passion to service them. If you get buy-in from one or two teachers
3472 then ideas like above could also be asked to be done as a project as
3473 well.</p>
3474
3475 <p>I think where we fall short more than anything is in marketing. For
3476 instance, Debian has this whole range of fonts in its archive but
3477 there isn't even a page where all those different fonts in the La
3478 Ipsum format could be tried out for newcomers.</p>
3479
3480 <p>One of the issues faced constantly in installations is with updates
3481 and upgrades.  People have this myth that each update and upgrade
3482 means the user interface will / has to change. I have seen this
3483 innumerable times.  That perhaps is one of the reasons which browsers
3484 like Iceweasel / Firefox change user interfaces so much, not because
3485 it might be needed or be functional but because people believe that
3486 changed user interfaces are better. This, can easily be pointed with
3487 the user interfaces changed with almost every MS-Windows and Mac OS
3488 releases.</p>
3489
3490 <p>The problems with Debian Edu for deployment are many. The biggest
3491 is the huge gap between what is taught in schools and what Debian Edu
3492 is aimed at.
3493
3494 <p>Me and my friends did teach on week-ends in a government school for
3495 around 2 years, and
3496 <a href="https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/sharings/">gathered
3497 some experience</a> there.  Some of the things we learnt/discovered
3498 there was :</p>
3499
3500 <ol>
3501
3502   <li>Most of the teachers are very territorial about their subjects
3503    and they do not want you to teach anything out of the
3504    portion/syllabus given.</li>
3505
3506   <li>They want any activity on the system in accordance to whatever
3507    is in the syllabus.</li>
3508
3509   <li>There are huge barriers both with the English language and at
3510    times with objects or whatever. An example, let's say in gcompris
3511    you have objects falling down and you have to name them and let's
3512    say the falling object is a hat or a fedora hat, this would not be
3513    as recognizable as say a
3514    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puneri_Pagadi">Puneri
3515    Pagdi</a> so there is need to inject local objects, words wherever
3516    possible. Especially for word-games there are so many hindi words
3517    which have become part of english vocabulary (for instance in
3518    parley), those could be made into a hinglish collection or
3519    something but that is something for upstream to do.</li>
3520
3521 </ol>
3522
3523       </div>
3524       <div class="tags">
3525
3526
3527         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
3528
3529
3530       </div>
3531     </div>
3532     <div class="padding"></div>
3533
3534     <div class="entry">
3535       <div class="title">
3536         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_m_going_to_the_Open_Source_Developers__Conference_Nordic_2015_.html">I'm going to the Open Source Developers' Conference Nordic 2015!</a>
3537       </div>
3538       <div class="date">
3539          7th April 2015
3540       </div>
3541       <div class="body">
3542         <p>I am happy to let you all know that I'm going to the <a
3543 href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/">Open Source Developers'
3544 Conference Nordic 2015</a>!</p>
3545
3546 <p>It take place Friday 8th to Sunday 10th of May in Oslo next to
3547 where I work, and I finally got around to submitting
3548 <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talk/6192">a talk proposal for
3549 it</a> (dead link for most people until the talk is accepted).  As
3550 part of my involvement with the
3551 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group member
3552 association</a> I have been slightly involved in the planning of this
3553 conference for a while now, with a focus on organising a Civic Hacking
3554 Hackathon with our friends
3555 over at <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> and
3556 <a href="http://www.holderdeord.no/">Holder de ord</a>.  This part is
3557 named the 'My Society' track in the program.  There is still space for
3558 more talks and participants.  I hope to see you there.</p>
3559
3560 <p>Check out <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talks">the talks
3561 submitted and accepted so far</a>.</p>
3562
3563       </div>
3564       <div class="tags">
3565
3566
3567         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>.
3568
3569
3570       </div>
3571     </div>
3572     <div class="padding"></div>
3573
3574     <div class="entry">
3575       <div class="title">
3576         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Proof_reading_the_Norwegian_translation_of_Free_Culture_by_Lessig.html">Proof reading the Norwegian translation of Free Culture by Lessig</a>
3577       </div>
3578       <div class="date">
3579          4th April 2015
3580       </div>
3581       <div class="body">
3582         <p>During eastern I had some time to continue working on the Norwegian
3583 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
3584 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
3585 At the moment I am proof reading the finished text, looking for typos,
3586 inconsistent wordings and sentences that do not flow as they should.
3587 I'm more than two thirds done with the text, and welcome others to
3588 check the text up to chapter 13.  The current status is available on the
3589 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
3590 project pages.  You can also check out the
3591 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
3592 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
3593 and HTML version available in the
3594 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
3595 directory</a>.</p>
3596
3597 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
3598 you find any.</p>
3599
3600       </div>
3601       <div class="tags">
3602
3603
3604         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
3605
3606
3607       </div>
3608     </div>
3609     <div class="padding"></div>
3610
3611     <div class="entry">
3612       <div class="title">
3613         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen__Norwegian_TV_channel_for_technical_topics.html">Frikanalen, Norwegian TV channel for technical topics</a>
3614       </div>
3615       <div class="date">
3616          9th March 2015
3617       </div>
3618       <div class="body">
3619         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a>,
3620 where I am a member, and where people interested in free software,
3621 open standards and UNIX like operating systems like Linux and the BSDs
3622 come together, record our monthly technical presentations on video.
3623 The purpose is to document the talks and spread them to a wider
3624 audience.  For this, the the Norwegian nationwide open channel
3625 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is a useful venue.
3626 Since a few days ago, when I figured out the
3627 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/api/">REST API</a> to program the
3628 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/guide/">channel time schedule</a>,
3629 the channel has been filled with NUUG talks, related recordings and
3630 some Creative Commons licensed TED talks (from archive.org).  I fill
3631 all "leftover bits" on the channel with content from NUUG, which at
3632 the moment is almost 17 of 24 hours every day.</p>
3633
3634 <p>The list of NUUG videos
3635 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/organization/82">uploaded so far</a>
3636 include things like a
3637 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/625090">one hour talk by John
3638 Perry Barlow when he visited Oslo</a>, a presentation of
3639 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624275">Haiku, the BeOS
3640 re-implementation</a>, the
3641 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624493">history of FiksGataMi,
3642 the Norwegian version of FixMyStreet</a>, the good old
3643 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/623566">Warriors of the net
3644 video</A> and many others.</p>
3645
3646 <p>We have a large backlog of NUUG talks not yet uploaded to
3647 Frikanalen, and plan to upload every useful bit to the channel to
3648 spread the word there.  I also hope to find useful recordings from the
3649 Chaos Computer Club and Debian conferences and spread them on the
3650 channel as well.  But this require locating the videos and their meta
3651 information (title, description, license, etc), and preparing the
3652 recordings for broadcast, and I have not yet had the spare time to
3653 focus on this.  Perhaps you want to help.  Please join us on IRC,
3654 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
3655 if you want to help make this happen.</p>
3656
3657 <p>But as I said, already the channel is already almost exclusively
3658 filled with technical topics, and if you want to learn something new
3659 today, check out the <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">Ogg Theora
3660 web stream</a> or use one of the other ways to get access to the
3661 channel.  Unfortunately the Ogg Theora recoding for distribution still
3662 do not properly sync the video and sound.  It is generated by recoding
3663 a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to
3664 Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and we have not been able to find a way that
3665 produces acceptable quality.  Help needed, please get in touch if you
3666 know how to fix it using free software.</p>
3667
3668       </div>
3669       <div class="tags">
3670
3671
3672         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
3673
3674
3675       </div>
3676     </div>
3677     <div class="padding"></div>
3678
3679     <div class="entry">
3680       <div class="title">
3681         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Citizenfour_documentary_on_the_Snowden_confirmations_to_Norway.html">The Citizenfour documentary on the Snowden confirmations to Norway</a>
3682       </div>
3683       <div class="date">
3684         28th February 2015
3685       </div>
3686       <div class="body">
3687         <p>Today I was happy to learn that the documentary
3688 <a href="https://citizenfourfilm.com/">Citizenfour</a> by
3689 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Poitras">Laura Poitras</a>
3690 finally will show up in Norway.  According to the magazine
3691 <a href="http://montages.no/">Montages</a>, a deal has finally been
3692 made for
3693 <a href="http://montages.no/nyheter/snowden-dokumentaren-citizenfour-far-norsk-kinodistribusjon/">Cinema
3694 distribution in Norway</a> and the movie will have its premiere soon.
3695 This is great news.  As part of my involvement with
3696 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User Group</a>, me and
3697 a friend have
3698 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_til_Norge_.shtml">tried
3699 to get the movie to Norway</a> ourselves, but obviously
3700 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_endelig_til_Norge_.shtml">we
3701 were too late</a> and Tor Fosse beat us to it.  I am happy he did, as
3702 the movie will make its way to the public and we do not have to make
3703 it happen ourselves.
3704 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwAvd5mvM">The trailer</a>
3705 can be seen on youtube, if you are curious what kind of film this
3706 is.</p>
3707
3708 <p>The whistle blower Edward Snowden really deserve political asylum
3709 here in Norway, but I am afraid he would not be safe.</p>
3710
3711       </div>
3712       <div class="tags">
3713
3714
3715         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
3716
3717
3718       </div>
3719     </div>
3720     <div class="padding"></div>
3721
3722     <div class="entry">
3723       <div class="title">
3724         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Norwegian_open_channel_Frikanalen___24x7_on_the_Internet.html">The Norwegian open channel Frikanalen - 24x7 on the Internet</a>
3725       </div>
3726       <div class="date">
3727         25th February 2015
3728       </div>
3729       <div class="body">
3730         <p>The Norwegian nationwide open channel
3731 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is still going
3732 strong.  It allow everyone to send the video they want on national
3733 television.  It is a TV station administrated completely using a web
3734 browser, running only <ahref="https://github.com/Frikanalen">Free
3735 Software</a>, providing <ahref="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api">a REST
3736 api</a> for administrators and members, and with distribution on the
3737 national DVB-T distribution network RiksTV.  But only between 12:00
3738 and 17:30 Norwegian time.  This has finally changed, after many years
3739 with limited distribution.  A few weeks ago, we set up a Ogg Theora
3740 stream via icecast to allow everyone with Internet access to check out
3741 the channel the rest of the day.  This is presented on
3742 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">the Frikanalen web site now</a>.  And
3743 since a few days ago, the channel is also available
3744 via <a href="https://www.uninett.no/iptv-tilgang">multicast on
3745 UNINETT</a>, available for those using IPTV TVs and set-top boxes in
3746 the Norwegian National Research and Education network.</p>
3747
3748 <p>If you want to see what is on the channel, point your media player
3749 to one of these sources.  The first should work with most players and
3750 browsers, while as far as I know, the multicast UDP stream only work
3751 with VLC.</p>
3752
3753 <ul>
3754   <li><a href="http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv">http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv</a></li>
3755   <li>udp://@224.17.43.129:1234</li>
3756 </ul>
3757
3758 <p>The Ogg Theora / icecast stream is not working well, as the video
3759 and audio is slightly out of sync.  We have not been able to figure
3760 out how to fix it.  It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG
3761 transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to Ogg Theora /
3762 Vorbis, and the result is less then stellar.  If you have ideas how to
3763 fix it, please let us know on frikanalen (at) nuug.no.  We currently
3764 use this with ffmpeg2theora 0.29:</p>
3765
3766 <blockquote><pre>
3767 ./ffmpeg2theora.linux &lt;OBE_gemini_URL.ts&gt; -F 25 -x 720 -y 405 \
3768  --deinterlace --inputfps 25 -c 1 -H 48000 --keyint 8 --buf-delay 100 \
3769  --nosync -V 700 -o - | oggfwd video.nuug.no 8000 &lt;pw&gt; /frikanalen.ogv
3770 </pre></blockquote>
3771
3772 <p>If you get the multicast UDP stream working, please let me know, as
3773 I am curious how far the multicast stream reach.  It do not make it to
3774 my home network, nor any other commercially available network in
3775 Norway that I am aware of.</p>
3776
3777       </div>
3778       <div class="tags">
3779
3780
3781         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
3782
3783
3784       </div>
3785     </div>
3786     <div class="padding"></div>
3787
3788     <div class="entry">
3789       <div class="title">
3790         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nude_body_scanner_now_present_on_Norwegian_airport.html">Nude body scanner now present on Norwegian airport</a>
3791       </div>
3792       <div class="date">
3793         10th February 2015
3794       </div>
3795       <div class="body">
3796         <p>Aftenposten, one of the largest newspapers in Norway, today report
3797 that
3798 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/reise/Slik-skannes-kroppen-din-i-fremtidens-sikkerhetskontroll-490666_1.snd">three
3799 of the nude body scanners now is put to use at Gardermoen</a>, the
3800 main airport in Norway.  This way the travelers can have their body
3801 photographed without cloths when visiting Norway.  Of course this
3802 horrible news is presented with a positive spin, stating that "now
3803 travelers can move past the security check point faster and more
3804 efficiently", but fail to mention that the machines in question take
3805 pictures of their nude bodies and store them internally in the
3806 computer, while only presenting sketch figure of the body to the
3807 public.  The article is written in a way that leave the impression
3808 that the new machines do not take these nude pictures and only create
3809 the sketch figures.  In reality the same nude pictures are still
3810 taken, but not presented to everyone.  They are still available for
3811 the owners of the system and the people doing maintenance of the
3812 scanners, as long as they are taken and stored.</p>
3813
3814 <p>Wikipedia have a more on
3815 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_body_scanner">Full body
3816 scanners</a>, including example images and a summary of the
3817 controversy about these scanners.</p>
3818
3819 <p>Personally I will decline to use these machines, as I believe strip
3820 searches of my body is a very intrusive attack on my privacy, and not
3821 something everyone should have to accept to travel.</p>
3822
3823       </div>
3824       <div class="tags">
3825
3826
3827         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
3828
3829
3830       </div>
3831     </div>
3832     <div class="padding"></div>
3833
3834     <div class="entry">
3835       <div class="title">
3836         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nagios_module_to_check_if_the_Frikanalen_video_stream_is_working.html">Nagios module to check if the Frikanalen video stream is working</a>
3837       </div>
3838       <div class="date">
3839          8th February 2015
3840       </div>
3841       <div class="body">
3842         <p>When running a TV station with both broadcast and web stream
3843 distribution, it is useful to know that the stream is working.  As I
3844 am involved in the Norwegian open channel
3845 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> as part of my
3846 activity in the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member
3847 organisation</a>, I wrote a script to use mplayer to connect to a
3848 video stream, pick two images 35 seconds apart and compare them.  If
3849 the images are missing or identical, something is probably wrong with
3850 the stream and an alarm should be triggered.  The script is written as
3851 a Nagios plugin, allowing us to use Nagios to run the check regularly
3852 and sound the alarm when something is wrong.  It is able to detect
3853 both a hanging and a broken video stream.</p>
3854
3855 <p>I just uploaded the code for the script into the
3856 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen/frikanalen/blob/master/nagios-plugin/check_video_stream_images">Frikanalen
3857 git repository</a> on github.  If you run a TV station with web
3858 streaming, perhaps you can find it useful too.</p>
3859
3860 <p>Last year, the Frikanalen public TV station transformed into using
3861 only Linux based free software to administrate, schedule and
3862 distribute the TV content.  The
3863 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen">source code for the entire TV
3864 station</a> is available from the Github project page.  Everyone can
3865 use it to send their content on national TV, and we provide both a web
3866 GUI and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api/">a web API</a> to
3867 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/login/?next=/members/video/">add</a>
3868 and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/members/plan/">schedule
3869 content</a>.  And thanks to last weeks developer gathering and
3870 following activity, we now have the schedule
3871 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/xmltv/2015/01/01">available as
3872 XMLTV</a> too.  Still a lot of work left to do, especially with the
3873 process to add videos and with the scheduling, so your contribution is
3874 most welcome.  Perhaps you want to set up your own TV station?</p>
3875
3876 <p>Update 2015-02-25: Got a tip from Uninett about their
3877 <a href="https://scm.uninett.no/maalepaaler/qstream/">qstream
3878 monitoring system</a>, which gather connection time, jitter, packet
3879 loss and burst bandwidth usage.  It look useful to check if UDP
3880 streams are working as they should.</p>
3881
3882       </div>
3883       <div class="tags">
3884
3885
3886         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
3887
3888
3889       </div>
3890     </div>
3891     <div class="padding"></div>
3892
3893     <div class="entry">
3894       <div class="title">
3895         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_subtitles_for_the_FSF_video_User_Liberation.html">Norwegian Bokmål subtitles for the FSF video User Liberation</a>
3896       </div>
3897       <div class="date">
3898         12th January 2015
3899       </div>
3900       <div class="body">
3901         <p>A few days ago, the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/">Free Software
3902 Foundation</a> announced a new video
3903 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">explaining
3904 Free software</a> in simple terms.  The video named User Liberation is
3905 3 minutes long, and I recommend showing it to everyone you know as a
3906 way to explain what Free Software is all about.  Unfortunately several
3907 of the people I know do not understand English and Spanish, so it did
3908 not make sense to show it to them.</p>
3909
3910 <p>But today I was told that
3911 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">English
3912 subtitles were available</a> and set out to provide Norwegian Bokmål
3913 subtitles based on these.  The result has been sent to FSF and made
3914 available in
3915 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/fsf-video-user-liberation-subtitles">a
3916 git repository</a> provided by Github.  Please let me know if you find
3917 errors or have improvements to the subtitles.</p>
3918
3919 <p>Update 2015-02-03: Since I publised this post, FSF created a
3920 Libreplanet
3921 <a href="http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:FSF/User_Liberation_Video_Translation">project
3922 to track subtitles</A> for the video.</p>
3923
3924       </div>
3925       <div class="tags">
3926
3927
3928         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
3929
3930
3931       </div>
3932     </div>
3933     <div class="padding"></div>
3934
3935     <div class="entry">
3936       <div class="title">
3937         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Updated_version_of_the_Norwegian_web_service_FiksGataMi.html">Updated version of the Norwegian web service FiksGataMi</a>
3938       </div>
3939       <div class="date">
3940         30th December 2014
3941       </div>
3942       <div class="body">
3943         <p>I am very happy that we in the
3944 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group (NUUG)</a>,
3945 spearheaded by Marius Halden from NUUG and Matthew Somerville from
3946 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>, finally managed to
3947 upgrade the code base for the Norwegian version of
3948 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org/">FixMyStreet</a>.  This
3949 was the first major update since 2011. The refurbished
3950 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is already live, and
3951 seem to hold up the pressure.  The
3952 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__FiksGataMi_i_oppdatert_og_mobilvennlig_klesdrakt.shtml">press
3953 release and announcement</a> went out this morning.</p>
3954
3955 <p>FixMyStreet is a web platform for allowing the citizens to easily
3956 report problems with public infrastructure to the responsible
3957 authorities.  Think of it as a shared mail client with map support,
3958 allowing everyone to see what already was reported and comment on the
3959 reports in public.</p>
3960
3961       </div>
3962       <div class="tags">
3963
3964
3965         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
3966
3967
3968       </div>
3969     </div>
3970     <div class="padding"></div>
3971
3972     <div class="entry">
3973       <div class="title">
3974         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Of_course_USA_loses_in_cyber_war___NSA_and_friends_made_sure_it_would_happen.html">Of course USA loses in cyber war - NSA and friends made sure it would happen</a>
3975       </div>
3976       <div class="date">
3977         19th December 2014
3978       </div>
3979       <div class="body">
3980         <p>So, Sony caved in
3981 (<a href="https://twitter.com/RobLowe/status/545338568512917504">according
3982 to Rob Lowe</a>) and demonstrated that America lost its first cyberwar
3983 (<a href="https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/status/545339074975109122">according
3984 to Newt Gingrich</a>).  It should not surprise anyone, after the
3985 whistle blower Edward Snowden documented that the government of USA
3986 and their allies for many years have done their best to make sure the
3987 technology used by its citizens is filled with security holes allowing
3988 the secret services to spy on its own population.  No one in their
3989 right minds could believe that the ability to snoop on the people all
3990 over the globe could only be used by the personnel authorized to do so
3991 by the president of the United States of America.  If the capabilities
3992 are there, they will be used by friend and foe alike, and now they are
3993 being used to bring Sony on its knees.</p>
3994
3995 <p>I doubt it will a lesson learned, and expect USA to lose its next
3996 cyber war too, given how eager the western intelligence communities
3997 (and probably the non-western too, but it is less in the news) seem to
3998 be to continue its current dragnet surveillance practice.</p>
3999
4000 <p>There is a reason why China and others are trying to move away from
4001 Windows to Linux and other alternatives, and it is not to avoid
4002 sending its hard earned dollars to Cayman Islands (or whatever
4003 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven">tax haven</a>
4004 Microsoft is using these days to collect the majority of its
4005 income. :)</p>
4006
4007       </div>
4008       <div class="tags">
4009
4010
4011         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
4012
4013
4014       </div>
4015     </div>
4016     <div class="padding"></div>
4017
4018     <div class="entry">
4019       <div class="title">
4020         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_stay_with_sysvinit_in_Debian_Jessie.html">How to stay with sysvinit in Debian Jessie</a>
4021       </div>
4022       <div class="date">
4023         22nd November 2014
4024       </div>
4025       <div class="body">
4026         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
4027 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
4028 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
4029 courtesy of
4030 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
4031 Schubert</a> and
4032 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
4033 McVittie</a>.
4034
4035 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
4036 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
4037 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
4038 you upgrade:</p>
4039
4040 <p><blockquote><pre>
4041 Package: systemd-sysv
4042 Pin: release o=Debian
4043 Pin-Priority: -1
4044 </pre></blockquote><p>
4045
4046 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
4047 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
4048 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
4049 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
4050 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
4051
4052 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
4053 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
4054 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
4055 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
4056 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
4057 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
4058
4059 <p><blockquote><pre>
4060 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
4061 </pre></blockquote><p>
4062
4063 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
4064
4065 <p><blockquote><pre>
4066 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
4067 </pre></blockquote><p>
4068
4069 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
4070 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
4071
4072 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
4073 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
4074 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
4075 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
4076 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
4077 Jessie is released.</p>
4078
4079 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
4080 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
4081 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
4082 line.</p>
4083
4084       </div>
4085       <div class="tags">
4086
4087
4088         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4089
4090
4091       </div>
4092     </div>
4093     <div class="padding"></div>
4094
4095     <div class="entry">
4096       <div class="title">
4097         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Debian_package_for_SMTP_via_Tor__aka_SMTorP__using_exim4.html">A Debian package for SMTP via Tor (aka SMTorP) using exim4</a>
4098       </div>
4099       <div class="date">
4100         10th November 2014
4101       </div>
4102       <div class="body">
4103         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
4104 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
4105 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
4106
4107 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
4108 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
4109 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
4110 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
4111 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
4112 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
4113 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
4114 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
4115 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
4116 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
4117 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
4118 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
4119 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
4120 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
4121 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
4122
4123 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
4124 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
4125 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
4126 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
4127 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
4128 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
4129 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
4130 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
4131 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
4132 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
4133 were fairly easy, and
4134 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
4135 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
4136 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
4137 useful approach.</p>
4138
4139 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
4140 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
4141 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
4142 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
4143 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
4144 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
4145 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
4146 this:</p>
4147
4148 <p><blockquote><pre>
4149 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
4150   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
4151 </pre></blockquote></p>
4152
4153 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
4154 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
4155
4156 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
4157 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
4158 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
4159 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
4160 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
4161 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
4162 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
4163 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
4164 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
4165 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
4166 system.</p>
4167
4168 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
4169 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
4170 SMTorP. :)</p>
4171
4172       </div>
4173       <div class="tags">
4174
4175
4176         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
4177
4178
4179       </div>
4180     </div>
4181     <div class="padding"></div>
4182
4183     <div class="entry">
4184       <div class="title">
4185         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_released__alpha0_.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu released (alpha0)</a>
4186       </div>
4187       <div class="date">
4188         27th October 2014
4189       </div>
4190       <div class="body">
4191         <p>I am happy to report that I on behalf of the Debian Edu team just
4192 sent out
4193 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2014/10/msg00000.html">this
4194 announcement</a>:</p>
4195
4196 <pre>
4197 The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu
4198 Jessie 8.0+edu0~alpha0
4199
4200 Debian Edu is a complete operating system for schools. Through its
4201 various installation profiles you can install servers, workstations
4202 and laptops which will work together on the school network. With
4203 Debian Edu, the teachers themselves or their technical support can
4204 roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within
4205 hours or a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications
4206 pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.
4207
4208 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
4209 installation instructions are available, including detailed
4210 instructions in the manual[1] explaining the first steps, such as
4211 setting up a network or adding users. Please note that the password
4212 for the user your prompted for during installation must have a length
4213 of at least 5 characters!
4214
4215  [1] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie</a> &gt;
4216
4217 Would you like to give your school's computer a longer life? Are you
4218 tired of sneaker administration, running from computer to computer
4219 reinstalling the operating system? Would you like to administrate all
4220 the computers in your school using only a couple of hours every week?
4221 Check out Debian Edu Jessie!
4222
4223 Skolelinux is used by at least two hundred schools all over the world,
4224 mostly in Germany and Norway.
4225
4226 About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
4227 ===============================
4228
4229 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux[2], is a Linux distribution based
4230 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
4231 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
4232 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
4233 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
4234 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
4235 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
4236 machines can be installed via the network.  The provided school server
4237 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
4238 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
4239 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
4240 packages[3] and more are available from the Debian archive, and
4241 schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
4242 environment.
4243
4244  [2] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">http://www.skolelinux.org/</a> &gt;
4245  [3] &lt;URL: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html</a> &gt;
4246
4247 Full release notes and manual
4248 =============================
4249
4250 Below the download URLs there is a list of some of the new features
4251 and bugfixes of Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie. The full
4252 list is part of the manual. (See the feature list in the manual[4] for
4253 the English version.) For some languages manual translations are
4254 available, see the manual translation overview[5].
4255
4256  [4] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features</a> &gt;
4257  [5] &lt;URL: <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/</a> &gt;
4258
4259 Where to get it
4260 ---------------
4261
4262 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release (624 MiB) you can use
4263
4264  * <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso</a>
4265  * <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso</a>
4266  * rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso .
4267
4268 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 361188818e036ce67280a572f757de82ebfeb095
4269
4270 New features for Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie released 2014-10-27
4271 ===============================================================================
4272
4273
4274 Installation changes
4275 --------------------
4276
4277  * PXE installation now installs firmware automatically for the hardware present.
4278
4279 Software updates
4280 ----------------
4281
4282 Everything which is new in Debian Jessie 8.0, eg:
4283
4284  * Linux kernel 3.16.x
4285  * Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.11.12, GNOME 3.14, Xfce 4.10,
4286    LXDE 0.5.6 and MATE 1.8 (KDE "Plasma" is installed by default; to
4287    choose one of the others see manual.)
4288  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 38
4289  * !LibreOffice 4.3.3
4290  * GOsa 2.7.4
4291  * LTSP 5.5.4
4292  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
4293  * new boot framework: systemd
4294  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.07
4295  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
4296  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
4297  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.0
4298  * golearn 0.9
4299  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
4300  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
4301  * Debian Jessie includes about 42000 packages available for
4302    installation.
4303  * More information about Debian Jessie 8.0 is provided in the release
4304    notes[6] and the installation manual[7].
4305
4306  [6] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes</a> &gt;
4307  [7] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual</a> &gt;
4308
4309 Fixed bugs
4310 ----------
4311
4312  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
4313    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
4314    information is corrected (Debian bug #710362)
4315  * and many others.
4316
4317 Documentation and translation updates
4318 -------------------------------------
4319
4320  * The Debian Edu Jessie Manual is fully translated to German, French,
4321    Italian, Danish and Dutch. Partly translated versions exist for
4322    Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
4323
4324 Other changes
4325 -------------
4326
4327  * Due to new Squid settings, powering off or rebooting the main
4328    server takes more time.
4329  * To manage printers localhost:631 has to be used, currently www:631
4330    doesn't work.
4331
4332 Regressions / known problems
4333 ----------------------------
4334
4335  * Installing LTSP chroot fails with a bug related to eatmydata about
4336    exim4-config failing to run its postinst (see Debian bug #765694
4337    and Debian bug #762103).
4338  * Munin collection is not properly configured on clients (Debian bug
4339    #764594).  The fix is available in a newer version of munin-node.
4340  * PXE setup for Main Server and Thin Client Server setup does not
4341    work when installing on a machine without direct Internet access.
4342    Will be fixed when Debian bug #766960 is fixed in Jessie.
4343
4344 See the status page[8] for the complete list.
4345
4346  [8] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie</a> &gt;
4347
4348 How to report bugs
4349 ------------------
4350
4351 &lt;URL: <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a> &gt;
4352
4353 About Debian
4354 ============
4355
4356 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
4357 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
4358 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
4359 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
4360 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
4361 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
4362 operating system.
4363
4364 Contact Information
4365 For further information, please visit the Debian web pages[9] or send
4366 mail to press@debian.org.
4367
4368  [9] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a> &gt;
4369 </pre>
4370
4371       </div>
4372       <div class="tags">
4373
4374
4375         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4376
4377
4378       </div>
4379     </div>
4380     <div class="padding"></div>
4381
4382     <div class="entry">
4383       <div class="title">
4384         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html">I spent last weekend recording MakerCon Nordic</a>
4385       </div>
4386       <div class="date">
4387         23rd October 2014
4388       </div>
4389       <div class="body">
4390         <p>I spent last weekend at <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">Makercon
4391 Nordic</a>, a great conference and workshop for makers in Norway and
4392 the surrounding countries.  I had volunteered on behalf of the
4393 Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG) to video record the talks, and we
4394 had a great and exhausting time recording the entire day, two days in
4395 a row.  There were only two of us, Hans-Petter and me, and we used the
4396 regular video equipment for NUUG, with a
4397 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">dvswitch</a>, a
4398 camera and a VGA to DV convert box, and mixed video and slides
4399 live.</p>
4400
4401 <p>Hans-Petter did the post-processing, consisting of uploading the
4402 around 180 GiB of raw video to Youtube, and the result is
4403 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">now becoming
4404 public</a> on the MakerConNordic account.  The videos have the license
4405 NUUG always use on our recordings, which is
4406 <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/no/">Creative
4407 Commons Navngivelse-Del på samme vilkår 3.0 Norge</a>.  Many great
4408 talks available.  Check it out! :)</p>
4409
4410       </div>
4411       <div class="tags">
4412
4413
4414         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
4415
4416
4417       </div>
4418     </div>
4419     <div class="padding"></div>
4420
4421     <div class="entry">
4422       <div class="title">
4423         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/listadmin__the_quick_way_to_moderate_mailman_lists___nice_free_software.html">listadmin, the quick way to moderate mailman lists - nice free software</a>
4424       </div>
4425       <div class="date">
4426         22nd October 2014
4427       </div>
4428       <div class="body">
4429         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
4430 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
4431 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
4432 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
4433 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
4434 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
4435 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
4436 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
4437 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
4438 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
4439 lists I recently took over:</p>
4440
4441 <p><blockquote><pre>
4442 % time listadmin xiph
4443 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
4444 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
4445
4446 real    0m1.709s
4447 user    0m0.232s
4448 sys     0m0.012s
4449 %
4450 </pre></blockquote></p>
4451
4452 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
4453 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
4454 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
4455 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
4456 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
4457 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
4458 program.</p>
4459
4460 <p>If you install
4461 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
4462 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
4463 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
4464
4465 <p><blockquote><pre>
4466 username username@example.org
4467 spamlevel 23
4468 default discard
4469 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
4470
4471 password secret
4472 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
4473 mailman-list@lists.example.com
4474
4475 password hidden
4476 other-list@otherserver.example.org
4477 </pre></blockquote></p>
4478
4479 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
4480 learn the details.</p>
4481
4482 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
4483 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
4484 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
4485 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
4486
4487 <p><blockquote><pre>
4488 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
4489 </pre></blockquote></p>
4490
4491 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
4492 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
4493 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
4494 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
4495 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
4496 email.</p>
4497
4498 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
4499 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
4500 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
4501 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
4502 software.</p>
4503
4504 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4505 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4506 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4507
4508 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
4509 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
4510 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
4511 sure why.</p>
4512
4513       </div>
4514       <div class="tags">
4515
4516
4517         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
4518
4519
4520       </div>
4521     </div>
4522     <div class="padding"></div>
4523
4524     <div class="entry">
4525       <div class="title">
4526         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
4527       </div>
4528       <div class="date">
4529         17th October 2014
4530       </div>
4531       <div class="body">
4532         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
4533 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
4534 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
4535 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
4536 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
4537 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
4538 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
4539
4540 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
4541 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
4542 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
4543 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
4544 of this story.)</p>
4545
4546 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
4547 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
4548 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
4549 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
4550 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
4551 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
4552 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
4553 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
4554 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
4555 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
4556
4557 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
4558 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
4559 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
4560 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
4561
4562 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
4563 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
4564
4565 <p><blockquote><pre>
4566 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
4567 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
4568 </pre></blockquote></p>
4569
4570 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
4571 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
4572 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
4573 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
4574 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
4575 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
4576 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
4577 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
4578
4579 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
4580 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
4581
4582 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
4583 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
4584 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
4585 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
4586 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
4587
4588 <p><blockquote><pre>
4589 Task: isenkram-packages
4590 Section: hardware
4591 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
4592  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
4593  proposed.
4594 Test-new-install: show show
4595 Relevance: 8
4596 Packages: for-current-hardware
4597
4598 Task: isenkram-firmware
4599 Section: hardware
4600 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
4601  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
4602  packages are proposed.
4603 Test-new-install: mark show
4604 Relevance: 8
4605 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
4606 </pre></blockquote></p>
4607
4608 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
4609 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
4610 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
4611 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
4612 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
4613
4614 <p><blockquote><pre>
4615 #!/bin/sh
4616 #
4617 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
4618 export PATH
4619 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
4620 </pre></blockquote></p>
4621
4622 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
4623 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
4624
4625 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
4626 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
4627 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
4628 install.</p>
4629
4630 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
4631 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
4632 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
4633
4634       </div>
4635       <div class="tags">
4636
4637
4638         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
4639
4640
4641       </div>
4642     </div>
4643     <div class="padding"></div>
4644
4645     <div class="entry">
4646       <div class="title">
4647         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ubuntu_used_to_show_the_bread_prizes_at_ICA_Storo.html">Ubuntu used to show the bread prizes at ICA Storo</a>
4648       </div>
4649       <div class="date">
4650          4th October 2014
4651       </div>
4652       <div class="body">
4653         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
4654 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
4655 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
4656 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
4657
4658 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
4659
4660 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
4661 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
4662 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
4663
4664       </div>
4665       <div class="tags">
4666
4667
4668         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4669
4670
4671       </div>
4672     </div>
4673     <div class="padding"></div>
4674
4675     <div class="entry">
4676       <div class="title">
4677         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_lsdvd_release_version_0_17_is_ready.html">New lsdvd release version 0.17 is ready</a>
4678       </div>
4679       <div class="date">
4680          4th October 2014
4681       </div>
4682       <div class="body">
4683         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
4684 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
4685 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
4686 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
4687 Dibb.</p>
4688
4689 <p>I just wrapped up
4690 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
4691 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
4692 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
4693 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
4694 0.17.</p>
4695
4696 <ul>
4697
4698  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
4699  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
4700    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
4701  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
4702  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
4703  <li>Fix include orders</li>
4704  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
4705  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
4706  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
4707    the palette size is the same.</li>
4708  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
4709  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
4710  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
4711  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
4712    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
4713
4714 </ul>
4715
4716 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
4717 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
4718 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
4719
4720       </div>
4721       <div class="tags">
4722
4723
4724         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
4725
4726
4727       </div>
4728     </div>
4729     <div class="padding"></div>
4730
4731     <div class="entry">
4732       <div class="title">
4733         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_Debian_Edu_Jessie_despite_some_fatal_problems_with_the_installer.html">How to test Debian Edu Jessie despite some fatal problems with the installer</a>
4734       </div>
4735       <div class="date">
4736         26th September 2014
4737       </div>
4738       <div class="body">
4739         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
4740 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
4741 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
4742 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
4743 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
4744 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
4745 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
4746 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
4747 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
4748 future.  The
4749 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
4750 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
4751 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
4752 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
4753 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
4754
4755 <p>First, download the test ISO via
4756 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
4757 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
4758 or rsync (use
4759 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
4760 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
4761 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
4762 install with some tweaking.</p>
4763
4764 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
4765 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
4766
4767 <p><blockquote><pre>
4768 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
4769 </pre></blockquote></p>
4770
4771 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
4772 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
4773 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
4774 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
4775
4776 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
4777 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
4778 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
4779 your need.</p>
4780
4781 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
4782 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
4783 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
4784 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
4785 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
4786 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
4787 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
4788 days.</p>
4789
4790 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
4791 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
4792 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
4793 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
4794 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
4795 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
4796 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
4797 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
4798 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
4799
4800 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
4801 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
4802 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
4803
4804       </div>
4805       <div class="tags">
4806
4807
4808         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4809
4810
4811       </div>
4812     </div>
4813     <div class="padding"></div>
4814
4815     <div class="entry">
4816       <div class="title">
4817         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Suddenly_I_am_the_new_upstream_of_the_lsdvd_command_line_tool.html">Suddenly I am the new upstream of the lsdvd command line tool</a>
4818       </div>
4819       <div class="date">
4820         25th September 2014
4821       </div>
4822       <div class="body">
4823         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
4824 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
4825 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
4826 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
4827 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
4828 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
4829 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
4830 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
4831 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
4832 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
4833 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
4834 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
4835 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
4836
4837 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
4838 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
4839 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
4840 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
4841 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
4842 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
4843 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
4844 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
4845 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
4846 list</a>. :)</p>
4847
4848       </div>
4849       <div class="tags">
4850
4851
4852         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
4853
4854
4855       </div>
4856     </div>
4857     <div class="padding"></div>
4858
4859     <div class="entry">
4860       <div class="title">
4861         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">Speeding up the Debian installer using eatmydata and dpkg-divert</a>
4862       </div>
4863       <div class="date">
4864         16th September 2014
4865       </div>
4866       <div class="body">
4867         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
4868 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
4869 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
4870 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
4871 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
4872 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
4873 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
4874 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
4875 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
4876 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
4877 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
4878 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
4879 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
4880 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
4881
4882 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
4883 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
4884 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
4885 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
4886 depend on the small and clever package
4887 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
4888 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
4889 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
4890 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
4891 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
4892 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
4893 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
4894 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
4895 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
4896 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
4897 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
4898
4899 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
4900 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
4901 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
4902 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
4903 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
4904 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
4905 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
4906 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
4907 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
4908 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
4909 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
4910 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
4911 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
4912 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
4913 dialog.</p>
4914
4915 <p><table>
4916
4917 <tr>
4918 <th>Machine/setup</th>
4919 <th>Original tasksel</th>
4920 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
4921 <th>Reduction</th>
4922 </tr>
4923
4924 <tr>
4925 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
4926 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
4927 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
4928 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
4929 </tr>
4930
4931 <tr>
4932 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
4933 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
4934 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
4935 <td>23 min 40%</td>
4936 </tr>
4937
4938 <tr>
4939 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
4940 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
4941 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
4942 <td>11 min 50%</td>
4943 </tr>
4944
4945 <tr>
4946 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
4947 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
4948 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
4949 <td>2 min 33%</td>
4950 </tr>
4951
4952 <tr>
4953 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
4954 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
4955 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
4956 <td>4 min 21%</td>
4957 </tr>
4958
4959 </table></p>
4960
4961 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
4962 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
4963 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
4964 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
4965 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
4966 installed.</p>
4967
4968 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
4969 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
4970 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
4971 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
4972 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
4973 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
4974 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
4975 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
4976 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
4977 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
4978 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
4979 for the entire installation.</p>
4980
4981 <p>I've implemented this in the
4982 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
4983 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
4984 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
4985 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
4986 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
4987
4988 <p><blockquote><pre>
4989 #!/bin/sh
4990 set -e
4991 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
4992 info() {
4993     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
4994 }
4995 error() {
4996     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
4997 }
4998 override_install() {
4999     apt-install eatmydata || true
5000     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
5001         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
5002             file=/usr/bin/$bin
5003             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
5004             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
5005                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
5006                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
5007                     > /target$file.edu
5008                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
5009                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
5010                     --rename --quiet --add $file
5011                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
5012             else
5013                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
5014             fi
5015         done
5016     else
5017         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
5018     fi
5019 }
5020
5021 override_install
5022 </pre></blockquote></p>
5023
5024 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
5025 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
5026
5027 <p><blockquote><pre>
5028 #! /bin/sh -e
5029 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
5030 error() {
5031     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
5032 }
5033 remove_install_override() {
5034     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
5035         file=/usr/bin/$bin
5036         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
5037             rm /target$file
5038             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
5039                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
5040             rm /target$file.edu
5041         else
5042             error "Missing divert for $file."
5043         fi
5044     done
5045     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
5046 }
5047
5048 remove_install_override
5049 </pre></blockquote></p>
5050
5051 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
5052 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
5053 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
5054
5055 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
5056 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
5057 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
5058 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
5059 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
5060 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
5061 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
5062 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
5063 everyone.</p>
5064
5065 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
5066 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
5067 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
5068 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
5069
5070 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
5071 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
5072 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
5073 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
5074 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
5075
5076 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
5077 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
5078 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
5079 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
5080 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
5081
5082       </div>
5083       <div class="tags">
5084
5085
5086         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5087
5088
5089       </div>
5090     </div>
5091     <div class="padding"></div>
5092
5093     <div class="entry">
5094       <div class="title">
5095         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_bye_subkeys_pgp_net__welcome_pool_sks_keyservers_net.html">Good bye subkeys.pgp.net, welcome pool.sks-keyservers.net</a>
5096       </div>
5097       <div class="date">
5098         10th September 2014
5099       </div>
5100       <div class="body">
5101         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
5102 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
5103 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
5104 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
5105 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
5106 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
5107 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
5108 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
5109 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
5110 those problems are gone now.</p>
5111
5112 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
5113 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
5114 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
5115 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
5116 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
5117
5118 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
5119 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
5120 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
5121
5122 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
5123 line:</p>
5124
5125 <p><blockquote><pre>
5126 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
5127 </pre></blockquote></p>
5128
5129 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
5130 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
5131 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
5132 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
5133
5134 <p><blockquote><pre>
5135 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
5136 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
5137 %
5138 </pre></blockquote></p>
5139
5140 <p>Now if only
5141 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
5142 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
5143 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
5144 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
5145 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
5146 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
5147 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
5148 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
5149 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
5150
5151       </div>
5152       <div class="tags">
5153
5154
5155         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
5156
5157
5158       </div>
5159     </div>
5160     <div class="padding"></div>
5161
5162     <div class="entry">
5163       <div class="title">
5164         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Do_you_need_an_agreement_with_MPEG_LA_to_publish_and_broadcast_H_264_video_in_Norway_.html">Do you need an agreement with MPEG-LA to publish and broadcast H.264 video in Norway?</a>
5165       </div>
5166       <div class="date">
5167         25th August 2014
5168       </div>
5169       <div class="body">
5170         <p>Two years later, I am still not sure if it is legal here in Norway
5171 to use or publish a video in H.264 or MPEG4 format edited by the
5172 commercially licensed video editors, without limiting the use to
5173 create "personal" or "non-commercial" videos or get a license
5174 agreement with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com">MPEG LA</a>.  If one
5175 want to publish and broadcast video in a non-personal or commercial
5176 setting, it might be that those tools can not be used, or that video
5177 format can not be used, without breaking their copyright license.  I
5178 am not sure.
5179 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Trenger_en_avtale_med_MPEG_LA_for___publisere_og_kringkaste_H_264_video_.html">Back
5180 then</a>, I found that the copyright license terms for Adobe Premiere
5181 and Apple Final Cut Pro both specified that one could not use the
5182 program to produce anything else without a patent license from MPEG
5183 LA.  The issue is not limited to those two products, though.  Other
5184 much used products like those from Avid and Sorenson Media have terms
5185 of use are similar to those from Adobe and Apple.  The complicating
5186 factor making me unsure if those terms have effect in Norway or not is
5187 that the patents in question are not valid in Norway, but copyright
5188 licenses are.</p>
5189
5190 <p>These are the terms for Avid Artist Suite, according to their
5191 <a href="http://www.avid.com/US/about-avid/legal-notices/legal-enduserlicense2">published
5192 end user</a>
5193 <a href="http://www.avid.com/static/resources/common/documents/corporate/LICENSE.pdf">license
5194 text</a> (converted to lower case text for easier reading):</p>
5195
5196 <p><blockquote>
5197 <p>18.2. MPEG-4. MPEG-4 technology may be included with the
5198 software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice: </p>
5199
5200 <p>This product is licensed under the MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio
5201 license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer for (i)
5202 encoding video in compliance with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4
5203 video”) and/or (ii) decoding MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a
5204 consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or was
5205 obtained from a video provider licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4
5206 video.  No license is granted or shall be implied for any other
5207 use. Additional information including that relating to promotional,
5208 internal and commercial uses and licensing may be obtained from MPEG
5209 LA, LLC.  See http://www.mpegla.com. This product is licensed under
5210 the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license for encoding in compliance
5211 with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except that an additional license
5212 and payment of royalties are necessary for encoding in connection with
5213 (i) data stored or replicated in physical media which is paid for on a
5214 title by title basis and/or (ii) data which is paid for on a title by
5215 title basis and is transmitted to an end user for permanent storage
5216 and/or use, such additional license may be obtained from MPEG LA,
5217 LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for additional details.</p>
5218
5219 <p>18.3. H.264/AVC. H.264/AVC technology may be included with the
5220 software.  MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:</p>
5221
5222 <p>This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
5223 the personal use of a consumer or other uses in which it does not
5224 receive remuneration to (i) encode video in compliance with the AVC
5225 standard (“AVC video”) and/or (ii) decode AVC video that was encoded
5226 by a consumer engaged in a personal activity and/or was obtained from
5227 a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No license is granted
5228 or shall be implied for any other use. Additional information may be
5229 obtained from MPEG LA, L.L.C. See http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
5230 </blockquote></p>
5231
5232 <p>Note the requirement that the videos created can only be used for
5233 personal or non-commercial purposes.</p>
5234
5235 <p>The Sorenson Media software have
5236 <a href="http://www.sorensonmedia.com/terms/">similar terms</a>:</p>
5237
5238 <p><blockquote>
5239
5240 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4 Video
5241 Decoders and/or Encoders: Any such product is licensed under the
5242 MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio license for the personal and
5243 non-commercial use of a consumer for (i) encoding video in compliance
5244 with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4 video”) and/or (ii) decoding
5245 MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and
5246 non-commercial activity and/or was obtained from a video provider
5247 licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4 video. No license is granted or
5248 shall be implied for any other use. Additional information including
5249 that relating to promotional, internal and commercial uses and
5250 licensing may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See
5251 http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
5252
5253 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4
5254 Consumer Recorded Data Encoder, MPEG-4 Systems Internet Data Encoder,
5255 MPEG-4 Mobile Data Encoder, and/or MPEG-4 Unique Use Encoder: Any such
5256 product is licensed under the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license
5257 for encoding in compliance with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except
5258 that an additional license and payment of royalties are necessary for
5259 encoding in connection with (i) data stored or replicated in physical
5260 media which is paid for on a title by title basis and/or (ii) data
5261 which is paid for on a title by title basis and is transmitted to an
5262 end user for permanent storage and/or use. Such additional license may
5263 be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for
5264 additional details.</p>
5265
5266 </blockquote></p>
5267
5268 <p>Some free software like
5269 <a href="https://handbrake.fr/">Handbrake</A> and
5270 <a href="http://ffmpeg.org/">FFMPEG</a> uses GPL/LGPL licenses and do
5271 not have any such terms included, so for those, there is no
5272 requirement to limit the use to personal and non-commercial.</p>
5273
5274       </div>
5275       <div class="tags">
5276
5277
5278         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
5279
5280
5281       </div>
5282     </div>
5283     <div class="padding"></div>
5284
5285     <div class="entry">
5286       <div class="title">
5287         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html">Debian Edu interview: Bernd Zeitzen</a>
5288       </div>
5289       <div class="date">
5290         31st July 2014
5291       </div>
5292       <div class="body">
5293         <p>The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for
5294 schools, <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
5295 Skolelinux</a>, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
5296 involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
5297 from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
5298 the setup.  I managed to interview him this summer.</p>
5299
5300 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
5301
5302 <p>My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I'm married with Hedda, a self
5303 employed physiotherapist.  My former profession is tool maker, but I
5304 haven't worked for 30 years in this job.  30 years ago I started to
5305 support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
5306 administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
5307 Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
5308 Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
5309 works with Windows . :-(</p>
5310
5311 <p>In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
5312 Windows 98, 2000, XP, …, 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX.  Today we are running a
5313 Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of
5314 children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
5315 psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
5316 work with the documentations of our patients.</p>
5317
5318 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
5319 project?</strong></p>
5320
5321 <p>Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
5322 his school (<a href="http://www.gymnasium-harsewinkel.de/">Gymnasium
5323 Harsewinkel</a>).  They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
5324 were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
5325 software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
5326 computer skills in optional lessons.  I'm spending 4-6 hours a week
5327 with this job.</p>
5328
5329 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
5330 Edu?</strong></p>
5331
5332 <p>The independence.</p>
5333
5334 <p>First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
5335 software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
5336 included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.</p>
5337
5338 <p>Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
5339 possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices.  The
5340 servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
5341 working reliable. </p>
5342
5343 <p>We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45
5344 workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
5345 solution for all classrooms.  These machines are all booting from the
5346 terminal server.  In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile
5347 workstations.  Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
5348 machines in their classrooms.  Internet access is realized by a WLAN
5349 router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
5350 dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.</p>
5351
5352 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
5353 Edu?</strong></p>
5354
5355 <p>Teachers and pupils are Windows users.  &lt;Irony on&gt; And Linux
5356 isn't cool. It's software for freaks using the command line. &lt;Irony
5357 off&gt; They don't realize the stability of the system. </p>
5358
5359 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
5360
5361 <p>Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Samba,
5362 Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, … and Skolelinux / Debian Edu)</p>
5363
5364 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
5365 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
5366
5367 <p>In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
5368 which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
5369 teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
5370 Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
5371 Office. They don't know about the possibility to use Free Software
5372 instead.  Another problem are the publisher of school books.  They
5373 develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.</p>
5374
5375       </div>
5376       <div class="tags">
5377
5378
5379         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
5380
5381
5382       </div>
5383     </div>
5384     <div class="padding"></div>
5385
5386     <div class="entry">
5387       <div class="title">
5388         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/98_6_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html">98.6 percent done with the Norwegian draft translation of Free Culture</a>
5389       </div>
5390       <div class="date">
5391         23rd July 2014
5392       </div>
5393       <div class="body">
5394         <p>This summer I finally had time to continue working on the Norwegian
5395 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
5396 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
5397 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with todays copyright
5398 law.  Yesterday, I finally completed translated the book text.  There
5399 are still some foot/end notes left to translate, the colophon page
5400 need to be rewritten, and a few words and phrases still need to be
5401 translated, but the Norwegian text is ready for the first proof
5402 reading. :) More spell checking is needed, and several illustrations
5403 need to be cleaned up.  The work stopped up because I had to give
5404 priority to other projects the last year, and the progress graph of
5405 the translation show this very well:</p>
5406
5407 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
5408
5409 <p>If you want to read the result, check out the
5410 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
5411 project pages and the
5412 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
5413 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
5414 and HTML version available in the
5415 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
5416 directory</a>.</p>
5417
5418 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
5419 you find any.</p>
5420
5421       </div>
5422       <div class="tags">
5423
5424
5425         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
5426
5427
5428       </div>
5429     </div>
5430     <div class="padding"></div>
5431
5432     <div class="entry">
5433       <div class="title">
5434         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html">From English wiki to translated PDF and epub via Docbook</a>
5435       </div>
5436       <div class="date">
5437         17th June 2014
5438       </div>
5439       <div class="body">
5440         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
5441 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
5442 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
5443 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
5444 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
5445
5446 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
5447 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
5448 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
5449 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
5450 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
5451 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
5452 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
5453 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
5454 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
5455 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
5456 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
5457 goals.</p>
5458
5459 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
5460 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
5461 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
5462 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
5463 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
5464 chapters together into one large web page (aka
5465 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
5466 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
5467 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
5468 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
5469 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
5470 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
5471 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
5472 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
5473 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
5474 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
5475 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
5476 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
5477 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
5478 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
5479 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
5480 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
5481 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
5482 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
5483
5484 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
5485 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
5486 track the English original.  For this we use the
5487 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
5488 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
5489 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
5490 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
5491 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
5492 files), which the translations update with the native language
5493 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
5494 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
5495 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
5496 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
5497 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
5498 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
5499 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
5500 of the documentation.</p>
5501
5502 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
5503 recommend using
5504 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
5505 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
5506 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
5507 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
5508 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
5509 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
5510 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
5511 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
5512
5513 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
5514 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
5515 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
5516 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
5517 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
5518 translated images by storing translated versions in
5519 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
5520 package maintainers know more.</p>
5521
5522 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
5523 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
5524 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
5525 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
5526 PDF version</a> or the
5527 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
5528 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
5529 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
5530
5531 <p>To learn more, check out
5532 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
5533 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
5534 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
5535 manual on the wiki</a> and
5536 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
5537 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
5538
5539       </div>
5540       <div class="tags">
5541
5542
5543         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5544
5545
5546       </div>
5547     </div>
5548     <div class="padding"></div>
5549
5550     <div class="entry">
5551       <div class="title">
5552         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_car_computer_solution_.html">Free software car computer solution?</a>
5553       </div>
5554       <div class="date">
5555         29th May 2014
5556       </div>
5557       <div class="body">
5558         <p>Dear lazyweb.  I'm planning to set up a small Raspberry Pi computer
5559 in my car, connected to
5560 <a href="http://www.dx.com/p/400a-4-0-tft-lcd-digital-monitor-for-vehicle-parking-reverse-camera-1440x272-12v-dc-57776">a
5561 small screen</a> next to the rear mirror.  I plan to hook it up with a
5562 GPS and a USB wifi card too.  The idea is to get my own
5563 "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carputer">Carputer</a>".  But I
5564 wonder if someone already created a good free software solution for
5565 such car computer.</p>
5566
5567 <p>This is my current wish list for such system:</p>
5568
5569 <ul>
5570
5571  <li>Work on Raspberry Pi.</li>
5572
5573  <li>Show current speed limit based on location, and warn if going too
5574    fast (for example using color codes yellow and red on the screen,
5575    or make a sound).  This could be done either using either data from
5576    <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">Openstreetmap</a> or OCR
5577    info gathered from a dashboard camera.</li>
5578
5579  <li>Track automatic toll road passes and their cost, show total spent
5580    and make it possible to calculate toll costs for planned
5581    route.</li>
5582
5583  <li>Collect GPX tracks for use with OpenStreetMap.</li>
5584
5585  <li>Automatically detect and use any wireless connection to connect
5586    to home server.  Try IP over DNS
5587    (<a href="http://dev.kryo.se/iodine/">iodine</a>) or ICMP
5588    (<a href="http://code.gerade.org/hans/">Hans</a>) if direct
5589    connection do not work.</li>
5590
5591  <li>Set up mesh network to talk to other cars with the same system,
5592    or some standard car mesh protocol.</li>
5593
5594  <li>Warn when approaching speed cameras and speed camera ranges
5595    (speed calculated between two cameras).</li>
5596
5597  <li>Suport dashboard/front facing camera to discover speed limits and
5598    run OCR to track registration number of passing cars.</li>
5599
5600 </ul>
5601
5602 <p>If you know of any free software car computer system supporting
5603 some or all of these features, please let me know.</p>
5604
5605       </div>
5606       <div class="tags">
5607
5608
5609         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5610
5611
5612       </div>
5613     </div>
5614     <div class="padding"></div>
5615
5616     <div class="entry">
5617       <div class="title">
5618         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_the_Coverity_issues_in_Gnash_fixed_in_the_next_release.html">Half the Coverity issues in Gnash fixed in the next release</a>
5619       </div>
5620       <div class="date">
5621         29th April 2014
5622       </div>
5623       <div class="body">
5624         <p>I've been following <a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">the Gnash
5625 project</a> for quite a while now.  It is a free software
5626 implementation of Adobe Flash, both a standalone player and a browser
5627 plugin.  Gnash implement support for the AVM1 format (and not the
5628 newer AVM2 format - see
5629 <a href="http://lightspark.github.io/">Lightspark</a> for that one),
5630 allowing several flash based sites to work.  Thanks to the friendly
5631 developers at Youtube, it also work with Youtube videos, because the
5632 Javascript code at Youtube detect Gnash and serve a AVM1 player to
5633 those users. :) Would be great if someone found time to implement AVM2
5634 support, but it has not happened yet.  If you install both Lightspark
5635 and Gnash, Lightspark will invoke Gnash if it find a AVM1 flash file,
5636 so you can get both handled as free software.  Unfortunately,
5637 Lightspark so far only implement a small subset of AVM2, and many
5638 sites do not work yet.</p>
5639
5640 <p>A few months ago, I started looking at
5641 <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/">Coverity</a>, the static source
5642 checker used to find heaps and heaps of bugs in free software (thanks
5643 to the donation of a scanning service to free software projects by the
5644 company developing this non-free code checker), and Gnash was one of
5645 the projects I decided to check out.  Coverity is able to find lock
5646 errors, memory errors, dead code and more.  A few days ago they even
5647 extended it to also be able to find the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.
5648 There are heaps of checks being done on the instrumented code, and the
5649 amount of bogus warnings is quite low compared to the other static
5650 code checkers I have tested over the years.</p>
5651
5652 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I've been working with the other Gnash
5653 developers squashing bugs discovered by Coverity.  I was quite happy
5654 today when I checked the current status and saw that of the 777 issues
5655 detected so far, 374 are marked as fixed.  This make me confident that
5656 the next Gnash release will be more stable and more dependable than
5657 the previous one.  Most of the reported issues were and are in the
5658 test suite, but it also found a few in the rest of the code.</p>
5659
5660 <p>If you want to help out, you find us on
5661 <a href="https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev">the
5662 gnash-dev mailing list</a> and on
5663 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#gnash">the #gnash channel on
5664 irc.freenode.net IRC server</a>.</p>
5665
5666       </div>
5667       <div class="tags">
5668
5669
5670         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
5671
5672
5673       </div>
5674     </div>
5675     <div class="padding"></div>
5676
5677     <div class="entry">
5678       <div class="title">
5679         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Install_hardware_dependent_packages_using_tasksel__Isenkram_0_7_.html">Install hardware dependent packages using tasksel (Isenkram 0.7)</a>
5680       </div>
5681       <div class="date">
5682         23rd April 2014
5683       </div>
5684       <div class="body">
5685         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
5686 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
5687 So I implemented one, using
5688 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
5689 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
5690 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
5691 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
5692 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
5693 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
5694
5695 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
5696 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
5697 packages to install.  The first part is in
5698 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
5699 this:</p>
5700
5701 <p><blockquote><pre>
5702 Task: isenkram
5703 Section: hardware
5704 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
5705  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
5706  proposed.
5707 Test-new-install: mark show
5708 Relevance: 8
5709 Packages: for-current-hardware
5710 </pre></blockquote></p>
5711
5712 <p>The second part is in
5713 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
5714 this:</p>
5715
5716 <p><blockquote><pre>
5717 #!/bin/sh
5718 #
5719 (
5720     isenkram-lookup
5721     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
5722 ) | sort -u
5723 </pre></blockquote></p>
5724
5725 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
5726 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
5727 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
5728 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
5729 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
5730 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
5731
5732 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
5733 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
5734 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
5735 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
5736 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
5737 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
5738 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
5739 the python-apt code (bug
5740 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
5741 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
5742 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
5743 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
5744 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
5745 unstable today.</p>
5746
5747 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
5748 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
5749 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
5750 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
5751 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
5752 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
5753 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
5754 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
5755 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
5756
5757 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
5758 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
5759 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
5760 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
5761 package.  See also
5762 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
5763 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
5764 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
5765 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
5766
5767       </div>
5768       <div class="tags">
5769
5770
5771         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
5772
5773
5774       </div>
5775     </div>
5776     <div class="padding"></div>
5777
5778     <div class="entry">
5779       <div class="title">
5780         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/FreedomBox_milestone___all_packages_now_in_Debian_Sid.html">FreedomBox milestone - all packages now in Debian Sid</a>
5781       </div>
5782       <div class="date">
5783         15th April 2014
5784       </div>
5785       <div class="body">
5786         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
5787 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
5788 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
5789 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
5790 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
5791 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
5792
5793 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
5794 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
5795 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
5796 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
5797 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
5798 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
5799 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
5800
5801 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
5802 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
5803 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
5804 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
5805 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
5806 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
5807 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
5808 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
5809 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
5810 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
5811 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
5812 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
5813
5814 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
5815 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
5816 become root:</p>
5817
5818 <p><pre>
5819 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
5820   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
5821   u-boot-tools
5822 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
5823   freedom-maker
5824 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
5825 </pre></p>
5826
5827 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
5828 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
5829 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
5830 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
5831 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
5832 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
5833 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
5834 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
5835
5836 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
5837 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
5838 the preseed values:</p>
5839
5840 <p><pre>
5841 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
5842 </pre></p>
5843
5844 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
5845 it still work.</p>
5846
5847 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
5848 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
5849 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
5850 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
5851 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
5852 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
5853 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
5854
5855 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
5856 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
5857 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
5858 irc.debian.org)</a> and
5859 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
5860 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
5861
5862       </div>
5863       <div class="tags">
5864
5865
5866         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
5867
5868
5869       </div>
5870     </div>
5871     <div class="padding"></div>
5872
5873     <div class="entry">
5874       <div class="title">
5875         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/S3QL__a_locally_mounted_cloud_file_system___nice_free_software.html">S3QL, a locally mounted cloud file system - nice free software</a>
5876       </div>
5877       <div class="date">
5878          9th April 2014
5879       </div>
5880       <div class="body">
5881         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
5882 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
5883 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
5884 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
5885 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
5886 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
5887 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
5888 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
5889 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
5890 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
5891 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
5892 have looked at a system called
5893 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
5894 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
5895
5896 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
5897 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
5898 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
5899 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
5900 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
5901 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
5902 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
5903 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
5904 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
5905 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
5906 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
5907 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
5908 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
5909
5910 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
5911 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
5912 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
5913 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
5914 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
5915 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
5916 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
5917 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
5918 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
5919 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
5920 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
5921 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
5922 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
5923 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
5924 account.</p>
5925
5926 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
5927 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
5928 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
5929 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
5930 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
5931 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
5932 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
5933
5934 <p><blockquote><pre>
5935 [s3c]
5936 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
5937 backend-login: API-login
5938 backend-password: API-password
5939 fs-passphrase: local-password
5940 </pre></blockquote></p>
5941
5942 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
5943 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
5944 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
5945 details and password to create it:</p>
5946
5947 <p><blockquote><pre>
5948 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
5949 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
5950   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
5951 Enter backend login:
5952 Enter backend password:
5953 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
5954 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
5955 Enter encryption password:
5956 Confirm encryption password:
5957 Generating random encryption key...
5958 Creating metadata tables...
5959 Dumping metadata...
5960 ..objects..
5961 ..blocks..
5962 ..inodes..
5963 ..inode_blocks..
5964 ..symlink_targets..
5965 ..names..
5966 ..contents..
5967 ..ext_attributes..
5968 Compressing and uploading metadata...
5969 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
5970 # </pre></blockquote></p>
5971
5972 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
5973
5974 <p><blockquote><pre>
5975 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
5976   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
5977 Using 4 upload threads.
5978 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
5979 Reading metadata...
5980 ..objects..
5981 ..blocks..
5982 ..inodes..
5983 ..inode_blocks..
5984 ..symlink_targets..
5985 ..names..
5986 ..contents..
5987 ..ext_attributes..
5988 Mounting filesystem...
5989 # df -h /s3ql
5990 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
5991 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
5992 #
5993 </pre></blockquote></p>
5994
5995 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
5996 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
5997 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
5998 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
5999 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
6000 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
6001
6002 <p><blockquote><pre>
6003 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
6004 #
6005 </pre></blockquote></p>
6006
6007 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
6008 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
6009 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
6010 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
6011 file system:</p>
6012
6013 <p><blockquote><pre>
6014 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
6015 Using cached metadata.
6016 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
6017 Checking DB integrity...
6018 Creating temporary extra indices...
6019 Checking lost+found...
6020 Checking cached objects...
6021 Checking names (refcounts)...
6022 Checking contents (names)...
6023 Checking contents (inodes)...
6024 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
6025 Checking objects (reference counts)...
6026 Checking objects (backend)...
6027 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
6028 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
6029 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
6030 Checking objects (sizes)...
6031 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
6032 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
6033 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
6034 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
6035 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
6036 Checking inodes (sizes)...
6037 Checking extended attributes (names)...
6038 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
6039 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
6040 Checking directory reachability...
6041 Checking unix conventions...
6042 Checking referential integrity...
6043 Dropping temporary indices...
6044 Backing up old metadata...
6045 Dumping metadata...
6046 ..objects..
6047 ..blocks..
6048 ..inodes..
6049 ..inode_blocks..
6050 ..symlink_targets..
6051 ..names..
6052 ..contents..
6053 ..ext_attributes..
6054 Compressing and uploading metadata...
6055 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
6056 #
6057 </pre></blockquote></p>
6058
6059 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
6060 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
6061 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
6062 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
6063 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
6064 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
6065 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
6066 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
6067 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
6068 working set.</p>
6069
6070 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
6071 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
6072 busy:</p>
6073
6074 <p><blockquote><pre>
6075 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
6076   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
6077 Using 8 upload threads.
6078 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
6079 #
6080 </pre></blockquote></p>
6081
6082 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
6083 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
6084 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
6085 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
6086 s3qlctrl:
6087
6088 <p><blockquote><pre>
6089 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
6090 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
6091 #
6092 </pre></blockquote></p>
6093
6094 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
6095 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
6096 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
6097 a report:</p>
6098
6099 <p><blockquote><pre>
6100 # s3qlstat /s3ql
6101 Directory entries:    9141
6102 Inodes:               9143
6103 Data blocks:          8851
6104 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
6105 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
6106 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
6107 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
6108 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
6109 #
6110 </pre></blockquote></p>
6111
6112 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
6113 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
6114 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
6115 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
6116 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
6117 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
6118 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
6119 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
6120 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
6121 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
6122 best.</p>
6123
6124 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
6125 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
6126 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
6127 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
6128 poster is titled
6129 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
6130 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
6131 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
6132 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
6133 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
6134
6135 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
6136 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
6137 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
6138 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
6139 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
6140 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
6141 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
6142 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
6143
6144 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
6145 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
6146 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
6147 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
6148 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
6149 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
6150 only read from it.</p>
6151
6152 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
6153 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
6154 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
6155
6156       </div>
6157       <div class="tags">
6158
6159
6160         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
6161
6162
6163       </div>
6164     </div>
6165     <div class="padding"></div>
6166
6167     <div class="entry">
6168       <div class="title">
6169         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ReactOS_Windows_clone___nice_free_software.html">ReactOS Windows clone - nice free software</a>
6170       </div>
6171       <div class="date">
6172          1st April 2014
6173       </div>
6174       <div class="body">
6175         <p>Microsoft have announced that Windows XP reaches its end of life
6176 2014-04-08, in 7 days.  But there are heaps of machines still running
6177 Windows XP, and depending on Windows XP to run their applications, and
6178 upgrading will be expensive, both when it comes to money and when it
6179 comes to the amount of effort needed to migrate from Windows XP to a
6180 new operating system.  Some obvious options (buy new a Windows
6181 machine, buy a MacOSX machine, install Linux on the existing machine)
6182 are already well known and covered elsewhere.  Most of them involve
6183 leaving the user applications installed on Windows XP behind and
6184 trying out replacements or updated versions. In this blog post I want
6185 to mention one strange bird that allow people to keep the hardware and
6186 the existing Windows XP applications and run them on a free software
6187 operating system that is Windows XP compatible.</p>
6188
6189 <p><a href="http://www.reactos.org/">ReactOS</a> is a free software
6190 operating system (GNU GPL licensed) working on providing a operating
6191 system that is binary compatible with Windows, able to run windows
6192 programs directly and to use Windows drivers for hardware directly.
6193 The project goal is for Windows user to keep their existing machines,
6194 drivers and software, and gain the advantages from user a operating
6195 system without usage limitations caused by non-free licensing.  It is
6196 a Windows clone running directly on the hardware, so quite different
6197 from the approach taken by <a href="http://www.winehq.org/">the Wine
6198 project</a>, which make it possible to run Windows binaries on
6199 Linux.</p>
6200
6201 <p>The ReactOS project share code with the Wine project, so most
6202 shared libraries available on Windows are already implemented already.
6203 There is also a software manager like the one we are used to on Linux,
6204 allowing the user to install free software applications with a simple
6205 click directly from the Internet.  Check out the
6206 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/screenshots">screen shots on the
6207 project web site</a> for an idea what it look like (it looks just like
6208 Windows before metro).</p>
6209
6210 <p>I do not use ReactOS myself, preferring Linux and Unix like
6211 operating systems.  I've tested it, and it work fine in a virt-manager
6212 virtual machine.  The browser, minesweeper, notepad etc is working
6213 fine as far as I can tell.  Unfortunately, my main test application
6214 is the software included on a CD with the Lego Mindstorms NXT, which
6215 seem to install just fine from CD but fail to leave any binaries on
6216 the disk after the installation.  So no luck with that test software.
6217 No idea why, but hope someone else figure out and fix the problem.
6218 I've tried the ReactOS Live ISO on a physical machine, and it seemed
6219 to work just fine.  If you like Windows and want to keep running your
6220 old Windows binaries, check it out by
6221 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/download">downloading</a> the
6222 installation CD, the live CD or the preinstalled virtual machine
6223 image.</p>
6224
6225       </div>
6226       <div class="tags">
6227
6228
6229         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos</a>.
6230
6231
6232       </div>
6233     </div>
6234     <div class="padding"></div>
6235
6236     <div class="entry">
6237       <div class="title">
6238         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Roger_Marsal.html">Debian Edu interview: Roger Marsal</a>
6239       </div>
6240       <div class="date">
6241         30th March 2014
6242       </div>
6243       <div class="body">
6244         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
6245 keep gaining new users.  Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC,
6246 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>, with a
6247 wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great
6248 contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background.</p>
6249
6250 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
6251
6252 <p>My name is Roger Marsal, I'm 27 years old (1986 generation) and I
6253 live in Barcelona, Spain. I've got a strong business background and I
6254 work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent.  Additionally,
6255 I've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the
6256 last development phase of a new social networking concept.</p>
6257
6258 <p>I'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years
6259 ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability
6260 and as a necessary step to gain expertise.</p>
6261
6262 <p>In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I
6263 can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux
6264 hunger.</p>
6265
6266 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
6267 project?</strong></p>
6268
6269 <p>I discovered the <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP</a> advantages
6270 with "Ubuntu 12.04 alternate install" and after a year of use I
6271 started looking for an alternative.  Even though I highly value and
6272 respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to
6273 change to a more robust and stable alternative.  As far as I was using
6274 Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install
6275 Debian and configure an LTSP server myself.  Surprised, I discovered
6276 that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent,
6277 and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and
6278 running.  I just loved it.</p>
6279
6280 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6281 Edu?</strong></p>
6282
6283 <p>I found a main advantage in that, once you know "the tips and
6284 tricks", a new installation just works out of the box. It's the most
6285 complete alternative I've found to create an LTSP network. All the
6286 other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to
6287 be made of steel.</p>
6288
6289 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6290 Edu?</strong></p>
6291
6292 <p>I found two main disadvantages.</p>
6293
6294 <p>I'm not an expert but I've got notions and I had to spent a considerable
6295 amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I'm quite
6296 stubborn and I just worked until I did but I'm sure many people with few
6297 resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched
6298 or dropped.</p>
6299
6300 <p>It's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved
6301 this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets
6302 more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can
6303 discourage many people too.</p>
6304
6305 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
6306
6307 <p>I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and
6308 Virtualbox.</p>
6309
6310
6311 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
6312 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
6313
6314 <p>I don't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free
6315 attribute in both "freedom" and "no price" meanings is what will
6316 really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of
6317 the <a href="http://www.r-project.org/">"R" statistical language</a>; a
6318 few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people.
