blog/tags/english/index.html

   1 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
   2           "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
   3 <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr">
   4   <head>
   5     <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
   6     <title>Petter Reinholdtsen: Entries Tagged english</title>
   7     <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/style.css" />
   8     <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/vim.css" />
   9     <link rel="alternate" title="RSS Feed" href="english.rss" type="application/rss+xml" />
  10   </head>
  11   <body>
  12     <div class="title">
  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/Legal_to_share_more_than_3000_movies_listed_on_IMDB_.html">Legal to share more than 3000 movies listed on IMDB?</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28         18th November 2017
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>A month ago, I blogged about my work to automatically check the
  32 copyright status of IMDB entries, and try to count the number of
  33 movies listed in IMDB that is legal to distribute on the Internet.  I
  34 have continued to look for good data sources, and identified a few
  35 more.  The code used to extract information from various data sources
  36 is available in
  37 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb">a
  38 git repository</a>, currently available from github.</p>
  39
  40 <p>So far I have identified 3186 unique IMDB title IDs.  To gain
  41 better understanding of the structure of the data set, I created a
  42 histogram of the year associated with each movie (typically release
  43 year).  It is interesting to notice where the peaks and dips in the
  44 graph are located.  I wonder why they are placed there.  I suspect
  45 World Word II caused the dip around 1940, but what caused the peak
  46 around 2010?</p>
  47
  48 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-11-18-verk-i-det-fri-filmer.png" /></p>
  49
  50 <p>I've so far identified ten sources for IMDB title IDs for movies in
  51 the public domain or with a free license.  This is the statistics
  52 reported when running 'make stats' in the git repository:</p>
  53
  54 <pre>
  55   249 entries (    6 unique) with and   288 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-butter.json
  56  2301 entries (  540 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json
  57   830 entries (   29 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-icheckmovies-archive-mochard.json
  58  2109 entries (  377 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-pd.json
  59   291 entries (  122 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-pd.json
  60   144 entries (  135 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-manual.json
  61   350 entries (    1 unique) with and   801 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies.json
  62     4 entries (    0 unique) with and   124 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainreview.json
  63   698 entries (  119 unique) with and   118 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomaintorrents.json
  64     8 entries (    8 unique) with and   196 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-vodo.json
  65  3186 unique IMDB title IDs in total
  66 </pre>
  67
  68 <p>The entries without IMDB title ID are candidates to increase the
  69 data set, but might equally well be duplicates of entries already
  70 listed with IMDB title ID in one of the other sources, or represent
  71 movies that lack a IMDB title ID.  I've seen examples of all these
  72 situations when peeking at the entries without IMDB title ID.  Based
  73 on these data sources, the lower bound for movies listed in IMDB that
  74 are legal to distribute on the Internet is between 3186 and 4713.
  75
  76 <p>It would be great for improving the accuracy of this measurement,
  77 if the various sources added IMDB title ID to their metadata.  I have
  78 tried to reach the people behind the various sources to ask if they
  79 are interested in doing this, without any positive replies so far.
  80 Perhaps you can help me get in touch with the people behind VODO,
  81 Public Domain Torrents, Public Domain Movies and Public Domain Review
  82 to try to convince them to add more metadata to their movie entries?</p>
  83
  84 <p>Another way you could help is by adding pages to Wikipedia about
  85 movies that are legal to distribute on the Internet.  If such page
  86 exist and include a link to both IMDB and The Internet Archive, the
  87 script used to generate free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json should
  88 pick up the mapping as soon as wikidata is updates.</p>
  89
  90       </div>
  91       <div class="tags">
  92
  93
  94         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>.
  95
  96
  97       </div>
  98     </div>
  99     <div class="padding"></div>
 100
 101     <div class="entry">
 102       <div class="title">
 103         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_fault_tolerant_storage_systems.html">Some notes on fault tolerant storage systems</a>
 104       </div>
 105       <div class="date">
 106          1st November 2017
 107       </div>
 108       <div class="body">
 109         <p>If you care about how fault tolerant your storage is, you might
 110 find these articles and papers interesting.  They have formed how I
 111 think of when designing a storage system.</p>
 112
 113 <ul>
 114
 115 <li>USENIX :login; <a
 116 href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2017/ganesan">Redundancy
 117 Does Not Imply Fault Tolerance.  Analysis of Distributed Storage
 118 Reactions to Single Errors and Corruptions</a> by Aishwarya Ganesan,
 119 Ramnatthan Alagappan, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi
 120 H. Arpaci-Dusseau</li>
 121
 122 <li>ZDNet
 123 <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/">Why
 124 RAID 5 stops working in 2009</a> by Robin Harris</li>
 125
 126 <li>ZDNet
 127 <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-6-stops-working-in-2019/">Why
 128 RAID 6 stops working in 2019</a> by Robin Harris</li>
 129
 130 <li>USENIX FAST'07
 131 <a href="http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf">Failure
 132 Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population</a> by Eduardo Pinheiro,
 133 Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz André Barroso</li>
 134
 135 <li>USENIX ;login: <a
 136 href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/hughes12-04.pdf">Data
 137 Integrity.  Finding Truth in a World of Guesses and Lies</a> by Doug
 138 Hughes</li>
 139
 140 <li>USENIX FAST'08
 141 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/events/fast08/tech/full_papers/bairavasundaram/bairavasundaram_html/">An
 142 Analysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack</a> by
 143 L. N. Bairavasundaram, G. R. Goodson, B. Schroeder, A. C.
 144 Arpaci-Dusseau, and R. H. Arpaci-Dusseau</li>
 145
 146 <li>USENIX FAST'07 <a
 147 href="https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/">Disk
 148 failures in the real world: what does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean
 149 to you?</a> by B. Schroeder and G. A. Gibson.</li>
 150
 151 <li>USENIX ;login: <a
 152 href="https://www.usenix.org/events/fast08/tech/full_papers/jiang/jiang_html/">Are
 153 Disks the Dominant Contributor for Storage Failures?  A Comprehensive
 154 Study of Storage Subsystem Failure Characteristics</a> by Weihang
 155 Jiang, Chongfeng Hu, Yuanyuan Zhou, and Arkady Kanevsky</li>
 156
 157 <li>SIGMETRICS 2007
 158 <a href="http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/latent-sigmetrics07.pdf">An
 159 analysis of latent sector errors in disk drives</a> by
 160 L. N. Bairavasundaram, G. R. Goodson, S. Pasupathy, and J. Schindler</li>
 161
 162 </ul>
 163
 164 <p>Several of these research papers are based on data collected from
 165 hundred thousands or millions of disk, and their findings are eye
 166 opening.  The short story is simply do not implicitly trust RAID or
 167 redundant storage systems.  Details matter.  And unfortunately there
 168 are few options on Linux addressing all the identified issues.  Both
 169 ZFS and Btrfs are doing a fairly good job, but have legal and
 170 practical issues on their own.  I wonder how cluster file systems like
 171 Ceph do in this regard.  After all, there is an old saying, you know
 172 you have a distributed system when the crash of a computer you have
 173 never heard of stops you from getting any work done.  The same holds
 174 true if fault tolerance do not work.</p>
 175
 176 <p>Just remember, in the end, it do not matter how redundant, or how
 177 fault tolerant your storage is, if you do not continuously monitor its
 178 status to detect and replace failed disks.</p>
 179
 180       </div>
 181       <div class="tags">
 182
 183
 184         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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
 185
 186
 187       </div>
 188     </div>
 189     <div class="padding"></div>
 190
 191     <div class="entry">
 192       <div class="title">
 193         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_services_for_writing_academic_LaTeX_papers_as_a_team.html">Web services for writing academic LaTeX papers as a team</a>
 194       </div>
 195       <div class="date">
 196         31st October 2017
 197       </div>
 198       <div class="body">
 199         <p>I was surprised today to learn that a friend in academia did not
 200 know there are easily available web services available for writing
 201 LaTeX documents as a team.  I thought it was common knowledge, but to
 202 make sure at least my readers are aware of it, I would like to mention
 203 these useful services for writing LaTeX documents.  Some of them even
 204 provide a WYSIWYG editor to ease writing even further.</p>
 205
 206 <p>There are two commercial services available,
 207 <a href="https://sharelatex.com">ShareLaTeX</a> and
 208 <a href="https://overleaf.com">Overleaf</a>.  They are very easy to
 209 use.  Just start a new document, select which publisher to write for
 210 (ie which LaTeX style to use), and start writing.  Note, these two
 211 have announced their intention to join forces, so soon it will only be
 212 one joint service.  I've used both for different documents, and they
 213 work just fine.  While
 214 <a href="https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex">ShareLaTeX is free
 215 software</a>, while the latter is not.  According to <a
 216 href="https://www.overleaf.com/help/17-is-overleaf-open-source">a
 217 announcement from Overleaf</a>, they plan to keep the ShareLaTeX code
 218 base maintained as free software.</p>
 219
 220 But these two are not the only alternatives.
 221 <a href="https://app.fiduswriter.org/">Fidus Writer</a> is another free
 222 software solution with <a href="https://github.com/fiduswriter">the
 223 source available on github</a>.  I have not used it myself.  Several
 224 others can be found on the nice
 225 <a href="https://alternativeto.net/software/sharelatex/">alterntiveTo
 226 web service</a>.
 227
 228 <p>If you like Google Docs or Etherpad, but would like to write
 229 documents in LaTeX, you should check out these services.  You can even
 230 host your own, if you want to. :)</p>
 231
 232
 233       </div>
 234       <div class="tags">
 235
 236
 237         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 238
 239
 240       </div>
 241     </div>
 242     <div class="padding"></div>
 243
 244     <div class="entry">
 245       <div class="title">
 246         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Locating_IMDB_IDs_of_movies_in_the_Internet_Archive_using_Wikidata.html">Locating IMDB IDs of movies in the Internet Archive using Wikidata</a>
 247       </div>
 248       <div class="date">
 249         25th October 2017
 250       </div>
 251       <div class="body">
 252         <p>Recently, I needed to automatically check the copyright status of a
 253 set of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/">The Internet Movie database
 254 (IMDB)</a> entries, to figure out which one of the movies they refer
 255 to can be freely distributed on the Internet.  This proved to be
 256 harder than it sounds.  IMDB for sure list movies without any
 257 copyright protection, where the copyright protection has expired or
 258 where the movie is lisenced using a permissive license like one from
 259 Creative Commons.  These are mixed with copyright protected movies,
 260 and there seem to be no way to separate these classes of movies using
 261 the information in IMDB.</p>
 262
 263 <p>First I tried to look up entries manually in IMDB,
 264 <a href="https://www.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a> and
 265 <a href="https://www.archive.org/">The Internet Archive</a>, to get a
 266 feel how to do this.  It is hard to know for sure using these sources,
 267 but it should be possible to be reasonable confident a movie is "out
 268 of copyright" with a few hours work per movie.  As I needed to check
 269 almost 20,000 entries, this approach was not sustainable.  I simply
 270 can not work around the clock for about 6 years to check this data
 271 set.</p>
 272
 273 <p>I asked the people behind The Internet Archive if they could
 274 introduce a new metadata field in their metadata XML for IMDB ID, but
 275 was told that they leave it completely to the uploaders to update the
 276 metadata.  Some of the metadata entries had IMDB links in the
 277 description, but I found no way to download all metadata files in bulk
 278 to locate those ones and put that approach aside.</p>
 279
 280 <p>In the process I noticed several Wikipedia articles about movies
 281 had links to both IMDB and The Internet Archive, and it occured to me
 282 that I could use the Wikipedia RDF data set to locate entries with
 283 both, to at least get a lower bound on the number of movies on The
 284 Internet Archive with a IMDB ID.  This is useful based on the
 285 assumption that movies distributed by The Internet Archive can be
 286 legally distributed on the Internet.  With some help from the RDF
 287 community (thank you DanC), I was able to come up with this query to
 288 pass to <a href="https://query.wikidata.org/">the SPARQL interface on
 289 Wikidata</a>:
 290
 291 <p><pre>
 292 SELECT ?work ?imdb ?ia ?when ?label
 293 WHERE
 294 {
 295   ?work wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q11424.
 296   ?work wdt:P345 ?imdb.
 297   ?work wdt:P724 ?ia.
 298   OPTIONAL {
 299         ?work wdt:P577 ?when.
 300         ?work rdfs:label ?label.
 301         FILTER(LANG(?label) = "en").
 302   }
 303 }
 304 </pre></p>
 305
 306 <p>If I understand the query right, for every film entry anywhere in
 307 Wikpedia, it will return the IMDB ID and The Internet Archive ID, and
 308 when the movie was released and its English title, if either or both
 309 of the latter two are available.  At the moment the result set contain
 310 2338 entries.  Of course, it depend on volunteers including both
 311 correct IMDB and The Internet Archive IDs in the wikipedia articles
 312 for the movie.  It should be noted that the result will include
 313 duplicates if the movie have entries in several languages.  There are
 314 some bogus entries, either because The Internet Archive ID contain a
 315 typo or because the movie is not available from The Internet Archive.
 316 I did not verify the IMDB IDs, as I am unsure how to do that
 317 automatically.</p>
 318
 319 <p>I wrote a small python script to extract the data set from Wikidata
 320 and check if the XML metadata for the movie is available from The
 321 Internet Archive, and after around 1.5 hour it produced a list of 2097
 322 free movies and their IMDB ID.  In total, 171 entries in Wikidata lack
 323 the refered Internet Archive entry.  I assume the 70 "disappearing"
 324 entries (ie 2338-2097-171) are duplicate entries.</p>
 325
 326 <p>This is not too bad, given that The Internet Archive report to
 327 contain <a href="https://archive.org/details/feature_films">5331
 328 feature films</a> at the moment, but it also mean more than 3000
 329 movies are missing on Wikipedia or are missing the pair of references
 330 on Wikipedia.</p>
 331
 332 <p>I was curious about the distribution by release year, and made a
 333 little graph to show how the amount of free movies is spread over the
 334 years:<p>
 335
 336 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-10-25-verk-i-det-fri-filmer.png"></p>
 337
 338 <p>I expect the relative distribution of the remaining 3000 movies to
 339 be similar.</p>
 340
 341 <p>If you want to help, and want to ensure Wikipedia can be used to
 342 cross reference The Internet Archive and The Internet Movie Database,
 343 please make sure entries like this are listed under the "External
 344 links" heading on the Wikipedia article for the movie:</p>
 345
 346 <p><pre>
 347 * {{Internet Archive film|id=FightingLady}}
 348 * {{IMDb title|id=0036823|title=The Fighting Lady}}
 349 </pre></p>
 350
 351 <p>Please verify the links on the final page, to make sure you did not
 352 introduce a typo.</p>
 353
 354 <p>Here is the complete list, if you want to correct the 171
 355 identified Wikipedia entries with broken links to The Internet
 356 Archive: <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1140317">Q1140317</a>,
 357 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q458656">Q458656</a>,
 358 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q458656">Q458656</a>,
 359 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q470560">Q470560</a>,
 360 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q743340">Q743340</a>,
 361 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q822580">Q822580</a>,
 362 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q480696">Q480696</a>,
 363 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q128761">Q128761</a>,
 364 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1307059">Q1307059</a>,
 365 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1335091">Q1335091</a>,
 366 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1537166">Q1537166</a>,
 367 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1438334">Q1438334</a>,
 368 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1479751">Q1479751</a>,
 369 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1497200">Q1497200</a>,
 370 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1498122">Q1498122</a>,
 371 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q865973">Q865973</a>,
 372 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q834269">Q834269</a>,
 373 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q841781">Q841781</a>,
 374 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q841781">Q841781</a>,
 375 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1548193">Q1548193</a>,
 376 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q499031">Q499031</a>,
 377 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1564769">Q1564769</a>,
 378 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1585239">Q1585239</a>,
 379 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1585569">Q1585569</a>,
 380 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1624236">Q1624236</a>,
 381 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4796595">Q4796595</a>,
 382 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4853469">Q4853469</a>,
 383 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4873046">Q4873046</a>,
 384 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q915016">Q915016</a>,
 385 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4660396">Q4660396</a>,
 386 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4677708">Q4677708</a>,
 387 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4738449">Q4738449</a>,
 388 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4756096">Q4756096</a>,
 389 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4766785">Q4766785</a>,
 390 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q880357">Q880357</a>,
 391 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q882066">Q882066</a>,
 392 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q882066">Q882066</a>,
 393 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q204191">Q204191</a>,
 394 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q204191">Q204191</a>,
 395 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1194170">Q1194170</a>,
 396 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q940014">Q940014</a>,
 397 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q946863">Q946863</a>,
 398 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q172837">Q172837</a>,
 399 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q573077">Q573077</a>,
 400 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1219005">Q1219005</a>,
 401 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1219599">Q1219599</a>,
 402 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1643798">Q1643798</a>,
 403 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1656352">Q1656352</a>,
 404 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1659549">Q1659549</a>,
 405 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1660007">Q1660007</a>,
 406 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1698154">Q1698154</a>,
 407 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1737980">Q1737980</a>,
 408 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1877284">Q1877284</a>,
 409 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199354">Q1199354</a>,
 410 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199354">Q1199354</a>,
 411 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199451">Q1199451</a>,
 412 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1211871">Q1211871</a>,
 413 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1212179">Q1212179</a>,
 414 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1238382">Q1238382</a>,
 415 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4906454">Q4906454</a>,
 416 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q320219">Q320219</a>,
 417 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1148649">Q1148649</a>,
 418 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q645094">Q645094</a>,
 419 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5050350">Q5050350</a>,
 420 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5166548">Q5166548</a>,
 421 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2677926">Q2677926</a>,
 422 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2698139">Q2698139</a>,
 423 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2707305">Q2707305</a>,
 424 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2740725">Q2740725</a>,
 425 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2024780">Q2024780</a>,
 426 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2117418">Q2117418</a>,
 427 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2138984">Q2138984</a>,
 428 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1127992">Q1127992</a>,
 429 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1058087">Q1058087</a>,
 430 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1070484">Q1070484</a>,
 431 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1080080">Q1080080</a>,
 432 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1090813">Q1090813</a>,
 433 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1251918">Q1251918</a>,
 434 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1254110">Q1254110</a>,
 435 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1257070">Q1257070</a>,
 436 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1257079">Q1257079</a>,
 437 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1197410">Q1197410</a>,
 438 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1198423">Q1198423</a>,
 439 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q706951">Q706951</a>,
 440 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q723239">Q723239</a>,
 441 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2079261">Q2079261</a>,
 442 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1171364">Q1171364</a>,
 443 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q617858">Q617858</a>,
 444 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5166611">Q5166611</a>,
 445 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5166611">Q5166611</a>,
 446 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q324513">Q324513</a>,
 447 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q374172">Q374172</a>,
 448 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7533269">Q7533269</a>,
 449 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q970386">Q970386</a>,
 450 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q976849">Q976849</a>,
 451 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7458614">Q7458614</a>,
 452 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5347416">Q5347416</a>,
 453 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5460005">Q5460005</a>,
 454 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5463392">Q5463392</a>,
 455 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3038555">Q3038555</a>,
 456 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5288458">Q5288458</a>,
 457 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2346516">Q2346516</a>,
 458 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5183645">Q5183645</a>,
 459 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5185497">Q5185497</a>,
 460 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5216127">Q5216127</a>,
 461 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5223127">Q5223127</a>,
 462 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5261159">Q5261159</a>,
 463 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1300759">Q1300759</a>,
 464 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5521241">Q5521241</a>,
 465 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7733434">Q7733434</a>,
 466 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7736264">Q7736264</a>,
 467 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7737032">Q7737032</a>,
 468 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7882671">Q7882671</a>,
 469 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7719427">Q7719427</a>,
 470 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7719444">Q7719444</a>,
 471 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7722575">Q7722575</a>,
 472 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2629763">Q2629763</a>,
 473 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2640346">Q2640346</a>,
 474 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2649671">Q2649671</a>,
 475 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7703851">Q7703851</a>,
 476 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7747041">Q7747041</a>,
 477 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q6544949">Q6544949</a>,
 478 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q6672759">Q6672759</a>,
 479 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2445896">Q2445896</a>,
 480 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q12124891">Q12124891</a>,
 481 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3127044">Q3127044</a>,
 482 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2511262">Q2511262</a>,
 483 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2517672">Q2517672</a>,
 484 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2543165">Q2543165</a>,
 485 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q426628">Q426628</a>,
 486 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q426628">Q426628</a>,
 487 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q12126890">Q12126890</a>,
 488 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q13359969">Q13359969</a>,
 489 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q13359969">Q13359969</a>,
 490 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2294295">Q2294295</a>,
 491 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2294295">Q2294295</a>,
 492 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2559509">Q2559509</a>,
 493 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2559912">Q2559912</a>,
 494 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7760469">Q7760469</a>,
 495 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q6703974">Q6703974</a>,
 496 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4744">Q4744</a>,
 497 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7766962">Q7766962</a>,
 498 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7768516">Q7768516</a>,
 499 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7769205">Q7769205</a>,
 500 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7769988">Q7769988</a>,
 501 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2946945">Q2946945</a>,
 502 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3212086">Q3212086</a>,
 503 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3212086">Q3212086</a>,
 504 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q18218448">Q18218448</a>,
 505 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q18218448">Q18218448</a>,
 506 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q18218448">Q18218448</a>,
 507 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q6909175">Q6909175</a>,
 508 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7405709">Q7405709</a>,
 509 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7416149">Q7416149</a>,
 510 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7239952">Q7239952</a>,
 511 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7317332">Q7317332</a>,
 512 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7783674">Q7783674</a>,
 513 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7783704">Q7783704</a>,
 514 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7857590">Q7857590</a>,
 515 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3372526">Q3372526</a>,
 516 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3372642">Q3372642</a>,
 517 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3372816">Q3372816</a>,
 518 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3372909">Q3372909</a>,
 519 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7959649">Q7959649</a>,
 520 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7977485">Q7977485</a>,
 521 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7992684">Q7992684</a>,
 522 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3817966">Q3817966</a>,
 523 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3821852">Q3821852</a>,
 524 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3420907">Q3420907</a>,
 525 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3429733">Q3429733</a>,
 526 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q774474">Q774474</a></p>
 527
 528       </div>
 529       <div class="tags">
 530
 531
 532         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>.