6319 Today it's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many
6320 different level of studies.  I believe free and open software will
6321 increasingly gain popularity, but I'm sure schools will be one of the
6322 first scenarios where this will happen.</p>
6323
6324       </div>
6325       <div class="tags">
6326
6327
6328         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
6329
6330
6331       </div>
6332     </div>
6333     <div class="padding"></div>
6334
6335     <div class="entry">
6336       <div class="title">
6337         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">Public Trusted Timestamping services for everyone</a>
6338       </div>
6339       <div class="date">
6340         25th March 2014
6341       </div>
6342       <div class="body">
6343         <p>Did you ever need to store logs or other files in a way that would
6344 allow it to be used as evidence in court, and needed a way to
6345 demonstrate without reasonable doubt that the file had not been
6346 changed since it was created?  Or, did you ever need to document that
6347 a given document was received at some point in time, like some
6348 archived document or the answer to an exam, and not changed after it
6349 was received?  The problem in these settings is to remove the need to
6350 trust yourself and your computers, while still being able to prove
6351 that a file is the same as it was at some given time in the past.</p>
6352
6353 <p>A solution to these problems is to have a trusted third party
6354 "stamp" the document and verify that at some given time the document
6355 looked a given way.  Such
6356 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notarius">notarius</a> service
6357 have been around for thousands of years, and its digital equivalent is
6358 called a
6359 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
6360 timestamping service</a>.  <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">The Internet
6361 Engineering Task Force</a> standardised how such service could work a
6362 few years ago as <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC
6363 3161</a>.  The mechanism is simple.  Create a hash of the file in
6364 question, send it to a trusted third party which add a time stamp to
6365 the hash and sign the result with its private key, and send back the
6366 signed hash + timestamp.  Both email, FTP and HTTP can be used to
6367 request such signature, depending on what is provided by the service
6368 used. Anyone with the document and the signature can then verify that
6369 the document matches the signature by creating their own hash and
6370 checking the signature using the trusted third party public key.
6371 There are several commercial services around providing such
6372 timestamping.  A quick search for
6373 "<a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rfc+3161+service">rfc 3161
6374 service</a>" pointed me to at least
6375 <a href="https://www.digistamp.com/technical/how-a-digital-time-stamp-works/">DigiStamp</a>,
6376 <a href="http://www.quovadisglobal.co.uk/CertificateServices/SigningServices/TimeStamp.aspx">Quo
6377 Vadis</a>,
6378 <a href="https://www.globalsign.com/timestamp-service/">Global Sign</a>
6379 and <a href="http://www.globaltrustfinder.com/TSADefault.aspx">Global
6380 Trust Finder</a>.  The system work as long as the private key of the
6381 trusted third party is not compromised.</p>
6382
6383 <p>But as far as I can tell, there are very few public trusted
6384 timestamp services available for everyone.  I've been looking for one
6385 for a while now. But yesterday I found one over at
6386 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">Deutches
6387 Forschungsnetz</a> mentioned in
6388 <a href="http://www.d-mueller.de/blog/dealing-with-trusted-timestamps-in-php-rfc-3161/">a
6389 blog by David Müller</a>.  I then found
6390 <a href="http://www.rz.uni-greifswald.de/support/dfn-pki-zertifikate/zeitstempeldienst.html">a
6391 good recipe on how to use the service</a> over at the University of
6392 Greifswald.</p>
6393
6394 <p><a href="http://www.openssl.org/">The OpenSSL library</a> contain
6395 both server and tools to use and set up your own signing service.  See
6396 the ts(1SSL), tsget(1SSL) manual pages for more details.  The
6397 following shell script demonstrate how to extract a signed timestamp
6398 for any file on the disk in a Debian environment:</p>
6399
6400 <p><blockquote><pre>
6401 #!/bin/sh
6402 set -e
6403 url="http://zeitstempel.dfn.de"
6404 caurl="https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt"
6405 reqfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsq)
6406 resfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsr)
6407 cafile=chain.txt
6408 if [ ! -f $cafile ] ; then
6409     wget -O $cafile "$caurl"
6410 fi
6411 openssl ts -query -data "$1" -cert | tee "$reqfile" \
6412     | /usr/lib/ssl/misc/tsget -h "$url" -o "$resfile"
6413 openssl ts -reply -in "$resfile" -text 1>&2
6414 openssl ts -verify -data "$1" -in "$resfile" -CAfile "$cafile" 1>&2
6415 base64 < "$resfile"
6416 rm "$reqfile" "$resfile"
6417 </pre></blockquote></p>
6418
6419 <p>The argument to the script is the file to timestamp, and the output
6420 is a base64 encoded version of the signature to STDOUT and details
6421 about the signature to STDERR.  Note that due to
6422 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=742553">a bug
6423 in the tsget script</a>, you might need to modify the included script
6424 and remove the last line.  Or just write your own HTTP uploader using
6425 curl. :) Now you too can prove and verify that files have not been
6426 changed.</p>
6427
6428 <p>But the Internet need more public trusted timestamp services.
6429 Perhaps something for <a href="http://www.uninett.no/">Uninett</a> or
6430 my work place the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
6431 to set up?</p>
6432
6433       </div>
6434       <div class="tags">
6435
6436
6437         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
6438
6439
6440       </div>
6441     </div>
6442     <div class="padding"></div>
6443
6444     <div class="entry">
6445       <div class="title">
6446         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Video_DVD_reader_library___python_dvdvideo___nice_free_software.html">Video DVD reader library / python-dvdvideo - nice free software</a>
6447       </div>
6448       <div class="date">
6449         21st March 2014
6450       </div>
6451       <div class="body">
6452         <p>Keeping your DVD collection safe from scratches and curious
6453 children fingers while still having it available when you want to see a
6454 movie is not straight forward.  My preferred method at the moment is
6455 to store a full copy of the ISO on a hard drive, and use VLC, Popcorn
6456 Hour or other useful players to view the resulting file.  This way the
6457 subtitles and bonus material are still available and using the ISO is
6458 just like inserting the original DVD record in the DVD player.</p>
6459
6460 <p>Earlier I used dd for taking security copies, but it do not handle
6461 DVDs giving read errors (which are quite a few of them).  I've also
6462 tried using
6463 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">dvdbackup
6464 and genisoimage</a>, but these days I use the marvellous python library
6465 and program
6466 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">python-dvdvideo</a>
6467 written by Bastian Blank.  It is
6468 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/python-dvdvideo.html">in Debian
6469 already</a> and the binary package name is python3-dvdvideo. Instead
6470 of trying to read every block from the DVD, it parses the file
6471 structure and figure out which block on the DVD is actually in used,
6472 and only read those blocks from the DVD.  This work surprisingly well,
6473 and I have been able to almost backup my entire DVD collection using
6474 this method.</p>
6475
6476 <p>So far, python-dvdvideo have failed on between 10 and
6477 20 DVDs, which is a small fraction of my collection.  The most common
6478 problem is
6479 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=720831">DVDs
6480 using UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 characters</a>, which according to
6481 Bastian is against the DVD specification (and seem to cause some
6482 players to fail too).  A rarer problem is what seem to be inconsistent
6483 DVD structures, as the python library
6484 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=723079">claim
6485 there is a overlap between objects</a>.  An equally rare problem claim
6486 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=741878">some
6487 value is out of range</a>.  No idea what is going on there.  I wish I
6488 knew enough about the DVD format to fix these, to ensure my movie
6489 collection will stay with me in the future.</p>
6490
6491 <p>So, if you need to keep your DVDs safe, back them up using
6492 python-dvdvideo. :)</p>
6493
6494       </div>
6495       <div class="tags">
6496
6497
6498         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
6499
6500
6501       </div>
6502     </div>
6503     <div class="padding"></div>
6504
6505     <div class="entry">
6506       <div class="title">
6507         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Freedombox_on_Dreamplug__Raspberry_Pi_and_virtual_x86_machine.html">Freedombox on Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and virtual x86 machine</a>
6508       </div>
6509       <div class="date">
6510         14th March 2014
6511       </div>
6512       <div class="body">
6513         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
6514 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
6515 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
6516 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
6517 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
6518 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
6519 release (0.2).</p>
6520
6521 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
6522 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
6523 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
6524 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
6525 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
6526 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
6527 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
6528 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
6529 and build using
6530 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
6531 with a user with sudo access to become root:
6532
6533 <pre>
6534 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
6535   freedom-maker
6536 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
6537   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
6538   u-boot-tools
6539 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
6540 </pre>
6541
6542 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
6543 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
6544 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
6545 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
6546 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
6547 kpartx call.</p>
6548
6549 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
6550 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
6551 the preseed values:</p>
6552
6553 <pre>
6554 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
6555 </pre>
6556
6557 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
6558 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
6559 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
6560 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
6561 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
6562 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
6563
6564 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
6565 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
6566 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
6567 irc.debian.org)</a> and
6568 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
6569 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
6570
6571       </div>
6572       <div class="tags">
6573
6574
6575         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
6576
6577
6578       </div>
6579     </div>
6580     <div class="padding"></div>
6581
6582     <div class="entry">
6583       <div class="title">
6584         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_add_extra_storage_servers_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">How to add extra storage servers in Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
6585       </div>
6586       <div class="date">
6587         12th March 2014
6588       </div>
6589       <div class="body">
6590         <p>On larger sites, it is useful to use a dedicated storage server for
6591 storing user home directories and data.  The design for handling this
6592 in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, is
6593 to update the automount rules in LDAP and let the automount daemon on
6594 the clients take care of the rest.  I was reminded about the need to
6595 document this better when one of the customers of
6596 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a>, where I am
6597 on the board of directors, asked about how to do this.  The steps to
6598 get this working are the following:</p>
6599
6600 <p><ol>
6601
6602 <li>Add new storage server in DNS.  I use nas-server.intern as the
6603 example host here.</li>
6604
6605 <li>Add automoun LDAP information about this server in LDAP, to allow
6606 all clients to automatically mount it on reqeust.</li>
6607
6608 <li>Add the relevant entries in tjener.intern:/etc/fstab, because
6609 tjener.intern do not use automount to avoid mounting loops.</li>
6610
6611 </ol></p>
6612
6613 <p>DNS entries are added in GOsa², and not described here.  Follow the
6614 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/GettingStarted">instructions
6615 in the manual</a> (Machine Management with GOsa² in section Getting
6616 started).</p>
6617
6618 <p>Ensure that the NFS export points on the server are exported to the
6619 relevant subnets or machines:</p>
6620
6621 <p><blockquote><pre>
6622 root@tjener:~# showmount -e nas-server
6623 Export list for nas-server:
6624 /storage         10.0.0.0/8
6625 root@tjener:~#
6626 </pre></blockquote></p>
6627
6628 <p>Here everything on the backbone network is granted access to the
6629 /storage export.  With NFSv3 it is slightly better to limit it to
6630 netgroup membership or single IP addresses to have some limits on the
6631 NFS access.</p>
6632
6633 <p>The next step is to update LDAP.  This can not be done using GOsa²,
6634 because it lack a module for automount.  Instead, use ldapvi and add
6635 the required LDAP objects using an editor.</p>
6636
6637 <p><blockquote><pre>
6638 ldapvi --ldap-conf -ZD '(cn=admin)' -b ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
6639 </pre></blockquote></p>
6640
6641 <p>When the editor show up, add the following LDAP objects at the
6642 bottom of the document.  The "/&" part in the last LDAP object is a
6643 wild card matching everything the nas-server exports, removing the
6644 need to list individual mount points in LDAP.</p>
6645
6646 <p><blockquote><pre>
6647 add cn=nas-server,ou=auto.skole,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
6648 objectClass: automount
6649 cn: nas-server
6650 automountInformation: -fstype=autofs --timeout=60 ldap:ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
6651
6652 add ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
6653 objectClass: top
6654 objectClass: automountMap
6655 ou: auto.nas-server
6656
6657 add cn=/,ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
6658 objectClass: automount
6659 cn: /
6660 automountInformation: -fstype=nfs,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,rw,intr,hard,nodev,nosuid,noatime nas-server.intern:/&
6661 </pre></blockquote></p>
6662
6663 <p>The last step to remember is to mount the relevant mount points in
6664 tjener.intern by adding them to /etc/fstab, creating the mount
6665 directories using mkdir and running "mount -a" to mount them.</p>
6666
6667 <p>When this is done, your users should be able to access the files on
6668 the storage server directly by just visiting the
6669 /tjener/nas-server/storage/ directory using any application on any
6670 workstation, LTSP client or LTSP server.</p>
6671
6672       </div>
6673       <div class="tags">
6674
6675
6676         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>.
6677
6678
6679       </div>
6680     </div>
6681     <div class="padding"></div>
6682
6683     <div class="entry">
6684       <div class="title">
6685         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_home_and_release_1_0_for_netgroup_and_innetgr__aka_ng_utils_.html">New home and release 1.0 for netgroup and innetgr (aka ng-utils)</a>
6686       </div>
6687       <div class="date">
6688         22nd February 2014
6689       </div>
6690       <div class="body">
6691         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
6692 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
6693 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
6694 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
6695 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
6696 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
6697 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
6698 proper home since then.</p>
6699
6700 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
6701 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
6702 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
6703 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
6704 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
6705
6706 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
6707 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
6708 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
6709 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
6710 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
6711 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
6712 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
6713 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
6714 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
6715
6716       </div>
6717       <div class="tags">
6718
6719
6720         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6721
6722
6723       </div>
6724     </div>
6725     <div class="padding"></div>
6726
6727     <div class="entry">
6728       <div class="title">
6729         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
6730       </div>
6731       <div class="date">
6732          3rd February 2014
6733       </div>
6734       <div class="body">
6735         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
6736 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
6737 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
6738 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
6739 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
6740 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
6741 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
6742 <a href="http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz">http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz</a>,
6743 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
6744
6745 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
6746 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
6747 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
6748 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
6749 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
6750 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
6751
6752 <p><blockquote><pre>
6753 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
6754 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
6755 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
6756 dhclient /dev/eth0
6757 </pre></blockquote></p>
6758
6759 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
6760 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
6761 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
6762
6763 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
6764 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
6765 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
6766 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
6767 side.</p>
6768
6769 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
6770 stuff:</p>
6771
6772 <p><blockquote><pre>
6773 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
6774 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
6775 EOF
6776 apt-get update
6777 apt-get dist-upgrade
6778 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
6779     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
6780 update-alternatives --config runsystem
6781 </pre></blockquote></p>
6782
6783 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
6784 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
6785 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
6786 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
6787 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
6788 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
6789 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
6790 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
6791 ssh instead.
6792
6793 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
6794 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
6795 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
6796 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
6797 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
6798 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
6799
6800 <p><blockquote><pre>
6801 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
6802 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
6803 EOF
6804 </pre></blockquote></p>
6805
6806 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
6807 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
6808 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
6809 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
6810
6811 <p><blockquote><pre>
6812 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
6813 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
6814 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
6815 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
6816 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
6817 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
6818 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
6819 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
6820 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
6821 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
6822 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
6823 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
6824 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
6825 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
6826 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
6827 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
6828 #
6829 </pre></blockquote></p>
6830
6831 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
6832 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
6833 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
6834 command line stuff.<p>
6835
6836       </div>
6837       <div class="tags">
6838
6839
6840         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6841
6842
6843       </div>
6844     </div>
6845     <div class="padding"></div>
6846
6847     <div class="entry">
6848       <div class="title">
6849         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_fist_full_of_non_anonymous_Bitcoins.html">A fist full of non-anonymous Bitcoins</a>
6850       </div>
6851       <div class="date">
6852         29th January 2014
6853       </div>
6854       <div class="body">
6855         <p>Bitcoin is a incredible use of peer to peer communication and
6856 encryption, allowing direct and immediate money transfer without any
6857 central control.  It is sometimes claimed to be ideal for illegal
6858 activity, which I believe is quite a long way from the truth.  At least
6859 I would not conduct illegal money transfers using a system where the
6860 details of every transaction are kept forever.  This point is
6861 investigated in
6862 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">USENIX ;login:</a>
6863 from December 2013, in the article
6864 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/03_meiklejohn-online.pdf">A
6865 Fistful of Bitcoins - Characterizing Payments Among Men with No
6866 Names</a>" by Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole,Grant Jordan, Kirill
6867 Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage.  They
6868 analyse the transaction log in the Bitcoin system, using it to find
6869 addresses belong to individuals and organisations and follow the flow
6870 of money from both Bitcoin theft and trades on Silk Road to where the
6871 money end up.  This is how they wrap up their article:</p>
6872
6873 <p><blockquote>
6874 <p>"To demonstrate the usefulness of this type of analysis, we turned
6875 our attention to criminal activity. In the Bitcoin economy, criminal
6876 activity can appear in a number of forms, such as dealing drugs on
6877 Silk Road or simply stealing someone else’s bitcoins. We followed the
6878 flow of bitcoins out of Silk Road (in particular, from one notorious
6879 address) and from a number of highly publicized thefts to see whether
6880 we could track the bitcoins to known services. Although some of the
6881 thieves attempted to use sophisticated mixing techniques (or possibly
6882 mix services) to obscure the flow of bitcoins, for the most part
6883 tracking the bitcoins was quite straightforward, and we ultimately saw
6884 large quantities of bitcoins flow to a variety of exchanges directly
6885 from the point of theft (or the withdrawal from Silk Road).</p>
6886
6887 <p>As acknowledged above, following stolen bitcoins to the point at
6888 which they are deposited into an exchange does not in itself identify
6889 the thief; however, it does enable further de-anonymization in the
6890 case in which certain agencies can determine (through, for example,
6891 subpoena power) the real-world owner of the account into which the
6892 stolen bitcoins were deposited.  Because such exchanges seem to serve
6893 as chokepoints into and out of the Bitcoin economy (i.e., there are
6894 few alternative ways to cash out), we conclude that using Bitcoin for
6895 money laundering or other illicit purposes does not (at least at
6896 present) seem to be particularly attractive."</p>
6897 </blockquote><p>
6898
6899 <p>These researches are not the first to analyse the Bitcoin
6900 transaction log.  The 2011 paper
6901 "<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524">An Analysis of Anonymity in
6902 the Bitcoin System</A>" by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan is
6903 summarized like this:</p>
6904
6905 <p><blockquote>
6906 "Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a
6907 complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by
6908 public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will
6909 attempt to construct the one-to-many mapping between users and
6910 public-keys and associate information external to the system with the
6911 users. Bitcoin tries to prevent this attack by storing the mapping of
6912 a user to his or her public-keys on that user's node only and by
6913 allowing each user to generate as many public-keys as required. In
6914 this chapter we consider the topological structure of two networks
6915 derived from Bitcoin's public transaction history. We show that the
6916 two networks have a non-trivial topological structure, provide
6917 complementary views of the Bitcoin system and have implications for
6918 anonymity. We combine these structures with external information and
6919 techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate
6920 an alleged theft of Bitcoins, which, at the time of the theft, had a
6921 market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars."
6922 </blockquote></p>
6923
6924 <p>I hope these references can help kill the urban myth that Bitcoin
6925 is anonymous.  It isn't really a good fit for illegal activites.  Use
6926 cash if you need to stay anonymous, at least until regular DNA
6927 sampling of notes and coins become the norm. :)</p>
6928
6929 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
6930 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
6931 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
6932
6933       </div>
6934       <div class="tags">
6935
6936
6937         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix</a>.
6938
6939
6940       </div>
6941     </div>
6942     <div class="padding"></div>
6943
6944     <div class="entry">
6945       <div class="title">
6946         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
6947       </div>
6948       <div class="date">
6949         14th January 2014
6950       </div>
6951       <div class="body">
6952         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
6953 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
6954 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
6955 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
6956 the source.  The company behind it provide
6957 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
6958 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
6959 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
6960 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
6961 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
6962 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
6963 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
6964 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
6965 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
6966 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
6967 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
6968 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
6969 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
6970 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
6971 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
6972 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
6973 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
6974 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
6975 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
6976
6977 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
6978
6979 <ul>
6980
6981   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
6982   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
6983   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
6984
6985 </ul>
6986
6987 <p>You can
6988 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
6989 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
6990 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
6991 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
6992 include a test suite check.</p>
6993
6994       </div>
6995       <div class="tags">
6996
6997
6998         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6999
7000
7001       </div>
7002     </div>
7003     <div class="padding"></div>
7004
7005     <div class="entry">
7006       <div class="title">
7007         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html">Debian Edu interview: Dominik George</a>
7008       </div>
7009       <div class="date">
7010         25th December 2013
7011       </div>
7012       <div class="body">
7013         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7014 project</a> consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
7015 was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
7016 up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
7017 successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School.  Say hello
7018 to <a href="https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Natureshadow">Dominik
7019 George</a>.</p>
7020
7021 <!-- http://www.dominik-george.de/images/foto.jpg -->
7022
7023 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
7024
7025 <p>I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
7026 life with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a
7027 student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
7028 Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
7029 voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
7030 a bit vacant right now however.</p>
7031
7032 <p>I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
7033 (public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
7034 around 2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
7035 it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
7036 network of that school together with a team of very interested and
7037 talented students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to
7038 learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
7039 to help building another school's informational education concept from
7040 scratch.</p>
7041
7042 <p>That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids
7043 and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
7044 ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.</p>
7045
7046 <p>When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
7047 and cycling.</p>
7048
7049 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
7050 project?</strong></p>
7051
7052 <p>I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
7053 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">FrOSCon</a> and visited the project
7054 booth. I think I wasn't too interested back then because I used to
7055 have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
7056 own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
7057 "out-of-the-box" solution ;).</p>
7058
7059 <p>The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
7060 <a href="http://www.openrheinruhr.de">OpenRheinRuhr</a> 2011 when the
7061 BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
7062 really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
7063 ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
7064 a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
7065 guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
7066 small demonstration, but there wasn't any real feedback and the guys
7067 seemed rather uninterested.</p>
7068
7069 <p>After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
7070 mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
7071 reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
7072 basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!</p>
7073
7074 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
7075 Edu?</strong></p>
7076
7077 <p>The most important advantage seems to be that it "just
7078 works". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
7079 in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
7080 without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
7081 from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't
7082 have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
7083 and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
7084 server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
7085 notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
7086 and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
7087 it. I could use 8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
7088 tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that's enough to say
7089 that it rocks!</p>
7090
7091 <p>Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no
7092 politician will ever permit a setup described as "Debian, an universal
7093 operating system, with some really cool educational tools" while they
7094 will be jsut fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
7095 school network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
7096 this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
7097 too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).</p>
7098
7099 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
7100 Edu?</strong></p>
7101
7102 <p>I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
7103 answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
7104 other words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I
7105 can list a few points about that:</p>
7106
7107 <ul>
7108
7109  <li>always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
7110  <li>be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
7111  <li>be helpful at being helpful ;)
7112
7113 </ul>
7114
7115 <p>I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!</p>
7116
7117 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
7118
7119 <p>First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
7120 all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
7121 year.</p>
7122
7123 <p>I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
7124 run text tools. I use
7125 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm">mksh</a> as shell,
7126 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/jupp.htm">jupp</a> as very advanced
7127 text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
7128 based full-featured student management software with the two),
7129 <a href="http://mcabber.com/">mcabber</a> for XMPP and
7130 <a href="http://www.irssi.org/">irssi</a> for IRC. For that overly
7131 coloured world called the WWW, I use
7132 <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/">Iceweasel
7133 (Firefox)</a>. Oh, and <a href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a> for
7134 e-mail.</p>
7135
7136 <p>However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
7137 are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
7138 least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
7139 kids. One of these things is <a href="http://jappix.org/">Jappix</a>,
7140 which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
7141 Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
7142 Facebook now ;).</p>
7143
7144 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
7145 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
7146
7147 <p>Well, that's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
7148 side is what I have experienced.</p>
7149
7150 <p>I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
7151 that won't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
7152 grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
7153 to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
7154 see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
7155 students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
7156 desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
7157 they jsut refused to use it because "Linux sucks". It is something
7158 that makes the council of our city spend around 600000 € to buy
7159 software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
7160 networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
7161 not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
7162 already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
7163 if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
7164 that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
7165 plain criminal.</p>
7166
7167 <p>That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
7168 method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
7169 founded an association named
7170 <a href="https://www.teckids.org">Teckids</a> here in Germany that does
7171 just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
7172 area of free and open source software, for example the
7173 <a href="http://kids.froscon.org">FrogLabs</a>, which share staff with
7174 Teckids and are the youth programme of
7175 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">the Free and Open Source Software
7176 Conference (FrOSCon)</a>. We do a lot more than most other conferences
7177 - this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
7178 aged 10 to 16. It was a huge success, with approx. 30 kids taking part
7179 and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
7180 of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.</p>
7181
7182 <p>Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
7183 the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
7184 their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
7185 Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
7186 clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
7187 it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
7188 who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
7189 We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
7190 open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
7191 software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
7192 group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
7193 Skolelinux in the future ;)!</p>
7194
7195 <p>So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren't for the world
7196 being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
7197 that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
7198 but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.</p>
7199
7200 <!--
7201
7202 >  * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
7203
7204 That's probably the hardest question of them all, as I do not know the
7205 community. However, I would be willing to do the following:
7206
7207  <li>Run an interview with a German headteacher who is very open to
7208    free software, and also prefers it, but cannot really use it because
7209    of the decision makers above;
7210  <li>Run interviews with some kids, both with and without previous
7211    knowledge about free software
7212
7213 If that is wanted, just let me know ;).
7214
7215 -->
7216
7217       </div>
7218       <div class="tags">
7219
7220
7221         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
7222
7223
7224       </div>
7225     </div>
7226     <div class="padding"></div>
7227
7228     <div class="entry">
7229       <div class="title">
7230         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html">Debian Edu interview: Klaus Knopper</a>
7231       </div>
7232       <div class="date">
7233          6th December 2013
7234       </div>
7235       <div class="body">
7236         <p>It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview,
7237 but the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
7238 Skolelinux</a> community is still going strong, and yesterday we even
7239 had a new school administrator show up on
7240 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a> to share
7241 his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school.  This
7242 time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of
7243 Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in
7244 Germany a few years ago.</p>
7245
7246 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
7247
7248 <p>I am Klaus Knopper.  I have a master degree in electrical
7249 engineering, and is currently professor in information management at
7250 the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and
7251 freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.</p>
7252
7253 <p>All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart
7254 from teaching, I'm also conducting some more or less experimental
7255 projects like the <a href="http://www.knoppix.org">Knoppix GNU/Linux live
7256 system</a> (Debian-based like Skolelinux),
7257 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html">ADRIANE</a>
7258 (a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and
7259 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/linbo/index-en.html">LINBO</a>
7260 (Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair
7261 system supporting various operating systems).</p>
7262
7263 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
7264 project?</strong></p>
7265
7266 <p>The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German
7267 coordinator for Skolelinux.  We were looking for an all-in-one open
7268 source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt
7269 introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.</p>
7270
7271 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
7272 Edu?</strong></p>
7273
7274 <ul>
7275   <li>Quick installation,</li>
7276   <li>works (almost) out of the box,</li>
7277   <li>contains many useful software packages for teaching and learning,</li>
7278   <li>is a purely community-based distro and not controlled by a
7279     single company,</li>
7280   <li>has a large number of supporters and teachers who share their
7281     experience and problem solutions.</li>
7282 </ul>
7283
7284 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
7285 Edu?</strong></p>
7286
7287 <ul>
7288   <li>Skolelinux is - as we had to learn - not easily upgradable to
7289   the next version.  Opposed to its genuine Debian base, upgrading to
7290   a new version means a full new installation from scratch to get it
7291   working again reliably.
7292
7293   <li>Skolelinux is based on Debian/stable, and therefore always a
7294   little outdated in terms of program versions compared to Edubuntu or
7295   similar educational Linux distros, which rather use Debian/testing
7296   as their base.
7297
7298   <li>Skolelinux has some very self-opinionated and stubborn default
7299   configuration which in my opinion adds unnecessary complexity and is
7300   not always suitable for a schools needs, the preset network
7301   configuration is actually a core definition feature of Skolelinux
7302   and not easy to change, so schools sometimes have to change their
7303   network configuration to make it "Skolelinux-compatible".
7304
7305   <li>Some proposed extensions, which were made available as
7306   contribution, like secure examination mode and lecture material
7307   distribution and collection, were not accepted into the mainline
7308   Skolelinux development and are now not easy to maintain in the
7309   future because of Skolelinux somewhat undeterministic update
7310   schemes.</li>
7311
7312   <li>Skolelinux has only a very tiny number of base developers
7313   compared to Debian.</li>
7314
7315 </ul>
7316
7317 <p>For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now
7318 rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until
7319 Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes
7320 upgradeable without reinstallation.</p>
7321
7322 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
7323
7324 <p>GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and
7325 programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence,
7326 occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various
7327 programming languages for teaching.</p>
7328
7329 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
7330 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
7331
7332 <p>Strong arguments are</p>
7333
7334 <ul>
7335
7336   <li>Knowledge is free, and so should be methods and tools for
7337     teaching and learning.</li>
7338
7339   <li>Students can learn with and use the same software at school, at
7340     home, and at their working place without running into license or
7341     conversion problems.</li>
7342
7343   <li>Closed source or proprietary software hides knowledge rather
7344     than exposing it, and proprietary software vendors try to bind
7345     customers to certain products.  But teachers need to teach
7346     science, not products.</li>
7347
7348   <li>If you have everything you for daily work as open source, what
7349     would you need proprietary software for?</li>
7350
7351 </ul>
7352
7353       </div>
7354       <div class="tags">
7355
7356
7357         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
7358
7359
7360       </div>
7361     </div>
7362     <div class="padding"></div>
7363
7364     <div class="entry">
7365       <div class="title">
7366         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnadsnett_for_alle__a_wireless_community_network_in_Oslo__take_shape.html">Dugnadsnett for alle, a wireless community network in Oslo, take shape</a>
7367       </div>
7368       <div class="date">
7369         30th November 2013
7370       </div>
7371       <div class="body">
7372         <p>If you want the ability to electronically communicate directly with
7373 your neighbors and friends using a network controlled by your peers in
7374 stead of centrally controlled by a few corporations, or would like to
7375 experiment with interesting network technology, the
7376 <a href="http://www.dugnadsnett.no/">Dugnasnett for alle i Oslo</a>
7377 might be project for you.  39 mesh nodes are currently being planned,
7378 in the freshly started initiative from NUUG and Hackeriet to create a
7379 wireless community network.  The work is inspired by
7380 <a href="http://freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a>,
7381 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan
7382 Network</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet">Roofnet</a>
7383 and other successful mesh networks around the globe.  Two days ago we
7384 held a workshop to try to get people started on setting up their own
7385 mesh node, and there we decided to create a new mailing list
7386 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/dugnadsnett">dugnadsnett
7387 (at) nuug.no</a> and IRC channel
7388 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#dugnadsnett.no">#dugnadsnett.no</a> to
7389 coordinate the work.  See also the NUUG blog post
7390 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/E_postliste_og_IRC_kanal_for_Dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">announcing
7391 the mailing list and IRC channel</a>.</p>
7392
7393       </div>
7394       <div class="tags">
7395
7396
7397         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
7398
7399
7400       </div>
7401     </div>
7402     <div class="padding"></div>
7403
7404     <div class="entry">
7405       <div class="title">
7406         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
7407       </div>
7408       <div class="date">
7409         24th November 2013
7410       </div>
7411       <div class="body">
7412         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
7413 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
7414 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
7415 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
7416 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
7417 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
7418 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
7419 is working on.  I checked the
7420 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
7421 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
7422 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
7423 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
7424 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
7425 These are the release notes:</p>
7426
7427 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
7428
7429 <ul>
7430
7431   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
7432    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
7433    up.</li>
7434
7435   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
7436
7437   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
7438    Matthias Klose.</li>
7439
7440   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
7441    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
7442
7443   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
7444    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
7445    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
7446
7447 </ul>
7448
7449 <p>You can
7450 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
7451 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
7452 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
7453 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
7454 include a testsuite check.</p>
7455
7456       </div>
7457       <div class="tags">
7458
7459
7460         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7461
7462
7463       </div>
7464     </div>
7465     <div class="padding"></div>
7466
7467     <div class="entry">
7468       <div class="title">
7469         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/All_drones_should_be_radio_marked_with_what_they_do_and_who_they_belong_to.html">All drones should be radio marked with what they do and who they belong to</a>
7470       </div>
7471       <div class="date">
7472         21st November 2013
7473       </div>
7474       <div class="body">
7475         <p>Drones, flying robots, are getting more and more popular.  The most
7476 know ones are the killer drones used by some government to murder
7477 people they do not like without giving them the chance of a fair
7478 trial, but the technology have many good uses too, from mapping and
7479 forest maintenance to photography and search and rescue.  I am sure it
7480 is just a question of time before "bad drones" are in the hands of
7481 private enterprises and not only state criminals but petty criminals
7482 too.  The drone technology is very useful and very dangerous.  To have
7483 some control over the use of drones, I agree with Daniel Suarez in his
7484 TED talk
7485 "<a href="https://archive.org/details/DanielSuarez_2013G">The kill
7486 decision shouldn't belong to a robot</a>", where he suggested this
7487 little gem to keep the good while limiting the bad use of drones:</p>
7488
7489 <blockquote>
7490
7491 <p>Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed
7492 I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement
7493 through public spaces. We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on
7494 aircraft. This is no different. And every citizen should be able to
7495 download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous
7496 vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and
7497 historically. And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones
7498 to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their
7499 own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their
7500 presence. And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic
7501 drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility.</p>
7502
7503 <p>But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. It
7504 would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles
7505 and drones while still preserving our open, civil society.</p>
7506
7507 </blockquote>
7508
7509 <p>The key is that <em>every citizen</em> should be able to read the
7510 radio beacons sent from the drones in the area, to be able to check
7511 both the government and others use of drones.  For such control to be
7512 effective, everyone must be able to do it.  What should such beacon
7513 contain?  At least formal owner, purpose, contact information and GPS
7514 location.  Probably also the origin and target position of the current
7515 flight.  And perhaps some registration number to be able to look up
7516 the drone in a central database tracking their movement.  Robots
7517 should not have privacy.  It is people who need privacy.</p>
7518
7519       </div>
7520       <div class="tags">
7521
7522
7523         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
7524
7525
7526       </div>
7527     </div>
7528     <div class="padding"></div>
7529
7530     <div class="entry">
7531       <div class="title">
7532         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_wireless_community_network_in_Oslo_.html">Lets make a wireless community network in Oslo!</a>
7533       </div>
7534       <div class="date">
7535         13th November 2013
7536       </div>
7537       <div class="body">
7538         <p>Today NUUG and Hackeriet announced
7539 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Bli_med___bygge_dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">our
7540 plans to join forces and create a wireless community network in
7541 Oslo</a>.  The workshop to help people get started will take place
7542 Thursday 2013-11-28, but we already are collecting the geolocation of
7543 people joining forces to make this happen.  We have
7544 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/oslo-nodes.geojson">9
7545 locations plotted on the map</a>, but we will need more before we have
7546 a connected mesh spread across Oslo.  If this sound interesting to
7547 you, please join us at the workshop.  If you are too impatient to wait
7548 15 days, please join us on the IRC channel
7549 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
7550 right away. :)</p>
7551
7552       </div>
7553       <div class="tags">
7554
7555
7556         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
7557
7558
7559       </div>
7560     </div>
7561     <div class="padding"></div>
7562
7563     <div class="entry">
7564       <div class="title">
7565         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Running_TP_Link_MR3040_as_a_batman_adv_mesh_node_using_openwrt.html">Running TP-Link MR3040 as a batman-adv mesh node using openwrt</a>
7566       </div>
7567       <div class="date">
7568         10th November 2013
7569       </div>
7570       <div class="body">
7571         <p>Continuing my research into mesh networking, I was recommended to
7572 use TP-Link 3040 and 3600 access points as mesh nodes, and the pair I
7573 bought arrived on Friday.  Here are my notes on how to set up the
7574 MR3040 as a mesh node using
7575 <a href="http://www.openwrt.org/">OpenWrt</a>.</p>
7576
7577 <p>I started by following the instructions on the OpenWRT wiki for
7578 <a href="http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3040">TL-MR3040</a>,
7579 and downloaded
7580 <a href="http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin">the
7581 recommended firmware image</a>
7582 (openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin) and
7583 uploaded it into the original web interface.  The flashing went fine,
7584 and the machine was available via telnet on the ethernet port.  After
7585 logging in and setting the root password, ssh was available and I
7586 could start to set it up as a batman-adv mesh node.</p>
7587
7588 <p>I started off by reading the instructions from
7589 <a href="http://wirelessafrica.meraka.org.za/wiki/index.php?title=Antoine's_Research">Wireless
7590 Africa</a>, which had quite a lot of useful information, but
7591 eventually I followed the recipe from the Open Mesh wiki for
7592 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Batman-adv-openwrt-config">using
7593 batman-adv on OpenWrt</a>.  A small snag was the fact that the
7594 <tt>opkg install kmod-batman-adv</tt> command did not work as it
7595 should.  The batman-adv kernel module would fail to load because its
7596 dependency crc16 was not already loaded.  I
7597 <a href="https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/14452">reported the bug</a> to
7598 the openwrt project and hope it will be fixed soon.  But the problem
7599 only seem to affect initial testing of batman-adv, as configuration
7600 seem to work when booting from scratch.</p>
7601
7602 <p>The setup is done using files in /etc/config/.  I did not bridge
7603 the Ethernet and mesh interfaces this time, to be able to hook up the
7604 box on my local network and log into it for configuration updates.
7605 The following files were changed and look like this after modifying
7606 them:</p>
7607
7608 <p><tt>/etc/config/network</tt></p>
7609
7610 <pre>
7611
7612 config interface 'loopback'
7613         option ifname 'lo'
7614         option proto 'static'
7615         option ipaddr '127.0.0.1'
7616         option netmask '255.0.0.0'
7617
7618 config globals 'globals'
7619         option ula_prefix 'fdbf:4c12:3fed::/48'
7620
7621 config interface 'lan'
7622         option ifname 'eth0'
7623         option type 'bridge'
7624         option proto 'dhcp'
7625         option ipaddr '192.168.1.1'
7626         option netmask '255.255.255.0'
7627         option hostname 'tl-mr3040'
7628         option ip6assign '60'
7629
7630 config interface 'mesh'
7631         option ifname 'adhoc0'
7632         option mtu '1528'
7633         option proto 'batadv'
7634         option mesh 'bat0'
7635 </pre>
7636
7637 <p><tt>/etc/config/wireless</tt></p>
7638 <pre>
7639
7640 config wifi-device 'radio0'
7641         option type 'mac80211'
7642         option channel '11'
7643         option hwmode '11ng'
7644         option path 'platform/ar933x_wmac'
7645         option htmode 'HT20'
7646         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-20'
7647         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-40'
7648         list ht_capab 'RX-STBC1'
7649         list ht_capab 'DSSS_CCK-40'
7650         option disabled '0'
7651
7652 config wifi-iface 'wmesh'
7653         option device 'radio0'
7654         option ifname 'adhoc0'
7655         option network 'mesh'
7656         option encryption 'none'
7657         option mode 'adhoc'
7658         option bssid '02:BA:00:00:00:01'
7659         option ssid 'meshfx@hackeriet'
7660 </pre>
7661 <p><tt>/etc/config/batman-adv</tt></p>
7662 <pre>
7663
7664 config 'mesh' 'bat0'
7665         option interfaces 'adhoc0'
7666         option 'aggregated_ogms'
7667         option 'ap_isolation'
7668         option 'bonding'
7669         option 'fragmentation'
7670         option 'gw_bandwidth'
7671         option 'gw_mode'
7672         option 'gw_sel_class'
7673         option 'log_level'
7674         option 'orig_interval'
7675         option 'vis_mode'
7676         option 'bridge_loop_avoidance'
7677         option 'distributed_arp_table'
7678         option 'network_coding'
7679         option 'hop_penalty'
7680
7681 # yet another batX instance
7682 # config 'mesh' 'bat5'
7683 #       option 'interfaces' 'second_mesh'
7684 </pre>
7685
7686 <p>The mesh node is now operational.  I have yet to test its range,
7687 but I hope it is good.  I have not yet tested the TP-Link 3600 box
7688 still wrapped up in plastic.</p>
7689
7690       </div>
7691       <div class="tags">
7692
7693
7694         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
7695
7696
7697       </div>
7698     </div>
7699     <div class="padding"></div>
7700
7701     <div class="entry">
7702       <div class="title">
7703         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_init_d_boot_script_example_for_rsyslog.html">Debian init.d boot script example for rsyslog</a>
7704       </div>
7705       <div class="date">
7706          2nd November 2013
7707       </div>
7708       <div class="body">
7709         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
7710 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
7711 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
7712 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
7713 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
7714
7715 <p><pre>
7716 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
7717 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
7718 # Provides:          rsyslog
7719 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
7720 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
7721 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
7722 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
7723 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
7724 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
7725 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
7726 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
7727 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
7728 ### END INIT INFO
7729 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
7730 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
7731 </pre></p>
7732
7733 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
7734 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
7735 info/comments.</p>
7736
7737 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
7738 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
7739
7740 <p><pre>
7741 #!/bin/sh
7742
7743 # Define LSB log_* functions.
7744 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
7745 # and status_of_proc is working.
7746 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
7747
7748 #
7749 # Function that starts the daemon/service
7750
7751 #
7752 do_start()
7753 {
7754         # Return
7755         #   0 if daemon has been started
7756         #   1 if daemon was already running
7757         #   2 if daemon could not be started
7758         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
7759                 || return 1
7760         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
7761                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
7762                 || return 2
7763         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
7764         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
7765         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
7766 }
7767
7768 #
7769 # Function that stops the daemon/service
7770 #
7771 do_stop()
7772 {
7773         # Return
7774         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
7775         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
7776         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
7777         #   other if a failure occurred
7778         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
7779         RETVAL="$?"
7780         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
7781         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
7782         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
7783         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
7784         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
7785         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
7786         # sleep for some time.
7787         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
7788         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
7789         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
7790         rm -f $PIDFILE
7791         return "$RETVAL"
7792 }
7793
7794 #
7795 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
7796 #
7797 do_reload() {
7798         #
7799         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
7800         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
7801         # then implement that here.
7802         #
7803         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
7804         return 0
7805 }
7806
7807 SCRIPTNAME=$1
7808 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
7809 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
7810 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
7811     script="$1"
7812     shift
7813     . $script
7814 else
7815     exit 0
7816 fi
7817
7818 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
7819 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
7820
7821 # Exit if the package is not installed
7822 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
7823
7824 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
7825 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
7826
7827 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
7828 . /lib/init/vars.sh
7829
7830 case "$1" in
7831   start)
7832         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
7833         do_start
7834         case "$?" in
7835                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
7836                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
7837         esac
7838         ;;
7839   stop)
7840         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
7841         do_stop
7842         case "$?" in
7843                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
7844                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
7845         esac
7846         ;;
7847   status)
7848         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
7849         ;;
7850   #reload|force-reload)
7851         #
7852         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
7853         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
7854         #
7855         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
7856         #do_reload
7857         #log_end_msg $?
7858         #;;
7859   restart|force-reload)
7860         #
7861         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
7862         # 'force-reload' alias
7863         #
7864         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
7865         do_stop
7866         case "$?" in
7867           0|1)
7868                 do_start
7869                 case "$?" in
7870                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
7871                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
7872                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
7873                 esac
7874                 ;;
7875           *)
7876                 # Failed to stop
7877                 log_end_msg 1
7878                 ;;
7879         esac
7880         ;;
7881   *)
7882         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
7883         exit 3
7884         ;;
7885 esac
7886
7887 :
7888 </pre></p>
7889
7890 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
7891 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
7892 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
7893 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
7894
7895 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
7896 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
7897 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
7898 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
7899 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
7900
7901       </div>
7902       <div class="tags">
7903
7904
7905         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7906
7907
7908       </div>
7909     </div>
7910     <div class="padding"></div>
7911
7912     <div class="entry">
7913       <div class="title">
7914         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Browser_plugin_for_SPICE__spice_xpi__uploaded_to_Debian.html">Browser plugin for SPICE (spice-xpi) uploaded to Debian</a>
7915       </div>
7916       <div class="date">
7917          1st November 2013
7918       </div>
7919       <div class="body">
7920         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
7921 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
7922 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
7923 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
7924 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
7925 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
7926 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
7927 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
7928 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
7929 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
7930 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
7931 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
7932
7933 <p>The source is now available from
7934 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/spice-xpi.git;a=summary">http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/spice-xpi.git;a=summary</a>.</p>
7935
7936       </div>
7937       <div class="tags">
7938
7939
7940         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7941
7942
7943       </div>
7944     </div>
7945     <div class="padding"></div>
7946
7947     <div class="entry">
7948       <div class="title">
7949         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Teaching_vmdebootstrap_to_create_Raspberry_Pi_SD_card_images.html">Teaching vmdebootstrap to create Raspberry Pi SD card images</a>
7950       </div>
7951       <div class="date">
7952         27th October 2013
7953       </div>
7954       <div class="body">
7955         <p>The
7956 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
7957 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
7958 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
7959 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
7960 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
7961 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
7962 of a plan to simplify the build system for
7963 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
7964 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
7965 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
7966 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
7967 Raspberry Pi.</p>
7968
7969 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
7970 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
7971 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
7972 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
7973 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
7974 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
7975 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
7976 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
7977 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
7978 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
7979 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
7980 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
7981 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
7982 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
7983 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
7984 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
7985 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
7986 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
7987 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
7988 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
7989 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
7990 available from
7991 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
7992 upstream project page</a>.</p>
7993
7994 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
7995 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
7996 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
7997 list:</p>
7998
7999 <p><pre>
8000 #!/bin/sh
8001 set -e # Exit on first error
8002 rootdir="$1"
8003 cd "$rootdir"
8004 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
8005 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
8006 EOF
8007 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
8008 # install a kernel somewhere too.
8009 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
8010     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
8011 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
8012 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
8013 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
8014 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
8015 </pre></p>
8016
8017 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
8018 to build the image:</p>
8019
8020 <pre>
8021 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
8022     --variant minbase \
8023     --arch armel \
8024     --distribution jessie \
8025     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
8026     --image test.img \
8027     --size 600M \
8028     --bootsize 64M \
8029     --boottype vfat \
8030     --log-level debug \
8031     --verbose \
8032     --no-kernel \
8033     --no-extlinux \
8034     --root-password raspberry \
8035     --hostname raspberrypi \
8036     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
8037     --customize `pwd`/customize \
8038     --package netbase \
8039     --package git-core \
8040     --package binutils \
8041     --package ca-certificates \
8042     --package wget \
8043     --package kmod
8044 </pre></p>
8045
8046 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
8047 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
8048 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
8049 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
8050 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
8051 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
8052 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
8053
8054 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
8055 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
8056 build dependency list.</p>
8057
8058 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
8059 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
8060 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
8061 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
8062
8063       </div>
8064       <div class="tags">
8065
8066
8067         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>.
8068
8069
8070       </div>
8071     </div>
8072     <div class="padding"></div>
8073
8074     <div class="entry">
8075       <div class="title">
8076         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">A Raspberry Pi based batman-adv Mesh network node</a>
8077       </div>
8078       <div class="date">
8079         21st October 2013
8080       </div>
8081       <div class="body">
8082         <p>The last few days I have been experimenting with
8083 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki">the
8084 batman-adv mesh technology</a>.  I want to gain some experience to see
8085 if it will fit <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the
8086 Freedombox project</a>, and together with my neighbors try to build a
8087 mesh network around the park where I live.  Batman-adv is a layer 2
8088 mesh system ("ethernet" in other words), where the mesh network appear
8089 as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch.</p>
8090
8091 <p>My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying
8092 around, but I've been unable to get them working with batman-adv.  So
8093 instead, I started playing with a
8094 <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org/">Raspberry Pi</a>, and tried to
8095 get it working as a mesh node.  My idea is to use it to create a mesh
8096 node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to
8097 the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh
8098 network.  This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys
8099 WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow
8100 non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh.  This in turn is useful for
8101 Android phones using <a href="http://servalproject.org/">the Serval
8102 Project</a> voip client, allowing every one around the playground to
8103 phone and message each other for free.  The reason is that Android
8104 phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from
8105 the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted.  But if
8106 they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to
8107 every client on the local network.</p>
8108
8109 <p>To get this working, I've created a debian package
8110 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node">meshfx-node</a>
8111 and a script
8112 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/build-rpi-mesh-node">build-rpi-mesh-node</a>
8113 to create the Raspberry Pi boot image.  I'm using Debian Jessie (and
8114 not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available.
8115 Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot
8116 image to get it booting, but I'll ignore that for now.  Also, as
8117 Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry
8118 Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit.  I hope
8119 the routing performance isn't affected by the lack of hardware FPU
8120 support.</p>
8121
8122 <p>To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user
8123 after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:</p>
8124
8125 <p><pre>
8126 % wget -O build-rpi-mesh-node \
8127     https://raw.github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
8128 % sudo bash -x ./build-rpi-mesh-node > build.log 2>&1
8129 % dd if=/root/rpi/rpi_basic_jessie_$(date +%Y%m%d).img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M
8130 %
8131 </pre></p>
8132
8133 <p>Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB
8134 wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node.  At least it does for
8135 me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the
8136 ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in
8137 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">an
8138 earlier blog post about this mesh testing</a>.</p>
8139
8140 <p>The mesh node was not horribly expensive either.  I bought
8141 everything over the counter in shops nearby.  If I had ordered online
8142 from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:</p>
8143
8144 <p><table>
8145
8146 <tr><th>Supplier</th><th>Model</th><th>NOK</th></tr>
8147 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi model B</td><td>349.90</td></tr>
8148 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi type B case</td><td>99.90</td></tr>
8149 <tr><td>Lefdal</td><td>Jensen Air:Link 25150</td><td>295.-</td></tr>
8150 <tr><td>Clas Ohlson</td><td>Kingston 16 GB SD card</td><td>199.-</td></tr>
8151 <tr><td>Total cost</td><td></td><td>943.80</td></tr>
8152
8153 </table></p>
8154
8155 <p>Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement
8156 connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the 1th
8157 floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one
8158 play-node I use to develop the image building script.  And some times
8159 I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it.  I look forward
8160 to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give,
8161 and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)</p>
8162
8163       </div>
8164       <div class="tags">
8165
8166
8167         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
8168
8169
8170       </div>
8171     </div>
8172     <div class="padding"></div>
8173
8174     <div class="entry">
8175       <div class="title">
8176         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_library_to_control_the_Spykee_robot_moved_to_github.html">Perl library to control the Spykee robot moved to github</a>
8177       </div>
8178       <div class="date">
8179         19th October 2013
8180       </div>
8181       <div class="body">
8182         <p>Back in 2010, I created a Perl library to talk to
8183 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spykee">the Spykee robot</a>
8184 (with two belts, wifi, USB and Linux) and made it available from my
8185 web page.  Today I concluded that it should move to a site that is
8186 easier to use to cooperate with others, and moved it to github.  If
8187 you got a Spykee robot, you might want to check out
8188 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/libspykee-perl">the
8189 libspykee-perl github repository</a>.</p>
8190
8191       </div>
8192       <div class="tags">
8193
8194
8195         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
8196
8197
8198       </div>
8199     </div>
8200     <div class="padding"></div>
8201
8202     <div class="entry">
8203       <div class="title">
8204         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_causes__Debian_Outreach_Program_for_Women__EFF_documenting_the_spying_and_Open_access_in_Norway.html">Good causes: Debian Outreach Program for Women, EFF documenting the spying and Open access in Norway</a>
8205       </div>
8206       <div class="date">
8207         15th October 2013
8208       </div>
8209       <div class="body">
8210         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
8211 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
8212 these. :)</p>
8213
8214 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
8215 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
8216 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
8217 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
8218 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
8219 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
8220 hope you will to. :)</p>
8221
8222 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
8223 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
8224 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
8225 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
8226 donated.  Are you next?</p>
8227
8228 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
8229 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
8230 statement under the heading
8231 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
8232 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
8233 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
8234 too.</p>
8235
8236       </div>
8237       <div class="tags">
8238
8239
8240         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
8241
8242
8243       </div>
8244     </div>
8245     <div class="padding"></div>
8246
8247     <div class="entry">
8248       <div class="title">
8249         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">Oslo community mesh network - with NUUG and Hackeriet at Hausmania</a>
8250       </div>
8251       <div class="date">
8252         11th October 2013
8253       </div>
8254       <div class="body">
8255         <p>Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
8256 networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
8257 areas, depending on the radio technology used.  Normal wifi equipment
8258 can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
8259 successful examples like
8260 <a href="http://www.freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a> and
8261 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network</a>
8262 (see
8263 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece">wikipedia
8264 for a large list</a>) around the globe.  To give you an idea how it
8265 work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
8266 can be seen from their
8267 <a href="http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html">dynamically
8268 updated node graph and map</a>, where one can see how the mesh nodes
8269 automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
8270 There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
8271 and that is the main topic of this blog post.</p>
8272
8273 <p>I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
8274 to do it as part of my involvement with the <a
8275 href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member organisation</a> community, and
8276 my recent involvement in
8277 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the Freedombox project</a>
8278 finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
8279 Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
8280 when possible, given that most communication between people are
8281 between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
8282 communication patterns).  It also allow people to communicate without
8283 any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
8284 private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
8285 important over the years.</p>
8286
8287 <p>So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
8288 working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
8289 <a href="http://hackeriet.no/">Hackeriet</a> at Husmania.  They seem to
8290 have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
8291 <a href="http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page">the Oslo
8292 Freifunk project</a>, but that effort is now dead and the people
8293 behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
8294 <a href="http://meshfx.org/trac">meshfx</a>.  Unfortunately the wiki
8295 site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
8296 reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to
8297 the new project.  A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
8298 from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks.  I
8299 came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
8300 speakers about this talk (from
8301 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Kd7CLkhSY">youtube</a>):</p>
8302
8303 <p><iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
8304
8305 <p>I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
8306 There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
8307 figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but
8308 given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
8309 is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
8310 completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
8311 batman-adv for now.  It sure help me to  know that the very cool
8312 <a href="http://www.servalproject.org/">Serval project in Australia</a>
8313 is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
8314 organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
8315 less industrialized communities.  Check out this cool video presenting
8316 that project (from
8317 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30qNfzJCQOA">youtube</a>):</p>
8318
8319 <p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/30qNfzJCQOA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
8320
8321 <p>According to the wikipedia page on
8322 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network">Wireless
8323 mesh network</a> there are around 70 competing schemes for routing
8324 packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
8325 B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
8326 based community mesh networks.</p>
8327
8328 <p>The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer 2
8329 (as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
8330 network.  One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
8331 vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
8332 computer.  The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
8333 least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up.  A
8334 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide">good
8335 introduction</a> is available from the Open Mesh project.  These are
8336 the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:</p>
8337
8338 <p><table>
8339 <tr><th>Setting</th><th>Value</th></tr>
8340 <tr><td>Protocol / kernel module</td><td>batman-adv</td></tr>
8341 <tr><td>ESSID</td><td>meshfx@hackeriet</td></tr>
8342 <td>Channel / Frequency</td><td>11 / 2462</td></tr>
8343 <td>Cell ID</td><td>02:BA:00:00:00:01</td>
8344 </table></p>
8345
8346 <p>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
8347 in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers.  (See a nice post from
8348 VillageTelco about
8349 "<a href="http://tiebing.blogspot.no/2009/12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html">Information
8350 about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!</a>
8351 for details.)  When these settings are activated and you have some
8352 other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
8353 network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
8354 any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)</p>
8355
8356 <p>My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
8357 but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
8358 firmware supporting batman-adv.  If anyone know how to use that old
8359 wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.</p>
8360
8361 <p>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
8362 us on IRC, either channel
8363 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace">#oslohackerspace</a>
8364 or <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug">#nuug</a> on
8365 irc.freenode.net.</p>
8366
8367 <p>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
8368 research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
8369 and Innovation called
8370 <a href="http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-2008.pdf">The
8371 reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks</a> and elsewhere
8372 learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
8373 Grünerløkka in Oslo.  So mesh networks are also interesting for
8374 commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
8375 to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
8376 know have closed down the experiment.  Perhaps Telenor or others would
8377 be interested in a cooperation?</p>
8378
8379 <p><strong>Update 2013-10-12</strong>: I was just
8380 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2013-October/005900.html">told
8381 by the Serval project developers</a> that they no longer use
8382 batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
8383 mesh system.</p>
8384
8385       </div>
8386       <div class="tags">
8387
8388
8389         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
8390
8391
8392       </div>
8393     </div>
8394     <div class="padding"></div>
8395
8396     <div class="entry">
8397       <div class="title">
8398         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_7_1_install_and_overview_video_from_Marcelo_Salvador.html">Skolelinux / Debian Edu 7.1 install and overview video from Marcelo Salvador</a>
8399       </div>
8400       <div class="date">
8401          8th October 2013
8402       </div>
8403       <div class="body">
8404         <p>The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
8405 Salvador had published a
8406 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GgpdqgLFc">video on
8407 Youtube</a> showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu /
8408 Skolelinux profile.  This is the profile intended for use at home or
8409 on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network
8410 services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc,
8411 in other word a single user machine).  The result is 11 minutes long,
8412 and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked).
8413 Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium
8414 showing the <a href="http://www.zygotebody.com/">Zygote Body 3D model
8415 of the human body</a>, but I guess he did not know about those or find
8416 other programs more interesting. :) And the video do not show the
8417 advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian
8418 Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of
8419 computers without hard drives by installing one central
8420 <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP server</a>.</p>
8421
8422 <p>Anyway, check out the video, embedded below and linked to above:</p>
8423
8424 <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/w-GgpdqgLFc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
8425
8426 <p>Are there other nice videos demonstrating Skolelinux?  Please let
8427 me know. :)</p>
8428
8429       </div>
8430       <div class="tags">
8431
8432
8433         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
8434
8435
8436       </div>
8437     </div>
8438     <div class="padding"></div>
8439
8440     <div class="entry">
8441       <div class="title">
8442         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Finally__Debian_Edu_Wheezy_is_released_today_.html">Finally, Debian Edu Wheezy is released today!</a>
8443       </div>
8444       <div class="date">
8445         29th September 2013
8446       </div>
8447       <div class="body">
8448         <p>A few hours ago, the announcement for the first stable release of
8449 Debian Edu Wheezy went out from the Debian publicity team.  The
8450 complete announcement text can be found at
8451 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130928">the Debian News
8452 section</a>, translated to several languages.  Please check it out.</p>
8453
8454 <p>There is one minor known problem that we will fix very soon.  One
8455 can not install a amd64 Thin Client Server using PXE, as the /var/
8456 partition is too small.  A workaround is to extend the partition (use
8457 lvresize + resize2fs in tty 2 while installing).</p>
8458
8459       </div>
8460       <div class="tags">
8461
8462
8463         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8464
8465
8466       </div>
8467     </div>
8468     <div class="padding"></div>
8469
8470     <div class="entry">
8471       <div class="title">
8472         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Videos_about_the_Freedombox_project___for_inspiration_and_learning.html">Videos about the Freedombox project - for inspiration and learning</a>
8473       </div>
8474       <div class="date">
8475         27th September 2013
8476       </div>
8477       <div class="body">
8478         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
8479 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
8480 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
8481 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
8482
8483 <ul>
8484
8485 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
8486 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
8487
8488 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
8489 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
8490
8491 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
8492 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
8493 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
8494 (Youtube)</li>
8495
8496 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
8497 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
8498
8499 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
8500 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
8501
8502 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
8503 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
8504 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
8505
8506 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
8507 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
8508 (Youtube)</li>
8509
8510 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
8511 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
8512
8513 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
8514 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
8515
8516 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
8517 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
8518 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
8519
8520 </ul>
8521
8522 <p>A larger list is available from
8523 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
8524 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
8525
8526 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
8527 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
8528 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
8529 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
8530 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
8531 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
8532 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
8533 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
8534 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
8535 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
8536 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
8537
8538       </div>
8539       <div class="tags">
8540
8541
8542         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
8543
8544
8545       </div>
8546     </div>
8547     <div class="padding"></div>
8548
8549     <div class="entry">
8550       <div class="title">
8551         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_and_probably_last_beta_release_of_Debian_Edu_Wheezy.html">Third and probably last beta release of Debian Edu Wheezy</a>
8552       </div>
8553       <div class="date">
8554         16th September 2013
8555       </div>
8556       <div class="body">
8557         <p>The third wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
8558 today.  This is the release announcement from Holger Levsen:</p>
8559
8560 <blockquote>
8561 <p>Hi,</p>
8562
8563 <p>it is my pleasure to announce the third beta release (beta 2 for
8564 short) of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
8565 Skolelinux</a> based on Debian Wheezy!</p>
8566
8567 <p>Please test these images extensivly, if no new problems are found
8568 we plan to do this final Debian Edu Wheezy release this coming
8569 weekend.  We are not aware of any major problems or blockers in beta2,
8570 if you find something, please notify us immediately!</p>
8571
8572 <p>(More about the remaining steps for the Edu Wheezy release in
8573 another mail to the edu list tonight or tomorrow...)</p>
8574
8575 <p>Noteworthy changes and software updates for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b2
8576 compared to beta1:</p>
8577
8578 <ul>
8579
8580 <li>The KDE proxy setup has been adjusted to use the provided wpad.dat. This
8581 also gets Chromium to use this proxy.</li>
8582 <li>Install kdepim-groupware with KDE desktops to make sure korganizer
8583 understand ical/dav sources.</li>
8584 <li>Increased default maximum size of /var/spool/squid and /skole/backup on the
8585 main server.</li>
8586 <li>A source DVD image containing all source packages is now available as well.</li>
8587 <li>Updates for chromium (29.0.1547.57-1~deb7u1), imagemagick
8588 (6.7.7.10-5+deb7u2), php5 (5.4.4-14+deb7u4), libmodplug
8589 (0.8.8.4-3+deb7u1+git20130828), tiff (4.0.2-6+deb7u2), linux-image
8590 (3.2.0-4-486_3.2.46-1+deb7u1).</li>
8591
8592 </ul>
8593
8594 <p>Where to get it:</p>
8595
8596 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
8597
8598 <ul>
8599 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso</a></li>
8600 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso</a></li>
8601 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso .</li>
8602 </ul>
8603
8604 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is:  3a1c89f4666df80eebcd46c5bf5fedb866f9472f</p>
8605
8606 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
8607 <ul>
8608 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso</a></li>
8609 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso</a></li>
8610 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso .</li>
8611 </ul>
8612
8613 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 702d1718548f401c74bfa6df9f032cc3ee16597e</p>
8614
8615 <p>The Source DVD image has the filename
8616 debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-source-DVD.iso and the SHA1SUM
8617 089eed8b3f962db47aae1f6a9685e9bb2fa30ca5 and is available the same way
8618 as the other isos.</p>
8619
8620 <p>How to report bugs</p>
8621
8622 <p>For information how to report bugs please see
8623 <br><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
8624
8625
8626 <p>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</p>
8627
8628 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
8629 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
8630 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
8631 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
8632 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
8633 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
8634 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
8635 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
8636 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
8637 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
8638 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
8639 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
8640 can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
8641
8642 <p>This is the seventh test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
8643 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
8644 Squeeze release.</p>
8645
8646 <p>Notes for upgrades from Alpha Prereleases</p>
8647
8648 <p>Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
8649 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
8650 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
8651 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
8652 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (2)
8653 Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin
8654 password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one
8655 (backup copy!). In both cases all users need to change their password
8656 to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home
8657 directory.</p>
8658
8659
8660 <p>cheers,
8661 <br>        Holger</p>
8662 </blockquote>
8663
8664       </div>
8665       <div class="tags">
8666
8667
8668         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8669
8670
8671       </div>
8672     </div>
8673     <div class="padding"></div>
8674
8675     <div class="entry">
8676       <div class="title">
8677         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recipe_to_test_the_Freedombox_project_on_amd64_or_Raspberry_Pi.html">Recipe to test the Freedombox project on amd64 or Raspberry Pi</a>
8678       </div>
8679       <div class="date">
8680         10th September 2013
8681       </div>
8682       <div class="body">
8683         <p>I was introduced to the
8684 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
8685 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
8686 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
8687 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
8688 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
8689 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
8690 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
8691 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
8692
8693 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
8694 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
8695 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
8696 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
8697 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
8698
8699 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
8700 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
8701 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
8702 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
8703 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
8704 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
8705 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
8706 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
8707 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
8708 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
8709 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
8710 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
8711 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
8712 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
8713 missing in Debian).</p>
8714
8715 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
8716 scripts
8717 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
8718 and a administrative web interface
8719 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
8720 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
8721 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
8722 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
8723 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
8724 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
8725 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
8726 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
8727 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
8728 this is really working yet, see
8729 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
8730 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
8731 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
8732 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
8733 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
8734 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
8735 with lots of half baked features.</p>
8736
8737 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
8738 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
8739 at.</p>
8740
8741 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
8742
8743 <ol>
8744
8745 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
8746 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
8747 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
8748 to the Debian installer:<p>
8749 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
8750
8751 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
8752 install on.</li>
8753
8754 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
8755 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
8756
8757 </ol>
8758
8759 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
8760
8761 <ol>
8762
8763 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
8764 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
8765 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
8766 <pre>
8767 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
8768 </pre></li>
8769 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
8770 <pre>
8771 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
8772    apt-key add -
8773 apt-get update
8774 apt-get install freedombox-setup
8775 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
8776 </pre></li>
8777 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
8778
8779 </ol>
8780
8781 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
8782 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
8783 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
8784 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
8785 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
8786
8787 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
8788 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
8789 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
8790 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
8791
8792 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
8793 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
8794 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
8795 irc.debian.org and the
8796 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
8797 mailing list</a>.</p>
8798
8799 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
8800 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
8801 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
8802 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
8803 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
8804 default password is 'secret'.</p>
8805
8806       </div>
8807       <div class="tags">
8808
8809
8810         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
8811
8812
8813       </div>
8814     </div>
8815     <div class="padding"></div>
8816
8817     <div class="entry">
8818       <div class="title">
8819         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_beta_release__beta_1__of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">Second beta release (beta 1) of Debian Edu/Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
8820       </div>
8821       <div class="date">
8822         22nd August 2013
8823       </div>
8824       <div class="body">
8825         <p>The second wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
8826 today, slightly delayed because of some bugs in the initial Windows
8827 integration fixes .  This is the release announcement:</p>
8828
8829 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b1 released 2013-08-22</strong></p>
8830
8831 <p>These are the release notes for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
8832 7.1+edu0~b1, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
8833
8834 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
8835
8836 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
8837 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
8838 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
8839 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
8840 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
8841 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
8842 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
8843 the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be
8844 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
8845 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
8846 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
8847 desktop contains
8848 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
8849 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
8850 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
8851 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
8852
8853 <p>This is the sixth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically this
8854 is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze
8855 release.</p>
8856
8857 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
8858 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
8859 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
8860 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
8861 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined
8862 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/08/msg00127.html">on
8863 the mailing list</a>. (2) Accept the new version of gosa.conf and
8864 replace both contained admin password placeholders with the password
8865 hashes found in the old one (backup copy!). In both cases every user
8866 need to change their their password to make sure a password is set for
8867 CIFS access to their home directory.</p>
8868
8869 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
8870
8871 <ul>
8872
8873 <li>Added ssh askpass packages to default installation, to ensure ssh
8874     work also without a attached tty.</li>
8875 <li>Add the command-not-found package to the default installation to
8876     make it easier to figure out where to find missing command line
8877     tools. Please note, that the command 'update-command-not-found'
8878     has to be run as root to actually make it useful (internet access
8879     required).</li>
8880
8881 </ul>
8882
8883 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
8884
8885 <ul>
8886
8887 <li>Adjusted the USB stick ISO image build to include every tool
8888 needed for desktop=xfce installations.</li>
8889 <li>Adjust thin-client-server task to work when installing from USB
8890 stick ISO image.</li>
8891 <li>Made new grub artwork (changed png from indexed to RGB format).</li>
8892 <li>Minor cleanup in the CUPS setup.</li>
8893 <li>Make sure that bootstrapping of the Samba domain really happens
8894     during installation of the main server and adjust SID handling to
8895     cope with this.</li>
8896 <li>Make Samba passwords changeable (again) via GOsa².</li>
8897 <li>Fix generation of LM and NT password hashes via GOsa² to avoid
8898     empty password hashes.</li>
8899 <li>Adapted Samba machine domain joining to latest change in the
8900     smbldap-tools Perl package, fixing bugs blocking Windows machines
8901     from joining the Samba domain.</li>
8902
8903 </ul>
8904
8905 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
8906
8907 <ul>
8908
8909 <li>KDE fails to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
8910     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
8911 <li>Chromium also fails to use the proxy when using the KDE desktop
8912     (using the KDE configuration).</li>
8913
8914 </ul>
8915
8916 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
8917
8918 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
8919
8920 <ul>
8921
8922 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso</a></li>
8923
8924 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso</a></li>
8925
8926 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso .</li>
8927
8928 </ul>
8929
8930 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 1e357f80b55e703523f2254adde6d78b
8931 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 7157f9be5fd27c7694d713c6ecfed61c3edda3b2</p>
8932
8933 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
8934
8935 <ul>
8936
8937 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso</a></li>
8938 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso</a></li>
8939 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso .</li>
8940
8941 </ul>
8942
8943 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 7a8408ead59cf7e3cef25afb6e91590b
8944 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: f1817c031f02790d5edb3bfa0dcf8451088ad119</p>
8945
8946
8947 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
8948
8949 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
8950
8951       </div>
8952       <div class="tags">
8953
8954
8955         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8956
8957
8958       </div>
8959     </div>
8960     <div class="padding"></div>
8961
8962     <div class="entry">
8963       <div class="title">
8964         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_180_SSD_disk_with_Lenovo_firmware_can_not_use_Intel_firmware.html">Intel 180 SSD disk with Lenovo firmware can not use Intel firmware</a>
8965       </div>
8966       <div class="date">
8967         18th August 2013
8968       </div>
8969       <div class="body">
8970         <p>Earlier, I reported about
8971 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
8972 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
8973 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
8974 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
8975 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
8976 currently on the disk.</p>
8977
8978 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
8979 <a href="https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProdId=3472&DwnldID=18363&ProductFamily=Solid-State+Drives+and+Caching&ProductLine=Intel%c2%ae+High+Performance+Solid-State+Drive&ProductProduct=Intel%c2%ae+SSD+520+Series+(180GB%2c+2.5in+SATA+6Gb%2fs%2c+25nm%2c+MLC)&lang=eng">issdfut_2.0.4.iso</a>
8980 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
8981 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
8982 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
8983 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
8984 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
8985 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
8986 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
8987 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
8988 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
8989 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
8990 the broken disks.</p>
8991
8992       </div>
8993       <div class="tags">
8994
8995
8996         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8997
8998
8999       </div>
9000     </div>
9001     <div class="padding"></div>
9002
9003     <div class="entry">
9004       <div class="title">
9005         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/90_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html">90 percent done with the Norwegian draft translation of Free Culture</a>
9006       </div>
9007       <div class="date">
9008          2nd August 2013
9009       </div>
9010       <div class="body">
9011         <p>It has been a while since my last update.  Since last summer, I
9012 have worked on a Norwegian
9013 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
9014 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
9015 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright
9016 law.  Yesterday, I finally broken the 90% mark, when counting the
9017 number of strings to translate.  Due to real life constraints, I have
9018 not had time to work on it since March, but when the summer broke out,
9019 I found time to work on it again.  Still lots of work left, but the
9020 first draft is nearing completion.  I created a graph to show the
9021 progress of the translation:</p>
9022
9023 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
9024
9025 <p>When the first draft is done, the translated text need to be
9026 proof read, and the remaining formatting problems with images and SVG
9027 drawings need to be fixed.  There are probably also some index entries
9028 missing that need to be added.  This can be done by comparing the
9029 index entries listed in the SiSU version of the book, or comparing the
9030 English docbook version with the paper version.  Last, the colophon
9031 page with ISBN numbers etc need to be wrapped up before the release is
9032 done.  I should also figure out how to get correct Norwegian sorting
9033 of the index pages.  All docbook tools I have tried so far (xmlto,
9034 docbook-xsl, dblatex) get the order of symbols and the special
9035 Norwegian letters ÆØÅ wrong.</p>
9036
9037 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
9038 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
9039 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
9040 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
9041 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
9042 around?  There are also some legal terms that are unfamiliar to me.