 533
 534
 535       </div>
 536     </div>
 537     <div class="padding"></div>
 538
 539     <div class="entry">
 540       <div class="title">
 541         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_one_way_wall_on_the_border_.html">A one-way wall on the border?</a>
 542       </div>
 543       <div class="date">
 544         14th October 2017
 545       </div>
 546       <div class="body">
 547         <p>I find it fascinating how many of the people being locked inside
 548 the proposed border wall between USA and Mexico support the idea.  The
 549 proposal to keep Mexicans out reminds me of
 550 <a href="http://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-berlin-wall">the
 551 propaganda twist from the East Germany government</a> calling the wall
 552 the “Antifascist Bulwark” after erecting the Berlin Wall, claiming
 553 that the wall was erected to keep enemies from creeping into East
 554 Germany, while it was obvious to the people locked inside it that it
 555 was erected to keep the people from escaping.</p>
 556
 557 <p>Do the people in USA supporting this wall really believe it is a
 558 one way wall, only keeping people on the outside from getting in,
 559 while not keeping people in the inside from getting out?</p>
 560
 561       </div>
 562       <div class="tags">
 563
 564
 565         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 566
 567
 568       </div>
 569     </div>
 570     <div class="padding"></div>
 571
 572     <div class="entry">
 573       <div class="title">
 574         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Generating_3D_prints_in_Debian_using_Cura_and_Slic3r__prusa_.html">Generating 3D prints in Debian using Cura and Slic3r(-prusa)</a>
 575       </div>
 576       <div class="date">
 577          9th October 2017
 578       </div>
 579       <div class="body">
 580         <p>At my nearby maker space,
 581 <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Sonen</a>, I heard the story that it
 582 was easier to generate gcode files for theyr 3D printers (Ultimake 2+)
 583 on Windows and MacOS X than Linux, because the software involved had
 584 to be manually compiled and set up on Linux while premade packages
 585 worked out of the box on Windows and MacOS X.  I found this annoying,
 586 as the software involved,
 587 <a href="https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura">Cura</a>, is free software
 588 and should be trivial to get up and running on Linux if someone took
 589 the time to package it for the relevant distributions.  I even found
 590 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/706656">a request for adding into
 591 Debian</a> from 2013, which had seem some activity over the years but
 592 never resulted in the software showing up in Debian.  So a few days
 593 ago I offered my help to try to improve the situation.</p>
 594
 595 <p>Now I am very happy to see that all the packages required by a
 596 working Cura in Debian are uploaded into Debian and waiting in the NEW
 597 queue for the ftpmasters to have a look.  You can track the progress
 598 on
 599 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=3dprinter-general%40lists.alioth.debian.org">the
 600 status page for the 3D printer team</a>.</p>
 601
 602 <p>The uploaded packages are a bit behind upstream, and was uploaded
 603 now to get slots in <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW
 604 queue</a> while we work up updating the packages to the latest
 605 upstream version.</p>
 606
 607 <p>On a related note, two competitors for Cura, which I found harder
 608 to use and was unable to configure correctly for Ultimaker 2+ in the
 609 short time I spent on it, are already in Debian.  If you are looking
 610 for 3D printer "slicers" and want something already available in
 611 Debian, check out
 612 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r">slic3r</a> and
 613 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r-prusa">slic3r-prusa</a>.
 614 The latter is a fork of the former.</p>
 615
 616       </div>
 617       <div class="tags">
 618
 619
 620         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>.
 621
 622
 623       </div>
 624     </div>
 625     <div class="padding"></div>
 626
 627     <div class="entry">
 628       <div class="title">
 629         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Visualizing_GSM_radio_chatter_using_gr_gsm_and_Hopglass.html">Visualizing GSM radio chatter using gr-gsm and Hopglass</a>
 630       </div>
 631       <div class="date">
 632         29th September 2017
 633       </div>
 634       <div class="body">
 635         <p>Every mobile phone announce its existence over radio to the nearby
 636 mobile cell towers.  And this radio chatter is available for anyone
 637 with a radio receiver capable of receiving them.  Details about the
 638 mobile phones with very good accuracy is of course collected by the
 639 phone companies, but this is not the topic of this blog post.  The
 640 mobile phone radio chatter make it possible to figure out when a cell
 641 phone is nearby, as it include the SIM card ID (IMSI).  By paying
 642 attention over time, one can see when a phone arrive and when it leave
 643 an area.  I believe it would be nice to make this information more
 644 available to the general public, to make more people aware of how
 645 their phones are announcing their whereabouts to anyone that care to
 646 listen.</p>
 647
 648 <p>I am very happy to report that we managed to get something
 649 visualizing this information up and running for
 650 <a href="http://norwaymakers.org/osf17">Oslo Skaperfestival 2017</a>
 651 (Oslo Makers Festival) taking place today and tomorrow at Deichmanske
 652 library.  The solution is based on the
 653 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">simple
 654 recipe for listening to GSM chatter</a> I posted a few days ago, and
 655 will show up at the stand of <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Åpen
 656 Sone from the Computer Science department of the University of
 657 Oslo</a>.  The presentation will show the nearby mobile phones (aka
 658 IMSIs) as dots in a web browser graph, with lines to the dot
 659 representing mobile base station it is talking to. It was working in
 660 the lab yesterday, and was moved into place this morning.</p>
 661
 662 <p>We set up a fairly powerful desktop machine using Debian
 663 Buster/Testing with several (five, I believe) RTL2838 DVB-T receivers
 664 connected and visualize the visible cell phone towers using an
 665 <a href="https://github.com/marlow925/hopglass">English version of
 666 Hopglass</a>.  A fairly powerfull machine is needed as the
 667 grgsm_livemon_headless processes from
 668 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a> converting
 669 the radio signal to data packages is quite CPU intensive.</p>
 670
 671 <p>The frequencies to listen to, are identified using a slightly
 672 patched scan-and-livemon (to set the --args values for each receiver),
 673 and the Hopglass data is generated using the
 674 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/IMSI-catcher/tree/meshviewer-output">patches
 675 in my meshviewer-output branch</a>.  For some reason we could not get
 676 more than four SDRs working.  There is also a geographical map trying
 677 to show the location of the base stations, but I believe their
 678 coordinates are hardcoded to some random location in Germany, I
 679 believe.  The code should be replaced with code to look up location in
 680 a text file, a sqlite database or one of the online databases
 681 mentioned in
 682 <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher/issues/14">the github
 683 issue for the topic</a>.
 684
 685 <p>If this sound interesting, visit the stand at the festival!</p>
 686
 687       </div>
 688       <div class="tags">
 689
 690
 691         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 692
 693
 694       </div>
 695     </div>
 696     <div class="padding"></div>
 697
 698     <div class="entry">
 699       <div class="title">
 700         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">Easier recipe to observe the cell phones around you</a>
 701       </div>
 702       <div class="date">
 703         24th September 2017
 704       </div>
 705       <div class="body">
 706         <p>A little more than a month ago I wrote
 707 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">how
 708 to observe the SIM card ID (aka IMSI number) of mobile phones talking
 709 to nearby mobile phone base stations using Debian GNU/Linux and a
 710 cheap USB software defined radio</a>, and thus being able to pinpoint
 711 the location of people and equipment (like cars and trains) with an
 712 accuracy of a few kilometer.  Since then we have worked to make the
 713 procedure even simpler, and it is now possible to do this without any
 714 manual frequency tuning and without building your own packages.</p>
 715
 716 <p>The <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a>
 717 package is now included in Debian testing and unstable, and the
 718 IMSI-catcher code no longer require root access to fetch and decode
 719 the GSM data collected using gr-gsm.</p>
 720
 721 <p>Here is an updated recipe, using packages built by Debian and a git
 722 clone of two python scripts:</p>
 723
 724 <ol>
 725
 726 <li>Start with a Debian machine running the Buster version (aka
 727   testing).</li>
 728
 729 <li>Run '<tt>apt install gr-gsm python-numpy python-scipy
 730   python-scapy</tt>' as root to install required packages.</li>
 731
 732 <li>Fetch the code decoding GSM packages using '<tt>git clone
 733   github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher.git</tt>'.</li>
 734
 735 <li>Insert USB software defined radio supported by GNU Radio.</li>
 736
 737 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
 738   scan-and-livemon</tt>' to locate the frequency of nearby base
 739   stations and start listening for GSM packages on one of them.</li>
 740
 741 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
 742   simple_IMSI-catcher.py</tt>' to display the collected information.</li>
 743
 744 </ol>
 745
 746 <p>Note, due to a bug somewhere the scan-and-livemon program (actually
 747 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/issues/336">its underlying
 748 program grgsm_scanner</a>) do not work with the HackRF radio.  It does
 749 work with RTL 8232 and other similar USB radio receivers you can get
 750 very cheaply
 751 (<a href="https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=rtl+2832">for example
 752 from ebay</a>), so for now the solution is to scan using the RTL radio
 753 and only use HackRF for fetching GSM data.</p>
 754
 755 <p>As far as I can tell, a cell phone only show up on one of the
 756 frequencies at the time, so if you are going to track and count every
 757 cell phone around you, you need to listen to all the frequencies used.
 758 To listen to several frequencies, use the --numrecv argument to
 759 scan-and-livemon to use several receivers.  Further, I am not sure if
 760 phones using 3G or 4G will show as talking GSM to base stations, so
 761 this approach might not see all phones around you.  I typically see
 762 0-400 IMSI numbers an hour when looking around where I live.</p>
 763
 764 <p>I've tried to run the scanner on a
 765 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi 2 and 3
 766 running Debian Buster</a>, but the grgsm_livemon_headless process seem
 767 to be too CPU intensive to keep up.  When GNU Radio print 'O' to
 768 stdout, I am told there it is caused by a buffer overflow between the
 769 radio and GNU Radio, caused by the program being unable to read the
 770 GSM data fast enough.  If you see a stream of 'O's from the terminal
 771 where you started scan-and-livemon, you need a give the process more
 772 CPU power.  Perhaps someone are able to optimize the code to a point
 773 where it become possible to set up RPi3 based GSM sniffers?  I tried
 774 using Raspbian instead of Debian, but there seem to be something wrong
 775 with GNU Radio on raspbian, causing glibc to abort().</p>
 776
 777       </div>
 778       <div class="tags">
 779
 780
 781         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 782
 783
 784       </div>
 785     </div>
 786     <div class="padding"></div>
 787
 788     <div class="entry">
 789       <div class="title">
 790         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">Simpler recipe on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher using Debian</a>
 791       </div>
 792       <div class="date">
 793          9th August 2017
 794       </div>
 795       <div class="body">
 796         <p>On friday, I came across an interesting article in the Norwegian
 797 web based ICT news magazine digi.no on
 798 <a href="https://www.digi.no/artikler/sikkerhetsforsker-lagde-enkel-imsi-catcher-for-60-kroner-na-kan-mobiler-kartlegges-av-alle/398588">how
 799 to collect the IMSI numbers of nearby cell phones</a> using the cheap
 800 DVB-T software defined radios.  The article refered to instructions
 801 and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjwgNd_as30">a recipe by
 802 Keld Norman on Youtube on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher</a>, and I decided to test them out.</p>
 803
 804 <p>The instructions said to use Ubuntu, install pip using apt (to
 805 bypass apt), use pip to install pybombs (to bypass both apt and pip),
 806 and the ask pybombs to fetch and build everything you need from
 807 scratch.  I wanted to see if I could do the same on the most recent
 808 Debian packages, but this did not work because pybombs tried to build
 809 stuff that no longer build with the most recent openssl library or
 810 some other version skew problem.  While trying to get this recipe
 811 working, I learned that the apt->pip->pybombs route was a long detour,
 812 and the only piece of software dependency missing in Debian was the
 813 gr-gsm package.  I also found out that the lead upstream developer of
 814 gr-gsm (the name stand for GNU Radio GSM) project already had a set of
 815 Debian packages provided in an Ubuntu PPA repository.  All I needed to
 816 do was to dget the Debian source package and built it.</p>
 817
 818 <p>The IMSI collector is a python script listening for packages on the
 819 loopback network device and printing to the terminal some specific GSM
 820 packages with IMSI numbers in them.  The code is fairly short and easy
 821 to understand.  The reason this work is because gr-gsm include a tool
 822 to read GSM data from a software defined radio like a DVB-T USB stick
 823 and other software defined radios, decode them and inject them into a
 824 network device on your Linux machine (using the loopback device by
 825 default).  This proved to work just fine, and I've been testing the
 826 collector for a few days now.</p>
 827
 828 <p>The updated and simpler recipe is thus to</p>
 829
 830 <ol>
 831
 832 <li>start with a Debian machine running Stretch or newer,</li>
 833
 834 <li>build and install the gr-gsm package available from
 835 <a href="http://ppa.launchpad.net/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gr-gsm/">http://ppa.launchpad.net/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gr-gsm/</a>,</li>
 836
 837 <li>clone the git repostory from <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher">https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher</a>,</li>
 838
 839 <li>run grgsm_livemon and adjust the frequency until the terminal
 840 where it was started is filled with a stream of text (meaning you
 841 found a GSM station).</li>
 842
 843 <li>go into the IMSI-catcher directory and run 'sudo python simple_IMSI-catcher.py' to extract the IMSI numbers.</li>
 844
 845 </ol>
 846
 847 <p>To make it even easier in the future to get this sniffer up and
 848 running, I decided to package
 849 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/">the gr-gsm project</a>
 850 for Debian (<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/871055">WNPP
 851 #871055</a>), and the package was uploaded into the NEW queue today.
 852 Luckily the gnuradio maintainer has promised to help me, as I do not
 853 know much about gnuradio stuff yet.</p>
 854
 855 <p>I doubt this "IMSI cacher" is anywhere near as powerfull as
 856 commercial tools like
 857 <a href="https://www.thespyphone.com/portable-imsi-imei-catcher/">The
 858 Spy Phone Portable IMSI / IMEI Catcher</a> or the
 859 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker">Harris
 860 Stingray</a>, but I hope the existance of cheap alternatives can make
 861 more people realise how their whereabouts when carrying a cell phone
 862 is easily tracked.  Seeing the data flow on the screen, realizing that
 863 I live close to a police station and knowing that the police is also
 864 wearing cell phones, I wonder how hard it would be for criminals to
 865 track the position of the police officers to discover when there are
 866 police near by, or for foreign military forces to track the location
 867 of the Norwegian military forces, or for anyone to track the location
 868 of government officials...</p>
 869
 870 <p>It is worth noting that the data reported by the IMSI-catcher
 871 script mentioned above is only a fraction of the data broadcasted on
 872 the GSM network.  It will only collect one frequency at the time,
 873 while a typical phone will be using several frequencies, and not all
 874 phones will be using the frequencies tracked by the grgsm_livemod
 875 program.  Also, there is a lot of radio chatter being ignored by the
 876 simple_IMSI-catcher script, which would be collected by extending the
 877 parser code.  I wonder if gr-gsm can be set up to listen to more than
 878 one frequency?</p>
 879
 880       </div>
 881       <div class="tags">
 882
 883
 884         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
 885
 886
 887       </div>
 888     </div>
 889     <div class="padding"></div>
 890
 891     <div class="entry">
 892       <div class="title">
 893         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_is_now_available.html">Norwegian Bokmål edition of Debian Administrator's Handbook is now available</a>
 894       </div>
 895       <div class="date">
 896         25th July 2017
 897       </div>
 898       <div class="body">
 899         <p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-07-25-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.png"/></p>
 900
 901 <p>I finally received a copy of the Norwegian Bokmål edition of
 902 "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
 903 Handbook</a>".  This test copy arrived in the mail a few days ago, and
 904 I am very happy to hold the result in my hand.   We spent around one and a half year translating it. This paperbook edition
 905 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian">is available
 906 from lulu.com</a>.  If you buy it quickly, you save 25% on the list
 907 price.  The book is also available for download in electronic form as
 908 PDF, EPUB and Mobipocket, as can be
 909 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/browse/nb-NO/stable/">read online
 910 as a web page</a>.</p>
 911
 912 <p>This is the second book I publish (the first was the book
 913 "<a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>" by Lawrence Lessig
 914 in
 915 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>,
 916 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">French</a>
 917 and
 918 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
 919 Bokmål</a>), and I am very excited to finally wrap up this
 920 project.  I hope
 921 "<a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/rapha%C3%ABl-hertzog-and-roland-mas/h%C3%A5ndbok-for-debian-administratoren/paperback/product-23262290.html">Håndbok
 922 for Debian-administratoren</a>" will be well received.</p>
 923
 924       </div>
 925       <div class="tags">
 926
 927
 928         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 929
 930
 931       </div>
 932     </div>
 933     <div class="padding"></div>
 934
 935     <div class="entry">
 936       <div class="title">
 937         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Updated_sales_number_for_my_Free_Culture_paper_editions.html">Updated sales number for my Free Culture paper editions</a>
 938       </div>
 939       <div class="date">
 940         12th June 2017
 941       </div>
 942       <div class="body">
 943         <p>It is pleasing to see that the work we put down in publishing new
 944 editions of the classic <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free
 945 Culture book</a> by the founder of the Creative Commons movement,
 946 Lawrence Lessig, is still being appreciated.  I had a look at the
 947 latest sales numbers for the paper edition today.  Not too impressive,
 948 but happy to see some buyers still exist.  All the revenue from the
 949 books is sent to the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative
 950 Commons Corporation</a>, and they receive the largest cut if you buy
 951 directly from Lulu.  Most books are sold via Amazon, with Ingram
 952 second and only a small fraction directly from Lulu.  The ebook
 953 edition is available for free from
 954 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Github</a>.</p>
 955
 956 <table border="0">
 957 <tr><th rowspan="2" valign="bottom">Title / language</th><th colspan="3">Quantity</th></tr>
 958 <tr><th>2016 jan-jun</th><th>2016 jul-dec</th><th>2017 jan-may</th></tr>
 959
 960 <tr>
 961   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Culture Libre / French</a></td>
 962   <td align="right">3</td>
 963   <td align="right">6</td>
 964   <td align="right">15</td>
 965 </tr>
 966
 967 <tr>
 968   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Fri kultur / Norwegian</a></td>
 969   <td align="right">7</td>
 970   <td align="right">1</td>
 971   <td align="right">0</td>
 972 </tr>
 973
 974 <tr>
 975   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">Free Culture / English</a></td>
 976   <td align="right">14</td>
 977   <td align="right">27</td>
 978   <td align="right">16</td>
 979 </tr>
 980
 981 <tr>
 982   <td>Total</td>
 983   <td align="right">24</td>
 984   <td align="right">34</td>
 985   <td align="right">31</td>
 986 </tr>
 987
 988 </table>
 989
 990 <p>A bit sad to see the low sales number on the Norwegian edition, and
 991 a bit surprising the English edition still selling so well.</p>
 992
 993 <p>If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native
 994 language, I would be happy to help make it happen.  Please get in
 995 touch.</p>
 996
 997       </div>
 998       <div class="tags">
 999
1000
1001         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>.
1002
1003
1004       </div>
1005     </div>
1006     <div class="padding"></div>
1007
1008     <div class="entry">
1009       <div class="title">
1010         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Release_0_1_1_of_free_software_archive_system_Nikita_announced.html">Release 0.1.1 of free software archive system Nikita announced</a>
1011       </div>
1012       <div class="date">
1013         10th June 2017
1014       </div>
1015       <div class="body">
1016         <p>I am very happy to report that the
1017 <a href="https://github.com/hiOA-ABI/nikita-noark5-core">Nikita Noark 5
1018 core project</a> tagged its second release today.  The free software
1019 solution is an implementation of the Norwegian archive standard Noark
1020 5 used by government offices in Norway.  These were the changes in
1021 version 0.1.1 since version 0.1.0 (from NEWS.md):
1022
1023 <ul>
1024
1025  <li>Continued work on the angularjs GUI, including document upload.</li>
1026  <li>Implemented correspondencepartPerson, correspondencepartUnit and
1027    correspondencepartInternal</li>
1028  <li>Applied for coverity coverage and started submitting code on
1029    regualr basis.</li>
1030  <li>Started fixing bugs reported by coverity</li>
1031  <li>Corrected and completed HATEOAS links to make sure entire API is
1032    available via URLs in _links.</li>
1033  <li>Corrected all relation URLs to use trailing slash.</li>
1034  <li>Add initial support for storing data in ElasticSearch.</li>
1035  <li>Now able to receive and store uploaded files in the archive.</li>
1036  <li>Changed JSON output for object lists to have relations in _links.</li>
1037  <li>Improve JSON output for empty object lists.</li>
1038  <li>Now uses correct MIME type application/vnd.noark5-v4+json.</li>
1039  <li>Added support for docker container images.</li>
1040  <li>Added simple API browser implemented in JavaScript/Angular.</li>
1041  <li>Started on archive client implemented in JavaScript/Angular.</li>
1042  <li>Started on prototype to show the public mail journal.</li>
1043  <li>Improved performance by disabling Sprint FileWatcher.</li>
1044  <li>Added support for 'arkivskaper', 'saksmappe' and 'journalpost'.</li>
1045  <li>Added support for some metadata codelists.</li>
1046  <li>Added support for Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS).</li>
1047  <li>Changed login method from Basic Auth to JSON Web Token (RFC 7519)
1048    style.</li>
1049  <li>Added support for GET-ing ny-* URLs.</li>
1050  <li>Added support for modifying entities using PUT and eTag.</li>
1051  <li>Added support for returning XML output on request.</li>
1052  <li>Removed support for English field and class names, limiting ourself
1053    to the official names.</li>
1054  <li>...</li>
1055
1056 </ul>
1057
1058 <p>If this sound interesting to you, please contact us on IRC (#nikita
1059 on irc.freenode.net) or email
1060 (<a href="https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark">nikita-noark
1061 mailing list).</p>
1062
1063       </div>
1064       <div class="tags">
1065
1066
1067         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/standard">standard</a>.
1068
1069
1070       </div>
1071     </div>
1072     <div class="padding"></div>
1073
1074     <div class="entry">
1075       <div class="title">
1076         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_trusted_timestamps_in_a_Noark_5_archive.html">Idea for storing trusted timestamps in a Noark 5 archive</a>
1077       </div>
1078       <div class="date">
1079          7th June 2017
1080       </div>
1081       <div class="body">
1082         <p><em>This is a copy of
1083 <a href="https://lists.nuug.no/pipermail/nikita-noark/2017-June/000297.html">an
1084 email I posted to the nikita-noark mailing list</a>.  Please follow up
1085 there if you would like to discuss this topic.  The background is that
1086 we are making a free software archive system based on the Norwegian
1087 <a href="https://www.arkivverket.no/forvaltning-og-utvikling/regelverk-og-standarder/noark-standarden">Noark
1088 5 standard</a> for government archives.</em></p>
1089
1090 <p>I've been wondering a bit lately how trusted timestamps could be
1091 stored in Noark 5.