9043 If you want to help, please get in touch with me, and check out the
9044 project files currently available from
9045 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
9046
9047 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
9048 the updated
9049 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
9050 and
9051 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
9052 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
9053 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
9054 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
9055
9056       </div>
9057       <div class="tags">
9058
9059
9060         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
9061
9062
9063       </div>
9064     </div>
9065     <div class="padding"></div>
9066
9067     <div class="entry">
9068       <div class="title">
9069         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_beta_release_of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">First beta release of Debian Edu/Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
9070       </div>
9071       <div class="date">
9072         27th July 2013
9073       </div>
9074       <div class="body">
9075         <p>The first wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
9076 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
9077
9078 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b0 released
9079 2013-07-27</strong></p>
9080
9081 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
9082 7.1+edu0~b0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
9083
9084 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
9085
9086 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
9087 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
9088 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
9089 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
9090 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
9091 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
9092 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
9093 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
9094 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
9095 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
9096 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
9097 desktop contains
9098 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
9099 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
9100 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
9101 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
9102
9103 <p>This is the fifth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
9104 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
9105 Squeeze release.</p>
9106
9107 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
9108 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
9109 release.</p>
9110
9111 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
9112
9113 <ul>
9114
9115 <li>Switched roaming workstation profiles from wicd to network-manager
9116    for network configuration, as wicd didn't work any more.</li>
9117 <li>Changed version numbers of patched gosa and libpam-mklocaluser
9118    packages to make sure our locally patched versions will be replaced
9119    by the official packages when they are released from Debian. Those
9120    installing alpha version need to reinstall or manually downgrade gosa
9121    and libpam-mklocaluser.</li>
9122 <li>Added bluetooth tools to the default desktop (bluedevil, blueman).</li>
9123 <li>Added tools for sharing the desktop on KDE (krdc, krfb).</li>
9124 <li>Added valgrind to the default installation for easier debugging of
9125    crash bugs.</li>
9126
9127 </ul>
9128
9129 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
9130
9131 <ul>
9132
9133 <li>Fixed artwork package to work with gnome, no longer break
9134    desktop=gnome installations.</li>
9135 <li>Adjusted installer to now work when forced to use a proxy with the
9136    netinst CD.</li>
9137 <li>Fixed code detecting and setting/loading hardware specific
9138    setup/firmware to work more robust out of the box.</li>
9139 <li>Adjusted Kerberos setup to detect realm and server settings at
9140    install time instead of dynamically at run time. This avoid a crash
9141    with krb5-auth-dialog on diskless workstations without a DNS name.</li>
9142 <li>Worked around misfeature in network-manager not calling the dhclient
9143    exit hooks, causing automatic proxy configuration and automatic host
9144    name setting at run time to work again.</li>
9145 <li>Fixed feature setting the default Iceweasel start page from URL
9146    fetched from LDAP, to allow schools to set the global default by
9147    updating the dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no LDAP object.</li>
9148 <li>Changed default host name on all networked machines to be unique
9149    (generated from MAC or reverse DNS) after boot.</li>
9150 <li>Adjusted partition sizes to make sure they are big enough.</li>
9151
9152 </ul>
9153
9154 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
9155
9156 <ul>
9157
9158 <li>Grub is missing the new artwork.</li>
9159 <li>KDE fail to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
9160     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
9161 <li>Chromium also fail to use the proxy.</li>
9162
9163 </ul>
9164
9165 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
9166
9167 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
9168
9169 <ul>
9170
9171 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso</a></li>
9172
9173 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso</a></li>
9174
9175 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso .</li>
9176
9177 </ul>
9178
9179 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 55d5de9765b6dccd5d9ec33cf1a07109
9180 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 996a1d9517740e4d627d100de2d12b23dd545a3f</p>
9181
9182 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
9183
9184 <ul>
9185
9186 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso</a></li>
9187 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso</a></li>
9188 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso .</li>
9189
9190 </ul>
9191
9192 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: d8f0818c51a78d357de794066f289f69
9193 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 49185ca354e8d0543240423746924f76a6cee733</p>
9194
9195
9196 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
9197
9198 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
9199
9200       </div>
9201       <div class="tags">
9202
9203
9204         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9205
9206
9207       </div>
9208     </div>
9209     <div class="padding"></div>
9210
9211     <div class="entry">
9212       <div class="title">
9213         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">How to fix a Thinkpad X230 with a broken 180 GB SSD disk</a>
9214       </div>
9215       <div class="date">
9216         17th July 2013
9217       </div>
9218       <div class="body">
9219         <p>Today I switched to
9220 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
9221 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
9222 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
9223 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html">180
9224 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
9225 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
9226 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
9227 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
9228 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
9229 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
9230 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
9231 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
9232 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
9233 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
9234 station from now on.</p>
9235
9236 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
9237 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
9238 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
9239 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
9240 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
9241 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
9242 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
9243 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
9244 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
9245 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
9246 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
9247 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
9248
9249 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
9250 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
9251 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
9252 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
9253 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
9254 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
9255 parameters are tuned:</p>
9256
9257 <ul>
9258
9259 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
9260     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
9261
9262 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
9263     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
9264     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
9265
9266 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
9267     systems.</li>
9268
9269 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
9270     /etc/fstab.</li>
9271
9272 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
9273
9274 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
9275     cron.daily).</li>
9276
9277 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
9278     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
9279
9280 </ul>
9281
9282 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
9283 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
9284 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
9285 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
9286 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
9287 from getting the data on the disk (see
9288 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
9289 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
9290 right thing to do.</p>
9291
9292 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
9293 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
9294 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
9295
9296 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
9297 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
9298 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
9299 instead of during my work.</p>
9300
9301 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
9302 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
9303
9304 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
9305 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
9306 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
9307
9308 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
9309 there.</p>
9310
9311 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
9312 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
9313 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
9314 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
9315 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
9316 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
9317 back.</p>
9318
9319       </div>
9320       <div class="tags">
9321
9322
9323         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9324
9325
9326       </div>
9327     </div>
9328     <div class="padding"></div>
9329
9330     <div class="entry">
9331       <div class="title">
9332         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Intel_SSD_520_Series_180_GB_with_Lenovo_firmware_still_lock_up_from_sustained_writes.html">Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB with Lenovo firmware still lock up from sustained writes</a>
9333       </div>
9334       <div class="date">
9335         10th July 2013
9336       </div>
9337       <div class="body">
9338         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
9339 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
9340 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
9341 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
9342 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
9343 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
9344 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
9345 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
9346
9347 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
9348 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
9349 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
9350 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
9351 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
9352 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
9353 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
9354 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
9355 lock up when I download a new
9356 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
9357 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
9358 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
9359
9360 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
9361 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
9362 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
9363 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
9364 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
9365 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
9366
9367 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
9368 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
9369 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
9370 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
9371 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
9372 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
9373
9374 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
9375 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
9376 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
9377 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
9378 exist).</p>
9379
9380       </div>
9381       <div class="tags">
9382
9383
9384         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9385
9386
9387       </div>
9388     </div>
9389     <div class="padding"></div>
9390
9391     <div class="entry">
9392       <div class="title">
9393         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/July_13th__Debian_Ubuntu_BSP_and_Skolelinux_Debian_Edu_developer_gathering_in_Oslo.html">July 13th: Debian/Ubuntu BSP and Skolelinux/Debian Edu developer gathering in Oslo</a>
9394       </div>
9395       <div class="date">
9396          9th July 2013
9397       </div>
9398       <div class="body">
9399         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
9400 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
9401 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
9402 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
9403 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
9404 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
9405 Bitraf</a>.</p>
9406
9407 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
9408 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
9409 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
9410 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
9411 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
9412
9413       </div>
9414       <div class="tags">
9415
9416
9417         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
9418
9419
9420       </div>
9421     </div>
9422     <div class="padding"></div>
9423
9424     <div class="entry">
9425       <div class="title">
9426         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230?</a>
9427       </div>
9428       <div class="date">
9429          5th July 2013
9430       </div>
9431       <div class="body">
9432         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
9433 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
9434 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
9435 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
9436 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
9437 ended up picking a
9438 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
9439 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
9440 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
9441 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
9442 on that below.</p>
9443
9444 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
9445 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
9446 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
9447 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
9448 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
9449 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
9450 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
9451 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
9452 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
9453
9454 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
9455 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
9456 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
9457 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
9458 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
9459 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
9460 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
9461
9462 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
9463 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
9464
9465 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
9466 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
9467 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
9468 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
9469 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
9470 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
9471 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
9472 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
9473 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
9474 kernel developers as
9475 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
9476 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
9477 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
9478 Lenovo forums, both for
9479 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
9480 2012-11-10</a> and for
9481 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/x230-SATA-errors-with-180GB-Intel-520-SSD-under-heavy-write-load/m-p/1068147">X230
9482 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
9483 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
9484 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
9485 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
9486 There is even a
9487 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
9488 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
9489 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
9490
9491 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
9492 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
9493 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
9494 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
9495 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
9496 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
9497 fixed. :)</p>
9498
9499       </div>
9500       <div class="tags">
9501
9502
9503         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9504
9505
9506       </div>
9507     </div>
9508     <div class="padding"></div>
9509
9510     <div class="entry">
9511       <div class="title">
9512         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230</a>
9513       </div>
9514       <div class="date">
9515          4th July 2013
9516       </div>
9517       <div class="body">
9518         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
9519 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
9520 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
9521 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
9522 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
9523 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
9524 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
9525 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
9526 with an expencive door stop.</p>
9527
9528 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
9529 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
9530 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
9531 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
9532 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
9533 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
9534 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
9535
9536 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
9537 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
9538 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
9539 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
9540 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
9541 new laptop now. :)</p>
9542
9543 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
9544
9545       </div>
9546       <div class="tags">
9547
9548
9549         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9550
9551
9552       </div>
9553     </div>
9554     <div class="padding"></div>
9555
9556     <div class="entry">
9557       <div class="title">
9558         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fourth_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">Fourth alpha release of Debian Edu/Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
9559       </div>
9560       <div class="date">
9561          3rd July 2013
9562       </div>
9563       <div class="body">
9564         <p>The fourth wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
9565 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
9566
9567 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~alpha3 released
9568 2013-07-03</strong></p>
9569
9570 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
9571 7.1+edu0~alpha3, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
9572
9573 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
9574
9575 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
9576 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
9577 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
9578 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
9579 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
9580 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
9581 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
9582 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
9583 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
9584 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
9585 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
9586 desktop contains
9587 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
9588 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
9589 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
9590 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
9591
9592 <p>This is the fourth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
9593 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
9594 Squeeze release.</p>
9595
9596 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
9597 <ul>
9598   <li>Dropped ispell dictionaries from our default installation.</li>
9599   <li>Dropped menu-xdg from the KDE desktop option, to drop the Debian
9600     submenu.  It was not included with Gnome, LXDE or Xfce, so this
9601     brings KDE in line with the others.</li>
9602   <li>Dropped xdrawchem, xjig and xsok from our default installation as
9603     they don't have a desktop menu entry and thus won't show up in the
9604     menu now that menu-xdg was removed.</li>
9605   <li>Removed the killer system to kill left behind processes on
9606     multi-user machines, as it was no longer able to understand when a
9607     X display was in use and killed the processes of the active users
9608     too.</li>
9609   <li>Dropped the golearn (from goplay) package as the debtags in wheezy
9610     are too few to make the package useful.</li>
9611 </ul>
9612 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
9613 <ul>
9614   <li>Updated artwork matching http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Joy
9615   <li>Multi-arch i386/amd64 USB stick ISO available.</li>
9616   <li>Got rid of ispell/wordlist related debconf questions that showed
9617     up for some language options.</li>
9618   <li>Switched to using http.debian.net as APT source by default.</li>
9619   <li>Fixed proxy configuration on Main Server installations.</li>
9620   <li>Changed LTSP setup to ask dpkg to use force-unsafe-io the same way
9621     d-i is doing it.</li>
9622   <li>Made sure root and user passwords were not left behind in the
9623     debconf database after installation on Main Server installations.</li>
9624   <li>Made Roaming Workstation dynamic setup more robust and added draft
9625     script setup-ad-client to hook a Roaming Workstation up to a
9626     Active Directory server instead of a Debian Edu Main Server.</li>
9627   <li>Update system to install needed firmware packages during
9628     installation, to work properly in Wheezy.</li>
9629   <li>Update system to handle hardware quirks (debian-edu-hwsetup).</li>
9630   <li>Corrected PXE installation setup to properly pass selected desktop
9631     and keymap settings to PXE installation clients.</li>
9632   <li>LTSP diskless workstations use sshfs by default, allowing them to
9633     work without adding them to DNS and NIS netgroups for NFS access.</li>
9634 </ul>
9635 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
9636 <ul>
9637   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
9638     available yet (698840).</li>
9639   <li>Artwork not enabled for all desktops.</li>
9640 </ul>
9641 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
9642
9643 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
9644 <ul>
9645   <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso</a></li>
9646   <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso</a></li>
9647   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso .</li>
9648 </ul>
9649
9650 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 2b161a99d2a848c376d8d04e3854e30c
9651 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 498922e9c508c0a7ee9dbe1dfe5bf830d779c3c8</p>
9652
9653 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
9654 <ul>
9655   <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso</a></li>
9656   <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso</a></li>
9657   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso .</li>
9658 </ul>
9659
9660 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 25e808e403a4c15dbef1d13c37d572ac
9661 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 15ecfc93eb6b4f453b7eb0bc04b6a279262d9721</p>
9662
9663 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
9664
9665 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
9666
9667       </div>
9668       <div class="tags">
9669
9670
9671         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9672
9673
9674       </div>
9675     </div>
9676     <div class="padding"></div>
9677
9678     <div class="entry">
9679       <div class="title">
9680         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_locate_and_install_required_firmware_packages_on_Debian__Isenkram_0_4_.html">Automatically locate and install required firmware packages on Debian (Isenkram 0.4)</a>
9681       </div>
9682       <div class="date">
9683         25th June 2013
9684       </div>
9685       <div class="body">
9686         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
9687 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
9688 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
9689 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
9690 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
9691 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
9692 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
9693 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
9694 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
9695 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
9696 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
9697
9698 <p><pre>
9699 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
9700 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
9701 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
9702 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
9703 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
9704 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
9705 firmware-ipw2x00
9706 firmware-ipw2x00
9707 Preconfiguring packages ...
9708 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
9709 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
9710 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
9711 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
9712 #
9713 </pre></p>
9714
9715 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
9716 printed instead:</p>
9717
9718 <p><pre>
9719 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
9720 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
9721 #
9722 </pre></p>
9723
9724 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
9725 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
9726
9727 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
9728 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
9729 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
9730 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
9731 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
9732 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
9733 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
9734 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
9735 machine.</p>
9736
9737 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
9738 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
9739 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
9740 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
9741 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
9742 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
9743
9744       </div>
9745       <div class="tags">
9746
9747
9748         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
9749
9750
9751       </div>
9752     </div>
9753     <div class="padding"></div>
9754
9755     <div class="entry">
9756       <div class="title">
9757         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_value_of_a_good_distro_wide_test_suite___.html">The value of a good distro wide test suite...</a>
9758       </div>
9759       <div class="date">
9760         22nd June 2013
9761       </div>
9762       <div class="body">
9763         <p>In the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
9764 Skolelinux</a> project, we include a post-installation test suite,
9765 which check that services are running, working, and return the
9766 expected results.  It runs automatically just after the first boot on
9767 test installations (using test ISOs), but not on production
9768 installations (using non-test ISOs).  It test that the LDAP service is
9769 operating, Kerberos is responding, DNS is replying, file systems are
9770 online resizable, etc, etc.  And it check that the PXE service is
9771 configured, which is the topic of this post.</p>
9772
9773 <p>The last week I've fixed the DVD and USB stick ISOs for our Debian
9774 Edu Wheezy release.  These ISOs are supposed to be able to install a
9775 complete system without any Internet connection, but for that to
9776 happen all the needed packages need to be on them.  Thanks to our test
9777 suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
9778 cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
9779 When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
9780 using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
9781 working packages to get it working.  And the packages changed name
9782 from debian-installer-6.0-netboot-$arch to
9783 debian-installer-7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
9784 packages during installation.  Without our test suite, I suspect we
9785 would never have discovered this before release.  Now it is fixed
9786 right after we got the ISOs operational.</p>
9787
9788 <p>Another by-product of the test suite is that we can ask system
9789 administrators with problems getting Debian Edu to work, to run the
9790 test suite using <tt>/usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install</tt> and see if
9791 any errors are detected.  This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
9792 the problem.</p>
9793
9794 <p>If you want to help us help kids learn how to share and create,
9795 please join us on
9796 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
9797 irc.debian.org</a> and the
9798 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@</a> mailing
9799 list.</p>
9800
9801       </div>
9802       <div class="tags">
9803
9804
9805         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9806
9807
9808       </div>
9809     </div>
9810     <div class="padding"></div>
9811
9812     <div class="entry">
9813       <div class="title">
9814         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html">Debian Edu interview: Victor Nițu</a>
9815       </div>
9816       <div class="date">
9817         17th June 2013
9818       </div>
9819       <div class="body">
9820         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
9821 Skolelinux</a> distribution have users and contributors all around the
9822 globe.  And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
9823 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">our IRC channel
9824 #debian-edu</a> and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
9825 worked.  We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
9826 help us with translations.  And today I managed to get an interview
9827 with him, to learn more about him.</p>
9828
9829 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
9830
9831 <p>I'm a 25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
9832 which is also my country of origin. Back in 2009, at a New Year's Eve
9833 party, I had a very nice <strike>beer</strike> discussion with a
9834 friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
9835 country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
9836 community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
9837 began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
9838 constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
9839 field.</p>
9840
9841 <p>A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
9842 provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
9843 activities. For the last 13 months, I have been the Technical Director
9844 of <a href="http://ceata.org/">Fundația Ceata</a>, which is a free
9845 software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
9846 the only one we have in our country.</p>
9847
9848 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
9849 project?</strong></p>
9850
9851 <p>The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
9852 even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
9853 it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
9854 educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
9855 love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
9856 technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
9857 ways to contribute.</p>
9858
9859 <p>My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
9860 configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
9861 haven't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
9862 areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
9863 software in my country is pretty low, I'll be happy to be the first
9864 one around here advocating for the project's adoption in educational
9865 environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
9866 for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
9867 from now on, time will tell what I'll be doing next, but I think I
9868 have a pretty consistent starting point.</p>
9869
9870 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
9871 Edu?</strong></p>
9872
9873 <p>Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
9874 maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
9875 took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
9876 Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
9877 time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
9878 with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
9879 out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
9880 it comes to managing a school's network, for example.</p>
9881
9882 <p>Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
9883 availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
9884 scenarios is something I can't wait to experiment "into the wild" (I
9885 only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
9886 lot more I haven't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
9887 project.</p>
9888
9889 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
9890 Edu?</strong></p>
9891
9892 <p>As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
9893 disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
9894 project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
9895 a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story.  I'd like to see
9896 Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
9897 ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
9898 lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
9899 opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project's dynamics. Not
9900 to mention it's a very fun blend to work on!</p>
9901
9902 <p>Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
9903 with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
9904 to all blends and derivatives, but it's an issue we can all work
9905 on.</p>
9906
9907 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
9908
9909 <p>I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
9910 daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
9911 am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
9912 Enlightenment project a lot!),
9913 <a href="http://www.claws-mail.org/‎">Claws Mail</a> due to its ease of
9914 use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
9915 <a href="https://launchpad.net/redshift">Redshift</a>, which helps me
9916 get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
9917 stuff in this bag, but I'll need a blog on my own for doing this!</p>
9918
9919 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
9920 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
9921
9922 <p>Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
9923 now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
9924 that:</p>
9925
9926 <ul>
9927
9928 <li>schools would like to get rid of proprietary software</li>
9929
9930 <li>students will love the openness of the system, and will want to
9931     experiment with it - maybe we need to harvest the native curiosity
9932     of teenagers more?</li>
9933
9934 <li>there is no "right one" when it comes to strategies, but it would
9935     be useful to have some success stories published somewhere, so
9936     other can get some inspiration from them (I know I'd promote
9937     them!)</li>
9938
9939 <li>more active promotion - talks, conferences, even small school
9940     lectures can do magical things if they encounter at least one
9941     person interested. Who knows who that person might be? ;-)</li>
9942
9943 </ul>
9944
9945 <p>I also see some problems in getting Skolelinux into schools; for
9946 example, in our country we have a great deal of corruption issues, so
9947 it might be hard(er) to fight against proprietary solutions. Also,
9948 people who relied on commercial software for all their lives, would be
9949 very hard to convert against their will.</p>
9950
9951       </div>
9952       <div class="tags">
9953
9954
9955         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
9956
9957
9958       </div>
9959     </div>
9960     <div class="padding"></div>
9961
9962     <div class="entry">
9963       <div class="title">
9964         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jonathan_Carter.html">Debian Edu interview: Jonathan Carter</a>
9965       </div>
9966       <div class="date">
9967         12th June 2013
9968       </div>
9969       <div class="body">
9970         <p>There is a certain cross-over between the
9971 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
9972 project</a> and <a href="http://www.edubuntu.org/">the Edubuntu
9973 project</a>, and for example the LTSP packages in Debian are a joint
9974 effort between the projects.  One person with a foot in both camps is
9975 Jonathan Carter, which I am now happy to present to you.</p>
9976
9977 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
9978
9979 <p>I'm a South-African free software geek who lives in Cape Town. My
9980 days vary quite a bit since I'm involved in too many things. As I'm
9981 getting older I'm learning how to focus a bit more :)</p>
9982
9983 <p>I'm also an Edubuntu contributor and I love when there are
9984 opportunities for the Edubuntu and Debian Edu projects to benefit from
9985 each other.</p>
9986
9987 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
9988 project?</strong></p>
9989
9990 <p>I've been somewhat familiar with the project before, but I think my
9991 first direct exposure to the project was when I met Petter
9992 [Reinholdtsen] and Knut [Yrvin] at the Edubuntu summit in 2005 in
9993 London. They provided great feedback that helped the bootstrapping of
9994 Edubuntu. Back then Edubuntu (and even Ubuntu) was still very new and
9995 it was great getting input from people who have been around longer. I
9996 was also still very excitable and said yes to everything and to this
9997 day I have a big todo list backlog that I'm catching up with. I think
9998 over the years the relationship between Edubuntu and Debian-Edu has
9999 been gradually improving, although I think there's a lot that we could
10000 still improve on in terms of working together on packages. I'm sure
10001 we'll get there one day.</p>
10002
10003 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10004 Edu?</strong></p>
10005
10006 <p>Debian itself already has so many advantages. I could go on about
10007 it for pages, but in essence I love that it's a very honest project
10008 that puts its users first with no hidden agendas and also produces
10009 very high quality work.</p>
10010
10011 <p>I think the advantage of Debian Edu is that it makes many common
10012 set-up tasks simpler so that administrators can get up and running
10013 with a lot less effort and frustration. At the same time I think it
10014 helps to standardise installations in schools so that it's easier for
10015 community members and commercial suppliers to support.</p>
10016
10017 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10018 Edu?</strong></p>
10019
10020 <p>I had to re-type this one a few times because I'm trying to
10021 separate "disadvantages" from "areas that need improvement" (which is
10022 what I originally rambled on about)</p>
10023
10024 <p>The biggest disadvantage I can think of is lack of manpower. The
10025 project could do so much more if there were more good contributors. I
10026 think some of the problems are external too. Free software and free
10027 content in education is a no-brainer but it takes some time to catch
10028 on. When you've been working with the same proprietary eco-system for
10029 years and have gotten used to it, it can be hard to adjust to some
10030 concepts in the free software world. It would be nice if there were
10031 more Debian Edu consultants across the world. I'd love to be one
10032 myself but I'm already so over-committed that it's just not possible
10033 currently.</p>
10034
10035 <p>I think the best short-term solution to that large-scale problem is
10036 for schools to be pro-active and share their experiences and grow
10037 their skills in-house. I'm often saddened to see how much money
10038 educational institutions spend on 3rd party solutions that they don't
10039 have access to after the service has ended and they could've gotten so
10040 much more value otherwise by being more self-sustainable and
10041 autonomous.</p>
10042
10043 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
10044
10045 <p>My main laptop dual-boots between Debian and Windows 7. I was
10046 Windows free for years but started dual-booting again last year for
10047 some games which help me focus and relax (Starcraft II in
10048 particular). Gaming support on Linux is improving in leaps and bounds
10049 so I suppose I'll soon be able to regain that disk space :)</p>
10050
10051 <p>Besides that I rely on Icedove, Chromium, Terminator, Byobu, irssi,
10052 git, Tomboy, KVM, VLC and LibreOffice. Recently I've been torn on
10053 which desktop environment I like and I'm taking some refuge in Xfce
10054 while I figure that out. I like tools that keep things simple. I enjoy
10055 Python and shell scripting. I went to an Arduino workshop recently and
10056 it was awesome seeing how easy and simple the IDE software was to get
10057 up and running in Debian compared to the users running Windows and OS
10058 X.</p>
10059
10060 <p>I also use mc which some people frown upon slightly. I got used to
10061 using Norton Commander in the early 90's and it stuck (I think the
10062 people who sneer at it is just jealous that they don't know how to use
10063 it :p)
10064
10065 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10066 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
10067
10068 <p>I think trying to force it is unproductive. I also think that in
10069 many cases it's appropriate for schools to use non-free systems and I
10070 don't think that there's any particular moral or ethical problem with
10071 that.</p>
10072
10073 <p>I do think though that free software can already solve so so many
10074 problems in educational institutions and it's just a shame not taking
10075 advantage of that.</p>
10076
10077 <p>I also think that some curricula need serious review. For example,
10078 some areas of the world rely heavily on very specific versions of MS
10079 Office, teaching students to parrot menu items instead of learning the
10080 general concepts. I think that's very unproductive because firstly, MS
10081 Office's interface changes drastically every few years and on top of
10082 that it also locks in a generation to a product that might not be the
10083 best solution for them.</p>
10084
10085 <p>To answer your question, I believe that the right strategy is to
10086 educate and inform, giving someone the information they require to
10087 make a decision that would work for them.</p>
10088
10089       </div>
10090       <div class="tags">
10091
10092
10093         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
10094
10095
10096       </div>
10097     </div>
10098     <div class="padding"></div>
10099
10100     <div class="entry">
10101       <div class="title">
10102         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_the_Linux_black_screen_of_death_on_machines_with_Intel_HD_video.html">Fixing the Linux black screen of death on machines with Intel HD video</a>
10103       </div>
10104       <div class="date">
10105         11th June 2013
10106       </div>
10107       <div class="body">
10108         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
10109 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
10110 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
10111 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
10112 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
10113 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
10114 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
10115 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
10116 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
10117 i915 driver used by the
10118 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
10119 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
10120
10121 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
10122 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
10123 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
10124 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
10125 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
10126
10127 <pre>
10128 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
10129 update-initramfs -u -k all
10130 </pre>
10131
10132 <p>Since March 2012 there is
10133 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
10134 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
10135 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
10136 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
10137 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
10138 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
10139 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
10140 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
10141 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
10142 number.</p>
10143
10144 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
10145 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
10146
10147 <p><pre>
10148 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
10149     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
10150     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
10151  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
10152  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
10153     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
10154  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
10155     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
10156  Latency: 0
10157  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
10158  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
10159  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
10160  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
10161  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
10162  Capabilities: <access denied>
10163  Kernel driver in use: i915
10164 </pre></p>
10165
10166 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
10167
10168 <p><pre>
10169 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
10170        ...
10171         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
10172         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
10173        ...
10174 }
10175 </pre></p>
10176
10177 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
10178 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
10179 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
10180 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
10181 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
10182 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
10183 yet shown up in
10184 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
10185 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
10186 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
10187 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
10188 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
10189 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
10190
10191 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
10192 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
10193 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
10194 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
10195 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
10196 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
10197 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
10198 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
10199 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
10200 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
10201 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
10202 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
10203
10204 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
10205 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
10206 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
10207 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
10208 backlight.</p>
10209
10210       </div>
10211       <div class="tags">
10212
10213
10214         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10215
10216
10217       </div>
10218     </div>
10219     <div class="padding"></div>
10220
10221     <div class="entry">
10222       <div class="title">
10223         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">Third alpha release of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
10224       </div>
10225       <div class="date">
10226         10th June 2013
10227       </div>
10228       <div class="body">
10229         <p>The third wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
10230 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
10231
10232 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha2 released
10233 2013-06-10</strong></p>
10234
10235 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
10236 alpha2, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
10237
10238 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
10239
10240 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
10241 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
10242 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
10243 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
10244 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
10245 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
10246 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
10247 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
10248 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
10249 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
10250 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
10251 desktop contains
10252 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
10253 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
10254 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
10255 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
10256
10257 <p>This is the third test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
10258 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
10259 Squeeze release.</p>
10260
10261 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
10262
10263 <ul>
10264
10265 <li>Iceweasel was updated from 10 to 17. (DSA 2699-1)
10266 <li>Updated libxv (DSA-2674), libxvmc (DSA-2675), libxfixes (DSA-2676), libxrender (DSA-2677), mesa (DSA-2678), xserver-xorg-video-openchrome (DSA-2679), libxt (DSA-2680), libxcursor (DSA-2681), libxext (DSA-2682), libxi (DSA-2683), libxrandr (DSA-2684), libxp (DSA-2685), libxcb (DSA-2686), libfs (DSA-2687), libxres (DSA-2688), libxtst (DSA-2689), libxxf86dga (DSA-2690), libxinerama (DSA-2691), libxxf86vm (DSA-2692), libx11 (DSA-2693), chromium-browser (DSA-2695), gnutls26 (DSA-2697), wireshark (DSA-2700), krb5 (DSA-2701), telepathy-gabble (DSA-2702) and subversion (DSA-2703).
10267 <li>Switched xrdp on thin client servers to use tightvncserver instead of xvnc4.
10268 <li>Now install software oscilloscope xoscope by default.
10269 <li>Now install music tools gtick, lingot and pianobooster by default.
10270
10271 </ul>
10272
10273 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
10274
10275 <ul>
10276
10277 <li>The subnet-change script is now able to change all files needing a change on the main-server when changing the IP network used.
10278 <li>Updated translation of the installation.
10279 <li>New Romanian translation.
10280 <li>Fix security problem causing root and first user password to no longer show up in /var/cache/debconf/templates.dat.
10281 <li>Fix roaming workstation setup (Closed in libpam-mklocaluser/0.8, libpam-mklocaluser/0.8~deb7u1: #706753: libpam-mklocaluser: Fail to create local user during first login).
10282 <li>Made roaming workstation setup more robust in non-Debian Edu environments.
10283 <li>New script debian-edu-bless to transform a Debian installation to a Debian Edu profile.
10284 <li>Adjust Iceweasel setup to improve performance when $HOME is on NFS.
10285 <li>More testsuite tests.
10286 <li>Make automatic proxy configuration more robust.
10287 <li>Adjust GOsa² GUI configuration.
10288
10289 <li>Update thin client and diskless workstation setup to work with
10290 LTSP in Wheezy.</li>
10291
10292 <li>Diskless workstations now run out of the box -- no need to set
10293 them up with GOsa².</li>
10294
10295 <li>Update IMAP server setup. </li>
10296
10297 <li>Fix login into Skolelinux Backup Tool (Closed in
10298 slbackup-php/0.4.4-1: #700257: slbackup-php: Fails to submit correctly
10299 entered password). </li>
10300
10301 </ul>
10302
10303 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
10304
10305 <ul>
10306
10307 <li>DVD binary and source images are not yet ready.</li>
10308
10309 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
10310 available yet (Open in gosa/2.7.4-4: #698840: gosa-plugin-ldapmanager:
10311 missing import feature).</li>
10312
10313 <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others). </li>
10314
10315 <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons (Closed: #502192: menu-xdg: invents
10316 own icon names instead of using existing). This will remain
10317 unfixed.</li>
10318
10319 </ul>
10320
10321 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
10322
10323 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
10324
10325 <ul>
10326
10327 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso</a></li>
10328
10329 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso</a></li>
10330
10331 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso .</li>
10332
10333 </ul>
10334
10335 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 27bbcace407743382f3c42c08dbe8178
10336 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: e35f7d7908566cd3075375b3721fa10ee420d419</p>
10337
10338 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
10339
10340 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
10341
10342       </div>
10343       <div class="tags">
10344
10345
10346         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10347
10348
10349       </div>
10350     </div>
10351     <div class="padding"></div>
10352
10353     <div class="entry">
10354       <div class="title">
10355         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_there_a_PHP_expert_in_the_building___Debian_Edu_need_help_.html">Is there a PHP expert in the building?  Debian Edu need help!</a>
10356       </div>
10357       <div class="date">
10358          5th June 2013
10359       </div>
10360       <div class="body">
10361         <p>Here is a call for help from the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project.
10362 We have two problems blocking the release of the Wheezy version we
10363 hope to get released soon.  The two problems require some with PHP
10364 skills, and we seem to lack anyone with both time and PHP skills in
10365 the project:
10366
10367 <ol>
10368
10369 <li>It is impossible to log into the slbackup web interface
10370   (slbackup-php) using the root user and password.  This is
10371   <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">BTS report #700257</a>.
10372   This used to work, but stopped working some time since Squeeze.
10373   Perhaps some obsolete PHP feature was used?</li>
10374
10375 <li>It is not possible to "mass import" user lists in Gosa, neither
10376   using ldif nor using CSV files.  The feature was disabled after a
10377   major rewrite of Gosa, and need to be ported to the new system.
10378   This is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">BTS report
10379   #698840</a>.</li>
10380
10381 </ol>
10382
10383 <p>If you can help us, please join us on IRC
10384 (<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
10385 irc.debian.org</a>) and provide patches via the BTS.</p>
10386
10387       </div>
10388       <div class="tags">
10389
10390
10391         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10392
10393
10394       </div>
10395     </div>
10396     <div class="padding"></div>
10397
10398     <div class="entry">
10399       <div class="title">
10400         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html">Debian Edu interview: Cédric Boutillier</a>
10401       </div>
10402       <div class="date">
10403          4th June 2013
10404       </div>
10405       <div class="body">
10406         <p>It has been a while since my last English
10407 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
10408 interview last November.  But the developers and translators are still
10409 pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this
10410 time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators
10411 in the project, Cédric Boutillier.</p>
10412
10413 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
10414
10415 <p>I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
10416 professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
10417 mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
10418 probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.</p>
10419
10420 <p>I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
10421 and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
10422 packaging, publicity and translation.</p>
10423
10424 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
10425 project?</strong></p>
10426
10427 <p>I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
10428 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Manuals">the
10429 Debian Edu manual</a> for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
10430 then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
10431 manual.
10432
10433 <p>I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
10434 virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
10435 shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
10436 how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.</p>
10437
10438 <p>What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
10439 ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
10440 by <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa²</a>.  What pleased
10441 me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
10442 there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages,
10443 to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
10444 artistic skills with music (<a href="http://ardour.org/">Ardour</a>,
10445 <a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a>) and
10446 movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
10447 <a href="http://linuxstopmotion.sourceforge.net/">Stopmotion</a>).</p>
10448
10449 <p>I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
10450 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>.
10451 Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this
10452 beautiful project.</p>
10453
10454 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10455 Edu?</strong></p>
10456
10457 <p>For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
10458 community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
10459 fact that it provides a solution ready to use.</p>
10460
10461 <p>I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
10462 distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
10463 of educational free software.</p>
10464
10465 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10466 Edu?</strong></p>
10467
10468 <p>Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
10469 project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
10470 not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
10471 solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
10472 is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.</p>
10473
10474 <p>One can find support from a company by looking at
10475 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Help/ProfessionalHelp">the
10476 wiki dokumentation</a>, where some countries already have a number of
10477 companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
10478 Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
10479 for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
10480 consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
10481 support for Debian Edu as well.</p>
10482
10483 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
10484
10485 <p>I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
10486 most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
10487 scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice.  I am
10488 also using the mathematical software
10489 <a href="http://www.scilab.org/en/scilab/about‎">Scilab</a> and
10490 <a href="http://www.sagemath.org/index.html‎">Sage</a> (built from
10491 source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).
10492
10493 <p><strong>Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
10494 using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
10495 statistics?</strong></p>
10496
10497 <p>I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our
10498 university, we use both <a href="http://www.r-project.org/‎">R</a> and
10499 Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
10500 geometry, there are nice programs:</p>
10501
10502 <ul>
10503
10504 <li><a href="http://www.drgeo.eu/">drgeo</a> and
10505 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/kig‎">kig</a> to do
10506 constructions in planar geometry
10507
10508 <li><a href="http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/software/download/kali.html">kali</a>
10509 to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze
10510 groups), although the interface looks a bit old.</li>
10511
10512 </ul>
10513
10514 <p>I like also
10515 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/cantor">cantor</a>, which
10516 provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage,
10517 <a href="http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Octave‎">Octave</a>, etc...</p>
10518
10519 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10520 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
10521
10522 <p>My suggestions would be to</p>
10523
10524 <ul>
10525
10526 <li>advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.</li>
10527
10528 <li>communicate about the quality of free software projects, using
10529     well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and
10530     OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.</li>
10531
10532 <li>advertise the living and strong community around the project.</li>
10533
10534 <li>show that it is not more difficult to use than any other
10535     system.</li>
10536
10537 </ul>
10538
10539       </div>
10540       <div class="tags">
10541
10542
10543         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
10544
10545
10546       </div>
10547     </div>
10548     <div class="padding"></div>
10549
10550     <div class="entry">
10551       <div class="title">
10552         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">Educational applications included in Debian Edu / Skolelinux (the screenshot collection :-)</a>
10553       </div>
10554       <div class="date">
10555          1st June 2013
10556       </div>
10557       <div class="body">
10558         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
10559 Skolelinux</a>, there are quite a lot of educational software.
10560 Created to help teachers teach, and pupils learn.  We have tried to
10561 tag them all using debtags use::learning and role::program, and using
10562 the debtags I was happy to be able to create a collage of the
10563 educational software packages installed by default, sorted by the
10564 debtag field.  Here it is.  Click on a image to learn more about the
10565 program.</p>
10566
10567 <!-- for f in $(debtags tagcat|grep field::|awk '{print $2}'); do   echo; echo "<p><strong>$f</strong></p>"; echo "<p>";   (     for p in $(debtags search --names "use::learning && interface::x11 && role::program && $f"); do img="<img src='http://screenshots.debian.net/thumbnail/$p' alt='$p'>"; if dpkg -s $p > /dev/null 2>&1; then           echo "<a href='http://packages.qa.debian.org/$p'>$img</a>"; fi;     done;   ) | LANG=C sort; echo "</p>"; done -->
10568
10569 <p><strong>field::arts</strong></p>
10570 <p>
10571 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=audacity'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/audacity.png' alt='audacity'></a>
10572 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=childsplay'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/childsplay.png' alt='childsplay'></a>
10573 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=denemo'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/denemo.png' alt='denemo'></a>
10574 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=freebirth'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/freebirth.png' alt='freebirth'></a>
10575 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
10576 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gimp'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gimp.png' alt='gimp'></a>
10577 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=hydrogen'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/hydrogen.png' alt='hydrogen'></a>
10578 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=lilypond'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/lilypond.png' alt='lilypond'></a>
10579 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=lmms'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/lmms.png' alt='lmms'></a>
10580 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=rosegarden'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/rosegarden.png' alt='rosegarden'></a>
10581 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=scribus'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/scribus.png' alt='scribus'></a>
10582 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=solfege'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/solfege.png' alt='solfege'></a>
10583 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=stopmotion'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/stopmotion.png' alt='stopmotion'></a>
10584 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=tuxpaint'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/tuxpaint.png' alt='tuxpaint'></a>
10585 </p>
10586
10587 <p><strong>field::astronomy</strong></p>
10588 <p>
10589 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=celestia-gnome'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/celestia-gnome.png' alt='celestia-gnome'></a>
10590 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gpredict'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gpredict.png' alt='gpredict'></a>
10591 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kstars'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kstars.png' alt='kstars'></a>
10592 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=planets'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/planets.png' alt='planets'></a>
10593 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=stellarium'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/stellarium.png' alt='stellarium'></a>
10594 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=xplanet'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/xplanet.png' alt='xplanet'></a>
10595 </p>
10596
10597 <p><strong>field::biology:structural</strong></p>
10598 <p>
10599 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=pymol'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/pymol.png' alt='pymol'></a>
10600 </p>
10601
10602 <p><strong>field::chemistry</strong></p>
10603 <p>
10604 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=atomix'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/atomix.png' alt='atomix'></a>
10605 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=chemtool'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/chemtool.png' alt='chemtool'></a>
10606 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=easychem'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/easychem.png' alt='easychem'></a>
10607 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gchempaint'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gchempaint.png' alt='gchempaint'></a>
10608 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gdis'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gdis.png' alt='gdis'></a>
10609 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=ghemical'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/ghemical.png' alt='ghemical'></a>
10610 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gperiodic'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gperiodic.png' alt='gperiodic'></a>
10611 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kalzium'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kalzium.png' alt='kalzium'></a>
10612 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=pymol'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/pymol.png' alt='pymol'></a>
10613 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=viewmol'>[viewmol]</a>
10614 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=xdrawchem'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/xdrawchem.png' alt='xdrawchem'></a>
10615 </p>
10616
10617 <p><strong>field::electronics</strong></p>
10618 <p>
10619 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
10620 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gpsim'>[gpsim]</a>
10621 </p>
10622
10623 <p><strong>field::geography</strong></p>
10624 <p>
10625 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kgeography'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kgeography.png' alt='kgeography'></a>
10626 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=marble'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/marble.png' alt='marble'></a>
10627 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=xplanet'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/xplanet.png' alt='xplanet'></a>
10628 </p>
10629
10630 <p><strong>field::linguistics</strong></p>
10631 <p>
10632 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
10633 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kanagram'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kanagram.png' alt='kanagram'></a>
10634 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=khangman'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/khangman.png' alt='khangman'></a>
10635 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=klettres'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/klettres.png' alt='klettres'></a>
10636 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=parley'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/parley.png' alt='parley'></a>
10637 </p>
10638
10639 <p><strong>field::mathematics</strong></p>
10640 <p>
10641 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=childsplay'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/childsplay.png' alt='childsplay'></a>
10642 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=drgeo'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/drgeo.png' alt='drgeo'></a>
10643 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
10644 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=geogebra'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/geogebra.png' alt='geogebra'></a>
10645 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=geomview'>[geomview]</a>
10646 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=grace'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/grace.png' alt='grace'></a>
10647 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=graphmonkey'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/graphmonkey.png' alt='graphmonkey'></a>
10648 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=graphthing'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/graphthing.png' alt='graphthing'></a>
10649 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kalgebra'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kalgebra.png' alt='kalgebra'></a>
10650 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kbruch'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kbruch.png' alt='kbruch'></a>
10651 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kig'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kig.png' alt='kig'></a>
10652 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=kmplot'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/kmplot.png' alt='kmplot'></a>
10653 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=mathwar'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/mathwar.png' alt='mathwar'></a>
10654 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=rocs'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/rocs.png' alt='rocs'></a>
10655 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=scratch'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/scratch.png' alt='scratch'></a>
10656 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=tuxmath'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/tuxmath.png' alt='tuxmath'></a>
10657 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=xabacus'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/xabacus.png' alt='xabacus'></a>
10658 </p>
10659
10660 <p><strong>field::physics</strong></p>
10661 <p>
10662 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
10663 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=step'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/step.png' alt='step'></a>
10664 </p>
10665
10666 <p><strong>field::TODO</strong></p>
10667 <p>
10668 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=blinken'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/blinken.png' alt='blinken'></a>
10669 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=cgoban'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/cgoban.png' alt='cgoban'></a>
10670 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=childsplay'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/childsplay.png' alt='childsplay'></a>
10671 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gcompris'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gcompris.png' alt='gcompris'></a>
10672 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gnuchess'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gnuchess.png' alt='gnuchess'></a>
10673 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gnugo'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gnugo.png' alt='gnugo'></a>
10674 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gtans'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/gtans.png' alt='gtans'></a>
10675 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=ktouch'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/ktouch.png' alt='ktouch'></a>
10676 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=librecad'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/librecad.png' alt='librecad'></a>
10677 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=scratch'><img src='http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-06-01-debian-edu-apps/scratch.png' alt='scratch'></a>
10678 </p>
10679
10680 <p>In total, 61 applications.  3 of them lacked screen shots on
10681 <a href="http://screenshot.debian.net">screenshot.debian.net</a>.  If
10682 you know of some packages we should install by default, please let us
10683 know on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu
10684 on irc.debian.org</a>, or our
10685 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">mailing list
10686 debian-edu@</a>.</p>
10687
10688       </div>
10689       <div class="tags">
10690
10691
10692         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10693
10694
10695       </div>
10696     </div>
10697     <div class="padding"></div>
10698
10699     <div class="entry">
10700       <div class="title">
10701         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8.html">How to install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8</a>
10702       </div>
10703       <div class="date">
10704         27th May 2013
10705       </div>
10706       <div class="body">
10707         <p>Two days ago, I asked
10708 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html">how
10709 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
10710 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
10711 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
10712 and Windows 8.</p>
10713
10714 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
10715 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
10716 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
10717 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
10718 enough to tell.</p>
10719
10720 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
10721 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
10722 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
10723 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
10724 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
10725 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
10726 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
10727 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
10728 to follow.</p>
10729
10730 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
10731 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
10732 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
10733 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
10734 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
10735 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
10736 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
10737 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
10738
10739 <p>I've updated the
10740 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
10741 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
10742 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
10743 machine.</p>
10744
10745 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
10746 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
10747
10748       </div>
10749       <div class="tags">
10750
10751
10752         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10753
10754
10755       </div>
10756     </div>
10757     <div class="padding"></div>
10758
10759     <div class="entry">
10760       <div class="title">
10761         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_can_I_install_Linux_on_a_Packard_Bell_Easynote_LV_preinstalled_with_Windows_8_.html">How can I install Linux on a Packard Bell Easynote LV preinstalled with Windows 8?</a>
10762       </div>
10763       <div class="date">
10764         25th May 2013
10765       </div>
10766       <div class="body">
10767         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
10768 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
10769 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
10770 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
10771 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
10772 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
10773
10774 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
10775 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
10776 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
10777 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
10778 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
10779 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
10780 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
10781 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
10782 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
10783 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
10784
10785 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
10786 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
10787 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
10788 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
10789 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
10790 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
10791
10792 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
10793 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
10794 on new Laptops?</p>
10795
10796       </div>
10797       <div class="tags">
10798
10799
10800         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10801
10802
10803       </div>
10804     </div>
10805     <div class="padding"></div>
10806
10807     <div class="entry">
10808       <div class="title">
10809         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_transform_a_Debian_based_system_to_a_Debian_Edu_installation.html">How to transform a Debian based system to a Debian Edu installation</a>
10810       </div>
10811       <div class="date">
10812         17th May 2013
10813       </div>
10814       <div class="body">
10815         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
10816 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
10817 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
10818 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
10819 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
10820 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
10821 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
10822 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
10823 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
10824 donate some money</a>.
10825
10826 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
10827 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
10828 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
10829 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
10830 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
10831
10832 <p>The script,
10833 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/branches/wheezy/debian-edu-config/share/debian-edu-config/tools/debian-edu-bless?view=markup">debian-edu-bless<a/>
10834 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
10835 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
10836 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
10837
10838 <ol>
10839
10840 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
10841 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
10842 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
10843     our configuration.</li>
10844 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
10845     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
10846     according to the profile specified in the config above,
10847     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
10848 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
10849     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
10850 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
10851
10852 </ol>
10853
10854 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
10855 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
10856 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
10857 the needed packages.</p>
10858
10859 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
10860 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
10861 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
10862 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
10863 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
10864 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
10865
10866 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
10867 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
10868 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
10869
10870 <p><pre>
10871 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
10872 DESKTOP="lxde"
10873 </pre></p>
10874
10875 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
10876 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
10877 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
10878 boot.</p>
10879
10880       </div>
10881       <div class="tags">
10882
10883
10884         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10885
10886
10887       </div>
10888     </div>
10889     <div class="padding"></div>
10890
10891     <div class="entry">
10892       <div class="title">
10893         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">Second alpha release of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
10894       </div>
10895       <div class="date">
10896         14th May 2013
10897       </div>
10898       <div class="body">
10899         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
10900 project</a> is making great progress and made its second Wheezy based
10901 release today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
10902
10903 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha1 released
10904 2013-05-14</strong></p>
10905
10906 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
10907 alpha1, based on <a href="http://www.debian.org">Debian</a> with
10908 codename "Wheezy".</p>
10909
10910 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
10911
10912 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
10913 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
10914 configured school network. Immediatly after installation a school
10915 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
10916 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
10917 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
10918 initial installation of the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all
10919 other machines can be installed via the network.</p>
10920
10921 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
10922 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
10923 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
10924
10925 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
10926 <ul>
10927   <li>Install freemind (0.9.0) by default, and stop installing vym by
10928     default.</li>
10929   <li>Install chromium (26.0.1410.43) by default.</li>
10930   <li>Install goplay (0.5-1.1) to make golearn available by default.</li>
10931   <li>Updated support for Japanese input methods, now based on
10932     ibus-anthy.</li>
10933 </ul>
10934
10935 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
10936 <ul>
10937
10938   <li>Switched default file system from ext3 to ext4 for speed and
10939     reliability improvements.</li>
10940   <li>Got rid of unwanted winbind daemon and PAM setup activated because
10941     of <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706434">706434</a>.</li>
10942   <li>Extended and improved the testsuite tests to detect more possible
10943     problems.</li>
10944   <li>Corrected proxy handling to not set http_proxy to a bogus
10945     direct:// URL.</li>
10946   <li>Corrected proxy setup for diskless workstations.</li>
10947   <li>Corrected PXE setup to use our updated udebs during installation.</li>
10948   <li>Made installation handling of low entropy level more robust.</li>
10949   <li>Create larger partitions for Roaming workstations and Thin client
10950     servers, to make room for all the software installed.</li>
10951   <li>Fix bug in Roaming workstation PAM setup, making it impossible to
10952     log in (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706753">706753</a>).</li>
10953 </ul>
10954
10955 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
10956 <ul>
10957
10958   <li>IP resolution for the local hostname give useless IPv6 address
10959     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/705900">705900</a>).  Only install
10960     libnss-myhostname on roaming workstations until it is fixed.</li>
10961   <li>DVD images are not yet ready.</li>
10962   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
10963     available yet (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">698840</a>).</li>
10964   <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others).</li>
10965   <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons.</li>
10966   <li>LXDE menu lacks entry for changing GOsa password
10967     (website). Installing gosa-desktop will be an option.</li>
10968   <li>Backup configuration via web interface is impossible due to
10969     password submission problem
10970     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">700257</a>).</li>
10971
10972 </ul>
10973
10974 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
10975
10976 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
10977 <ul>
10978
10979   <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso</a></li>
10980   <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso</a></li>
10981   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso debian-edu~7.0+edu0~a1-CD.iso</li>
10982
10983 </ul>
10984
10985 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 685ed76c1aa8e44b12d3fde21faf450b</p>
10986
10987 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 6c874de157024da13e115bab29c068080a11ec4c</p>
10988
10989 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
10990
10991 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
10992
10993       </div>
10994       <div class="tags">
10995
10996
10997         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10998
10999
11000       </div>
11001     </div>
11002     <div class="padding"></div>
11003
11004     <div class="entry">
11005       <div class="title">
11006         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian__the_Linux_distribution_of_choice_for_LEGO_designers_.html">Debian, the Linux distribution of choice for LEGO designers?</a>
11007       </div>
11008       <div class="date">
11009         11th May 2013
11010       </div>
11011       <div class="body">
11012         <P>In January,
11013 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
11014 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
11015 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
11016 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
11017 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
11018 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
11019 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
11020 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
11021 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
11022 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
11023 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
11024 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
11025
11026 <p><table>
11027 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/brickos">brickos</a></td><td>alternative OS for LEGO Mindstorms RCX. Supports development in C/C++</td></tr>
11028 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
11029 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libnxt">libnxt</a></td><td>utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NX</td></tr>
11030 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
11031 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
11032 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
11033 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/python-nxt">python-nxt</a></td><td>python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot</td></tr>
11034 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/python-nxt-filer">python-nxt-filer</a></td><td>simple GUI to manage files on a LEGO Mindstorms NXT</td></tr>
11035 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/scratch">scratch</a></td><td>easy to use programming environment for ages 8 and up</td></tr>
11036 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
11037 </table></p>
11038
11039 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
11040 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
11041 available in experimental.</p>
11042
11043 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
11044 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
11045 for LEGO designers.</p>
11046
11047       </div>
11048       <div class="tags">
11049
11050
11051         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
11052
11053
11054       </div>
11055     </div>
11056     <div class="padding"></div>
11057
11058     <div class="entry">
11059       <div class="title">
11060         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Wheezy_is_out___and_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_should_soon_follow___newinwheezy.html">Debian Wheezy is out - and Debian Edu / Skolelinux should soon follow! #newinwheezy</a>
11061       </div>
11062       <div class="date">
11063          5th May 2013
11064       </div>
11065       <div class="body">
11066         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
11067 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
11068 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
11069 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
11070 soon.</p>
11071
11072 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
11073 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
11074 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
11075 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
11076 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
11077 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
11078 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
11079 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
11080 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
11081 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
11082 Edu.</a>
11083
11084 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
11085 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
11086 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
11087 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
11088 follow.<p>
11089
11090       </div>
11091       <div class="tags">
11092
11093
11094         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11095
11096
11097       </div>
11098     </div>
11099     <div class="padding"></div>
11100
11101     <div class="entry">
11102       <div class="title">
11103         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">First alpha release of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
11104       </div>
11105       <div class="date">
11106         26th April 2013
11107       </div>
11108       <div class="body">
11109         <p>The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is still going strong and made
11110 its first Wheezy based release today.  This is the release
11111 announcement:</p>
11112
11113 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu ~7.0.0 alpha0 released
11114 2013-04-26</strong></p>
11115
11116 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux ~7.0.0
11117 edu alpha0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
11118
11119 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
11120
11121 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
11122 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
11123 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
11124 network. Immediatly after installation a school server running all
11125 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
11126 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
11127 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
11128 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
11129 installed via the network.</p>
11130
11131 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
11132 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
11133 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
11134
11135 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
11136
11137 <ul>
11138 <li>Everything which is new in Debian Wheezy, eg:
11139   <ul>
11140      <li>Linux kernel 3.2.x</li>
11141      <li>Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.8.4, GNOME 3.4, and LXDE 4
11142          (KDE is installed by default; to choose GNOME or LXDE: see
11143          manual.)</li>
11144      <li>Web browser Iceweasel 10 ESR</li>
11145      <li>LibreOffice 3.5.4</li>
11146      <li>LTSP 5.4.2</li>
11147      <li>GOsa 2.7.4</li>
11148      <li>CUPS print system 1.5.3</li>
11149      <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 12.01</li>
11150      <li>Music creator Rosegarden 12.04</li>
11151      <li>Image editor Gimp 2.8.2</li>
11152      <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.1</li>
11153      <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.11.3</li>
11154      <li>Scratch visual programming environment 1.4.0.6</li>
11155      <li>New version of debian-installer from Debian Wheezy, see
11156          <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual">installation
11157          manual</a> for more details.</li>
11158      <li>Debian Wheezy includes about 37000 packages available for
11159          installation.</li>
11160      <li>More information about Debian Wheezy 7.0 is provided in the
11161          <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/releasenotes">release notes</a> and the <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual">installation manual</a>.</li>
11162   </ul></li>
11163 </ul>
11164
11165 <p><strong>Documentation</strong></p>
11166 <ul>
11167 <li>The (<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy">English</a>) Debian Edu Wheezy Manual is fully translated to
11168     German, French, Italian and Danish. Partly translated versions exist
11169     for Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.</li>
11170 </ul>
11171
11172 <p><Strong>LDAP related changes</strong></p>
11173 <ul>
11174 <li>Slight changes to some objects and acls to have more types to
11175     choose from when adding systems in GOsa. Now systems can be of type
11176     server, workstation, printer, terminal or netdevice.</li>
11177 </ul>
11178
11179 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
11180 <ul>
11181 <li>LTSP clients start as diskless workstation / thin client can be
11182     configured via command line argument -- or individually adding an
11183     entry in lts.conf or LDAP.<li>
11184 <li>GOsa gui: Now some options that seemed to be available, but are non
11185     functional, are greyed out (or are not clickable). Some tabs are
11186     completely hidden to the end user, others even to the GOsa admin.</li>
11187 </ul>
11188
11189 <p><strong>Regressions</strong></p>
11190 <ul>
11191 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv) available
11192     yet.</li>
11193 </ul>
11194
11195 <p><strong>No updated artwork</strong></p>
11196
11197 <ul>
11198 <li>Updated artwork which is visible during installation, in the login
11199     screen and as desktop wallpaper is still missing or the same as we
11200     had for our Squeeze based release.</li>
11201 </ul>
11202
11203 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
11204
11205 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
11206 <ul>
11207 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
11208 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
11209 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</li>
11210 </ul>
11211
11212 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: c5e773ddafdaa4f48c409c682f598b6c</p>
11213
11214 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 25934fabb9b7d20235499a0a51f08ce6c54215f2</p>
11215
11216 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
11217
11218 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
11219
11220       </div>
11221       <div class="tags">
11222
11223
11224         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11225
11226
11227       </div>
11228     </div>
11229     <div class="padding"></div>
11230
11231     <div class="entry">
11232       <div class="title">
11233         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_developer_gathering_in_2013_take_place_in_Trondheim.html">First Debian Edu / Skolelinux developer gathering in 2013 take place in Trondheim</a>
11234       </div>
11235       <div class="date">
11236         16th April 2013
11237       </div>
11238       <div class="body">
11239         <p>This years first <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux /
11240 Debian Edu</a> developer gathering take place the coming weekend in Trondheim.
11241 Details about the gathering can be found
11242 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2013-04-19-21-Trondheim">on
11243 the FRiSK wiki</a>.  The dates are 19-21th of April 2013, and online
11244 participation for those unable to make it in person is very welcome,
11245 and I plan to participate online myself as I could not leave Oslo this
11246 weekend.</p>
11247
11248 <p>The focus of the gathering is to work on the web pages and project
11249 infrastructure, and to continue the work on the Wheezy based Debian
11250 Edu release.</p>
11251
11252 <p>See you on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu on irc.debian.org,</a> then?</p>
11253
11254       </div>
11255       <div class="tags">
11256
11257
11258         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11259
11260
11261       </div>
11262     </div>
11263     <div class="padding"></div>
11264
11265     <div class="entry">
11266       <div class="title">
11267         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_0_2_finally_in_the_Debian_archive.html">Isenkram 0.2 finally in the Debian archive</a>
11268       </div>
11269       <div class="date">
11270          3rd April 2013
11271       </div>
11272       <div class="body">
11273         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
11274 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
11275 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
11276 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
11277
11278 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
11279 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
11280 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
11281 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
11282 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
11283 BTS. :)</p>
11284
11285       </div>
11286       <div class="tags">
11287
11288
11289         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
11290
11291
11292       </div>
11293     </div>
11294     <div class="padding"></div>
11295
11296     <div class="entry">
11297       <div class="title">
11298         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Change_the_font__save_the_world__and_save_some_money_in_the_process_.html">Change the font, save the world (and save some money in the process)</a>
11299       </div>
11300       <div class="date">
11301         26th March 2013
11302       </div>
11303       <div class="body">
11304         <p>Would you like to help the environment and save money at the same
11305 time, without much sacrifice?  A small step could be to change the
11306 font you use when printing.</p>
11307
11308 <p>Three years ago,
11309 <a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/04/last-year-printer-comparison-website/">Ars
11310 Technica</a> reported how the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
11311 changed their default front from
11312 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial">Arial</a> to
11313 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Gothic">Century
11314 Gothic</a> to save money.  The Century Gothic font uses 30% less toner
11315 than Arial to print the same text.  In other word, you could cut your
11316 toner costs by 30% (or actually, increase your toner supply life time
11317 by more than 30%), by simply changing the default font used in your
11318 prints.</p>
11319
11320 <p>But it is not quite obvious how much one will save by switching.
11321 The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay said it used $100,000 per year
11322 on ink and toner cartridges, according to
11323 <a href="http://www.twincities.com/ci_14833097">a report from
11324 TwinCities.com</a>, and expected to save between $5,000 and $10,000
11325 per year by asking staff and students to use a different font.  Not
11326 all PDFs and documents are created internally, and those from external
11327 sources will most likely still use a different font.  Also, the
11328 Century Gothic font is slightly wider than Arial, and thus might use
11329 more sheets of paper to print the same text, so the total saving
11330 depend on the documents printed.</p>
11331
11332 <p>But it is definitely something to consider, if you want to reduce
11333 the amount of trash, decrease the amount of toner used in the world,
11334 and save some money in the process.</p>
11335
11336 <p>Update 2013-04-10: If you want to know how much ink/toner could be
11337 saved when switching between fonts, Inkfarm got a
11338 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/What-the-Font">service to calculate the
11339 difference between font pairs</a>.  They also
11340 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/Recommended-Ink-Saving-Fonts---">recommend
11341 which fonts to use</a> to save ink.  Check it out. :) While updating
11342 this blog post, I also came across a blog post from InkCloners,
11343 <a href="http://inkcloners.com/blog/ink-cartridges/change-fonts-to-save-ink-costs/">listing
11344 the fonts they recommend</a>, with Centory Gothic at the top.</p>
11345
11346       </div>
11347       <div class="tags">
11348
11349
11350         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11351
11352
11353       </div>
11354     </div>
11355     <div class="padding"></div>
11356
11357     <div class="entry">
11358       <div class="title">
11359         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_a_short_story_using_docbook_for_PDF__HTML_and_EPUB.html">Typesetting a short story using docbook for PDF, HTML and EPUB</a>
11360       </div>
11361       <div class="date">
11362         24th March 2013
11363       </div>
11364       <div class="body">
11365         <p>A few days ago, during a discussion in
11366 <a href="http://www.efn.no/">EFN</a> about interesting books to read
11367 about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
11368 the 1968 short story Kodémus by
11369 <a href="http://web2.gyldendal.no/toraage/">Tore Åge Bringsværd</a>
11370 came up.  The text was only available in old paper books, and thus not
11371 easily available for current and future generations.  Some of the
11372 people participating in the discussion contacted the author, and
11373 reported back 2013-03-19 that the author was OK with releasing the
11374 short story using a <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org/">Creative
11375 Commons</a> license.  The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
11376 were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.</p>
11377
11378 <p>As I already had some experience formatting text in my project to
11379 provide a Norwegian version of the Free Culture book by Lawrence
11380 Lessig, I chipped in and set up a
11381 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">DocBook</a> processing framework to
11382 generate PDF, HTML and EPUB version of the short story.  The tools to
11383 transform DocBook to different formats are already in my Linux
11384 distribution of choice, <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>, so
11385 all I had to do was to use the
11386 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a>,
11387 <a href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/epub/README">dbtoepub</a>
11388 and <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/xmlto/">xmlto</a> tools to do the
11389 conversion.  After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
11390 xsltproc/fop (aka
11391 <a href="http://wiki.docbook.org/DocBookXslStylesheets">docbook-xsl</a>),
11392 to get the copyright information to show up in the PDF and to get a
11393 nicer &lt;variablelist&gt; typesetting, but that is just a minor
11394 technical detail.</p>
11395
11396 <p>There were a few challenges, of course.  We want to typeset the
11397 short story to look like the original, and that require fairly good
11398 control over the layout.  The original short story have three
11399 parts/scenes separated by a single horizontally centred star (*), and
11400 the paragraphs do not contain only flowing text, but dialogs and text
11401 that started on a new line in the middle of the paragraph.</p>
11402
11403 <p>I initially solved the first challenge by using a paragraph with a
11404 single star in it, ie &lt;para&gt;*&lt;/para&gt;, but it made sure a
11405 placeholder indicated where the scene shifted.  This did not look too
11406 good without the centring.  The next approach was to create a new
11407 preprocessor directive &lt;?newscene?&gt;, mapping to "&lt;hr/&gt;"
11408 for HTML and "&lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;&lt;fo:leader
11409 leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;&lt;/fo:block&gt;"
11410 for FO/PDF output (did not try to implement this in dblatex, as we had
11411 switched at this time).  The HTML XSL file looked like this:</p>
11412
11413 <p><blockquote><pre>
11414 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
11415 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
11416   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
11417     &lt;hr/&gt;
11418   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
11419 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
11420 </pre></blockquote></p>
11421
11422 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
11423
11424 <p><blockquote><pre>
11425 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
11426 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
11427   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
11428     &lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;
11429       &lt;fo:leader leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;
11430     &lt;/fo:block&gt;
11431   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
11432 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
11433 </pre></blockquote></p>
11434
11435 <p>Finally, I came across the &lt;bridgehead&gt; tag, which seem to be
11436 a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced &lt;?newscene?&gt;
11437 with &lt;bridgehead&gt;*&lt;/bridgehead&gt;.  It isn't centred, but we
11438 can fix it with some XSL rule if the current visual layout isn't
11439 enough.</p>
11440
11441 <p>I did not find a good DocBook compliant way to solve the
11442 linebreak/paragraph challenge, so I ended up creating a new processor
11443 directive &lt;?linebreak?&gt;, mapping to &lt;br/&gt; in HTML, and
11444 &lt;fo:block/&gt; in FO/PDF.  I suspect there are better ways to do
11445 this, and welcome ideas and patches on github.  The HTML XSL file now
11446 look like this:</p>
11447
11448 <p><blockquote><pre>
11449 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
11450 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
11451   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
11452     &lt;br/&gt;
11453   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
11454 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
11455 </pre></blockquote></p>
11456
11457 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
11458
11459 <p><blockquote><pre>
11460 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
11461 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'
11462   xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"&gt;
11463   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
11464     &lt;fo:block/&gt;
11465   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
11466 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
11467 </pre></blockquote></p>
11468
11469 <p>One unsolved challenge is our wish to expose different ISBN numbers
11470 per publication format, while keeping all of them in some conditional
11471 structure in the DocBook source.  No idea how to do this, so we ended
11472 up listing all the ISBN numbers next to their format in the colophon
11473 page.</p>
11474
11475 <p>If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
11476 <a href="https://github.com/sickel/kodemus">source repository at
11477 github</a>
11478 (<a href="https://github.com/EFN/kodemus">future/new/official
11479 repository</a>).  We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
11480 days.</p>
11481
11482       </div>
11483       <div class="tags">
11484
11485
11486         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
11487
11488
11489       </div>
11490     </div>
11491     <div class="padding"></div>
11492
11493     <div class="entry">
11494       <div class="title">
11495         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux_6_got_a_video_review_from_Pcwizz.html">Skolelinux 6 got a video review from Pcwizz</a>
11496       </div>
11497       <div class="date">
11498         17th March 2013
11499       </div>
11500       <div class="body">
11501         <p>Via
11502 <a href="https://twitter.com/pcwizz/status/313044373262716930">twitter</a>
11503 I just discovered that <a href="http://pcwizz.net/">Pcwizz</a> have
11504 done a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPzTZ61Pcuc">video
11505 review</a> on Youtube of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
11506 / Debian Edu</a> version 6.  He installed the standalone profile and
11507 the video show a walk-through of of the menu content, demonstration of
11508 a few programs and his view of our distribution.</p>
11509
11510 <p>There is also some really nice quotes (transcribed by me, might
11511 have heard wrong).  While looking thought the Graphics menu:</p>
11512
11513 <blockquote>
11514 "Basically everything you ever need in a school environment."
11515 </blockquote>
11516
11517 <p>And as a general evaluation of the entire distribution:</p>
11518
11519 <blockquote>
11520 "So, yeah, a bit bloated.  It kept all the Debian stuff in there, just
11521 to keep it nice and GNU.  So, I do not want to go on about it, but
11522 lets give it 7 out of 10.  I am not going to use it.  That is because
11523 I am not deploying a school network.  There may be some mythical
11524 feature to help you deploy Skolelinux on a school network."
11525 </blockquote>
11526
11527 <p>To bad he did not test the server profile, and discovered the PXE
11528 installation option.  It make it possible to install only the main
11529 server from CD, and the rest of the machines via the net, and might be
11530 considered the mythical feature he talk about. :)</p>
11531
11532 <p>While looking through the menus, there is also this funny comment
11533 about the part of the K menu generated from the Debian menu subsystem:
11534
11535 <blockquote>
11536 "[The K menu] have a special Debian section for software that no-one
11537 is going to look at, because it contain lots of junky stuff that you
11538 actually don't need in the education distribution, but have just been
11539 included because it isn't stripped out for some reason."
11540 </blockquote>
11541
11542 <p>I guess it is yet another argument for merging the Debian menu and
11543 Gnome/KDE desktop menu entries into
11544 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/DebianMenuUsingDesktopEntries">one
11545 consistent menu system</a> instead of two incomplete and partly
11546 inconsistent menu systems.</p>
11547
11548 <p>The entire video is available below for those accepting iframe
11549 embedding:</p>
11550
11551 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wPzTZ61Pcuc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
11552
11553       </div>
11554       <div class="tags">
11555
11556
11557         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
11558
11559
11560       </div>
11561     </div>
11562     <div class="padding"></div>
11563
11564     <div class="entry">
11565       <div class="title">
11566         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_update_released.html">First Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze update released</a>
11567       </div>
11568       <div class="date">
11569          8th March 2013
11570       </div>
11571       <div class="body">
11572         <p>Last Sunday, 2013-03-03,, Holger Levsen announced the first update
11573 of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
11574 based on Debian Squeeze.  This is the first update since
11575 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
11576 initial release 2012-03-11</a>.  This is the
11577 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2013/03/msg00000.html">release
11578 announcement email from Holger</a>:</p>
11579
11580 <blockquote><p>Hi,</p>
11581
11582 <p>it's my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of Debian
11583 Edu 6.0.7+r1 ("Debian Edu Squeeze").</p>
11584
11585 <p>Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 is an incremental update to Debian Edu
11586 6.0.4+r0, containing all the changes between Debian 6.0.4 and 6.0.7 as
11587 well Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements. See below (in this
11588 mail) for the full list of (edu) changes.  Please see
11589 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311">http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311</a>
11590 for more information on "Debian Edu Squeeze".</p>
11591
11592 <p>Images are available for download at
11593 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/</a></p>
11594
11595 <p>md5sums:
11596 <br>1fe79eb4f0f9ae1c58fc318e26cc1e2e  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
11597 <br>a6ddd924a8bd9a1b5ca122e8fe1c34ec  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
11598 <br>ac6c72cd7925ccec51bfbf58e2a7c69c  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
11599
11600 <p>sha1sums:
11601 <br>a4b58233b672a99c7df8dc24fb6de3327654a5c3  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
11602 <br>9b524915e0ff2aa793f13d93123e5bd2bab2dbaa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
11603 <br>43997614893fc5e9e59ad6ce066b05d07fd836fa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
11604
11605 <p>These images are suitable for amd64+i386.</p>
11606
11607 <p>Changes for Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 Codename "Squeeze", released
11608 2013-03-03:</p>
11609
11610 <ul>
11611   <li>sitesummary was updated from 0.1.3 to 0.1.8
11612   <ul>
11613         <li>Make Nagios configuration more robust and efficient</li>
11614         <li>Comply with 3.X kernel</li>
11615   </ul></li>
11616   <li>debian-edu-doc from 1.4~20120310~6.0.4+r0 to 1.4~20130228~6.0.7+r1
11617   <ul>
11618         <li>Minor updates from the wiki</li>
11619         <li>Danish translation now complete</li>
11620   </ul></li>
11621   <li>debian-edu-config from 1.453 to 1.455
11622      <ul>
11623         <li>Fix /etc/hosts for LTSP diskless workstations. Closes: #699880</li>
11624         <li>Make ltsp_local_mount script work for multiple devices.</li>
11625         <li>Correct Kerberos user policy: don't expire password after 2 days.
11626                 Closes: #664596</li>
11627         <li>Handle '#' characters in the root or first users password.
11628                 Closes: #664976</li>
11629         <li>Fixes for gosa-sync:
11630            <ul>
11631                 <li>Don't fail if password contains "</li>
11632                 <li>Don't disclose new password string in syslog</li>
11633            </ul></li>
11634         <li>Fixes for gosa-create:
11635            <ul>
11636                 <li>Invalidate libnss cache before applying changes</li>
11637                 <li>Multiple failures during mass user import into GOsa²</li>
11638                 <li>gosa-netgroups plugin: don't erase entries of attribute type
11639                          "memberNisNetgroup". Closes: #687256</li>
11640                 <li>First user now uses the same Kerberos policy as all other users</li>
11641            </ul></li>
11642         <li>Add Danish web page</li>
11643     </ul>
11644   <li>debian-edu-install from 1.528 to 1.530
11645     <ul>
11646         <li>Improve preseeding support and documentation</li>
11647     </ul></li>
11648 </ul>
11649
11650 <p>End-user documentation in English is available at
11651 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/</a>
11652 - translations to French, Italian, Danish and German are available in
11653 the debian-edu-doc package. (Other languages could use your help!)</p>
11654
11655 <p>If you want to contribute to Debian Edu, please join our
11656 mailinglist
11657 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@lists.debian.org</a>!
11658 </p></blockquote>
11659
11660 <p>I am very happy to see the fruits of a year of hard work. :)</p>
11661
11662       </div>
11663       <div class="tags">
11664
11665
11666         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11667
11668
11669       </div>
11670     </div>
11671     <div class="padding"></div>
11672
11673     <div class="entry">
11674       <div class="title">
11675         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen___Complete_TV_station_organised_using_the_web.html">Frikanalen - Complete TV station organised using the web</a>
11676       </div>
11677       <div class="date">
11678          3rd March 2013
11679       </div>
11680       <div class="body">
11681         <p>Do you want to set up your own TV station, schedule videos and
11682 broadcast them on the air?  Using free software?  With video on demand
11683 support using
11684 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
11685 open standards</a>?  Included a web based video stream as well?  And
11686 administrate it all in your web browser from anywhere in the world?  A
11687 few years now the Norwegian public access TV-channel
11688 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> have been building a
11689 system to do just this.  The source code for the solution is licensed
11690 using the GNU LGPL, and
11691 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from github</a>.</p>
11692
11693 <p>The idea is simple.  You upload a video file over the web, and
11694 attach meta information to the file.  You select a time slot in the
11695 program schedule, and when the time come it is played on the air and
11696 in the web stream.  It is also made available in a video on demand
11697 solution for anyone to see it also outside its scheduled time.  All
11698 you need to run a TV station - using your web browser.</p>
11699
11700 <p>There are several parts to this web based solution.  I'll mention
11701 the three most important ones.  The first part is the database of
11702 videos and the schedule.  This is written in Django and include a REST
11703 API.  The current database is SQLite, but the plan is to migrate it to
11704 PostgreSQL.  At the moment this system can be tested on
11705 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/">beta.frikanalen.tv</a>.  The
11706 second part is the video playout, taking the schedule information from
11707 the database and providing a video stream to broadcast.  This is done
11708 using <a href="http://www.casparcg.com/">CasparCG from SVT</a> and
11709 <a href="http://www.mltframework.org/">Media Lovin' Toolkit</a>.  Video
11710 signal distribution is handled using
11711 <a href="http://www.ob-encoder.com/">Open Broadcast Encoder</a>.  The
11712 third part is the converter, handling the transformation of uploaded
11713 video files to a format useful for broadcasting, streaming and video
11714 on demand.  It is still very much work in progress, so it is not yet
11715 decided what it will end up using.  Note that the source of the latter
11716 two parts are not yet pushed to github.  The lead author want to clean
11717 them up a bit more first.</p>
11718
11719 <p>The development is coordinated on the
11720 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23frikanalen">#frikanalen IRC
11721 channel</a> (irc.freenode.net), and discussed on
11722 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/frikanalen">the
11723 frikanalen mailing list</a>. The lead developer is Benjamin Bruheim
11724 (phed on IRC).  Anyone is welcome to participate in the
11725 development.</p>
11726
11727       </div>
11728       <div class="tags">
11729
11730
11731         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
11732
11733
11734       </div>
11735     </div>
11736     <div class="padding"></div>
11737
11738     <div class="entry">
11739       <div class="title">
11740         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dr__Richard_Stallman__founder_of_Free_Software_Foundation__give_a_talk_in_Oslo_March_1st_2013.html">Dr. Richard Stallman, founder of Free Software Foundation, give a talk in Oslo March 1st 2013</a>
11741       </div>
11742       <div class="date">
11743         27th February 2013
11744       </div>
11745       <div class="body">
11746         <p>Dr. <a href="http://www.stallman.org/">Richard Stallman</a>,
11747 founder of <a href="http://www.fsf.org/">Free Software Foundation</a>,
11748 is giving <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">a
11749 talk in Oslo March 1st 2013 17:00 to 19:00</a>.  The event is public
11750 and organised by <a href="">Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG)</a>
11751 (where I am the chair of the board) and
11752 <a href="http://www.friprog.no/">The Norwegian Open Source Competence
11753 Center</a>.  The title of the talk is «The Free Software Movement and
11754 GNU», with this description:
11755
11756 <p><blockquote>
11757 The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users' freedom to
11758 cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software Movement
11759 developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the
11760 kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms possible.
11761 </blockquote></p>
11762
11763 <p>The meeting is open for everyone.  Due to space limitations, the
11764 doors opens for NUUG members at 16:15, and everyone else at 16:45.  I
11765 am really curious how many will show up.  See
11766 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">the event
11767 page</a> for the location details.</p>
11768
11769       </div>
11770       <div class="tags">
11771
11772
11773         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
11774
11775
11776       </div>
11777     </div>
11778     <div class="padding"></div>
11779
11780     <div class="entry">
11781       <div class="title">
11782         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikart___Free_Garmin_maps_for_European_countries_based_on_OpenStreetmap.html">Frikart - Free Garmin maps for European countries based on OpenStreetmap</a>
11783       </div>
11784       <div class="date">
11785         15th February 2013
11786       </div>
11787       <div class="body">
11788         <p>If you, like me, want an updated a map for your Garmin GPS, there is
11789 now a great source of free maps available from
11790 <a href="http://www.frikart.no/garmin/index.html">Frikart</a>.  To
11791 download a map, just click on the country you are interested in, and
11792 download the map type you want.  There are 8 different maps available,
11793 using different colours and data selection.  Pick one of Roadmap, Topo
11794 Summer, Topo Winter, Roadmap II, Topo Summer II, Topo Winter II,
11795 "Trails - overlay map" and "Cross country - overlay map" (see the web
11796 page for descriptions).</p>
11797
11798 <p>The maps are updated weekly, so if you find something wrong in the
11799 map you can just edit the
11800 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> map source
11801 (anyone can contribute) and fetch a fixed map a week later. :)</p>
11802
11803       </div>
11804       <div class="tags">
11805
11806
11807         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>.
11808
11809
11810       </div>
11811     </div>
11812     <div class="padding"></div>
11813
11814     <div class="entry">
11815       <div class="title">
11816         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html">"Electronic" paper invoices - using vCard in a QR code</a>
11817       </div>
11818       <div class="date">
11819         12th February 2013
11820       </div>
11821       <div class="body">
11822         <p>Here in Norway, electronic invoices are spreading, and the
11823 <a href="http://www.anskaffelser.no/e-handel/faktura">solution promoted
11824 by the Norwegian government</a> require that invoices are sent through
11825 one of the approved facilitators, and it is not possible to send
11826 electronic invoices without an agreement with one of these
11827 facilitators.  This seem like a needless limitation to be able to
11828 transfer invoice information between buyers and sellers.  My preferred
11829 solution would be to just transfer the invoice information directly
11830 between seller and buyer, for example using SMTP, or some HTTP based
11831 protocol like REST or SOAP.  But this might also be overkill, as the
11832 "electronic" information can be transferred using paper invoices too,
11833 using a simple bar code.  My bar code encoding of choice would be QR
11834 codes, as this encoding can be read by any smart phone out there.  The
11835 content of the code could be anything, but I would go with
11836 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard">the vCard format</a>, as
11837 it too is supported by a lot of computer equipment these days.</p>
11838
11839 <p>The vCard format support extentions, and the invoice specific
11840 information can be included using such extentions.  For example an
11841 invoice from SLX Debian Labs (picked because we
11842 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">ask
11843 for donations to the Debian Edu project</a> and thus have bank account
11844 information publicly available) for NOK 1000.00 could have these extra
11845 fields:</p>
11846
11847 <p><pre>
11848 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
11849 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
11850 X-INVOICE-KID:123412341234
11851 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
11852 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
11853 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
11854 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
11855 </pre></p>
11856
11857 <p>The X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER field was proposed in a stackoverflow
11858 answer regarding
11859 <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10045664/storing-bank-account-in-vcard-file">how
11860 to put bank account information into a vCard</a>.  For payments in
11861 Norway, either X-INVOICE-KID (payment ID) or X-INVOICE-MSG could be
11862 used to pass on information to the seller when paying the invoice.</p>
11863
11864 <p>The complete vCard could look like this:</p>
11865
11866 <p><pre>
11867 BEGIN:VCARD
11868 VERSION:2.1
11869 ORG:SLX Debian Labs Foundation
11870 ADR;WORK:;;Gunnar Schjelderups vei 29D;OSLO;;0485;Norway
11871 URL;WORK:http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/
11872 EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:sdl-styret@rt.nuug.no
11873 REV:20130212T095000Z
11874 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
11875 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
11876 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
11877 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
11878 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
11879 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
11880 END:VCARD
11881 </pre></p>
11882
11883 <p>The resulting QR code created using
11884 <a href="http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/">qrencode</a> would look
11885 like this, and should be readable (and thus checkable) by any smart
11886 phone, or for example the <a href="http://zbar.sourceforge.net/">zbar
11887 bar code reader</a> and feed right into the approval and accounting
11888 system.</p>
11889
11890 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-12-qr-invoice.png"></p>
11891
11892 <p>The extension fields will most likely not show up in any normal
11893 vCard reader, so those parts would have to go directly into a system
11894 handling invoices.  I am a bit unsure how vCards without name parts
11895 are handled, but a simple test indicate that this work just fine.</p>
11896
11897 <p><strong>Update 2013-02-12 11:30</strong>: Added KID to the proposal
11898 based on feedback from Sturle Sunde.</p>
11899
11900       </div>
11901       <div class="tags">
11902
11903
11904         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
11905
11906
11907       </div>
11908     </div>
11909     <div class="padding"></div>
11910
11911     <div class="entry">
11912       <div class="title">
11913         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sleep_until_morning___home_automation_for_the_kids.html">Sleep until morning - home automation for the kids</a>
11914       </div>
11915       <div class="date">
11916         10th February 2013
11917       </div>
11918       <div class="body">
11919         <p><img align="left" style="margin-right:25px;" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-10-morning-light.jpeg"></p>
11920
11921 <p>With kids in the house, one challenge is getting them to sleep
11922 during the night and wake up when it is morning.  I mean, when I
11923 believe it is morning, and not two hours earlier.  In our household we
11924 have decided that 07:00 is the turning point, but getting the kids to
11925 sleep until 07:00 is a small challenge every day.  They have adapted
11926 quite well, and rarely wake up at 05:00 any more, but some times wake
11927 up at times like 05:50, 06:15, 06:30 or 06:45, and it is hard to put
11928 the awake one to bed again without disturbing and waking the rest.
11929 And I understand perfectly well that they fail to sleep until 07:00
11930 some times, as there is no way for them to know if it is before or
11931 after the magic moment without coming and asking us parents.</p>
11932
11933 <p>But yesterday I came up with a method to solve this problem.  It
11934 involve home automation.  A few years ago I bought a
11935 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick">Tellstick</a> and RF
11936 switches at the local <a href="http://www.clasohlson.com/">Clas
11937 Ohlson</a> shop, allowing me to control lights and other electrical
11938 gadgets using my Linux server.  When I moved from the old flat to a
11939 small house, I put away all this equipment as most of the lighting in
11940 the house was not using wall sockets and thus not easy to connect to
11941 the gadgets I had.  But recently I bought a
11942 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick_net">Tellstick
11943 Net</a> to be able to read sensor input as well as control power
11944 sockets.  I want to control ovens in the basement to avoid the pipes
11945 to freeze, and monitor the humidity to detect flooding.  The default
11946 setup for Tellstick Net is to be controlled by the vendor web service,
11947 which to me is a security problem, but it is also possible to build
11948 ones own
11949 <a href="http://developer.telldus.com/blog/2012/03/02/help-us-develop-local-access-using-tellstick-net-build-your-own-firmware">firmware
11950 with local access</A> instead of being controlled by a Swedish
11951 company, thanks to the release of the GPL licensed firmware source
11952 code.  I plan to get that running before I let it control anything
11953 important.  But while working on this, one idea to make it easier for
11954 the kids came to me yesterday.  We can set up a night light controlled
11955 by the computer, and turn it automatically on at 07:00.  The kids can
11956 then check the light in the morning to know if they are supposed to
11957 get up or not.  They joined me in setting everything up, and I
11958 repeated the concept several times before bed times to make sure they
11959 remembered to check the light before getting up in the morning.</p>
11960
11961 <p>We tested it this morning, and all the kids stayed in bed until
11962 after 07:00, and every one of them commented on the fact that the
11963 "morning light" was turned on and signalled that the morning had
11964 arrived.  So this look like a success, and I am excited to see how
11965 this develops the next few days. :) I really hope this can allow us
11966 all to sleep a bit longer in the morning.</p>
11967
11968 <p>A nice advantage of this setup is that we can remote control when
11969 to tell the kids to get up.  We do not have to wait until 07:00, and
11970 can also delay it if we want to.</p>
11971
11972       </div>
11973       <div class="tags">
11974
11975
11976         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11977
11978
11979       </div>
11980     </div>
11981     <div class="padding"></div>
11982
11983     <div class="entry">
11984       <div class="title">
11985         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html">Bitcoin GUI now available from Debian/unstable (and Ubuntu/raring)</a>
11986       </div>
11987       <div class="date">
11988          2nd February 2013
11989       </div>
11990       <div class="body">
11991         <p>My
11992 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
11993 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
11994 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
11995 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
11996 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
11997 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
11998 version too.</p>
11999
12000 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
12001 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
12002 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
12003 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
12004 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
12005 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
12006 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
12007 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
12008
12009 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
12010 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
12011 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
12012 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
12013 it. :)</p>
12014
12015 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
12016 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
12017 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
12018
12019       </div>
12020       <div class="tags">
12021
12022
12023         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12024
12025
12026       </div>
12027     </div>
12028     <div class="padding"></div>
12029
12030     <div class="entry">
12031       <div class="title">
12032         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
12033       </div>
12034       <div class="date">
12035         22nd January 2013
12036       </div>
12037       <div class="body">
12038         <p>Yesterday, I
12039 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
12040 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
12041 pluggable hardware devices, which I
12042 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
12043 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
12044 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
12045 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
12046 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
12047 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
12048 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
12049 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
12050 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
12051 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
12052
12053 <pre>
12054 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
12055 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
12056 </pre>
12057
12058 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
12059 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
12060 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
12061 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
12062
12063 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
12064 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
12065 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
12066 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
12067 word.</p>
12068
12069 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
12070 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
12071 process.</p>
12072
12073 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
12074 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
12075
12076       </div>
12077       <div class="tags">
12078
12079
12080         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
12081
12082
12083       </div>
12084     </div>
12085     <div class="padding"></div>
12086
12087     <div class="entry">
12088       <div class="title">
12089         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">First prototype ready making hardware easier to use in Debian</a>
12090       </div>
12091       <div class="date">
12092         21st January 2013
12093       </div>
12094       <div class="body">
12095         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
12096 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
12097 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
12098 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
12099 it, fetch the
12100 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
12101 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
12102 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
12103 autostart script.</p>
12104
12105 <p>The design is simple:</p>
12106
12107 <ul>
12108
12109 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
12110 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
12111
12112 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
12113 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
12114 initially did.</li>
12115
12116 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
12117 the APT database, a database
12118 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
12119 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
12120
12121 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
12122 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
12123 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
12124 package or packages.</li>
12125
12126 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
12127 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
12128
12129 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
12130 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
12131
12132 </ul>
12133
12134 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
12135 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
12136 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
12137 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
12138
12139 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
12140 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
12141 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
12142 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
12143 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
12144
12145 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
12146 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
12147 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
12148 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
12149 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
12150 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
12151 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
12152 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
12153
12154 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
12155 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
12156 '<tt>svn checkout
12157 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
12158 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
12159 devscripts package.</p>
12160
12161 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
12162 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
12163 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
12164 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
12165 instructions</a> for details.</p>
12166
12167       </div>
12168       <div class="tags">
12169
12170
12171         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
12172
12173
12174       </div>
12175     </div>
12176     <div class="padding"></div>
12177
12178     <div class="entry">
12179       <div class="title">
12180         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">Thank you Thinkpad X41, for your long and trustworthy service</a>
12181       </div>
12182       <div class="date">
12183         19th January 2013
12184       </div>
12185       <div class="body">
12186         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
12187 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
12188 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
12189 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
12190 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
12191 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
12192 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
12193 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
12194 not a durable solution.
12195
12196 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
12197 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
12198
12199 <ul>
12200
12201 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
12202   than A4).</li>
12203 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
12204 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
12205 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
12206 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
12207 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
12208 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
12209 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
12210 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
12211 size).</li>
12212 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
12213   X.org packages.</li>
12214 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
12215   the time).
12216
12217 </ul>
12218
12219 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
12220 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
12221 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
12222 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
12223 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
12224 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
12225 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
12226 still be useful.</p>
12227
12228 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
12229 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
12230 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
12231 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
12232 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
12233 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
12234
12235       </div>
12236       <div class="tags">
12237
12238
12239         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12240
12241
12242       </div>
12243     </div>
12244     <div class="padding"></div>
12245
12246     <div class="entry">
12247       <div class="title">
12248         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_find_a_browser_plugin_supporting_a_given_MIME_type.html">How to find a browser plugin supporting a given MIME type</a>
12249       </div>
12250       <div class="date">
12251         18th January 2013
12252       </div>
12253       <div class="body">
12254         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
12255 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
12256 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
12257 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
12258 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
12259 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
12260 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
12261
12262 <pre>
12263 #!/usr/bin/python
12264 import sys
12265 import apt
12266 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
12267     cache = apt.Cache()
12268     cache.open(None)
12269     thepkgs = []
12270     for pkg in cache:
12271         version = pkg.candidate
12272         if version is None:
12273             version = pkg.installed
12274         if version is None:
12275             continue
12276         record = version.record
12277         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
12278             continue
12279         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
12280         for t in mime_types:
12281             t = t.rstrip().strip()
12282             if t == mimetype:
12283                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
12284     return thepkgs
12285 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
12286 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
12287     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
12288 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
12289 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
12290     print "  %s" %pkg
12291 </pre>
12292
12293 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
12294
12295 <pre>
12296 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
12297 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
12298   gecko-mediaplayer
12299 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
12300 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
12301   browser-plugin-gnash
12302 %
12303 </pre>
12304
12305 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
12306 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
12307 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
12308 anyone working on adding it?</p>
12309
12310 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
12311 request for icweasel support for this feature is
12312 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
12313 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
12314 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
12315 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
12316
12317       </div>
12318       <div class="tags">
12319
12320
12321         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12322
12323
12324       </div>
12325     </div>
12326     <div class="padding"></div>
12327
12328     <div class="entry">
12329       <div class="title">
12330         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">What is the most supported MIME type in Debian?</a>
12331       </div>
12332       <div class="date">
12333         16th January 2013
12334       </div>
12335       <div class="body">
12336         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
12337 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
12338 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
12339 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
12340 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
12341 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
12342 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
12343 downloaded by the browser.</p>
12344
12345 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
12346 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
12347 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
12348 can be found on the
12349 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
12350 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
12351 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
12352 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
12353 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
12354
12355 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
12356
12357 <pre>
12358   count MIME type
12359   ----- -----------------------
12360      32 text/plain
12361      30 audio/mpeg
12362      29 image/png
12363      28 image/jpeg
12364      27 application/ogg
12365      26 audio/x-mp3
12366      25 image/tiff
12367      25 image/gif
12368      22 image/bmp
12369      22 audio/x-wav
12370      20 audio/x-flac
12371      19 audio/x-mpegurl
12372      18 video/x-ms-asf
12373      18 audio/x-musepack
12374      18 audio/x-mpeg
12375      18 application/x-ogg
12376      17 video/mpeg
12377      17 audio/x-scpls
12378      17 audio/ogg
12379      16 video/x-ms-wmv
12380 </pre>
12381
12382 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
12383
12384 <pre>
12385   count MIME type
12386   ----- -----------------------
12387      33 text/plain
12388      32 image/png
12389      32 image/jpeg
12390      29 audio/mpeg
12391      27 image/gif
12392      26 image/tiff
12393      26 application/ogg
12394      25 audio/x-mp3
12395      22 image/bmp
12396      21 audio/x-wav
12397      19 audio/x-mpegurl
12398      19 audio/x-mpeg
12399      18 video/mpeg
12400      18 audio/x-scpls
12401      18 audio/x-flac
12402      18 application/x-ogg
12403      17 video/x-ms-asf
12404      17 text/html
12405      17 audio/x-musepack
12406      16 image/x-xbitmap
12407 </pre>
12408
12409 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
12410
12411 <pre>
12412   count MIME type
12413   ----- -----------------------
12414      31 text/plain
12415      31 image/png
12416      31 image/jpeg
12417      29 audio/mpeg
12418      28 application/ogg
12419      27 image/gif
12420      26 image/tiff
12421      26 audio/x-mp3
12422      23 audio/x-wav
12423      22 image/bmp
12424      21 audio/x-flac
12425      20 audio/x-mpegurl
12426      19 audio/x-mpeg
12427      18 video/x-ms-asf
12428      18 video/mpeg
12429      18 audio/x-scpls
12430      18 application/x-ogg
12431      17 audio/x-musepack
12432      16 video/x-ms-wmv
12433      16 video/x-msvideo
12434 </pre>
12435
12436 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
12437 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
12438 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
12439 issues.</p>
12440
12441 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
12442 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
12443
12444       </div>
12445       <div class="tags">
12446
12447
12448         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12449
12450
12451       </div>
12452     </div>
12453     <div class="padding"></div>
12454
12455     <div class="entry">
12456       <div class="title">
12457         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_modalias_info_to_find_packages_handling_my_hardware.html">Using modalias info to find packages handling my hardware</a>
12458       </div>
12459       <div class="date">
12460         15th January 2013
12461       </div>
12462       <div class="body">
12463         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
12464 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
12465 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
12466 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
12467 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
12468 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
12469 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
12470 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
12471 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
12472 packages.</p>
12473
12474 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
12475 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
12476 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
12477 modalias.</p>
12478
12479 <p><blockquote>
12480 Package: package-name
12481 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
12482 </blockquote></p>
12483
12484 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
12485 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
12486
12487 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
12488 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
12489
12490 <p><blockquote>
12491 Package: cheese
12492 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
12493 </blockquote></p>
12494
12495 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
12496 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
12497
12498 <p><blockquote>
12499 Package: pcmciautils
12500 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
12501 </blockquote></p>
12502
12503 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
12504 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
12505
12506 <p><blockquote>
12507 Package: colorhug-client
12508 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
12509 </blockquote></p>
12510
12511 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
12512 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
12513 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
12514
12515 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
12516 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
12517 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
12518 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
12519 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
12520 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
12521 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
12522 Raring.</p>
12523
12524 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
12525 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
12526 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
12527 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
12528 try the
12529 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
12530 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
12531 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
12532 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
12533
12534 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
12535 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
12536
12537 <p><blockquote>
12538 % ./hw-support-lookup
12539 <br>yubikey-personalization
12540 <br>%
12541 </blockquote></p>
12542
12543 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
12544 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
12545
12546 <p><blockquote>
12547 % ./hw-support-lookup
12548 <br>pcmciautils
12549 <br>%
12550 </blockquote></p>
12551
12552 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
12553 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
12554 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
12555
12556 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
12557 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
12558 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
12559 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
12560 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
12561 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
12562 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
12563 see if it work.</p>
12564
12565 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
12566 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
12567 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
12568 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
12569
12570       </div>
12571       <div class="tags">
12572
12573
12574         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
12575
12576
12577       </div>
12578     </div>
12579     <div class="padding"></div>
12580
12581     <div class="entry">
12582       <div class="title">
12583         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">Modalias strings - a practical way to map "stuff" to hardware</a>
12584       </div>
12585       <div class="date">
12586         14th January 2013
12587       </div>
12588       <div class="body">
12589         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
12590 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
12591 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
12592 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
12593 in
12594 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
12595 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
12596
12597 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
12598
12599 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
12600 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
12601 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
12602 &lt;URL: <a href="http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/26132/how-to-assign-usb-driver-to-device">http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/26132/how-to-assign-usb-driver-to-device</a> &gt;,
12603 &lt;URL: <a href="http://code.metager.de/source/history/linux/stable/scripts/mod/file2alias.c">http://code.metager.de/source/history/linux/stable/scripts/mod/file2alias.c</a> &gt; and
12604 &lt;URL: <a href="http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/dmidecode/dmidecode.c?root=dmidecode&view=markup">http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/dmidecode/dmidecode.c?root=dmidecode&view=markup</a> &gt;.
12605
12606 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
12607 this shell script:</p>
12608
12609 <pre>
12610 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
12611 </pre>
12612
12613 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
12614 using modinfo:</p>
12615
12616 <pre>
12617 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
12618 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
12619 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
12620 %
12621 </pre>
12622
12623 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
12624
12625 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
12626 Bridge memory controller:</p>
12627
12628 <p><blockquote>
12629 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
12630 </blockquote></p>
12631
12632 <p>This represent these values:</p>
12633
12634 <pre>
12635  v   00008086  (vendor)
12636  d   00002770  (device)
12637  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
12638  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
12639  bc  06        (bus class)
12640  sc  00        (bus subclass)
12641  i   00        (interface)
12642 </pre>
12643
12644 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
12645 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
12646 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
12647 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
12648
12649 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
12650 means.</p>
12651
12652 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
12653
12654 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
12655 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
12656
12657 <p><blockquote>
12658 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
12659 </blockquote></p>
12660
12661 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
12662
12663 <pre>
12664  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
12665  p    0001  (device product)
12666  d    0206  (bcddevice)
12667  dc     09  (device class)
12668  dsc    00  (device subclass)
12669  dp     00  (device protocol)
12670  ic     09  (interface class)
12671  isc    00  (interface subclass)
12672  ip     00  (interface protocol)
12673 </pre>
12674
12675 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
12676 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
12677 these alias entries show up:</p>
12678
12679 <p><blockquote>
12680 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
12681 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
12682 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
12683 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
12684 </blockquote></p>
12685
12686 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
12687 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
12688 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
12689
12690 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
12691
12692 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
12693 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
12694
12695 <p><blockquote>
12696 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
12697 </blockquote></p>
12698
12699 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
12700
12701 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
12702
12703 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
12704 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
12705 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
12706
12707 <p><blockquote>
12708 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
12709 </blockquote></p>
12710
12711 <p>The values present are</p>
12712
12713 <pre>
12714  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
12715  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
12716  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
12717  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
12718  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
12719  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
12720  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
12721  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
12722  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
12723  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
12724  ct   10             (chassis type)
12725  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
12726 </pre>
12727
12728 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
12729 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
12730
12731 <pre>
12732   3 Desktop
12733   4 Low Profile Desktop
12734   5 Pizza Box
12735   6 Mini Tower
12736   7 Tower
12737   8 Portable
12738   9 Laptop
12739  10 Notebook
12740  11 Hand Held
12741  12 Docking Station
12742  13 All In One
12743  14 Sub Notebook
12744  15 Space-saving
12745  16 Lunch Box
12746  17 Main Server Chassis
12747  18 Expansion Chassis
12748  19 Sub Chassis
12749  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
12750  21 Peripheral Chassis
12751  22 RAID Chassis
12752  23 Rack Mount Chassis
12753  24 Sealed-case PC
12754  25 Multi-system
12755  26 CompactPCI
12756  27 AdvancedTCA
12757  28 Blade
12758  29 Blade Enclosing
12759 </pre>
12760
12761 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
12762 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
12763 claim it is a desktop.</p>
12764
12765 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
12766
12767 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
12768 test machine:</p>
12769
12770 <p><blockquote>
12771 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
12772 </blockquote></p>
12773
12774 <p>The values present are</p>
12775
12776 <pre>
12777   ty  01  (type)
12778   pr  00  (prototype)
12779   id  00  (id)
12780   ex  00  (extra)
12781 </pre>
12782
12783 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
12784 the valid values are.</p>
12785
12786 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
12787
12788 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
12789 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
12790 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
12791 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
12792 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
12793 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
12794 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
12795
12796 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
12797
12798 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
12799 one can use the following shell script:</p>
12800
12801 <pre>
12802   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
12803     echo "$id" ; \
12804     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
12805   done
12806 </pre>
12807
12808 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
12809 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
12810
12811 <pre>
12812   acpi:ACPI0003:
12813     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
12814   acpi:device:
12815   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
12816   acpi:IBM0068:
12817     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
12818     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
12819     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
12820     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
12821   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
12822     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
12823     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
12824     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
12825   [...]
12826 </pre>
12827
12828 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
12829 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
12830 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
12831 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
12832
12833 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
12834 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
12835 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
12836
12837       </div>
12838       <div class="tags">
12839
12840
12841         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
12842
12843
12844       </div>
12845     </div>
12846     <div class="padding"></div>
12847
12848     <div class="entry">
12849       <div class="title">
12850         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html">Moved the pymissile Debian packaging to collab-maint</a>
12851       </div>
12852       <div class="date">
12853         10th January 2013
12854       </div>
12855       <div class="body">
12856         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
12857 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
12858 Launcher and updated the Debian package
12859 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
12860 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
12861 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
12862 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
12863 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
12864 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
12865 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
12866 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
12867 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
12868 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
12869 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
12870 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
12871 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
12872 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
12873 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
12874
12875       </div>
12876       <div class="tags">
12877
12878
12879         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
12880
12881
12882       </div>
12883     </div>
12884     <div class="padding"></div>
12885
12886     <div class="entry">
12887       <div class="title">
12888         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">Lets make hardware dongles easier to use in Debian</a>
12889       </div>
12890       <div class="date">
12891          9th January 2013
12892       </div>
12893       <div class="body">
12894         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
12895 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
12896 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
12897 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
12898 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
12899 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
12900 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
12901 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
12902 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
12903 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
12904 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
12905
12906 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
12907 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
12908 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
12909 simple:
12910
12911 <ul>
12912
12913 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
12914   starting when a user log in.</li>
12915
12916 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
12917   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
12918
12919 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
12920   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
12921   packages.</li>
12922
12923 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
12924   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
12925
12926 </ul>
12927
12928 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
12929 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
12930 discover database to find packages and
12931 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
12932 packages.</p>
12933
12934 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
12935 draft package is now checked into
12936 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
12937 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
12938 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
12939 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
12940 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
12941 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
12942 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
12943 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
12944 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
12945 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
12946 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
12947 because of the freeze).</p>
12948
12949 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
12950 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
12951 inserted):</p>
12952
12953 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
12954
12955 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
12956 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
12957 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
12958
12959 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
12960 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
12961 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
12962 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
12963 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
12964 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
12965 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
12966
12967 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
12968 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
12969 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
12970 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
12971 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
12972 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
12973 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
12974 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
12975 not be installed?</p>
12976
12977 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
12978 please send me an email. :)</p>
12979
12980       </div>
12981       <div class="tags">
12982
12983
12984         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
12985
12986
12987       </div>
12988     </div>
12989     <div class="padding"></div>
12990
12991     <div class="entry">
12992       <div class="title">
12993         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">New IRC channel for LEGO designers using Debian</a>
12994       </div>
12995       <div class="date">
12996          2nd January 2013
12997       </div>
12998       <div class="body">
12999         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
13000 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
13001 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
13002 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
13003 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
13004 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
13005 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
13006 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
13007 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
13008 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
13009
13010 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
13011 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
13012 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
13013
13014       </div>
13015       <div class="tags">
13016
13017
13018         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
13019
13020
13021       </div>
13022     </div>
13023     <div class="padding"></div>
13024
13025     <div class="entry">
13026       <div class="title">
13027         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html">A Christmas present for Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
13028       </div>
13029       <div class="date">
13030         28th December 2012
13031       </div>
13032       <div class="body">
13033         <p>I was happy to discover a few days ago that the
13034 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
13035 project also this year received a Christmas present from Another
13036 Agency in Trondheim.  NOK 1000,- showed up on our donation account
13037 December 24th.  I want to express our thanks for this very welcome
13038 present.  As the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is very short on
13039 funding these days, and thus lack the money to do regular developer
13040 gatherings, this donation was most welcome.  One developer gathering
13041 cost around NOK 15&nbsp;000,-, so we need quite a lot more to keep the
13042 development pace we want.  Thus, I hope their example this year is
13043 followed by many others. :)</p>
13044
13045 <p>The public list of donors can be found on
13046 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">the
13047 donation page</a> for the project, which also contain instructions if
13048 you want to donate to the project.</p>
13049
13050       </div>
13051       <div class="tags">
13052
13053
13054         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13055
13056
13057       </div>
13058     </div>
13059     <div class="padding"></div>
13060
13061     <div class="entry">
13062       <div class="title">
13063         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">How to backport bitcoin-qt version 0.7.2-2 to Debian Squeeze</a>
13064       </div>
13065       <div class="date">
13066         25th December 2012
13067       </div>
13068       <div class="body">
13069         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
13070 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
13071
13072 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
13073 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
13074 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
13075 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
13076 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
13077 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
13078 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
13079 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
13080 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
13081 name.</p>
13082
13083 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
13084 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
13085 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
13086
13087 <blockquote><pre>
13088 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
13089 cd bitcoin
13090 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
13091 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
13092 </pre></blockquote>
13093
13094 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
13095 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
13096 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
13097 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
13098 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
13099 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
13100 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
13101 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
13102 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
13103
13104 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
13105 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
13106 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
13107
13108       </div>
13109       <div class="tags">
13110
13111
13112         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13113
13114
13115       </div>
13116     </div>
13117     <div class="padding"></div>
13118
13119     <div class="entry">
13120       <div class="title">
13121         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
13122       </div>
13123       <div class="date">
13124         21st December 2012
13125       </div>
13126       <div class="body">
13127         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
13128 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
13129 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
13130 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
13131 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
13132 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
13133 is now maintained by a
13134 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
13135 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
13136 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
13137 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
13138 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
13139 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
13140 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
13141 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
13142 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
13143 Corallo in a
13144 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
13145 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
13146 Debian package.</p>
13147
13148 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
13149 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
13150 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
13151 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
13152 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
13153 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
13154 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
13155 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
13156 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
13157 new version to unstable.
13158
13159 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
13160 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
13161 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
13162 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
13163 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
13164 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
13165 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
13166 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
13167 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
13168 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
13169 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
13170 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
13171 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
13172 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
13173 have not tested them.</p>
13174
13175 <p>My
13176 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
13177 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
13178 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
13179 years ago, as can be
13180 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
13181 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
13182 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
13183 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
13184 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
13185 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
13186 the same address as last time,
13187 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
13188
13189       </div>
13190       <div class="tags">
13191
13192
13193         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13194
13195
13196       </div>
13197     </div>
13198     <div class="padding"></div>
13199
13200     <div class="entry">
13201       <div class="title">
13202         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ledger___double_entry_accounting_using_text_based_storage_format.html">Ledger - double-entry accounting using text based storage format</a>
13203       </div>
13204       <div class="date">
13205         18th December 2012
13206       </div>
13207       <div class="body">
13208         <p>A few days ago I came across
13209 <a href="http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/hledger/">a blog post from Joey
13210 Hess</a> describing <a href="http://ledger-cli.org/">ledger</a> and
13211 hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting.  I found it
13212 interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
13213 accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
13214 the different web based systems we use.  I find it hard to find what I
13215 look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
13216 the systems.  Ledger seem different.  The accounting data is kept in
13217 text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
13218
13219 are at least <a href="https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Ports">five
13220 different implementations</a> able to read the format.  An example
13221 entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
13222 generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:</p>
13223
13224 <blockquote><pre>
13225 2004-05-27 Book Store
13226       Expenses:Books                 $20.00
13227       Liabilities:Visa
13228 </pre></blockquote>
13229
13230 <p>The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
13231 look for others using it.  I found blog posts from
13232 <a href="http://blog.spang.cc/posts/hledger_rocks_my_world/">Christine
13233 Spang</a>,
13234 <a href="http://bugsplat.info/2010-05-23-keeping-finances-with-ledger.html">Pete
13235 Keen</a>,
13236 <a href="http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2010/11/06/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/">Andrew
13237 Cantino</a> and
13238 <a href="http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/2012/11/29/command-line-double-entry-accounting/">Ronald
13239 Ip</a> describing how they use it, as well as a post from
13240 <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ledger-cli/r0oWjwbQ9Bo">Bradley
13241 M. Kuhn</a> at the Software Freedom Conservancy.  All seemed like good
13242 recommendations fitting my need.</p>
13243
13244 <p>The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/ledger.html">ledger</a>
13245 package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
13246 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/haskell-hledger.html">hledger</a>
13247 package only is available in Debian Sid.  As I use Squeeze, ledger
13248 seemed the best choice to get started.</p>
13249
13250 <p>To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
13251 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/tools/lodo2ledger">web scraper</a> for
13252 <a href="http://www.lodo.no/">LODO</a>, the accounting system used by
13253 the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> association, and started to
13254 play with the data set.  I'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
13255 am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
13256 using the "<tt>ledger balance</tt>" command.  But I will have to
13257 gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
13258 for the organisations I am involved in.</p>
13259
13260       </div>
13261       <div class="tags">
13262
13263
13264         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
13265
13266
13267       </div>
13268     </div>
13269     <div class="padding"></div>
13270
13271     <div class="entry">
13272       <div class="title">
13273         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Scripting_the_Cerebrum_bofhd_user_administration_system_using_XML_RPC.html">Scripting the Cerebrum/bofhd user administration system using XML-RPC</a>
13274       </div>
13275       <div class="date">
13276          6th December 2012
13277       </div>
13278       <div class="body">
13279         <p>Where I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of
13280 Oslo</a>, we use the
13281 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/cerebrum/">Cerebrum user
13282 administration system</a> to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
13283 I've known since the system was written that the server is providing
13284 an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC">XML-RPC</a> API, but
13285 I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we
13286 always use the bofh command line client at work.  Until today.  I want
13287 to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up
13288 virtual machines.  Here are a few notes on how to use it with
13289 Python.</p>
13290
13291 <p>I started by looking at the source of the Java
13292 <a href="http://cerebrum.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cerebrum/trunk/cerebrum/clients/jbofh/">bofh
13293 client</a>, to figure out how it connected to the API server.  I also
13294 googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
13295 <a href="http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XML-RPC-HOWTO/xmlrpc-howto-python.html">a
13296 simple example in</a> the XML-RPC howto.</p>
13297
13298 <p>This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
13299 commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
13300 user currently logged in:</p>
13301
13302 <blockquote><pre>
13303 #!/usr/bin/env python
13304 import getpass
13305 import xmlrpclib
13306 server_url = 'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:8000';
13307 username = getpass.getuser()
13308 password = getpass.getpass()
13309 server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
13310 #print server.get_commands(sessionid)
13311 sessionid = server.login(username, password)
13312 print server.run_command(sessionid, "user_info", username)
13313 result = server.logout(sessionid)
13314 print result
13315 </pre></blockquote>
13316
13317 <p>Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
13318 and DHCP updates I wanted to do.</p>
13319
13320       </div>
13321       <div class="tags">
13322
13323
13324         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
13325
13326
13327       </div>
13328     </div>
13329     <div class="padding"></div>
13330
13331     <div class="entry">
13332       <div class="title">
13333         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_the_value_of_copyright_taxed_.html">Why isn't the value of copyright taxed?</a>
13334       </div>
13335       <div class="date">
13336         17th November 2012
13337       </div>
13338       <div class="body">
13339         <p>While working on a
13340 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Norwegian
13341 translation of the Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig</a> (76% done),
13342 which cover the problems with todays copyright law and how it stifles
13343 creativity, one idea occurred to me.  The idea is to get the tax
13344 office to help make more works enter the public domain and also help
13345 make it easier to clear rights for using copyrighted works.</p>
13346
13347 <p>I mentioned this idea briefly during Yesterdays
13348 <a href="http://www.farmann.no/2012/11/14/john-perry-barlow-in-oslo-friday-nov-16
13349 -15-30-19-00/">presentation
13350 by John Perry Barlow</a>, and concluded that it was best to put it
13351 in writing for a wider audience.  The idea is not really based on the
13352 argument that copyrighted works are "intellectual property", as the
13353 core requirement is that copyrighted work have value for the copyright
13354 holder and the tax office like to collect their share from any value
13355 controlled by the citizens in a country.  I'm sharing the idea here to
13356 let others consider it and perhaps shoot it down with a fresh set of
13357 arguments.</p>
13358
13359 <p>Most valuables are taxed by the government.  At least here in
13360 Norway, the amount of money you have, the value of our land property,
13361 the value of your house, the value of your car, the value of our
13362 stocks and other valuables are all added together.  If the tax value
13363 of these values exceed your debt, you have to pay the tax office some
13364 taxes for these values.  And copyrighted work have value.  It have
13365 value for the rights holder, who can earn money selling access to the
13366 work.  But it is not included in the tax calculations?  Why not?</p>
13367
13368 <p>If the government want to tax copyrighted works, it would want to
13369 maintain a database of all the copyrighted works and who are the
13370 rights holders for a given works, to be able to associate the works
13371 value to the right citizen or company for tax purposes.  If such
13372 database exist, it will become a lot easier to find out who to talk to
13373 for clearing permissions to use a copyrighted work, which is a very
13374 hard operation with todays copyright law.  To ensure that copyright
13375 holders keep the database up-to-date, it would have to become a
13376 requirement to be able to collect money for granting access to
13377 copyrighted works that the work is listed in the database with the
13378 correct right holder.</p>
13379
13380 <p>If copyright causes copyright holders to have to pay more taxes,
13381 they will have a small incentive to "disown" their copyright, and let
13382 the work enter the public domain. For works with several right holders
13383 one of the right holders could state (and get it registered in the
13384 database) that she do not need to be consulted when clearing rights to
13385 use the work in question and thus will not get any income from that
13386 work.  Stating this would have to be impossible to revert and stop the
13387 tax office from adding the value of that work to the given citizens
13388 tax calculation.  I assume the copyright law would stay the same,
13389 allowing creators to pick a license of their choosing, and also
13390 allowing them to put their work directly in the public domain.  The
13391 existence of such database will make it even easier to clear rights,
13392 and if the right holders listed in the database is taxed, this system
13393 would increase the amount of works that enter the public domain.</p>
13394
13395 <p>The effect would be that the tax office help to make it easier to
13396 get rights to use the works that have not yet entered the public
13397 domain and help to get more work into the public domain and .</p>
13398
13399 <p>Why have such taxing not happened yet?  I am sure the tax office
13400 would like to tax copyrighted work values if they could.</p>
13401
13402       </div>
13403       <div class="tags">
13404
13405
13406         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
13407
13408
13409       </div>
13410     </div>
13411     <div class="padding"></div>
13412
13413     <div class="entry">
13414       <div class="title">
13415         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html">Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß</a>
13416       </div>
13417       <div class="date">
13418         14th November 2012
13419       </div>
13420       <div class="body">
13421         <p>Here is another interview with one of the people in the <a
13422 href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
13423 community.  I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
13424 if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
13425 After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
13426 the people behind the German
13427 "<a href="http://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/">IT-Zukunft Schule</a>"
13428 project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview.  Give a warm
13429 welcome to Angela Fuß. :)</p>
13430
13431 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13432
13433 <p>I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
13434 Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my
13435 two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.
13436
13437 <p>At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
13438 the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
13439 Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
13440 growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
13441 system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-).  We are also
13442 in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.</p>
13443
13444 <p>In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
13445 nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there.  Besides
13446 that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
13447 working in our own school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" in North
13448 Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
13449 relationship management and the communication processes in the
13450 project.</p>
13451
13452 <p>Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
13453 and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
13454 and a yoga teacher.</p>
13455
13456 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
13457 project?</strong></p>
13458
13459 <p>I fell in love with Mike ;-).</p>
13460
13461 <p>Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
13462 Free Software.  At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
13463 founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
13464 their IT environment.  Often when Mike came home from working at the
13465 newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
13466 several points where the communication with the schools head or the
13467 teachers did not work.  So we were clear that he would not work for
13468 one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
13469 between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
13470 parents.</p>
13471
13472 <p>Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
13473 started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
13474 schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
13475 Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
13476 networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
13477 Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
13478 Germany.</p>
13479
13480 <p>For information about our school project you can read
13481 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">the
13482 interview with Mike Gabriel</a>.</p>
13483
13484 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
13485 Edu?</strong></p>
13486
13487 <p>First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
13488 answer comes rather from a social point of view.</p>
13489
13490 <p>The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
13491 and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
13492 background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
13493 and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
13494 something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
13495 ;-). This is of course a user experience.  What I also get as a big
13496 advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
13497 works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
13498 teachers, parents...</p>
13499
13500 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
13501 Edu?</strong></p>
13502
13503 <p>I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
13504 Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
13505
13506 <p>What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
13507 the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
13508 marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
13509 schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
13510 I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
13511
13512 <p>Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
13513 do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
13514 democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
13515 and helpful.  I am also missing some kind of contact between the
13516 Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
13517 level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
13518 different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
13519
13520 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13521
13522 <p>On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
13523 on.  As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
13524 LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
13525 my N900 running with Maemo.</p>
13526
13527 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13528 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13529
13530 <p>I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft
13531 Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
13532 schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
13533 that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
13534 strategy has three crucial pillars:</p>
13535
13536 <ul>
13537
13538 <li>We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
13539 concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
13540 kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.</li>
13541
13542 <li>Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
13543 are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
13544 beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
13545 they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
13546 they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
13547 needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
13548 we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.</li>
13549
13550 <li>Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
13551 co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
13552 contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
13553 offer to become more and more independent from us.</li>
13554
13555 </ul>
13556
13557       </div>
13558       <div class="tags">
13559
13560
13561         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
13562
13563
13564       </div>
13565     </div>
13566     <div class="padding"></div>
13567
13568     <div class="entry">
13569       <div class="title">
13570         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_European_Central_Bank__ECB__take_a_look_at_bitcoin.html">The European Central Bank (ECB) take a look at bitcoin</a>
13571       </div>
13572       <div class="date">
13573          4th November 2012
13574       </div>
13575       <div class="body">
13576         <p>Slashdot just ran a story about the European Central Bank (ECB)
13577 <a href="http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemes201210en.pdf">releasing
13578 a report (PDF)</a> about virtual currencies and
13579 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>.  It is interesting to
13580 see how a member of the bitcoin community
13581 <a href="http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/10/30/the-ecb-report-on-bitcoin-and-virtual-currencies.html">receive
13582 the report</a>.  As for the future, I suspect the central banks and
13583 the governments will outlaw bitcoin if it gain any popularity, to avoid
13584 competition.  My thoughts go to the
13585 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wörgl">Wörgl experiment</a> with
13586 negative inflation on cash which was such a success that it was
13587 terminated by the Austrian National Bank in 1933.  A successful
13588 alternative would be a threat to the current money system and gain
13589 powerful forces to work against it.</p>
13590
13591 <p>While checking out the current status of bitcoin, I also discovered
13592 that the community already seem to have
13593 <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/27/3271637/bitcoin-savings-trust-pyramid-scheme-shuts-down">experienced
13594 its first pyramid game / Ponzi scheme</a>.  Not very surprising, given
13595 how members of "small" communities tend to trust each other.  I guess
13596 enterprising crocks will try again and again, as they do anywhere
13597 wealth is available.</p>
13598
13599       </div>
13600       <div class="tags">
13601
13602
13603         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
13604
13605
13606       </div>
13607     </div>
13608     <div class="padding"></div>
13609
13610     <div class="entry">
13611       <div class="title">
13612         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/12_years_of_outages___summarised_by_Stuart_Kendrick.html">12 years of outages - summarised by Stuart Kendrick</a>
13613       </div>
13614       <div class="date">
13615         26th October 2012
13616       </div>
13617       <div class="body">
13618         <p>I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
13619 looking after the computers, mostly on the unix side, but in general
13620 all over the place.  I am also a member (and currently leader) of
13621 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG association</a>, which in turn
13622 make me a member of <a href="http://www.usenix.org/">USENIX</a>.  NUUG
13623 is an member organisation for us in Norway interested in free
13624 software, open standards and unix like operating systems, and USENIX
13625 is a US based member organisation with similar targets.  And thanks to
13626 these memberships, I get all issues of the great USENIX magazine
13627 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">;login:</a> in the
13628 mail several times a year.  The magazine is great, and I read most of
13629 it every time.</p>
13630
13631 <p>In the last issue of the USENIX magazine ;login:, there is an
13632 article by <a href="http://www.skendric.com/">Stuart Kendrick</a> from
13633 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center titled
13634 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/october-2012-volume-37-number-5/what-takes-us-down">What
13635 Takes Us Down</a>" (longer version also
13636 <a href="http://www.skendric.com/problem/incident-analysis/2012-06-30/What-Takes-Us-Down.pdf">available
13637 from his own site</a>), where he report what he found when he
13638 processed the outage reports (both planned and unplanned) from the
13639 last twelve years and classified them according to cause, time of day,
13640 etc etc.  The article is a good read to get some empirical data on
13641 what kind of problems affect a data centre, but what really inspired
13642 me was the kind of reporting they had put in place since 2000.<p>
13643
13644 <p>The centre set up a mailing list, and started to send fairly
13645 standardised messages to this list when a outage was planned or when
13646 it already occurred, to announce the plan and get feedback on the
13647 assumtions on scope and user impact.  Here is the two example from the
13648 article: First the unplanned outage:
13649
13650 <blockquote><pre>
13651 Subject:     Exchange 2003 Cluster Issues
13652 Severity:    Critical (Unplanned)
13653 Start:       Monday, May 7, 2012, 11:58
13654 End:         Monday, May 7, 2012, 12:38
13655 Duration:    40 minutes
13656 Scope:       Exchange 2003
13657 Description: The HTTPS service on the Exchange cluster crashed, triggering
13658              a cluster failover.
13659
13660 User Impact: During this period, all Exchange users were unable to
13661              access e-mail. Zimbra users were unaffected.
13662 Technician:  [xxx]
13663 </pre></blockquote>
13664
13665 Next the planned outage:
13666
13667 <blockquote><pre>
13668 Subject:     H Building Switch Upgrades
13669 Severity:    Major (Planned)
13670 Start:       Saturday, June 16, 2012, 06:00
13671 End:         Saturday, June 16, 2012, 16:00
13672 Duration:    10 hours
13673 Scope:       H2 Transport
13674 Description: Currently, Catalyst 4006s provide 10/100 Ethernet to end-
13675              stations. We will replace these with newer Catalyst
13676              4510s.
13677 User Impact: All users on H2 will be isolated from the network during
13678              this work. Afterward, they will have gigabit
13679              connectivity.
13680 Technician:  [xxx]
13681 </pre></blockquote>
13682
13683 <p>He notes in his article that the date formats and other fields have
13684 been a bit too free form to make it easy to automatically process them
13685 into a database for further analysis, and I would have used ISO 8601
13686 dates myself to make it easier to process (in other words I would ask
13687 people to write '2012-06-16 06:00 +0000' instead of the start time
13688 format listed above).  There are also other issues with the format
13689 that could be improved, read the article for the details.</p>
13690
13691 <p>I find the idea of standardising outage messages seem to be such a
13692 good idea that I would like to get it implemented here at the
13693 university too.  We do register
13694 <a href="http://www.uio.no/tjenester/it/aktuelt/planlagte-tjenesteavbrudd/">planned
13695 changes and outages in a calendar</a>, and report the to a mailing
13696 list, but we do not do so in a structured format and there is not a
13697 report to the same location for unplanned outages.  Perhaps something
13698 for other sites to consider too?</p>
13699
13700       </div>
13701       <div class="tags">
13702
13703
13704         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix</a>.
13705
13706
13707       </div>
13708     </div>
13709     <div class="padding"></div>
13710
13711     <div class="entry">
13712       <div class="title">
13713         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Amazon_steal_books_from_customer_and_throw_out_her_out_without_any_explanation.html">Amazon steal books from customer and throw out her out without any explanation</a>
13714       </div>
13715       <div class="date">
13716         22nd October 2012
13717       </div>
13718       <div class="body">
13719         <p>A blog post from Martin Bekkelund today tell the story of
13720 <a href="http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/">how
13721 Amazon erased the books from a customer's kindle, locked the account
13722 and refuse to tell the customer why</a>.  If a real book store did
13723 this to a customer, it would be called breaking into private property
13724 and theft.  The story has spread around the net today.  A bit more
13725 background information is available in Norwegian from
13726 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904658/hun-ble-kastet-ut-av-amazon">digi.no</a>.
13727 It is no surprise that digital restriction mechanisms (DRM) are used
13728 this way, as it has been warned about such abuse since DRM was
13729 introduced many years back.  And Amazon proved in 2009 that it was
13730 willing to
13731 <a href="http://boingboing.net/2009/07/20/amazons-orwellian-de.html">
13732 break into customers equipment and remove the books</a> people had
13733 bought, when it removed the book 1984 by George Orwell from all the
13734 customers who had bought it.  From the official comments, it even
13735 sounded like
13736 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html">Amazon
13737 would never do that again</a>.  And here we are, three years
13738 later.</p>
13739
13740 <p>And thought this action is
13741 <a href="http://www.itavisen.no/904648/forbrukerraadet-helt-haarreisende">against
13742 Norwegian regulations and law</a>, it is according to the terms of use
13743 as written by Amazon, and it is hard to hold Amazon accountable to
13744 Norwegian laws.  It is just yet another example of unacceptable terms
13745 of use on the web, and how they are used to remove customer
13746 rights.</p>
13747
13748 <p>Luckily for electronic books, there are alternatives without
13749 unacceptable terms.  For example
13750 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about 40,000
13751 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a> (1,652
13752 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The Internet
13753 Archive</a> (3,641,797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which
13754 can read by anyone and shared with anyone.</p>
13755
13756 <p>Update 2012-10-23: This story broke in the morning on Monday. In
13757 the evening after the story had spread all across the Internet, Amazon
13758 restored the account of the user, as reported by
13759 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904675/helomvending-fra-amazon">digi.no</a>
13760 and <a href="http://nrk.no/kultur-og-underholdning/1.8368487">NRK</a>.
13761 Apparently public pressure work.  The story from Martin have seen
13762 several twitter messages per minute the last 24 hours, which is quite
13763 a lot, and is still drawing a lot of attention.  But even when the
13764 account is restored, the fundamental problem still exist.  I recommend
13765 reading two opinions from
13766 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm">Simon
13767 Phipps</a> and
13768 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/10/is-amazon-playing-fair/index.htm">Glen
13769 Moody</a> if you want to learn more about the fundamentals and more
13770 details about the original story.</p>
13771
13772       </div>
13773       <div class="tags">
13774
13775
13776         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
13777
13778
13779       </div>
13780     </div>
13781     <div class="padding"></div>
13782
13783     <div class="entry">
13784       <div class="title">
13785         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_fight_for_freedom_and_privacy.html">The fight for freedom and privacy</a>
13786       </div>
13787       <div class="date">
13788         18th October 2012
13789       </div>
13790       <div class="body">
13791         <p>Civil liberties and privacy in the western world are going down the
13792 drain, and it is hard to fight against it.  I try to do my best, but
13793 time is limited.  I hope you do your best too.  A few years ago I came
13794 across a marvellous drawing by
13795 <a href="http://www.claybennett.com/about.html">Clay Bennett</a>
13796 visualising some of what is going on.
13797
13798 <p><a href="http://www.claybennett.com/pages/security_fence.html">
13799 <img src="http://www.claybennett.com/images/archivetoons/security_fence.jpg"></a></p>
13800
13801 <blockquote>
13802 «They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
13803 safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.» - Benjamin Franklin
13804 </blockquote>
13805
13806 <p>Do you feel safe at the airport?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when
13807 you see a surveillance camera?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when you
13808 leave electronic traces of your behaviour and opinions?  I do not.  I
13809 just remember <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon">the
13810 Panopticon</a>, and can not help to think that we are slowly
13811 transforming our society to a huge Panopticon on our own.</p>
13812
13813       </div>
13814       <div class="tags">
13815
13816
13817         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
13818
13819
13820       </div>
13821     </div>
13822     <div class="padding"></div>
13823
13824     <div class="entry">
13825       <div class="title">
13826         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColonHelp_produser_sue_WordPress_to_silence_critic.html">ColonHelp produser sue WordPress to silence critic</a>
13827       </div>
13828       <div class="date">
13829         12th October 2012
13830       </div>
13831       <div class="body">
13832         <p>Thanks to a blog post by
13833 <a href="http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.no/2012/10/a-shitstorm-is-comming.html">Eddy
13834 Petrișor</a>, I became aware of yet another "alternative medicine"
13835 company using legal intimidation tactics to scare off critics.
13836 According to the originating blog post about the detox "cure"
13837 <a href="http://insulaindoielii.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/colon-help-sues-wordpress/">ColonHelp
13838 and its producers Zenyth Pharmaceuticals actions</a>, the producer
13839 sues Wordpress to get rid of the critical information.  To check if
13840 the story was for real, I contacted Automattic, the company behind
13841 wordpress.com, and they reply was "We can confirm that Zenyth is
13842 seeking a court order against WordPress / Automattic.  However, we
13843 don't believe the Terms of Service have been violated in this
13844 matter".</p>
13845
13846 <p>The story seem to be simply that a blogger checked the scientific
13847 foundation for a popular health product in Rumania, ColonHelp, and
13848 reported that there was no reason at all to believe it improved the
13849 health of its users.  This caused the company behind the product,
13850 Zenyth Pharmaceuticals, to use legal intimidation to try to silence
13851 the critic, instead of presenting its views and scientific foundation
13852 to argue its side.</p>
13853
13854 <p>This is the usual story, and the Zenyth Pharmaceuticals company
13855 deserve everyone to know how it failed to act properly.  Lets hope the
13856 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect">Streisand
13857 effect</a> can make it rethink its strategy.</p>
13858
13859 <p>What is the harm, you might think.  I suggest you take a look at
13860 <a href="http://www.whatstheharm.net/detoxification.html">a list of
13861 victims of detoxification</a>.</p>
13862
13863       </div>
13864       <div class="tags">
13865
13866
13867         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis</a>.
13868
13869
13870       </div>
13871     </div>
13872     <div class="padding"></div>
13873
13874     <div class="entry">
13875       <div class="title">
13876         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_is_your_local_library_collecting_the__wrong__computer_books_.html">Why is your local library collecting the "wrong" computer books?</a>
13877       </div>
13878       <div class="date">
13879          3rd October 2012
13880       </div>
13881       <div class="body">
13882         <p>I just read the blog post from Tim Retout
13883 <a href="http://retout.co.uk/blog/2012/10/02/the-library-challenge">about
13884 the computer science book collection available in his local
13885 library</a>, and just wanted to share my comment on his theory about
13886 computer books becoming obsolete so soon.  That is part of the reason
13887 why the selection is so sad in almost any local library (it is in mine
13888 too), but I believe the major contributing factor is that the people
13889 buying books to the library have no way to know a good and future
13890 computer classic from trash.  And they need to know which one will
13891 become a classic in the future, as they would normally buy one of the
13892 recently published books.</p>
13893
13894 <p>During my university years, I worked for a while at the university
13895 library, and even there the person in charge of buying computer
13896 related books (and in fact any natural science related book), did not
13897 know enough about computers to make a good educated guess.  Once, just
13898 before Christmas, they had some leftover money on the book budget and
13899 I was asked if I could pick out a lot of computer books in the
13900 university book store, for the library to buy for their collection.  I
13901 had a great time picking all the books I dreamt of buying and reading,
13902 and the books I knew were classics (like most of the
13903 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens">Stevens
13904 collection</a>).  I picked several of the generic O'Reilly books (ie
13905 documenting protocols, formats and systems, not specific versions of
13906 products) and stayed away from the 'teach yourself X in N days' class.
13907 I had a great time, and probably picked out more than a hundred books
13908 for the library that evening.</p>
13909
13910 <p>The sad fact is that there is no way a overworked librarian is
13911 going to know that for example
13912 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming">The
13913 Practice of Programming</a> is a must-have in any computer library,
13914 and they will most of the time end up picking the wrong books to buy.
13915 Perhaps you can help your local library make better choices by giving
13916 the suggestions for books to get?  I know they would love to hear from
13917 you, even if their budget might block them from getting your favourite
13918 book right away.</p>
13919
13920       </div>
13921       <div class="tags">
13922
13923
13924         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13925
13926
13927       </div>
13928     </div>
13929     <div class="padding"></div>
13930
13931     <div class="entry">
13932       <div class="title">
13933         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Seventy_percent_done_with_Norwegian_docbook_version_of_Free_Culture.html">Seventy percent done with Norwegian docbook version of Free Culture</a>
13934       </div>
13935       <div class="date">
13936         23rd September 2012
13937       </div>
13938       <div class="body">
13939         <p>Since this summer, I have worked in my spare time on a Norwegian <a
13940 href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book <a
13941 href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
13942 The reason is that this book is a great primer on what problems exist
13943 in the current copyright laws, and I want it to be available also for
13944 those that are reluctant do read an English book.
13945
13946 When I started, I
13947 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
13948 for volunteers</a> to help me, but too few have volunteered so far,
13949 and progress is a bit slow.  Anyway, today I broken the 70 percent
13950 mark for the first rough translation.  At the moment, less than 700
13951 strings (paragraphs, index terms, titles) are left to translate.  With
13952 my current progress of 10-20 strings per day, it will take a while to
13953 complete the translation.  This graph show the updated progress:</p>
13954
13955 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
13956
13957 <p>Progress have slowed down lately due to family and work
13958 commitments.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out
13959 the project files currently available from
13960 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
13961
13962 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
13963 the updated
13964 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
13965 and
13966 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
13967 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
13968 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
13969 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
13970
13971       </div>
13972       <div class="tags">
13973
13974
13975         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
13976
13977
13978       </div>
13979     </div>
13980     <div class="padding"></div>
13981
13982     <div class="entry">
13983       <div class="title">
13984         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html">Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda</a>
13985       </div>
13986       <div class="date">
13987         17th September 2012
13988       </div>
13989       <div class="body">
13990         <p>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
13991 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
13992 community, I finally found time to wrap up another.  This time it is
13993 Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
13994 this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
13995 administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
13996 conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.</p>
13997
13998 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13999
14000 <p>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
14001 in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
14002 university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
14003 Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
14004 IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
14005 got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
14006 labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
14007 the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
14008 training is anyway very important</p>
14009
14010 <p>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
14011 <a href="http://www.spse.ch/">SPSE school</a> (secondary) is a very
14012 special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
14013 all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
14014 recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
14015
14016 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
14017 project?</strong></p>
14018
14019 <p>Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
14020 already several years ago. But since the system was still not
14021 Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
14022 use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
14023 next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
14024 hole.</p>
14025
14026 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
14027 Edu?</strong></p>
14028
14029 <p>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
14030 very generous for help and hints.  Chat help is crucial, together with
14031 the mailing list.  Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
14032 engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
14033 and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
14034 can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
14035 platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
14036 head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
14037 hassle.</p>
14038
14039 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
14040 Edu?</strong></p>
14041
14042 <p>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
14043 flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
14044 there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
14045 need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
14046 devices that have specific software packages for another specific
14047 distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
14048 Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
14049 and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)</p>
14050
14051 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
14052
14053 <p>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
14054 mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
14055 combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
14056 <a href="http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html">Perceus</a>
14057 has the same...</p>
14058
14059 <p>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
14060 only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
14061 something breaks.  Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
14062 statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.</p>
14063
14064 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
14065 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
14066
14067 <P>I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
14068 cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
14069 just because they are normally not open to change.</p>
14070
14071 <p>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
14072 to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
14073 don't.</p>
14074
14075 <p>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
14076 laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
14077 we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
14078 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
14079 reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
14080 repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
14081 Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.</p>
14082
14083       </div>
14084       <div class="tags">
14085
14086
14087         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
14088
14089
14090       </div>
14091     </div>
14092     <div class="padding"></div>
14093
14094     <div class="entry">
14095       <div class="title">
14096         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html">IETF activity to standardise video codec</a>
14097       </div>
14098       <div class="date">
14099         15th September 2012
14100       </div>
14101       <div class="body">
14102         <p>After the
14103 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">Opus
14104 codec made</a> it into <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> as
14105 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716</a>, I had a look
14106 to see if there is any activity in IETF to standardise a video codec
14107 too, and I was happy to discover that there is some activity in this
14108 area.  A non-"working group" mailing list
14109 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/video-codec">video-codec</a>
14110 was
14111 <a href="http://ietf.10.n7.nabble.com/New-Non-WG-Mailing-List-video-codec-Video-codec-BoF-discussion-list-td119548.html">created 2012-08-20</a>.  It is intended to discuss the topic and if a
14112 formal working group should be formed.</p>
14113
14114 <p>I look forward to see how this plays out.  There is already
14115 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/video-codec/current/msg00003.html">an
14116 email from someone</a> in the MPEG group at ISO asking people to
14117 participate in the ISO group.  Given how ISO failed with OOXML and given
14118 that it so far (as far as I can remember) only have produced
14119 multimedia formats requiring royalty payments, I suspect
14120 joining the ISO group would be a complete waste of time, but I am not
14121 involved in any codec work and my opinion will not matter much.</p>
14122
14123 <p>If one of my readers is involved with codec work, I hope she will
14124 join this work to standardise a royalty free video codec within
14125 IETF.</p>
14126
14127       </div>
14128       <div class="tags">
14129
14130
14131         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
14132
14133
14134       </div>
14135     </div>
14136     <div class="padding"></div>
14137
14138     <div class="entry">
14139       <div class="title">
14140         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">IETF standardize its first multimedia codec: Opus</a>
14141       </div>
14142       <div class="date">
14143         12th September 2012
14144       </div>
14145       <div class="body">
14146         <p>Yesterday, <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> announced the
14147 publication of of
14148 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716, the Definition
14149 of the Opus Audio Codec</a>, a low latency, variable bandwidth, codec
14150 intended for both VoIP, film and music.  This is the first time, as
14151 far as I know, that IETF have standardized a multimedia codec.  In
14152 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3533">RFC 3533</a>, IETF
14153 standardized the OGG container format, and it has proven to be a great
14154 royalty free container for audio, video and movies.  I hope IETF will
14155 continue to standardize more royalty free codeces, after ISO and MPEG
14156 have proven incapable of securing everyone equal rights to publish
14157 multimedia content on the Internet.</p>
14158
14159 <p>IETF require two interoperating independent implementations to
14160 ratify a standard, and have so far ensured to only standardize royalty
14161 free specifications.  Both are key factors to allow everyone (rich and
14162 poor), to compete on equal terms on the Internet.</p>
14163
14164 <p>Visit the <a href="http://opus-codec.org/">Opus project page</a> if
14165 you want to learn more about the solution.</p>
14166
14167       </div>
14168       <div class="tags">
14169
14170
14171         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
14172
14173
14174       </div>
14175     </div>
14176     <div class="padding"></div>
14177
14178     <div class="entry">
14179       <div class="title">
14180         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Git repository for song book for Computer Scientists</a>
14181       </div>
14182       <div class="date">
14183          7th September 2012
14184       </div>
14185       <div class="body">
14186         <p>As I
14187 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
14188 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
14189 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
14190 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
14191 repository for the project</a>.</p>
14192
14193 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
14194 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
14195 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
14196 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
14197
14198 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
14199 PostScript formats at
14200 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
14201 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
14202
14203       </div>
14204       <div class="tags">
14205
14206
14207         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
14208
14209
14210       </div>
14211     </div>
14212     <div class="padding"></div>
14213
14214     <div class="entry">
14215       <div class="title">
14216         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_forced_Microsoft_to_open_Office__and_don_t_forget_Officeshots_.html">Free software forced Microsoft to open Office (and don't forget Officeshots)</a>
14217       </div>
14218       <div class="date">
14219         23rd August 2012
14220       </div>
14221       <div class="body">
14222         <p>I came across a great comment from Simon Phipps today, about how
14223 <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/how-microsoft-was-forced-open-office-200233">Microsoft
14224 have been forced to open Office</a>, and it made me remember and
14225 revisit the great site
14226 <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">officeshots</a> which allow you
14227 to check out how different programs present the ODF file format.  I
14228 recommend both to those of my readers interested in ODF. :)</p>
14229
14230       </div>
14231       <div class="tags">
14232
14233
14234         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
14235
14236
14237       </div>
14238     </div>
14239     <div class="padding"></div>
14240
14241     <div class="entry">
14242       <div class="title">
14243         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_way_there_with_translated_docbook_version_of_Free_Culture.html">Half way there with translated docbook version of Free Culture</a>
14244       </div>
14245       <div class="date">
14246         17th August 2012
14247       </div>
14248       <div class="body">
14249         <p>In my spare time, I currently work on a Norwegian
14250 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
14251 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
14252 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law
14253 I can give to my parents and others that are reluctant to read an
14254 English book.  It is a marvellous set of examples on how the ever
14255 expanding copyright regulations hurt culture and society.  When the
14256 translation is done, I hope to find funding to print and ship a copy
14257 to all the members of the Norwegian parliament, before they sit down
14258 to debate the latest revisions to the Norwegian copyright law.  This
14259 summer I
14260 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
14261 for volunteers</a> to help me, and I have been able to secure the
14262 valuable contribution from at least one other Norwegian.</p>
14263
14264 <p>Two days ago, we finally broke the 50% mark.  Then more than 50% of
14265 the number of strings to translate (normally paragraphs, but also
14266 titles and index entries are also counted).  All parts from the
14267 beginning up to and including chapter four is translated.  So is
14268 chapters six, seven and the conclusion.  I created a graph to show the
14269 progress:</p>
14270
14271 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
14272
14273 <p>The number of strings to translate increase as I insert the index
14274 entries into the docbook.  They were missing with the docbook version
14275 I initially started with.  There are still quite a few index entries
14276 missing, but everyone starting with A, B, O, Z and Y are done.  I
14277 currently focus on completing the index entries, to get a complete
14278 english version of the docbook source.</p>
14279
14280 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
14281 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
14282 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
14283 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
14284 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
14285 around?  I am sure there are some legal terms that are unfamiliar to
14286 me.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out the
14287 project files currently available from <a
14288 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
14289
14290 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
14291 the updated
14292 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
14293 and
14294 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
14295 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
14296 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
14297 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
14298
14299       </div>
14300       <div class="tags">
14301
14302
14303         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
14304
14305
14306       </div>
14307     </div>
14308     <div class="padding"></div>
14309
14310     <div class="entry">
14311       <div class="title">
14312         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Notes_on_language_codes_for_Norwegian_docbook_processing___.html">Notes on language codes for Norwegian docbook processing...</a>
14313       </div>
14314       <div class="date">
14315         10th August 2012
14316       </div>
14317       <div class="body">
14318         <p>In <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> one can specify
14319 the language used at the top, and the processing pipeline will use
14320 this information to pick the correct translations for 'chapter', 'see
14321 also', 'index' etc.  And for most languages used with docbook, I guess
14322 this work just fine.  For example a German user can start the document
14323 with &lt;book lang="de"&gt;, and the document will show up with the
14324 correct content with any of the docbook processors.  This is not the
14325 case for the language
14326 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html">I
14327 am working with at the moment</a>, Norwegian Bokmål.</p>
14328
14329 <p>For a while, I was confused about which language code to use,
14330 because I was unable to find any language code that would work across
14331 all tools.  I am currently testing dblatex, xmlto, docbook-xsl, and
14332 dbtoepub, and they do not handle Norwegian Bokmål the same way.  Some
14333 of them do not handle it at all.</p>
14334
14335 <p>A bit of background information is probably needed to understand
14336 this mess.  Norwegian is not one, but two written variants.  The
14337 variants are Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål.  There are three
14338 two letter language codes associated with these languages, Norwegian
14339 is 'no', Norwegian Nynorsk is 'nn' and Norwegian Bokmål is 'nb'.