1092 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">Trusted
1093 timestamps</a> can be used to verify that some information
1094 (document/file/checksum/metadata) have not been changed since a
1095 specific time in the past.  This is useful to verify the integrity of
1096 the documents in the archive.</p>
1097
1098 <p>Then it occured to me, perhaps the trusted timestamps could be
1099 stored as dokument variants (ie dokumentobjekt referered to from
1100 dokumentbeskrivelse) with the filename set to the hash it is
1101 stamping?</p>
1102
1103 <p>Given a "dokumentbeskrivelse" with an associated "dokumentobjekt",
1104 a new dokumentobjekt is associated with "dokumentbeskrivelse" with the
1105 same attributes as the stamped dokumentobjekt except these
1106 attributes:</p>
1107
1108 <ul>
1109
1110 <li>format -> "RFC3161"
1111 <li>mimeType -> "application/timestamp-reply"
1112 <li>formatDetaljer -> "&lt;source URL for timestamp service&gt;"
1113 <li>filenavn -> "&lt;sjekksum&gt;.tsr"
1114
1115 </ul>
1116
1117 <p>This assume a service following
1118 <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">IETF RFC 3161</a> is
1119 used, which specifiy the given MIME type for replies and the .tsr file
1120 ending for the content of such trusted timestamp.  As far as I can
1121 tell from the Noark 5 specifications, it is OK to have several
1122 variants/renderings of a dokument attached to a given
1123 dokumentbeskrivelse objekt.  It might be stretching it a bit to make
1124 some of these variants represent crypto-signatures useful for
1125 verifying the document integrity instead of representing the dokument
1126 itself.</p>
1127
1128 <p>Using the source of the service in formatDetaljer allow several
1129 timestamping services to be used.  This is useful to spread the risk
1130 of key compromise over several organisations.  It would only be a
1131 problem to trust the timestamps if all of the organisations are
1132 compromised.</p>
1133
1134 <p>The following oneliner on Linux can be used to generate the tsr
1135 file.  $input is the path to the file to checksum, and $sha256 is the
1136 SHA-256 checksum of the file (ie the "<sjekksum>.tsr" value mentioned
1137 above).</p>
1138
1139 <p><blockquote><pre>
1140 openssl ts -query -data "$inputfile" -cert -sha256 -no_nonce \
1141   | curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/timestamp-query" \
1142       --data-binary "@-" http://zeitstempel.dfn.de > $sha256.tsr
1143 </pre></blockquote></p>
1144
1145 <p>To verify the timestamp, you first need to download the public key
1146 of the trusted timestamp service, for example using this command:</p>
1147
1148 <p><blockquote><pre>
1149 wget -O ca-cert.txt \
1150   https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
1151 </pre></blockquote></p>
1152
1153 <p>Note, the public key should be stored alongside the timestamps in
1154 the archive to make sure it is also available 100 years from now.  It
1155 is probably a good idea to standardise how and were to store such
1156 public keys, to make it easier to find for those trying to verify
1157 documents 100 or 1000 years from now. :)</p>
1158
1159 <p>The verification itself is a simple openssl command:</p>
1160
1161 <p><blockquote><pre>
1162 openssl ts -verify -data $inputfile -in $sha256.tsr \
1163   -CAfile ca-cert.txt -text
1164 </pre></blockquote></p>
1165
1166 <p>Is there any reason this approach would not work?  Is it somehow against
1167 the Noark 5 specification?</p>
1168
1169       </div>
1170       <div class="tags">
1171
1172
1173         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/standard">standard</a>.
1174
1175
1176       </div>
1177     </div>
1178     <div class="padding"></div>
1179
1180     <div class="entry">
1181       <div class="title">
1182         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_archive_system_Nikita_now_able_to_store_documents.html">Free software archive system Nikita now able to store documents</a>
1183       </div>
1184       <div class="date">
1185         19th March 2017
1186       </div>
1187       <div class="body">
1188         <p>The <a href="https://github.com/hiOA-ABI/nikita-noark5-core">Nikita
1189 Noark 5 core project</a> is implementing the Norwegian standard for
1190 keeping an electronic archive of government documents.
1191 <a href="http://www.arkivverket.no/arkivverket/Offentlig-forvaltning/Noark/Noark-5/English-version">The
1192 Noark 5 standard</a> document the requirement for data systems used by
1193 the archives in the Norwegian government, and the Noark 5 web interface
1194 specification document a REST web service for storing, searching and
1195 retrieving documents and metadata in such archive.  I've been involved
1196 in the project since a few weeks before Christmas, when the Norwegian
1197 Unix User Group
1198 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/NOARK5_kjerne_som_fri_programvare_f_r_epostliste_hos_NUUG.shtml">announced
1199 it supported the project</a>.  I believe this is an important project,
1200 and hope it can make it possible for the government archives in the
1201 future to use free software to keep the archives we citizens depend
1202 on.  But as I do not hold such archive myself, personally my first use
1203 case is to store and analyse public mail journal metadata published
1204 from the government.  I find it useful to have a clear use case in
1205 mind when developing, to make sure the system scratches one of my
1206 itches.</p>
1207
1208 <p>If you would like to help make sure there is a free software
1209 alternatives for the archives, please join our IRC channel
1210 (<a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nikita"">#nikita on
1211 irc.freenode.net</a>) and
1212 <a href="https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark">the
1213 project mailing list</a>.</p>
1214
1215 <p>When I got involved, the web service could store metadata about
1216 documents.  But a few weeks ago, a new milestone was reached when it
1217 became possible to store full text documents too.  Yesterday, I
1218 completed an implementation of a command line tool
1219 <tt>archive-pdf</tt> to upload a PDF file to the archive using this
1220 API.  The tool is very simple at the moment, and find existing
1221 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonds">fonds</a>, series and
1222 files while asking the user to select which one to use if more than
1223 one exist.  Once a file is identified, the PDF is associated with the
1224 file and uploaded, using the title extracted from the PDF itself.  The
1225 process is fairly similar to visiting the archive, opening a cabinet,
1226 locating a file and storing a piece of paper in the archive.  Here is
1227 a test run directly after populating the database with test data using
1228 our API tester:</p>
1229
1230 <p><blockquote><pre>
1231 ~/src//noark5-tester$ ./archive-pdf mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
1232 using arkiv: Title of the test fonds created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
1233 using arkivdel: Title of the test series created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
1234
1235  0 - Title of the test case file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
1236  1 - Title of the test file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
1237 Select which mappe you want (or search term): 0
1238 Uploading mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
1239   PDF title: Mangler i spesifikasjonsdokumentet for NOARK 5 Tjenestegrensesnitt
1240   File 2017/1: Title of the test case file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
1241 ~/src//noark5-tester$
1242 </pre></blockquote></p>
1243
1244 <p>You can see here how the fonds (arkiv) and serie (arkivdel) only had
1245 one option, while the user need to choose which file (mappe) to use
1246 among the two created by the API tester.  The <tt>archive-pdf</tt>
1247 tool can be found in the git repository for the API tester.</p>
1248
1249 <p>In the project, I have been mostly working on
1250 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester">the API
1251 tester</a> so far, while getting to know the code base.  The API
1252 tester currently use
1253 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS">the HATEOAS links</a>
1254 to traverse the entire exposed service API and verify that the exposed
1255 operations and objects match the specification, as well as trying to
1256 create objects holding metadata and uploading a simple XML file to
1257 store.  The tester has proved very useful for finding flaws in our
1258 implementation, as well as flaws in the reference site and the
1259 specification.</p>
1260
1261 <p>The test document I uploaded is a summary of all the specification
1262 defects we have collected so far while implementing the web service.
1263 There are several unclear and conflicting parts of the specification,
1264 and we have
1265 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester/tree/master/mangelmelding">started
1266 writing down</a> the questions we get from implementing it.  We use a
1267 format inspired by how <a href="http://www.opengroup.org/austin/">The
1268 Austin Group</a> collect defect reports for the POSIX standard with
1269 <a href="http://www.opengroup.org/austin/mantis.html">their
1270 instructions for the MANTIS defect tracker system</a>, in lack of an official way to structure defect reports for Noark 5 (our first submitted defect report was a <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester/blob/master/mangelmelding/sendt/2017-03-15-mangel-prosess.md">request for a procedure for submitting defect reports</a> :).
1271
1272 <p>The Nikita project is implemented using Java and Spring, and is
1273 fairly easy to get up and running using Docker containers for those
1274 that want to test the current code base.  The API tester is
1275 implemented in Python.</p>
1276
1277       </div>
1278       <div class="tags">
1279
1280
1281         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/standard">standard</a>.
1282
1283
1284       </div>
1285     </div>
1286     <div class="padding"></div>
1287
1288     <div class="entry">
1289       <div class="title">
1290         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detecting_NFS_hangs_on_Linux_without_hanging_yourself___.html">Detecting NFS hangs on Linux without hanging yourself...</a>
1291       </div>
1292       <div class="date">
1293          9th March 2017
1294       </div>
1295       <div class="body">
1296         <p>Over the years, administrating thousand of NFS mounting linux
1297 computers at the time, I often needed a way to detect if the machine
1298 was experiencing NFS hang.  If you try to use <tt>df</tt> or look at a
1299 file or directory affected by the hang, the process (and possibly the
1300 shell) will hang too.  So you want to be able to detect this without
1301 risking the detection process getting stuck too.  It has not been
1302 obvious how to do this.  When the hang has lasted a while, it is
1303 possible to find messages like these in dmesg:</p>
1304
1305 <p><blockquote>
1306 nfs: server nfsserver not responding, still trying
1307 <br>nfs: server nfsserver OK
1308 </blockquote></p>
1309
1310 <p>It is hard to know if the hang is still going on, and it is hard to
1311 be sure looking in dmesg is going to work.  If there are lots of other
1312 messages in dmesg the lines might have rotated out of site before they
1313 are noticed.</p>
1314
1315 <p>While reading through the nfs client implementation in linux kernel
1316 code, I came across some statistics that seem to give a way to detect
1317 it.  The om_timeouts sunrpc value in the kernel will increase every
1318 time the above log entry is inserted into dmesg.  And after digging a
1319 bit further, I discovered that this value show up in
1320 /proc/self/mountstats on Linux.</p>
1321
1322 <p>The mountstats content seem to be shared between files using the
1323 same file system context, so it is enough to check one of the
1324 mountstats files to get the state of the mount point for the machine.
1325 I assume this will not show lazy umounted NFS points, nor NFS mount
1326 points in a different process context (ie with a different filesystem
1327 view), but that does not worry me.</p>
1328
1329 <p>The content for a NFS mount point look similar to this:</p>
1330
1331 <p><blockquote><pre>
1332 [...]
1333 device /dev/mapper/Debian-var mounted on /var with fstype ext3
1334 device nfsserver:/mnt/nfsserver/home0 mounted on /mnt/nfsserver/home0 with fstype nfs statvers=1.1
1335         opts:   rw,vers=3,rsize=65536,wsize=65536,namlen=255,acregmin=3,acregmax=60,acdirmin=30,acdirmax=60,soft,nolock,proto=tcp,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,mountaddr=129.240.3.145,mountvers=3,mountport=4048,mountproto=udp,local_lock=all
1336         age:    7863311
1337         caps:   caps=0x3fe7,wtmult=4096,dtsize=8192,bsize=0,namlen=255
1338         sec:    flavor=1,pseudoflavor=1
1339         events: 61063112 732346265 1028140 35486205 16220064 8162542 761447191 71714012 37189 3891185 45561809 110486139 4850138 420353 15449177 296502 52736725 13523379 0 52182 9016896 1231 0 0 0 0 0
1340         bytes:  166253035039 219519120027 0 0 40783504807 185466229638 11677877 45561809
1341         RPC iostats version: 1.0  p/v: 100003/3 (nfs)
1342         xprt:   tcp 925 1 6810 0 0 111505412 111480497 109 2672418560317 0 248 53869103 22481820
1343         per-op statistics
1344                 NULL: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1345              GETATTR: 61063106 61063108 0 9621383060 6839064400 453650 77291321 78926132
1346              SETATTR: 463469 463470 0 92005440 66739536 63787 603235 687943
1347               LOOKUP: 17021657 17021657 0 3354097764 4013442928 57216 35125459 35566511
1348               ACCESS: 14281703 14290009 5 2318400592 1713803640 1709282 4865144 7130140
1349             READLINK: 125 125 0 20472 18620 0 1112 1118
1350                 READ: 4214236 4214237 0 715608524 41328653212 89884 22622768 22806693
1351                WRITE: 8479010 8494376 22 187695798568 1356087148 178264904 51506907 231671771
1352               CREATE: 171708 171708 0 38084748 46702272 873 1041833 1050398
1353                MKDIR: 3680 3680 0 773980 993920 26 23990 24245
1354              SYMLINK: 903 903 0 233428 245488 6 5865 5917
1355                MKNOD: 80 80 0 20148 21760 0 299 304
1356               REMOVE: 429921 429921 0 79796004 61908192 3313 2710416 2741636
1357                RMDIR: 3367 3367 0 645112 484848 22 5782 6002
1358               RENAME: 466201 466201 0 130026184 121212260 7075 5935207 5961288
1359                 LINK: 289155 289155 0 72775556 67083960 2199 2565060 2585579
1360              READDIR: 2933237 2933237 0 516506204 13973833412 10385 3190199 3297917
1361          READDIRPLUS: 1652839 1652839 0 298640972 6895997744 84735 14307895 14448937
1362               FSSTAT: 6144 6144 0 1010516 1032192 51 9654 10022
1363               FSINFO: 2 2 0 232 328 0 1 1
1364             PATHCONF: 1 1 0 116 140 0 0 0
1365               COMMIT: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1366
1367 device binfmt_misc mounted on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc with fstype binfmt_misc
1368 [...]
1369 </pre></blockquote></p>
1370
1371 <p>The key number to look at is the third number in the per-op list.
1372 It is the number of NFS timeouts experiences per file system
1373 operation.  Here 22 write timeouts and 5 access timeouts.  If these
1374 numbers are increasing, I believe the machine is experiencing NFS
1375 hang.  Unfortunately the timeout value do not start to increase right
1376 away.  The NFS operations need to time out first, and this can take a
1377 while.  The exact timeout value depend on the setup.  For example the
1378 defaults for TCP and UDP mount points are quite different, and the
1379 timeout value is affected by the soft, hard, timeo and retrans NFS
1380 mount options.</p>
1381
1382 <p>The only way I have been able to get working on Debian and RedHat
1383 Enterprise Linux for getting the timeout count is to peek in /proc/.
1384 But according to
1385 <ahref="http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/816-4555/netmonitor-12/index.html">Solaris
1386 10 System Administration Guide: Network Services</a>, the 'nfsstat -c'
1387 command can be used to get these timeout values.  But this do not work
1388 on Linux, as far as I can tell.  I
1389 <ahref="http://bugs.debian.org/857043">asked Debian about this</a>,
1390 but have not seen any replies yet.</p>
1391
1392 <p>Is there a better way to figure out if a Linux NFS client is
1393 experiencing NFS hangs?  Is there a way to detect which processes are
1394 affected?  Is there a way to get the NFS mount going quickly once the
1395 network problem causing the NFS hang has been cleared?  I would very
1396 much welcome some clues, as we regularly run into NFS hangs.</p>
1397
1398       </div>
1399       <div class="tags">
1400
1401
1402         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
1403
1404
1405       </div>
1406     </div>
1407     <div class="padding"></div>
1408
1409     <div class="entry">
1410       <div class="title">
1411         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_does_it_feel_to_be_wiretapped__when_you_should_be_doing_the_wiretapping___.html">How does it feel to be wiretapped, when you should be doing the wiretapping...</a>
1412       </div>
1413       <div class="date">
1414          8th March 2017
1415       </div>
1416       <div class="body">
1417         <p>So the new president in the United States of America claim to be
1418 surprised to discover that he was wiretapped during the election
1419 before he was elected president.  He even claim this must be illegal.
1420 Well, doh, if it is one thing the confirmations from Snowden
1421 documented, it is that the entire population in USA is wiretapped, one
1422 way or another.  Of course the president candidates were wiretapped,
1423 alongside the senators, judges and the rest of the people in USA.</p>
1424
1425 <p>Next, the Federal Bureau of Investigation ask the Department of
1426 Justice to go public rejecting the claims that Donald Trump was
1427 wiretapped illegally.  I fail to see the relevance, given that I am
1428 sure the surveillance industry in USA believe they have all the legal
1429 backing they need to conduct mass surveillance on the entire
1430 world.</p>
1431
1432 <p>There is even the director of the FBI stating that he never saw an
1433 order requesting wiretapping of Donald Trump.  That is not very
1434 surprising, given how the FISA court work, with all its activity being
1435 secret.  Perhaps he only heard about it?</p>
1436
1437 <p>What I find most sad in this story is how Norwegian journalists
1438 present it.  In a news reports the other day in the radio from the
1439 Norwegian National broadcasting Company (NRK), I heard the journalist
1440 claim that 'the FBI denies any wiretapping', while the reality is that
1441 'the FBI denies any illegal wiretapping'.  There is a fundamental and
1442 important difference, and it make me sad that the journalists are
1443 unable to grasp it.</p>
1444
1445 <p><strong>Update 2017-03-13:</strong> Look like
1446 <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/03/13/rand-paul-is-right-nsa-routinely-monitors-americans-communications-without-warrants/">The
1447 Intercept report that US Senator Rand Paul confirm what I state above</a>.</p>
1448
1449       </div>
1450       <div class="tags">
1451
1452
1453         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>.
1454
1455
1456       </div>
1457     </div>
1458     <div class="padding"></div>
1459
1460     <div class="entry">
1461       <div class="title">
1462         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_complete__proofreading_in_progress.html">Norwegian Bokmål translation of The Debian Administrator's Handbook complete, proofreading in progress</a>
1463       </div>
1464       <div class="date">
1465          3rd March 2017
1466       </div>
1467       <div class="body">
1468         <p>For almost a year now, we have been working on making a Norwegian
1469 Bokmål edition of <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian
1470 Administrator's Handbook</a>.  Now, thanks to the tireless effort of
1471 Ole-Erik, Ingrid and Andreas, the initial translation is complete, and
1472 we are working on the proof reading to ensure consistent language and
1473 use of correct computer science terms.  The plan is to make the book
1474 available on paper, as well as in electronic form.  For that to
1475 happen, the proof reading must be completed and all the figures need
1476 to be translated.  If you want to help out, get in touch.</p>
1477
1478 <p><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-handbook/debian-handbook-nb-NO.pdf">A
1479
1480 fresh PDF edition</a> in A4 format (the final book will have smaller
1481 pages) of the book created every morning is available for
1482 proofreading.  If you find any errors, please
1483 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">visit
1484 Weblate and correct the error</a>.  The
1485 <a href="http://l.github.io/debian-handbook/stat/nb-NO/index.html">state
1486 of the translation including figures</a> is a useful source for those
1487 provide Norwegian bokmål screen shots and figures.</p>
1488
1489       </div>
1490       <div class="tags">
1491
1492
1493         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1494
1495
1496       </div>
1497     </div>
1498     <div class="padding"></div>
1499
1500     <div class="entry">
1501       <div class="title">
1502         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlimited_randomness_with_the_ChaosKey_.html">Unlimited randomness with the ChaosKey?</a>
1503       </div>
1504       <div class="date">
1505          1st March 2017
1506       </div>
1507       <div class="body">
1508         <p>A few days ago I ordered a small batch of
1509 <a href="http://altusmetrum.org/ChaosKey/">the ChaosKey</a>, a small
1510 USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith
1511 Packard.  Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it
1512 work great!  According to its designers, to get it to work out of the
1513 box, you need the Linux kernel version 4.1 or later.  I tested on a
1514 Debian Stretch machine (kernel version 4.9), and there it worked just
1515 fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly.  I wrote a small
1516 test oneliner to test.  It first print the current entropy level,
1517 drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds.
1518 Here is the situation without the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
1519
1520 <blockquote><pre>
1521 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1522   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
1523   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
1524      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1525      sleep 1; \
1526   done
1527 300
1528 0+1 oppføringer inn
1529 0+1 oppføringer ut
1530 28 byte kopiert, 0,000264565 s, 106 kB/s
1531 4
1532 8
1533 12
1534 17
1535 21
1536 %
1537 </pre></blockquote>
1538
1539 <p>The entropy level increases by 3-4 every second.  In such case any
1540 application requiring random bits (like a HTTPS enabled web server)
1541 will halt and wait for more entrpy.  And here is the situation with
1542 the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
1543
1544 <blockquote><pre>
1545 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1546   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
1547   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
1548      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
1549      sleep 1; \
1550   done
1551 1079
1552 0+1 oppføringer inn
1553 0+1 oppføringer ut
1554 104 byte kopiert, 0,000487647 s, 213 kB/s
1555 433
1556 1028
1557 1031
1558 1035
1559 1038
1560 %
1561 </pre></blockquote>
1562
1563 <p>Quite the difference. :) I bought a few more than I need, in case
1564 someone want to buy one here in Norway. :)</p>
1565
1566 <p>Update: The dongle was presented at Debconf last year.  You might
1567 find <a href="https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/94/">the talk
1568 recording illuminating</a>.  It explains exactly what the source of
1569 randomness is, if you are unable to spot it from the schema drawing
1570 available from the ChaosKey web site linked at the start of this blog
1571 post.</p>
1572
1573       </div>
1574       <div class="tags">
1575
1576
1577         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>.
1578
1579
1580       </div>
1581     </div>
1582     <div class="padding"></div>
1583
1584     <div class="entry">
1585       <div class="title">
1586         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detect_OOXML_files_with_undefined_behaviour_.html">Detect OOXML files with undefined behaviour?</a>
1587       </div>
1588       <div class="date">
1589         21st February 2017
1590       </div>
1591       <div class="body">
1592         <p>I just noticed
1593 <a href="http://www.arkivrad.no/aktuelt/riksarkivarens-forskrift-pa-horing">the
1594 new Norwegian proposal for archiving rules in the goverment</a> list
1595 <a href="http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm">ECMA-376</a>
1596 / ISO/IEC 29500 (aka OOXML) as valid formats to put in long term
1597 storage.  Luckily such files will only be accepted based on
1598 pre-approval from the National Archive.  Allowing OOXML files to be
1599 used for long term storage might seem like a good idea as long as we
1600 forget that there are plenty of ways for a "valid" OOXML document to
1601 have content with no defined interpretation in the standard, which
1602 lead to a question and an idea.</p>
1603
1604 <p>Is there any tool to detect if a OOXML document depend on such
1605 undefined behaviour?  It would be useful for the National Archive (and
1606 anyone else interested in verifying that a document is well defined)
1607 to have such tool available when considering to approve the use of
1608 OOXML.  I'm aware of the
1609 <a href="https://github.com/arlm/officeotron/">officeotron OOXML
1610 validator</a>, but do not know how complete it is nor if it will
1611 report use of undefined behaviour.  Are there other similar tools
1612 available?  Please send me an email if you know of any such tool.</p>
1613
1614       </div>
1615       <div class="tags">
1616
1617
1618         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>.
1619
1620
1621       </div>
1622     </div>
1623     <div class="padding"></div>
1624
1625     <div class="entry">
1626       <div class="title">
1627         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ruling_ignored_our_objections_to_the_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no___domstolkontroll_.html">Ruling ignored our objections to the seizure of popcorn-time.no (#domstolkontroll)</a>
1628       </div>
1629       <div class="date">
1630         13th February 2017
1631       </div>
1632       <div class="body">
1633         <p>A few days ago, we received the ruling from
1634 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_day_in_court_challenging_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no_for__domstolkontroll.html">my
1635 day in court</a>.  The case in question is a challenge of the seizure
1636 of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no.  The ruling simply did not mention
1637 most of our arguments, and seemed to take everything ØKOKRIM said at
1638 face value, ignoring our demonstration and explanations.  But it is
1639 hard to tell for sure, as we still have not seen most of the documents
1640 in the case and thus were unprepared and unable to contradict several
1641 of the claims made in court by the opposition.  We are considering an
1642 appeal, but it is partly a question of funding, as it is costing us
1643 quite a bit to pay for our lawyer.  If you want to help, please
1644 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">donate to the
1645 NUUG defense fund</a>.</p>
1646
1647 <p>The details of the case, as far as we know it, is available in
1648 Norwegian from
1649 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/tags/dns-domenebeslag/">the NUUG
1650 blog</a>.  This also include
1651 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/Avslag_etter_rettslig_h_ring_om_DNS_beslaget___vurderer_veien_videre.shtml">the
1652 ruling itself</a>.</p>
1653
1654       </div>
1655       <div class="tags">
1656
1657
1658         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>.
1659
1660
1661       </div>
1662     </div>
1663     <div class="padding"></div>
1664
1665     <div class="entry">
1666       <div class="title">
1667         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_day_in_court_challenging_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no_for__domstolkontroll.html">A day in court challenging seizure of popcorn-time.no for #domstolkontroll</a>
1668       </div>
1669       <div class="date">
1670          3rd February 2017
1671       </div>
1672       <div class="body">
1673         <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-02-01-popcorn-time-in-court.jpeg"></p>
1674
1675 <p>On Wednesday, I spent the entire day in court in Follo Tingrett
1676 representing <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the member association
1677 NUUG</a>, alongside <a href="https://www.efn.no/">the member
1678 association EFN</a> and <a href="http://www.imc.no">the DNS registrar
1679 IMC</a>, challenging the seizure of the DNS name popcorn-time.no.  It
1680 was interesting to sit in a court of law for the first time in my
1681 life.  Our team can be seen in the picture above: attorney Ola
1682 Tellesbø, EFN board member Tom Fredrik Blenning, IMC CEO Morten Emil
1683 Eriksen and NUUG board member Petter Reinholdtsen.</p>
1684
1685 <p><a href="http://www.domstol.no/no/Enkelt-domstol/follo-tingrett/Nar-gar-rettssaken/Beramming/?cid=AAAA1701301512081262234UJFBVEZZZZZEJBAvtale">The
1686 case at hand</a> is that the Norwegian National Authority for
1687 Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime (aka
1688 Økokrim) decided on their own, to seize a DNS domain early last
1689 year, without following
1690 <a href="https://www.norid.no/no/regelverk/navnepolitikk/#link12">the
1691 official policy of the Norwegian DNS authority</a> which require a
1692 court decision.  The web site in question was a site covering Popcorn
1693 Time.  And Popcorn Time is the name of a technology with both legal
1694 and illegal applications.  Popcorn Time is a client combining
1695 searching a Bittorrent directory available on the Internet with
1696 downloading/distribute content via Bittorrent and playing the
1697 downloaded content on screen.  It can be used illegally if it is used
1698 to distribute content against the will of the right holder, but it can
1699 also be used legally to play a lot of content, for example the
1700 millions of movies
1701 <a href="https://archive.org/details/movies">available from the
1702 Internet Archive</a> or the collection
1703 <a href="http://vodo.net/films/">available from Vodo</a>.  We created
1704 <a href="magnet:?xt=urn:btih:86c1802af5a667ca56d3918aecb7d3c0f7173084&dn=PresentasjonFolloTingrett.mov&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fpublic.popcorn-tracker.org%3A6969%2Fannounce">a
1705 video demonstrating legally use of Popcorn Time</a> and played it in
1706 Court.  It can of course be downloaded using Bittorrent.</p>
1707
1708 <p>I did not quite know what to expect from a day in court.  The
1709 government held on to their version of the story and we held on to
1710 ours, and I hope the judge is able to make sense of it all.  We will
1711 know in two weeks time.  Unfortunately I do not have high hopes, as
1712 the Government have the upper hand here with more knowledge about the
1713 case, better training in handling criminal law and in general higher
1714 standing in the courts than fairly unknown DNS registrar and member
1715 associations.  It is expensive to be right also in Norway.  So far the
1716 case have cost more than NOK 70 000,-.  To help fund the case, NUUG
1717 and EFN have asked for donations, and managed to collect around NOK 25
1718 000,- so far.  Given the presentation from the Government, I expect
1719 the government to appeal if the case go our way.  And if the case do
1720 not go our way, I hope we have enough funding to appeal.</p>
1721
1722 <p>From the other side came two people from Økokrim.  On the benches,
1723 appearing to be part of the group from the government were two people
1724 from the Simonsen Vogt Wiik lawyer office, and three others I am not
1725 quite sure who was.  Økokrim had proposed to present two witnesses
1726 from The Motion Picture Association, but this was rejected because
1727 they did not speak Norwegian and it was a bit late to bring in a
1728 translator, but perhaps the two from MPA were present anyway.  All
1729 seven appeared to know each other.  Good to see the case is take
1730 seriously.</p>
1731
1732 <p>If you, like me, believe the courts should be involved before a DNS
1733 domain is hijacked by the government, or you believe the Popcorn Time
1734 technology have a lot of useful and legal applications, I suggest you
1735 too <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">donate to
1736 the NUUG defense fund</a>.  Both Bitcoin and bank transfer are
1737 available. If NUUG get more than we need for the legal action (very
1738 unlikely), the rest will be spend promoting free software, open
1739 standards and unix-like operating systems in Norway, so no matter what
1740 happens the money will be put to good use.</p>
1741
1742 <p>If you want to lean more about the case, I recommend you check out
1743 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/tags/dns-domenebeslag/">the blog
1744 posts from NUUG covering the case</a>.  They cover the legal arguments
1745 on both sides.</p>
1746
1747       </div>
1748       <div class="tags">
1749
1750
1751         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>.
1752
1753
1754       </div>
1755     </div>
1756     <div class="padding"></div>
1757
1758     <div class="entry">
1759       <div class="title">
1760         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Where_did_that_package_go___mdash__geolocated_IP_traceroute.html">Where did that package go? &mdash; geolocated IP traceroute</a>
1761       </div>
1762       <div class="date">
1763          9th January 2017
1764       </div>
1765       <div class="body">
1766         <p>Did you ever wonder where the web trafic really flow to reach the
1767 web servers, and who own the network equipment it is flowing through?
1768 It is possible to get a glimpse of this from using traceroute, but it
1769 is hard to find all the details.  Many years ago, I wrote a system to
1770 map the Norwegian Internet (trying to figure out if our plans for a
1771 network game service would get low enough latency, and who we needed
1772 to talk to about setting up game servers close to the users.  Back
1773 then I used traceroute output from many locations (I asked my friends
1774 to run a script and send me their traceroute output) to create the
1775 graph and the map.  The output from traceroute typically look like
1776 this:
1777
1778 <p><pre>
1779 traceroute to www.stortinget.no (85.88.67.10), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1780  1  uio-gw10.uio.no (129.240.202.1)  0.447 ms  0.486 ms  0.621 ms
1781  2  uio-gw8.uio.no (129.240.24.229)  0.467 ms  0.578 ms  0.675 ms
1782  3  oslo-gw1.uninett.no (128.39.65.17)  0.385 ms  0.373 ms  0.358 ms
1783  4  te3-1-2.br1.fn3.as2116.net (193.156.90.3)  1.174 ms  1.172 ms  1.153 ms
1784  5  he16-1-1.cr1.san110.as2116.net (195.0.244.234)  2.627 ms he16-1-1.cr2.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.244.48)  3.172 ms he16-1-1.cr1.san110.as2116.net (195.0.244.234)  2.857 ms
1785  6  ae1.ar8.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.242.39)  0.662 ms  0.637 ms ae0.ar8.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.242.23)  0.622 ms
1786  7  89.191.10.146 (89.191.10.146)  0.931 ms  0.917 ms  0.955 ms
1787  8  * * *
1788  9  * * *
1789 [...]
1790 </pre></p>
1791
1792 <p>This show the DNS names and IP addresses of (at least some of the)
1793 network equipment involved in getting the data traffic from me to the
1794 www.stortinget.no server, and how long it took in milliseconds for a
1795 package to reach the equipment and return to me.  Three packages are
1796 sent, and some times the packages do not follow the same path.  This
1797 is shown for hop 5, where three different IP addresses replied to the
1798 traceroute request.</p>
1799
1800 <p>There are many ways to measure trace routes.  Other good traceroute
1801 implementations I use are traceroute (using ICMP packages) mtr (can do
1802 both ICMP, UDP and TCP) and scapy (python library with ICMP, UDP, TCP
1803 traceroute and a lot of other capabilities).  All of them are easily
1804 available in <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>.</p>
1805
1806 <p>This time around, I wanted to know the geographic location of
1807 different route points, to visualize how visiting a web page spread
1808 information about the visit to a lot of servers around the globe.  The
1809 background is that a web site today often will ask the browser to get
1810 from many servers the parts (for example HTML, JSON, fonts,
1811 JavaScript, CSS, video) required to display the content.  This will
1812 leak information about the visit to those controlling these servers
1813 and anyone able to peek at the data traffic passing by (like your ISP,
1814 the ISPs backbone provider, FRA, GCHQ, NSA and others).</p>
1815
1816 <p>Lets pick an example, the Norwegian parliament web site
1817 www.stortinget.no.  It is read daily by all members of parliament and
1818 their staff, as well as political journalists, activits and many other
1819 citizens of Norway.  A visit to the www.stortinget.no web site will
1820 ask your browser to contact 8 other servers: ajax.googleapis.com,
1821 insights.hotjar.com, script.hotjar.com, static.hotjar.com,
1822 stats.g.doubleclick.net, www.google-analytics.com,
1823 www.googletagmanager.com and www.netigate.se.  I extracted this by
1824 asking <a href="http://phantomjs.org/">PhantomJS</a> to visit the
1825 Stortinget web page and tell me all the URLs PhantomJS downloaded to
1826 render the page (in HAR format using
1827 <a href="https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/blob/master/examples/netsniff.js">their
1828 netsniff example</a>.  I am very grateful to Gorm for showing me how
1829 to do this).  My goal is to visualize network traces to all IP
1830 addresses behind these DNS names, do show where visitors personal
1831 information is spread when visiting the page.</p>
1832
1833 <p align="center"><a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml"><img
1834 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geoip-small.png" alt="map of combined traces for URLs used by www.stortinget.no using GeoIP"/></a></p>
1835
1836 <p>When I had a look around for options, I could not find any good
1837 free software tools to do this, and decided I needed my own traceroute
1838 wrapper outputting KML based on locations looked up using GeoIP.  KML
1839 is easy to work with and easy to generate, and understood by several
1840 of the GIS tools I have available.  I got good help from by NUUG
1841 colleague Anders Einar with this, and the result can be seen in
1842 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/kmltraceroute">my
1843 kmltraceroute git repository</a>.  Unfortunately, the quality of the
1844 free GeoIP databases I could find (and the for-pay databases my
1845 friends had access to) is not up to the task.  The IP addresses of
1846 central Internet infrastructure would typically be placed near the
1847 controlling companies main office, and not where the router is really
1848 located, as you can see from <a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml">the
1849 KML file I created</a> using the GeoLite City dataset from MaxMind.
1850
1851 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg"><img
1852 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy-small.png" alt="scapy traceroute graph for URLs used by www.stortinget.no"/></a></p>
1853
1854 <p>I also had a look at the visual traceroute graph created by
1855 <a href="http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/">the scrapy project</a>,
1856 showing IP network ownership (aka AS owner) for the IP address in
1857 question.
1858 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg">The
1859 graph display a lot of useful information about the traceroute in SVG
1860 format</a>, and give a good indication on who control the network
1861 equipment involved, but it do not include geolocation.  This graph
1862 make it possible to see the information is made available at least for
1863 UNINETT, Catchcom, Stortinget, Nordunet, Google, Amazon, Telia, Level
1864 3 Communications and NetDNA.</p>
1865
1866 <p align="center"><a href="https://geotraceroute.com/index.php?node=4&host=www.stortinget.no"><img
1867 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-small.png" alt="example geotraceroute view for www.stortinget.no"/></a></p>
1868
1869 <p>In the process, I came across the
1870 <a href="https://geotraceroute.com/">web service GeoTraceroute</a> by
1871 Salim Gasmi.  Its methology of combining guesses based on DNS names,
1872 various location databases and finally use latecy times to rule out
1873 candidate locations seemed to do a very good job of guessing correct
1874 geolocation.  But it could only do one trace at the time, did not have
1875 a sensor in Norway and did not make the geolocations easily available
1876 for postprocessing.  So I contacted the developer and asked if he
1877 would be willing to share the code (he refused until he had time to
1878 clean it up), but he was interested in providing the geolocations in a
1879 machine readable format, and willing to set up a sensor in Norway.  So
1880 since yesterday, it is possible to run traces from Norway in this
1881 service thanks to a sensor node set up by
1882 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG assosiation</a>, and get the
1883 trace in KML format for further processing.</p>
1884
1885 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.kml"><img
1886 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.png" alt="map of combined traces for URLs used by www.stortinget.no using geotraceroute"/></a></p>
1887
1888 <p>Here we can see a lot of trafic passes Sweden on its way to
1889 Denmark, Germany, Holland and Ireland.  Plenty of places where the
1890 Snowden confirmations verified the traffic is read by various actors
1891 without your best interest as their top priority.</p>
1892
1893 <p>Combining KML files is trivial using a text editor, so I could loop
1894 over all the hosts behind the urls imported by www.stortinget.no and
1895 ask for the KML file from GeoTraceroute, and create a combined KML
1896 file with all the traces (unfortunately only one of the IP addresses
1897 behind the DNS name is traced this time.  To get them all, one would
1898 have to request traces using IP number instead of DNS names from
1899 GeoTraceroute).  That might be the next step in this project.</p>
1900
1901 <p>Armed with these tools, I find it a lot easier to figure out where
1902 the IP traffic moves and who control the boxes involved in moving it.
1903 And every time the link crosses for example the Swedish border, we can
1904 be sure Swedish Signal Intelligence (FRA) is listening, as GCHQ do in
1905 Britain and NSA in USA and cables around the globe.  (Hm, what should
1906 we tell them? :) Keep that in mind if you ever send anything
1907 unencrypted over the Internet.</p>
1908
1909 <p>PS: KML files are drawn using
1910 <a href="http://ivanrublev.me/kml/">the KML viewer from Ivan
1911 Rublev<a/>, as it was less cluttered than the local Linux application
1912 Marble.  There are heaps of other options too.</p>
1913
1914 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1915 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1916 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1917
1918       </div>
1919       <div class="tags">
1920
1921
1922         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
1923
1924
1925       </div>
1926     </div>
1927     <div class="padding"></div>
1928
1929     <div class="entry">
1930       <div class="title">
1931         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Introducing_ical_archiver_to_split_out_old_iCalendar_entries.html">Introducing ical-archiver to split out old iCalendar entries</a>
1932       </div>
1933       <div class="date">
1934          4th January 2017
1935       </div>
1936       <div class="body">
1937         <p>Do you have a large <a href="https://icalendar.org/">iCalendar</a>
1938 file with lots of old entries, and would like to archive them to save
1939 space and resources?  At least those of us using KOrganizer know that
1940 turning on and off an event set become slower and slower the more
1941 entries are in the set.  While working on migrating our calendars to a
1942 <a href="http://radicale.org/">Radicale CalDAV server</a> on our
1943 <a href="https://freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox server</a/>, my
1944 loved one wondered if I could find a way to split up the calendar file
1945 she had in KOrganizer, and I set out to write a tool.  I spent a few
1946 days writing and polishing the system, and it is now ready for general
1947 consumption.  The
1948 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/ical-archiver">code for
1949 ical-archiver</a> is publicly available from a git repository on
1950 github.  The system is written in Python and depend on
1951 <a href="http://eventable.github.io/vobject/">the vobject Python
1952 module</a>.</p>
1953
1954 <p>To use it, locate the iCalendar file you want to operate on and
1955 give it as an argument to the ical-archiver script.  This will
1956 generate a set of new files, one file per component type per year for
1957 all components expiring more than two years in the past.  The vevent,
1958 vtodo and vjournal entries are handled by the script.  The remaining
1959 entries are stored in a 'remaining' file.</p>
1960
1961 <p>This is what a test run can look like:
1962
1963 <p><pre>
1964 % ical-archiver t/2004-2016.ics
1965 Found 3612 vevents
1966 Found 6 vtodos
1967 Found 2 vjournals
1968 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2004.ics
1969 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2005.ics
1970 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2006.ics
1971 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2007.ics
1972 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2008.ics
1973 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2009.ics
1974 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2010.ics
1975 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2011.ics
1976 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2012.ics
1977 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2013.ics
1978 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2014.ics
1979 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vjournal-2007.ics
1980 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vjournal-2011.ics
1981 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vtodo-2012.ics
1982 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-remaining.ics
1983 %
1984 </pre></p>
1985
1986 <p>As you can see, the original file is untouched and new files are
1987 written with names derived from the original file.  If you are happy
1988 with their content, the *-remaining.ics file can replace the original
1989 the the others can be archived or imported as historical calendar
1990 collections.</p>
1991
1992 <p>The script should probably be improved a bit.  The error handling
1993 when discovering broken entries is not good, and I am not sure yet if
1994 it make sense to split different entry types into separate files or
1995 not.  The program is thus likely to change.  If you find it
1996 interesting, please get in touch. :)</p>
1997
1998 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1999 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2000 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2001
2002       </div>
2003       <div class="tags">
2004
2005
2006         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>.
2007
2008
2009       </div>
2010     </div>
2011     <div class="padding"></div>
2012
2013     <div class="entry">
2014       <div class="title">
2015         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Appstream_just_learned_how_to_map_hardware_to_packages_too_.html">Appstream just learned how to map hardware to packages too!</a>
2016       </div>
2017       <div class="date">
2018         23rd December 2016
2019       </div>
2020       <div class="body">
2021         <p>I received a very nice Christmas present today.  As my regular
2022 readers probably know, I have been working on the
2023 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the Isenkram
2024 system</a> for many years.  The goal of the Isenkram system is to make
2025 it easier for users to figure out what to install to get a given piece
2026 of hardware to work in Debian, and a key part of this system is a way
2027 to map hardware to packages.  Isenkram have its own mapping database,
2028 and also uses data provided by each package using the AppStream
2029 metadata format.  And today,
2030 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/appstream">AppStream</a> in
2031 Debian learned to look up hardware the same way Isenkram is doing it,
2032 ie using fnmatch():</p>
2033
2034 <p><pre>
2035 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias \
2036   usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
2037 Identifier: pymissile [generic]
2038 Name: pymissile
2039 Summary: Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher
2040 Package: pymissile
2041 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias usb:v0694p0002d0000
2042 Identifier: libnxt [generic]
2043 Name: libnxt
2044 Summary: utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT brick
2045 Package: libnxt
2046 ---
2047 Identifier: t2n [generic]
2048 Name: t2n
2049 Summary: Simple command-line tool for Lego NXT
2050 Package: t2n
2051 ---
2052 Identifier: python-nxt [generic]
2053 Name: python-nxt
2054 Summary: Python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot
2055 Package: python-nxt
2056 ---
2057 Identifier: nbc [generic]
2058 Name: nbc
2059 Summary: C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
2060 Package: nbc
2061 %
2062 </pre></p>
2063
2064 <p>A similar query can be done using the combined AppStream and
2065 Isenkram databases using the isenkram-lookup tool:</p>
2066
2067 <p><pre>
2068 % isenkram-lookup usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
2069 pymissile
2070 % isenkram-lookup usb:v0694p0002d0000
2071 libnxt
2072 nbc
2073 python-nxt
2074 t2n
2075 %
2076 </pre></p>
2077
2078 <p>You can find modalias values relevant for your machine using
2079 <tt>cat $(find /sys/devices/ -name modalias)</tt>.
2080
2081 <p>If you want to make this system a success and help Debian users
2082 make the most of the hardware they have, please
2083 help<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add
2084 AppStream metadata for your package following the guidelines</a>
2085 documented in the wiki.  So far only 11 packages provide such
2086 information, among the several hundred hardware specific packages in
2087 Debian. The Isenkram database on the other hand contain 101 packages,
2088 mostly related to USB dongles.  Most of the packages with hardware
2089 mapping in AppStream are LEGO Mindstorms related, because I have, as
2090 part of my involvement in
2091 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the Debian LEGO
2092 team</a> given priority to making sure LEGO users get proposed the
2093 complete set of packages in Debian for that particular hardware.  The
2094 team also got a nice Christmas present today.  The
2095 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nxt-firmware">nxt-firmware
2096 package</a> made it into Debian.  With this package in place, it is
2097 now possible to use the LEGO Mindstorms NXT unit with only free
2098 software, as the nxt-firmware package contain the source and firmware
2099 binaries for the NXT brick.</p>
2100
2101 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2102 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2103 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2104
2105       </div>
2106       <div class="tags">
2107
2108
2109         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>.