14340 Historically the 'no' language code was used for Norwegian Bokmål, but
14341 many years ago this was found to be å bad idea, and the recommendation
14342 is to use the most specific language code instead, to avoid confusion.
14343 In the transition period it is a good idea to make sure 'no' was an
14344 alias for 'nb'.</p>
14345
14346 <p>Back to docbook processing tools in Debian.  The dblatex tool only
14347 understand 'nn'.  There are translations for 'no', but not 'nb' (BTS
14348 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/684391">#684391</a>), but due to a bug
14349 (BTS <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">#682936</a>) the 'no'
14350 language code is not recognised.  The docbook-xsl tool chain only
14351 recognise 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The xmlto tool only recognise
14352 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The end result that there is no language
14353 code I can use to get the docbook file working with all of these tools
14354 at the same time. :(</p>
14355
14356 <p>The correct solution is to use &lt;book lang="nb"&gt;, but it will
14357 take time before that will work with all the free software docbook
14358 processors. :(</p>
14359
14360 <p>Oh, the joy of well integrated tools. :/</p>
14361
14362       </div>
14363       <div class="tags">
14364
14365
14366         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
14367
14368
14369       </div>
14370     </div>
14371     <div class="padding"></div>
14372
14373     <div class="entry">
14374       <div class="title">
14375         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html">Best way to create a docbook book?</a>
14376       </div>
14377       <div class="date">
14378         31st July 2012
14379       </div>
14380       <div class="body">
14381         <p>I tried to send this text to the
14382 <a href="https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/">docbook-apps
14383 mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org</a>, but it only accept messages
14384 from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
14385 bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
14386 try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
14387 out.</p>
14388
14389 <p>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
14390 learning curve at the moment.</p>
14391
14392 <p>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
14393 translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
14394 docbook to handle the process.  The files to build the book are
14395 available from
14396 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.
14397 The book got around 400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
14398 index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
14399 software docbook processors.  My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
14400 Squeeze.</p>
14401
14402 <p>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
14403 tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
14404 formats.  I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
14405 problems.</p>
14406
14407 <ul>
14408
14409 <li>Using dblatex, the &lt;part&gt; handling is not the way I want to,
14410    as &lt;/part&gt; do not really end the &lt;part&gt;. (See
14411    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683166">BTS report #683166</a>), the
14412    xetex backend (needed to process UTF-8) give incorrect hyphens in
14413    index references spanning several pages (See
14414    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682901">BTS report #682901</a>), and
14415    I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
14416    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">BTS report #682936</a>).</li>
14417
14418 <li>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
14419    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683163">BTS report
14420    #683163</a>).</li>
14421
14422 <li>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
14423    show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
14424    footnote and text body, see
14425    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683197">BTS report #683197</a>), and
14426    fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
14427    refs listed are not right).</li>
14428
14429 <li>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.</li>
14430
14431 <li>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
14432    index problems the xmlto + fop processing.</li>
14433
14434 </ul>
14435
14436 <p>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
14437 of this book?  Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
14438 experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?</p>
14439
14440 <p>What about HTML and EPUB versions?</p>
14441
14442       </div>
14443       <div class="tags">
14444
14445
14446         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>.
14447
14448
14449       </div>
14450     </div>
14451     <div class="padding"></div>
14452
14453     <div class="entry">
14454       <div class="title">
14455         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html">Free Culture in Norwegian - 5 chapters done, 74 percent left to do</a>
14456       </div>
14457       <div class="date">
14458         21st July 2012
14459       </div>
14460       <div class="body">
14461         <p>I reported earlier that I am working on
14462 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">a
14463 norwegian version</a> of the book
14464 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
14465 Progress is good, and yesterday I got a major contribution from Anders
14466 Hagen Jarmund completing chapter six.  The source files as well as a
14467 PDF and EPUB version of this book are available from
14468 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
14469
14470 <p>I am happy to report that the draft for the first two chapters
14471 (preface, introduction) is complete, and three other chapters are also
14472 completely translated.  This completes 26 percent of the number of
14473 strings (equivalent to paragraphs) in the book, and there is thus 74
14474 percent left to translate.  A graph of the progress is present at the
14475 bottom of the github project page.  There is still room for more
14476 contributors.  Get in touch or send github pull requests with fixes if
14477 you got time and are willing to help make this book make it to
14478 print. :)</p>
14479
14480 <p>The book translation framework could also be a good basis for other
14481 translations, if you want the book to be available in your
14482 language.</p>
14483
14484       </div>
14485       <div class="tags">
14486
14487
14488         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
14489
14490
14491       </div>
14492     </div>
14493     <div class="padding"></div>
14494
14495     <div class="entry">
14496       <div class="title">
14497         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Call_for_help_from_docbook_expert_to_tag_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig.html">Call for help from docbook expert to tag Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig</a>
14498       </div>
14499       <div class="date">
14500         16th July 2012
14501       </div>
14502       <div class="body">
14503         <p>I am currently working on a
14504 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">project
14505 to translate</a> the book
14506 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig
14507 to Norwegian.  And the source we base our translation on is the
14508 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook">docbook</a> version, to
14509 allow us to use po4a and .po files to handle the translation, and for
14510 this to work well the docbook source document need to be properly
14511 tagged.  The source files of this project is available from
14512 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
14513
14514 <p>The problem is that the docbook source have flaws, and we have
14515 no-one involved in the project that is a docbook expert.  Is there a
14516 docbook expert somewhere that is interested in helping us create a
14517 well tagged docbook version of the book, and adjust our build process
14518 for the PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book?  This will provide a
14519 well tagged English version (our source document), and make it a lot
14520 easier for us to create a good Norwegian version.  If you can and want
14521 to help, please get in touch with me or fork the github project and
14522 send pull requests with fixes. :)</p>
14523
14524       </div>
14525       <div class="tags">
14526
14527
14528         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
14529
14530
14531       </div>
14532     </div>
14533     <div class="padding"></div>
14534
14535     <div class="entry">
14536       <div class="title">
14537         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html">Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg</a>
14538       </div>
14539       <div class="date">
14540          9th July 2012
14541       </div>
14542       <div class="body">
14543         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
14544 Skolelinux</a> project have users all over the globe, but until
14545 recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
14546 country Sweden.  This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
14547 this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
14548 to adjust and scale the just released
14549 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
14550 Wheezy</a> setup to his liking.  He granted me an interview, and I am
14551 happy to share his answers with you here.</p>
14552
14553 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
14554
14555 <p>I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
14556 the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
14557 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
14558 "folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups.  In
14559 Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
14560 in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
14561 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
14562 perspective when working with IT.</p>
14563
14564 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
14565 project?</strong></p>
14566
14567 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
14568 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
14569 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
14570 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
14571 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
14572 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
14573
14574 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
14575 Edu?</strong></p>
14576
14577 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
14578 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
14579 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
14580 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
14581 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
14582 well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
14583 when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
14584 showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
14585 mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
14586 same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
14587 setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
14588 workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
14589 thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
14590 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
14591 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
14592 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
14593 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
14594 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time.  Our
14595 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
14596 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
14597 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
14598 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
14599 quicker to update.
14600
14601 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
14602 Edu?</strong></p>
14603
14604 <p>Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
14605 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
14606 year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
14607 sound from working with them.  It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
14608 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
14609 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.</p>
14610
14611 <p>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
14612 install time.  In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
14613 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
14614 That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
14615 Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
14616 to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
14617 support for single-sign on.  That will make the transition to free
14618 software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
14619 need.  No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
14620 some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
14621 run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes.  We run a journalist
14622 education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
14623 by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association).  Our
14624 education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
14625 are done.  This is important if you want to get a job.</p>
14626
14627 <p>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
14628 magazines.  We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
14629 market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
14630 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
14631 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
14632 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
14633 edit and compile a newspaper.  But politically at our school we are not
14634 there yet.  And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.</p>
14635
14636 <p>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
14637 the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
14638 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
14639 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
14640 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
14641 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
14642 studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
14643 want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise.  Those
14644 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
14645 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
14646 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
14647 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
14648 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
14649 sound file.</p>
14650
14651 <p>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
14652 will try.  The problem is the students have certain expectations when
14653 they start an education towards a profession.  So the programs has to
14654 look and feel professional.  Good thing with radio, there are many
14655 programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
14656 as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
14657 program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
14658 learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
14659 the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.</p>
14660
14661 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
14662
14663 <p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days.  I use almost
14664 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
14665 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
14666 )</p>
14667
14668 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
14669 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
14670
14671 <p>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
14672 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
14673 it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
14674 flawlessly.  The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
14675 will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
14676 students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
14677 clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
14678 idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
14679 the administration.  It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
14680 open source, if the principal has to run Windows.  It also creates a
14681 problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
14682 will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
14683 support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
14684 desktop is essential.  At least at our school, where we have mixed
14685 level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
14686
14687 <p>Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
14688 useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
14689 article <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/481607/">Radio station
14690 management with Airtime</a>,
14691 <a href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/">Airtime</a> which
14692 claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
14693 <a href="http://www.rivendellaudio.org/">Rivendell</a> which claim to
14694 be complete radio broadcast automation solution.  All of them seem
14695 useful to the aspiring radio producer.</p>
14696
14697       </div>
14698       <div class="tags">
14699
14700
14701         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
14702
14703
14704       </div>
14705     </div>
14706     <div class="padding"></div>
14707
14708     <div class="entry">
14709       <div class="title">
14710         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html">Why do schools waste money on IT?</a>
14711       </div>
14712       <div class="date">
14713          8th July 2012
14714       </div>
14715       <div class="body">
14716         <p>In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
14717 of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
14718 in schools and municipalities.  We provide what the happy users of
14719 Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
14720 alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution.  I
14721 was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
14722 Steinberg in his blog post
14723 "<a href="http://www.mysociety.org/2012/06/19/can-you-recognize-the-million-pound-chair/">Can
14724 you recognize the million pound chair?</a>".  Read it and weep for the
14725 spending of your tax money.</p>
14726
14727 <p>Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
14728 projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
14729 causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
14730 to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
14731 public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
14732 purchases.</p>
14733
14734       </div>
14735       <div class="tags">
14736
14737
14738         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14739
14740
14741       </div>
14742     </div>
14743     <div class="padding"></div>
14744
14745     <div class="entry">
14746       <div class="title">
14747         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html">Free Timetabling Software - nice free software</a>
14748       </div>
14749       <div class="date">
14750          7th July 2012
14751       </div>
14752       <div class="body">
14753         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
14754 Skolelinux</a> is a large collection of end user and school specific
14755 software.  It is one of the packages not installed by default but
14756 provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
14757 is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
14758 information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
14759 the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
14760 receive.  The software is
14761
14762 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/">named FET</a>, and it provide a
14763 graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
14764 result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
14765 both teachers and students.  It is available both for
14766 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download.html">Linux, MacOSX and
14767 Windows</a>.</p>
14768
14769 <p>This is <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/features.html">the
14770 feature list</a>, liftet from the project web site:</p>
14771
14772 <p><ul>
14773
14774   <li>FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
14775     You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it </li>
14776
14777   <li>Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
14778     (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
14779     (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
14780     (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
14781     (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
14782     (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
14783     sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
14784     (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
14785     </li>
14786
14787   <li>Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
14788     semi-automatic or manual allocation</li>
14789
14790   <li>Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
14791     GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports </li>
14792
14793   <li>Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
14794     with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)</li>
14795
14796   <li>Import/export from CSV format</li>
14797
14798   <li>The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
14799     formats </li>
14800
14801   <li>Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
14802     and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
14803     non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
14804     (as separate sets)</li>
14805
14806   <li>Each constraint has a weight percentage, from 0.0% to 100.0%
14807     (but some special constraints are allowed to have only 100% weight
14808     percentage)</li>
14809
14810   <li>Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
14811     demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
14812     memory):
14813     <ul>
14814       <li>Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day: 60</li>
14815       <li>Maximum number of working days per week: 35</li>
14816       <li>Maximum total number of teachers: 6000</li>
14817       <li>Maximum total number of sets of students: 30000</li>
14818       <li>Maximum total number of subjects: 6000</li>
14819       <li>Virtually unlimited number of activity tags</li>
14820       <li>Maximum number of activities: 30000</li>
14821       <li>Maximum number of rooms: 6000</li>
14822       <li>Maximum number of buildings: 6000</li>
14823       <li>Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
14824           students sets for each activity.  (it is possible
14825           also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
14826           activity)</li>
14827       <li>Virtually unlimited number of time constraints</li>
14828       <li>Virtually unlimited number of space constraints</li>
14829     </ul></li>
14830
14831   <li>A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
14832     <ul>
14833       <li>Break periods</li>
14834       <li>For teacher(s):
14835         <ul>
14836           <li>Not available periods</li>
14837           <li>Max/min days per week</li>
14838           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
14839           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
14840           <li>Min hours daily</li>
14841           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
14842
14843           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
14844             days per week</li>
14845         </ul></li>
14846       <li>For students (sets):
14847         <ul>
14848           <li>Not available periods</li>
14849           <li>Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)</li>
14850           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
14851           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
14852           <li>Min hours daily</li>
14853           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
14854
14855           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
14856             days per week</li>
14857         </ul></li>
14858       <li>For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
14859         <ul>
14860           <li>A single preferred starting time</li>
14861           <li>A set of preferred starting times</li>
14862           <li>A set of preferred time slots</li>
14863           <li>Min/max days between them</li>
14864           <li>End(s) students day</li>
14865           <li>Same starting time/day/hour</li>
14866           <li>Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
14867             flexible constraint, useful in many situations)</li>
14868           <li>Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for 2 or 3 (sub)activities)</li>
14869           <li>Not overlapping</li>
14870           <li>Max simultaneous in selected time slots</li>
14871           <li>Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities</li>
14872         </ul></li>
14873     </ul></li>
14874
14875   <li>A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
14876     <ul>
14877       <li>Room not available periods</li>
14878       <li>For teacher(s):
14879         <ul>
14880           <li>Home room(s)</li>
14881           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
14882           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
14883         </ul>
14884       </li>
14885
14886       <li>For students (sets):
14887         <ul>
14888           <li>Home room(s)</li>
14889           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
14890           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
14891         </ul>
14892       </li>
14893       <li>Preferred room(s):
14894         <ul>
14895           <li>For a subject</li>
14896           <li>For an activity tag</li>
14897           <li>For a subject and an activity tag</li>
14898           <li>Individually for a (sub)activity</li>
14899         </ul>
14900       </li>
14901
14902       <li>For a set of activities:
14903         <ul>
14904           <li>Occupy a maximum number of different rooms</li>
14905         </ul>
14906       </li>
14907     </ul>
14908   </li>
14909 </ul></p>
14910
14911 <p>I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
14912 planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it.  If you
14913 need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
14914 manually, check it out.
14915
14916 A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
14917 <a href="http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/2012/03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/">a
14918 blog post from MarvelSoft</a>.  If you find FET useful, please provide
14919 a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
14920 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos">Debian Edu HowTo
14921 section</a>.</p>
14922
14923       </div>
14924       <div class="tags">
14925
14926
14927         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
14928
14929
14930       </div>
14931     </div>
14932     <div class="padding"></div>
14933
14934     <div class="entry">
14935       <div class="title">
14936         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Can_Zimbra_be_told_to_send_autoreplies_to_the_From__address_.html">Can Zimbra be told to send autoreplies to the From: address?</a>
14937       </div>
14938       <div class="date">
14939          3rd July 2012
14940       </div>
14941       <div class="body">
14942         <p>In the NUUG <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a>
14943 project (Norwegian version of
14944 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> from
14945 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>), we have discovered
14946 a problem with the municipalities using
14947 <a href="http://www.zimbra.com/">Zimbra</a>.  When FiksGataMi send a
14948 problem report to the government, the email From: address is set to
14949 the address of the person reporting the problem, while envelope sender
14950 is set to the FiksGataMi contact address.  The intention is to make
14951 sure the municipality send any replies to the person reporting the
14952 problem, while any email delivery problems are sent to us in NUUG.
14953 This work well in most cases, but not for Karmøy municipality using
14954 Zimbra.  Karmøy is using the vacation message function in Zimbra to
14955 send an automatic reply to report that the message has been received,
14956 and this message is sent to the envelope sender and not the address in
14957 the From: header.</p>
14958
14959 <p>This causes the automatic message from Karmøy to go to NUUGs
14960 request-tracker instance instead of to the person reporting the
14961 problem.  We can not really change the envelope sender address, as
14962 this would make it impossible for us to discover when there are
14963 problems with the MTAs receiving problem reports.  We have been in
14964 contact with the people at Karmøy municipality, and they are willing
14965 to adjust Zimbra if something can be changed there to get a better
14966 behaviour.</p>
14967
14968 <p>The default behaviour of Zimbra is as far as I can tell according
14969 to the specification in RFC 3834, which recommend that vacation
14970 messages are sent to the envelope sender and not to the From: address.
14971 But I wonder if it is possible to adjust or configure Zimbra to behave
14972 differently.  Anyone know?  Please let us know at
14973 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
14974 (at) nuug.no</a>.</p>
14975
14976       </div>
14977       <div class="tags">
14978
14979
14980         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
14981
14982
14983       </div>
14984     </div>
14985     <div class="padding"></div>
14986
14987     <div class="entry">
14988       <div class="title">
14989         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jos__Luis_Redrejo_Rodr_guez.html">Debian Edu interview: José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez</a>
14990       </div>
14991       <div class="date">
14992         26th June 2012
14993       </div>
14994       <div class="body">
14995         <p>I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
14996 another interview with the people behind
14997 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
14998 This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
14999 helpers from Spain.  His effort was the reason we added support for
15000 several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
15001 Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
15002 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
15003 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
15004
15005 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
15006
15007 <p>I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
15008 ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
15009 ICT in schools</p>
15010
15011 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
15012 project?</strong></p>
15013
15014 <p>At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
15015 project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
15016 similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
15017 I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.</p>
15018
15019 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
15020 Edu?</strong></p>
15021
15022 <p>A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
15023 really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
15024 concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
15025 been used everyday inside Debian Edu.</p>
15026
15027 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
15028 Edu?</strong></p>
15029
15030 <p>Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
15031 economical and technical resources in the different countries don't
15032 allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
15033 approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
15034 lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
15035 technologies in school.</p>
15036
15037 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
15038
15039 <p>Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
15040 between Iceweasel, <a href="http://www.geany.org/">Geany</a> and
15041 <a href="http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator">Terminator</a>.</p>
15042
15043 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
15044 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
15045
15046 <p>I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
15047 different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
15048 environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
15049 laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.</p>
15050
15051 <p>Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
15052 not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
15053 universities. So different strategies are needed.</p>
15054
15055 <p>But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
15056 we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
15057 our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
15058 multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
15059 more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
15060 using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in
15061 the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
15062 them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
15063 working there.</p>
15064
15065       </div>
15066       <div class="tags">
15067
15068
15069         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
15070
15071
15072       </div>
15073     </div>
15074     <div class="padding"></div>
15075
15076     <div class="entry">
15077       <div class="title">
15078         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
15079       </div>
15080       <div class="date">
15081         24th June 2012
15082       </div>
15083       <div class="body">
15084         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
15085 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
15086 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
15087 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
15088 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
15089 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
15090 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
15091 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
15092 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
15093 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
15094 missing in my book.</p>
15095
15096 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
15097 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
15098 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
15099 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
15100 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
15101 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
15102 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
15103
15104       </div>
15105       <div class="tags">
15106
15107
15108         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
15109
15110
15111       </div>
15112     </div>
15113     <div class="padding"></div>
15114
15115     <div class="entry">
15116       <div class="title">
15117         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___some_ideas_for_the_future_versions.html">Debian Edu - some ideas for the future versions</a>
15118       </div>
15119       <div class="date">
15120         11th June 2012
15121       </div>
15122       <div class="body">
15123         <p>During my work on
15124 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.nb.html">Debian Edu
15125 based on Squeeze</a>, I came across some issues that should be
15126 addressed in the Wheezy release.  I finally found time to wrap up my
15127 notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
15128 explanation.</p>
15129
15130 <p><ul>
15131
15132 <li>We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
15133 changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
15134 with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
15135 system depend on tasksel tasks in
15136 /usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
15137 installation.</li>
15138
15139 <li>Enable Kerberos login for more services.  Now with the Kerberos
15140 foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
15141 services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions.  We should
15142 at least try to enable it for these services:
15143 <ul>
15144
15145   <li>CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
15146     quotas.</li>
15147   <li>Nagios for admins checking the system status.</li>
15148   <li>GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.</li>
15149   <li>LDAP for admins updating LDAP.</li>
15150   <li>Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.</li>
15151   <li>ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.</li>
15152
15153 </ul></li>
15154
15155 <li>When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
15156 authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
15157 use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
15158 is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind</li>
15159
15160 <li>Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install.  The split made
15161 sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
15162 inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.</li>
15163
15164 <li>Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
15165 touching the disk if the disk is too small.  This is
15166 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/653305">BTS report #653305</a> and the
15167 d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
15168 it and upload.  After this is done we need to adjust
15169 debian-edu-install to use this new hook.</li>
15170
15171 <li>Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
15172 time config).  LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
15173 packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
15174 in Wheezy.
15175
15176 <li>Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
15177 the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
15178 up KDE login on slow networks.</li>
15179
15180 <li>Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
15181 change on first login.  This is useful when handing out password on
15182 paper, to make sure only the user know the password.  This require
15183 fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.</li>
15184
15185 <li>Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
15186 The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
15187 familiar with GUIs.  This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
15188 have it available where the admin will be looking for it..</li>
15189
15190 <li>We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
15191 actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses).  None of the
15192 Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.</li>
15193
15194 <li>We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
15195 using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
15196 packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.</li>
15197
15198 <li>We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
15199 when changing password using the Kerberos protocol.  The hook was
15200 requested in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/588968">BTS report
15201 #588968</a> and is now available in Wheezy.  We might need to write a
15202 MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.</li>
15203
15204 <li>We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
15205 <ul>
15206
15207 <li>reduce the number of chemistry visualisers</li>
15208 <li>consider dropping xpaint</li>
15209 <li>and probably more?</li>
15210 </ul></li>
15211
15212 <li>Some hardware need external firmware to work properly.  This is
15213 mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
15214 examples too.  For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
15215 firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
15216 some GUI to do this.  Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
15217 could consider using their packages.  At the moment we have some
15218 command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
15219 for the LTSP chroot).</li>
15220
15221
15222 <li>In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options.  We
15223 should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
15224 install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
15225 use.</li>
15226
15227 <li>The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
15228 interesting educational packages.  We should work on the package
15229 tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
15230 packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
15231 new applications with a simple mouse click.</li>
15232
15233 <li>The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
15234 with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
15235 be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
15236 filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled.  We should
15237 implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
15238 instead of the "it is documented" method of today.</li>
15239
15240 <li>A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
15241 "take over" the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
15242 There are at least three implementations,
15243 <a href="italc.sourceforge.net/">italc</a>,
15244 <a href="http://www.itais.net/help/en/">controlaula</a> og
15245 <a href="http://www.epoptes.org/">epoptes</a> and we should pick one of
15246 them and make it trivial to set it up in a school.  The challenges is
15247 how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
15248 and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
15249 given room.</li>
15250
15251 <li>Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
15252 should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
15253 the Debian Edu network.  Not quite sure how.  Perhaps we should
15254 provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
15255 them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
15256 configuration and data with the central server.  This should be
15257 investigated.</li>
15258
15259 </ul></p>
15260
15261 <p>I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
15262 version.</p>
15263
15264       </div>
15265       <div class="tags">
15266
15267
15268         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15269
15270
15271       </div>
15272     </div>
15273     <div class="padding"></div>
15274
15275     <div class="entry">
15276       <div class="title">
15277         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/TV_with_face_recognition__for_improved_viewer_experience.html">TV with face recognition, for improved viewer experience</a>
15278       </div>
15279       <div class="date">
15280          9th June 2012
15281       </div>
15282       <div class="body">
15283         <p>Slashdot got a story about Intel planning a
15284 <a href="http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/12/06/09/0012247/intel-to-launch-tv-service-with-facial-recognition-by-end-of-the-year">TV
15285 with face recognition</a> to recognise the viewer, and it occurred to
15286 me that it would be more interesting to turn it around, and do face
15287 recognition on the TV image itself.  It could let the viewer know who
15288 is present on the screen, and perhaps look up their credibility,
15289 company affiliation, previous appearances etc for the viewer to better
15290 evaluate what is being said and done.  That would be a feature I would
15291 be willing to pay for.</p>
15292
15293 <p>I would not be willing to pay for a TV that point a camera on my
15294 household, like the big brother feature apparently proposed by Intel.
15295 It is the telescreen idea fetched straight out of the book
15296 <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt">1984 by George
15297 Orwell</a>.</p>
15298
15299       </div>
15300       <div class="tags">
15301
15302
15303         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
15304
15305
15306       </div>
15307     </div>
15308     <div class="padding"></div>
15309
15310     <div class="entry">
15311       <div class="title">
15312         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_service_to_look_up_HP_and_Dell_computer_hardware_support_status.html">Web service to look up HP and Dell computer hardware support status</a>
15313       </div>
15314       <div class="date">
15315          6th June 2012
15316       </div>
15317       <div class="body">
15318         <p>A few days ago
15319 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">I
15320 reported how to get</a> the support status out of Dell using an
15321 unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was
15322 <a href="http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2012-February/045959.html">discovered
15323 by Daniel De Marco in february</a>.  Combined with my web scraping
15324 code for HP, Dell and IBM
15325 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">from
15326 2009</a>, I got inspired and wrote
15327 <a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/">a
15328 web service</a> based on Scraperwiki to make it easy to look up the
15329 support status and get a machine readable result back.</p>
15330
15331 <p>This is what it look like at the moment when asking for the JSON
15332 output:
15333
15334 <blockquote><pre>
15335 % GET <a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/?format=json&vendor=Dell&servicetag=2v1xwn1">https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/?format=json&vendor=Dell&servicetag=2v1xwn1</a>
15336 supportstatus({"servicetag": "2v1xwn1", "warrantyend": "2013-11-24", "shipped": "2010-11-24", "scrapestamputc": "2012-06-06T20:26:56.965847", "scrapedurl": "http://143.166.84.118/services/assetservice.asmx?WSDL", "vendor": "Dell", "productid": ""})
15337 %
15338 </pre></blockquote>
15339
15340 <p>It currently support Dell and HP, and I am hoping for help to add
15341 support for other vendors.  The python source is available on
15342 Scraperwiki and I welcome help with adding more features.</p>
15343
15344       </div>
15345       <div class="tags">
15346
15347
15348         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15349
15350
15351       </div>
15352     </div>
15353     <div class="padding"></div>
15354
15355     <div class="entry">
15356       <div class="title">
15357         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel</a>
15358       </div>
15359       <div class="date">
15360          2nd June 2012
15361       </div>
15362       <div class="body">
15363         <p>Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
15364 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
15365 mailing list.  He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
15366 thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
15367 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
15368 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
15369
15370 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
15371
15372 <p>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
15373 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
15374 (Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
15375 by Angela).</p>
15376
15377 <p>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
15378 and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
15379 touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
15380 the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
15381 becoming an osteopath.</p>
15382
15383 <p>Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
15384 have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
15385 introducing free software into schools. The project's name is
15386 "IT-Zukunft Schule" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
15387 skills with communication skills.</p>
15388
15389 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
15390 project?</strong></p>
15391
15392 <p>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
15393 "IT-Zukunft Schule" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
15394 reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
15395 people said.  From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
15396 distributions that target being used for school networks.</p>
15397
15398 <p>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
15399 commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
15400 Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
15401 went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
15402 and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
15403 Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
15404 got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
15405 attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
15406 the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.</p>
15407
15408 <p>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
15409 people.  People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
15410 protection experts, other IT professionals.</p>
15411
15412 <p>We came to two conclusions:</p>
15413
15414 <p>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
15415 bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
15416 by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
15417 whereas most of each school's requirements could mapped by a standard
15418 IT solution.  The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
15419 customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
15420 possible.  In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
15421 standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
15422 degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
15423 locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
15424 point.</p>
15425
15426 <p>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
15427 all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
15428 for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
15429 has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
15430 of people into using IT and teaching with IT. "IT-Zukunft Schule"
15431 tries to provide an approach for this.</p>
15432
15433 <p>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
15434 defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
15435 Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school's IT
15436 equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
15437 teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
15438 spare time.</p>
15439
15440 <p>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
15441 networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
15442 here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
15443 teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
15444 non-existent until 2010/2011.</p>
15445
15446 <p>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
15447 class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
15448 avoidance do exist.</p>
15449
15450 <p>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
15451 social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
15452 for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
15453 several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
15454 they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
15455 at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
15456 and probably a gain for all.</p>
15457
15458 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
15459 Edu?</strong></p>
15460
15461 <p>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
15462 any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
15463 the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
15464 workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
15465 project communication, honest communication within the group of
15466 developers, etc.</p>
15467
15468 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
15469 Edu?</strong></p>
15470
15471 <p>Every coin has two sides:</p>
15472
15473 <p>Technically: <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/311188">BTS issue
15474 #311188</a>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
15475 client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
15476 should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
15477 about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
15478 several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
15479 contribute).</p>
15480
15481 <p>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
15482 find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
15483 Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
15484 promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
15485 there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
15486 these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
15487 all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
15488 meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
15489 there being rather disconnected from the development department of
15490 Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
15491
15492 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
15493
15494 <p>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.</p>
15495
15496 <p>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
15497 serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
15498 more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.</p>
15499
15500 <p>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
15501 development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
15502 PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
15503 is being integrated in Ubuntu's software center.</p>
15504
15505 <p>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
15506 as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
15507 I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
15508 the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
15509 whiteboard.</p>
15510
15511 <p>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.</p>
15512
15513 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
15514 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
15515
15516 <p>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
15517 enrol people.</p>
15518
15519       </div>
15520       <div class="tags">
15521
15522
15523         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
15524
15525
15526       </div>
15527     </div>
15528     <div class="padding"></div>
15529
15530     <div class="entry">
15531       <div class="title">
15532         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">SOAP based webservice from Dell to check server support status</a>
15533       </div>
15534       <div class="date">
15535          1st June 2012
15536       </div>
15537       <div class="body">
15538         <p>A few years ago I wrote
15539 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">how
15540 to extract support status</a> for your Dell and HP servers.  Recently
15541 I have learned from colleges here at the
15542 <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> that Dell have
15543 made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service.  Given
15544 the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
15545 readable information about the support status.  This perl code
15546 demonstrate how to do it:</p>
15547
15548 <p><pre>
15549 use strict;
15550 use warnings;
15551 use SOAP::Lite;
15552 use Data::Dumper;
15553 my $GUID = '11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111';
15554 my $App = 'test';
15555 my $servicetag = $ARGV[0] or die "Please supply a servicetag. $!\n";
15556 my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
15557 my $s = SOAP::Lite
15558     -> uri('http://support.dell.com/WebServices/')
15559     -> on_action( sub { join '', @_ } )
15560     -> proxy('http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx')
15561     ;
15562 my $a = $s->GetAssetInformation(
15563     SOAP::Data->name('guid')->value($GUID)->type(''),
15564     SOAP::Data->name('applicationName')->value($App)->type(''),
15565     SOAP::Data->name('serviceTags')->value($servicetag)->type(''),
15566 );
15567 print Dumper($a -> result) ;
15568 </pre></p>
15569
15570 <p>The output can look like this:</p>
15571
15572 <p><pre>
15573 $VAR1 = {
15574           'Asset' => {
15575                      'Entitlements' => {
15576                                        'EntitlementData' => [
15577                                                             {
15578                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
15579                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
15580                                                               'Provider' => '',
15581                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
15582                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
15583                                                             },
15584                                                             {
15585                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
15586                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
15587                                                               'Provider' => '',
15588                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
15589                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
15590                                                             },
15591                                                             {
15592                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
15593                                                               'EndDate' => '2007-07-29T00:00:00',
15594                                                               'Provider' => '',
15595                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
15596                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
15597                                                             }
15598                                                           ]
15599                                      },
15600                      'AssetHeaderData' => {
15601                                           'SystemModel' => 'GX620',
15602                                           'ServiceTag' => '8DSGD2J',
15603                                           'SystemShipDate' => '2006-07-29T19:00:00-05:00',
15604                                           'Buid' => '2323',
15605                                           'Region' => 'Europe',
15606                                           'SystemID' => 'PLX_GX620',
15607                                           'SystemType' => 'OptiPlex'
15608                                         }
15609                    }
15610         };
15611 </pre></p>
15612
15613 <p>I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
15614 service outside the
15615 <a href="http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation">inline
15616 documentation</a>, and according to
15617 <a href="http://iboyd.net/index.php/2012/02/14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/">one
15618 comment</a> it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
15619 scraping HTML pages. :)</p>
15620
15621 <p>Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service.  If
15622 you know of one, drop me an email. :)</p>
15623
15624       </div>
15625       <div class="tags">
15626
15627
15628         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
15629
15630
15631       </div>
15632     </div>
15633     <div class="padding"></div>
15634
15635     <div class="entry">
15636       <div class="title">
15637         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html">First monitor calibration using ColorHug</a>
15638       </div>
15639       <div class="date">
15640         31st May 2012
15641       </div>
15642       <div class="body">
15643         <p>A few days ago my color calibration gadget
15644 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">ColorHug</a> arrived in the
15645 mail, and I've had a few days to test it.  As all my machines are
15646 running Debian Squeeze, where
15647 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">the
15648 calibration software</a> is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid),
15649 I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD.  This worked
15650 just fine.  So far I have only done the quick calibration.  It was
15651 slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for
15652 another day.</p>
15653
15654 <p>After calibration, I get a
15655 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile">ICC color
15656 profile</a> file that can be passed to programs understanding such
15657 tools.  KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched
15658 for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X.
15659 xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single
15660 monitor setups.  But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen
15661 attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct
15662 monitor.  After searching a bit, I
15663 <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347896">discovered</a>
15664 that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted,
15665 and a simple</p>
15666
15667 <p><pre>
15668 dispwin -d 1 profile.icc
15669 </pre></p>
15670
15671 <p>later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor.  The
15672 result was a bit more pink than I expected.  I guess I picked the
15673 wrong monitor type for the "led" monitor I got, but the result is good
15674 enough for now.</p>
15675
15676       </div>
15677       <div class="tags">
15678
15679
15680         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15681
15682
15683       </div>
15684     </div>
15685     <div class="padding"></div>
15686
15687     <div class="entry">
15688       <div class="title">
15689         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html">Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter</a>
15690       </div>
15691       <div class="date">
15692         27th May 2012
15693       </div>
15694       <div class="body">
15695         <p>In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the
15696 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
15697 mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
15698 up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils.  His name was Ralf
15699 Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
15700 since then, helping to make sure the
15701 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
15702 Squeeze</a> release became as good as it is..</p>
15703
15704 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
15705
15706 <p>I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
15707 Mathematics, and Computer Science ("Informatik"). During the past 12
15708 years (since 2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
15709 also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
15710 O- or A-level ("Abitur").  For quite as long, I've been taking care of
15711 our computer network.</p>
15712
15713 <p>Now, in my early 40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
15714 spare time together with my wife, our son (3 years) and our daughter
15715 (4 months).</p>
15716
15717 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
15718 project?</strong></p>
15719
15720 <p>We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
15721 my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
15722 very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
15723 ("Best Newcomer Distribution", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
15724 to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt, 2005 (IIRC). Few
15725 months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
15726 (Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others.  For more
15727 than 7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
15728 our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
15729 approximately 50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
15730 locally installed Skolelinux image.  As a consequence, I joined quite
15731 a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
15732 (Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
15733 one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.</p>
15734
15735 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
15736 Edu?</strong></p>
15737
15738 <p>Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
15739 project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
15740 the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
15741 computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
15742 free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
15743 up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
15744 labs).  Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
15745 administration costs tend towards zero.</p>
15746
15747 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
15748 Edu?</strong></p>
15749
15750 <p>While Debian's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
15751 might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
15752 budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
15753 supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
15754 office packages or desktop environments.  These schools have the
15755 option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
15756 capacity to do so.  Another issue is that Debian release cycles
15757 include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
15758 power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
15759 within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
15760 the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
15761 i.e. harder to understand for novices.</p>
15762
15763 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
15764
15765 <p>LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
15766 KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
15767 PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)</p>
15768
15769 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
15770 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
15771
15772 <p><ol>
15773
15774 <li>Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
15775 people really "own" their hardware, to make them understand the
15776 difference between proprietary software products, and free software
15777 developing.</li>
15778
15779 <li>Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany's public schools
15780 there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
15781 licenses), so schools won't benefit from any savings here. This
15782 privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
15783 share among German Skolelinux schools.</li>
15784
15785 <li>Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
15786 trained. In many cases, teachers' software customs are respected by
15787 decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.</li>
15788
15789 <li>Don't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
15790 free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
15791 general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
15792 shared world wide (school books e.g.).</li>
15793
15794 <li>Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
15795 office suites is much above 20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don't
15796 need to know the "ribbon menu" in order to get employed.</li>
15797
15798 <li>Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.</li>
15799
15800 <li>Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
15801 for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
15802 Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials.  And
15803 keep sending documents in ODF formats.</li>
15804
15805 </ol></p>
15806
15807       </div>
15808       <div class="tags">
15809
15810
15811         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
15812
15813
15814       </div>
15815     </div>
15816     <div class="padding"></div>
15817
15818     <div class="entry">
15819       <div class="title">
15820         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html">The cost of ODF and OOXML</a>
15821       </div>
15822       <div class="date">
15823         26th May 2012
15824       </div>
15825       <div class="body">
15826         <p>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
15827 claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
15828 government.  I just sent him an email to let him know that his
15829 assumption are most likely wrong.  Sharing it here in case some of my
15830 blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.</p>
15831
15832 <p><blockquote> <p>Hi.  I just noted your
15833 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/does-microsoft-office-lock-in-cost-the-uk-government-500-million/index.htm">http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/does-microsoft-office-lock-in-cost-the-uk-government-500-million/index.htm</a>
15834 comment:</p>
15835
15836 <p><blockquote>"They're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
15837 with the help of Google Translate I can't find any figures about the
15838 savings of "moving to a flexible two standard" as claimed by the
15839 Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let's take
15840 it, and the £500 million figure for the UK, on trust."
15841 </blockquote></p>
15842
15843 <p>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated.  I believe it is
15844 the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around 2007,
15845 and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
15846 at the content.  In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
15847 will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
15848 existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
15849 formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
15850 ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
15851 10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver.  In
15852 reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
15853 receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
15854 would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not 20 minutes
15855 of wasted effort.</p>
15856
15857 <p>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
15858 transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending 10
15859 minutes converting to ODF. :)</p>
15860
15861 <p>See
15862 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php</a>
15863 and
15864 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php</a>
15865 for background information.  Norwegian only, sorry. :)</p>
15866 </blockquote></p>
15867
15868       </div>
15869       <div class="tags">
15870
15871
15872         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
15873
15874
15875       </div>
15876     </div>
15877     <div class="padding"></div>
15878
15879     <div class="entry">
15880       <div class="title">
15881         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColorHug___USB_and_free_software_based_screen_color_calibration.html">ColorHug - USB and free software based screen color calibration</a>
15882       </div>
15883       <div class="date">
15884         18th May 2012
15885       </div>
15886       <div class="body">
15887         <p>In january, I
15888 <a href="http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2012/01/17/colorhug-has-arrived/">discovered
15889 the ColorHug</a>, a USB dongle from
15890 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">Hughski</a> to calibrate
15891 the color on a computer screen.  The software required is
15892 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">included
15893 in Debian</a>, and I decided back then to preorder from the next
15894 batch.  Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the
15895 opportunity to order.  Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the
15896 delivery.  I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it
15897 should go in the mail on monday. :)</p>
15898
15899 <p>If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended
15900 colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software
15901 drivers. :)</p>
15902
15903       </div>
15904       <div class="tags">
15905
15906
15907         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15908
15909
15910       </div>
15911     </div>
15912     <div class="padding"></div>
15913
15914     <div class="entry">
15915       <div class="title">
15916         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html">Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner</a>
15917       </div>
15918       <div class="date">
15919         13th May 2012
15920       </div>
15921       <div class="body">
15922         <p>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
15923 publish another interview with the people behind
15924 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
15925 This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
15926 years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
15927 details get right before release.
15928
15929 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
15930
15931 <p>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
15932 Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany.  I worked nearly 20 years as
15933 certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
15934 international company for machinery and equipment.  Since 2011 I'm a
15935 certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
15936 documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer.  From April this year
15937 I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
15938 manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.</p>
15939
15940 <p>My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
15941 it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
15942 home since 2006.</p>
15943
15944 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
15945 project?</strong></p>
15946
15947 <p>Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
15948 daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
15949 middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
15950 him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
15951 asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
15952 computers in use. I answered: "Yes".</p>
15953
15954 <p>Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
15955 running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
15956 gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
15957 network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
15958 and with a lot of fun.  About one year later the school was connected
15959 to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
15960 building.  That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
15961 Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
15962 being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
15963 costs for things like licence and software.  So I searched for a
15964 school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
15965 people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
15966 prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school.  I
15967 managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
15968 the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
15969 Bielefeld in December of 2006.</p>
15970
15971 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
15972 Edu?</strong></p>
15973
15974 <p>When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
15975 for me as today.</p>
15976
15977 <p>In the past there were advantages like:</p>
15978
15979 <p><ul>
15980
15981 <li>I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
15982 they had little money to spent for computers and software.</li>
15983
15984 <li>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
15985 cost.</li>
15986
15987 <li>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
15988 schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
15989 clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
15990 infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
15991 server</li>
15992
15993 <li>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
15994 school.</li>
15995
15996 </ul></p>
15997
15998 <p>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
15999 came up in this way:</p>
16000
16001 <p><ul>
16002
16003 <li>Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
16004 now.</li>
16005
16006 <li>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
16007 have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
16008 because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.</li>
16009
16010 <li>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
16011 management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
16012 interfaces used in the past.</li>
16013
16014 <li>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
16015 different needs.</li>
16016
16017 <li>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.</li>
16018
16019 <li>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
16020 world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
16021 is sharing knowledge and minds.</li>
16022
16023 <li>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
16024 solved today by Debian Edu. </li>
16025
16026 </ul></p>
16027
16028 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16029 Edu?</strong></p>
16030
16031 <p><ul>
16032
16033 <li>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
16034 their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
16035 whole municipality areas.</li>
16036
16037 <li>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
16038 enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
16039 politicians.</li>
16040
16041 <li>Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.</li>
16042
16043 </ul></p>
16044
16045 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
16046
16047 <p>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
16048 computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
16049 use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
16050 KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
16051 need from the KDE environment.  On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
16052 screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.</p>
16053
16054 <p>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
16055 and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
16056 rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
16057 with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
16058 and the whole family.  I probably forgot something.</p>
16059
16060 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
16061 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
16062
16063 <p>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
16064 Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
16065 countries and areas all over the world.</p>
16066
16067       </div>
16068       <div class="tags">
16069
16070
16071         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
16072
16073
16074       </div>
16075     </div>
16076     <div class="padding"></div>
16077
16078     <div class="entry">
16079       <div class="title">
16080         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cutting_it_short___and_picking_the_right_tool_for_the_job.html">Cutting it short - and picking the right tool for the job</a>
16081       </div>
16082       <div class="date">
16083         30th April 2012
16084       </div>
16085       <div class="body">
16086         <p><!-- IMG_5869.JPG -->
16087 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-1611.jpeg"></p>
16088
16089 <p>I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a
16090 common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway.
16091 But the last ones have not really been up to the task.  My last
16092 cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the
16093 time, and cutting my head took forever.  And the one before that did
16094 not work very well either.  We have looked for something better for a
16095 while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we
16096 discovered that there are indeed better tools available.  But these
16097 are not marketed and sold to "regular consumers".  The hair saloons
16098 can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell
16099 companies.  The models they sell, are very different from the ones
16100 available from Elkjøp and Lefdal.  The main difference is their
16101 efficiency.  It would cut my hair in 5 minutes, instead of the 30-40
16102 minutes required by my impotent Braun.  The hairdresser I visited had
16103 a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the
16104 producer.  But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.</p>
16105
16106 <p>The next step was to find somewhere to buy it.  This was not
16107 straight forward.  The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser
16108 did not want to sell anything to me.  But searching for the model on
16109 the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for
16110 around NOK 4000,-.  This was a bit much.  We kept searching and
16111 finally found a Danish supplier
16112 <a href="http://nicehair.dk/panasonic-er-1611-professionel-hartrimmer.html">selling
16113 it for around NOK 1800,-</a>.  We ordered one, and it arrived a few
16114 days ago.</p>
16115
16116 <p>The instructions said it had to charge for 8 hours when we started
16117 to use it, so we left it charging over night.  Normally it will only
16118 need one hour to charge.  The following evening we successfully tested
16119 it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair
16120 cutter.  The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter
16121 toys.</p>
16122
16123       </div>
16124       <div class="tags">
16125
16126
16127         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16128
16129
16130       </div>
16131     </div>
16132     <div class="padding"></div>
16133
16134     <div class="entry">
16135       <div class="title">
16136         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/HTC_One_X___Your_video___What_do_you_mean_.html">HTC One X - Your video?  What do you mean?</a>
16137       </div>
16138       <div class="date">
16139         26th April 2012
16140       </div>
16141       <div class="body">
16142         <p>In <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article243690.ece">an
16143 article today</a> published by Computerworld Norway, the photographer
16144 <a href="http://www.urke.com/eirik/">Eirik Helland Urke</a> reports
16145 that the video editor application included with
16146 <a href="http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs">HTC One
16147 X</a> have some quite surprising terms of use.  The article is mostly
16148 based on the twitter message from mister Urke, stating:
16149
16150 <p><blockquote>
16151 "<a href="http://twitter.com/urke/status/194062269724897280">Drøy
16152 brukeravtale: HTC kan bruke MINE redigerte videoer kommersielt. Selv
16153 kan jeg KUN bruke dem privat.</a>"
16154 </blockquote></p>
16155
16156 <p>I quickly translated it to this English message:</p>
16157
16158 <p><blockquote>
16159 "Arrogant user agreement: HTC can use MY edited videos
16160 commercially.  Although I can ONLY use them privately."
16161 </blockquote></p>
16162
16163 <p>I've been unable to find the text of the license term myself, but
16164 suspect it is a variation of the MPEG-LA terms I
16165 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html">discovered
16166 with my Canon IXUS 130</a>.  The HTC One X specification specifies that
16167 the recording format of the phone is .amr for audio and .mp3 for
16168 video.  AMR is
16169 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec#Licensing_and_patent_issues">Adaptive
16170 Multi-Rate audio codec</a> with patents which according to the
16171 Wikipedia article require an license agreement with
16172 <a href="http://www.voiceage.com/">VoiceAge</a>.  MP4 is
16173 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing">MPEG4 with
16174 H.264</a>, which according to Wikipedia require a licence agreement
16175 with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/">MPEG-LA</a>.</p>
16176
16177 <p>I know why I prefer
16178 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and open
16179 standards</a> also for video.</p>
16180
16181       </div>
16182       <div class="tags">
16183
16184
16185         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
16186
16187
16188       </div>
16189     </div>
16190     <div class="padding"></div>
16191
16192     <div class="entry">
16193       <div class="title">
16194         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html">RAND terms - non-reasonable and discriminatory</a>
16195       </div>
16196       <div class="date">
16197         19th April 2012
16198       </div>
16199       <div class="body">
16200         <p>Here in Norway, the
16201 <a href="http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad.html?id=339"> Ministry of
16202 Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs</a> is behind
16203 a <a href="http://standard.difi.no/forvaltningsstandarder">directory of
16204 standards</a> that are recommended or mandatory for use by the
16205 government.  When the directory was created, the people behind it made
16206 an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the
16207 standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions
16208 to the government.  Free software and non-free software could compete
16209 on the same level.</p>
16210
16211 <p>But recently, some standards with RAND
16212 (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing">Reasonable
16213 And Non-Discriminatory</a>) terms have made their way into the
16214 directory.  And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that
16215 standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from
16216 implementing them.  The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per
16217 user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone
16218 willing to pay will get a license.  Both sound great in theory.  In
16219 practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and
16220 be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user.  By
16221 definition, users of free software do not need to register their use.
16222 So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects.
16223 And given that people will use the software without handing any money
16224 to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free
16225 software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights
16226 to implement a standard when the income available is zero.  The result
16227 in these situations is that free software are locked out from
16228 implementing standards with RAND terms.</p>
16229
16230 <p>Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a
16231 standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is
16232 how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory.  Because free
16233 software developers are working in a global market, it does not really
16234 help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable
16235 in Norway.  The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here.
16236 I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more
16237 attention to these issues in the future.</p>
16238
16239 <p>You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms
16240 from Simon Phipps
16241 (<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/11/rand-not-so-reasonable/">RAND:
16242 Not So Reasonable?</a>).</p>
16243
16244 <p>Update 2012-04-21: Just came across a
16245 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/of-microsoft-netscape-patents-and-open-standards/index.htm">blog
16246 post from Glyn Moody</a> over at Computer World UK warning about the
16247 same issue, and urging people to speak out to the UK government.  I
16248 can only urge Norwegian users to do the same for
16249 <a href="http://www.standard.difi.no/hoyring/hoyring-om-nye-anbefalte-it-standarder">the
16250 hearing taking place at the moment</a> (respond before 2012-04-27).
16251 It proposes to require video conferencing standards including
16252 specifications with RAND terms.</p>
16253
16254       </div>
16255       <div class="tags">
16256
16257
16258         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
16259
16260
16261       </div>
16262     </div>
16263     <div class="padding"></div>
16264
16265     <div class="entry">
16266       <div class="title">
16267         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html">Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt</a>
16268       </div>
16269       <div class="date">
16270         15th April 2012
16271       </div>
16272       <div class="body">
16273         <p>Behind <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
16274 Skolelinux</a> there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
16275 setting together all the pieces.  This time I present to you Andreas
16276 Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
16277 years.  He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
16278 up in the recently released
16279 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
16280 Edu Squeeze</a> version.</p>
16281
16282 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
16283
16284 <p>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany.  After
16285 studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
16286 Quantum Optics.  After that I worked some years in an optics company.
16287 Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
16288 teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school.  I teach math, physics,
16289 information technology and science/technology.</p>
16290
16291 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
16292 project?</strong></p>
16293
16294 <p>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
16295 project because of my interest in education and Debian.  Within the
16296 qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
16297 contributing.</p>
16298
16299 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16300 Edu?</strong></p>
16301
16302 <p>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
16303 out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
16304 Debian Project!</p>
16305
16306 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16307 Edu?</strong></p>
16308
16309 <p>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
16310 downside, too.  In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
16311 setup, if you need or want that.  Further more, it is not easily
16312 possible to upgrade the system to a new release.  It takes much too
16313 long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
16314 because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
16315 rather small and often busy elsewhere.</p>
16316
16317 <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN">Debian LAN</a>
16318 project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.</p>
16319
16320 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
16321
16322 <p>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
16323 on all my machines.  For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
16324 mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing.  At school I
16325 have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.</p>
16326
16327 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
16328 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
16329
16330 <p>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
16331 Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
16332 politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader".  The school
16333 administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
16334 Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats.  Even
16335 free browsers do not work for the school administration.  Publishers
16336 of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.</p>
16337
16338 <p>To change this, political work is very important.  Parts of the
16339 political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
16340 However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free'
16341 the system.  There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and
16342 "Free/Open Standards".  I am not sure if all the involved parties have
16343 a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
16344 fraction takes them seriously.  However it might slowly make free
16345 software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.</p>
16346
16347       </div>
16348       <div class="tags">
16349
16350
16351         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
16352
16353
16354       </div>
16355     </div>
16356     <div class="padding"></div>
16357
16358     <div class="entry">
16359       <div class="title">
16360         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html">Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye</a>
16361       </div>
16362       <div class="date">
16363          8th April 2012
16364       </div>
16365       <div class="body">
16366         <p>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
16367 like <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>,
16368 and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
16369 contributor to the
16370 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
16371 Edu Squeeze release manual</a>.
16372
16373 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
16374
16375 <p>I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
16376 occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.</p>
16377
16378 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
16379 project?</strong></p>
16380
16381 <p>I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user!  The only
16382 reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
16383 around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
16384 they'd like a native English speaker to proofread...  So I did a sweep
16385 through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
16386 "localisation".</p>
16387
16388 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16389 Edu?</strong></p>
16390
16391 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16392 Edu?</strong></p>
16393
16394 <p>These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it!  In fact I
16395 had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the
16396 education system.</p>
16397
16398 <p>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
16399 as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
16400 everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
16401 money on the latest hardware.</p>
16402
16403 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
16404
16405 <p>I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
16406 software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
16407 words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).</p>
16408
16409 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
16410 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
16411
16412 <p>Well, I don't know.  I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning
16413 with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
16414 you would hardly need a strategy.</p>
16415
16416       </div>
16417       <div class="tags">
16418
16419
16420         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
16421
16422
16423       </div>
16424     </div>
16425     <div class="padding"></div>
16426
16427     <div class="entry">
16428       <div class="title">
16429         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_the_KDE_menu_is_slow_when__usr__is_NFS_mounted___and_a_workaround.html">Why the KDE menu is slow when /usr/ is NFS mounted - and a workaround</a>
16430       </div>
16431       <div class="date">
16432          6th April 2012
16433       </div>
16434       <div class="body">
16435         <p>Recently I have spent time with
16436 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a> on speeding
16437 up a <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
16438 Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
16439 process I discovered something very surprising.  The reason the KDE
16440 menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
16441 due to the way KDE find application icons.  I discovered that showing
16442 the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
16443 passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server.  Most of these were
16444
16445 NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response.  Because the
16446 ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
16447 ms, the menus would be very slow.  Looking at the strace of kicker in
16448 Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
16449 the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
16450 non-existing files.  KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
16451 one icon file.  In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
16452 around 230 access(2) calls.</p>
16453
16454 <p>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
16455 directories, and the list of possible directories is large.  In
16456 (almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
16457 and .xpm.  The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
16458 mounted.  Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
16459 requests.  I am not the first one to discover this.  I found a
16460 <a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211416">KDE bug report
16461 from 2009</a> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.</p>
16462
16463 <p>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
16464 kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
16465 used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
16466 for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
16467 icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/.  Finally, I add symlinks to
16468 these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
16469 for them.  This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
16470 one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
16471 almost instantaneous.  I'm not quite sure where to make the package
16472 publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.</p>
16473
16474 <p>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
16475 and icon handling, but also the login process.  Not quite sure how to
16476 speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
16477 that is not really an option at the moment.</p>
16478
16479 <p>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
16480 (at) lists.debian.org.</p>
16481
16482 <p>Update 2015-08-04: The
16483 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-edu/upstream/kde-icon-cache.git/">source
16484 of the scripts and associated Debian package</a> is available from the
16485 Debian Edu github repository.</p>
16486
16487       </div>
16488       <div class="tags">
16489
16490
16491         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16492
16493
16494       </div>
16495     </div>
16496     <div class="padding"></div>
16497
16498     <div class="entry">
16499       <div class="title">
16500         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html">Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News</a>
16501       </div>
16502       <div class="date">
16503          5th April 2012
16504       </div>
16505       <div class="body">
16506         <p>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
16507 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a> by
16508 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News.  The result was made public for
16509 non-subscribers today.  I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
16510 for schools.  Check out his article
16511 <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/488805/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
16512 distribution for education</a> if you want to learn more.</p>
16513
16514       </div>
16515       <div class="tags">
16516
16517
16518         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16519
16520
16521       </div>
16522     </div>
16523     <div class="padding"></div>
16524
16525     <div class="entry">
16526       <div class="title">
16527         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html">Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer</a>
16528       </div>
16529       <div class="date">
16530          1st April 2012
16531       </div>
16532       <div class="body">
16533         <p>Germany is a core area for the
16534 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
16535 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
16536 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
16537
16538 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
16539
16540 <p>I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
16541 Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
16542 "<a href="http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/">Westfalen-Kolleg
16543 Dortmund</a>", a second chance school.  Here, young adults is given
16544 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
16545 examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This
16546 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
16547 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.</p>
16548
16549 <p>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
16550 blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other
16551 information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been
16552 teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my
16553 school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at
16554 the end of April this year.</p>
16555
16556 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
16557 project?</strong></p>
16558
16559 <p>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
16560 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
16561 Project).  At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
16562 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
16563 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
16564 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
16565 reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
16566 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
16567 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
16568 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
16569 Skolelinux.</p>
16570
16571 <p>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
16572 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
16573 clients.  The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
16574 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
16575 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
16576 the admin teachers.</p>
16577
16578 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16579 Edu?</strong></p>
16580
16581 <p>It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
16582 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
16583 So it was a perfect choice.</p>
16584
16585 <p>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's
16586 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
16587 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp.  It's of
16588 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
16589 a school and to choose where to get support for this.</p>
16590
16591 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16592 Edu?</strong></p>
16593
16594 <p>Nothing yet.</p>
16595
16596 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
16597
16598 <p>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
16599 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
16600 Annotator).  At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
16601 LibreOffice.</p>
16602
16603 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
16604 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
16605
16606 <p>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
16607 that doesn't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
16608 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.</p>
16609
16610       </div>
16611       <div class="tags">
16612
16613
16614         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
16615
16616
16617       </div>
16618     </div>
16619     <div class="padding"></div>
16620
16621     <div class="entry">
16622       <div class="title">
16623         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Checking_email_with_kmail_using_Kerberos_authentication.html">Debian Edu screencast: Checking email with kmail using Kerberos authentication</a>
16624       </div>
16625       <div class="date">
16626         25th March 2012
16627       </div>
16628       <div class="body">
16629         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
16630
16631 <p>The same Debian Edu developer that did the last screen cast I
16632 published, Wolfgang Schweer, has created a new screen cast showing how
16633 to set up Kmail in Debian Edu Squeze to authenticate using Kerberos,
16634 allowing users to check their local email account without providing
16635 any password. The video is embedded here in quarter size,
16636 and also available from <a href="https://vimeo.com/38601767">vimeo</a>
16637 and download as a
16638 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg
16639 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
16640
16641 <p><video id="kmail-kerberos-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
16642   <source src="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv" type='video/ogg; codecs="theora, vorbis"' />
16643     <p>Download video as
16644       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
16645 </video></p>
16646
16647       </div>
16648       <div class="tags">
16649
16650
16651         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16652
16653
16654       </div>
16655     </div>
16656     <div class="padding"></div>
16657
16658     <div class="entry">
16659       <div class="title">
16660         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html">Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby</a>
16661       </div>
16662       <div class="date">
16663         19th March 2012
16664       </div>
16665       <div class="body">
16666         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
16667 users are spread all across the globe.  The second inteview after
16668 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
16669 Squeeze release</a> was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
16670 long time Linux user in United Kingdom.</p>
16671
16672 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
16673
16674 <p>I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
16675 Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
16676 author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
16677 contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
16678 encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
16679 years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
16680 weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
16681 installations.</p>
16682
16683 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
16684 project?</strong></p>
16685
16686 <p>Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
16687 London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
16688 just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
16689 along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
16690 mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
16691 well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
16692 have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
16693 LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
16694 these things we decided to try it.</p>
16695
16696 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16697 Edu?</strong></p>
16698
16699 <p>By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
16700 from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
16701 goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
16702 would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
16703 low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
16704 that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
16705 Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
16706 proprietary software everywhere.</p>
16707
16708 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16709 Edu?</strong></p>
16710
16711 <p>As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
16712 how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
16713 various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
16714 English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
16715 users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!</p>
16716
16717 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
16718
16719 <p>Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
16720 OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
16721 desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
16722 use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
16723 that counts...)</p>
16724
16725 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
16726 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
16727
16728 <p>That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
16729 and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
16730 the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
16731 applications".  However, schools today are experiencing budget
16732 constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
16733 XP.  At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
16734 iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
16735 longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
16736 realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
16737 putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
16738 first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.</p>
16739
16740 <p>I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
16741 free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
16742 Edu users in this country has to be part of it.</p>
16743
16744       </div>
16745       <div class="tags">
16746
16747
16748         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
16749
16750
16751       </div>
16752     </div>
16753     <div class="padding"></div>
16754
16755     <div class="entry">
16756       <div class="title">
16757         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html">Writing and translating documentation in Debian Edu</a>
16758       </div>
16759       <div class="date">
16760         16th March 2012
16761       </div>
16762       <div class="body">
16763         <p>Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
16764 it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
16765 translated versions in sync.  To do this we have come up with what we
16766 believe is a very efficient work flow.</p>
16767
16768 <ol>
16769
16770 <li>The documentation is written in a
16771 <a href="http://moinmo.in">moinmoin wiki</a> (see for example
16772 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">the
16773 Squeeze release manual</a>) with support for exporting the content as
16774 docbook XML.</li>
16775
16776 <li>This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
16777 .pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
16778 with the translated text.</li>
16779
16780 <li>The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
16781 which part of the original wiki document is new or changed.  They can
16782 use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
16783 the translation.  There is even a system in place to handle translated
16784 images.</li>
16785
16786 <li>The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
16787 XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.</li>
16788
16789 <li>The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
16790 create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.</li>
16791
16792 </ol>
16793
16794 <p>This setup work very well, but have a few issues.  The biggest
16795 issue is that <a href="http://moinmo.in/DocBook">the docbook support
16796 we use in moinmoin</a> is not actively maintained.  The docbook
16797 support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
16798 make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.</p>
16799
16800 <p>If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
16801 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc">debian-edu-doc
16802 package</a>.</p>
16803
16804       </div>
16805       <div class="tags">
16806
16807
16808         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16809
16810
16811       </div>
16812     </div>
16813     <div class="padding"></div>
16814
16815     <div class="entry">
16816       <div class="title">
16817         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html">Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze is out!</a>
16818       </div>
16819       <div class="date">
16820         11th March 2012
16821       </div>
16822       <div class="body">
16823         <p>This weekend we finally published the first stable release of
16824 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> based
16825 on Debian/Squeeze.  The full announcement is
16826 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">available</a>
16827 from the project announcement list.  Now is a good time to test if it
16828 you have not done so already.</p>
16829
16830 <p>I plan to present the new version at
16831 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20120313-skolelinux/">a NUUG
16832 meeting</a> on tuesday.  I look forward to seeing you there if you are
16833 in Oslo, Norway.</p>
16834
16835       </div>
16836       <div class="tags">
16837
16838
16839         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16840
16841
16842       </div>
16843     </div>
16844     <div class="padding"></div>
16845
16846     <div class="entry">
16847       <div class="title">
16848         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html">Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker</a>
16849       </div>
16850       <div class="date">
16851          9th March 2012
16852       </div>
16853       <div class="body">
16854         <p>Inspired by <a href="http://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/interview/">the
16855 interview series</a> conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
16856 interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
16857 community.  This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
16858 more international audience.</p>
16859
16860 <p>While <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
16861 Skolelinux</a> originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
16862 Europe, there are users all around the globe.  One of those far away
16863 from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
16864 and contributor.  It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
16865 work out of the box in Japan.  I got him to answer a few questions,
16866 and am happy to share the response with you. :)
16867
16868
16869 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
16870
16871 <p>My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
16872 and we have three lovely children, aged 15, 14 and 4(!) I am the IT
16873 Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
16874 teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
16875 Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
16876 I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
16877 primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
16878 so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
16879 also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
16880 to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
16881 appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.</p>
16882
16883 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
16884 project?</strong></p>
16885
16886 <p>In around 2004 or 5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
16887 server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
16888 samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
16889 Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn't really improve my setup. I
16890 did various desperate searches for things like "school Linux server"
16891 and ended up in a document called "Drift" something or other. Reading
16892 there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
16893 problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
16894 previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
16895 Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
16896 downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
16897 Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
16898 my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.</p>
16899
16900 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16901 Edu?</strong></p>
16902
16903 <p>For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
16904 workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
16905 ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
16906 designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
16907 doesn't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
16908 school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
16909 Japan.</p>
16910
16911 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
16912 Edu?</strong></p>
16913
16914 <p>The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
16915 have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
16916 make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
16917 who don't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
16918 important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
16919 instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
16920 default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
16921 kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
16922 Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is.  A
16923 second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
16924 customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
16925 multiplies. For example, backup wasn't working properly in Lenny. It
16926 took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
16927 I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
16928 help.</p>
16929
16930 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
16931
16932 <p>Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
16933 studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
16934 (customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
16935 still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
16936 house, that's very useful for the family photos and music.  At school
16937 the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
16938 have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
16939 day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
16940 installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS.  We also
16941 have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
16942 and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.</p>
16943
16944 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
16945 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
16946
16947 <p>Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
16948 and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
16949 popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
16950 to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
16951 file formats and Word than they did 5 years ago.  The Edu aspect is
16952 also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
16953 Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu?  But of course the main attraction is
16954 budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
16955 compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
16956 is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
16957 are not impressed when their USB drive doesn't work, or their browser
16958 doesn't play flash, for example.</p>
16959
16960       </div>
16961       <div class="tags">
16962
16963
16964         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
16965
16966
16967       </div>
16968     </div>
16969     <div class="padding"></div>
16970
16971     <div class="entry">
16972       <div class="title">
16973         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_screencast__Mass_creation_of_user_accounts_in_Squeeze.html">Debian Edu screencast: Mass creation of user accounts in Squeeze</a>
16974       </div>
16975       <div class="date">
16976          7th March 2012
16977       </div>
16978       <div class="body">
16979         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
16980
16981 <p>One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a
16982 screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on
16983 Debian Edu Squeeze.  The video is embedded here in quarter size, and
16984 also available from <a href="http://vimeo.com/37675399">vimeo</a> and
16985 download as a
16986 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg
16987 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
16988
16989 <p><video id="gosa-mass-user-create-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
16990   <source src="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv" type='video/ogg; codecs="theora, vorbis"' />
16991     <p>Download video as
16992       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
16993 </video></p>
16994
16995       </div>
16996       <div class="tags">
16997
16998
16999         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17000
17001
17002       </div>
17003     </div>
17004     <div class="padding"></div>
17005
17006     <div class="entry">
17007       <div class="title">
17008         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html">Third release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</a>
17009       </div>
17010       <div class="date">
17011          4th March 2012
17012       </div>
17013       <div class="body">
17014         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the third release
17015 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
17016 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
17017 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00000.html">available</a>
17018 from the project announcement list.  Check it out if you
17019 need a software solution for your school.</p>
17020
17021       </div>
17022       <div class="tags">
17023
17024
17025         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17026
17027
17028       </div>
17029     </div>
17030     <div class="padding"></div>
17031
17032     <div class="entry">
17033       <div class="title">
17034         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Stopmotion_for_making_stop_motion_animations_on_Linux___reloaded.html">Stopmotion for making stop motion animations on Linux - reloaded</a>
17035       </div>
17036       <div class="date">
17037          3rd March 2012
17038       </div>
17039       <div class="body">
17040         <p>Many years ago, the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
17041 / Debian Edu project</a> initiated a student project to create a tool
17042 for making stop motion movies.  The proposal came from a teacher
17043 needing such tool on Skolelinux.  The project, called "stopmotion",
17044 was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a
17045 national aware with this great project.  The project was initiated and
17046 mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bjørn Erik Nilsen
17047 and Fredrik Berg Kjølstad.  They got in touch with people at Aardman
17048 Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like
17049 such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by
17050 animators around the globe.  But as is usual after studying, both got
17051 jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the
17052 project, and it has been lingering for a few years now.  Until last
17053 year...</p>
17054
17055 <p>Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the
17056 project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new
17057 name,
17058 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxstopmotion/">linuxstopmotion</a>.
17059 The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using
17060 Internet search engines (try to search for 'stopmotion' to see what I
17061 mean). I've been following
17062 <a href="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxstopmotion-community">the
17063 mailing list</a> and the improvement already in place and planned for
17064 the future is encouraging.  If you want to make stop motion movies.