2110
2111
2112       </div>
2113     </div>
2114     <div class="padding"></div>
2115
2116     <div class="entry">
2117       <div class="title">
2118         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_updated_with_a_lot_more_hardware_package_mappings.html">Isenkram updated with a lot more hardware-package mappings</a>
2119       </div>
2120       <div class="date">
2121         20th December 2016
2122       </div>
2123       <div class="body">
2124         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
2125 system</a> I wrote two years ago to make it easier in Debian to find
2126 and install packages to get your hardware dongles to work, is still
2127 going strong.  It is a system to look up the hardware present on or
2128 connected to the current system, and map the hardware to Debian
2129 packages.  It can either be done using the tools in isenkram-cli or
2130 using the user space daemon in the isenkram package.  The latter will
2131 notify you, when inserting new hardware, about what packages to
2132 install to get the dongle working.  It will even provide a button to
2133 click on to ask packagekit to install the packages.</p>
2134
2135 <p>Here is an command line example from my Thinkpad laptop:</p>
2136
2137 <p><pre>
2138 % isenkram-lookup
2139 bluez
2140 cheese
2141 ethtool
2142 fprintd
2143 fprintd-demo
2144 gkrellm-thinkbat
2145 hdapsd
2146 libpam-fprintd
2147 pidgin-blinklight
2148 thinkfan
2149 tlp
2150 tp-smapi-dkms
2151 tp-smapi-source
2152 tpb
2153 %
2154 </pre></p>
2155
2156 <p>It can also list the firware package providing firmware requested
2157 by the load kernel modules, which in my case is an empty list because
2158 I have all the firmware my machine need:
2159
2160 <p><pre>
2161 % /usr/sbin/isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
2162 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
2163 %
2164 </pre></p>
2165
2166 <p>The last few days I had a look at several of the around 250
2167 packages in Debian with udev rules.  These seem like good candidates
2168 to install when a given hardware dongle is inserted, and I found
2169 several that should be proposed by isenkram.  I have not had time to
2170 check all of them, but am happy to report that now there are 97
2171 packages packages mapped to hardware by Isenkram.  11 of these
2172 packages provide hardware mapping using AppStream, while the rest are
2173 listed in the modaliases file provided in isenkram.</p>
2174
2175 <p>These are the packages with hardware mappings at the moment.  The
2176 <strong>marked packages</strong> are also announcing their hardware
2177 support using AppStream, for everyone to use:</p>
2178
2179 <p>air-quality-sensor, alsa-firmware-loaders, argyll,
2180 <strong>array-info</strong>, avarice, avrdude, b43-fwcutter,
2181 bit-babbler, bluez, bluez-firmware, <strong>brltty</strong>,
2182 <strong>broadcom-sta-dkms</strong>, calibre, cgminer, cheese, colord,
2183 <strong>colorhug-client</strong>, dahdi-firmware-nonfree, dahdi-linux,
2184 dfu-util, dolphin-emu, ekeyd, ethtool, firmware-ipw2x00, fprintd,
2185 fprintd-demo, <strong>galileo</strong>, gkrellm-thinkbat, gphoto2,
2186 gpsbabel, gpsbabel-gui, gpsman, gpstrans, gqrx-sdr, gr-fcdproplus,
2187 gr-osmosdr, gtkpod, hackrf, hdapsd, hdmi2usb-udev, hpijs-ppds, hplip,
2188 ipw3945-source, ipw3945d, kde-config-tablet, kinect-audio-setup,
2189 <strong>libnxt</strong>, libpam-fprintd, <strong>lomoco</strong>,
2190 madwimax, minidisc-utils, mkgmap, msi-keyboard, mtkbabel,
2191 <strong>nbc</strong>, <strong>nqc</strong>, nut-hal-drivers, ola,
2192 open-vm-toolbox, open-vm-tools, openambit, pcgminer, pcmciautils,
2193 pcscd, pidgin-blinklight, printer-driver-splix,
2194 <strong>pymissile</strong>, python-nxt, qlandkartegt,
2195 qlandkartegt-garmin, rosegarden, rt2x00-source, sispmctl,
2196 soapysdr-module-hackrf, solaar, squeak-plugins-scratch, sunxi-tools,
2197 <strong>t2n</strong>, thinkfan, thinkfinger-tools, tlp, tp-smapi-dkms,
2198 tp-smapi-source, tpb, tucnak, uhd-host, usbmuxd, viking,
2199 virtualbox-ose-guest-x11, w1retap, xawtv, xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse,
2200 xserver-xorg-input-wacom, xserver-xorg-video-qxl,
2201 xserver-xorg-video-vmware, yubikey-personalization and
2202 zd1211-firmware</p>
2203
2204 <p>If you know of other packages, please let me know with a wishlist
2205 bug report against the isenkram-cli package, and ask the package
2206 maintainer to
2207 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add AppStream
2208 metadata according to the guidelines</a> to provide the information
2209 for everyone.  In time, I hope to get rid of the isenkram specific
2210 hardware mapping and depend exclusively on AppStream.</p>
2211
2212 <p>Note, the AppStream metadata for broadcom-sta-dkms is matching too
2213 much hardware, and suggest that the package with with any ethernet
2214 card.  See <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/838735">bug #838735</a> for
2215 the details.  I hope the maintainer find time to address it soon.  In
2216 the mean time I provide an override in isenkram.</p>
2217
2218       </div>
2219       <div class="tags">
2220
2221
2222         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>.
2223
2224
2225       </div>
2226     </div>
2227     <div class="padding"></div>
2228
2229     <div class="entry">
2230       <div class="title">
2231         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oolite__a_life_in_space_as_vagabond_and_mercenary___nice_free_software.html">Oolite, a life in space as vagabond and mercenary - nice free software</a>
2232       </div>
2233       <div class="date">
2234         11th December 2016
2235       </div>
2236       <div class="body">
2237         <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-12-11-nice-oolite.png"/></p>
2238
2239 <p>In my early years, I played
2240 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Classic_Elite">the epic game
2241 Elite</a> on my PC.  I spent many months trading and fighting in
2242 space, and reached the 'elite' fighting status before I moved on.  The
2243 original Elite game was available on Commodore 64 and the IBM PC
2244 edition I played had a 64 KB executable.  I am still impressed today
2245 that the authors managed to squeeze both a 3D engine and details about
2246 more than 2000 planet systems across 7 galaxies into a binary so
2247 small.</p>
2248
2249 <p>I have known about <a href="http://www.oolite.org/">the free
2250 software game Oolite inspired by Elite</a> for a while, but did not
2251 really have time to test it properly until a few days ago.  It was
2252 great to discover that my old knowledge about trading routes were
2253 still valid.  But my fighting and flying abilities were gone, so I had
2254 to retrain to be able to dock on a space station.  And I am still not
2255 able to make much resistance when I am attacked by pirates, so I
2256 bougth and mounted the most powerful laser in the rear to be able to
2257 put up at least some resistance while fleeing for my life. :)</p>
2258
2259 <p>When playing Elite in the late eighties, I had to discover
2260 everything on my own, and I had long lists of prices seen on different
2261 planets to be able to decide where to trade what.  This time I had the
2262 advantages of the
2263 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Main_Page">Elite wiki</a>,
2264 where information about each planet is easily available with common
2265 price ranges and suggested trading routes.  This improved my ability
2266 to earn money and I have been able to earn enough to buy a lot of
2267 useful equipent in a few days.  I believe I originally played for
2268 months before I could get a docking computer, while now I could get it
2269 after less then a week.</p>
2270
2271 <p>If you like science fiction and dreamed of a life as a vagabond in
2272 space, you should try out Oolite.  It is available for Linux, MacOSX
2273 and Windows, and is included in Debian and derivatives since 2011.</p>
2274
2275 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2276 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2277 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2278
2279       </div>
2280       <div class="tags">
2281
2282
2283         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>.
2284
2285
2286       </div>
2287     </div>
2288     <div class="padding"></div>
2289
2290     <div class="entry">
2291       <div class="title">
2292         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_installations_using_eatmydata.html">Quicker Debian installations using eatmydata</a>
2293       </div>
2294       <div class="date">
2295         25th November 2016
2296       </div>
2297       <div class="body">
2298         <p>Two years ago, I did some experiments with eatmydata and the Debian
2299 installation system, observing how using
2300 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">eatmydata
2301 could speed up the installation</a> quite a bit.  My testing measured
2302 speedup around 20-40 percent for Debian Edu, where we install around
2303 1000 packages from within the installer.  The eatmydata package
2304 provide a way to disable/delay file system flushing.  This is a bit
2305 risky in the general case, as files that should be stored on disk will
2306 stay only in memory a bit longer than expected, causing problems if a
2307 machine crashes at an inconvenient time.  But for an installation, if
2308 the machine crashes during installation the process is normally
2309 restarted, and avoiding disk operations as much as possible to speed
2310 up the process make perfect sense.
2311
2312 <p>I added code in the Debian Edu specific installation code to enable
2313 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libeatmydata">eatmydata</a>,
2314 but did not have time to push it any further.  But a few months ago I
2315 picked it up again and worked with the libeatmydata package maintainer
2316 Mattia Rizzolo to make it easier for everyone to get this installation
2317 speedup in Debian.  Thanks to our cooperation There is now an
2318 eatmydata-udeb package in Debian testing and unstable, and simply
2319 enabling/installing it in debian-installer (d-i) is enough to get the
2320 quicker installations.  It can be enabled using preseeding.  The
2321 following untested kernel argument should do the trick:</p>
2322
2323 <blockquote><pre>
2324 preseed/early_command="anna-install eatmydata-udeb"
2325 </pre></blockquote>
2326
2327 <p>This should ask d-i to install the package inside the d-i
2328 environment early in the installation sequence.  Having it installed
2329 in d-i in turn will make sure the relevant scripts are called just
2330 after debootstrap filled /target/ with the freshly installed Debian
2331 system to configure apt to run dpkg with eatmydata.  This is enough to
2332 speed up the installation process.  There is a proposal to
2333 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/841153">extend the idea a bit further
2334 by using /etc/ld.so.preload instead of apt.conf</a>, but I have not
2335 tested its impact.</p>
2336
2337
2338       </div>
2339       <div class="tags">
2340
2341
2342         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>.
2343
2344
2345       </div>
2346     </div>
2347     <div class="padding"></div>
2348
2349     <div class="entry">
2350       <div class="title">
2351         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_profiler_for_multi_threaded_software_is_now_in_Debian.html">Coz profiler for multi-threaded software is now in Debian</a>
2352       </div>
2353       <div class="date">
2354         13th November 2016
2355       </div>
2356       <div class="body">
2357         <p><a href="http://coz-profiler.org/">The Coz profiler</a>, a nice
2358 profiler able to run benchmarking experiments on the instrumented
2359 multi-threaded program, finally
2360 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/coz-profiler">made it into
2361 Debian unstable yesterday</A>.  Lluís Vilanova and I have spent many
2362 months since
2363 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">I
2364 blogged about the coz tool</a> in August working with upstream to make
2365 it suitable for Debian.  There are still issues with clang
2366 compatibility, inline assembly only working x86 and minimized
2367 JavaScript libraries.</p>
2368
2369 <p>To test it, install 'coz-profiler' using apt and run it like this:</p>
2370
2371 <p><blockquote>
2372 <tt>coz run --- /path/to/binary-with-debug-info</tt>
2373 </blockquote></p>
2374
2375 <p>This will produce a profile.coz file in the current working
2376 directory with the profiling information.  This is then given to a
2377 JavaScript application provided in the package and available from
2378 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">a project web page</a>.
2379 To start the local copy, invoke it in a browser like this:</p>
2380
2381 <p><blockquote>
2382 <tt>sensible-browser /usr/share/coz-profiler/viewer/index.htm</tt>
2383 </blockquote></p>
2384
2385 <p>See the project home page and the
2386 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">USENIX
2387 ;login: article on Coz</a> for more information on how it is
2388 working.</p>
2389
2390       </div>
2391       <div class="tags">
2392
2393
2394         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>.
2395
2396
2397       </div>
2398     </div>
2399     <div class="padding"></div>
2400
2401     <div class="entry">
2402       <div class="title">
2403         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_talk_with_your_loved_ones_in_private.html">How to talk with your loved ones in private</a>
2404       </div>
2405       <div class="date">
2406          7th November 2016
2407       </div>
2408       <div class="body">
2409         <p>A few days ago I ran a very biased and informal survey to get an
2410 idea about what options are being used to communicate with end to end
2411 encryption with friends and family.  I explicitly asked people not to
2412 list options only used in a work setting.  The background is the
2413 uneasy feeling I get when using Signal, a feeling shared by others as
2414 a blog post from Sander Venima about
2415 <a href="https://sandervenema.ch/2016/11/why-i-wont-recommend-signal-anymore/">why
2416 he do not recommend Signal anymore</a> (with
2417 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12883410">feedback from
2418 the Signal author available from ycombinator</a>).  I wanted an
2419 overview of the options being used, and hope to include those options
2420 in a less biased survey later on.  So far I have not taken the time to
2421 look into the individual proposed systems.  They range from text
2422 sharing web pages, via file sharing and email to instant messaging,
2423 VOIP and video conferencing.  For those considering which system to
2424 use, it is also useful to have a look at
2425 <a href="https://www.eff.org/secure-messaging-scorecard">the EFF Secure
2426 messaging scorecard</a> which is slightly out of date but still
2427 provide valuable information.</p>
2428
2429 <p>So, on to the list.  There were some used by many, some used by a
2430 few, some rarely used ones and a few mentioned but without anyone
2431 claiming to use them.  Notice the grouping is in reality quite random
2432 given the biased self selected set of participants.  First the ones
2433 used by many:</p>
2434
2435 <ul>
2436
2437 <li><a href="https://whispersystems.org/">Signal</a></li>
2438 <li>Email w/<a href="http://openpgp.org/">OpenPGP</a> (Enigmail, GPGSuite,etc)</li>
2439 <li><a href="https://www.whatsapp.com/">Whatsapp</a></li>
2440 <li>IRC w/<a href="https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/">OTR</a></li>
2441 <li>XMPP w/<a href="https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/">OTR</a></li>
2442
2443 </ul>
2444
2445 <p>Then the ones used by a few.</p>
2446
2447 <ul>
2448
2449 <li><a href="https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page">Mumble</a></li>
2450 <li>iMessage (included in iOS from Apple)</li>
2451 <li><a href="https://telegram.org/">Telegram</a></li>
2452 <li><a href="https://jitsi.org/">Jitsi</a></li>
2453 <li><a href="https://keybase.io/download">Keybase file</a></li>
2454
2455 </ul>
2456
2457 <p>Then the ones used by even fewer people</p>
2458
2459 <ul>
2460
2461 <li><a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a></li>
2462 <li><a href="https://bitmessage.org/">Bitmessage</a></li>
2463 <li><a href="https://wire.com/">Wire</a></li>
2464 <li>VoIP w/<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZRTP">ZRTP</a> or controlled <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Real-time_Transport_Protocol">SRTP</a> (e.g using <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSipSimple">CSipSimple</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linphone">Linphone</a>)</li>
2465 <li><a href="https://matrix.org/">Matrix</a></li>
2466 <li><a href="https://kontalk.org/">Kontalk</a></li>
2467 <li><a href="https://0bin.net/">0bin</a> (encrypted pastebin)</li>
2468 <li><a href="https://appear.in">Appear.in</a></li>
2469 <li><a href="https://riot.im/">riot</a></li>
2470 <li><a href="https://www.wickr.com/">Wickr Me</a></li>
2471
2472 </ul>
2473
2474 <p>And finally the ones mentioned by not marked as used by
2475 anyone. This might be a mistake, perhaps the person adding the entry
2476 forgot to flag it as used?</p>
2477
2478 <ul>
2479
2480 <li>Email w/Certificates <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME">S/MIME</a></li>
2481 <li><a href="https://www.crypho.com/">Crypho</a></li>
2482 <li><a href="https://cryptpad.fr/">CryptPad</a></li>
2483 <li><a href="https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet">ricochet</a></li>
2484
2485 </ul>
2486
2487 <p>Given the network effect it seem obvious to me that we as a society
2488 have been divided and conquered by those interested in keeping
2489 encrypted and secure communication away from the masses.  The
2490 finishing remarks <a href="https://vimeo.com/97505679">from Aral Balkan
2491 in his talk "Free is a lie"</a> about the usability of free software
2492 really come into effect when you want to communicate in private with
2493 your friends and family.  We can not expect them to allow the
2494 usability of communication tool to block their ability to talk to
2495 their loved ones.</p>
2496
2497 <p>Note for example the option IRC w/OTR.  Most IRC clients do not
2498 have OTR support, so in most cases OTR would not be an option, even if
2499 you wanted to.  In my personal experience, about 1 in 20 I talk to
2500 have a IRC client with OTR.  For private communication to really be
2501 available, most people to talk to must have the option in their
2502 currently used client.  I can not simply ask my family to install an
2503 IRC client.  I need to guide them through a technical multi-step
2504 process of adding extensions to the client to get them going.  This is
2505 a non-starter for most.</p>
2506
2507 <p>I would like to be able to do video phone calls, audio phone calls,
2508 exchange instant messages and share files with my loved ones, without
2509 being forced to share with people I do not know.  I do not want to
2510 share the content of the conversations, and I do not want to share who
2511 I communicate with or the fact that I communicate with someone.
2512 Without all these factors in place, my private life is being more or
2513 less invaded.</p>
2514
2515       </div>
2516       <div class="tags">
2517
2518
2519         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>.
2520
2521
2522       </div>
2523     </div>
2524     <div class="padding"></div>
2525
2526     <div class="entry">
2527       <div class="title">
2528         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_own_self_balancing_Lego_Segway.html">My own self balancing Lego Segway</a>
2529       </div>
2530       <div class="date">
2531          4th November 2016
2532       </div>
2533       <div class="body">
2534         <p>A while back I received a Gyro sensor for the NXT
2535 <a href="mindstorms.lego.com">Mindstorms</a> controller as a birthday
2536 present.  It had been on my wishlist for a while, because I wanted to
2537 build a Segway like balancing lego robot.  I had already built
2538 <a href="http://www.nxtprograms.com/NXT2/segway/">a simple balancing
2539 robot</a> with the kids, using the light/color sensor included in the
2540 NXT kit as the balance sensor, but it was not working very well.  It
2541 could balance for a while, but was very sensitive to the light
2542 condition in the room and the reflective properties of the surface and
2543 would fall over after a short while.  I wanted something more robust,
2544 and had
2545 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=NGY1044">the
2546 gyro sensor from HiTechnic</a> I believed would solve it on my
2547 wishlist for some years before it suddenly showed up as a gift from my
2548 loved ones. :)</p>
2549
2550 <p>Unfortunately I have not had time to sit down and play with it
2551 since then.  But that changed some days ago, when I was searching for
2552 lego segway information and came across a recipe from HiTechnic for
2553 building
2554 <a href="http://www.hitechnic.com/blog/gyro-sensor/htway/">the
2555 HTWay</a>, a segway like balancing robot.  Build instructions and
2556 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/upload/786-HTWayC.nxc">source
2557 code</a> was included, so it was just a question of putting it all
2558 together.  And thanks to the great work of many Debian developers, the
2559 compiler needed to build the source for the NXT is already included in
2560 Debian, so I was read to go in less than an hour.  The resulting robot
2561 do not look very impressive in its simplicity:</p>
2562
2563 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-robot.jpeg"></p>
2564
2565 <p>Because I lack the infrared sensor used to control the robot in the
2566 design from HiTechnic, I had to comment out the last task
2567 (taskControl).  I simply placed /* and */ around it get the program
2568 working without that sensor present.  Now it balances just fine until
2569 the battery status run low:</p>
2570
2571 <p align="center"><video width="70%" controls="true">
2572    <source src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-balancing.ogv" type="video/ogg">
2573 </video></p>
2574
2575 <p>Now we would like to teach it how to follow a line and take remote
2576 control instructions using the included Bluetooth receiver in the NXT.</p>
2577
2578 <p>If you, like me, love LEGO and want to make sure we find the tools
2579 they need to work with LEGO in Debian and all our derivative
2580 distributions like Ubuntu, check out
2581 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the LEGO designers
2582 project page</a> and join the Debian LEGO team.  Personally I own a
2583 RCX and NXT controller (no EV3), and would like to make sure the
2584 Debian tools needed to program the systems I own work as they
2585 should.</p>
2586
2587       </div>
2588       <div class="tags">
2589
2590
2591         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
2592
2593
2594       </div>
2595     </div>
2596     <div class="padding"></div>
2597
2598     <div class="entry">
2599       <div class="title">
2600         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile phone</a>
2601       </div>
2602       <div class="date">
2603         10th October 2016
2604       </div>
2605       <div class="body">
2606         <p>In July
2607 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html">I
2608 wrote how to get the Signal Chrome/Chromium app working</a> without
2609 the ability to receive SMS messages (aka without a cell phone).  It is
2610 time to share some experiences and provide an updated setup.</p>
2611
2612 <p>The Signal app have worked fine for several months now, and I use
2613 it regularly to chat with my loved ones.  I had a major snag at the
2614 end of my summer vacation, when the the app completely forgot my
2615 setup, identity and keys.  The reason behind this major mess was
2616 running out of disk space.  To avoid that ever happening again I have
2617 started storing everything in <tt>userdata/</tt> in git, to be able to
2618 roll back to an earlier version if the files are wiped by mistake.  I
2619 had to use it once after introducing the git backup.  When rolling
2620 back to an earlier version, one need to use the 'reset session' option
2621 in Signal to get going, and notify the people you talk with about the
2622 problem.  I assume there is some sequence number tracking in the
2623 protocol to detect rollback attacks.  The git repository is rather big
2624 (674 MiB so far), but I have not tried to figure out if some of the
2625 content can be added to a .gitignore file due to lack of spare
2626 time.</p>
2627
2628 <p>I've also hit the 90 days timeout blocking, and noticed that this
2629 make it impossible to send messages using Signal.  I could still
2630 receive them, but had to patch the code with a new timestamp to send.
2631 I believe the timeout is added by the developers to force people to
2632 upgrade to the latest version of the app, even when there is no
2633 protocol changes, to reduce the version skew among the user base and
2634 thus try to keep the number of support requests down.</p>
2635
2636 <p>Since my original recipe, the Signal source code changed slightly,
2637 making the old patch fail to apply cleanly.  Below is an updated
2638 patch, including the shell wrapper I use to start Signal.  The
2639 original version required a new user to locate the JavaScript console
2640 and call a function from there.  I got help from a friend with more
2641 JavaScript knowledge than me to modify the code to provide a GUI
2642 button instead.  This mean that to get started you just need to run
2643 the wrapper and click the 'Register without mobile phone' to get going
2644 now.  I've also modified the timeout code to always set it to 90 days
2645 in the future, to avoid having to patch the code regularly.</p>
2646
2647 <p>So, the updated recipe for Debian Jessie:</p>
2648
2649 <ol>
2650
2651 <li>First, install required packages to get the source code and the
2652 browser you need.  Signal only work with Chrome/Chromium, as far as I
2653 know, so you need to install it.
2654
2655 <pre>
2656 apt install git tor chromium
2657 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
2658 </pre></li>
2659
2660 <li>Modify the source code using command listed in the the patch
2661 block below.</li>
2662
2663 <li>Start Signal using the run-signal-app wrapper (for example using
2664 <tt>`pwd`/run-signal-app</tt>).
2665
2666 <li>Click on the 'Register without mobile phone', will in a phone
2667 number you can receive calls to the next minute, receive the
2668 verification code and enter it into the form field and press
2669 'Register'.  Note, the phone number you use will be user Signal
2670 username, ie the way others can find you on Signal.</li>
2671
2672 <li>You can now use Signal to contact others.  Note, new contacts do
2673 not show up in the contact list until you restart Signal, and there is
2674 no way to assign names to Contacts.  There is also no way to create or
2675 update chat groups.  I suspect this is because the web app do not have
2676 a associated contact database.</li>
2677
2678 </ol>
2679
2680 <p>I am still a bit uneasy about using Signal, because of the way its
2681 main author moxie0 reject federation and accept dependencies to major
2682 corporations like Google (part of the code is fetched from Google) and
2683 Amazon (the central coordination point is owned by Amazon).  See for
2684 example
2685 <a href="https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37">the
2686 LibreSignal issue tracker</a> for a thread documenting the authors
2687 view on these issues.  But the network effect is strong in this case,
2688 and several of the people I want to communicate with already use
2689 Signal.  Perhaps we can all move to <a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a>
2690 once it <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/830265">work on my
2691 laptop</a>?  It already work on Windows and Android, and is included
2692 in <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ring">Debian</a> and
2693 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ring">Ubuntu</a>, but not
2694 working on Debian Stable.</p>
2695
2696 <p>Anyway, this is the patch I apply to the Signal code to get it
2697 working.  It switch to the production servers, disable to timeout,
2698 make registration easier and add the shell wrapper:</p>
2699
2700 <pre>
2701 cd Signal-Desktop; cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p1
2702 diff --git a/js/background.js b/js/background.js
2703 index 24b4c1d..579345f 100644
2704 --- a/js/background.js
2705 +++ b/js/background.js
2706 @@ -33,9 +33,9 @@
2707          });
2708      });
2709
2710 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
2711 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org';
2712      var SERVER_PORTS = [80, 4433, 8443];
2713 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
2714 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
2715      var messageReceiver;
2716      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
2717          if (messageReceiver) {
2718 diff --git a/js/expire.js b/js/expire.js
2719 index 639aeae..beb91c3 100644
2720 --- a/js/expire.js
2721 +++ b/js/expire.js
2722 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
2723  ;(function() {
2724      'use strict';
2725 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
2726 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = Date.now() + (90 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
2727
2728      window.extension = window.extension || {};
2729
2730 diff --git a/js/views/install_view.js b/js/views/install_view.js
2731 index 7816f4f..1d6233b 100644
2732 --- a/js/views/install_view.js
2733 +++ b/js/views/install_view.js
2734 @@ -38,7 +38,8 @@
2735              return {
2736                  'click .step1': this.selectStep.bind(this, 1),
2737                  'click .step2': this.selectStep.bind(this, 2),
2738 -                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3)
2739 +                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3),
2740 +                'click .callreg': function() { extension.install('standalone') },
2741              };
2742          },
2743          clearQR: function() {
2744 diff --git a/options.html b/options.html
2745 index dc0f28e..8d709f6 100644
2746 --- a/options.html
2747 +++ b/options.html
2748 @@ -14,7 +14,10 @@
2749          &lt;div class='nav'>
2750            &lt;h1>{{ installWelcome }}&lt;/h1>
2751            &lt;p>{{ installTagline }}&lt;/p>
2752 -          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a> &lt;/div>
2753 +          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a>
2754 +           &lt;br> &lt;a class="button callreg">Register without mobile phone&lt;/a>
2755 +
2756 +         &lt;/div>
2757            &lt;span class='dot step1 selected'>&lt;/span>
2758            &lt;span class='dot step2'>&lt;/span>
2759            &lt;span class='dot step3'>&lt;/span>
2760 --- /dev/null   2016-10-07 09:55:13.730181472 +0200
2761 +++ b/run-signal-app   2016-10-10 08:54:09.434172391 +0200
2762 @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
2763 +#!/bin/sh
2764 +set -e
2765 +cd $(dirname $0)
2766 +mkdir -p userdata
2767 +userdata="`pwd`/userdata"
2768 +if [ -d "$userdata" ] && [ ! -d "$userdata/.git" ] ; then
2769 +    (cd $userdata && git init)
2770 +fi
2771 +(cd $userdata && git add . && git commit -m "Current status." || true)
2772 +exec chromium \
2773 +  --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
2774 +  --user-data-dir=$userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
2775 EOF
2776 chmod a+rx run-signal-app
2777 </pre>
2778
2779 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2780 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2781 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2782
2783       </div>
2784       <div class="tags">
2785
2786
2787         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
2788
2789
2790       </div>
2791     </div>
2792     <div class="padding"></div>
2793
2794     <div class="entry">
2795       <div class="title">
2796         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram__Appstream_and_udev_make_life_as_a_LEGO_builder_easier.html">Isenkram, Appstream and udev make life as a LEGO builder easier</a>
2797       </div>
2798       <div class="date">
2799          7th October 2016
2800       </div>
2801       <div class="body">
2802         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
2803 system</a> provide a practical and easy way to figure out which
2804 packages support the hardware in a given machine.  The command line
2805 tool <tt>isenkram-lookup</tt> and the tasksel options provide a
2806 convenient way to list and install packages relevant for the current
2807 hardware during system installation, both user space packages and
2808 firmware packages. The GUI background daemon on the other hand provide
2809 a pop-up proposing to install packages when a new dongle is inserted
2810 while using the computer.  For example, if you plug in a smart card
2811 reader, the system will ask if you want to install <tt>pcscd</tt> if
2812 that package isn't already installed, and if you plug in a USB video
2813 camera the system will ask if you want to install <tt>cheese</tt> if
2814 cheese is currently missing.  This already work just fine.</p>
2815
2816 <p>But Isenkram depend on a database mapping from hardware IDs to
2817 package names.  When I started no such database existed in Debian, so
2818 I made my own data set and included it with the isenkram package and
2819 made isenkram fetch the latest version of this database from git using
2820 http.  This way the isenkram users would get updated package proposals
2821 as soon as I learned more about hardware related packages.</p>
2822
2823 <p>The hardware is identified using modalias strings.  The modalias
2824 design is from the Linux kernel where most hardware descriptors are
2825 made available as a strings that can be matched using filename style
2826 globbing.  It handle USB, PCI, DMI and a lot of other hardware related
2827 identifiers.</p>
2828
2829 <p>The downside to the Isenkram specific database is that there is no
2830 information about relevant distribution / Debian version, making
2831 isenkram propose obsolete packages too.  But along came AppStream, a
2832 cross distribution mechanism to store and collect metadata about
2833 software packages.  When I heard about the proposal, I contacted the
2834 people involved and suggested to add a hardware matching rule using
2835 modalias strings in the specification, to be able to use AppStream for
2836 mapping hardware to packages.  This idea was accepted and AppStream is
2837 now a great way for a package to announce the hardware it support in a
2838 distribution neutral way.  I wrote
2839 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">a
2840 recipe on how to add such meta-information</a> in a blog post last
2841 December.  If you have a hardware related package in Debian, please
2842 announce the relevant hardware IDs using AppStream.</p>
2843
2844 <p>In Debian, almost all packages that can talk to a LEGO Mindestorms
2845 RCX or NXT unit, announce this support using AppStream.  The effect is
2846 that when you insert such LEGO robot controller into your Debian
2847 machine, Isenkram will propose to install the packages needed to get
2848 it working.  The intention is that this should allow the local user to
2849 start programming his robot controller right away without having to
2850 guess what packages to use or which permissions to fix.</p>
2851
2852 <p>But when I sat down with my son the other day to program our NXT
2853 unit using his Debian Stretch computer, I discovered something
2854 annoying.  The local console user (ie my son) did not get access to
2855 the USB device for programming the unit.  This used to work, but no
2856 longer in Jessie and Stretch.  After some investigation and asking
2857 around on #debian-devel, I discovered that this was because udev had
2858 changed the mechanism used to grant access to local devices.  The
2859 ConsoleKit mechanism from <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>
2860 no longer applied, because LDAP users no longer was added to the
2861 plugdev group during login.  Michael Biebl told me that this method
2862 was obsolete and the new method used ACLs instead.  This was good
2863 news, as the plugdev mechanism is a mess when using a remote user
2864 directory like LDAP.  Using ACLs would make sure a user lost device
2865 access when she logged out, even if the user left behind a background
2866 process which would retain the plugdev membership with the ConsoleKit
2867 setup.  Armed with this knowledge I moved on to fix the access problem
2868 for the LEGO Mindstorms related packages.</p>
2869
2870 <p>The new system uses a udev tag, 'uaccess'.  It can either be
2871 applied directly for a device, or is applied in
2872 /lib/udev/rules.d/70-uaccess.rules for classes of devices.  As the
2873 LEGO Mindstorms udev rules did not have a class, I decided to add the
2874 tag directly in the udev rules files included in the packages.  Here
2875 is one example.  For the nqc C compiler for the RCX, the
2876 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/60-nqc.rules</tt> file now look like this:
2877
2878 <p><pre>
2879 SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="add", ATTR{idVendor}=="0694", ATTR{idProduct}=="0001", \
2880     SYMLINK+="rcx-%k", TAG+="uaccess"
2881 </pre></p>
2882
2883 <p>The key part is the 'TAG+="uaccess"' at the end.  I suspect all
2884 packages using plugdev in their /lib/udev/rules.d/ files should be
2885 changed to use this tag (either directly or indirectly via
2886 <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>).  Perhaps a lintian check should be created
2887 to detect this?</p>
2888
2889 <p>I've been unable to find good documentation on the uaccess feature.
2890 It is unclear to me if the uaccess tag is an internal implementation
2891 detail like the udev-acl tag used by
2892 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>.  If it is, I guess the
2893 indirect method is the preferred way.  Michael
2894 <a href="https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4288">asked for more
2895 documentation from the systemd project</a> and I hope it will make
2896 this clearer.  For now I use the generic classes when they exist and
2897 is already handled by <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>, and add the tag
2898 directly if no such class exist.</p>
2899
2900 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
2901 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
2902 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
2903
2904 <p>To help out making life for LEGO constructors in Debian easier,
2905 please join us on our IRC channel
2906 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> and join
2907 the <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/debian-lego/">Debian
2908 LEGO team</a> in the Alioth project we created yesterday.  A mailing
2909 list is not yet created, but we are working on it. :)</p>
2910
2911 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2912 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2913 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2914
2915       </div>
2916       <div class="tags">
2917
2918
2919         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>.
2920
2921
2922       </div>
2923     </div>
2924     <div class="padding"></div>
2925
2926     <div class="entry">
2927       <div class="title">
2928         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_draft_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_now_public.html">First draft Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook now public</a>
2929       </div>
2930       <div class="date">
2931         30th August 2016
2932       </div>
2933       <div class="body">
2934         <p>In April we
2935 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">started
2936 to work</a> on a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the "open access" book on
2937 how to set up and administrate a Debian system.  Today I am happy to
2938 report that the first draft is now publicly available.  You can find
2939 it on <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/">get the Debian
2940 Administrator's Handbook page</a> (under Other languages).  The first
2941 eight chapters have a first draft translation, and we are working on
2942 proofreading the content.  If you want to help out, please start
2943 contributing using
2944 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
2945 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
2946 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
2947 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
2948 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
2949 contributors</a>.  A good way to contribute is to proofread the text
2950 and update weblate if you find errors.</p>
2951
2952 <p>Our goal is still to make the Norwegian book available on paper as well as
2953 electronic form.</p>
2954
2955       </div>
2956       <div class="tags">
2957
2958
2959         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2960
2961
2962       </div>
2963     </div>
2964     <div class="padding"></div>
2965
2966     <div class="entry">
2967       <div class="title">
2968         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">Coz can help you find bottlenecks in multi-threaded software - nice free software</a>
2969       </div>
2970       <div class="date">
2971         11th August 2016
2972       </div>
2973       <div class="body">
2974         <p>This summer, I read a great article
2975 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">coz:
2976 This Is the Profiler You're Looking For</a>" in USENIX ;login: about
2977 how to profile multi-threaded programs.  It presented a system for
2978 profiling software by running experiences in the running program,
2979 testing how run time performance is affected by "speeding up" parts of
2980 the code to various degrees compared to a normal run.  It does this by
2981 slowing down parallel threads while the "faster up" code is running
2982 and measure how this affect processing time.  The processing time is
2983 measured using probes inserted into the code, either using progress
2984 counters (COZ_PROGRESS) or as latency meters (COZ_BEGIN/COZ_END).  It
2985 can also measure unmodified code by measuring complete the program
2986 runtime and running the program several times instead.</p>
2987
2988 <p>The project and presentation was so inspiring that I would like to
2989 get the system into Debian.  I
2990 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=830708">created
2991 a WNPP request for it</a> and contacted upstream to try to make the
2992 system ready for Debian by sending patches.  The build process need to
2993 be changed a bit to avoid running 'git clone' to get dependencies, and
2994 to include the JavaScript web page used to visualize the collected
2995 profiling information included in the source package.
2996 But I expect that should work out fairly soon.</p>
2997
2998 <p>The way the system work is fairly simple.  To run an coz experiment
2999 on a binary with debug symbols available, start the program like this:
3000
3001 <p><blockquote><pre>
3002 coz run --- program-to-run
3003 </pre></blockquote></p>
3004
3005 <p>This will create a text file profile.coz with the instrumentation
3006 information.  To show what part of the code affect the performance
3007 most, use a web browser and either point it to
3008 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/</a>
3009 or use the copy from git (in the gh-pages branch).  Check out this web
3010 site to have a look at several example profiling runs and get an idea what the end result from the profile runs look like.  To make the
3011 profiling more useful you include &lt;coz.h&gt; and insert the
3012 COZ_PROGRESS or COZ_BEGIN and COZ_END at appropriate places in the
3013 code, rebuild and run the profiler.  This allow coz to do more
3014 targeted experiments.</p>
3015
3016 <p>A video published by ACM
3017 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE0V-p1odPg">presenting the
3018 Coz profiler</a> is available from Youtube.  There is also a paper
3019 from the 25th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles available
3020 titled
3021 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/curtsinger">Coz:
3022 finding code that counts with causal profiling</a>.</p>
3023
3024 <p><a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz">The source code</a>
3025 for Coz is available from github.  It will only build with clang
3026 because it uses a
3027 <a href="https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=55606">C++
3028 feature missing in GCC</a>, but I've submitted
3029 <a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz/pull/67">a patch to solve
3030 it</a> and hope it will be included in the upstream source soon.</p>
3031
3032 <p>Please get in touch if you, like me, would like to see this piece
3033 of software in Debian.  I would very much like some help with the
3034 packaging effort, as I lack the in depth knowledge on how to package
3035 C++ libraries.</p>
3036
3037       </div>
3038       <div class="tags">
3039
3040
3041         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>.
3042
3043
3044       </div>
3045     </div>
3046     <div class="padding"></div>
3047
3048     <div class="entry">
3049       <div class="title">
3050         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sales_number_for_the_Free_Culture_translation__first_half_of_2016.html">Sales number for the Free Culture translation, first half of 2016</a>
3051       </div>
3052       <div class="date">
3053          5th August 2016
3054       </div>
3055       <div class="body">
3056         <p>As my regular readers probably remember, the last year I published
3057 a French and Norwegian translation of the classic
3058 <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free Culture book</a> by the
3059 founder of the Creative Commons movement, Lawrence Lessig.  A bit less
3060 known is the fact that due to the way I created the translations,
3061 using docbook and po4a, I also recreated the English original.  And
3062 because I already had created a new the PDF edition, I published it
3063 too.  The revenue from the books are sent to the Creative Commons
3064 Corporation.  In other words, I do not earn any money from this
3065 project, I just earn the warm fuzzy feeling that the text is available
3066 for a wider audience and more people can learn why the Creative
3067 Commons is needed.</p>
3068
3069 <p>Today, just for fun, I had a look at the sales number over at
3070 Lulu.com, which take care of payment, printing and shipping.  Much to
3071 my surprise, the English edition is selling better than both the
3072 French and Norwegian edition, despite the fact that it has been
3073 available in English since it was first published.  In total, 24 paper
3074 books was sold for USD $19.99 between 2016-01-01 and 2016-07-31:</p>
3075
3076 <table border="0">
3077 <tr><th>Title / language</th><th>Quantity</th></tr>
3078 <tr><td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Culture Libre / French</a></td><td align="right">3</td></tr>
3079 <tr><td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Fri kultur / Norwegian</a></td><td align="right">7</td></tr>
3080 <tr><td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">Free Culture / English</a></td><td align="right">14</td></tr>
3081 </table>
3082
3083 <p>The books are available both from Lulu.com and from large book
3084 stores like Amazon and Barnes&Noble.  Most revenue, around $10 per
3085 book, is sent to the Creative Commons project when the book is sold
3086 directly by Lulu.com.  The other channels give less revenue.  The
3087 summary from Lulu tell me 10 books was sold via the Amazon channel, 10
3088 via Ingram (what is this?) and 4 directly by Lulu.  And Lulu.com tells
3089 me that the revenue sent so far this year is USD $101.42.  No idea
3090 what kind of sales numbers to expect, so I do not know if that is a
3091 good amount of sales for a 10 year old book or not.  But it make me
3092 happy that the buyers find the book, and I hope they enjoy reading it
3093 as much as I did.</p>
3094
3095 <p>The ebook edition is available for free from
3096 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Github</a>.</p>
3097
3098 <p>If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native
3099 language, I would be happy to help make it happen.  Please get in
3100 touch.</p>
3101
3102       </div>
3103       <div class="tags">
3104
3105
3106         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>.
3107
3108
3109       </div>
3110     </div>
3111     <div class="padding"></div>
3112
3113     <div class="entry">
3114       <div class="title">
3115         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Techno_TV_broadcasting_live_across_Norway_and_the_Internet___debconf16___nuug__on__frikanalen.html">Techno TV broadcasting live across Norway and the Internet (#debconf16, #nuug) on @frikanalen</a>
3116       </div>
3117       <div class="date">
3118          1st August 2016
3119       </div>
3120       <div class="body">
3121         <p>Did you know there is a TV channel broadcasting talks from DebConf
3122 16 across an entire country?  Or that there is a TV channel
3123 broadcasting talks by or about
3124 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625529/">Linus Torvalds</a>,
3125 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625599/">Tor</a>,
3126 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/624019/">OpenID</A>,
3127 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625624/">Common Lisp</a>,
3128 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625446/">Civic Tech</a>,
3129 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625090/">EFF founder John Barlow</a>,
3130 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625432/">how to make 3D
3131 printer electronics</a> and many more fascinating topics?  It works
3132 using only free software (all of it
3133 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from Github</a>), and
3134 is administrated using a web browser and a web API.</p>
3135
3136 <p>The TV channel is the Norwegian open channel
3137 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, and I am involved
3138 via <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG member association</a> in
3139 running and developing the software for the channel.  The channel is
3140 organised as a member organisation where its members can upload and
3141 broadcast what they want (think of it as Youtube for national
3142 broadcasting television).  Individuals can broadcast too.  The time
3143 slots are handled on a first come, first serve basis.  Because the
3144 channel have almost no viewers and very few active members, we can
3145 experiment with TV technology without too much flack when we make
3146 mistakes.  And thanks to the few active members, most of the slots on
3147 the schedule are free.  I see this as an opportunity to spread
3148 knowledge about technology and free software, and have a script I run
3149 regularly to fill up all the open slots the next few days with
3150 technology related video.  The end result is a channel I like to
3151 describe as Techno TV - filled with interesting talks and
3152 presentations.</p>
3153
3154 <p>It is available on channel 50 on the Norwegian national digital TV
3155 network (RiksTV).  It is also available as a multicast stream on
3156 Uninett.  And finally, it is available as
3157 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/">a WebM unicast stream</a> from
3158 Frikanalen and NUUG.  Check it out. :)</p>
3159
3160       </div>
3161       <div class="tags">
3162
3163
3164         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>.
3165
3166
3167       </div>
3168     </div>
3169     <div class="padding"></div>
3170
3171     <div class="entry">
3172       <div class="title">
3173         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlocking_HTC_Desire_HD_on_Linux_using_unruu_and_fastboot.html">Unlocking HTC Desire HD on Linux using unruu and fastboot</a>
3174       </div>
3175       <div class="date">
3176          7th July 2016
3177       </div>
3178       <div class="body">
3179         <p>Yesterday, I tried to unlock a HTC Desire HD phone, and it proved
3180 to be a slight challenge.  Here is the recipe if I ever need to do it
3181 again.  It all started by me wanting to try the recipe to set up
3182 <a href="https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardening-android-security-and-privacy">an
3183 hardened Android installation</a> from the Tor project blog on a
3184 device I had access to.  It is a old mobile phone with a broken
3185 microphone The initial idea had been to just
3186 <a href="http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_ace">install
3187 CyanogenMod on it</a>, but did not quite find time to start on it
3188 until a few days ago.</p>
3189
3190 <p>The unlock process is supposed to be simple: (1) Boot into the boot
3191 loader (press volume down and power at the same time), (2) select
3192 'fastboot' before (3) connecting the device via USB to a Linux
3193 machine, (4) request the device identifier token by running 'fastboot
3194 oem get_identifier_token', (5) request the device unlocking key using
3195 the <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader/">HTC developer web
3196 site</a> and unlock the phone using the key file emailed to you.</p>
3197
3198 <p>Unfortunately, this only work fi you have hboot version 2.00.0029
3199 or newer, and the device I was working on had 2.00.0027.  This
3200 apparently can be easily fixed by downloading a Windows program and
3201 running it on your Windows machine, if you accept the terms Microsoft
3202 require you to accept to use Windows - which I do not.  So I had to
3203 come up with a different approach.  I got a lot of help from AndyCap
3204 on #nuug, and would not have been able to get this working without
3205 him.</p>
3206
3207 <p>First I needed to extract the hboot firmware from
3208 <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/ruu/PD9810000_Ace_Sense30_S_hboot_2.00.0029.exe">the
3209 windows binary for HTC Desire HD</a> downloaded as 'the RUU' from HTC.
3210 For this there is is <a href="https://github.com/kmdm/unruu/">a github
3211 project named unruu</a> using libunshield.  The unshield tool did not
3212 recognise the file format, but unruu worked and extracted rom.zip,
3213 containing the new hboot firmware and a text file describing which
3214 devices it would work for.</p>
3215
3216 <p>Next, I needed to get the new firmware into the device.  For this I
3217 followed some instructions
3218 <a href="http://www.htc1guru.com/2013/09/new-ruu-zips-posted/">available
3219 from HTC1Guru.com</a>, and ran these commands as root on a Linux
3220 machine with Debian testing:</p>
3221
3222 <p><pre>
3223 adb reboot-bootloader
3224 fastboot oem rebootRUU
3225 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
3226 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
3227 fastboot reboot
3228 </pre></p>
3229
3230 <p>The flash command apparently need to be done twice to take effect,
3231 as the first is just preparations and the second one do the flashing.