17065 Check it out. :)</p>
17066
17067       </div>
17068       <div class="tags">
17069
17070
17071         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
17072
17073
17074       </div>
17075     </div>
17076     <div class="padding"></div>
17077
17078     <div class="entry">
17079       <div class="title">
17080         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html">Second release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</a>
17081       </div>
17082       <div class="date">
17083         27th February 2012
17084       </div>
17085       <div class="body">
17086         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the second release
17087 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
17088 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement did for some
17089 reason not make it the project announcement list, but is
17090 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/02/msg00015.html">available</a>
17091 from the Debian development announcement list.  Check it out if you
17092 need a software solution for your school.</p>
17093
17094       </div>
17095       <div class="tags">
17096
17097
17098         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17099
17100
17101       </div>
17102     </div>
17103     <div class="padding"></div>
17104
17105     <div class="entry">
17106       <div class="title">
17107         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_release_candidate_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html">First release candidate of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</a>
17108       </div>
17109       <div class="date">
17110         19th February 2012
17111       </div>
17112       <div class="body">
17113         <p>One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
17114 wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
17115 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
17116 on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
17117 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00001.html">available</a>
17118 on the project announcement list.  Check it out if you need a software
17119 solution for your school.</p>
17120
17121       </div>
17122       <div class="tags">
17123
17124
17125         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17126
17127
17128       </div>
17129     </div>
17130     <div class="padding"></div>
17131
17132     <div class="entry">
17133       <div class="title">
17134         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_figure_out_which_RAID_disk_to_replace_when_it_fail.html">How to figure out which RAID disk to replace when it fail</a>
17135       </div>
17136       <div class="date">
17137         14th February 2012
17138       </div>
17139       <div class="body">
17140         <p>Once in a while my home server have disk problems.  Thanks to Linux
17141 Software RAID, I have not lost data yet (but
17142 <a href="http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/34532">I was
17143 close</a> this summer :).  But once a disk is starting to behave
17144 funny, a practical problem present itself.  How to get from the Linux
17145 device name (like /dev/sdd) to something that can be used to identify
17146 the disk when the computer is turned off?  In my case I have SATA
17147 disks with a unique ID printed on the label.  All I need is a way to
17148 figure out how to query the disk to get the ID out.</p>
17149
17150 <p>After fumbling a bit, I
17151 <a href="http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-getting-scsi-ide-harddisk-information/">found
17152 that hdparm -I</a> will report the disk serial number, which is
17153 printed on the disk label.  The following (almost) one-liner can be
17154 used to look up the ID of all the failed disks:</p>
17155
17156 <blockquote><pre>
17157 for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep '(F)'|tr ' ' "\n"|grep '(F)'|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u);
17158 do
17159     printf "Failed disk $d: "
17160     hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep 'Serial Num'
17161 done
17162 </blockquote></pre>
17163
17164 <p>Putting it here to make sure I do not have to search for it the
17165 next time, and in case other find it useful.</p>
17166
17167 <p>At the moment I have two failing disk. :(</p>
17168
17169 <blockquote><pre>
17170 Failed disk sdd1:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
17171 Failed disk sdd2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
17172 Failed disk sde2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1840589
17173 </blockquote></pre>
17174
17175 <p>The last time I had failing disks, I added the serial number on
17176 labels I printed and stuck on the short sides of each disk, to be able
17177 to figure out which disk to take out of the box without having to
17178 remove each disk to look at the physical vendor label.  The vendor
17179 label is at the top of the disk, which is hidden when the disks are
17180 mounted inside my box.</p>
17181
17182 <p>I really wish the check_linux_raid Nagios plugin for checking Linux
17183 Software RAID in the
17184 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nagios-plugins.html">nagios-plugins-standard</a>
17185 debian package would look up this value automatically, as it would
17186 make the plugin a lot more useful when my disks fail.  At the moment
17187 it only report a failure when there are no more spares left (it really
17188 should warn as soon as a disk is failing), and it do not tell me which
17189 disk(s) is failing when the RAID is running short on disks.</p>
17190
17191       </div>
17192       <div class="tags">
17193
17194
17195         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid</a>.
17196
17197
17198       </div>
17199     </div>
17200     <div class="padding"></div>
17201
17202     <div class="entry">
17203       <div class="title">
17204         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">Automatic proxy configuration with Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
17205       </div>
17206       <div class="date">
17207         13th February 2012
17208       </div>
17209       <div class="body">
17210         <p>New in the Squeeze version of
17211 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is the
17212 ability for clients to automatically configure their proxy settings
17213 based on their environment.  We want all systems on the client to use
17214 the WPAD based proxy definition fetched from <tt>http://wpad/wpad.dat</tt>, to
17215 allow sites to control the proxy setting from a central place and make
17216 sure clients do not have hard coded proxy settings.  The schools can
17217 change the global proxy setting by editing
17218 <tt>tjener:/etc/debian-edu/www/wpad.dat</tt> and the change propagate
17219 to all Debian Edu clients in the network.</p>
17220
17221 <p>The problem is that some systems do not understand the WPAD system.
17222 In other words, how do one get from a WPAD file like this (this is a
17223 simple one, they can run arbitrary code):</p>
17224
17225 <blockquote><pre>
17226 function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
17227 {
17228    if (!isResolvable(host) ||
17229        isPlainHostName(host) ||
17230        dnsDomainIs(host, ".intern"))
17231       return "DIRECT";
17232    else
17233       return "PROXY webcache:3128; DIRECT";
17234 }
17235 </pre></blockquote>
17236
17237 <p>to a proxy setting in the process environment looking like this:</p>
17238
17239 <blockquote><pre>
17240 http_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
17241 ftp_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
17242 </pre></blockquote>
17243
17244 <p>To do this conversion I developed a perl script that will execute
17245 the javascript fragment in the WPAD file and return the proxy that
17246 would be used for
17247 <tt><a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a></tt>,
17248 and insert this extracted proxy URL in <tt>/etc/environment</tt> and
17249 <tt>/etc/apt/apt.conf</tt>.  The perl script wpad-extract work just
17250 fine in Squeeze, but in Wheezy the library it need to run the
17251 javascript code is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/631045">no longer
17252 able to build</a> because the C library it depended on is now a C++
17253 library.  I hope someone find a solution to that problem before Wheezy
17254 is frozen.  An alternative would be for us to rewrite wpad-extract to
17255 use some other javascript library currently working in Wheezy, but no
17256 known alternative is known at the moment.</p>
17257
17258 <p>This automatic proxy system allow the roaming workstation (aka
17259 laptop) setup in Debian Edu/Squeeze to use the proxy when the laptop
17260 is connected to the backbone network in a Debian Edu setup, and to
17261 automatically use any proxy present and announced using the WPAD
17262 feature when it is connected to other networks.  And if no proxy is
17263 announced, direct connections will be used instead.</p>
17264
17265 <p>Silently using a proxy announced on the network might be a privacy
17266 or security problem.  But those controlling DHCP and DNS on a network
17267 could just as easily set up a transparent proxy, and force all HTTP
17268 and FTP connections to use a proxy anyway, so I consider that
17269 distinction to be academic.  If you are afraid of using the wrong
17270 proxy, you should avoid connecting to the network in question in the
17271 first place.  In Debian Edu, the proxy setup is updated using dhcp and
17272 ifupdown hooks, to make sure the configuration is updated every time
17273 the network setup changes.</p>
17274
17275 <p>The WPAD system is documented in a
17276 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-01">IETF
17277 draft</a> and a
17278 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol">Wikipedia
17279 page</a> for those that want to learn more.</p>
17280
17281       </div>
17282       <div class="tags">
17283
17284
17285         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17286
17287
17288       </div>
17289     </div>
17290     <div class="padding"></div>
17291
17292     <div class="entry">
17293       <div class="title">
17294         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Saving_power_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_using_shutdown_at_night.html">Saving power with Debian Edu / Skolelinux using shutdown-at-night</a>
17295       </div>
17296       <div class="date">
17297          5th February 2012
17298       </div>
17299       <div class="body">
17300         <p>Since the Lenny version of
17301 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, a
17302 feature to save power have been included.  It is as simple as it is
17303 practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again
17304 in the morning.  This is done using the
17305 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/shutdown-at-night.html">shutdown-at-night</a> Debian package.</p>
17306
17307 <p>To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to
17308 the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts.  For Debian Edu, this is done in
17309 LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check
17310 every hour from 16:00 until 06:00 to see if the machine is unused, and
17311 shut it down if it is.  If the hardware in question is supported by
17312 the
17313 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvram-wakeup.html">nvram-wakeup</a>
17314 package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around 07:00 +-
17315 10 minutes.  If this isn't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to
17316 try to turn on the client.  The wake-on-lan option is only documented
17317 and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.</p>
17318
17319 <p>It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can
17320 blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like
17321 the common setup for a classroom.  The nvram-wakeup method only work
17322 for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock.  I've seen old
17323 machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were
17324 starting from 0 (or was it 1990?) every boot.  If you have one of
17325 those, you have to turn on the computer manually.</p>
17326
17327 <p>The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can
17328 also be used outside the Debian Edu environment.  For those without a
17329 central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file
17330 <tt>/etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night</tt> to enable it.
17331 Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?</p>
17332
17333       </div>
17334       <div class="tags">
17335
17336
17337         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17338
17339
17340       </div>
17341     </div>
17342     <div class="padding"></div>
17343
17344     <div class="entry">
17345       <div class="title">
17346         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html">Third beta version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</a>
17347       </div>
17348       <div class="date">
17349          4th February 2012
17350       </div>
17351       <div class="body">
17352         <p>I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and
17353 publish the third beta version of
17354 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
17355 on Squeeze.  If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with
17356 out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and
17357 installing new machines, check it out.  If you need a software
17358 solution for your school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
17359 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00000.html">available</a>
17360 on the project announcement list.</p>
17361
17362 <p>I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since
17363 beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):</p>
17364
17365 <ul>
17366
17367 <li>It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from
17368   10.0.0.0/8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after
17369   the installation.</li>
17370
17371 <li>Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main
17372   Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.</li>
17373
17374 <li>The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all
17375   disabled queues are restarted every hour.  This should cut down on
17376   the amount of manual administration needed for printers.</li>
17377
17378 <li>The set of initial users have been changed.  Now a personal user
17379   for the local system administrator is created during installation
17380   instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users,
17381   and this user is granted administrative privileges using group
17382   membership.  This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep
17383   up to date on the system.</li>
17384
17385 </ul>
17386
17387 <p>The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my
17388 private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home.  I will use it look
17389 for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the
17390 final Squeeze release is published.</p>
17391
17392 <p>Next weekend the project organise a
17393 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00001.html">developer
17394 gathering</a> in Oslo.  We will continue the work on the Squeeze
17395 version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version.  Perhaps I
17396 will see you there?</p>
17397
17398       </div>
17399       <div class="tags">
17400
17401
17402         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17403
17404
17405       </div>
17406     </div>
17407     <div class="padding"></div>
17408
17409     <div class="entry">
17410       <div class="title">
17411         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Handling_non_free_firmware_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html">Handling non-free firmware in Debian Edu/Squeeze</a>
17412       </div>
17413       <div class="date">
17414         27th January 2012
17415       </div>
17416       <div class="body">
17417         <p>With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
17418 This is the sad fact of todays computers.  In the next version of
17419 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
17420 on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
17421 firmware blobs easier to handle.  The common use case I run into is a
17422 laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
17423 work, but there are other use cases as well.</p>
17424
17425 <p>First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
17426 with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
17427 included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
17428 during installation.  This take care firmware for network devices used
17429 by the installer when installing from from local media.  But for
17430 example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
17431 not taken care of by this.</p>
17432
17433 <p>For non-network devices, we provide the script
17434 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware</tt> which
17435 search through the <tt>dmesg</tt> output for drivers requesting extra
17436 firmware.  The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
17437 file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
17438 the requested firmware file(s) is installed.  I have proposed to do
17439 something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
17440 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">#655507</a>), to allow PXE
17441 installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better.  Run the
17442 script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
17443 firmware packages.</p>
17444
17445 <p>Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
17446 because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
17447 working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
17448 included to be able to install at all.  To fill the PXE installation
17449 initrd with extra firmware, the
17450 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware</tt> script is
17451 provided.  Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
17452 PXE initrd with firmware packages.</p>
17453
17454 <p>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
17455 network cards working.  For this,
17456 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware</tt> is
17457 provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs.  It is used
17458 the same way as the other firmware related tools.</p>
17459
17460 <p>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation.  We
17461 do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
17462 non-free software, and it is their choice.</p>
17463
17464 <p>We plan to release beta3 this weekend.  You might want to give it a
17465 try.</p>
17466
17467       </div>
17468       <div class="tags">
17469
17470
17471         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17472
17473
17474       </div>
17475     </div>
17476     <div class="padding"></div>
17477
17478     <div class="entry">
17479       <div class="title">
17480         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Setting_up_a_new_school_with_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html">Setting up a new school with Debian Edu/Squeeze</a>
17481       </div>
17482       <div class="date">
17483         25th January 2012
17484       </div>
17485       <div class="body">
17486         <p>The next version of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu
17487 / Skolelinux</a> will include a new tool
17488 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp</tt>, which can be used to quickly set up all
17489 the computers in a school without much manual labour.  Here is a short
17490 summary on how to use it to set up a new school.</p>
17491
17492 <p>First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
17493 central server in the network.  Next, PXE boot all the client machines
17494 as thin clients and wait 5 minutes after the last client booted to
17495 allow the clients to report their existence to the central server.  When
17496 this is done, log on to the central server and run
17497 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a</tt> in the <tt>konsole</tt> to use the
17498 collected information to generate system objects in LDAP.  The output
17499 will look similar to this:</p>
17500
17501 <p><blockquote><pre>
17502 % sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
17503 info: Updating machine tjener.intern [10.0.2.2] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:05.
17504 info: Create GOsa machine for auto-mac-00-01-02-03-04-06 [10.0.16.20] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:06.
17505
17506 Enter password if you want to activate these changes, and ^c to abort.
17507
17508 Connecting to LDAP as cn=admin,ou=ldap-access,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
17509 enter password: *******
17510 %
17511 </pre></blockquote></p>
17512
17513 <p>After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
17514 root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
17515 populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
17516 automatically generated names.  The final step to set up the school is
17517 then to log into <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa</a>,
17518 the web based user, group and system administration system to change
17519 system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
17520 enable DHCP and DNS for the systems.  All clients that should be used
17521 as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
17522 group.  After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
17523 and get their assigned names and group based configuration
17524 automatically.</p>
17525
17526 <p>We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
17527 enabled this weekend.  You might want to give it a try.</p>
17528
17529 <p>Update 2012-01-28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
17530 hosts, one need to add the option -a.  I forgot to mention this in my
17531 original text, and have added it to the text now.</p>
17532
17533       </div>
17534       <div class="tags">
17535
17536
17537         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
17538
17539
17540       </div>
17541     </div>
17542     <div class="padding"></div>
17543
17544     <div class="entry">
17545       <div class="title">
17546         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Changing_the_default_Iceweasel_start_page_in_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html">Changing the default Iceweasel start page in Debian Edu/Squeeze</a>
17547       </div>
17548       <div class="date">
17549         10th January 2012
17550       </div>
17551       <div class="body">
17552         <p>In the Squeeze version of
17553 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> soon
17554 to be released, users of the system will get their default browser
17555 start page set from LDAP, allowing the system administrator to point
17556 all users to the school web page by updating one setting in LDAP.  In
17557 addition to setting the default start page when a machine boots, users
17558 are shown the same page as a welcome page when they log in for the
17559 first time.</p>
17560
17561 <p>The LDAP object dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no have an attribute
17562 labeledURI with "http://www/ LDAP for Debian Edu/Skolelinux" as the
17563 default content.  By changing this value to another URL, all users get
17564 to see the page behind this new URL.</p>
17565
17566 <p>An easy way to update it is by using the ldapvi tool.  It can be
17567 called as "<tt>ldapvi -ZD '(cn=admin)'</tt>' to update LDAP with the
17568 new setting.</p>
17569
17570 <p>We have written the code to adjust the default start page and show
17571 the welcome page, and I wonder if there is an easier way to do this
17572 from within Iceweasel instead.</p>
17573
17574       </div>
17575       <div class="tags">
17576
17577
17578         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
17579
17580
17581       </div>
17582     </div>
17583     <div class="padding"></div>
17584
17585     <div class="entry">
17586       <div class="title">
17587         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Second_beta_version_of_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Squeeze.html">Second beta version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze</a>
17588       </div>
17589       <div class="date">
17590          7th January 2012
17591       </div>
17592       <div class="body">
17593         <p>I am happy to announce that today we managed to wrap up and publish
17594 the second beta version of
17595 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>.  If
17596 you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE
17597 configuration for running diskless machines and installing new
17598 machines, check it out.  If you need a software solution for your
17599 school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
17600 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00000.html">available</a>
17601 on the project announcement list.</p>
17602
17603       </div>
17604       <div class="tags">
17605
17606
17607         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17608
17609
17610       </div>
17611     </div>
17612     <div class="padding"></div>
17613
17614     <div class="entry">
17615       <div class="title">
17616         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fixing_an_hanging_debian_installer_for_Debian_Edu.html">Fixing an hanging debian installer for Debian Edu</a>
17617       </div>
17618       <div class="date">
17619          3rd January 2012
17620       </div>
17621       <div class="body">
17622         <p>During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of
17623 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ready
17624 for release.  The initial problem I looked at was particularly
17625 interesting.</p>
17626
17627 <P>The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it
17628 post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find
17629 the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I
17630 integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from
17631 scratch.  I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors,
17632 remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and
17633 wrap up its tasks.</p>
17634
17635 <p>Eventually the cause was found.  The kernel was simply running out
17636 of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more.
17637 Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries
17638 to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but
17639 because I was typing.</P>
17640
17641 <p>The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at
17642 the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking
17643 /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the
17644 installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do 'find /' to
17645 generate some disk IO.  Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is
17646 one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to
17647 generate entropy.</p>
17648
17649 <p>The fix is in
17650 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/Installation">beta1
17651 of the Debian Edu/Squeeze</a> version, and we
17652 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu">welcome more testers and
17653 developers</a>.  We plan to release beta2 this weekend.</p>
17654
17655       </div>
17656       <div class="tags">
17657
17658
17659         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17660
17661
17662       </div>
17663     </div>
17664     <div class="padding"></div>
17665
17666     <div class="entry">
17667       <div class="title">
17668         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
17669       </div>
17670       <div class="date">
17671         21st November 2011
17672       </div>
17673       <div class="body">
17674         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
17675 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
17676 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
17677 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
17678 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
17679 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
17680 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
17681 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
17682 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
17683 the tools to do so.</p>
17684
17685 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
17686 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
17687 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
17688 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
17689
17690 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
17691 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
17692 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
17693 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
17694 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
17695 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
17696 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
17697 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
17698
17699 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
17700 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
17701 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
17702
17703 <p><pre>
17704 #!/usr/bin/perl
17705 use strict;
17706 use warnings;
17707 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
17708 BEGIN {
17709     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
17710     my %rhelmodules = (
17711         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
17712         );
17713     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
17714         eval "use $module;";
17715         if ($@) {
17716             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
17717             system("yum install -y $pkg");
17718             eval "use $module;";
17719         }
17720     }
17721 }
17722 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
17723
17724 upgrade_dell();
17725
17726 exit 0;
17727
17728 sub run_firmware_script {
17729     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
17730     unless ($script) {
17731         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
17732         exit 1
17733     }
17734     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
17735
17736     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
17737         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
17738     } else {
17739         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
17740     }
17741 }
17742
17743 sub run_firmware_scripts {
17744     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
17745     # Run firmware packages
17746     for my $dir (@dirs) {
17747         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
17748         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
17749         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
17750             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
17751             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
17752         }
17753         closedir $dh;
17754     }
17755 }
17756
17757 sub download {
17758     my $url = shift;
17759     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
17760     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
17761 }
17762
17763 sub upgrade_dell {
17764     my @dirs;
17765     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
17766     chomp $product;
17767
17768     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
17769
17770         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
17771         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
17772
17773         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
17774             CLEANUP => 1
17775             );
17776         chdir($tmpdir);
17777         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
17778         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
17779         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
17780         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
17781         my $fwopts = "-q";
17782         if (@paths) {
17783             for my $url (@paths) {
17784                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
17785             }
17786             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
17787         } else {
17788             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
17789             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
17790         }
17791         chdir('/');
17792     } else {
17793         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
17794         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
17795     }
17796 }
17797
17798 sub fetch_dell_fw {
17799     my $path = shift;
17800     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
17801     download($url);
17802 }
17803
17804 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
17805 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
17806 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
17807 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
17808     my $filename = shift;
17809
17810     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
17811     chomp $product;
17812     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
17813
17814     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
17815
17816     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
17817     my @paths;
17818     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
17819         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
17820         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
17821         my $oscode;
17822         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
17823             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
17824         } else {
17825             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
17826         }
17827         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
17828         {
17829             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
17830         }
17831     }
17832     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
17833         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
17834
17835         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
17836         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
17837
17838         my $cpath = $component->{path};
17839         for my $path (@paths) {
17840             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
17841                 push(@paths, $cpath);
17842             }
17843         }
17844     }
17845     return @paths;
17846 }
17847 </pre>
17848
17849 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
17850 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
17851 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
17852 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
17853 outdated.</p>
17854
17855       </div>
17856       <div class="tags">
17857
17858
17859         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17860
17861
17862       </div>
17863     </div>
17864     <div class="padding"></div>
17865
17866     <div class="entry">
17867       <div class="title">
17868         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_e_book_kiosk_for_the_public_libraries_.html">Free e-book kiosk for the public libraries?</a>
17869       </div>
17870       <div class="date">
17871          7th October 2011
17872       </div>
17873       <div class="body">
17874         <p>Here in Norway the public libraries are debating with the
17875 publishing houses how to handle electronic books.  Surprisingly, the
17876 libraries seem to be willing to accept digital restriction mechanisms
17877 (DRM) on books and renting e-books with artificial scarcity from the
17878 publishing houses.  Time limited renting (2-3 years) is one proposed
17879 model, and only allowing X borrowers for each book is another.
17880 Personally I find it amazing that libraries are even considering such
17881 models.</p>
17882
17883 <p>Anyway, while reading <a href="http://boklaben.no/?p=220">part of
17884 this debate</a>, it occurred to me that someone should present a more
17885 sensible approach to the libraries, to allow its borrowers to get used
17886 to a better model.  The idea is simple:</p>
17887
17888 <p>Create a computer system for the libraries, either in the form of a
17889 Live DVD or a installable distribution, that provide a simple kiosk
17890 solution to hand out free e-books.  As a start, the books distributed
17891 by <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about
17892 36,000 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a>
17893 (1149 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The
17894 Internet Archive</a> (3,033,748 books) could be included, but any book
17895 where the copyright has expired or with a free licence could be
17896 distributed.</p>
17897
17898 <p>The computer system would make it easy to:</p>
17899
17900 <ul>
17901
17902 <li>Copy e-books into a USB stick, reading tablets, cell phones and
17903   other relevant equipment.</li>
17904
17905 <li>Show the books for reading on the the screen in the library.</li>
17906
17907 </ul>
17908
17909 <p>In addition to such kiosk solution, there should probably be a web
17910 site as well to allow people easy access to these books without
17911 visiting the library.  The site would be the distribution point for
17912 the kiosk systems, which would connect regularly to fetch any new
17913 books available.</p>
17914
17915 <p>Are there anyone working on a system like this?  I guess it would
17916 fit any library in the world, and not just the Norwegian public
17917 libraries. :)</p>
17918
17919       </div>
17920       <div class="tags">
17921
17922
17923         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
17924
17925
17926       </div>
17927     </div>
17928     <div class="padding"></div>
17929
17930     <div class="entry">
17931       <div class="title">
17932         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">Ripping problematic DVDs using dvdbackup and genisoimage</a>
17933       </div>
17934       <div class="date">
17935         17th September 2011
17936       </div>
17937       <div class="body">
17938         <p>For convenience, I want to store copies of all my DVDs on my file
17939 server.  It allow me to save shelf space flat while still having my
17940 movie collection easily available.  It also make it possible to let
17941 the kids see their favourite DVDs without wearing the physical copies
17942 down.  I prefer to store the DVDs as ISOs to keep the DVD menu and
17943 subtitle options intact.  It also ensure that the entire film is one
17944 file on the disk.  As this is for personal use, the ripping is
17945 perfectly legal here in Norway.</p>
17946
17947 <p>Normally I rip the DVDs using dd like this:</p>
17948
17949 <blockquote><pre>
17950 #!/bin/sh
17951 # apt-get install lsdvd
17952 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
17953 dd if=/dev/dvd of=/storage/dvds/$title.iso bs=1M
17954 </pre></blockquote>
17955
17956 <p>But some DVDs give a input/output error when I read it, and I have
17957 been looking for a better alternative.  I have no idea why this I/O
17958 error occur, but suspect my DVD drive, the Linux kernel driver or
17959 something fishy with the DVDs in question.  Or perhaps all three.</p>
17960
17961 <p>Anyway, I believe I found a solution today using dvdbackup and
17962 genisoimage.  This script gave me a working ISO for a problematic
17963 movie by first extracting the DVD file system and then re-packing it
17964 back as an ISO.
17965
17966 <blockquote><pre>
17967 #!/bin/sh
17968 # apt-get install lsdvd dvdbackup genisoimage
17969 set -e
17970 tmpdir=/storage/dvds/
17971 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
17972 dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M -o $tmpdir -n$title
17973 genisoimage -dvd-video -o $tmpdir/$title.iso $tmpdir/$title
17974 rm -rf $tmpdir/$title
17975 </pre></blockquote>
17976
17977 <p>Anyone know of a better way available in Debian/Squeeze?</p>
17978
17979 <p>Update 2011-09-18: I got a tip from Konstantin Khomoutov about the
17980 readom program from the wodim package.  It is specially written to
17981 read optical media, and is called like this: <tt>readom dev=/dev/dvd
17982 f=image.iso</tt>.  It got 6 GB along with the problematic Cars DVD
17983 before it failed, and failed right away with a Timmy Time DVD.</p>
17984
17985 <p>Next, I got a tip from Bastian Blank about
17986 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">his
17987 program python-dvdvideo</a>, which seem to be just what I am looking
17988 for.  Tested it with my problematic Timmy Time DVD, and it succeeded
17989 creating a ISO image.  The git source built and installed just fine in
17990 Squeeze, so I guess this will be my tool of choice in the future.</p>
17991
17992       </div>
17993       <div class="tags">
17994
17995
17996         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
17997
17998
17999       </div>
18000     </div>
18001     <div class="padding"></div>
18002
18003     <div class="entry">
18004       <div class="title">
18005         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html">How is booting into runlevel 1 different from single user boots?</a>
18006       </div>
18007       <div class="date">
18008          4th August 2011
18009       </div>
18010       <div class="body">
18011         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
18012 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
18013 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
18014 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
18015 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
18016 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
18017 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
18018 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
18019 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
18020
18021 <p><blockquote>
18022 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
18023 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
18024 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
18025 </blockquote></p>
18026
18027 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
18028 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
18029 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
18030 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
18031 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
18032 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
18033 hard to explain.</p>
18034
18035 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
18036 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
18037 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
18038 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
18039 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
18040 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
18041 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
18042 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
18043 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
18044 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
18045 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
18046 mode).</p>
18047
18048 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
18049 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
18050 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
18051 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
18052 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
18053 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
18054 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
18055 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
18056 after visiting single user mode.</p>
18057
18058 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
18059 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
18060 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
18061 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
18062 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
18063 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
18064 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
18065 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
18066
18067 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
18068 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
18069 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
18070
18071       </div>
18072       <div class="tags">
18073
18074
18075         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18076
18077
18078       </div>
18079     </div>
18080     <div class="padding"></div>
18081
18082     <div class="entry">
18083       <div class="title">
18084         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">What should start from /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian? - almost nothing</a>
18085       </div>
18086       <div class="date">
18087         30th July 2011
18088       </div>
18089       <div class="body">
18090         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
18091 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
18092 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
18093 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
18094 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
18095 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
18096 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
18097 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
18098 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
18099 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
18100 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
18101 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
18102 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
18103
18104 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
18105 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
18106 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
18107 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
18108 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
18109 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
18110 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
18111 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
18112 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
18113
18114 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
18115 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
18116 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
18117 is presented.</p>
18118
18119 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
18120 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
18121 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
18122 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
18123 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
18124 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
18125 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
18126 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
18127 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
18128 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
18129 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
18130 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
18131 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
18132 find time to push this forward.</p>
18133
18134       </div>
18135       <div class="tags">
18136
18137
18138         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18139
18140
18141       </div>
18142     </div>
18143     <div class="padding"></div>
18144
18145     <div class="entry">
18146       <div class="title">
18147         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">What is missing in the Debian desktop, or why my parents use Kubuntu</a>
18148       </div>
18149       <div class="date">
18150         29th July 2011
18151       </div>
18152       <div class="body">
18153         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
18154 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
18155 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
18156 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
18157 issues.</p>
18158
18159 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
18160 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
18161 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
18162
18163 <ol>
18164
18165 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
18166 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
18167 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
18168 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
18169 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
18170 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
18171 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
18172 Debian.</li>
18173
18174 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
18175 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
18176 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
18177 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
18178 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
18179 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
18180 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
18181 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
18182 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
18183 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
18184 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
18185 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
18186 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
18187
18188 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
18189 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
18190 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
18191 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
18192 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
18193 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
18194 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
18195 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
18196 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
18197 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
18198
18199 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
18200 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
18201 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
18202 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
18203 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
18204 latter behaviour.</li>
18205
18206 </ol>
18207
18208 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
18209 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
18210 it do not matter much.</p>
18211
18212 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
18213 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
18214 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
18215
18216       </div>
18217       <div class="tags">
18218
18219
18220         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
18221
18222
18223       </div>
18224     </div>
18225     <div class="padding"></div>
18226
18227     <div class="entry">
18228       <div class="title">
18229         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_modules_used_by_FixMyStreet_which_are_missing_in_Debian_Squeeze.html">Perl modules used by FixMyStreet which are missing in Debian/Squeeze</a>
18230       </div>
18231       <div class="date">
18232         26th July 2011
18233       </div>
18234       <div class="body">
18235         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
18236 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
18237 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
18238 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
18239 security support for a few years.</p>
18240
18241 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
18242 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
18243 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
18244 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
18245 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
18246 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
18247 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
18248 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
18249 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
18250 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
18251 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
18252 easier in the future.</p>
18253
18254 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
18255 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
18256 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
18257 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
18258 do not have time for.</p>
18259
18260       </div>
18261       <div class="tags">
18262
18263
18264         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>.
18265
18266
18267       </div>
18268     </div>
18269     <div class="padding"></div>
18270
18271     <div class="entry">
18272       <div class="title">
18273         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html">Free Software vs. proprietary softare...</a>
18274       </div>
18275       <div class="date">
18276         20th June 2011
18277       </div>
18278       <div class="body">
18279         <p>Reading
18280 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/06/20/open-source-vs-closed-source-eulas/">the
18281 thingiverse blog</a>, I came across two highlights of interesting
18282 parts of the
18283 <a href="http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Autodesk_EULA">Autodesk</a>
18284 and
18285 <a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/06/things-you-cant-do-with-the-microsoft-kinect-sdk.html">Microsoft
18286 Kinect</a> End User License Agreements (EULAs), which illustrates
18287 quite well why I stay away from software with EULAs.  Whenever I take
18288 the time to read their content, the terms are simply unacceptable.</p>
18289
18290       </div>
18291       <div class="tags">
18292
18293
18294         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
18295
18296
18297       </div>
18298     </div>
18299     <div class="padding"></div>
18300
18301     <div class="entry">
18302       <div class="title">
18303         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experimental_Open311_API_for_the_mySociety_fixmystreet_system.html">Experimental Open311 API for the mySociety fixmystreet system</a>
18304       </div>
18305       <div class="date">
18306         30th April 2011
18307       </div>
18308       <div class="body">
18309         <p>Today, the first draft implementation of an
18310 <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> for the Norwegian
18311 service <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> started to
18312 work.  It is only available on the developer server for now, and I
18313 have not tested it using any existing Open311 client (I lack the
18314 platforms needed to run the clients I have found so far), but it is
18315 able to query the database and extract a list of open and closed
18316 requests within a given category and reported to a given municipality.
18317 I believe that is a good start to create a useful service for those
18318 that want to do data mining on the requests submitted so far.</p>
18319
18320 <p>Where is it?  Visit
18321 <a href="http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/">http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/</a>
18322 to have a look.  Please send feedback to the
18323 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
18324 (at) nuug.no</a> mailing list.</p>
18325
18326       </div>
18327       <div class="tags">
18328
18329
18330         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311</a>.
18331
18332
18333       </div>
18334     </div>
18335     <div class="padding"></div>
18336
18337     <div class="entry">
18338       <div class="title">
18339         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Initial_notes_on_adding_Open311_server_API_on_FixMyStreet.html">Initial notes on adding Open311 server API on FixMyStreet</a>
18340       </div>
18341       <div class="date">
18342         29th April 2011
18343       </div>
18344       <div class="body">
18345         <p>The last few days I have spent some time trying to add support for
18346 the <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> in the
18347 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">Norwegian FixMyStreet service</a>.
18348 Earlier I believed Open311 would be a useful API to use to submit
18349 reports to the municipalities, but when I noticed that the
18350 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org.nz/">New Zealand version</a> of
18351 FixMyStreet had implemented Open311 on the server side, it occurred to
18352 me that this was a nice way to allow the public, press and
18353 municipalities to do data mining directly in the FixMyStreet service.
18354 Thus I went to work implementing the Open311 specification for
18355 FixMyStreet.  The implementation is not yet ready, but I am starting
18356 to get a draft limping along.  In the process, I have discovered a few
18357 issues with the Open311 specification.</p>
18358
18359 <p>One obvious missing feature is the lack of natural language
18360 handling in the specification.  The specification seem to assume all
18361 reports will be written in English, and do not provide a way for the
18362 receiving end to specify which languages are understood there.  To be
18363 able to use the same client and submit to several Open311 receivers,
18364 it would be useful to know which language to use when writing reports.
18365 I believe the specification should be extended to allow the receivers
18366 of problem reports to specify which language they accept, and the
18367 submitter to specify which language the report is written in.
18368 Language of a text can also be automatically guessed using statistical
18369 methods, but for multi-lingual persons like myself, it is useful to
18370 know which language to use when writing a problem report.  I suspect
18371 some lang=nb,nn kind of attribute would solve it.</p>
18372
18373 <p>A key part of the Open311 API is the list of services provided,
18374 which is similar to the categories used by FixMyStreet.  One issue I
18375 run into is the need to specify both name and unique identifier for
18376 each category.  The specification do not state that the identifier
18377 should be numeric, but all example implementations have used numbers
18378 here.  In FixMyStreet, there is no number associated with each
18379 category.  As the specification do not forbid it, I will use the name
18380 as the unique identifier for now and see how open311 clients handle
18381 it.</p>
18382
18383 <p>The report format in open311 and the report format in FixMyStreet
18384 differ in a key part.  FixMyStreet have a title and a description,
18385 while Open311 only have a description and lack the title.  I'm not
18386 quite sure how to best handle this yet.  When asking for a FixMyStreet
18387 report in Open311 format, I just merge title an description into the
18388 open311 description, but this is not going to work if the open311 API
18389 should be used for submitting new reports to FixMyStreet.</p>
18390
18391 <p>The search feature in Open311 is missing a way to ask for problems
18392 near a geographic location.  I believe this is important if one is to
18393 use Open311 as the query language for mobile units.  The specification
18394 should be extended to handle this, probably using some new lat=, lon=
18395 and range= options.</p>
18396
18397 <p>The final challenge I see is that the FixMyStreet code handle
18398 several administrations in one interface, while the Open311 API seem
18399 to assume only one administration.  For FixMyStreet, this mean a
18400 report can be sent to several administrations, and the categories
18401 available depend on the location of the problem.  Not quite sure how
18402 to best handle this.  I've noticed
18403 <a href="http://seeclickfix.com/open311/">SeeClickFix</a> added
18404 latitude and longitude options to the services request, but it do not
18405 solve the problem of what to return when no location is specified.
18406 Will have to investigate this a bit more.</p>
18407
18408 <p>My distaste for web forums have kept me from bringing these issues
18409 up with the open311 developer group.  I really wish they had a email
18410 list available via <a href="http://www.gmane.org/">Gmane</a> to use for
18411 discussions instead of only
18412 <a href="http://lists.open311.org/groups/discuss">a forum<a/>.  Oh,
18413 well.  That will probably resolve itself, one way or another.  I've
18414 also tried visiting the IRC channel #open311 on FreeNode, but no-one
18415 seem to reply to my questions there.  This make me wonder if I just
18416 fail to understand how the open311 community work.  It sure do not
18417 work like the free software project communities I am used to.</p>
18418
18419       </div>
18420       <div class="tags">
18421
18422
18423         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311</a>.
18424
18425
18426       </div>
18427     </div>
18428     <div class="padding"></div>
18429
18430     <div class="entry">
18431       <div class="title">
18432         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html">Gnash enteres Google Summer of Code 2011</a>
18433       </div>
18434       <div class="date">
18435          6th April 2011
18436       </div>
18437       <div class="body">
18438         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is still
18439 the most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation.
18440 A few days ago the project
18441 <a href="http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/2011-04/msg00011.html">announced</a>
18442 that it will participate in Google Summer of Code.  I hope many
18443 students apply, and that some of them succeed in getting AVM2 support
18444 into Gnash.</p>
18445
18446       </div>
18447       <div class="tags">
18448
18449
18450         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
18451
18452
18453       </div>
18454     </div>
18455     <div class="padding"></div>
18456
18457     <div class="entry">
18458       <div class="title">
18459         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html">A Norwegian FixMyStreet have kept me busy the last few weeks</a>
18460       </div>
18461       <div class="date">
18462          3rd April 2011
18463       </div>
18464       <div class="body">
18465         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
18466 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
18467 update in English.</p>
18468
18469 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
18470 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
18471 of the British service
18472 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
18473 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
18474 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
18475 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
18476 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
18477 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
18478 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
18479 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
18480 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
18481 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
18482 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
18483 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
18484 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
18485
18486 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
18487 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
18488 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
18489 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
18490 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
18491 public infrastructure.</p>
18492
18493 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
18494 such service?</p>
18495
18496       </div>
18497       <div class="tags">
18498
18499
18500         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>.
18501
18502
18503       </div>
18504     </div>
18505     <div class="padding"></div>
18506
18507     <div class="entry">
18508       <div class="title">
18509         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html">Using NVD and CPE to track CVEs in locally maintained software</a>
18510       </div>
18511       <div class="date">
18512         28th January 2011
18513       </div>
18514       <div class="body">
18515         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
18516 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
18517 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
18518 available on the Internet, and check our locally
18519 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
18520 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
18521 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
18522 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
18523 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
18524 out which security holes were present in our free software
18525 collection.</p>
18526
18527 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
18528 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
18529 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
18530 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
18531 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
18532 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
18533 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
18534 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
18535 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
18536 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
18537 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
18538 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
18539 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
18540 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
18541 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
18542 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
18543
18544 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
18545 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
18546 check out, one could look up
18547 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search?cpe=cpe%3A%2Fa%3Agnu%3Agzip:1.3.3">cpe:/a:gnu:gzip:1.3.3
18548 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
18549 The most recent one is
18550 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
18551 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
18552 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
18553
18554 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
18555 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
18556 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
18557 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
18558 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
18559 security issues out.</p>
18560
18561 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
18562 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
18563 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
18564 RHEL is providing
18565 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
18566 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
18567 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
18568
18569 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
18570 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
18571 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
18572 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
18573 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
18574 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
18575 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
18576 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
18577 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
18578 established soon.</p>
18579
18580 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
18581 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
18582 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
18583 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
18584 for their packages.</p>
18585
18586       </div>
18587       <div class="tags">
18588
18589
18590         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
18591
18592
18593       </div>
18594     </div>
18595     <div class="padding"></div>
18596
18597     <div class="entry">
18598       <div class="title">
18599         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Which_module_is_loaded_for_a_given_PCI_and_USB_device_.html">Which module is loaded for a given PCI and USB device?</a>
18600       </div>
18601       <div class="date">
18602         23rd January 2011
18603       </div>
18604       <div class="body">
18605         <p>In the
18606 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
18607 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
18608 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
18609 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
18610 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
18611 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
18612 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
18613 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
18614 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
18615 one of my machines like this:</p>
18616
18617 <pre>
18618 loaded modules:
18619 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
18620 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
18621 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
18622 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
18623 10de:03ec pata_amd
18624 10de:03f6 sata_nv
18625 1022:1103 k8temp
18626 109e:036e bttv
18627 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
18628 11ab:4364 sky2
18629 </pre>
18630
18631 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
18632 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
18633
18634 <pre>
18635 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
18636     echo loaded pci modules:
18637     (
18638         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
18639         for address in * ; do
18640             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
18641                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
18642                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
18643                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
18644                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
18645                     echo "$id $module"
18646                 fi
18647             fi
18648         done
18649     )
18650     echo
18651 fi
18652 </pre>
18653
18654 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
18655 mappings:</p>
18656
18657 <pre>
18658 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
18659     echo loaded usb modules:
18660     (
18661         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
18662         for address in * ; do
18663             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
18664                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
18665                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
18666                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
18667                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
18668                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
18669                         echo "$id $module"
18670                     fi
18671                 fi
18672             fi
18673         done
18674     )
18675     echo
18676 fi
18677 </pre>
18678
18679 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
18680 well.</p>
18681
18682       </div>
18683       <div class="tags">
18684
18685
18686         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18687
18688
18689       </div>
18690     </div>
18691     <div class="padding"></div>
18692
18693     <div class="entry">
18694       <div class="title">
18695         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_video_format_most_supported_in_web_browsers_.html">The video format most supported in web browsers?</a>
18696       </div>
18697       <div class="date">
18698         16th January 2011
18699       </div>
18700       <div class="body">
18701         <p>The video format struggle on the web continues, and the three
18702 contenders seem to be Ogg Theora, H.264 and WebM.  Most video sites
18703 seem to use H.264, while others use Ogg Theora.  Interestingly enough,
18704 the comments I see give me the feeling that a lot of people believe
18705 H.264 is the most supported video format in browsers, but according to
18706 the Wikipedia article on
18707 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">HTML5 video</a>,
18708 this is not true.  Check out the nice table of supprted formats in
18709 different browsers there.  The format supported by most browsers is
18710 Ogg Theora, supported by released versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google
18711 Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Origyn Web Browser and
18712 BOLT browser, while not supported by Internet Explorer nor Safari.
18713 The runner up is WebM supported by released versions of Google Chrome
18714 Chromium Opera and Origyn Web Browser, and test versions of Mozilla
18715 Firefox.  H.264 is supported by released versions of Safari, Origyn
18716 Web Browser and BOLT browser, and the test version of Internet
18717 Explorer.  Those wanting Ogg Theora support in Internet Explorer and
18718 Safari can install plugins to get it.</p>
18719
18720 <p>To me, the simple conclusion from this is that to reach most users
18721 without any extra software installed, one uses Ogg Theora with the
18722 HTML5 video tag.   Of course to reach all those without a browser
18723 handling HTML5, one need fallback mechanisms.  In
18724 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a>, we provide first fallback to a
18725 plugin capable of playing MPEG1 video, and those without such support
18726 we have a second fallback to the Cortado java applet playing Ogg
18727 Theora.  This seem to work quite well, as can be seen in an <a
18728 href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20110111-semantic-web/">example
18729 from last week</a>.</p>
18730
18731 <p>The reason Ogg Theora is the most supported format, and H.264 is
18732 the least supported is simple.  Implementing and using H.264
18733 require royalty payment to MPEG-LA, and the terms of use from MPEG-LA
18734 are incompatible with free software licensing.  If you believed H.264
18735 was without royalties and license terms, check out
18736 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
18737 Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps.</p>
18738
18739 <p>A incomplete list of sites providing video in Ogg Theora is
18740 available from
18741 <a href="http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_Theora_videos">the
18742 Xiph.org wiki</a>, if you want to have a look.  I'm not aware of a
18743 similar list for WebM nor H.264.</p>
18744
18745 <p>Update 2011-01-16 09:40: A question from Tollef on IRC made me
18746 realise that I failed to make it clear enough this text is about the
18747 &lt;video&gt; tag support in browsers and not the video support
18748 provided by external plugins like the Flash plugins.</p>
18749
18750       </div>
18751       <div class="tags">
18752
18753
18754         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
18755
18756
18757       </div>
18758     </div>
18759     <div class="padding"></div>
18760
18761     <div class="entry">
18762       <div class="title">
18763         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Chrome_plan_to_drop_H_264_support_for_HTML5__lt_video_gt_.html">Chrome plan to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt;</a>
18764       </div>
18765       <div class="date">
18766         12th January 2011
18767       </div>
18768       <div class="body">
18769         <p>Today I discovered
18770 <a href="http://www.digi.no/860070/google-dropper-h264-stotten-i-chrome">via
18771 digi.no</a> that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
18772 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html">yesterday
18773 announced</a> plans to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt; in
18774 the browser.  The argument used is that H.264 is not a "completely
18775 open" codec technology.  If you believe H.264 was free for everyone
18776 to use, I recommend having a look at the essay
18777 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
18778 Free That Matters</a>".  It is not free of cost for creators of video
18779 tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the
18780 terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from
18781 licensing the patents needed for H.264.  Some background information
18782 on the Google announcement is available from
18783 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24243/Google_To_Drop_H264_Support_from_Chrome">OSnews</a>.
18784 A good read. :)</p>
18785
18786 <p>Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to
18787 promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on
18788 the Internet.  This can only be done by publishing using free and open
18789 standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support
18790 for these free and open standards.  At the moment there seem to be two
18791 camps in the web browser world when it come to video support.  Some
18792 browsers support H.264, and others support
18793 <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg Theora</a> and
18794 <a href="http://www.webmproject.org/">WebM</a>
18795 (<a href="http://www.diracvideo.org/">Dirac</a> is not really an option
18796 yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet
18797 and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for
18798 H.264 to not reach all potential viewers.
18799 Wikipedia keep <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">an
18800 updated summary</a> of the current browser support.</p>
18801
18802 <p>Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
18803 promoting H.264, and John Gruber
18804 <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/simple_questions">presents
18805 the mind set</a> of these people quite well.  His rhetorical questions
18806 provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
18807 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24245/10_Questions_for_John_Gruber_Regarding_H_264_WebM">presenting
18808 the issues with H.264</a>. Both are worth a read.</p>
18809
18810 <p>Some argue that if Google is dropping H.264 because it isn't free,
18811 they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin.  This
18812 argument was covered by Simon Phipps in
18813 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/01/google-and-h264---far-from-hypocritical/index.htm">todays
18814 blog post</a>, which I find to put the issue in context.  To me it
18815 make perfect sense to drop native H.264 support for HTML5 in the
18816 browser while still allowing plugins.</p>
18817
18818 <p>I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest,
18819 is that all the users and promoters of H.264 suddenly get an uneasy
18820 feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse.  A lot of TV
18821 broadcasters have been moving to H.264 the last few years, and a lot
18822 of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they
18823 could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web
18824 publishing.  Suddenly this belief is shaken.</p>
18825
18826 <p>An interesting question is why Google is doing this.  While the
18827 presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only
18828 present the argument if the change make sense from a business
18829 perspective.  One reason might be that they are currently negotiating
18830 with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the
18831 feeling that dropping H.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and
18832 Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google.
18833 Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having
18834 to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a
18835 video format not requiring royalties at all.  A third reason might be
18836 that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the
18837 Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome.
18838 I guess time will tell.</p>
18839
18840 <p>Update 2011-01-15: The Google Chrome team provided
18841 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html">more
18842 background and information on the move</a> it a blog post yesterday.</p>
18843
18844       </div>
18845       <div class="tags">
18846
18847
18848         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
18849
18850
18851       </div>
18852     </div>
18853     <div class="padding"></div>
18854
18855     <div class="entry">
18856       <div class="title">
18857         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_standards_are_Free_and_Open_as_defined_by_Digistan_.html">What standards are Free and Open as defined by Digistan?</a>
18858       </div>
18859       <div class="date">
18860         30th December 2010
18861       </div>
18862       <div class="body">
18863         <p>After trying to
18864 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html">compare
18865 Ogg Theora</a> to
18866 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the Digistan
18867 definition</a> of a free and open standard, I concluded that this need
18868 to be done for more standards and started on a framework for doing
18869 this.  As a start, I want to get the status for all the standards in
18870 the Norwegian reference directory, which include UTF-8, HTML, PDF, ODF,
18871 JPEG, PNG, SVG and others.  But to be able to complete this in a
18872 reasonable time frame, I will need help.</p>
18873
18874 <p>If you want to help out with this work, please visit
18875 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/standard/digistan-analyse">the
18876 wiki pages I have set up for this</a>, and let me know that you want
18877 to help out.  The IRC channel #nuug on irc.freenode.net is a good
18878 place to coordinate this for now, as it is the IRC channel for the
18879 NUUG association where I have created the framework (I am the leader
18880 of the Norwegian Unix User Group).</p>
18881
18882 <p>The framework is still forming, and a lot is left to do.  Do not be
18883 scared by the sketchy form of the current pages. :)</p>
18884
18885       </div>
18886       <div class="tags">
18887
18888
18889         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
18890
18891
18892       </div>
18893     </div>
18894     <div class="padding"></div>
18895
18896     <div class="entry">
18897       <div class="title">
18898         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html">The many definitions of a open standard</a>
18899       </div>
18900       <div class="date">
18901         27th December 2010
18902       </div>
18903       <div class="body">
18904         <p>One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of
18905 "<a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">Free and
18906 Open Standard</a>" is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of
18907 the term has been decided by Digistan.  The term "Open Standard" has
18908 become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking
18909 about standards.  One end up discussing which definition is the best
18910 one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of
18911 de-facto standards and proprietary solutions.</p>
18912
18913 <p>But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open
18914 standards, here are a few that I know about.  This list is not
18915 complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a
18916 complete survey.  More definitions are available on the
18917 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard">wikipedia
18918 page</a>.</p>
18919
18920 <p>First off is my favourite, the definition from the European
18921 Interoperability Framework version 1.0.  Really sad to notice that BSA
18922 and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version 2.0 of the
18923 framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with
18924 their own people.  Anyway, the definition is still available and it
18925 include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a
18926 specification on equal terms.</p>
18927
18928 <blockquote>
18929
18930 <p>The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification
18931 and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an
18932 open standard:</p>
18933
18934 <ul>
18935
18936 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
18937 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
18938 open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties
18939 (consensus or majority decision etc.).</li>
18940
18941 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
18942 document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be
18943 permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a
18944 nominal fee.</li>
18945
18946 <li>The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of
18947 (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-
18948 free basis.</li>
18949
18950 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
18951
18952 </ul>
18953 </blockquote>
18954
18955 <p>Another one originates from my friends over at
18956 <a href="http://www.dkuug.dk/">DKUUG</a>, who coined and gathered
18957 support for <a href="http://www.aaben-standard.dk/">this
18958 definition</a> in 2004.  It even made it into the Danish parlament as
18959 <a href="http://www.ft.dk/dokumenter/tingdok.aspx?/samling/20051/beslutningsforslag/B103/som_fremsat.htm">their
18960 definition of a open standard</a>.  Another from a different part of
18961 the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.</p>
18962
18963 <blockquote>
18964
18965 <p>En åben standard opfylder følgende krav:</p>
18966
18967 <ol>
18968
18969 <li>Veldokumenteret med den fuldstændige specifikation offentligt
18970 tilgængelig.</li>
18971
18972 <li>Frit implementerbar uden økonomiske, politiske eller juridiske
18973 begrænsninger på implementation og anvendelse.</li>
18974
18975 <li>Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et åbent forum (en såkaldt
18976 "standardiseringsorganisation") via en åben proces.</li>
18977
18978 </ol>
18979
18980 </blockquote>
18981
18982 <p>Then there is <a href="http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/def.html">the
18983 definition</a> from Free Software Foundation Europe.</p>
18984
18985 <blockquote>
18986
18987 <p>An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is</p>
18988
18989 <ol>
18990
18991 <li>subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a
18992 manner equally available to all parties;</li>
18993
18994 <li>without any components or extensions that have dependencies on
18995 formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open
18996 Standard themselves;</li>
18997
18998 <li>free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by
18999 any party or in any business model;</li>
19000
19001 <li>managed and further developed independently of any single vendor
19002 in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third
19003 parties;</li>
19004
19005 <li>available in multiple complete implementations by competing
19006 vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all
19007 parties.</li>
19008
19009 </ol>
19010
19011 </blockquote>
19012
19013 <p>A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created
19014 its
19015 <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/dennisding/resource/Open%20Standard%20Definition.pdf">Open
19016 Standards Checklist</a> with a fairly detailed description.</p>
19017
19018 <blockquote>
19019 <p>Creation and Management of an Open Standard
19020
19021 <ul>
19022
19023 <li>Its development and management process must be collaborative and
19024   democratic:
19025
19026          <ul>
19027
19028          <li>Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to
19029             participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria
19030             imposed by the organization under which it is developed
19031             and managed.</li>
19032
19033          <li>The processes must be documented and, through a known
19034             method, can be changed through input from all
19035             participants.</li>
19036
19037          <li>The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for
19038             the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.</li>
19039
19040          <li>Development and management should strive for consensus,
19041             and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.</li>
19042
19043          <li>The standard specification must be open to extensive
19044             public review at least once in its life-cycle, with
19045             comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.</li>
19046
19047          </ul>
19048
19049 </li>
19050
19051 </ul>
19052
19053 <p>Use and Licensing of an Open Standard</p>
19054 <ul>
19055
19056 <li>The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation,
19057   and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing
19058   implementations to the interface described in the standard without
19059   undue or restrictive constraints.  Interfaces include APIs,
19060   protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.</li>
19061
19062 <li> The standard must not contain any proprietary "hooks" that create
19063   a technical or economic barriers</li>
19064
19065 <li>Faithful implementations of the standard must
19066   interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer
19067   program to communicate and exchange information with other computer
19068   programs and mutually to use the information which has been
19069   exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange
19070   file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or
19071   conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other
19072   computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are
19073   intended to function.</li>
19074
19075 <li>It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the
19076   standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it
19077   must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.</li>
19078
19079 <li>It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or
19080   fees; also known as "royalty free"), worldwide, non-exclusive and
19081   perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and
19082   sell products based on the standard.  The only exceptions are
19083   terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms
19084   outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished
19085   patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is
19086   only for the exact scope of the standard in question.
19087
19088       <ul>
19089
19090       <li> May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of
19091         licensees' patent claims essential to practice that standard
19092         (also known as a reciprocity clause)</li>
19093
19094       <li> May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor
19095         or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims
19096         essential to practice that standard (also known as a
19097         "defensive suspension" clause)</li>
19098
19099       <li> The same licensing terms are available to every potential
19100         licensor</li>
19101
19102       </ul>
19103 </li>
19104
19105 <li>The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude
19106   implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms
19107   or restricted licensing terms</li>
19108
19109 </ul>
19110
19111 </blockquote>
19112
19113 <p>It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that
19114 there are so many of them.  As you can see, the same holds true for
19115 open standard definitions.  Most of the definitions have a lot in
19116 common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open
19117 standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it
19118 possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real
19119 competition to downplay the significance of open standards.  I hope we
19120 can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open
19121 Standards.</p>
19122
19123       </div>
19124       <div class="tags">
19125
19126
19127         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
19128
19129
19130       </div>
19131     </div>
19132     <div class="padding"></div>
19133
19134     <div class="entry">
19135       <div class="title">
19136         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html">Is Ogg Theora a free and open standard?</a>
19137       </div>
19138       <div class="date">
19139         25th December 2010
19140       </div>
19141       <div class="body">
19142         <p><a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">The
19143 Digistan definition</a> of a free and open standard reads like this:</p>
19144
19145 <blockquote>
19146
19147 <p>The Digital Standards Organization defines free and open standard
19148 as follows:</p>
19149
19150 <ol>
19151
19152 <li>A free and open standard is immune to vendor capture at all stages
19153 in its life-cycle. Immunity from vendor capture makes it possible to
19154 freely use, improve upon, trust, and extend a standard over time.</li>
19155
19156 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
19157 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
19158 open decision-making procedure available to all interested
19159 parties.</li>
19160
19161 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
19162 document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy,
19163 distribute, and use it freely.</li>
19164
19165 <li>The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made
19166 irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.</li>
19167
19168 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
19169
19170 </ol>
19171
19172 <p>The economic outcome of a free and open standard, which can be
19173 measured, is that it enables perfect competition between suppliers of
19174 products based on the standard.</p>
19175 </blockquote>
19176
19177 <p>For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free
19178 and open standard according to this definition.  Here is a short
19179 writeup of what I have been able to gather so far.  I brought up the
19180 topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list
19181 <a href="http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/advocacy/2009-July/001632.html">in
19182 July 2009</a>, for those that want to see some background information.
19183 According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list
19184 the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.</p>
19185
19186 <p><strong>Free from vendor capture?</strong></p>
19187
19188 <p>As far as I can see, there is no single vendor that can control the
19189 Ogg Theora specification.  It can be argued that the
19190 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/">Xiph foundation</A> is such vendor, but
19191 given that it is a non-profit foundation with the expressed goal
19192 making free and open protocols and standards available, it is not
19193 obvious that this is a real risk.  One issue with the Xiph
19194 foundation is that its inner working (as in board member list, or who
19195 control the foundation) are not easily available on the web.  I've
19196 been unable to find out who is in the foundation board, and have not
19197 seen any accounting information documenting how money is handled nor
19198 where is is spent in the foundation.  It is thus not obvious for an
19199 external observer who control The Xiph foundation, and for all I know
19200 it is possible for a single vendor to take control over the
19201 specification.  But it seem unlikely.</p>
19202
19203 <p><strong>Maintained by open not-for-profit organisation?</strong></p>
19204
19205 <p>Assuming that the Xiph foundation is the organisation its web pages
19206 claim it to be, this point is fulfilled.  If Xiph foundation is
19207 controlled by a single vendor, it isn't, but I have not found any
19208 documentation indicating this.</p>
19209
19210 <p>According to
19211 <a href="http://media.hiof.no/diverse/fad/rapport_4.pdf">a report</a>
19212 prepared by Audun Vaaler og Børre Ludvigsen for the Norwegian
19213 government, the Xiph foundation is a non-commercial organisation and
19214 the development process is open, transparent and non-Discrimatory.
19215 Until proven otherwise, I believe it make most sense to believe the
19216 report is correct.</p>
19217
19218 <p><strong>Specification freely available?</strong></p>
19219
19220 <p>The specification for the <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/">Ogg
19221 container format</a> and both the
19222 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/">Vorbis</a> and
19223 <a href="http://theora.org/doc/">Theora</a> codeces are available on
19224 the web.  This are the terms in the Vorbis and Theora specification:
19225
19226 <blockquote>
19227
19228 Anyone may freely use and distribute the Ogg and [Vorbis/Theora]
19229 specifications, whether in private, public, or corporate
19230 capacity. However, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the Ogg project reserve
19231 the right to set the Ogg [Vorbis/Theora] specification and certify
19232 specification compliance.
19233
19234 </blockquote>
19235
19236 <p>The Ogg container format is specified in IETF
19237 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/rfc3533.txt">RFC 3533</a>, and
19238 this is the term:<p>
19239
19240 <blockquote>
19241
19242 <p>This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
19243 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
19244 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
19245 distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
19246 provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
19247 included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
19248 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
19249 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
19250 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
19251 Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
19252 in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to
19253 translate it into languages other than English.</p>
19254
19255 <p>The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
19256 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.</p>
19257 </blockquote>
19258
19259 <p>All these terms seem to allow unlimited distribution and use, an
19260 this term seem to be fulfilled.  There might be a problem with the
19261 missing permission to distribute modified versions of the text, and
19262 thus reuse it in other specifications.  Not quite sure if that is a
19263 requirement for the Digistan definition.</p>
19264
19265 <p><strong>Royalty-free?</strong></p>
19266
19267 <p>There are no known patent claims requiring royalties for the Ogg
19268 Theora format.
19269 <a href="http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=65782">MPEG-LA</a>
19270 and
19271 <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/237238/Steve-Jobs-Hints-At-Theora-Lawsuit">Steve
19272 Jobs</a> in Apple claim to know about some patent claims (submarine
19273 patents) against the Theora format, but no-one else seem to believe
19274 them.  Both Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation have looked into
19275 this and decided to implement Ogg Theora support in their browsers
19276 without paying any royalties.  For now the claims from MPEG-LA and
19277 Steve Jobs seem more like FUD to scare people to use the H.264 codec
19278 than any real problem with Ogg Theora.</p>
19279
19280 <p><strong>No constraints on re-use?</strong></p>
19281
19282 <p>I am not aware of any constraints on re-use.</p>
19283
19284 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
19285
19286 <p>3 of 5 requirements seem obviously fulfilled, and the remaining 2
19287 depend on the governing structure of the Xiph foundation.  Given the
19288 background report used by the Norwegian government, I believe it is
19289 safe to assume the last two requirements are fulfilled too, but it
19290 would be nice if the Xiph foundation web site made it easier to verify
19291 this.</p>
19292
19293 <p>It would be nice to see other analysis of other specifications to
19294 see if they are free and open standards.</p>
19295
19296       </div>
19297       <div class="tags">
19298
19299
19300         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
19301
19302
19303       </div>
19304     </div>
19305     <div class="padding"></div>
19306
19307     <div class="entry">
19308       <div class="title">
19309         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_reply_from_Edgar_Villanueva_to_Microsoft_in_Peru.html">The reply from Edgar Villanueva to Microsoft in Peru</a>
19310       </div>
19311       <div class="date">
19312         25th December 2010
19313       </div>
19314       <div class="body">
19315         <p>A few days ago
19316 <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article189879.ece">an
19317 article</a> in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version
19318 2.0 of
19319 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Framework">European
19320 Interoperability Framework</a> has been successfully lobbied by the
19321 proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software.