3232 The adb command is just to get to the boot loader menu, so turning the
3233 device on while holding volume down and the power button should work
3234 too.</p>
3235
3236 <p>With the new hboot version in place I could start following the
3237 instructions on the HTC developer web site.  I got the device token
3238 like this:</p>
3239
3240 <p><pre>
3241 fastboot oem get_identifier_token 2>&1 | sed 's/(bootloader) //'
3242 </pre>
3243
3244 <p>And once I got the unlock code via email, I could use it like
3245 this:</p>
3246
3247 <p><pre>
3248 fastboot flash unlocktoken Unlock_code.bin
3249 </pre></p>
3250
3251 <p>And with that final step in place, the phone was unlocked and I
3252 could start stuffing the software of my own choosing into the device.
3253 So far I only inserted a replacement recovery image to wipe the phone
3254 before I start.  We will see what happen next.  Perhaps I should
3255 install <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> on it. :)</p>
3256
3257       </div>
3258       <div class="tags">
3259
3260
3261         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
3262
3263
3264       </div>
3265     </div>
3266     <div class="padding"></div>
3267
3268     <div class="entry">
3269       <div class="title">
3270         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html">How to use the Signal app if you only have a land line (ie no mobile phone)</a>
3271       </div>
3272       <div class="date">
3273          3rd July 2016
3274       </div>
3275       <div class="body">
3276         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to test
3277 <a href="https://whispersystems.org/">the Signal app</a>, as it is
3278 said to provide end to end encrypted communication and several of my
3279 friends and family are already using it.  As I by choice do not own a
3280 mobile phone, this proved to be harder than expected.  And I wanted to
3281 have the source of the client and know that it was the code used on my
3282 machine.  But yesterday I managed to get it working.  I used the
3283 Github source, compared it to the source in
3284 <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/signal-private-messenger/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk?hl=en-US">the
3285 Signal Chrome app</a> available from the Chrome web store, applied
3286 patches to use the production Signal servers, started the app and
3287 asked for the hidden "register without a smart phone" form.  Here is
3288 the recipe how I did it.</p>
3289
3290 <p>First, I fetched the Signal desktop source from Github, using
3291
3292 <pre>
3293 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
3294 </pre>
3295
3296 <p>Next, I patched the source to use the production servers, to be
3297 able to talk to other Signal users:</p>
3298
3299 <pre>
3300 cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p0
3301 diff -ur ./js/background.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js
3302 --- ./js/background.js  2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
3303 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js    2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
3304 @@ -47,8 +47,8 @@
3305          });
3306      });
3307
3308 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
3309 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
3310 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org:4433';
3311 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
3312      var messageReceiver;
3313      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
3314          if (messageReceiver) {
3315 diff -ur ./js/expire.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js
3316 --- ./js/expire.js      2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
3317 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
3318 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
3319  ;(function() {
3320      'use strict';
3321 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
3322 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 1474492690000;
3323
3324      window.extension = window.extension || {};
3325
3326 EOF
3327 </pre>
3328
3329 <p>The first part is changing the servers, and the second is updating
3330 an expiration timestamp.  This timestamp need to be updated regularly.
3331 It is set 90 days in the future by the build process (Gruntfile.js).
3332 The value is seconds since 1970 times 1000, as far as I can tell.</p>
3333
3334 <p>Based on a tip and good help from the #nuug IRC channel, I wrote a
3335 script to launch Signal in Chromium.</p>
3336
3337 <pre>
3338 #!/bin/sh
3339 cd $(dirname $0)
3340 mkdir -p userdata
3341 exec chromium \
3342   --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
3343   --user-data-dir=`pwd`/userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
3344 </pre>
3345
3346 <p> The script start the app and configure Chromium to use the Tor
3347 SOCKS5 proxy to make sure those controlling the Signal servers (today
3348 Amazon and Whisper Systems) as well as those listening on the lines
3349 will have a harder time location my laptop based on the Signal
3350 connections if they use source IP address.</p>
3351
3352 <p>When the script starts, one need to follow the instructions under
3353 "Standalone Registration" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the git
3354 repository.  I right clicked on the Signal window to get up the
3355 Chromium debugging tool, visited the 'Console' tab and wrote
3356 'extension.install("standalone")' on the console prompt to get the
3357 registration form.  Then I entered by land line phone number and
3358 pressed 'Call'.  5 seconds later the phone rang and a robot voice
3359 repeated the verification code three times.  After entering the number
3360 into the verification code field in the form, I could start using
3361 Signal from my laptop.
3362
3363 <p>As far as I can tell, The Signal app will leak who is talking to
3364 whom and thus who know who to those controlling the central server,
3365 but such leakage is hard to avoid with a centrally controlled server
3366 setup.  It is something to keep in mind when using Signal - the
3367 content of your chats are harder to intercept, but the meta data
3368 exposing your contact network is available to people you do not know.
3369 So better than many options, but not great.  And sadly the usage is
3370 connected to my land line, thus allowing those controlling the server
3371 to associate it to my home and person.  I would prefer it if only
3372 those I knew could tell who I was on Signal.  There are options
3373 avoiding such information leakage, but most of my friends are not
3374 using them, so I am stuck with Signal for now.</p>
3375
3376 <p><strong>Update 2017-01-10</strong>: There is an updated blog post
3377 on this topic in
3378 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience
3379 and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile
3380 phone</a>.</p>
3381
3382       </div>
3383       <div class="tags">
3384
3385
3386         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
3387
3388
3389       </div>
3390     </div>
3391     <div class="padding"></div>
3392
3393     <div class="entry">
3394       <div class="title">
3395         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?</a>
3396       </div>
3397       <div class="date">
3398          6th June 2016
3399       </div>
3400       <div class="body">
3401         <p>When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out
3402 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">which
3403 multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats /
3404 MIME types</a>, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types
3405 the various players claimed support for.  The range was from 55 to 130
3406 MIME types.  I suspect most media formats are supported by all
3407 players, but this is not really reflected in the MimeTypes values in
3408 their desktop files.  There are probably also some bogus MIME types
3409 listed, but it is hard to identify which one this is.</p>
3410
3411 <p>Anyway, in the mean time I got in touch with upstream for some of
3412 the players suggesting to add more MIME types to their desktop files,
3413 and decided to spend some time myself improving the situation for my
3414 favorite media player VLC.  The fixes for VLC entered Debian unstable
3415 yesterday. The complete list of MIME types can be seen on the
3416 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">Multimedia
3417 player MIME type support status</a> Debian wiki page.</p>
3418
3419 <p>The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?  It is VLC, followed by
3420 totem, parole, kplayer, gnome-mpv, mpv, smplayer, mplayer-gui and
3421 kmplayer.  I am sure some of the other players desktop files support
3422 several of the formats currently listed as working only with vlc,
3423 toten and parole.</p>
3424
3425 <p>A sad observation is that only 14 MIME types are listed as
3426 supported by all the tested multimedia players in Debian in their
3427 desktop files: audio/mpeg, audio/vnd.rn-realaudio, audio/x-mpegurl,
3428 audio/x-ms-wma, audio/x-scpls, audio/x-wav, video/mp4, video/mpeg,
3429 video/quicktime, video/vnd.rn-realvideo, video/x-matroska,
3430 video/x-ms-asf, video/x-ms-wmv and video/x-msvideo.  Personally I find
3431 it sad that video/ogg and video/webm is not supported by all the media
3432 players in Debian.  As far as I can tell, all of them can handle both
3433 formats.</p>
3434
3435       </div>
3436       <div class="tags">
3437
3438
3439         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>.
3440
3441
3442       </div>
3443     </div>
3444     <div class="padding"></div>
3445
3446     <div class="entry">
3447       <div class="title">
3448         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_program_should_be_able_to_open_its_own_files_on_Linux.html">A program should be able to open its own files on Linux</a>
3449       </div>
3450       <div class="date">
3451          5th June 2016
3452       </div>
3453       <div class="body">
3454         <p>Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I
3455 decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a
3456 talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine.  I
3457 wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed
3458 the day before I would give the talk.  The next day I took a plane to
3459 the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I
3460 started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover
3461 that kpresenter refused to load its own data file.  I cursed a bit and
3462 started making the slides again from memory, to have something to
3463 present when I arrived.  I tested that the saved files could be
3464 loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued.  I continued to polish the
3465 slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer
3466 be loaded into kpresenter.  In the end I had to rewrite the slides
3467 three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and
3468 shorter.  After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem &ndash;
3469 kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand.
3470 Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great
3471 program to make slides.  The point I'm trying to make is that we
3472 expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is
3473 embarrassing to its developers if it can't.</p>
3474
3475 <p>Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data
3476 files from the desktop file browser?  It is not a uncommon problem.  A
3477 while back I discovered that the screencast recorder
3478 gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file
3479 browser would refuse to open.  No video player claimed to understand
3480 such file.  I tracked down the cause being <tt>file --mime-type</tt>
3481 returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had
3482 installed listed as a MIME type they would understand.  I asked for
3483 <a href="http://bugs.gw.com/view.php?id=382">file to change its
3484 behavour</a> and use the MIME type video/ogg instead.  I also asked
3485 several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give
3486 the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files.  After a
3487 while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the
3488 output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly.</p>
3489
3490 <p>But history repeats itself.  A few days ago I tested the music
3491 system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file
3492 browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files
3493 (*.rg).  I've reported <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/825993">the
3494 rosegarden problem to BTS</a> and a fix is commited to git and will be
3495 included in the next upload.  To increase the chance of me remembering
3496 how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files
3497 from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it.</p>
3498
3499 <p>The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types.
3500 There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file.  The output from
3501 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> mentioned above, and the content of the
3502 shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/).  The file MIME
3503 type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this
3504 information is collected from
3505 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/">the
3506 desktop files</a> available in /usr/share/applications/.  If there is
3507 one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is
3508 activated when asking to open a given file.  If there are more, one
3509 can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and
3510 selecting the wanted one using 'Open with' or similar.  In general
3511 this work well.  But it depend on each program picking a good MIME
3512 type (preferably
3513 <a href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">a
3514 MIME type registered with IANA</a>), file and/or the shared MIME
3515 registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME
3516 type in its list of supported MIME types.</p>
3517
3518 <p>The <tt>/usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml</tt> entry for
3519 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec">the
3520 Shared MIME database</a> look like this:</p>
3521
3522 <p><blockquote><pre>
3523 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
3524 &lt;mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info"&gt;
3525   &lt;mime-type type="audio/x-rosegarden"&gt;
3526     &lt;sub-class-of type="application/x-gzip"/&gt;
3527     &lt;comment&gt;Rosegarden project file&lt;/comment&gt;
3528     &lt;glob pattern="*.rg"/&gt;
3529   &lt;/mime-type&gt;
3530 &lt;/mime-info&gt;
3531 </pre></blockquote></p>
3532
3533 <p>This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip
3534 (it is a gzipped XML file).  Note, it is much better to use an
3535 official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own
3536 unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden.</p>
3537
3538 <p>The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list
3539 audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the
3540 file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:</p>
3541
3542 <p><blockquote><pre>
3543 % grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
3544 MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
3545 X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
3546 %
3547 </pre></blockquote></p>
3548
3549 <p>The fix was to add "audio/x-rosegarden;" at the end of the
3550 MimeType= line.</p>
3551
3552 <p>If you run into a file which fail to open the correct program when
3553 selected from the file browser, please check out the output from
3554 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> for the file, ensure the file ending and
3555 MIME type is registered somewhere under /usr/share/mime/ and check
3556 that some desktop file under /usr/share/applications/ is claiming
3557 support for this MIME type.  If not, please report a bug to have it
3558 fixed. :)</p>
3559
3560       </div>
3561       <div class="tags">
3562
3563
3564         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>.
3565
3566
3567       </div>
3568     </div>
3569     <div class="padding"></div>
3570
3571     <div class="entry">
3572       <div class="title">
3573         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Tor___from_its_creators_mouth_11_years_ago.html">Tor - from its creators mouth 11 years ago</a>
3574       </div>
3575       <div class="date">
3576         28th May 2016
3577       </div>
3578       <div class="body">
3579         <p>A little more than 11 years ago, one of the creators of Tor, and
3580 the current President of <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">the Tor
3581 project</a>, Roger Dingledine, gave a talk for the members of the
3582 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group</a> (NUUG).  A
3583 video of the talk was recorded, and today, thanks to the great help
3584 from David Noble, I finally was able to publish the video of the talk
3585 on Frikanalen, the Norwegian open channel TV station where NUUG
3586 currently publishes its talks.  You can
3587 <a href="http://frikanalen.no/se">watch the live stream using a web
3588 browser</a> with WebM support, or check out the recording on the video
3589 on demand page for the talk
3590 "<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625599">Tor: Anonymous
3591 communication for the US Department of Defence...and you.</a>".</p>
3592
3593 <p>Here is the video included for those of you using browsers with
3594 HTML video and Ogg Theora support:</p>
3595
3596 <p><video width="70%" poster="http://simula.gunkies.org/media/625599/large_thumb/20050421-tor-frikanalen.jpg" controls>
3597   <source src="http://simula.gunkies.org/media/625599/theora/20050421-tor-frikanalen.ogv" type="video/ogg"/>
3598 </video></p>
3599
3600 <p>I guess the gist of the talk can be summarised quite simply: If you
3601 want to help the military in USA (and everyone else), use Tor. :)</p>
3602
3603       </div>
3604       <div class="tags">
3605
3606
3607         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>.
3608
3609
3610       </div>
3611     </div>
3612     <div class="padding"></div>
3613
3614     <div class="entry">
3615       <div class="title">
3616         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_with_PackageKit_support___new_version_0_23_available_in_Debian_unstable.html">Isenkram with PackageKit support - new version 0.23 available in Debian unstable</a>
3617       </div>
3618       <div class="date">
3619         25th May 2016
3620       </div>
3621       <div class="body">
3622         <p><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">The isenkram
3623 system</a> is a user-focused solution in Debian for handling hardware
3624 related packages.  The idea is to have a database of mappings between
3625 hardware and packages, and pop up a dialog suggesting for the user to
3626 install the packages to use a given hardware dongle.  Some use cases
3627 are when you insert a Yubikey, it proposes to install the software
3628 needed to control it; when you insert a braille reader list it
3629 proposes to install the packages needed to send text to the reader;
3630 and when you insert a ColorHug screen calibrator it suggests to
3631 install the driver for it.  The system work well, and even have a few
3632 command line tools to install firmware packages and packages for the
3633 hardware already in the machine (as opposed to hotpluggable hardware).</p>
3634
3635 <p>The system was initially written using aptdaemon, because I found
3636 good documentation and example code on how to use it.  But aptdaemon
3637 is going away and is generally being replaced by
3638 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/">PackageKit</a>,
3639 so Isenkram needed a rewrite.  And today, thanks to the great patch
3640 from my college Sunil Mohan Adapa in the FreedomBox project, the
3641 rewrite finally took place.  I've just uploaded a new version of
3642 Isenkram into Debian Unstable with the patch included, and the default
3643 for the background daemon is now to use PackageKit.  To check it out,
3644 install the <tt>isenkram</tt> package and insert some hardware dongle
3645 and see if it is recognised.</p>
3646
3647 <p>If you want to know what kind of packages isenkram would propose for
3648 the machine it is running on, you can check out the isenkram-lookup
3649 program.  This is what it look like on a Thinkpad X230:</p>
3650
3651 <p><blockquote><pre>
3652 % isenkram-lookup
3653 bluez
3654 cheese
3655 fprintd
3656 fprintd-demo
3657 gkrellm-thinkbat
3658 hdapsd
3659 libpam-fprintd
3660 pidgin-blinklight
3661 thinkfan
3662 tleds
3663 tp-smapi-dkms
3664 tp-smapi-source
3665 tpb
3666 %p
3667 </pre></blockquote></p>
3668
3669 <p>The hardware mappings come from several places.  The preferred way
3670 is for packages to announce their hardware support using
3671 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
3672 cross distribution appstream system</a>.
3673 See
3674 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">previous
3675 blog posts about isenkram</a> to learn how to do that.</p>
3676
3677       </div>
3678       <div class="tags">
3679
3680
3681         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>.
3682
3683
3684       </div>
3685     </div>
3686     <div class="padding"></div>
3687
3688     <div class="entry">
3689       <div class="title">
3690         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Discharge_rate_estimate_in_new_battery_statistics_collector_for_Debian.html">Discharge rate estimate in new battery statistics collector for Debian</a>
3691       </div>
3692       <div class="date">
3693         23rd May 2016
3694       </div>
3695       <div class="body">
3696         <p>Yesterday I updated the
3697 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats
3698 package in Debian</a> with a few patches sent to me by skilled and
3699 enterprising users.  There were some nice user and visible changes.
3700 First of all, both desktop menu entries now work.  A design flaw in
3701 one of the script made the history graph fail to show up (its PNG was
3702 dumped in ~/.xsession-errors) if no controlling TTY was available.
3703 The script worked when called from the command line, but not when
3704 called from the desktop menu.  I changed this to look for a DISPLAY
3705 variable or a TTY before deciding where to draw the graph, and now the
3706 graph window pop up as expected.</p>
3707
3708 <p>The next new feature is a discharge rate estimator in one of the
3709 graphs (the one showing the last few hours).  New is also the user of
3710 colours showing charging in blue and discharge in red.  The percentages
3711 of this graph is relative to last full charge, not battery design
3712 capacity.</p>
3713
3714 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-rate.png"/></p>
3715
3716 <p>The other graph show the entire history of the collected battery
3717 statistics, comparing it to the design capacity of the battery to
3718 visualise how the battery life time get shorter over time.  The red
3719 line in this graph is what the previous graph considers 100 percent:
3720
3721 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-history.png"/></p>
3722
3723 <p>In this graph you can see that I only charge the battery to 80
3724 percent of last full capacity, and how the capacity of the battery is
3725 shrinking. :(</p>
3726
3727 <p>The last new feature is in the collector, which now will handle
3728 more hardware models.  On some hardware, Linux power supply
3729 information is stored in /sys/class/power_supply/ACAD/, while the
3730 collector previously only looked in /sys/class/power_supply/AC/.  Now
3731 both are checked to figure if there is power connected to the
3732 machine.</p>
3733
3734 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
3735 check out the
3736 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
3737 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
3738 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from <a
3739 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
3740 Patches are very welcome.</p>
3741
3742 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3743 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3744 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3745
3746       </div>
3747       <div class="tags">
3748
3749
3750         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>.
3751
3752
3753       </div>
3754     </div>
3755     <div class="padding"></div>
3756
3757     <div class="entry">
3758       <div class="title">
3759         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/French_edition_of_Lawrence_Lessigs_book_Cultura_Libre_on_Amazon_and_Barnes___Noble.html">French edition of Lawrence Lessigs book Cultura Libre on Amazon and Barnes & Noble</a>
3760       </div>
3761       <div class="date">
3762         21st May 2016
3763       </div>
3764       <div class="body">
3765         <p>A few weeks ago the French paperback edition of Lawrence Lessigs
3766 2004 book Cultura Libre was published.  Today I noticed that the book
3767 is now available from book stores.  You can now buy it from
3768 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Libre-French-Lawrence-Lessig/dp/8269018260">Amazon</a>
3769 ($19.99),
3770 <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/culture-libre-lawrence-lessig/1123776705">Barnes
3771 & Noble</a> ($?) and as always from
3772 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Lulu.com</a>
3773 ($19.99).  The revenue is donated to the Creative Commons project.  If
3774 you buy from Lulu.com, they currently get $10.59, while if you buy
3775 from one of the book stores most of the revenue go to the book store
3776 and the Creative Commons project get much (not sure how much
3777 less).</p>
3778
3779 <p>I was a bit surprised to discover that there is a kindle edition
3780 sold by Amazon Digital Services LLC on Amazon.  Not quite sure how
3781 that edition was created, but if you want to download a electronic
3782 edition (PDF, EPUB, Mobi) generated from the same files used to create
3783 the paperback edition, they are
3784 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">available
3785 from github</a>.</p>
3786
3787       </div>
3788       <div class="tags">
3789
3790
3791         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>.
3792
3793
3794       </div>
3795     </div>
3796     <div class="padding"></div>
3797
3798     <div class="entry">
3799       <div class="title">
3800         <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>
3801       </div>
3802       <div class="date">
3803         19th May 2016
3804       </div>
3805       <div class="body">
3806         <p>I just donated to the
3807 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">NUUG defence
3808 "fond"</a> to fund the effort in Norway to get the seizure of the news
3809 site popcorn-time.no tested in court.  I hope everyone that agree with
3810 me will do the same.</p>
3811
3812 <p>Would you be worried if you knew the police in your country could
3813 hijack DNS domains of news sites covering free software system without
3814 talking to a judge first?  I am.  What if the free software system
3815 combined search engine lookups, bittorrent downloads and video playout
3816 and was called Popcorn Time?  Would that affect your view?  It still
3817 make me worried.</p>
3818
3819 <p>In March 2016, the Norwegian police seized (as in forced NORID to
3820 change the IP address pointed to by it to one controlled by the
3821 police) the DNS domain popcorn-time.no, without any supervision from
3822 the courts.  I did not know about the web site back then, and assumed
3823 the courts had been involved, and was very surprised when I discovered
3824 that the police had hijacked the DNS domain without asking a judge for
3825 permission first.  I was even more surprised when I had a look at
3826 <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://popcorn-time.no">the web
3827 site content on the Internet Archive</A>, and only found news coverage
3828 about Popcorn Time, not any material published without the right
3829 holders permissions.</p>
3830
3831 <p>The seizure was widely covered in the Norwegian press (see for
3832 example <a href="http://www.hegnar.no/Nyheter/Naeringsliv/2016/03/Popcorn-time.no-beslaglagt-av-OEkokrim">Hegnar Online</a> and
3833 <a href="http://itavisen.no/2016/03/08/okokrim-har-beslaglagt-popcorn-time-no/">ITavisen<a/>
3834 and
3835 <a href="http://www.nrk.no/kultur/okokrim-gar-til-aksjon-mot-popcorn-time-1.12842452">NRK</a>),
3836 at first due to the press release sent out by Økokrim, but then based
3837 on
3838 <a href="http://blogg.torvund.net/2016/03/09/okokrims-beslag-i-domenet-popcorn-time-no/">protests
3839 from the law professor Olav Torvund</a> and
3840 <a href="http://www.klassekampen.no/article/20160311/ARTICLE/160319995">lawyer
3841 Jon Wessel-Aas</a>.  It even got some
3842 <a href="https://torrentfreak.com/norwegian-authorities-sued-over-popcorn-time-domain-seizure-160418/">coverage
3843 on TorrentFreak</a>.</p>
3844
3845 <p>I
3846 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html">
3847 wrote about the case a month ago</a>, when the
3848 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> (NUUG),
3849 where I am an active member, decided to ask the courts to test this seizure.