19322 Nothing very surprising there, given
19323 <a href="http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/29/2115235/Open-Source-Open-Standards-Under-Attack-In-Europe">earlier
19324 reports</a> on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in
19325 this work.  But I find this very sad.   The definition of
19326 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dokumenter/standard-presse-def-200506.txt">an
19327 open standard from version 1</a> was very good, and something I
19328 believe should be used also in the future, alongside
19329 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the
19330 definition from Digistan</A>.  Version 2 have removed the open
19331 standard definition from its content.</p>
19332
19333 <p>Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar
19334 Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply
19335 to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software
19336 in the public sector in Peru.  As the text was not available from a
19337 few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from
19338 <a href="http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/articles/en/reponseperou/villanueva_to_ms.html">my
19339 source</a> to ensure it is available also in the future.  Some
19340 background information about that story is available in
19341 <a href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6099">an article</a> from
19342 Linux Journal in 2002.</p>
19343
19344 <blockquote>
19345 <p>Lima, 8th of April, 2002<br>
19346 To: Señor JUAN ALBERTO GONZÁLEZ<br>
19347 General Manager of Microsoft Perú</p>
19348
19349 <p>Dear Sir:</p>
19350
19351 <p>First of all, I thank you for your letter of March 25, 2002 in which you state the official position of Microsoft relative to Bill Number 1609, Free Software in Public Administration, which is indubitably inspired by the desire for Peru to find a suitable place in the global technological context. In the same spirit, and convinced that we will find the best solutions through an exchange of clear and open ideas, I will take this opportunity to reply to the commentaries included in your letter.</p>
19352
19353 <p>While acknowledging that opinions such as yours constitute a significant contribution, it would have been even more worthwhile for me if, rather than formulating objections of a general nature (which we will analyze in detail later) you had gathered solid arguments for the advantages that proprietary software could bring to the Peruvian State, and to its citizens in general, since this would have allowed a more enlightening exchange in respect of each of our positions.</p>
19354
19355 <p>With the aim of creating an orderly debate, we will assume that what you call "open source software" is what the Bill defines as "free software", since there exists software for which the source code is distributed together with the program, but which does not fall within the definition established by the Bill; and that what you call "commercial software" is what the Bill defines as "proprietary" or "unfree", given that there exists free software which is sold in the market for a price like any other good or service.</p>
19356
19357 <p>It is also necessary to make it clear that the aim of the Bill we are discussing is not directly related to the amount of direct savings that can by made by using free software in state institutions. That is in any case a marginal aggregate value, but in no way is it the chief focus of the Bill. The basic principles which inspire the Bill are linked to the basic guarantees of a state of law, such as:</p>
19358
19359 <p>
19360 <ul>
19361 <li>Free access to public information by the citizen. </li>
19362 <li>Permanence of public data. </li>
19363 <li>Security of the State and citizens.</li>
19364 </ul>
19365 </p>
19366
19367 <p>To guarantee the free access of citizens to public information, it is indispensable that the encoding of data is not tied to a single provider. The use of standard and open formats gives a guarantee of this free access, if necessary through the creation of compatible free software.</p>
19368
19369 <p>To guarantee the permanence of public data, it is necessary that the usability and maintenance of the software does not depend on the goodwill of the suppliers, or on the monopoly conditions imposed by them. For this reason the State needs systems the development of which can be guaranteed due to the availability of the source code.</p>
19370
19371 <p>To guarantee national security or the security of the State, it is indispensable to be able to rely on systems without elements which allow control from a distance or the undesired transmission of information to third parties. Systems with source code freely accessible to the public are required to allow their inspection by the State itself, by the citizens, and by a large number of independent experts throughout the world. Our proposal brings further security, since the knowledge of the source code will eliminate the growing number of programs with *spy code*. </p>
19372
19373 <p>In the same way, our proposal strengthens the security of the citizens, both in their role as legitimate owners of information managed by the state, and in their role as consumers. In this second case, by allowing the growth of a widespread availability of free software not containing *spy code* able to put at risk privacy and individual freedoms.</p>
19374
19375 <p>In this sense, the Bill is limited to establishing the conditions under which the state bodies will obtain software in the future, that is, in a way compatible with these basic principles.</p>
19376
19377
19378 <p>From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:<br>
19379 <li>the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software</li>
19380 <li>the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software</li>
19381 <li>the law does not specify which concrete software to use</li>
19382 <li>the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought</li>
19383 <li>the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.</li>
19384
19385 </p>
19386
19387 <p>What the Bill does express clearly, is that, for software to be acceptable for the state it is not enough that it is technically capable of fulfilling a task, but that further the contractual conditions must satisfy a series of requirements regarding the license, without which the State cannot guarantee the citizen adequate processing of his data, watching over its integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility throughout time, as these are very critical aspects for its normal functioning.</p>
19388
19389 <p>We agree, Mr. Gonzalez, that information and communication technology have a significant impact on the quality of life of the citizens (whether it be positive or negative). We surely also agree that the basic values I have pointed out above are fundamental in a democratic state like Peru. So we are very interested to know of any other way of guaranteeing these principles, other than through the use of free software in the terms defined by the Bill.</p>
19390
19391 <p>As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail:</p>
19392
19393 <p>Firstly, you point out that: "1. The bill makes it compulsory for all public bodies to use only free software, that is to say open source software, which breaches the principles of equality before the law, that of non-discrimination and the right of free private enterprise, freedom of industry and of contract, protected by the constitution."</p>
19394
19395 <p>This understanding is in error. The Bill in no way affects the rights you list; it limits itself entirely to establishing conditions for the use of software on the part of state institutions, without in any way meddling in private sector transactions. It is a well established principle that the State does not enjoy the wide spectrum of contractual freedom of the private sector, as it is limited in its actions precisely by the requirement for transparency of public acts; and in this sense, the preservation of the greater common interest must prevail when legislating on the matter.</p>
19396
19397 <p>The Bill protects equality under the law, since no natural or legal person is excluded from the right of offering these goods to the State under the conditions defined in the Bill and without more limitations than those established by the Law of State Contracts and Purchasing (T.U.O. by Supreme Decree No. 012-2001-PCM).</p>
19398
19399 <p>The Bill does not introduce any discrimination whatever, since it only establishes *how* the goods have to be provided (which is a state power) and not *who* has to provide them (which would effectively be discriminatory, if restrictions based on national origin, race religion, ideology, sexual preference etc. were imposed). On the contrary, the Bill is decidedly antidiscriminatory. This is so because by defining with no room for doubt the conditions for the provision of software, it prevents state bodies from using software which has a license including discriminatory conditions.</p>
19400
19401 <p>It should be obvious from the preceding two paragraphs that the Bill does not harm free private enterprise, since the latter can always choose under what conditions it will produce software; some of these will be acceptable to the State, and others will not be since they contradict the guarantee of the basic principles listed above. This free initiative is of course compatible with the freedom of industry and freedom of contract (in the limited form in which the State can exercise the latter). Any private subject can produce software under the conditions which the State requires, or can refrain from doing so. Nobody is forced to adopt a model of production, but if they wish to provide software to the State, they must provide the mechanisms which guarantee the basic principles, and which are those described in the Bill.</p>
19402
19403 <p>By way of an example: nothing in the text of the Bill would prevent your company offering the State bodies an office "suite", under the conditions defined in the Bill and setting the price that you consider satisfactory. If you did not, it would not be due to restrictions imposed by the law, but to business decisions relative to the method of commercializing your products, decisions with which the State is not involved.</p>
19404
19405 <p>To continue; you note that:" 2. The bill, by making the use of open source software compulsory, would establish discriminatory and non competitive practices in the contracting and purchasing by public bodies..."</p>
19406
19407 <p>This statement is just a reiteration of the previous one, and so the response can be found above. However, let us concern ourselves for a moment with your comment regarding "non-competitive ... practices."</p>
19408
19409 <p>Of course, in defining any kind of purchase, the buyer sets conditions which relate to the proposed use of the good or service. From the start, this excludes certain manufacturers from the possibility of competing, but does not exclude them "a priori", but rather based on a series of principles determined by the autonomous will of the purchaser, and so the process takes place in conformance with the law. And in the Bill it is established that *no one* is excluded from competing as far as he guarantees the fulfillment of the basic principles.</p>
19410
19411 <p>Furthermore, the Bill *stimulates* competition, since it tends to generate a supply of software with better conditions of usability, and to better existing work, in a model of continuous improvement.</p>
19412
19413 <p>On the other hand, the central aspect of competivity is the chance to provide better choices to the consumer. Now, it is impossible to ignore the fact that marketing does not play a neutral role when the product is offered on the market (since accepting the opposite would lead one to suppose that firms' expenses in marketing lack any sense), and that therefore a significant expense under this heading can influence the decisions of the purchaser. This influence of marketing is in large measure reduced by the bill that we are backing, since the choice within the framework proposed is based on the *technical merits* of the product and not on the effort put into commercialization by the producer; in this sense, competitiveness is increased, since the smallest software producer can compete on equal terms with the most powerful corporations.</p>
19414
19415 <p>It is necessary to stress that there is no position more anti-competitive than that of the big software producers, which frequently abuse their dominant position, since in innumerable cases they propose as a solution to problems raised by users: "update your software to the new version" (at the user's expense, naturally); furthermore, it is common to find arbitrary cessation of technical help for products, which, in the provider's judgment alone, are "old"; and so, to receive any kind of technical assistance, the user finds himself forced to migrate to new versions (with non-trivial costs, especially as changes in hardware platform are often involved). And as the whole infrastructure is based on proprietary data formats, the user stays "trapped" in the need to continue using products from the same supplier, or to make the huge effort to change to another environment (probably also proprietary).</p>
19416
19417 <p>You add: "3. So, by compelling the State to favor a business model based entirely on open source, the bill would only discourage the local and international manufacturing companies, which are the ones which really undertake important expenditures, create a significant number of direct and indirect jobs, as well as contributing to the GNP, as opposed to a model of open source software which tends to have an ever weaker economic impact, since it mainly creates jobs in the service sector."</p>
19418
19419 <p>I do not agree with your statement. Partly because of what you yourself point out in paragraph 6 of your letter, regarding the relative weight of services in the context of software use. This contradiction alone would invalidate your position. The service model, adopted by a large number of companies in the software industry, is much larger in economic terms, and with a tendency to increase, than the licensing of programs.</p>
19420
19421 <p>On the other hand, the private sector of the economy has the widest possible freedom to choose the economic model which best suits its interests, even if this freedom of choice is often obscured subliminally by the disproportionate expenditure on marketing by the producers of proprietary software.</p>
19422
19423 <p>In addition, a reading of your opinion would lead to the conclusion that the State market is crucial and essential for the proprietary software industry, to such a point that the choice made by the State in this bill would completely eliminate the market for these firms. If that is true, we can deduce that the State must be subsidizing the proprietary software industry. In the unlikely event that this were true, the State would have the right to apply the subsidies in the area it considered of greatest social value; it is undeniable, in this improbable hypothesis, that if the State decided to subsidize software, it would have to do so choosing the free over the proprietary, considering its social effect and the rational use of taxpayers money.</p>
19424
19425 <p>In respect of the jobs generated by proprietary software in countries like ours, these mainly concern technical tasks of little aggregate value; at the local level, the technicians who provide support for proprietary software produced by transnational companies do not have the possibility of fixing bugs, not necessarily for lack of technical capability or of talent, but because they do not have access to the source code to fix it. With free software one creates more technically qualified employment and a framework of free competence where success is only tied to the ability to offer good technical support and quality of service, one stimulates the market, and one increases the shared fund of knowledge, opening up alternatives to generate services of greater total value and a higher quality level, to the benefit of all involved: producers, service organizations, and consumers.</p>
19426
19427 <p>It is a common phenomenon in developing countries that local software industries obtain the majority of their takings in the service sector, or in the creation of "ad hoc" software. Therefore, any negative impact that the application of the Bill might have in this sector will be more than compensated by a growth in demand for services (as long as these are carried out to high quality standards). If the transnational software companies decide not to compete under these new rules of the game, it is likely that they will undergo some decrease in takings in terms of payment for licenses; however, considering that these firms continue to allege that much of the software used by the State has been illegally copied, one can see that the impact will not be very serious. Certainly, in any case their fortune will be determined by market laws, changes in which cannot be avoided; many firms traditionally associated with proprietary software have already set out on the road (supported by copious expense) of providing services associated with free software, which shows that the models are not mutually exclusive.</p>
19428
19429 <p>With this bill the State is deciding that it needs to preserve certain fundamental values. And it is deciding this based on its sovereign power, without affecting any of the constitutional guarantees. If these values could be guaranteed without having to choose a particular economic model, the effects of the law would be even more beneficial. In any case, it should be clear that the State does not choose an economic model; if it happens that there only exists one economic model capable of providing software which provides the basic guarantee of these principles, this is because of historical circumstances, not because of an arbitrary choice of a given model.</p>
19430
19431 <p>Your letter continues: "4. The bill imposes the use of open source software without considering the dangers that this can bring from the point of view of security, guarantee, and possible violation of the intellectual property rights of third parties."</p>
19432
19433 <p>Alluding in an abstract way to "the dangers this can bring", without specifically mentioning a single one of these supposed dangers, shows at the least some lack of knowledge of the topic. So, allow me to enlighten you on these points.</p>
19434
19435 <p>On security:</p>
19436
19437 <p>National security has already been mentioned in general terms in the initial discussion of the basic principles of the bill. In more specific terms, relative to the security of the software itself, it is well known that all software (whether proprietary or free) contains errors or "bugs" (in programmers' slang). But it is also well known that the bugs in free software are fewer, and are fixed much more quickly, than in proprietary software. It is not in vain that numerous public bodies responsible for the IT security of state systems in developed countries require the use of free software for the same conditions of security and efficiency.</p>
19438
19439 <p>What is impossible to prove is that proprietary software is more secure than free, without the public and open inspection of the scientific community and users in general. This demonstration is impossible because the model of proprietary software itself prevents this analysis, so that any guarantee of security is based only on promises of good intentions (biased, by any reckoning) made by the producer itself, or its contractors.</p>
19440
19441 <p>It should be remembered that in many cases, the licensing conditions include Non-Disclosure clauses which prevent the user from publicly revealing security flaws found in the licensed proprietary product.</p>
19442
19443 <p>In respect of the guarantee:</p>
19444
19445 <p>As you know perfectly well, or could find out by reading the "End User License Agreement" of the products you license, in the great majority of cases the guarantees are limited to replacement of the storage medium in case of defects, but in no case is compensation given for direct or indirect damages, loss of profits, etc... If as a result of a security bug in one of your products, not fixed in time by yourselves, an attacker managed to compromise crucial State systems, what guarantees, reparations and compensation would your company make in accordance with your licensing conditions? The guarantees of proprietary software, inasmuch as programs are delivered ``AS IS'', that is, in the state in which they are, with no additional responsibility of the provider in respect of function, in no way differ from those normal with free software.</p>
19446
19447 <p>On Intellectual Property:</p>
19448
19449 <p>Questions of intellectual property fall outside the scope of this bill, since they are covered by specific other laws. The model of free software in no way implies ignorance of these laws, and in fact the great majority of free software is covered by copyright. In reality, the inclusion of this question in your observations shows your confusion in respect of the legal framework in which free software is developed. The inclusion of the intellectual property of others in works claimed as one's own is not a practice that has been noted in the free software community; whereas, unfortunately, it has been in the area of proprietary software. As an example, the condemnation by the Commercial Court of Nanterre, France, on 27th September 2001 of Microsoft Corp. to a penalty of 3 million francs in damages and interest, for violation of intellectual property (piracy, to use the unfortunate term that your firm commonly uses in its publicity).</p>
19450
19451 <p>You go on to say that: "The bill uses the concept of open source software incorrectly, since it does not necessarily imply that the software is free or of zero cost, and so arrives at mistaken conclusions regarding State savings, with no cost-benefit analysis to validate its position."</p>
19452
19453 <p>This observation is wrong; in principle, freedom and lack of cost are orthogonal concepts: there is software which is proprietary and charged for (for example, MS Office), software which is proprietary and free of charge (MS Internet Explorer), software which is free and charged for (Red Hat, SuSE etc GNU/Linux distributions), software which is free and not charged for (Apache, Open Office, Mozilla), and even software which can be licensed in a range of combinations (MySQL).</p>
19454
19455 <p>Certainly free software is not necessarily free of charge. And the text of the bill does not state that it has to be so, as you will have noted after reading it. The definitions included in the Bill state clearly *what* should be considered free software, at no point referring to freedom from charges. Although the possibility of savings in payments for proprietary software licenses are mentioned, the foundations of the bill clearly refer to the fundamental guarantees to be preserved and to the stimulus to local technological development. Given that a democratic State must support these principles, it has no other choice than to use software with publicly available source code, and to exchange information only in standard formats.</p>
19456
19457 <p>If the State does not use software with these characteristics, it will be weakening basic republican principles. Luckily, free software also implies lower total costs; however, even given the hypothesis (easily disproved) that it was more expensive than proprietary software, the simple existence of an effective free software tool for a particular IT function would oblige the State to use it; not by command of this Bill, but because of the basic principles we enumerated at the start, and which arise from the very essence of the lawful democratic State.</p>
19458
19459 <p>You continue: "6. It is wrong to think that Open Source Software is free of charge. Research by the Gartner Group (an important investigator of the technological market recognized at world level) has shown that the cost of purchase of software (operating system and applications) is only 8% of the total cost which firms and institutions take on for a rational and truly beneficial use of the technology. The other 92% consists of: installation costs, enabling, support, maintenance, administration, and down-time."</p>
19460
19461 <p>This argument repeats that already given in paragraph 5 and partly contradicts paragraph 3. For the sake of brevity we refer to the comments on those paragraphs. However, allow me to point out that your conclusion is logically false: even if according to Gartner Group the cost of software is on average only 8% of the total cost of use, this does not in any way deny the existence of software which is free of charge, that is, with a licensing cost of zero.</p>
19462
19463 <p>In addition, in this paragraph you correctly point out that the service components and losses due to down-time make up the largest part of the total cost of software use, which, as you will note, contradicts your statement regarding the small value of services suggested in paragraph 3. Now the use of free software contributes significantly to reduce the remaining life-cycle costs. This reduction in the costs of installation, support etc. can be noted in several areas: in the first place, the competitive service model of free software, support and maintenance for which can be freely contracted out to a range of suppliers competing on the grounds of quality and low cost. This is true for installation, enabling, and support, and in large part for maintenance. In the second place, due to the reproductive characteristics of the model, maintenance carried out for an application is easily replicable, without incurring large costs (that is, without paying more than once for the same thing) since modifications, if one wishes, can be incorporated in the common fund of knowledge. Thirdly, the huge costs caused by non-functioning software ("blue screens of death", malicious code such as virus, worms, and trojans, exceptions, general protection faults and other well-known problems) are reduced considerably by using more stable software; and it is well known that one of the most notable virtues of free software is its stability.</p>
19464
19465 <p>You further state that: "7. One of the arguments behind the bill is the supposed freedom from costs of open-source software, compared with the costs of commercial software, without taking into account the fact that there exist types of volume licensing which can be highly advantageous for the State, as has happened in other countries."</p>
19466
19467 <p>I have already pointed out that what is in question is not the cost of the software but the principles of freedom of information, accessibility, and security. These arguments have been covered extensively in the preceding paragraphs to which I would refer you.</p>
19468
19469 <p>On the other hand, there certainly exist types of volume licensing (although unfortunately proprietary software does not satisfy the basic principles). But as you correctly pointed out in the immediately preceding paragraph of your letter, they only manage to reduce the impact of a component which makes up no more than 8% of the total.</p>
19470
19471 <p>You continue: "8. In addition, the alternative adopted by the bill (I) is clearly more expensive, due to the high costs of software migration, and (II) puts at risk compatibility and interoperability of the IT platforms within the State, and between the State and the private sector, given the hundreds of versions of open source software on the market."</p>
19472
19473 <p>Let us analyze your statement in two parts. Your first argument, that migration implies high costs, is in reality an argument in favor of the Bill. Because the more time goes by, the more difficult migration to another technology will become; and at the same time, the security risks associated with proprietary software will continue to increase. In this way, the use of proprietary systems and formats will make the State ever more dependent on specific suppliers. Once a policy of using free software has been established (which certainly, does imply some cost) then on the contrary migration from one system to another becomes very simple, since all data is stored in open formats. On the other hand, migration to an open software context implies no more costs than migration between two different proprietary software contexts, which invalidates your argument completely.</p>
19474
19475 <p>The second argument refers to "problems in interoperability of the IT platforms within the State, and between the State and the private sector" This statement implies a certain lack of knowledge of the way in which free software is built, which does not maximize the dependence of the user on a particular platform, as normally happens in the realm of proprietary software. Even when there are multiple free software distributions, and numerous programs which can be used for the same function, interoperability is guaranteed as much by the use of standard formats, as required by the bill, as by the possibility of creating interoperable software given the availability of the source code.</p>
19476
19477 <p>You then say that: "9. The majority of open source code does not offer adequate levels of service nor the guarantee from recognized manufacturers of high productivity on the part of the users, which has led various public organizations to retract their decision to go with an open source software solution and to use commercial software in its place."</p>
19478
19479 <p>This observation is without foundation. In respect of the guarantee, your argument was rebutted in the response to paragraph 4. In respect of support services, it is possible to use free software without them (just as also happens with proprietary software), but anyone who does need them can obtain support separately, whether from local firms or from international corporations, again just as in the case of proprietary software.</p>
19480
19481 <p>On the other hand, it would contribute greatly to our analysis if you could inform us about free software projects *established* in public bodies which have already been abandoned in favor of proprietary software. We know of a good number of cases where the opposite has taken place, but not know of any where what you describe has taken place.</p>
19482
19483 <p>You continue by observing that: "10. The bill discourages the creativity of the Peruvian software industry, which invoices 40 million US$/year, exports 4 million US$ (10th in ranking among non-traditional exports, more than handicrafts) and is a source of highly qualified employment. With a law that encourages the use of open source, software programmers lose their intellectual property rights and their main source of payment."</p>
19484
19485 <p>It is clear enough that nobody is forced to commercialize their code as free software. The only thing to take into account is that if it is not free software, it cannot be sold to the public sector. This is not in any case the main market for the national software industry. We covered some questions referring to the influence of the Bill on the generation of employment which would be both highly technically qualified and in better conditions for competition above, so it seems unnecessary to insist on this point.</p>
19486
19487 <p>What follows in your statement is incorrect. On the one hand, no author of free software loses his intellectual property rights, unless he expressly wishes to place his work in the public domain. The free software movement has always been very respectful of intellectual property, and has generated widespread public recognition of its authors. Names like those of Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, Larry Wall, Miguel de Icaza, Andrew Tridgell, Theo de Raadt, Andrea Arcangeli, Bruce Perens, Darren Reed, Alan Cox, Eric Raymond, and many others, are recognized world-wide for their contributions to the development of software that is used today by millions of people throughout the world. On the other hand, to say that the rewards for authors rights make up the main source of payment of Peruvian programmers is in any case a guess, in particular since there is no proof to this effect, nor a demonstration of how the use of free software by the State would influence these payments.</p>
19488
19489 <p>You go on to say that: "11. Open source software, since it can be distributed without charge, does not allow the generation of income for its developers through exports. In this way, the multiplier effect of the sale of software to other countries is weakened, and so in turn is the growth of the industry, while Government rules ought on the contrary to stimulate local industry."</p>
19490
19491 <p>This statement shows once again complete ignorance of the mechanisms of and market for free software. It tries to claim that the market of sale of non- exclusive rights for use (sale of licenses) is the only possible one for the software industry, when you yourself pointed out several paragraphs above that it is not even the most important one. The incentives that the bill offers for the growth of a supply of better qualified professionals, together with the increase in experience that working on a large scale with free software within the State will bring for Peruvian technicians, will place them in a highly competitive position to offer their services abroad.</p>
19492
19493 <p>You then state that: "12. In the Forum, the use of open source software in education was discussed, without mentioning the complete collapse of this initiative in a country like Mexico, where precisely the State employees who founded the project now state that open source software did not make it possible to offer a learning experience to pupils in the schools, did not take into account the capability at a national level to give adequate support to the platform, and that the software did not and does not allow for the levels of platform integration that now exist in schools."</p>
19494
19495 <p>In fact Mexico has gone into reverse with the Red Escolar (Schools Network) project. This is due precisely to the fact that the driving forces behind the Mexican project used license costs as their main argument, instead of the other reasons specified in our project, which are far more essential. Because of this conceptual mistake, and as a result of the lack of effective support from the SEP (Secretary of State for Public Education), the assumption was made that to implant free software in schools it would be enough to drop their software budget and send them a CD ROM with Gnu/Linux instead. Of course this failed, and it couldn't have been otherwise, just as school laboratories fail when they use proprietary software and have no budget for implementation and maintenance. That's exactly why our bill is not limited to making the use of free software mandatory, but recognizes the need to create a viable migration plan, in which the State undertakes the technical transition in an orderly way in order to then enjoy the advantages of free software.</p>
19496
19497 <p>You end with a rhetorical question: "13. If open source software satisfies all the requirements of State bodies, why do you need a law to adopt it? Shouldn't it be the market which decides freely which products give most benefits or value?"</p>
19498
19499 <p>We agree that in the private sector of the economy, it must be the market that decides which products to use, and no state interference is permissible there. However, in the case of the public sector, the reasoning is not the same: as we have already established, the state archives, handles, and transmits information which does not belong to it, but which is entrusted to it by citizens, who have no alternative under the rule of law. As a counterpart to this legal requirement, the State must take extreme measures to safeguard the integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility of this information. The use of proprietary software raises serious doubts as to whether these requirements can be fulfilled, lacks conclusive evidence in this respect, and so is not suitable for use in the public sector.</p>
19500
19501 <p>The need for a law is based, firstly, on the realization of the fundamental principles listed above in the specific area of software; secondly, on the fact that the State is not an ideal homogeneous entity, but made up of multiple bodies with varying degrees of autonomy in decision making. Given that it is inappropriate to use proprietary software, the fact of establishing these rules in law will prevent the personal discretion of any state employee from putting at risk the information which belongs to citizens. And above all, because it constitutes an up-to-date reaffirmation in relation to the means of management and communication of information used today, it is based on the republican principle of openness to the public.</p>
19502
19503 <p>In conformance with this universally accepted principle, the citizen has the right to know all information held by the State and not covered by well- founded declarations of secrecy based on law. Now, software deals with information and is itself information. Information in a special form, capable of being interpreted by a machine in order to execute actions, but crucial information all the same because the citizen has a legitimate right to know, for example, how his vote is computed or his taxes calculated. And for that he must have free access to the source code and be able to prove to his satisfaction the programs used for electoral computations or calculation of his taxes.</p>
19504
19505 <p>I wish you the greatest respect, and would like to repeat that my office will always be open for you to expound your point of view to whatever level of detail you consider suitable.</p>
19506
19507 <p>Cordially,<br>
19508 DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NUÑEZ<br>
19509 Congressman of the Republic of Perú.</p>
19510 </blockquote>
19511
19512       </div>
19513       <div class="tags">
19514
19515
19516         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
19517
19518
19519       </div>
19520     </div>
19521     <div class="padding"></div>
19522
19523     <div class="entry">
19524       <div class="title">
19525         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html">Officeshots still going strong</a>
19526       </div>
19527       <div class="date">
19528         25th December 2010
19529       </div>
19530       <div class="body">
19531         <p>Half a year ago I
19532 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">wrote
19533 a bit</a> about <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>,
19534 a web service to allow anyone to test how ODF documents are handled by
19535 the different programs reading and writing the ODF format.</p>
19536
19537 <p>I just had a look at the service, and it seem to be going strong.
19538 Very interesting to see the results reported in the gallery, how
19539 different Office implementations handle different ODF features.  Sad
19540 to see that KOffice was not doing it very well, and happy to see that
19541 LibreOffice has been tested already (but sadly not listed as a option
19542 for OfficeShots users yet).  I am glad to see that the ODF community
19543 got such a great test tool available.</p>
19544
19545       </div>
19546       <div class="tags">
19547
19548
19549         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
19550
19551
19552       </div>
19553     </div>
19554     <div class="padding"></div>
19555
19556     <div class="entry">
19557       <div class="title">
19558         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html">How to test if a laptop is working with Linux</a>
19559       </div>
19560       <div class="date">
19561         22nd December 2010
19562       </div>
19563       <div class="body">
19564         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
19565 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
19566 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
19567 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
19568 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
19569 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
19570 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
19571 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
19572 university.</p>
19573
19574 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
19575 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
19576 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
19577 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
19578 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
19579 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
19580 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
19581 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
19582
19583 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
19584 I perform on a new model.</p>
19585
19586 <ul>
19587
19588 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
19589 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
19590 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
19591
19592 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
19593 installation, X.org is working.</li>
19594
19595 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
19596 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
19597 reported by the program.</li>
19598
19599 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
19600 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
19601 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
19602 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
19603 normally test this by playing
19604 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
19605 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
19606
19607 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
19608 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
19609
19610 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
19611 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
19612
19613 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
19614 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
19615
19616 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
19617 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
19618 few.</li>
19619
19620 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
19621 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
19622 notice this.</li>
19623
19624 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
19625 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
19626 resume.</li>
19627
19628 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
19629 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
19630 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
19631 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
19632 not.</li>
19633
19634 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
19635 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
19636 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
19637 existence.</li>
19638
19639 </ul>
19640
19641 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
19642 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
19643 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
19644 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
19645 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
19646 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
19647 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
19648 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
19649
19650       </div>
19651       <div class="tags">
19652
19653
19654         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
19655
19656
19657       </div>
19658     </div>
19659     <div class="padding"></div>
19660
19661     <div class="entry">
19662       <div class="title">
19663         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
19664       </div>
19665       <div class="date">
19666         11th December 2010
19667       </div>
19668       <div class="body">
19669         <p>As I continue to explore
19670 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
19671 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
19672 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
19673
19674 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
19675 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
19676 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
19677 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
19678 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
19679 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
19680 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
19681 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
19682 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
19683 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
19684 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
19685 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
19686 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
19687 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
19688 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
19689 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
19690 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
19691 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
19692 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
19693 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
19694
19695 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
19696 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
19697 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
19698 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
19699 If the Skolelinux foundation
19700 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
19701 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
19702 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
19703 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
19704 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
19705 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
19706 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
19707 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
19708
19709 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
19710 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
19711 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
19712 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
19713 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
19714 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
19715 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
19716 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
19717 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
19718 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
19719 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
19720 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
19721 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
19722 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
19723 currencies.</p>
19724
19725 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
19726 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
19727 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
19728 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
19729 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
19730 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
19731 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
19732 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
19733 BitCoins.  Check out
19734 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
19735 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
19736 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
19737 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
19738 yet.</p>
19739
19740 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
19741 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
19742 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
19743 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
19744 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
19745
19746       </div>
19747       <div class="tags">
19748
19749
19750         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
19751
19752
19753       </div>
19754     </div>
19755     <div class="padding"></div>
19756
19757     <div class="entry">
19758       <div class="title">
19759         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">Now accepting bitcoins - anonymous and distributed p2p crypto-money</a>
19760       </div>
19761       <div class="date">
19762         10th December 2010
19763       </div>
19764       <div class="body">
19765         <p>With this weeks lawless
19766 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
19767 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
19768 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
19769 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
19770 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
19771 A blog post from
19772 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
19773 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
19774 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
19775 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
19776 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
19777 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
19778 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
19779
19780 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
19781 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
19782 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
19783 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
19784 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
19785 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
19786 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
19787 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
19788 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
19789 Debian</a> soon.</p>
19790
19791 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
19792 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
19793 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
19794 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
19795 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
19796 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
19797 you can even get
19798 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
19799 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
19800 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
19801 on the current exchange rates.</p>
19802
19803 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
19804 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
19805 donations to the address
19806 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
19807
19808       </div>
19809       <div class="tags">
19810
19811
19812         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
19813
19814
19815       </div>
19816     </div>
19817     <div class="padding"></div>
19818
19819     <div class="entry">
19820       <div class="title">
19821         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Student_group_continue_the_work_on_my_Reprap_3D_printer.html">Student group continue the work on my Reprap 3D printer</a>
19822       </div>
19823       <div class="date">
19824          9th December 2010
19825       </div>
19826       <div class="body">
19827         <p>A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot
19828 student assosiation <a href="http://www.robotica.no/">Robotica
19829 Osloensis</a> at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to
19830 get their own 3D printer.  They wanted to learn from me based on my
19831 work in the area.  After having a short lunch meeting with them, I
19832 offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete
19833 the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon.  I look
19834 forward to see how this goes.  This monday their volunteer driver
19835 picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the
19836 last exam is over so they can start work on getting the 3D printer
19837 operational.</p>
19838
19839 <p>The robotic group have already build several robots on their own,
19840 and seem capable of getting the reprap operational.  I really look
19841 forward to being able to print all the cool 3D designs published on
19842 <a href="http://www.thingiverse.com/">Thingiverse</a>.  I even got
19843 some 3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at
19844 the computer science department at the university demonstrated their
19845 very cool 3D scanner.</p>
19846
19847       </div>
19848       <div class="tags">
19849
19850
19851         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap</a>.
19852
19853
19854       </div>
19855     </div>
19856     <div class="padding"></div>
19857
19858     <div class="entry">
19859       <div class="title">
19860         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_development_gathering_and_General_Assembly_for_FRiSK.html">Debian Edu development gathering and General Assembly for FRiSK</a>
19861       </div>
19862       <div class="date">
19863         29th November 2010
19864       </div>
19865       <div class="body">
19866         <p>On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
19867 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2010-12-03-05-Oslo">development
19868 gathering</a> in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway.  I
19869 really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
19870 Squeeze release.  The gathering is open for everyone interested in
19871 learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
19872
19873 <p>On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
19874 organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
19875 will hold its
19876 <a href="http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Genfors/2010">General Assembly
19877 for 2010</a>.  Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388
19878 people registered as members.  Last year 32 members cast their vote in
19879 the memberdb based election system.  I hope more people find time to
19880 vote this year.</p>
19881
19882       </div>
19883       <div class="tags">
19884
19885
19886         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
19887
19888
19889       </div>
19890     </div>
19891     <div class="padding"></div>
19892
19893     <div class="entry">
19894       <div class="title">
19895         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
19896       </div>
19897       <div class="date">
19898         27th November 2010
19899       </div>
19900       <div class="body">
19901         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
19902 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
19903 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
19904 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
19905 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
19906 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
19907 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
19908 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
19909
19910 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
19911 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
19912 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
19913 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
19914 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
19915 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
19916 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
19917 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
19918 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
19919 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
19920 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
19921
19922 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
19923 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
19924 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
19925 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
19926 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
19927 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
19928 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
19929 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
19930 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
19931 what is going on.</p>
19932
19933       </div>
19934       <div class="tags">
19935
19936
19937         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
19938
19939
19940       </div>
19941     </div>
19942     <div class="padding"></div>
19943
19944     <div class="entry">
19945       <div class="title">
19946         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades_of_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop__now_with_apt_get_autoremove.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades of the Gnome and KDE desktop, now with apt-get autoremove</a>
19947       </div>
19948       <div class="date">
19949         22nd November 2010
19950       </div>
19951       <div class="body">
19952         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
19953 upgrade testing of the
19954 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
19955 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
19956 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
19957 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
19958
19959 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
19960
19961 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
19962
19963 <blockquote><p>
19964   apache2.2-bin
19965   aptdaemon
19966   baobab
19967   binfmt-support
19968   browser-plugin-gnash
19969   cheese-common
19970   cli-common
19971   cups-pk-helper
19972   dmz-cursor-theme
19973   empathy
19974   empathy-common
19975   freedesktop-sound-theme
19976   freeglut3
19977   gconf-defaults-service
19978   gdm-themes
19979   gedit-plugins
19980   geoclue
19981   geoclue-hostip
19982   geoclue-localnet
19983   geoclue-manual
19984   geoclue-yahoo
19985   gnash
19986   gnash-common
19987   gnome
19988   gnome-backgrounds
19989   gnome-cards-data
19990   gnome-codec-install
19991   gnome-core
19992   gnome-desktop-environment
19993   gnome-disk-utility
19994   gnome-screenshot
19995   gnome-search-tool
19996   gnome-session-canberra
19997   gnome-system-log
19998   gnome-themes-extras
19999   gnome-themes-more
20000   gnome-user-share
20001   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
20002   gstreamer0.10-tools
20003   gtk2-engines
20004   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
20005   gtk2-engines-smooth
20006   hamster-applet
20007   libapache2-mod-dnssd
20008   libapr1
20009   libaprutil1
20010   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
20011   libaprutil1-ldap
20012   libart2.0-cil
20013   libboost-date-time1.42.0
20014   libboost-python1.42.0
20015   libboost-thread1.42.0
20016   libchamplain-0.4-0
20017   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
20018   libcheese-gtk18
20019   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
20020   libcryptui0
20021   libdiscid0
20022   libelf1
20023   libepc-1.0-2
20024   libepc-common
20025   libepc-ui-1.0-2
20026   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
20027   libfreerdp0
20028   libgconf2.0-cil
20029   libgdata-common
20030   libgdata7
20031   libgdu-gtk0
20032   libgee2
20033   libgeoclue0
20034   libgexiv2-0
20035   libgif4
20036   libglade2.0-cil
20037   libglib2.0-cil
20038   libgmime2.4-cil
20039   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
20040   libgnome2.24-cil
20041   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
20042   libgpod-common
20043   libgpod4
20044   libgtk2.0-cil
20045   libgtkglext1
20046   libgtksourceview2.0-common
20047   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
20048   libmono-addins0.2-cil
20049   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
20050   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
20051   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
20052   libmono-posix2.0-cil
20053   libmono-security2.0-cil
20054   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
20055   libmono-system2.0-cil
20056   libmtp8
20057   libmusicbrainz3-6
20058   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
20059   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
20060   libopal3.6.8
20061   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
20062   libpt2.6.7
20063   libpython2.6
20064   librpm1
20065   librpmio1
20066   libsdl1.2debian
20067   libsrtp0
20068   libssh-4
20069   libtelepathy-farsight0
20070   libtelepathy-glib0
20071   libtidy-0.99-0
20072   media-player-info
20073   mesa-utils
20074   mono-2.0-gac
20075   mono-gac
20076   mono-runtime
20077   nautilus-sendto
20078   nautilus-sendto-empathy
20079   p7zip-full
20080   pkg-config
20081   python-aptdaemon
20082   python-aptdaemon-gtk
20083   python-axiom
20084   python-beautifulsoup
20085   python-bugbuddy
20086   python-clientform
20087   python-coherence
20088   python-configobj
20089   python-crypto
20090   python-cupshelpers
20091   python-elementtree
20092   python-epsilon
20093   python-evolution
20094   python-feedparser
20095   python-gdata
20096   python-gdbm
20097   python-gst0.10
20098   python-gtkglext1
20099   python-gtksourceview2
20100   python-httplib2
20101   python-louie
20102   python-mako
20103   python-markupsafe
20104   python-mechanize
20105   python-nevow
20106   python-notify
20107   python-opengl
20108   python-openssl
20109   python-pam
20110   python-pkg-resources
20111   python-pyasn1
20112   python-pysqlite2
20113   python-rdflib
20114   python-serial
20115   python-tagpy
20116   python-twisted-bin
20117   python-twisted-conch
20118   python-twisted-core
20119   python-twisted-web
20120   python-utidylib
20121   python-webkit
20122   python-xdg
20123   python-zope.interface
20124   remmina
20125   remmina-plugin-data
20126   remmina-plugin-rdp
20127   remmina-plugin-vnc
20128   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
20129   rhythmbox-plugins
20130   rpm-common
20131   rpm2cpio
20132   seahorse-plugins
20133   shotwell
20134   software-center
20135   system-config-printer-udev
20136   telepathy-gabble
20137   telepathy-mission-control-5
20138   telepathy-salut
20139   tomboy
20140   totem
20141   totem-coherence
20142   totem-mozilla
20143   totem-plugins
20144   transmission-common
20145   xdg-user-dirs
20146   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
20147   xserver-xephyr
20148 </p></blockquote>
20149
20150 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
20151
20152 <blockquote><p>
20153   cheese
20154   ekiga
20155   eog
20156   epiphany-extensions
20157   evolution-exchange
20158   fast-user-switch-applet
20159   file-roller
20160   gcalctool
20161   gconf-editor
20162   gdm
20163   gedit
20164   gedit-common
20165   gnome-games
20166   gnome-games-data
20167   gnome-nettool
20168   gnome-system-tools
20169   gnome-themes
20170   gnuchess
20171   gucharmap
20172   guile-1.8-libs
20173   libavahi-ui0
20174   libdmx1
20175   libgalago3
20176   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
20177   libgtksourceview2.0-0
20178   liblircclient0
20179   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
20180   libspeexdsp1
20181   libsvga1
20182   rhythmbox
20183   seahorse
20184   sound-juicer
20185   system-config-printer
20186   totem-common
20187   transmission-gtk
20188   vinagre
20189   vino
20190 </p></blockquote>
20191
20192 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
20193
20194 <blockquote><p>
20195   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
20196 </p></blockquote>
20197
20198 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
20199
20200 <blockquote><p>
20201 [nothing]
20202 </p></blockquote>
20203
20204 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
20205
20206 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
20207
20208 <blockquote><p>
20209   ksmserver
20210 </p></blockquote>
20211
20212 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
20213
20214 <blockquote><p>
20215   kwin
20216   network-manager-kde
20217 </p></blockquote>
20218
20219 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
20220
20221 <blockquote><p>
20222   arts
20223   dolphin
20224   freespacenotifier
20225   google-gadgets-gst
20226   google-gadgets-xul
20227   kappfinder
20228   kcalc
20229   kcharselect
20230   kde-core
20231   kde-plasma-desktop
20232   kde-standard
20233   kde-window-manager
20234   kdeartwork
20235   kdeartwork-emoticons
20236   kdeartwork-style
20237   kdeartwork-theme-icon
20238   kdebase
20239   kdebase-apps
20240   kdebase-workspace
20241   kdebase-workspace-bin
20242   kdebase-workspace-data
20243   kdeeject
20244   kdelibs
20245   kdeplasma-addons
20246   kdeutils
20247   kdewallpapers
20248   kdf
20249   kfloppy
20250   kgpg
20251   khelpcenter4
20252   kinfocenter
20253   konq-plugins-l10n
20254   konqueror-nsplugins
20255   kscreensaver
20256   kscreensaver-xsavers
20257   ktimer
20258   kwrite
20259   libgle3
20260   libkde4-ruby1.8
20261   libkonq5
20262   libkonq5-templates
20263   libnetpbm10
20264   libplasma-ruby
20265   libplasma-ruby1.8
20266   libqt4-ruby1.8
20267   marble-data
20268   marble-plugins
20269   netpbm
20270   nuvola-icon-theme
20271   plasma-dataengines-workspace
20272   plasma-desktop
20273   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
20274   plasma-runners-addons
20275   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
20276   plasma-scriptengine-python
20277   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
20278   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
20279   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
20280   plasma-scriptengines
20281   plasma-wallpapers-addons
20282   plasma-widget-folderview
20283   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
20284   ruby
20285   sweeper
20286   update-notifier-kde
20287   xscreensaver-data-extra
20288   xscreensaver-gl
20289   xscreensaver-gl-extra
20290   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
20291 </p></blockquote>
20292
20293 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
20294
20295 <blockquote><p>
20296   ark
20297   google-gadgets-common
20298   google-gadgets-qt
20299   htdig
20300   kate
20301   kdebase-bin
20302   kdebase-data
20303   kdepasswd
20304   kfind
20305   klipper
20306   konq-plugins
20307   konqueror
20308   ksysguard
20309   ksysguardd
20310   libarchive1
20311   libcln6
20312   libeet1
20313   libeina-svn-06
20314   libggadget-1.0-0b
20315   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
20316   libgps19
20317   libkdecorations4
20318   libkephal4
20319   libkonq4
20320   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
20321   libkscreensaver5
20322   libksgrd4
20323   libksignalplotter4
20324   libkunitconversion4
20325   libkwineffects1a
20326   libmarblewidget4
20327   libntrack-qt4-1
20328   libntrack0
20329   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
20330   libplasmaclock4a
20331   libplasmagenericshell4
20332   libprocesscore4a
20333   libprocessui4a
20334   libqalculate5
20335   libqedje0a
20336   libqtruby4shared2
20337   libqzion0a
20338   libruby1.8
20339   libscim8c2a
20340   libsmokekdecore4-3
20341   libsmokekdeui4-3
20342   libsmokekfile3
20343   libsmokekhtml3
20344   libsmokekio3
20345   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
20346   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
20347   libsmokekparts3
20348   libsmokektexteditor3
20349   libsmokekutils3
20350   libsmokenepomuk3
20351   libsmokephonon3
20352   libsmokeplasma3
20353   libsmokeqtcore4-3
20354   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
20355   libsmokeqtgui4-3
20356   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
20357   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
20358   libsmokeqtscript4-3
20359   libsmokeqtsql4-3
20360   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
20361   libsmokeqttest4-3
20362   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
20363   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
20364   libsmokeqtxml4-3
20365   libsmokesolid3
20366   libsmokesoprano3
20367   libtaskmanager4a
20368   libtidy-0.99-0
20369   libweather-ion4a
20370   libxklavier16
20371   libxxf86misc1
20372   okteta
20373   oxygencursors
20374   plasma-dataengines-addons
20375   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
20376   plasma-widget-lancelot
20377   plasma-widgets-addons
20378   plasma-widgets-workspace
20379   polkit-kde-1
20380   ruby1.8
20381   systemsettings
20382   update-notifier-common
20383 </p></blockquote>
20384
20385 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
20386 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
20387 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
20388 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
20389
20390       </div>
20391       <div class="tags">
20392
20393
20394         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
20395
20396
20397       </div>
20398     </div>
20399     <div class="padding"></div>
20400
20401     <div class="entry">
20402       <div class="title">
20403         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html">Migrating Xen virtual machines using LVM to KVM using disk images</a>
20404       </div>
20405       <div class="date">
20406         22nd November 2010
20407       </div>
20408       <div class="body">
20409         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
20410 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
20411 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
20412 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
20413 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
20414 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
20415 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
20416 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
20417 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
20418
20419 <p>I found
20420 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
20421 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
20422 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
20423 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
20424 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
20425 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
20426
20427 <pre>
20428 #!/bin/sh
20429
20430 # Based on
20431 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
20432
20433 set -e
20434 set -x
20435
20436 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
20437     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
20438     exit 1
20439 else
20440     host="$1"
20441 fi
20442
20443 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
20444     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
20445     exit 1
20446 fi
20447
20448 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
20449 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
20450 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
20451 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
20452
20453 img=$host.img
20454 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
20455 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
20456
20457 parted $img mklabel msdos
20458 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
20459 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
20460 parted $img set 1 boot on
20461
20462 modprobe dm-mod
20463 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
20464 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
20465
20466 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
20467 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
20468 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
20469
20470 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
20471 losetup -d /dev/loop0
20472 </pre>
20473
20474 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
20475 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
20476
20477 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
20478 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
20479 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
20480 seem to work just fine.</p>
20481
20482       </div>
20483       <div class="tags">
20484
20485
20486         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
20487
20488
20489       </div>
20490     </div>
20491     <div class="padding"></div>
20492
20493     <div class="entry">
20494       <div class="title">
20495         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome and KDE desktop</a>
20496       </div>
20497       <div class="date">
20498         20th November 2010
20499       </div>
20500       <div class="body">
20501         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
20502 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
20503 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
20504 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
20505
20506 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
20507 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
20508 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
20509
20510 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
20511
20512 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
20513
20514 <blockquote><p>
20515   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
20516   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
20517   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
20518   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
20519   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
20520   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
20521   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
20522   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
20523   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
20524   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
20525   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
20526   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
20527   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
20528   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
20529   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
20530   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
20531   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
20532   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
20533   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
20534   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
20535   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
20536   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
20537   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
20538   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
20539   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
20540   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
20541   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
20542   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
20543   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
20544   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
20545   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
20546   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
20547   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
20548   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
20549   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
20550   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
20551   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
20552   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
20553   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
20554   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
20555   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
20556   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
20557   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
20558   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
20559   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
20560   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
20561   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
20562   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
20563   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
20564   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
20565   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
20566   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
20567   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
20568   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
20569   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
20570   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
20571   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
20572   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
20573   zip
20574 </p></blockquote>
20575
20576 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
20577
20578 <blockquote><p>
20579   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
20580   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
20581   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
20582   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
20583   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
20584   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
20585   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
20586   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
20587   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
20588   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
20589   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
20590   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
20591   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
20592   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
20593   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
20594   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
20595   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
20596   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
20597   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
20598   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
20599   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
20600   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
20601   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
20602   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
20603   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
20604   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
20605   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
20606   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
20607   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
20608 </p></blockquote>
20609
20610 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
20611
20612 <blockquote><p>
20613   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
20614 </p></blockquote>
20615
20616 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
20617
20618 <blockquote><p>
20619 [nothing]
20620 </p></blockquote>
20621
20622 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
20623
20624 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
20625
20626 <blockquote><p>
20627   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
20628   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
20629   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
20630   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
20631   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
20632   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
20633   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
20634   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
20635   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
20636   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
20637   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
20638   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
20639   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
20640   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
20641   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
20642   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
20643   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
20644   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
20645   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
20646   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
20647   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
20648   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
20649   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
20650   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
20651   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
20652   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
20653   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
20654   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
20655   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
20656   ttf-sazanami-gothic
20657 </p></blockquote>
20658
20659 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
20660
20661 <blockquote><p>
20662   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
20663   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
20664   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
20665   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
20666   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
20667   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
20668   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
20669   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
20670   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
20671   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
20672   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
20673   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
20674   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
20675   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
20676   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
20677   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
20678   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
20679   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
20680   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
20681   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
20682   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
20683   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
20684   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
20685   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
20686   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
20687   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
20688   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
20689   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
20690   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
20691   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
20692   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
20693   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
20694   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
20695 </p></blockquote>
20696
20697 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
20698
20699 <blockquote><p>
20700   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
20701   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
20702   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
20703   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
20704   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
20705   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
20706   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
20707 </p></blockquote>
20708
20709 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
20710
20711 <blockquote><p>
20712   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
20713 </p></blockquote>
20714
20715       </div>
20716       <div class="tags">
20717
20718
20719         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
20720
20721
20722       </div>
20723     </div>
20724     <div class="padding"></div>
20725
20726     <div class="entry">
20727       <div class="title">
20728         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
20729       </div>
20730       <div class="date">
20731         20th November 2010
20732       </div>
20733       <div class="body">
20734         <p>Answering
20735 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
20736 call from the Gnash project</a> for
20737 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
20738 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
20739 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
20740 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
20741 releases out more often.</p>
20742
20743 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
20744 I have considered setting up a <a
20745 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
20746 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
20747 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
20748 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
20749 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
20750 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
20751 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
20752 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
20753 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
20754 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
20755 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
20756 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
20757
20758       </div>
20759       <div class="tags">
20760
20761
20762         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
20763
20764
20765       </div>
20766     </div>
20767     <div class="padding"></div>
20768
20769     <div class="entry">
20770       <div class="title">
20771         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
20772       </div>
20773       <div class="date">
20774          9th November 2010
20775       </div>
20776       <div class="body">
20777         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
20778
20779 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
20780 3D linked in from
20781 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
20782 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
20783
20784       </div>
20785       <div class="tags">
20786
20787
20788         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
20789
20790
20791       </div>
20792     </div>
20793     <div class="padding"></div>
20794
20795     <div class="entry">
20796       <div class="title">
20797         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_room_on_the_Debian_Edu_Sqeeze_DVD.html">Making room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD</a>
20798       </div>
20799       <div class="date">
20800          7th November 2010
20801       </div>
20802       <div class="body">
20803         <p>Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
20804 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> DVD, which is
20805 supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
20806 needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard.  Even
20807 schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
20808 working using this DVD.</p>
20809
20810 <p>The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
20811 installing recommended packages by default.  We want the same set of
20812 packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
20813 that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD.  I created
20814 a patch for debian-cd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/601203">BTS
20815 report #601203</a> to do this, and since this change was applied to
20816 the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.</p>
20817
20818 <p>A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
20819 the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
20820 those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
20821 Debian archive.</p>
20822
20823 <p>Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
20824 were using most space.  A few large packages are well know;
20825 openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont.  But I also
20826 discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB.
20827 The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
20828 when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were
20829 the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
20830 I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
20831 our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
20832 documentation.  Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
20833 which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
20834 free X driver should work.</p>
20835
20836 <p>With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
20837 desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
20838 DVD more useful again.</p>
20839
20840       </div>
20841       <div class="tags">
20842
20843
20844         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
20845
20846
20847       </div>
20848     </div>
20849     <div class="padding"></div>
20850
20851     <div class="entry">
20852       <div class="title">
20853         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
20854       </div>
20855       <div class="date">
20856         24th October 2010
20857       </div>
20858       <div class="body">
20859         <p>Some updates.</p>
20860
20861 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
20862 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
20863 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
20864 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
20865 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
20866 :)</p>
20867
20868 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
20869 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
20870 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
20871 It is called
20872 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
20873 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
20874 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
20875 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
20876 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
20877 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
20878
20879 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
20880 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
20881 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
20882 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
20883 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
20884 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
20885 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
20886 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
20887 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
20888 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
20889
20890       </div>
20891       <div class="tags">
20892
20893
20894         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
20895
20896
20897       </div>
20898     </div>
20899     <div class="padding"></div>
20900
20901     <div class="entry">
20902       <div class="title">
20903         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pledge_for_funding_to_the_Gnash_project_to_get_AVM2_support.html">Pledge for funding to the Gnash project to get AVM2 support</a>
20904       </div>
20905       <div class="date">
20906         19th October 2010
20907       </div>
20908       <div class="body">
20909         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is the
20910 most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation. It
20911 has done great so far, but there is still far to go, and recently its
20912 funding has dried up.  I believe AVM2 support in Gnash is vital to the
20913 continued progress of the project, as more and more sites show up with
20914 AVM2 flash files.</p>
20915
20916 <p>To try to get funding for developing such support, I have started
20917 <a href="http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">a pledge</a> with the
20918 following text:</P>
20919
20920 <p><blockquote>
20921
20922   <p>"I will pay 100$ to the Gnash project to develop AVM2 support but
20923   only if 10 other people will do the same."</p>
20924
20925   <p>- Petter Reinholdtsen, free software developer</p>
20926
20927   <p>Deadline to sign up by: 24th December 2010</p>
20928
20929   <p>The Gnash project need to get support for the new Flash file
20930   format AVM2 to work with a lot of sites using Flash on the
20931   web. Gnash already work with a lot of Flash sites using the old AVM1
20932   format, but more and more sites are using the AVM2 format these
20933   days. The project web page is available from
20934   http://www.getgnash.org/ . Gnash is a free software implementation
20935   of Adobe Flash, allowing those of us that do not accept the terms of
20936   the Adobe Flash license to get access to Flash sites.</p>
20937
20938   <p>The project need funding to get developers to put aside enough
20939   time to develop the AVM2 support, and this pledge is my way to try
20940   to get this to happen.</p>
20941
20942   <p>The project accept donations via the OpenMediaNow foundation,
20943   <a href="http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32">http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32</a> .</p>
20944
20945 </blockquote></p>
20946
20947 <p>I hope you will support this effort too.  I hope more than 10
20948 people will participate to make this happen.  The more money the
20949 project gets, the more features it can develop using these funds.
20950 :)</p>
20951
20952       </div>
20953       <div class="tags">
20954
20955
20956         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
20957
20958
20959       </div>
20960     </div>
20961     <div class="padding"></div>
20962
20963     <div class="entry">
20964       <div class="title">
20965         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_version_of_a_Perl_library_to_control_the_Spykee_robot.html">First version of a Perl library to control the Spykee robot</a>
20966       </div>
20967       <div class="date">
20968          9th October 2010
20969       </div>
20970       <div class="body">
20971         <p>This summer I got the chance to buy cheap Spykee robots, and since
20972 then I have worked on getting Linux software in place to control them.
20973 The firmware for the robot is available from the producer, and using
20974 that source it was trivial to figure out the protocol specification.
20975 I've started on a perl library to control it, and made some demo
20976 programs using this perl library to allow one to control the
20977 robots.</p>
20978
20979 <p>The library is quite functional already, and capable of controlling
20980 the driving, fetching video, uploading MP3s and play them.  There are
20981 a few less important features too.</p>
20982
20983 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I ran out of time to spend on this project,
20984 but I never got around to releasing the current source.  I decided
20985 today that it was time to do something about it, and uploaded the
20986 source to my Debian package store at people.skolelinux.org.</p>
20987
20988 <p>Because it was simpler for me, I made a Debian package and
20989 published the source and deb.  If you got a spykee robot, grab the
20990 source or binary package:</p>
20991
20992 <p><ul>
20993 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian/packages/lenny/libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.tar.gz">libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.tar.gz</a></li>
20994 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian/packages/lenny/libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.dsc">libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1.dsc</a></li>
20995 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian/packages/lenny/libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1_all.deb">libspykee-perl_0.0.20101009-1_all.deb</a></li>
20996 </ul></p>
20997
20998 <p>If you are interested in helping out with developing this library,
20999 please let me know.</p>
21000
21001       </div>
21002       <div class="tags">
21003
21004
21005         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
21006
21007
21008       </div>
21009     </div>
21010     <div class="padding"></div>
21011
21012     <div class="entry">
21013       <div class="title">
21014         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html">Links for 2010-10-03</a>
21015       </div>
21016       <div class="date">
21017          3rd October 2010
21018       </div>
21019       <div class="body">
21020         <p><ul>
21021
21022 <li><a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/09/there-is-no-plan-b-why-the-ipv4-to-ipv6-transition-will-be-ugly.ars">There
21023 is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly</a></li>
21024
21025 <li>Scanner looking under clothes
21026 <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/10/03/nyheter/utenriks/reise/overvakingskamera/flyplasser/13667192/">has
21027 already been misused at Heathrow</a>.</li>
21028
21029 <li><a href="http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Landell">Landell
21030 Webcasting</a> - interesting alternative for
21031 <ahref="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">DVSwitch</a> with
21032 simple setup.
21033
21034 </ul></p>
21035
21036       </div>
21037       <div class="tags">
21038
21039
21040         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
21041
21042
21043       </div>
21044     </div>
21045     <div class="padding"></div>
21046
21047     <div class="entry">
21048       <div class="title">
21049         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html">Terms of use for video produced by a Canon IXUS 130 digital camera</a>
21050       </div>
21051       <div class="date">
21052          9th September 2010
21053       </div>
21054       <div class="body">
21055         <p>A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital
21056 camera, a Canon IXUS 130.  It was instructive and very disturbing to
21057 be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to
21058 specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera.
21059 Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras
21060 are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway.  What is the
21061 problem, you might ask?  It is software patents, MPEG-4, H.264 and the
21062 MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences
21063 without asking for permissions that is at risk.
21064
21065 <p>On page 27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is
21066 written:</p>
21067
21068 <blockquote>
21069 <p>This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard
21070 and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding
21071 MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and
21072 non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the
21073 AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video.</p>
21074
21075 <p>No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4
21076 standard.</p>
21077 </blockquote>
21078
21079 <p>In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology
21080 (MPEG-4/H.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and
21081 non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations
21082 holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.</p>
21083
21084 <p>This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to
21085 read
21086 "<a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA">Why
21087 Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the
21088 MPEG-LA</a>" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and
21089 "<a href="http://webmink.com/2010/09/03/h-264-and-foss/">H.264 Is Not
21090 The Sort Of Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps to learn more about
21091 the issue.  The solution is to support the
21092 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
21093 open standards</a> for video, like <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg
21094 Theora</a>, and avoid MPEG-4 and H.264 if you can.</p>
21095
21096       </div>
21097       <div class="tags">
21098
21099
21100         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
21101
21102
21103       </div>
21104     </div>
21105     <div class="padding"></div>
21106
21107     <div class="entry">
21108       <div class="title">
21109         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html">Some notes on Flash in Debian and Debian Edu</a>
21110       </div>
21111       <div class="date">
21112          4th September 2010
21113       </div>
21114       <div class="body">
21115         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
21116 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
21117 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
21118 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
21119 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
21120 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
21121 installed.</p>
21122
21123 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
21124 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
21125 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
21126 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
21127 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
21128 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
21129 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
21130 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
21131 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
21132
21133 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
21134 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
21135 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
21136 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
21137 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
21138 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
21139 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
21140 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
21141 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
21142 pages they want to visit.</p>
21143
21144 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
21145 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
21146 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
21147 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
21148 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
21149 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
21150 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
21151 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
21152 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
21153 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
21154 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
21155
21156       </div>
21157       <div class="tags">
21158
21159
21160         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
21161
21162
21163       </div>
21164     </div>
21165     <div class="padding"></div>
21166
21167     <div class="entry">
21168       <div class="title">
21169         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_first_perl_GUI_application___controlling_a_Spykee_robot.html">My first perl GUI application - controlling a Spykee robot</a>
21170       </div>
21171       <div class="date">
21172          1st September 2010
21173       </div>
21174       <div class="body">
21175         <p>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application.  The last few
21176 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
21177 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
21178 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
21179 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
21180 allow me to drive the robot around.  I picked PerlQt as I have had
21181 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
21182 browsing the web for examples.  Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
21183 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
21184 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
21185 libqt-perl.  Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
21186 drive around.</p>
21187
21188 <p>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
21189 controlling the robot.  Here is an small example on how to use it:</p>
21190
21191 <p><pre>
21192 use Spykee;
21193 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
21194 my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
21195 my $spykee = Spykee->new();
21196 $spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
21197 $spykee->left();
21198 sleep 2;
21199 $spykee->right();
21200 sleep 2;
21201 $spykee->forward();
21202 sleep 2;
21203 $spykee->back();
21204 sleep 2;
21205 $spykee->stop();
21206 </pre></p>
21207
21208 <p>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
21209 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
21210 implement the protocol used by the robot.  I've implemented several of
21211 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
21212 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote.  First I
21213 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
21214 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
21215 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
21216 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
21217 going. :).</p>
21218
21219 <p>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
21220 where to make it available first.  I will add a link to
21221 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/">the NUUG wiki</a> for
21222 those that want to check back later to find it.</p>
21223
21224       </div>
21225       <div class="tags">
21226
21227
21228         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
21229
21230
21231       </div>
21232     </div>
21233     <div class="padding"></div>
21234
21235     <div class="entry">
21236       <div class="title">
21237         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken hard link handling with sshfs</a>
21238       </div>
21239       <div class="date">
21240         30th August 2010
21241       </div>
21242       <div class="body">
21243         <p>Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
21244 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">previous
21245 post about sshfs</a>.  He reported another problem with sshfs.  It
21246 fail to handle hard links properly.  A simple way to spot this is to
21247 look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree.  These should have
21248 a link count >1, but on sshfs the count is 1.  I just tested to see
21249 what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:</p>
21250
21251 <pre>
21252 % ln foo bar
21253 ln: creating hard link `bar' => `foo': Function not implemented
21254 %
21255 </pre>
21256
21257 <p>I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
21258 system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
21259 avoid surprised unix programs.  Not as useful as working file locking
21260 and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
21261 nevertheless. :)</p>
21262
21263 <p>The latest version of the file system test code is available via
21264 git from
21265 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a></p>
21266
21267       </div>
21268       <div class="tags">
21269
21270
21271         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
21272
21273
21274       </div>
21275     </div>
21276     <div class="padding"></div>
21277
21278     <div class="entry">
21279       <div class="title">
21280         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken umask handling with sshfs</a>
21281       </div>
21282       <div class="date">
21283         26th August 2010
21284       </div>
21285       <div class="body">
21286         <p>My file system sematics program
21287 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">presented
21288 a few days ago</a> is very useful to verify that a file system can
21289 work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit.  I'm
21290 looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
21291 University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs.  My friend
21292 Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
21293 Edu, but stopped because of problems.  I asked today what the problems
21294 where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
21295 Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
21296 script:</p>
21297
21298 <pre>
21299 mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
21300   mode_t retval = 0;
21301   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
21302   if (-1 != fd) {
21303     unlink(name);
21304     struct stat statbuf;
21305     if (-1 != fstat(fd, &statbuf)) {
21306       retval = statbuf.st_mode & 0x1ff;
21307     }
21308     close(fd);
21309   }
21310   return retval;
21311 }
21312
21313 /* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
21314 int test_umask(void) {
21315   printf("info: testing umask effect on file creation\n");
21316
21317   mode_t orig_umask = umask(000);
21318   mode_t newmode;
21319   if (0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
21320     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 000\n",
21321            newmode);
21322   }
21323   umask(007);
21324   if (0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
21325     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 007\n",
21326            newmode);
21327   }
21328
21329   umask (orig_umask);
21330   return 0;
21331 }
21332
21333 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
21334   [...]
21335   test_umask();
21336   return 0;
21337 }
21338 </pre>
21339
21340 <p>Sure enough.  On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:</p>
21341
21342 <pre>
21343 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
21344 info: testing symlink creation
21345 info: testing subdirectory creation
21346 info: testing fcntl locking
21347   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
21348   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
21349   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
21350   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
21351   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
21352   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
21353 info: testing umask effect on file creation
21354 </pre>
21355
21356 <p>When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this
21357 result:</p>
21358
21359 <pre>
21360 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
21361 info: testing symlink creation
21362 info: testing subdirectory creation
21363 info: testing fcntl locking
21364   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
21365   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
21366   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
21367   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
21368   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
21369   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
21370 info: testing umask effect on file creation
21371   error: Wrong file mode 644 when creating using mode 666 and umask 000
21372   error: Wrong file mode 640 when creating using mode 666 and umask 007
21373 </pre>
21374
21375 <p>So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a
21376 Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home
21377 directory.</p>
21378
21379 <p>Update 2010-08-26: Reported the issue in
21380 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/594498">BTS report #594498</a></p>
21381
21382 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
21383 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
21384 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
21385
21386       </div>
21387       <div class="tags">
21388
21389
21390         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
21391
21392
21393       </div>
21394     </div>
21395     <div class="padding"></div>
21396
21397     <div class="entry">
21398       <div class="title">
21399         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html">Rob Weir: How to Crush Dissent</a>
21400       </div>
21401       <div class="date">
21402         15th August 2010
21403       </div>
21404       <div class="body">
21405         <p>I found the notes from Rob Weir on
21406 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/VGb23-kta8c/how-to-crush-dissent.html">how
21407 to crush dissent</a> matching my own thoughts on the matter quite
21408 well.  Highly recommended for those wondering which road our society
21409 should go down.  In my view we have been heading the wrong way for a
21410 long time.</p>
21411
21412       </div>
21413       <div class="tags">
21414
21415
21416         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
21417
21418
21419       </div>
21420     </div>
21421     <div class="padding"></div>
21422
21423     <div class="entry">
21424       <div class="title">
21425         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html">No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients</a>
21426       </div>
21427       <div class="date">
21428          9th August 2010
21429       </div>
21430       <div class="body">
21431         <p>As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
21432 Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
21433 configuration settings on the clients.  I believe the work to be
21434 mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
21435 generated configuration.</p>
21436
21437 <p>What is the point, you might ask?  The point is to allow a Debian
21438 Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
21439 without any manual configuration.</p>
21440
21441 <p>This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
21442 the University of Oslo using PXE.  With the PXE installation, I am
21443 asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
21444 layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
21445 accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
21446 popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret).  After answering
21447 these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
21448 after around 50 minutes it is done.  I press enter to finish the
21449 installation, and the machine reboots into KDE.  When the machine is
21450 ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
21451 username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
21452 been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
21453 same username and password to the KDE 4.4 desktop.  At no point during
21454 this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
21455 required configuration was dynamically detected using information
21456 fetched via DHCP and DNS.  The roaming workstation is now ready for
21457 use.</p>
21458
21459 <p>How was this done, you might wonder?  First of all, here is the
21460 list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
21461 working properly out of the box:</p>
21462
21463 <ul>
21464 <li>IP address/netmask and DNS server.</li>
21465 <li>Web proxy URL.</li>
21466 <li>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).</li>
21467 <li>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.</li>
21468 <li>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)</li>
21469 <li>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)</li>
21470 <li>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)</li>
21471 </ul>
21472
21473 <p>(Hm, did I forget anything?  Let me knew if I did.)</p>
21474
21475 <p>The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
21476 machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
21477 administrators to track their machines.  Since yesterday, everything
21478 but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
21479 and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.</p>
21480
21481 <p>The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
21482 When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
21483 http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
21484 configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
21485 /etc/apt/apt.conf.  I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
21486 hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
21487 it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
21488 proxy present on the new network when it moves around.</p>
21489
21490 <p>The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
21491 configuration are generated using DNS information at boot.  First the
21492 installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain.  If
21493 not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead.  If an
21494 LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
21495 attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
21496 determine which LDAP base to use for NSS.  If there are several
21497 namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
21498 LDAP subtree is used as the base.  If defaultNamingContext is missing,
21499 the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
21500 object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
21501 such an object is used as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
21502 search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
21503 for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record.  I've been unable to find a way to
21504 look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
21505 current DNS domain is used.</p>
21506
21507 <p>For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
21508 for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
21509 found.  This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
21510 Oslo.  A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
21511 server, but have not been implemented yet.  I decided to fetch and
21512 save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
21513 different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
21514 log in nor the passwords required to log in.  Usernames and passwords
21515 will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
21516 network, and will not change as the laptop move around.  For a
21517 non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
21518 supposed to stay in place it should not matter much.  Perhaps we
21519 should switch those to use sssd too?</p>
21520
21521 <p>The user's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
21522 located when the user logs in for the first time.  The LDAP server is
21523 consulted to look for the user's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
21524 attribute is used if found.  If it isn't found, the home directory
21525 path fetched from NSS is used instead.  Assuming the path is of the
21526 form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
21527 DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
21528 smb://server.domain/username.  This algorithm works for both Debian
21529 edu and the University of Oslo.  Perhaps there are better attributes
21530 to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
21531 do for now. :)</p>
21532
21533 <p>This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
21534 into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
21535 more flexible than before.  I suspect it will also work for thin
21536 client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
21537 existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
21538 yet.</p>
21539
21540 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
21541 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
21542
21543 <p>Update 2010-08-09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
21544 detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
21545 before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name.  Will have to
21546 implement it for Debian Edu. :)</p>
21547
21548       </div>
21549       <div class="tags">
21550
21551
21552         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
21553
21554
21555       </div>
21556     </div>
21557     <div class="padding"></div>
21558
21559     <div class="entry">
21560       <div class="title">
21561         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">Testing if a file system can be used for home directories...</a>
21562       </div>
21563       <div class="date">
21564          8th August 2010
21565       </div>
21566       <div class="body">
21567         <p>A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
21568 Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
21569 Edu/Skolelinux machines.  This was thought to be no problem, as the
21570 access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
21571 knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
21572 mount home directories without any problems.  But, after months of
21573 struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.</p>
21574
21575 <p>The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
21576 directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
21577 work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
21578 underlying file system is a unix file system.  When using a Windows
21579 file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
21580 and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
21581 want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.</p>
21582
21583 <p>As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
21584 with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
21585 OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
21586 it should.  If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
21587 help you find your way out again.  This is the fs-test.c source:</p>
21588
21589 <pre>
21590 /*
21591  * Some tests to check the file system sematics.  Used to verify that
21592  * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
21593  * directory.
21594  * License: GPL v2 or later
21595  *
21596  * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
21597  * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
21598 */
21599
21600 #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
21601 #define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE 1
21602 #define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE 1
21603
21604 #define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
21605
21606 #include &lt;errno.h>
21607 #include &lt;fcntl.h>
21608 #include &lt;stdio.h>
21609 #include &lt;string.h>
21610 #include &lt;stdlib.h>
21611 #include &lt;sys/file.h>
21612 #include &lt;sys/stat.h>
21613 #include &lt;sys/types.h>
21614 #include &lt;unistd.h>
21615
21616 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
21617 /*
21618  * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
21619  * package and linking with -lsqlite3.  A more low level test is
21620  * below.
21621  * See also &lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 >.
21622  */
21623 #include &lt;sqlite3.h>
21624 #define CREATE_TABLE_USERS                                              \
21625   "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); "
21626 int test_sqlite_open(void) {
21627   char *zErrMsg;
21628   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
21629   sqlite3 *db=NULL;
21630   unlink(name);
21631   int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &db);
21632   if( rc ){
21633     printf("error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
21634     sqlite3_close(db);
21635     return -1;
21636   }
21637
21638   /* create tables */
21639   rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,  0, &zErrMsg);
21640   if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
21641     printf("error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n", zErrMsg);
21642     sqlite3_close(db);
21643     return -1;
21644   }
21645   printf("info: sqlite worked\n");
21646   sqlite3_close(db);
21647   return 0;
21648 }
21649 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
21650
21651 /*
21652  * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3.  This
21653  * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows 2003.  This is
21654  * done in the sqlite3 library.
21655  * See also
21656  * &lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html> and the
21657  * POSIX specification
21658  * &lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html>.
21659  */
21660 int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
21661   struct flock fl;
21662   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
21663   unlink(name);
21664   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
21665   printf("info: testing fcntl locking\n");
21666
21667   fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
21668   fl.l_pid    = getpid();
21669   printf("  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
21670   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
21671   fl.l_len    = 1;
21672   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
21673   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
21674
21675   printf("  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
21676   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
21677   fl.l_len    = 510;
21678   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
21679   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
21680
21681   printf("  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824");
21682   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
21683   fl.l_len    = 1;
21684   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
21685   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
21686
21687   printf("  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
21688   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
21689   fl.l_len    = 1;
21690   fl.l_type   = F_WRLCK;
21691   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
21692
21693   printf("  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
21694   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
21695   fl.l_len    = 510;
21696   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
21697
21698   printf("  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824");
21699   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
21700   fl.l_len    = 2;
21701   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
21702   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
21703
21704   close(fd);
21705   return 0;
21706 }
21707
21708 /*
21709  * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
21710  * below them.  This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
21711  * Mounting with option 'sync' seem to solve this problem while
21712  * slowing down file operations.
21713  */
21714 int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
21715 #define LEVELS 5
21716   char *path = strdup("test");
21717   char *dirs[LEVELS];
21718   int level;
21719   printf("info: testing subdirectory creation\n");
21720   for (level = 0; level &lt; LEVELS; level++) {
21721     char *newpath = NULL;
21722     if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777)) {
21723       printf("  error: Unable to create directory '%s': %s\n",
21724              path, strerror(errno));
21725       break;
21726     }
21727     asprintf(&newpath, "%s/%s", path, "test");
21728     free(path);
21729     path = newpath;
21730   }
21731   return 0;
21732 }
21733
21734 /*
21735  * Test if symlinks can be created.  This was a problem detected with
21736  * KDE.
21737  */
21738 int test_symlinks(void) {
21739   printf("info: testing symlink creation\n");
21740   unlink("symlink");
21741   if (-1 == symlink("file", "symlink"))
21742     printf("  error: Unable to create symlink\n");
21743   return 0;
21744 }
21745
21746 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
21747   printf("Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n");
21748   test_symlinks();
21749   test_subdirectory_creation();
21750 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
21751   test_sqlite_open();
21752 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
21753   test_gcompris_locking();
21754   return 0;
21755 }
21756 </pre>
21757
21758 <p>When everything is working, it should print something like
21759 this:</p>
21760
21761 <pre>
21762 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
21763 info: testing symlink creation
21764 info: testing subdirectory creation
21765 info: sqlite worked
21766 info: testing fcntl locking
21767   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
21768   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
21769   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
21770   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
21771   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
21772   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
21773 </pre>
21774
21775 <p>I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
21776 of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
21777 read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
21778 the read-only lock (while Windows do not).  Another was a bug in the
21779 CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
21780 meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
21781 OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
21782 not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.</p>
21783
21784 <p>Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
21785 it. :)</p>
21786
21787 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
21788 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
21789 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
21790
21791       </div>
21792       <div class="tags">
21793
21794
21795         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
21796
21797
21798       </div>
21799     </div>
21800     <div class="padding"></div>
21801
21802     <div class="entry">
21803       <div class="title">
21804         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Autodetecting_Client_setup_for_roaming_workstations_in_Debian_Edu.html">Autodetecting Client setup for roaming workstations in Debian Edu</a>
21805       </div>
21806       <div class="date">
21807          7th August 2010
21808       </div>
21809       <div class="body">
21810         <p>A few days ago, I
21811 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">tried
21812 to install</a> a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
21813 while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
21814 noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
21815 university infrastructure.  It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
21816 that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
21817 connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
21818 itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
21819 around it.  Now I am a huge step further along that road.</p>
21820
21821 <p>With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
21822 workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
21823 university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
21824 servers for Kerberos authentication.  All this without any
21825 configuration at all during installation.  My users home directory got
21826 a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
21827 In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured.  In addition to
21828 this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
21829 proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
21830 /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf.  Iceweasel and KDE is
21831 configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
21832 a proxy when at the university network.  If the machine is moved to a
21833 network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
21834 gave it a IP address.</p>
21835
21836 <p>The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
21837 entry ldap.$domain.  If this do not exist, it look for the
21838 _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
21839 server.  Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
21840 namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
21841 pick the first one as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
21842 algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
21843 uppercase version of $domain.</p>
21844
21845 <p>So, what is not working, you might ask.  SMB mounting my home
21846 directory do not work.  No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
21847 Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
21848 the cause.  These are not properly configured during installation, and
21849 had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
21850 but SMB mounting still do not work. :(</p>
21851
21852 <p>With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
21853 roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
21854 connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
21855 authentication.  It should also work out of the box in a Active
21856 Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
21857 with UID and GID values.</p>
21858
21859 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
21860 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
21861
21862       </div>
21863       <div class="tags">
21864
21865
21866         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
21867
21868
21869       </div>
21870     </div>
21871     <div class="padding"></div>
21872
21873     <div class="entry">
21874       <div class="title">
21875         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">Debian Edu roaming workstation - at the university of Oslo</a>
21876       </div>
21877       <div class="date">
21878          3rd August 2010
21879       </div>
21880       <div class="body">
21881         <p>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
21882 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
21883 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
21884 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
21885 infrastructure.  In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
21886 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
21887 servers.</p>
21888
21889 <p>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
21890 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
21891 /etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
21892 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
21893 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
21894 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
21895 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
21896 .uio.no.</p>
21897
21898 <p>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
21899 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
21900 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
21901 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
21902 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
21903 university servers.</p>
21904
21905 <p>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
21906 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
21907 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
21908 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
21909 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
21910 uses.</p>
21911
21912       </div>
21913       <div class="tags">
21914
21915
21916         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
21917
21918
21919       </div>
21920     </div>
21921     <div class="padding"></div>
21922
21923     <div class="entry">
21924       <div class="title">
21925         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
21926       </div>
21927       <div class="date">
21928         27th July 2010
21929       </div>
21930       <div class="body">
21931         <p>I discovered this while doing
21932 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
21933 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
21934 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
21935 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
21936 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
21937
21938 <p>An example is from todays
21939 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
21940 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
21941 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
21942 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
21943 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
21944 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
21945 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
21946
21947 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
21948
21949 <blockquote><pre>
21950 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
21951  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
21952   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
21953 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
21954  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
21955 </pre></blockquote>
21956
21957 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
21958 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
21959 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
21960 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
21961 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
21962 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
21963 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
21964 of dependency loops.</p>
21965
21966 <p>Thanks to
21967 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
21968 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
21969 dependencies
21970 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
21971 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
21972
21973 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
21974 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
21975 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
21976 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
21977 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
21978 it.</p>
21979
21980       </div>
21981       <div class="tags">
21982
21983
21984         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
21985
21986
21987       </div>
21988     </div>
21989     <div class="padding"></div>
21990
21991     <div class="entry">
21992       <div class="title">
21993         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Debian_Edu_test_release__alpha0__based_on_Squeeze_is_released.html">First Debian Edu test release (alpha0) based on Squeeze is released</a>
21994       </div>
21995       <div class="date">
21996         27th July 2010
21997       </div>
21998       <div class="body">
21999         <p>I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
22000 with the next Debian Edu release.  Not nearly done, but one major step
22001 completed.</p>
22002
22003 <blockquote>
22004 <p>This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
22005 release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
22006 install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
22007 of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
22008 user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
22009 longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
22010 Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
22011 language of choice, please let us know too.</p>
22012
22013 <p>In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
22014 artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
22015 and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.</p>
22016
22017 <p>The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
22018 work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
22019 much.</p>
22020
22021 <p>Changes compared to the lenny based version</p>
22022
22023 <ul>
22024 <li>Everything from Debian Squeeze
22025 <ul>
22026   <li>Desktop environment KDE 4.4 => the new KDE desktop in
22027          combination with some new artwork
22028   <li>Web browser Iceweasel 3.5
22029   <li>OpenOffice.org 3.2
22030   <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3
22031   <li>Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2
22032   <li>Image editor Gimp 2.6.10
22033   <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0
22034   <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4
22035   <li>3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)
22036   <li>Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)
22037 </ul></li>
22038 <li>Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
22039     Enabled for:
22040 <ul>
22041   <li>PAM
22042   <li>LDAP
22043   <li>IMAP
22044   <li>SMTP (sender verification)
22045 </ul>
22046 </li>
22047 <li>New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.</li>
22048 <li>Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
22049     fetched from LDAP.</li>
22050 <li>New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.</li>
22051 <li>General cleanup (not finished)</li>
22052 </ul>
22053 <p>The following features are not working as they should</p>
22054
22055 <ul>
22056 <li>No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
22057     scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
22058     for testing.</li>
22059 <li>DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
22060     and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
22061     clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.</li>
22062 <li>The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.</li>
22063 <li>The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.</li>
22064 <li>The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.</li>
22065 <li>Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
22066     netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.</li>
22067 <li>The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
22068     some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
22069     jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.</li>
22070 <li>Some packages lack translations. See
22071     http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
22072     and help out with translations.</li>
22073 </ul>
22074
22075 <p>To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use</p>
22076
22077 <ul>
22078 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</a></li>
22079 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</a></li>
22080 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
22081 </ul>
22082 <p>To download this multiarch dvd release you can use</p>
22083
22084 <ul>
22085 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</a></li>
22086 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</a></li>
22087 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
22088 </ul>
22089
22090 <p>There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
22091 get closer to the final release.</p>
22092
22093 <p>The MD5SUM of these images are</p>
22094
22095 <ul>
22096 <li>3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
22097 <li>22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
22098 </ul>
22099
22100 <p>The SHA1SUM of these images are</p>
22101 <ul>
22102 <li>c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
22103 <li>2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
22104 </ul>
22105 <p>How to report bugs:
22106 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla</p>
22107
22108 <p>Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org</p>
22109 </blockquote>
22110
22111       </div>
22112       <div class="tags">
22113
22114
22115         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
22116
22117
22118       </div>
22119     </div>
22120     <div class="padding"></div>
22121
22122     <div class="entry">
22123       <div class="title">
22124         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_step_closer_to_single_signon_in_Debian_Edu.html">One step closer to single signon in Debian Edu</a>
22125       </div>
22126       <div class="date">
22127         25th July 2010
22128       </div>
22129       <div class="body">
22130         <p>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
22131 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
22132 Edu/Skolelinux into shape.  This future version will use Kerberos for
22133 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
22134 getting rid of password questions one at the time.</p>
22135
22136 <p>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
22137 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
22138 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
22139 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server.  This
22140 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
22141 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
22142 package.  I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.</p>
22143
22144 <p>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
22145 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
22146 password when mounting the SMB volume.  A simple click on the shortcut
22147 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
22148 up. :)</p>
22149
22150 <p>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
22151 Debian Edu.  We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
22152 also Samba.  Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.</p>
22153
22154 <p>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
22155 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
22156 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
22157 the release.  It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
22158 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
22159 time for a alpha0 release today.  As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
22160 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
22161 release another day.</p>
22162
22163 <p>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
22164 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
22165
22166       </div>
22167       <div class="tags">
22168
22169
22170         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
22171
22172
22173       </div>
22174     </div>
22175     <div class="padding"></div>
22176
22177     <div class="entry">
22178       <div class="title">
22179         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenStreetmap_one_step_closer_to_having_routing_on_its_front_page.html">OpenStreetmap one step closer to having routing on its front page</a>
22180       </div>
22181       <div class="date">
22182         18th July 2010
22183       </div>
22184       <div class="body">
22185         <p>Thanks to
22186 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home">todays
22187 opengeodata blog entry</a>, I just discovered that the
22188 OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
22189 <a href="http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT">support
22190 for calculating routes</a>.  The support is still experimental and
22191 only available from the development server, until more experience is
22192 gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.</p>
22193
22194 <p>Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
22195 was provided by <a href="http://maps.cloudmade.com/">Cloudmade</a>,
22196 but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
22197 the issue.  I've had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
22198 alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
22199 and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
22200 www.openstreetmap.org front page.</p>
22201
22202       </div>
22203       <div class="tags">
22204
22205
22206         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
22207
22208
22209       </div>
22210     </div>
22211     <div class="padding"></div>
22212
22213     <div class="entry">
22214       <div class="title">
22215         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html">What are they searching for - PowerDNS and ISC DHCP in LDAP</a>
22216       </div>
22217       <div class="date">
22218         17th July 2010
22219       </div>
22220       <div class="body">
22221         <p>This is a
22222 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
22223 on my
22224 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_a_change_to_LDAP_schemas_allowing_DNS_and_DHCP_info_to_be_combined_into_one_object.html">previous
22225 work</a> on
22226 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
22227 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
22228
22229 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
22230 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
22231 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
22232 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
22233
22234 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
22235 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
22236 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
22237
22238 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
22239
22240 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
22241 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
22242 the web.
22243
22244 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
22245 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
22246 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
22247 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
22248 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
22249 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
22250
22251 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
22252 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
22253 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
22254 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
22255 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
22256 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
22257 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
22258 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
22259 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
22260 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
22261 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
22262 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
22263 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
22264 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
22265 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
22266 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
22267
22268 <blockquote><pre>
22269 ldapsearch -h ldap \
22270   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
22271   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
22272   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
22273   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
22274   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
22275   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
22276
22277 ldapsearch -h ldap \
22278   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
22279   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
22280   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
22281   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
22282   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
22283 </pre></blockquote>
22284
22285 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
22286 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
22287 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
22288 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
22289 also exist.</p>
22290
22291 <blockquote><pre>
22292 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
22293 objectclass: top
22294 objectclass: dnsdomain
22295 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
22296 dc: tjener
22297 arecord: 10.0.2.2
22298 associateddomain: tjener.intern
22299
22300 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
22301 objectclass: top
22302 objectclass: dnsdomain2
22303 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
22304 dc: 2
22305 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
22306 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
22307 </pre></blockquote>
22308
22309 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
22310 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
22311 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
22312 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
22313 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
22314 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
22315 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
22316 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
22317 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
22318 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
22319 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
22320 instead.</p>
22321
22322 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
22323 like this:</p>
22324
22325 <blockquote><pre>
22326 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
22327   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
22328   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
22329   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
22330   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
22331   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
22332
22333 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
22334   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
22335 </pre></blockquote>
22336
22337 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
22338 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
22339 reverse lookups.</p>
22340
22341 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
22342 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
22343 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
22344 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
22345
22346 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
22347 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
22348 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
22349
22350 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
22351 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
22352 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
22353 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
22354 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
22355
22356 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
22357 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
22358 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
22359 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
22360 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
22361
22362 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
22363 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
22364 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
22365 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
22366 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
22367 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
22368
22369 <blockquote><pre>
22370 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
22371     SUP top
22372     AUXILIARY
22373     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
22374           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
22375           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
22376           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
22377           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
22378     ))
22379 </pre></blockquote>
22380
22381 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
22382 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
22383 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
22384 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
22385 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
22386 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
22387
22388 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
22389
22390 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
22391 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
22392 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
22393 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
22394 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
22395
22396 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
22397 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
22398 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
22399 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
22400
22401 <blockquote><pre>
22402 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
22403 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
22404 </pre></blockquote>
22405
22406 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
22407 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
22408 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
22409 search result is this entry:</p>
22410
22411 <blockquote><pre>
22412 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
22413 cn: dhcp
22414 objectClass: top
22415 objectClass: dhcpServer
22416 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
22417 </pre></blockquote>
22418
22419 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
22420 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
22421 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
22422 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
22423 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
22424 The search result is this entry:</p>
22425
22426 <blockquote><pre>
22427 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
22428 cn: DHCP Config
22429 objectClass: top
22430 objectClass: dhcpService
22431 objectClass: dhcpOptions
22432 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
22433 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
22434 dhcpStatements: authoritative
22435 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
22436 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
22437 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
22438 </pre></blockquote>
22439
22440 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
22441 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
22442 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
22443 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
22444 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
22445 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
22446 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
22447 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
22448 related computer objects.</p>
22449
22450 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
22451 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
22452 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
22453 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
22454 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
22455 like:</p>
22456
22457 <blockquote><pre>
22458 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
22459 cn: hostname
22460 objectClass: top
22461 objectClass: dhcpHost
22462 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
22463 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
22464 </pre></blockquote>
22465
22466 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
22467 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
22468 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
22469 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
22470 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
22471 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
22472 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
22473 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
22474 structural object class.
22475
22476 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
22477
22478 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
22479 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
22480 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
22481 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
22482 in the configuration.</p>
22483
22484 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
22485 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
22486 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
22487 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
22488 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
22489 structure.</p>
22490
22491 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
22492 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
22493
22494 <blockquote><pre>
22495 ou=services
22496   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
22497     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
22498     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
22499       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
22500         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
22501     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
22502       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
22503         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
22504     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
22505       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
22506 </pre></blockquote>
22507
22508 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
22509 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
22510 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
22511 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
22512
22513 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
22514 like this:</p>
22515
22516 <blockquote><pre>
22517 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
22518 dc: hostname
22519 objectClass: top
22520 objectClass: dhcpHost
22521 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
22522 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
22523 associateddomain: hostname.intern
22524 arecord: 10.11.12.13
22525 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
22526 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
22527 </pre></blockquote>
22528
22529 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
22530 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
22531 auxiliary object class.</p>
22532
22533       </div>
22534       <div class="tags">
22535
22536
22537         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
22538
22539
22540       </div>
22541     </div>
22542     <div class="padding"></div>
22543
22544     <div class="entry">
22545       <div class="title">
22546         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
22547       </div>
22548       <div class="date">
22549         14th July 2010
22550       </div>
22551       <div class="body">
22552         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
22553 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
22554 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
22555 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
22556 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
22557
22558 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
22559 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
22560
22561 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
22562 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
22563 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
22564 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
22565 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
22566 to a slave DNS server.</p>
22567
22568 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
22569 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
22570 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
22571 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
22572 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
22573 seem to work.</p>
22574
22575 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
22576 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
22577 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
22578 this:</p>
22579
22580 <blockquote><pre>
22581   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
22582   cn: hostname
22583   objectClass: dhcphost
22584   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
22585   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
22586   associateddomain: hostname.intern
22587   arecord: 10.11.12.13
22588   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
22589   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
22590   ldapconfigsound: Y
22591 </pre></blockquote>
22592
22593 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
22594 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
22595 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
22596 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
22597
22598 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
22599 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
22600 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
22601 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
22602 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
22603 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
22604 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
22605 might be a good place to put it.</p>
22606
22607 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
22608 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
22609
22610       </div>
22611       <div class="tags">
22612
22613
22614         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
22615
22616
22617       </div>
22618     </div>
22619     <div class="padding"></div>
22620
22621     <div class="entry">
22622       <div class="title">
22623         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
22624       </div>
22625       <div class="date">
22626         11th July 2010
22627       </div>
22628       <div class="body">
22629         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
22630 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
22631 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
22632 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
22633
22634 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
22635 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
22636 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
22637 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
22638 LTSP clients.</p>
22639
22640 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
22641 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
22642 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
22643
22644 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
22645 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
22646 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
22647
22648 <blockquote><pre>
22649 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
22650 #
22651 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
22652 #
22653 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
22654 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
22655 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
22656 #
22657 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
22658 # existence of attribute names.
22659 #
22660 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
22661 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
22662 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
22663 #
22664 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
22665 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
22666 #
22667 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
22668 #     SUP top
22669 #     AUXILIARY
22670 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
22671
22672 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
22673 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
22674     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
22675     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
22676         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
22677         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
22678             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
22679             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
22680             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
22681             # bass value on to clients
22682             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
22683         done
22684     done
22685 fi
22686 </pre></blockquote>
22687
22688 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
22689 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
22690 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
22691 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
22692 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
22693
22694 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
22695 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
22696
22697 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
22698 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
22699 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
22700 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
22701 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
22702 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
22703
22704       </div>
22705       <div class="tags">
22706
22707
22708         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
22709
22710
22711       </div>
22712     </div>
22713     <div class="padding"></div>
22714
22715     <div class="entry">
22716       <div class="title">
22717         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
22718       </div>
22719       <div class="date">
22720          9th July 2010
22721       </div>
22722       <div class="body">
22723         <p>Since
22724 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
22725 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
22726 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
22727 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
22728 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
22729 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
22730 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
22731 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
22732 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
22733 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
22734 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
22735 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
22736 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
22737
22738       </div>
22739       <div class="tags">
22740
22741
22742         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
22743
22744
22745       </div>
22746     </div>
22747     <div class="padding"></div>
22748
22749     <div class="entry">
22750       <div class="title">
22751         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome desktop</a>
22752       </div>
22753       <div class="date">
22754          3rd July 2010
22755       </div>
22756       <div class="body">
22757         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
22758 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
22759 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
22760 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
22761 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
22762 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
22763 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
22764 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
22765
22766 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
22767 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
22768 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
22769 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
22770 publish the difference.</p>
22771
22772 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
22773
22774 <blockquote><p>
22775   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
22776   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
22777   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
22778   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
22779   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
22780   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
22781   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
22782   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
22783 </p></blockquote>
22784
22785 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
22786
22787 <blockquote><p>
22788   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
22789   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
22790   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
22791   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
22792   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
22793   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
22794   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
22795   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
22796   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
22797   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
22798   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
22799   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
22800   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
22801   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
22802   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
22803   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
22804   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
22805   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
22806   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
22807   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
22808 </p></blockquote>
22809
22810 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
22811
22812 <blockquote><p>
22813   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
22814   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
22815   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
22816   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
22817   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
22818   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
22819   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
22820   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
22821   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
22822   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
22823   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
22824   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
22825   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
22826   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
22827   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
22828   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
22829   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
22830   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
22831   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
22832   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
22833   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
22834 </p></blockquote>
22835
22836 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
22837
22838 <blockquote><p>
22839   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
22840   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
22841   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
22842 </p></blockquote>
22843
22844 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
22845 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
22846 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
22847 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
22848 the difference somewhat.
22849
22850       </div>
22851       <div class="tags">
22852
22853
22854         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
22855
22856
22857       </div>
22858     </div>
22859     <div class="padding"></div>
22860
22861     <div class="entry">
22862       <div class="title">
22863         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Caching_password__user_and_group_on_a_roaming_Debian_laptop.html">Caching password, user and group on a roaming Debian laptop</a>
22864       </div>
22865       <div class="date">
22866          1st July 2010
22867       </div>
22868       <div class="body">
22869         <p>For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
22870 a bit troubling.  Laptops are typically used also when not connected
22871 to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
22872 unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
22873 This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
22874 and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
22875 in Debian.  Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
22876 It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
22877 setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.</p>
22878
22879 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
22880
22881 This is the traditional method with a twist.  The password caching is
22882 provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on
22883 Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd.  The directory
22884 lookup and password checking is done using LDAP.  If one want to use
22885 Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
22886 replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal.  If one is happy having a
22887 local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
22888 pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
22889 using libpam-mklocaluser.  A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
22890 pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
22891 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/568577">bug #568577</a> is in the
22892 archive.  Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
22893 directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
22894 prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/.  This
22895 is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.</p>
22896
22897 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured</p>
22898
22899 <blockquote><pre>
22900 libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
22901 </pre></blockquote>
22902
22903 <p>The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
22904 one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site.  Make sure the
22905 PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
22906 sent in clear text to the LDAP server.  I've been unable to get TLS
22907 certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
22908 LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
22909 is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
22910 on how to get this working.</p>
22911
22912 <p>Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
22913 caching until <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">bug #485282</a>
22914 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
22915 currently in /etc/nscd.conf.  The changes are in the fields
22916 reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
22917 instructions I found in the
22918 <a href="http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/">LDAP for Mobile Laptops</a>
22919 instructions by Flyn Computing.</p>
22920
22921 <blockquote><pre>
22922         debug-level             0
22923         reload-count            unlimited
22924         paranoia                no
22925
22926         enable-cache            passwd          yes
22927         positive-time-to-live   passwd          2592000
22928         negative-time-to-live   passwd          20
22929         suggested-size          passwd          211
22930         check-files             passwd          yes
22931         persistent              passwd          yes
22932         shared                  passwd          yes
22933         max-db-size             passwd          33554432
22934         auto-propagate          passwd          yes
22935
22936         enable-cache            group           yes
22937         positive-time-to-live   group           2592000
22938         negative-time-to-live   group           20
22939         suggested-size          group           211
22940         check-files             group           yes
22941         persistent              group           yes
22942         shared                  group           yes
22943         max-db-size             group           33554432
22944         auto-propagate          group           yes
22945
22946         enable-cache            hosts           no
22947         positive-time-to-live   hosts           2592000
22948         negative-time-to-live   hosts           20
22949         suggested-size          hosts           211
22950         check-files             hosts           yes
22951         persistent              hosts           yes
22952         shared                  hosts           yes
22953         max-db-size             hosts           33554432
22954
22955         enable-cache            services        yes
22956         positive-time-to-live   services        2592000
22957         negative-time-to-live   services        20
22958         suggested-size          services        211
22959         check-files             services        yes
22960         persistent              services        yes
22961         shared                  services        yes
22962         max-db-size             services        33554432
22963 </pre></blockquote>
22964
22965 <p>While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
22966 automatically like the one provided in
22967 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/496915">bug #496915</a>, the file
22968 content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
22969 directory service on the machine.  /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
22970 look like this:</p>
22971
22972 <blockquote><pre>
22973 passwd:         files ldap
22974 group:          files ldap
22975 shadow:         files ldap
22976 hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
22977 networks:       files
22978 protocols:      files
22979 services:       files
22980 ethers:         files
22981 rpc:            files
22982 netgroup:       files ldap
22983 </pre></blockquote>
22984
22985 <p>The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
22986 shadow and netgroup.</p>
22987
22988 <p>With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
22989 in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
22990 directory created and have the password as well as user and group
22991 attributes cached.
22992
22993 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
22994   libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
22995
22996 <p>Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
22997 problems doing proper caching, I've seen suggestions and recipes to
22998 use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
22999 LDAP database is available.  I have not tested such setup, because I
23000 discovered sssd.</p>
23001
23002 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser</h2>
23003
23004 <p>A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
23005 mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
23006 <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/">sssd</a> package from Redhat.
23007 It is part of the <a href="http://www.freeipa.org/">FreeIPA</A> project
23008 to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
23009 machines.  The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
23010 information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
23011 libpam-ccreds.  It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS.  Version
23012 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
23013 in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010.  Because the
23014 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd package</a>
23015 was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
23016 version 1.2 is now in testing.
23017
23018 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
23019 roaming setup I want</p>
23020
23021 <blockquote><pre>
23022 libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
23023 </pre></blockquote>
23024
23025 The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
23026 <tt>/etc/sssd/sssd.conf</tt>.
23027
23028 <blockquote><pre>
23029 [sssd]
23030 config_file_version = 2
23031 reconnection_retries = 3
23032 sbus_timeout = 30
23033 services = nss, pam
23034 domains = INTERN
23035
23036 [nss]
23037 filter_groups = root
23038 filter_users = root
23039 reconnection_retries = 3
23040
23041 [pam]
23042 reconnection_retries = 3
23043
23044 [domain/INTERN]
23045 enumerate = false
23046 cache_credentials = true
23047
23048 id_provider = ldap
23049 auth_provider = ldap
23050 chpass_provider = ldap
23051
23052 ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
23053 ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
23054 ldap_tls_reqcert = never
23055 ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
23056 </pre></blockquote>
23057
23058 <p>I got the same problem here with certificate checking.  Had to set
23059 "ldap_tls_reqcert = never" to get it working.</p>
23060
23061 <p>With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
23062 nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
23063 modify it manually.</p>
23064
23065 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
23066 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
23067
23068       </div>
23069       <div class="tags">
23070
23071
23072         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
23073
23074
23075       </div>
23076     </div>
23077     <div class="padding"></div>
23078
23079     <div class="entry">
23080       <div class="title">
23081         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
23082       </div>
23083       <div class="date">
23084         28th June 2010
23085       </div>
23086       <div class="body">
23087         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
23088 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
23089 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
23090 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
23091 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
23092 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
23093 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
23094 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
23095 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
23096 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
23097
23098 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
23099 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
23100 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
23101 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
23102 released.</p>
23103
23104 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
23105 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
23106 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
23107 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
23108
23109 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
23110 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
23111
23112 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
23113 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
23114 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
23115 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
23116 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
23117
23118       </div>
23119       <div class="tags">
23120
23121
23122         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
23123
23124
23125       </div>
23126     </div>
23127     <div class="padding"></div>
23128
23129     <div class="entry">
23130       <div class="title">
23131         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_a_change_to_LDAP_schemas_allowing_DNS_and_DHCP_info_to_be_combined_into_one_object.html">Idea for a change to LDAP schemas allowing DNS and DHCP info to be combined into one object</a>
23132       </div>
23133       <div class="date">
23134         24th June 2010
23135       </div>
23136       <div class="body">
23137         <p>A while back, I
23138 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
23139 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
23140 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
23141 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
23142
23143 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
23144 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
23145 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
23146 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
23147
23148 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
23149 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
23150 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
23151 Debian Edu.</p>
23152
23153 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
23154 the
23155 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
23156 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
23157 available today from IETF.</p>
23158
23159 <pre>
23160 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
23161 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
23162 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
23163  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
23164         NAME 'dhcpHost'
23165         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
23166 -       SUP top
23167 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
23168         MUST cn
23169         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
23170         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
23171 </pre>
23172
23173 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
23174 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
23175 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
23176
23177 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
23178 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
23179
23180       </div>
23181       <div class="tags">
23182
23183
23184         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
23185
23186
23187       </div>
23188     </div>
23189     <div class="padding"></div>
23190
23191     <div class="entry">
23192       <div class="title">
23193         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html">Calling tasksel like the installer, while still getting useful output</a>
23194       </div>
23195       <div class="date">
23196         16th June 2010
23197       </div>
23198       <div class="body">
23199         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
23200 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
23201 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
23202 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
23203 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
23204 this:
23205
23206 <blockquote><pre>
23207 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
23208 tasksel --new-install
23209 </pre></blockquote>
23210
23211 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
23212 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
23213 any output what so ever.
23214
23215 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
23216 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
23217 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
23218 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
23219 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
23220 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
23221 code like this:
23222
23223 <blockquote><pre>
23224 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
23225 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
23226 $cmd
23227 </pre></blockquote>
23228
23229 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
23230 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
23231 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
23232 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
23233 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
23234 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
23235 installation.</p>
23236
23237 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
23238 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
23239 like this.</p>
23240
23241       </div>
23242       <div class="tags">
23243
23244
23245         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
23246
23247
23248       </div>
23249     </div>
23250     <div class="padding"></div>
23251
23252     <div class="entry">
23253       <div class="title">
23254         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">Officeshots taking shape</a>
23255       </div>
23256       <div class="date">
23257         13th June 2010
23258       </div>
23259       <div class="body">
23260         <p>For those of us caring about document exchange and
23261 interoperability, <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>
23262 is a great service.  It is to ODF documents what
23263 <a href="http://browsershots.org/">BrowserShots</a> is for web
23264 pages.</p>
23265
23266 <p>A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
23267 that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
23268 and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
23269 interested in supporting the project.  I helped him to navigate his
23270 request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
23271 a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
23272 arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot.  The machine is
23273 administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
23274 contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
23275 see how the project is doing.</p>
23276
23277 <p>Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
23278 machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
23279 OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
23280 in 17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
23281 Windows.  This is great.</p>
23282
23283       </div>
23284       <div class="tags">
23285
23286
23287         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
23288
23289
23290       </div>
23291     </div>
23292     <div class="padding"></div>
23293
23294     <div class="entry">
23295       <div class="title">
23296         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, removals by apt and aptitude</a>
23297       </div>
23298       <div class="date">
23299         13th June 2010
23300       </div>
23301       <div class="body">
23302         <p>My
23303 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
23304 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
23305 finally made the upgrade logs available from
23306 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
23307 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
23308 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
23309 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
23310
23311 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
23312 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
23313 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
23314 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
23315 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
23316 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
23317 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
23318 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
23319
23320 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
23321 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
23322 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
23323 too surprising.</p>
23324
23325 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
23326 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
23327 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
23328 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
23329 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
23330 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
23331 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
23332 continue.</p>
23333
23334 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
23335 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
23336   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
23337   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
23338   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
23339   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
23340   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
23341   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
23342   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
23343   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
23344   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
23345   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
23346   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
23347   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
23348   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
23349   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
23350   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
23351   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
23352   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
23353   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
23354   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
23355   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
23356   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
23357   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
23358   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
23359   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
23360   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
23361   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
23362   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
23363   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
23364
23365 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
23366
23367 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
23368   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
23369   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
23370   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
23371   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
23372   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
23373   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
23374   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
23375   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
23376   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
23377   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
23378   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
23379   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
23380   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
23381   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
23382   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
23383   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
23384   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
23385   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
23386   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
23387   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
23388   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
23389   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
23390   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
23391   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
23392   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
23393   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
23394   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
23395   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
23396   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
23397   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
23398   zip</p>
23399
23400 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
23401
23402 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
23403   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
23404   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
23405   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
23406   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
23407   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
23408   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
23409   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
23410   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
23411   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
23412   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
23413   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
23414   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
23415   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
23416   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
23417   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
23418   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
23419   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
23420   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
23421   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
23422   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
23423   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
23424   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
23425   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
23426   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
23427   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
23428   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
23429   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
23430
23431 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
23432 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
23433   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
23434   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
23435   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
23436   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
23437   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
23438   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
23439   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
23440   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
23441   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
23442   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
23443   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
23444   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
23445   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
23446   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
23447   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
23448   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
23449   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
23450   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
23451   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
23452   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
23453   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
23454   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
23455   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
23456   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
23457   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
23458   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
23459   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
23460   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
23461   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
23462   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
23463   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
23464   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
23465   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
23466   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
23467   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
23468   xulrunner-1.9</p>
23469
23470
23471       </div>
23472       <div class="tags">
23473
23474
23475         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
23476
23477
23478       </div>
23479     </div>
23480     <div class="padding"></div>
23481
23482     <div class="entry">
23483       <div class="title">
23484         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
23485       </div>
23486       <div class="date">
23487         11th June 2010
23488       </div>
23489       <div class="body">
23490         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
23491 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
23492 have been discovered and reported in the process
23493 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
23494 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
23495 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
23496 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
23497 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
23498
23499 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
23500 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
23501 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
23502 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
23503 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
23504 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
23505
23506 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
23507 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
23508 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
23509 is created.  The bug report
23510 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
23511 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
23512 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
23513 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
23514 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
23515 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
23516 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
23517 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
23518 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
23519 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
23520 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
23521 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
23522 Debian Squeeze.</p>
23523
23524 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
23525 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
23526 trick:</p>
23527
23528 <blockquote><pre>
23529 #!/bin/sh
23530 set -ex
23531
23532 if [ "$1" ] ; then
23533     desktop=$1
23534 else
23535     desktop=gnome
23536 fi
23537
23538 from=lenny
23539 to=squeeze
23540
23541 exec &lt; /dev/null
23542 unset LANG
23543 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
23544 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
23545 fuser -mv .
23546 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
23547 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
23548 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
23549 #!/bin/sh
23550 exit 101
23551 EOF
23552 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
23553 exit_cleanup() {
23554     umount $tmpdir/proc
23555 }
23556 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
23557 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
23558 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
23559
23560 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
23561
23562 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
23563 # to return the correct answers.
23564 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
23565     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
23566
23567 # Include the desktop and laptop task
23568 for test in desktop laptop ; do
23569     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
23570 #!/bin/sh
23571 exit 2
23572 EOF
23573     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
23574 done
23575
23576 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
23577 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
23578 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
23579 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
23580
23581 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
23582 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
23583 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
23584 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
23585 fuser -mv
23586 </pre></blockquote>
23587
23588 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
23589 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
23590 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
23591 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
23592 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
23593 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
23594
23595 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
23596 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
23597 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
23598 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
23599 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
23600 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
23601 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
23602
23603 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
23604 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
23605 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
23606 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
23607 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
23608 packages.</p>
23609
23610       </div>
23611       <div class="tags">
23612
23613
23614         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
23615
23616
23617       </div>
23618     </div>
23619     <div class="padding"></div>
23620
23621     <div class="entry">
23622       <div class="title">
23623         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html">Upstart or sysvinit - as init.d scripts see it</a>
23624       </div>
23625       <div class="date">
23626          6th June 2010
23627       </div>
23628       <div class="body">
23629         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
23630 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
23631 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
23632 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
23633 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
23634 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
23635 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
23636
23637 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
23638 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
23639 COLUMNS):</p>
23640
23641 <blockquote><pre>
23642 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
23643 previous=N
23644 PREVLEVEL=
23645 RUNLEVEL=
23646 runlevel=S
23647 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
23648 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
23649 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
23650 </pre></blockquote>
23651
23652 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
23653 script.</p>
23654
23655 <blockquote><pre>
23656 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
23657 previous=N
23658 PREVLEVEL=N
23659 RUNLEVEL=S
23660 runlevel=S
23661 </pre></blockquote>
23662
23663 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
23664 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
23665 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
23666
23667 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
23668 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
23669 choice.</p>
23670
23671       </div>
23672       <div class="tags">
23673
23674
23675         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
23676
23677
23678       </div>
23679     </div>
23680     <div class="padding"></div>
23681
23682     <div class="entry">
23683       <div class="title">
23684         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
23685       </div>
23686       <div class="date">
23687          6th June 2010
23688       </div>
23689       <div class="body">
23690         <p>Via the
23691 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
23692 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
23693 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
23694 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
23695 following the standards wars of today.</p>
23696
23697       </div>
23698       <div class="tags">
23699
23700
23701         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
23702
23703
23704       </div>
23705     </div>
23706     <div class="padding"></div>
23707
23708     <div class="entry">
23709       <div class="title">
23710         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing computer hardware models used at site</a>
23711       </div>
23712       <div class="date">
23713          3rd June 2010
23714       </div>
23715       <div class="body">
23716         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
23717 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
23718 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
23719 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
23720 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
23721
23722 <blockquote><pre>
23723 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
23724   vendor                    count
23725   Dell Computer Corporation     1
23726     PowerEdge 1750              1
23727   IBM                           1
23728     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
23729   Intel                         2
23730   [no-dmi-info]                 3
23731 maintainer:~#
23732 </pre></blockquote>
23733
23734 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
23735 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
23736 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
23737 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
23738 option to list the individual machines.</p>
23739
23740 <p>A larger list is
23741 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
23742 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
23743 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
23744 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
23745 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
23746 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
23747 collector.</p>
23748
23749       </div>
23750       <div class="tags">
23751
23752
23753         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
23754
23755
23756       </div>
23757     </div>
23758     <div class="padding"></div>
23759
23760     <div class="entry">
23761       <div class="title">
23762         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html">KDM fail at boot with NVidia cards - and no one try to fix it?</a>
23763       </div>
23764       <div class="date">
23765          1st June 2010
23766       </div>
23767       <div class="body">
23768         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
23769 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
23770 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
23771 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
23772 wait.</p>
23773
23774 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
23775 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
23776 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
23777 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
23778 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
23779 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
23780
23781 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
23782 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
23783 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
23784 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
23785 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
23786 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
23787 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
23788 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
23789
23790 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
23791
23792       </div>
23793       <div class="tags">
23794
23795
23796         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
23797
23798
23799       </div>
23800     </div>
23801     <div class="padding"></div>
23802
23803     <div class="entry">
23804       <div class="title">
23805         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html">Parallellized boot seem to hold up well in Debian/testing</a>
23806       </div>
23807       <div class="date">
23808         27th May 2010
23809       </div>
23810       <div class="body">
23811         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
23812 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
23813 issues are known and should be solved:
23814
23815 <p><ul>
23816
23817 <li>The wicd package seen to
23818 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
23819 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
23820 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
23821 seem to be on the case.</li>
23822
23823 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
23824 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
23825 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
23826 maintainer is on the case.</li>
23827
23828 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
23829 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
23830 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
23831 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
23832 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
23833 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
23834 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
23835 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
23836
23837 </ul></p>
23838
23839 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
23840 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
23841 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
23842 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
23843
23844 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
23845 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
23846 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
23847 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
23848
23849 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
23850
23851       </div>
23852       <div class="tags">
23853
23854
23855         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
23856
23857
23858       </div>
23859     </div>
23860     <div class="padding"></div>
23861
23862     <div class="entry">
23863       <div class="title">
23864         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
23865       </div>
23866       <div class="date">
23867         22nd May 2010
23868       </div>
23869       <div class="body">
23870         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
23871 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
23872 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
23873 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
23874
23875 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
23876 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
23877 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
23878 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
23879 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
23880 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
23881 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
23882 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
23883 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
23884 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
23885 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
23886 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
23887 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
23888 going to work.</p>
23889
23890 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
23891 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
23892 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
23893 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
23894 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
23895 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
23896 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
23897 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
23898 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
23899 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
23900 Edu.</p>
23901
23902 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
23903 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
23904 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
23905 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
23906 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
23907 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
23908
23909 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
23910 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
23911
23912       </div>
23913       <div class="tags">
23914
23915
23916         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
23917
23918
23919       </div>
23920     </div>
23921     <div class="padding"></div>
23922
23923     <div class="entry">
23924       <div class="title">
23925         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pieces_of_the_roaming_laptop_puzzle_in_Debian.html">Pieces of the roaming laptop puzzle in Debian</a>
23926       </div>
23927       <div class="date">
23928         19th May 2010
23929       </div>
23930       <div class="body">
23931         <p>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
23932 Edu finally entered the Debian archive.  Today, the new
23933 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html">libpam-mklocaluser</a>
23934 package was accepted.  Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
23935 into unstable.  The
23936 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html">pam-python</a>
23937 package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
23938 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd</a> package
23939 passed NEW on Monday.  In addition, the
23940 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
23941 package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
23942 hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.</p>
23943
23944 <p>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
23945 roaming laptops.  The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
23946 nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
23947 which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
23948 for nscd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">BTS report
23949 #485282</a> is implemented.  The alternative setup is to use sssd with
23950 libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
23951 care of the caching of passwords and group information.</p>
23952
23953 <p>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
23954 at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
23955 problem with the server certificate.  I plan to update the Debian
23956 package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
23957 find time to make sure the next release will include both the
23958 Debian/Ubuntu specific patches.  Upstream is friendly and responsive,
23959 and I am sure we will find a good solution.</p>
23960
23961 <p>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
23962 LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
23963 when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
23964 cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
23965 memberhips and other relevant LDAP information.  The
23966 libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
23967 directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
23968 be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used.  To avoid confusion
23969 with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
23970 to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
23971 on the home directory servers.</p>
23972
23973 <p>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
23974 message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
23975 is created.  Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
23976 message.  The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
23977 a bug in gdm.  Have not investigated if there is some other message
23978 type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.</p>
23979
23980 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
23981 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
23982
23983       </div>
23984       <div class="tags">
23985
23986
23987         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
23988
23989
23990       </div>
23991     </div>
23992     <div class="padding"></div>
23993
23994     <div class="entry">
23995       <div class="title">
23996         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html">Parallellized boot is now the default in Debian/unstable</a>
23997       </div>
23998       <div class="date">
23999         14th May 2010
24000       </div>
24001       <div class="body">
24002         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
24003 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
24004 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
24005 expected, if I am to believe the
24006 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
24007 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
24008 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
24009 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
24010 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
24011 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
24012 version.</p>
24013
24014 More information about
24015 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
24016 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
24017 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
24018 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
24019
24020 <blockquote><pre>
24021 CONCURRENCY=none
24022 </pre></blockquote>
24023
24024 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
24025 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
24026 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
24027 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
24028
24029       </div>
24030       <div class="tags">
24031
24032
24033         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
24034
24035
24036       </div>
24037     </div>
24038     <div class="padding"></div>
24039
24040     <div class="entry">
24041       <div class="title">
24042         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients</a>
24043       </div>
24044       <div class="date">
24045         14th May 2010
24046       </div>
24047       <div class="body">
24048         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
24049 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
24050 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
24051 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
24052 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
24053 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
24054 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
24055 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
24056
24057 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
24058 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
24059 this on the collector host:</p>
24060
24061 <blockquote><pre>
24062 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
24063 </pre></blockquote>
24064
24065 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
24066 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
24067
24068 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
24069 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
24070 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
24071 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
24072 written yet.</p>
24073
24074       </div>
24075       <div class="tags">
24076
24077
24078         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
24079
24080
24081       </div>
24082     </div>
24083     <div class="padding"></div>
24084
24085     <div class="entry">
24086       <div class="title">
24087         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
24088       </div>
24089       <div class="date">
24090         13th May 2010
24091       </div>
24092       <div class="body">
24093         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
24094 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
24095 has been
24096 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
24097
24098 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
24099 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
24100 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
24101 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
24102 based boot system.  Tollef is
24103 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
24104 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
24105 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
24106 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
24107 at the moment do not.</p>
24108
24109 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
24110 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
24111 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
24112 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
24113 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
24114 way forward.</p>
24115
24116 <p>In the mean time, based on the
24117 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
24118 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
24119 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
24120 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
24121 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
24122 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
24123 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
24124 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
24125
24126       </div>
24127       <div class="tags">
24128
24129
24130         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
24131
24132
24133       </div>
24134     </div>
24135     <div class="padding"></div>
24136
24137     <div class="entry">
24138       <div class="title">
24139         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html">Parallellizing the boot in Debian Squeeze - ready for wider testing</a>
24140       </div>
24141       <div class="date">
24142          6th May 2010
24143       </div>
24144       <div class="body">
24145         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
24146 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
24147 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
24148 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
24149 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
24150 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
24151 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
24152
24153 <blockquote><pre>
24154 CONCURRENCY=makefile
24155 </pre></blockquote>
24156
24157 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
24158 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
24159 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
24160 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
24161 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
24162 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
24163 make this happen.</p>
24164
24165 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
24166 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
24167 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
24168 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
24169 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
24170
24171 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
24172 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
24173 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
24174 fix the remaining issues.</p>
24175
24176 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
24177 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
24178 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
24179 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
24180
24181       </div>
24182       <div class="tags">
24183
24184
24185         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
24186
24187
24188       </div>
24189     </div>
24190     <div class="padding"></div>
24191
24192     <div class="entry">
24193       <div class="title">
24194         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Forcing_new_users_to_change_their_password_on_first_login.html">Forcing new users to change their password on first login</a>
24195       </div>
24196       <div class="date">
24197          2nd May 2010
24198       </div>
24199       <div class="body">
24200         <p>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
24201 create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
24202 change the password on the first login attempt.</p>
24203
24204 <p>I'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
24205 Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account.  The account
24206 and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
24207 unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
24208 passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.</p>
24209
24210 <p>A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
24211 settings in /etc/shadow:</p>
24212
24213 <blockquote><pre>
24214 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
24215 Last password change                                    : May 02, 2010
24216 Password expires                                        : never
24217 Password inactive                                       : never
24218 Account expires                                         : never
24219 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
24220 Maximum number of days between password change          : 99999
24221 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
24222 root@tjener:~#
24223 </pre></blockquote>
24224
24225 <p>The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
24226 account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
24227 lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
24228 to the difference in days between that date and today.  To make it
24229 simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
24230 avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).</p>
24231
24232 <p>After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
24233 intended:</p>
24234
24235 <blockquote><pre>
24236 root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test
24237 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
24238 Last password change                                    : Jan 02, 1970
24239 Password expires                                        : never
24240 Password inactive                                       : never
24241 Account expires                                         : never
24242 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
24243 Maximum number of days between password change          : 10950
24244 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
24245 root@tjener:~#
24246 </pre></blockquote>
24247
24248 <p>So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
24249 Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
24250 user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).</p>
24251
24252 <p>Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
24253 sure only the user itself have the account password?</p>
24254
24255 <p>If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
24256 Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
24257
24258 <p>Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
24259 shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
24260 last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
24261 on the first login.  This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
24262 I did not notice this in my initial testing.  I have tested it on
24263 Squeeze, and '<tt>chage -d 0 username</tt>' do work there.  I have not
24264 tested it on Lenny yet.</p>
24265
24266 <p>Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
24267 equivalent command to expire a password is '<tt>passwd -e
24268 username</tt>', which insert zero into the date of the last password
24269 change.</p>
24270
24271       </div>
24272       <div class="tags">
24273
24274
24275         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
24276
24277
24278       </div>
24279     </div>
24280     <div class="padding"></div>
24281
24282     <div class="entry">
24283       <div class="title">
24284         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thoughts_on_roaming_laptop_setup_for_Debian_Edu.html">Thoughts on roaming laptop setup for Debian Edu</a>
24285       </div>
24286       <div class="date">
24287         28th April 2010
24288       </div>
24289       <div class="body">
24290         <p>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
24291 Debian Edu.  The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
24292 handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
24293 and go.</p>
24294
24295 <p>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
24296 Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
24297 example called Roaming Workstations.  Here are my thought on this.
24298 The setup would consist of the following:</p>
24299
24300 <ul>
24301
24302  <li>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
24303    the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
24304    the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
24305    server.  This allow the user to work also when offline.  The
24306    central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
24307    request, for example mounted via CIFS.  It could be mounted
24308    automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
24309    and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
24310    hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
24311    request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
24312    can be used to access it when needed.  Perhaps it is enough to use
24313    the fish protocol in KDE?</li>
24314
24315  <li>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
24316    authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
24317    to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
24318    to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server.  This can be done using
24319    <a href="http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
24320    or the Fedora developed
24321    <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD">System
24322    Security Services Daemon</a> packages.</li>
24323
24324  <li>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
24325    using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
24326    directory, using unison.</li>
24327
24328  <li>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
24329    their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
24330    the box with CUPS.  For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
24331    system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
24332    implemented.</li>
24333
24334  <li>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
24335    sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.</li>
24336
24337  <li>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
24338    cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
24339    local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.</li>
24340
24341 </ul>
24342
24343 <p>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
24344 the moment.  If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
24345 in time for the Squeeze release to freeze.  Some of the pieces need
24346 tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
24347 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566718">#566718</a>) and nslcd (or
24348 perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
24349 its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
24350 when disconnected from the net.  If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
24351 to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.</p>
24352
24353 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
24354 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
24355
24356       </div>
24357       <div class="tags">
24358
24359
24360         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
24361
24362
24363       </div>
24364     </div>
24365     <div class="padding"></div>
24366
24367     <div class="entry">
24368       <div class="title">
24369         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Great_book___Content__Selected_Essays_on_Technology__Creativity__Copyright__and_the_Future_of_the_Future_.html">Great book: "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future"</a>
24370       </div>
24371       <div class="date">
24372         19th April 2010
24373       </div>
24374       <div class="body">
24375         <p>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
24376 thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
24377 touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
24378 conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
24379 book titled "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
24380 Copyright, and the Future of the Future" is available with few
24381 restrictions on the web, for example from
24382 <a href="http://craphound.com/content/">his own site</a>. I read the
24383 epub-version from
24384 <a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2883">feedbooks</a> using
24385 <a href="http://www.fbreader.org/">fbreader</a> and my N810. I
24386 strongly recommend this book.</p>
24387
24388       </div>
24389       <div class="tags">
24390
24391
24392         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
24393
24394
24395       </div>
24396     </div>
24397     <div class="padding"></div>
24398
24399     <div class="entry">
24400       <div class="title">
24401         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html">Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?</a>
24402       </div>
24403       <div class="date">
24404         14th April 2010
24405       </div>
24406       <div class="body">
24407         <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/">Yesterdays
24408 NUUG presentation</a> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
24409 about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux.  Setting up a
24410 Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
24411 place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
24412 have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
24413 directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
24414 not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
24415 users and cryptographic keys instead.</p>
24416
24417 <p>A challenge will be integration and administration.  Is there a
24418 Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
24419 administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups?  With it, the
24420 school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
24421 files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.</p>
24422
24423 <p>A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
24424 pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together.  Anyone know?</p>
24425
24426 <p>Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
24427 Nagios.  I have no idea how much work that will be to implement.  We
24428 would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
24429 shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
24430 to work properly.</p>
24431
24432 <p>I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
24433 skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
24434 configuration and integration.  A natural starting point would be
24435 setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
24436 rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
24437 time.</p>
24438
24439 <p>If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
24440 I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
24441 presentation, and start using Kerberos at home.  The video show show
24442 up in a few days.</p>
24443
24444       </div>
24445       <div class="tags">
24446
24447
24448         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
24449
24450
24451       </div>
24452     </div>
24453     <div class="padding"></div>
24454
24455     <div class="entry">
24456       <div class="title">
24457         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/After_6_years_of_waiting__the_Xreset_d_feature_is_implemented.html">After 6 years of waiting, the Xreset.d feature is implemented</a>
24458       </div>
24459       <div class="date">
24460          6th March 2010
24461       </div>
24462       <div class="body">
24463         <p>6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
24464 in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
24465 when the user log out.  A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
24466 package in 2004 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/230422">#230422</a>),
24467 and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
24468 Today, this finally paid off.</p>
24469
24470 <p>The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
24471 repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
24472 been updated to use this framework.  Next on my agenda is to make sure
24473 kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.</p>
24474
24475 <p>In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
24476 user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
24477 after a user.  With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
24478 a generic way that work with all display managers using this
24479 framework.  My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
24480 similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.<p>
24481
24482       </div>
24483       <div class="tags">
24484
24485
24486         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
24487
24488
24489       </div>
24490     </div>
24491     <div class="padding"></div>
24492
24493     <div class="entry">
24494       <div class="title">
24495         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu___Skolelinux_based_on_Lenny_released__work_continues.html">Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Lenny released, work continues</a>
24496       </div>
24497       <div class="date">
24498         11th February 2010
24499       </div>
24500       <div class="body">
24501         <p>On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
24502 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> was finally
24503 shipped.  This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
24504 pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up.  Work on the first
24505 point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
24506 month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
24507 and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.</p>
24508
24509 <p>Perhaps it even is time for some partying?</p>
24510
24511 <p>After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
24512 next major release, based on Squeeze.  We will try to get as many of
24513 the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
24514 and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.</p>
24515
24516       </div>
24517       <div class="tags">
24518
24519
24520         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
24521
24522
24523       </div>
24524     </div>
24525     <div class="padding"></div>
24526
24527     <div class="entry">
24528       <div class="title">
24529         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html">Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration</a>
24530       </div>
24531       <div class="date">
24532         27th January 2010
24533       </div>
24534       <div class="body">
24535         <p>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
24536 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
24537 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
24538 Nagios.  The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
24539 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
24540 further.</p>
24541
24542 <p>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
24543 configured as a Munin and Nagios server.  In addition, it is
24544 configured to be a server for the
24545 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">SiteSummary
24546 system</a> I have written for use in Debian Edu.  The SiteSummary
24547 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
24548 work.  In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
24549 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
24550 computer submitting information to this collector.  This allow for
24551 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
24552 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
24553 packages got etc.  This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
24554 and Nagios configuration.</p>
24555
24556 <p>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
24557 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
24558 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
24559 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.</p>
24560
24561 <p>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
24562 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
24563 services detected).  In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
24564 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
24565 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
24566 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
24567 the machine.</p>
24568
24569 <p>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
24570 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
24571 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
24572 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.</p>
24573
24574 <p>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
24575 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP.  The system
24576 administrator need to run "<tt>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
24577 nagiosadmin</tt>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
24578 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages.  After that,
24579 everything is taken care of.</p>
24580
24581       </div>
24582       <div class="tags">
24583
24584
24585         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
24586
24587
24588       </div>
24589     </div>
24590     <div class="padding"></div>
24591
24592     <div class="entry">
24593       <div class="title">
24594         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Relative_popularity_of_document_formats__MS_Office_vs__ODF_.html">Relative popularity of document formats (MS Office vs. ODF)</a>
24595       </div>
24596       <div class="date">
24597         12th August 2009
24598       </div>
24599       <div class="body">
24600         <p>Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
24601 and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
24602 OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage.  I searched using
24603 'filetype:odt' and equvalent terms, and got these results:</P>
24604
24605 <table>
24606 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
24607 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:282000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
24608 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:75600</td> <td>pptx:183000</td></tr>
24609 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:145000</td></tr>
24610 </table>
24611
24612 <p>Next, I added a 'site:no' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
24613 got these numbers:</p>
24614
24615 <table>
24616 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
24617 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480 </td> <td>docx:4460</td></tr>
24618 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:299   </td> <td>pptx:741</td></tr>
24619 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:187       </td> <td>xlsx:372</td></tr>
24620 </table>
24621
24622 <p>I wonder how these numbers change over time.</p>
24623
24624 <p>I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
24625 on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
24626 they are conduced in another country.  Because of this, I did the same
24627 search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
24628 search done from a machine here in Norway.</p>
24629
24630
24631 <table>
24632 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
24633 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:129000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
24634 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:44200</td> <td>pptx:93900</td></tr>
24635 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:82400</td></tr>
24636 </table>
24637
24638 <p>And with 'site:no':
24639
24640 <table>
24641 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
24642 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480</td> <td>docx:3410</td></tr>
24643 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:175</td> <td>pptx:604</td></tr>
24644 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:186       </td> <td>xlsx:296</td></tr>
24645 </table>
24646
24647 <p>Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
24648 numbers.</p>
24649
24650       </div>
24651       <div class="tags">
24652
24653
24654         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
24655
24656
24657       </div>
24658     </div>
24659     <div class="padding"></div>
24660
24661     <div class="entry">
24662       <div class="title">
24663         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html">ISO still hope to fix OOXML</a>
24664       </div>
24665       <div class="date">
24666          8th August 2009
24667       </div>
24668       <div class="body">
24669         <p>According to <a
24670 href="http://twerner.blogspot.com/2009/08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html">a
24671 blog post from Torsten Werner</a>, the current defect report for ISO
24672 29500 (ISO OOXML) is 809 pages.  His interesting point is that the
24673 defect report is 71 pages more than the full ODF 1.1 specification.
24674 Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
24675 can be fixed in ISO.  Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
24676 and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
24677 close to solving the problems.  I was part of the Norwegian committee
24678 involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
24679 Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.</p>
24680
24681 <p>These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
24682 with the future ahead of it.  We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
24683 seminar this autumn.</p>
24684
24685       </div>
24686       <div class="tags">
24687
24688
24689         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
24690
24691
24692       </div>
24693     </div>
24694     <div class="padding"></div>
24695
24696     <div class="entry">
24697       <div class="title">
24698         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html">Debian has switched to dependency based boot sequencing</a>
24699       </div>
24700       <div class="date">
24701         27th July 2009
24702       </div>
24703       <div class="body">
24704         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
24705 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
24706 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
24707 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
24708 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
24709 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
24710 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
24711
24712 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
24713 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
24714 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
24715
24716       </div>
24717       <div class="tags">
24718
24719
24720         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
24721
24722
24723       </div>
24724     </div>
24725     <div class="padding"></div>
24726
24727     <div class="entry">
24728       <div class="title">
24729         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
24730       </div>
24731       <div class="date">
24732         22nd July 2009
24733       </div>
24734       <div class="body">
24735         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
24736 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
24737 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
24738 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
24739 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
24740 the package up to date.</p>
24741
24742 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
24743 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
24744 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
24745 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
24746 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
24747 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
24748 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
24749 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
24750 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
24751 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
24752 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
24753 working on the future release.</p>
24754
24755 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
24756 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
24757
24758       </div>
24759       <div class="tags">
24760
24761
24762         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
24763
24764
24765       </div>
24766     </div>
24767     <div class="padding"></div>
24768
24769     <div class="entry">
24770       <div class="title">
24771         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
24772       </div>
24773       <div class="date">
24774         24th June 2009
24775       </div>
24776       <div class="body">
24777         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
24778 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
24779 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
24780 funded
24781 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
24782 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
24783 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
24784 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
24785 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
24786 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
24787
24788 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
24789 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
24790 boot:</p>
24791
24792 <ul>
24793
24794 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
24795
24796 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
24797    clock is in UTC.</li>
24798
24799 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
24800    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
24801    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
24802
24803 </ul>
24804
24805 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
24806 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
24807 Villegas</a>.
24808
24809 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
24810 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
24811 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
24812 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
24813 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
24814 using this.</p>
24815
24816 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
24817 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
24818 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
24819 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
24820 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
24821 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
24822 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
24823
24824       </div>
24825       <div class="tags">
24826
24827
24828         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
24829
24830
24831       </div>
24832     </div>
24833     <div class="padding"></div>
24834
24835     <div class="entry">
24836       <div class="title">
24837         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html">Two projects that have improved the quality of free software a lot</a>
24838       </div>
24839       <div class="date">
24840          2nd May 2009
24841       </div>
24842       <div class="body">
24843         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
24844 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
24845 do not yet know them.</p>
24846
24847 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
24848 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
24849 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
24850 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
24851 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
24852 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
24853 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
24854 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
24855 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
24856 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
24857 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
24858
24859 <p>The second one is
24860 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
24861 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
24862 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
24863 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
24864 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
24865 and the company behind it is running
24866 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
24867 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
24868 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
24869 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
24870 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
24871 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
24872 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
24873 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
24874
24875 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
24876 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
24877 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
24878 surrounded by today.</p>
24879
24880       </div>
24881       <div class="tags">
24882
24883
24884         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
24885
24886
24887       </div>
24888     </div>
24889     <div class="padding"></div>
24890
24891     <div class="entry">
24892       <div class="title">
24893         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html">No patch is not better than a useless patch</a>
24894       </div>
24895       <div class="date">
24896         28th April 2009
24897       </div>
24898       <div class="body">
24899         <p>Julien Blache
24900 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
24901 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
24902 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
24903 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
24904 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
24905 properties.</p>
24906
24907       </div>
24908       <div class="tags">
24909
24910
24911         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
24912
24913
24914       </div>
24915     </div>
24916     <div class="padding"></div>
24917
24918     <div class="entry">
24919       <div class="title">
24920         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html">Recording video from cron using VLC</a>
24921       </div>
24922       <div class="date">
24923          5th April 2009
24924       </div>
24925       <div class="body">
24926         <p>One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
24927 run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net.  The
24928 task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
24929 of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
24930 vlc.  I finally found a way to do it today.  I spent an hour or so
24931 searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation.  The
24932 hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
24933 dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:</p>
24934
24935 <blockquote><pre>URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
24936 SAVEFILE=rms.ogg
24937 DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
24938   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
24939   --intf=dummy</pre></blockquote>
24940
24941 <p>The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
24942 duplicating the output stream to "nodisplay" and the file, using the
24943 dummy interface.  The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
24944 sure no X interface is needed.</p>
24945
24946 <p>The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
24947 and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
24948 the vlc process with SIGTERM.  Here is a complete script
24949 <tt>vlc-record</tt> to use from <tt>at</tt> or <tt>cron</tt>:</p>
24950
24951 <blockquote><pre>#!/bin/sh
24952 set -e
24953 URL="$1"
24954 SAVEFILE="$2"
24955 DURATION="$3"
24956 DISPLAY= vlc -q "$URL" \
24957   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
24958   --intf=dummy < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 &
24959 pid=$!
24960 sleep $DURATION
24961 kill $pid
24962 wait $pid</pre></blockquote>
24963
24964       </div>
24965       <div class="tags">
24966
24967
24968         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
24969
24970
24971       </div>
24972     </div>
24973     <div class="padding"></div>
24974
24975     <div class="entry">
24976       <div class="title">
24977         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html">Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications</a>
24978       </div>
24979       <div class="date">
24980         30th March 2009
24981       </div>
24982       <div class="body">
24983         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
24984 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
24985 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
24986 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
24987 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
24988 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
24989 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
24990 application.</p>
24991
24992 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
24993 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
24994 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
24995 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
24996 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
24997 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
24998 blocked from doing so.</p>
24999
25000 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
25001 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
25002 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
25003 requirements change.</p>
25004
25005 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
25006 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
25007 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
25008
25009       </div>
25010       <div class="tags">
25011
25012
25013         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
25014
25015
25016       </div>
25017     </div>
25018     <div class="padding"></div>
25019
25020     <div class="entry">
25021       <div class="title">
25022         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
25023       </div>
25024       <div class="date">
25025         29th March 2009
25026       </div>
25027       <div class="body">
25028         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
25029 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
25030 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
25031 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
25032 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
25033 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
25034 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
25035 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
25036 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
25037 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
25038 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
25039 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
25040 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
25041 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
25042 now. :)</p>
25043
25044       </div>
25045       <div class="tags">
25046
25047
25048         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
25049
25050
25051       </div>
25052     </div>
25053     <div class="padding"></div>
25054
25055     <div class="entry">
25056       <div class="title">
25057         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">Time for new  LDAP schemas replacing RFC 2307?</a>
25058       </div>
25059       <div class="date">
25060         29th March 2009
25061       </div>
25062       <div class="body">
25063         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
25064 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
25065 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
25066 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
25067 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
25068 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
25069
25070 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
25071 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
25072 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
25073 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
25074 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
25075 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
25076 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
25077 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
25078 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
25079 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
25080 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
25081 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
25082 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
25083
25084 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
25085 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
25086 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
25087 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
25088
25089 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
25090 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
25091
25092 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
25093 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
25094 new IETF work group?</p>
25095
25096       </div>
25097       <div class="tags">
25098
25099
25100         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
25101
25102
25103       </div>
25104     </div>
25105     <div class="padding"></div>
25106
25107     <div class="entry">
25108       <div class="title">
25109         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">Checking server hardware support status for Dell, HP and IBM servers</a>
25110       </div>
25111       <div class="date">
25112         28th February 2009
25113       </div>
25114       <div class="body">
25115         <p>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
25116 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
25117 contract expire for each server.  We have a machine (and service)
25118 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
25119 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
25120 each machine.  To make it easier for us to track support contract
25121 status, I've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
25122 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
25123 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
25124 machines.  I extended a perl script already being used to import
25125 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
25126 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
25127 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
25128 for the relevant machines.  This make the support status information
25129 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
25130 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
25131 The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
25132 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
25133 them.  27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
25134 using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
25135 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
25136 services.  After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
25137 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
25138 them break down.  When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
25139 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
25140 machine.</p>
25141
25142 <p>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
25143 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
25144 Werner Forsbring.  The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
25145 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
25146 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code.  I know the HTML
25147 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
25148 introduce more dependencies.  This is the current incarnation:</p>
25149
25150 <pre>
25151 use LWP::Simple;
25152 use POSIX;
25153 use WWW::Mechanize;
25154 use Date::Parse;
25155 [...]
25156 sub get_support_info {
25157     my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
25158     my $str;
25159
25160     if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
25161         # fetch website from Dell support
25162         my $url = "http://support.euro.dell.com/support/topics/topic.aspx/emea/shared/support/my_systems_info/no/details?c=no&amp;cs=nodhs1&amp;l=no&amp;s=dhs&amp;ServiceTag=$serial";
25163         my $webpage = get($url);
25164         return undef unless ($webpage);
25165
25166         my $daysleft = -1;
25167         my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
25168         foreach my $line (@lines) {
25169             next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
25170             $line =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
25171             $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;
25172
25173             my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
25174             @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
25175             my $lastend = "";
25176             while ($f[3] eq "DELL") {
25177                 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];
25178
25179                 my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
25180                                             localtime(str2time($startstr)));
25181                 my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
25182                                           localtime(str2time($endstr)));
25183                 $str .= "$type $start -> $end ";
25184                 @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
25185                 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
25186             }
25187             my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
25188             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
25189                 if ($lastend lt $today);
25190         }
25191     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
25192         my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
25193         my $url =
25194             'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do';
25195         $mech->get($url);
25196         my $fields = {
25197             'BODServiceID' => 'NA',
25198             'RegisteredPurchaseDate' => '',
25199             'country' => 'NO',
25200             'productNumber' => $productnumber,
25201             'serialNumber1' => $serial,
25202         };
25203         $mech->submit_form( form_number => 2,
25204                             fields      => $fields );
25205         # Next step is screen scraping
25206         my $content = $mech->content();
25207
25208         $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
25209         $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
25210         $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
25211         $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
25212
25213         my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
25214
25215         while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
25216             my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
25217                 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
25218             $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
25219             my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
25220                                         localtime(str2time($startstr)));
25221             my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
25222                                       localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
25223
25224             $str .= "$type ($status) $start -> $end ";
25225
25226             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
25227                 if ($end lt $today);
25228         }
25229     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
25230         # This code ignore extended support contracts.
25231         my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
25232         if ($producttype &amp;&amp; $serial) {
25233             my $content =
25234                 get("http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;brandind=5000008&amp;Submit=Submit&amp;type=$producttype&amp;serial=$serial");
25235             if ($content) {
25236                 $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
25237                 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
25238                 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
25239                 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
25240
25241                 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
25242                 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
25243
25244                 $str .= "($status) -> $end ";
25245
25246                 my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
25247                 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
25248                     if ($end lt $today);
25249             }
25250         }
25251     }
25252     return $str;
25253 }
25254 </pre>
25255
25256 <p>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
25257 serial numbers.  The information passed in as arguments are fetched
25258 from dmidecode.</p>
25259
25260 <pre>
25261 print get_support_info("hp.host", "HP ProLiant BL460c G1", "1234567890"
25262                        "447707-B21");
25263 print get_support_info("dell.host", "Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950", "1234567");
25264 print get_support_info("ibm.host", "IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-",
25265                        "1234567");
25266 </pre>
25267
25268 <p>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
25269 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)</p>
25270
25271 <p>Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
25272 contracts, so it is useless in that case.  The original Dell code do
25273 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
25274 do so.</p>
25275
25276       </div>
25277       <div class="tags">
25278
25279
25280         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
25281
25282
25283       </div>
25284     </div>
25285     <div class="padding"></div>
25286
25287     <div class="entry">
25288       <div class="title">
25289         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html">Using bar codes at a computing center</a>
25290       </div>
25291       <div class="date">
25292         20th February 2009
25293       </div>
25294       <div class="body">
25295         <p>At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
25296 in our computing center.  This give us a challenge in tracking the
25297 location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
25298 removed.  Some times the location register is not updated when a
25299 computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
25300 the "missing" computer.</p>
25301
25302 <p>In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
25303 <a href="http://www.libdmtx.org/">libdmtx</a> to write and read bar
25304 code blocks as defined in the
25305 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix">The Data Matrix
25306 Standard</a>.  This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
25307 digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
25308 codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture.  The bar code standard
25309 allow up to 2 KiB to be written in the tag.  There is another project
25310 with <a href="http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/">a bar code
25311 writer written in postscript</a> capable of creating such bar codes,
25312 but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
25313 codes.</p>
25314
25315 <p>It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
25316 machines in our computing center.  If both racks and computers are
25317 tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
25318 computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
25319 If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
25320 locations, and can detect movements and removals.</p>
25321
25322 <p>I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
25323 random rack and tagged all the machines with their names.  Next, I
25324 took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
25325 these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read.  This worked
25326 fairly well.  If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
25327 side, all tags in the image could be read.  Because of limited space
25328 between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
25329 rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
25330 about half the rack.  I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
25331 to 60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.</p>
25332
25333 <p>My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
25334 at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
25335 easier automatic tracking of computers.</p>
25336
25337       </div>
25338       <div class="tags">
25339
25340
25341         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
25342
25343
25344       </div>
25345     </div>
25346     <div class="padding"></div>
25347
25348     <div class="entry">
25349       <div class="title">
25350         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/When_web_browser_developers_make_a_video_player___.html">When web browser developers make a video player...</a>
25351       </div>
25352       <div class="date">
25353         17th January 2009
25354       </div>
25355       <div class="body">
25356         <p>As part of the work we do in <a href="http://www.nuug.no">NUUG</a>
25357 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
25358 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording.  Putting a
25359 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
25360 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy.  I hope this
25361 will become easier when the &lt;video&gt; tag is implemented in all
25362 browsers, but I am not sure.  We provide the recordings in several
25363 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
25364 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
25365 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
25366 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
25367 &lt;video&gt; tag, the &lt;object&gt; tag, the &lt;embed&gt; tag and
25368 the &lt;applet&gt; tag.  All of these take a lot of options, and
25369 finding the best options is a major challenge.</p>
25370
25371 <p>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from <a
25372 href="http://labs.opera.com">labs.opera.com</a>, to see how it handled
25373 a &lt;video&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
25374 I was not very impressed.  The browser start by fetching a picture
25375 from the video stream.  Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
25376 definitely very early in the recording.  So far, so good. Next,
25377 instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
25378 of it, but do not start to play the video.  This mean I have to wait
25379 for several minutes for the downloading to finish.  When the download
25380 is done, the playing of the video do not start!  Waiting for the
25381 download, but I do not get to see the video?  Some testing later, I
25382 discover that I have to add the controls="true" attribute to be able
25383 to get a play button to pres to start the video.  Adding
25384 autoplay="true" did not help.  I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
25385 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
25386 &lt;video&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
25387 playing when the download is done.</p>
25388
25389 <p>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
25390 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/">available
25391 from the nuug site</a>.  Will have to test it with the new Firefox
25392 too.</p>
25393
25394 <p>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature.  I was unable
25395 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
25396 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video.  I
25397 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)</p>
25398
25399       </div>
25400       <div class="tags">
25401
25402
25403         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
25404
25405
25406       </div>
25407     </div>
25408     <div class="padding"></div>
25409
25410     <div class="entry">
25411       <div class="title">
25412         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html">Software video mixer on a USB stick</a>
25413       </div>
25414       <div class="date">
25415         28th December 2008
25416       </div>
25417       <div class="body">
25418         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> is
25419 recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
25420 worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
25421 directly with the video stream.  For this, we use the
25422 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/">dvswitch</a> package from
25423 the Debian video team.  As this require quite one computer per video
25424 source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
25425 borrow laptops.  And to avoid having to install extra software on
25426 these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
25427 bootable USB stick.  The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
25428 source, sink and mixer applications and
25429 <a href="http://www.kinodv.org/">dvgrab</a>.  To allow this setup to
25430 work without any configuration, I've patched dvswitch to use
25431 <a href="http://www.avahi.org/">avahi</a> to connect the various parts
25432 together.  And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
25433 upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
25434 with USB sources.  We have not yet tested this setup in a production
25435 setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
25436 video mixer in a very short time frame.  We will need it for
25437 <a href="http://www.goopen.no/">Go Open 2009</a>.</p>
25438
25439 <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz">The
25440 USB image</a> is for a 1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
25441 larger stick as well.</p>
25442
25443       </div>
25444       <div class="tags">
25445
25446
25447         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
25448
25449
25450       </div>
25451     </div>
25452     <div class="padding"></div>
25453
25454     <div class="entry">
25455       <div class="title">
25456         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html">Devcamp brought us closer to the Lenny based Debian Edu release</a>
25457       </div>
25458       <div class="date">
25459          7th December 2008
25460       </div>
25461       <div class="body">
25462         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
25463 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
25464 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
25465 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
25466 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
25467 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
25468 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
25469 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
25470
25471 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
25472 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
25473 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
25474 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
25475 of these cards.</p>
25476
25477       </div>
25478       <div class="tags">
25479
25480
25481         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp</a>.
25482
25483
25484       </div>
25485     </div>
25486     <div class="padding"></div>
25487
25488     <div class="entry">
25489       <div class="title">
25490         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html">The sorry state of multimedia browser plugins in Debian</a>
25491       </div>
25492       <div class="date">
25493         25th November 2008
25494       </div>
25495       <div class="body">
25496         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
25497 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
25498 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
25499 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
25500 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
25501 notes are available on
25502 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
25503 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
25504 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
25505 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
25506 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
25507 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
25508 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
25509 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
25510 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
25511
25512 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
25513 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
25514
25515       </div>
25516       <div class="tags">
25517
25518
25519         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
25520
25521
25522       </div>
25523     </div>
25524     <div class="padding"></div>
25525
25526     <p style="text-align: right;"><a href="english.rss"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/xml.gif" alt="RSS Feed" width="36" height="14" /></a></p>
25527     <div id="sidebar">
25528
25529
25530
25531 <h2>Archive</h2>
25532 <ul>
25533
25534 <li>2016
25535 <ul>
25536
25537 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/01/">January (3)</a></li>
25538
25539 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/02/">February (2)</a></li>
25540
25541 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/03/">March (3)</a></li>
25542
25543 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/04/">April (8)</a></li>
25544
25545 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/05/">May (4)</a></li>
25546
25547 </ul></li>
25548
25549 <li>2015
25550 <ul>
25551
25552 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
25553
25554 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (6)</a></li>
25555
25556 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/03/">March (1)</a></li>
25557
25558 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/04/">April (4)</a></li>
25559
25560 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/05/">May (3)</a></li>
25561
25562 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/06/">June (4)</a></li>
25563
25564 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/07/">July (6)</a></li>
25565
25566 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/08/">August (2)</a></li>
25567
25568 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/09/">September (2)</a></li>
25569
25570 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/10/">October (9)</a></li>
25571
25572 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/11/">November (6)</a></li>
25573
25574 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/12/">December (3)</a></li>
25575
25576 </ul></li>
25577
25578 <li>2014
25579 <ul>
25580
25581 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
25582
25583 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
25584
25585 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
25586
25587 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
25588
25589 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
25590
25591 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
25592
25593 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
25594
25595 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
25596
25597 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
25598
25599 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
25600
25601 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
25602
25603 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
25604
25605 </ul></li>
25606
25607 <li>2013
25608 <ul>
25609
25610 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
25611
25612 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
25613
25614 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
25615
25616 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
25617
25618 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
25619
25620 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
25621
25622 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
25623
25624 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
25625
25626 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
25627
25628 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
25629
25630 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
25631
25632 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
25633
25634 </ul></li>
25635
25636 <li>2012
25637 <ul>
25638
25639 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
25640
25641 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
25642
25643 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
25644
25645 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
25646
25647 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
25648
25649 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
25650
25651 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
25652
25653 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
25654
25655 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
25656
25657 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
25658
25659 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
25660
25661 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
25662
25663 </ul></li>
25664
25665 <li>2011
25666 <ul>
25667
25668 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
25669
25670 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
25671
25672 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
25673
25674 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
25675
25676 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
25677
25678 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
25679
25680 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
25681
25682 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
25683
25684 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
25685
25686 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
25687
25688 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
25689
25690 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
25691
25692 </ul></li>
25693
25694 <li>2010
25695 <ul>
25696
25697 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
25698
25699 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
25700
25701 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
25702
25703 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
25704
25705 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
25706
25707 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
25708
25709 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
25710
25711 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
25712
25713 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
25714
25715 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
25716
25717 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
25718
25719 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
25720
25721 </ul></li>
25722
25723 <li>2009
25724 <ul>
25725
25726 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
25727
25728 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
25729
25730 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
25731
25732 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
25733
25734 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
25735
25736 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
25737
25738 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
25739
25740 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
25741
25742 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
25743
25744 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
25745
25746 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
25747
25748 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
25749
25750 </ul></li>
25751
25752 <li>2008
25753 <ul>
25754
25755 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
25756
25757 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
25758
25759 </ul></li>
25760
25761 </ul>
25762
25763
25764
25765 <h2>Tags</h2>
25766 <ul>
25767
25768  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (13)</a></li>
25769
25770  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
25771
25772  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
25773
25774  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
25775
25776  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (9)</a></li>
25777
25778  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (15)</a></li>
25779
25780  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
25781
25782  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
25783
25784  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (127)</a></li>
25785
25786  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (156)</a></li>
25787
25788  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (10)</a></li>
25789
25790  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (15)</a></li>
25791
25792  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (21)</a></li>
25793
25794  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
25795
25796  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (315)</a></li>
25797
25798  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (23)</a></li>
25799
25800  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (12)</a></li>
25801
25802  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (26)</a></li>
25803
25804  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
25805
25806  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (16)</a></li>
25807
25808  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264 (20)</a></li>
25809
25810  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (42)</a></li>
25811
25812  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (11)</a></li>
25813
25814  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (19)</a></li>
25815
25816  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
25817
25818  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
25819
25820  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
25821
25822  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
25823
25824  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
25825
25826  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (38)</a></li>
25827
25828  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software (7)</a></li>
25829
25830  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (275)</a></li>
25831
25832  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (180)</a></li>
25833
25834  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (26)</a></li>
25835
25836  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
25837
25838  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (60)</a></li>
25839
25840  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (92)</a></li>
25841
25842  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (1)</a></li>
25843
25844  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
25845
25846  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
25847
25848  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
25849
25850  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (9)</a></li>
25851
25852  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
25853
25854  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (4)</a></li>
25855
25856  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
25857
25858  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (46)</a></li>
25859
25860  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
25861
25862  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (4)</a></li>
25863
25864  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (49)</a></li>
25865
25866  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (4)</a></li>
25867
25868  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (10)</a></li>
25869
25870  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (36)</a></li>
25871
25872  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (2)</a></li>
25873
25874  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
25875
25876  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (8)</a></li>
25877
25878  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (56)</a></li>
25879
25880  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
25881
25882  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (38)</a></li>
25883
25884 </ul>
25885
25886
25887     </div>
25888     <p style="text-align: right">
25889  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
25890 </p>
25891
25892   </body>
25893 </html>