3850 The request was denied, but NUUG and its co-requestor EFN have not
3851 given up, and now they are rallying for support to get the seizure
3852 legally challenged.  They accept both bank and Bitcoin transfer for
3853 those that want to support the request.</p>
3854
3855 <p>If you as me believe news sites about free software should not be
3856 censored, even if the free software have both legal and illegal
3857 applications, and that DNS hijacking should be tested by the courts, I
3858 suggest you <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">show
3859 your support by donating to NUUG</a>.</a>
3860
3861       </div>
3862       <div class="tags">
3863
3864
3865         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>.
3866
3867
3868       </div>
3869     </div>
3870     <div class="padding"></div>
3871
3872     <div class="entry">
3873       <div class="title">
3874         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html">Debian now with ZFS on Linux included</a>
3875       </div>
3876       <div class="date">
3877         12th May 2016
3878       </div>
3879       <div class="body">
3880         <p>Today, after many years of hard work from many people,
3881 <a href="http://zfsonlinux.org/">ZFS for Linux</a> finally entered
3882 Debian.  The package status can be seen on
3883 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/zfs-linux">the package tracker
3884 for zfs-linux</a>.  and
3885 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
3886 team status page</a>. If you want to help out, please join us.
3887 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">The
3888 source code</a> is available via git on Alioth.  It would also be
3889 great if you could help out with
3890 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dkms">the dkms package</a>, as
3891 it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.</p>
3892
3893       </div>
3894       <div class="tags">
3895
3896
3897         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>.
3898
3899
3900       </div>
3901     </div>
3902     <div class="padding"></div>
3903
3904     <div class="entry">
3905       <div class="title">
3906         <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>
3907       </div>
3908       <div class="date">
3909          8th May 2016
3910       </div>
3911       <div class="body">
3912         <p><strong>Where I set out to figure out which multimedia player in
3913 Debian claim support for most file formats.</strong></p>
3914
3915 <p>A few years ago, I had a look at the media support for Browser
3916 plugins in Debian, to get an idea which plugins to include in Debian
3917 Edu.  I created a script to extract the set of supported MIME types
3918 for each plugin, and used this to find out which multimedia browser
3919 plugin supported most file formats / media types.
3920 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">The
3921 result</a> can still be seen on the Debian wiki, even though it have
3922 not been updated for a while.  But browser plugins are less relevant
3923 these days, so I thought it was time to look at standalone
3924 players.</p>
3925
3926 <p>A few days ago I was tired of VLC not being listed as a viable
3927 player when I wanted to play videos from the Norwegian National
3928 Broadcasting Company, and decided to investigate why.  The cause is a
3929 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/822245">missing MIME type in the VLC
3930 desktop file</a>.  In the process I wrote a script to compare the set
3931 of MIME types announced in the desktop file and the browser plugin,
3932 only to discover that there is quite a large difference between the
3933 two for VLC.  This discovery made me dig up the script I used to
3934 compare browser plugins, and adjust it to compare desktop files
3935 instead, to try to figure out which multimedia player in Debian
3936 support most file formats.</p>
3937
3938 <p>The result can be seen on the Debian Wiki, as
3939 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">a
3940 table listing all MIME types supported by one of the packages included
3941 in the table</a>, with the package supporting most MIME types being
3942 listed first in the table.</p>
3943
3944 </p>The best multimedia player in Debian?  It is totem, followed by
3945 parole, kplayer, mpv, vlc, smplayer mplayer-gui gnome-mpv and
3946 kmplayer.  Time for the other players to update their announced MIME
3947 support?</p>
3948
3949       </div>
3950       <div class="tags">
3951
3952
3953         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>.
3954
3955
3956       </div>
3957     </div>
3958     <div class="padding"></div>
3959
3960     <div class="entry">
3961       <div class="title">
3962         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html">The Pyra - handheld computer with Debian preinstalled</a>
3963       </div>
3964       <div class="date">
3965          4th May 2016
3966       </div>
3967       <div class="body">
3968         A friend of mine made me aware of
3969 <a href="https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/">The Pyra</a>, a
3970 handheld computer which will be delivered with Debian preinstalled.  I
3971 would love to get one of those for my birthday. :)</p>
3972
3973 <p>The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB
3974 plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a 5"
3975 LCD touch screen.  The 6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole
3976 day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests
3977 confirming this.  The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the
3978 last I heard last night was that 22 more orders were needed before
3979 production started.</p>
3980
3981 <p>As far as I know, this is the first handheld preinstalled with
3982 Debian.  Please let me know if you know of any others.  Is it the
3983 first computer being sold with Debian preinstalled?</p>
3984
3985       </div>
3986       <div class="tags">
3987
3988
3989         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>.
3990
3991
3992       </div>
3993     </div>
3994     <div class="padding"></div>
3995
3996     <div class="entry">
3997       <div class="title">
3998         <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>
3999       </div>
4000       <div class="date">
4001         18th April 2016
4002       </div>
4003       <div class="body">
4004         <p>It is days like today I am really happy to be a member of
4005 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User group</a>, a
4006 member association for those of us believing in free software, open
4007 standards and unix-like operating systems.  NUUG announced today it
4008 will
4009 <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
4010 to bring the seizure of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no as
4011 unlawful</a>, to stand up for the principle that writing about a
4012 controversial topic is not infringing copyrights, and censuring web
4013 pages by hijacking DNS domain should be decided by the courts, not the
4014 police.  The DNS domain was seized by the Norwegian National Authority
4015 for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime
4016 a month ago.  I hope this bring more paying members to NUUG to give
4017 the association the financial muscle needed to bring this case as far
4018 as it must go to stop this kind of DNS hijacking.</p>
4019
4020       </div>
4021       <div class="tags">
4022
4023
4024         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>.
4025
4026
4027       </div>
4028     </div>
4029     <div class="padding"></div>
4030
4031     <div class="entry">
4032       <div class="title">
4033         <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>
4034       </div>
4035       <div class="date">
4036         13th April 2016
4037       </div>
4038       <div class="body">
4039         <p>I first got to know I.F. Stone when I came across an article by Jon
4040 Schwarz on The Intercept
4041 <a href="https://theintercept.com/2015/05/07/new-documentary-legacy-f-stone/">about
4042 his extraordinary contribution to investigative journalism in
4043 USA</a>. The article is about a new documentary in two parts
4044 (<a href="https://vimeo.com/123974841">part one is 12 minutes</a> and
4045 <a href="https://vimeo.com/123974842">part two is 30 minutes</a>), and
4046 I found both truly fascinating.  It is amazing what he was able to
4047 find by digging up public sources and government papers.  He
4048 documented lots of government abuse and cover ups, and I find
4049 <a href="http://www.ifstone.org/weekly.php">his weekly news letters</a>
4050 inspiring to read even today.</p>
4051
4052 <p><blockquote>
4053 All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.
4054 <br>- I. F. Stone
4055 </blockquote></p>
4056
4057 <p>His starting point was that reporters should not assume governments
4058 and corporations are telling the truth, but verify all their claims as
4059 much as possible.  I wonder how many Norwegian reporters can be said
4060 to follow the principles of I. F. Stone.  They are definitely in short
4061 supply.  If you, like me half a year ago, have never heard of him,
4062 check him out.</p>
4063
4064       </div>
4065       <div class="tags">
4066
4067
4068         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>.
4069
4070
4071       </div>
4072     </div>
4073     <div class="padding"></div>
4074
4075     <div class="entry">
4076       <div class="title">
4077         <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>
4078       </div>
4079       <div class="date">
4080         12th April 2016
4081       </div>
4082       <div class="body">
4083         <p>I'm happy to report that
4084 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">the
4085 French paperback edition</a> of
4086 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
4087 project to translate</a> the <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free
4088 Culture</a> book by Lawrence Lessig is now available for sale on
4089 Lulu.com.  Once I have formally verified my proof reading copy, which
4090 should be in the mail, the paperback edition should be available in
4091 book stores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble too.</p>
4092
4093 <p>This French edition, Culture Libre, is the work of the
4094 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a> developer Benoît
4095 Guillon, who created the PO file from the initial translation
4096 available from
4097 <a href="http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre">the Wikilivres
4098 wiki pages</a> and completed and corrected the translation to match
4099 the original docbook edition my project is using, as well as
4100 coordinated the proof reading of the final result.  I believe the end
4101 result look great, but I am biased and do not read French.  In
4102 addition to the paperback edition, the book is available in PDF, EPUB
4103 and Mobi format from the github project page linked to above.</p>
4104
4105 <p>When enabling book store distribution on Lulu.com, I had to nearly
4106 triple the price to allow the book stores some profit.  I also had to
4107 accept that I will get some revenue when a book is sold via Lulu.com.
4108 But because of the non-commercial clause in the book license
4109 (CC-BY-NC), this might be a problem.  To bypass the problem I
4110 discussed how to handle the revenue with the author, and we agreed
4111 that the revenue for these editions go to the
4112 <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons non-profit
4113 Corporation</a> who handle donations to the Creative Commons project.
4114 So far they have earned around USD 70 on sales of the
4115 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>
4116 and
4117 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
4118 Bokmål</a> editions, according to Lulu.com.  They will get the revenue
4119 for the French edition too.  Their revenue is higher if you buy the
4120 book directly from Lulu.com instead of via a book store, so I
4121 recommend you buy directly from Lulu.com.</p>
4122
4123 <p>Perhaps you would like to get the book published in your language?
4124 The translation is done using a web based translator service, so the
4125 technical bar to enter is fairly low.  Get in touch if you would like
4126 to make this happen.</p>
4127
4128       </div>
4129       <div class="tags">
4130
4131
4132         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>.
4133
4134
4135       </div>
4136     </div>
4137     <div class="padding"></div>
4138
4139     <div class="entry">
4140       <div class="title">
4141         <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>
4142       </div>
4143       <div class="date">
4144         10th April 2016
4145       </div>
4146       <div class="body">
4147         <p>During this weekends
4148 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Oslo__Takk_for_feilfiksingsfesten.shtml">bug
4149 squashing party and developer gathering</a>, we decided to do our part
4150 to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian
4151 Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the
4152 <a href="http://debian-handbook.info/">Debian Administrator's Handbook
4153 project</a> to get started.  If you want to help out, please start
4154 contributing using
4155 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
4156 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
4157 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
4158 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
4159 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
4160 contributors</a>.</p>
4161
4162 <p>The book is already available on paper in English, French and
4163 Japanese, and our goal is to get it available on paper in Norwegian
4164 Bokmål too.  In addition to the paper edition, there are also EPUB and
4165 Mobi versions available.  And there are incomplete translations
4166 available for many more languages.</p>
4167
4168       </div>
4169       <div class="tags">
4170
4171
4172         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4173
4174
4175       </div>
4176     </div>
4177     <div class="padding"></div>
4178
4179     <div class="entry">
4180       <div class="title">
4181         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_in_two_hundred_Debian_users_using_ZFS_on_Linux_.html">One in two hundred Debian users using ZFS on Linux?</a>
4182       </div>
4183       <div class="date">
4184          7th April 2016
4185       </div>
4186       <div class="body">
4187         <p>Just for fun I had a look at the popcon number of ZFS related
4188 packages in Debian, and was quite surprised with what I found.  I use
4189 ZFS myself at home, but did not really expect many others to do so.
4190 But I might be wrong.</p>
4191
4192 <p>According to
4193 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=spl-linux">the popcon
4194 results for spl-linux</a>, there are 1019 Debian installations, or
4195 0.53% of the population, with the package installed.  As far as I know
4196 the only use of the spl-linux package is as a support library for ZFS
4197 on Linux, so I use it here as proxy for measuring the number of ZFS
4198 installation on Linux in Debian.  In the kFreeBSD variant of Debian
4199 the ZFS feature is already available, and there
4200 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=zfsutils">the popcon
4201 results for zfsutils</a> show 1625 Debian installations or 0.84% of
4202 the population.  So I guess I am not alone in using ZFS on Debian.</p>
4203
4204 <p>But even though the Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum
4205 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00006.html">announced
4206 in April 2015</a> that the legal obstacles blocking ZFS on Debian were
4207 cleared, the package is still not in Debian.  The package is again in
4208 the NEW queue.  Several uploads have been rejected so far because the
4209 debian/copyright file was incomplete or wrong, but there is no reason
4210 to give up.  The current status can be seen on
4211 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
4212 team status page</a>, and
4213 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">the
4214 source code</a> is available on Alioth.</p>
4215
4216 <p>As I want ZFS to be included in next version of Debian to make sure
4217 my home server can function in the future using only official Debian
4218 packages, and the current blocker is to get the debian/copyright file
4219 accepted by the FTP masters in Debian, I decided a while back to try
4220 to help out the team.  This was the background for my blog post about
4221 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">creating,
4222 updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>, and I
4223 used the techniques I explored there to try to find any errors in the
4224 copyright file.  It is not very easy to check every one of the around
4225 2000 files in the source package, but I hope we this time got it
4226 right.  If you want to help out, check out the git source and try to
4227 find missing entries in the debian/copyright file.</p>
4228
4229       </div>
4230       <div class="tags">
4231
4232
4233         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>.
4234
4235
4236       </div>
4237     </div>
4238     <div class="padding"></div>
4239
4240     <div class="entry">
4241       <div class="title">
4242         <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>
4243       </div>
4244       <div class="date">
4245          2nd April 2016
4246       </div>
4247       <div class="body">
4248         <p>Two years ago, I had
4249 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">a
4250 look at trusted timestamping options available</a>, and among
4251 other things noted a still open
4252 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/742553">bug in the tsget script</a>
4253 included in openssl that made it harder than necessary to use openssl
4254 as a trusted timestamping client.  A few days ago I was told
4255 <a href="https:/www.difi.no/">the Norwegian government office DIFI</a> is
4256 close to releasing their own trusted timestamp service, and in the
4257 process I was happy to learn about a replacement for the tsget script
4258 using only curl:</p>
4259
4260 <p><pre>
4261 openssl ts -query -data "/etc/shells" -cert -sha256 -no_nonce \
4262   | curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/timestamp-query" \
4263          --data-binary "@-" http://zeitstempel.dfn.de > etc-shells.tsr
4264 openssl ts -reply -text -in etc-shells.tsr
4265 </pre></p>
4266
4267 <p>This produces a binary timestamp file (etc-shells.tsr) which can be
4268 used to verify that the content of the file /etc/shell with the
4269 calculated sha256 hash existed at the point in time when the request
4270 was made.  The last command extract the content of the etc-shells.tsr
4271 in human readable form.  The idea behind such timestamp is to be able
4272 to prove using cryptography that the content of a file have not
4273 changed since the file was stamped.</p>
4274
4275 <p>To verify that the file on disk match the public key signature in
4276 the timestamp file, run the following commands.  It make sure you have
4277 the required certificate for the trusted timestamp service available
4278 and use it to compare the file content with the timestamp.  In
4279 production, one should of course use a better method to verify the
4280 service certificate.</p>
4281
4282 <p><pre>
4283 wget -O ca-cert.txt https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
4284 openssl ts -verify -data /etc/shells -in etc-shells.tsr -CAfile ca-cert.txt -text
4285 </pre></p>
4286
4287 <p>Wikipedia have a lot more information about
4288 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
4289 Timestamping</a> and
4290 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_timestamping">linked
4291 timestamping</a>, and there are several trusted timestamping services
4292 around, both as commercial services and as free and public services.
4293 Among the latter is
4294 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">the
4295 zeitstempel.dfn.de service</a> mentioned above and
4296 <a href="https://freetsa.org/">freetsa.org service</a> linked to from the
4297 wikipedia web site.  I believe the DIFI service should show up on
4298 https://tsa.difi.no, but it is not available to the public at the
4299 moment.  I hope this will change when it is into production.  The
4300 <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC 3161</a> trusted
4301 timestamping protocol standard is even implemented in LibreOffice,
4302 Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat, making it possible to verify when
4303 a document was created.</p>
4304
4305 <p>I would find it useful to be able to use such trusted timestamp
4306 service to make it possible to verify that my stored syslog files have
4307 not been tampered with.  This is not a new idea.  I found one example
4308 implemented on the Endian network appliances where
4309 <a href="http://help.endian.com/entries/21518508-Enabling-Timestamping-on-log-files-">the
4310 configuration of such feature was described in 2012</a>.</p>
4311
4312 <p>But I could not find any free implementation of such feature when I
4313 searched, so I decided to try to
4314 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp">build
4315 a prototype named syslog-trusted-timestamp</a>.  My idea is to
4316 generate a timestamp of the old log files after they are rotated, and
4317 store the timestamp in the new log file just after rotation.  This
4318 will form a chain that would make it possible to see if any old log
4319 files are tampered with.  But syslog is bad at handling kilobytes of
4320 binary data, so I decided to base64 encode the timestamp and add an ID
4321 and line sequence numbers to the base64 data to make it possible to
4322 reassemble the timestamp file again.  To use it, simply run it like
4323 this:
4324
4325 <p><pre>
4326 syslog-trusted-timestamp /path/to/list-of-log-files
4327 </pre></p>
4328
4329 <p>This will send a timestamp from one or more timestamp services (not
4330 yet decided nor implemented) for each listed file to the syslog using
4331 logger(1).  To verify the timestamp, the same program is used with the
4332 --verify option:</p>
4333
4334 <p><pre>
4335 syslog-trusted-timestamp --verify /path/to/log-file /path/to/log-with-timestamp
4336 </pre></p>
4337
4338 <p>The verification step is not yet well designed.  The current
4339 implementation depend on the file path being unique and unchanging,
4340 and this is not a solid assumption.  It also uses process number as
4341 timestamp ID, and this is bound to create ID collisions.  I hope to
4342 have time to come up with a better way to handle timestamp IDs and
4343 verification later.</p>
4344
4345 <p>Please check out
4346 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp">the
4347 prototype for syslog-trusted-timestamp on github</a> and send
4348 suggestions and improvement, or let me know if there already exist a
4349 similar system for timestamping logs already to allow me to join
4350 forces with others with the same interest.</p>
4351
4352 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4353 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4354 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4355
4356       </div>
4357       <div class="tags">
4358
4359
4360         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>.
4361
4362
4363       </div>
4364     </div>
4365     <div class="padding"></div>
4366
4367     <div class="entry">
4368       <div class="title">
4369         <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>
4370       </div>
4371       <div class="date">
4372         23rd March 2016
4373       </div>
4374       <div class="body">
4375         <p>Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an
4376 extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for
4377 later processing and graphing.  The original collector store the
4378 battery level as percentage of last full level, while the new
4379 collector also record battery vendor, model, serial number, design
4380 full level, last full level and current battery level.  This make it
4381 possible to predict the lifetime of the battery as well as visualise
4382 the energy flow when the battery is charging or discharging.</p>
4383
4384 <p>The new tools are available in <tt>/usr/share/battery-stats/</tt>
4385 in the version 0.5.1 package in unstable.  Get the new battery level graph
4386 and lifetime prediction by running:
4387
4388 <p><pre>
4389 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph /var/log/battery-stats.csv
4390 </pre></p>
4391
4392 <p>Or select the 'Battery Level Graph' from your application menu.</p>
4393
4394 <p>The flow in/out of the battery can be seen by running (no menu
4395 entry yet):</p>
4396
4397 <p><pre>
4398 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph-flow
4399 </pre></p>
4400
4401 <p>I'm not quite happy with the way the data is visualised, at least
4402 when there are few data points.  The graphs look a bit better with a
4403 few years of data.</p>
4404
4405 <p>A while back one important feature I use in the battery stats
4406 collector broke in Debian.  The scripts in
4407 <tt>/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/</tt> were no longer executed.  I
4408 suspect it happened when Jessie started using systemd, but I do not
4409 know.  The issue is reported as
4410 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/818649">bug #818649</a> against
4411 pm-utils.  I managed to work around it by adding an udev rule to call
4412 the collector script every time the power connector is connected and
4413 disconnected.  With this fix in place it was finally time to make a
4414 new release of the package, and get it into Debian.</p>
4415
4416 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
4417 check out the
4418 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
4419 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
4420 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
4421 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
4422 As always, patches are very welcome.</p>
4423
4424       </div>
4425       <div class="tags">
4426
4427
4428         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>.
4429
4430
4431       </div>
4432     </div>
4433     <div class="padding"></div>
4434
4435     <div class="entry">
4436       <div class="title">
4437         <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>
4438       </div>
4439       <div class="date">
4440         19th March 2016
4441       </div>
4442       <div class="body">
4443         <p>Back in 2013 I proposed
4444 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html">a
4445 way to make paper and PDF invoices easier to process electronically by
4446 adding a QR code with the key information about the invoice</a>.  I
4447 suggested using vCard field definition, to get some standard format
4448 for name and address, but any format would work.  I did not do
4449 anything about the proposal, but hoped someone one day would make
4450 something like it.  It would make it possible to efficiently send
4451 machine readable invoices directly between seller and buyer.</p>
4452
4453 <p>This was the background when I came across a proposal and
4454 specification from the web based accounting and invoicing supplier
4455 <a href="http://www.visma.com/">Visma</a> in Sweden called
4456 <a href="http://usingqr.com/">UsingQR</a>.  Their PDF invoices contain
4457 a QR code with the key information of the invoice in JSON format.
4458 This is the typical content of a QR code following the UsingQR
4459 specification (based on a real world example, some numbers replaced to
4460 get a more bogus entry).  I've reformatted the JSON to make it easier
4461 to read.  Normally this is all on one long line:</p>
4462
4463 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-03-19-qr-invoice.png" align="right"><pre>
4464 {
4465  "vh":500.00,
4466  "vm":0,
4467  "vl":0,
4468  "uqr":1,
4469  "tp":1,
4470  "nme":"Din Leverandør",
4471  "cc":"NO",
4472  "cid":"997912345 MVA",
4473  "iref":"12300001",
4474  "idt":"20151022",
4475  "ddt":"20151105",
4476  "due":2500.0000,
4477  "cur":"NOK",
4478  "pt":"BBAN",
4479  "acc":"17202612345",
4480  "bc":"BIENNOK1",
4481  "adr":"0313 OSLO"
4482 }
4483 </pre></p>
4484
4485 </p>The interpretation of the fields can be found in the
4486 <a href="http://usingqr.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/UsingQR_specification1.pdf">format
4487 specification</a> (revision 2 from june 2014).  The format seem to
4488 have most of the information needed to handle accounting and payment
4489 of invoices, at least the fields I have needed so far here in
4490 Norway.</p>
4491
4492 <p>Unfortunately, the site and document do not mention anything about
4493 the patent, trademark and copyright status of the format and the
4494 specification.  Because of this, I asked the people behind it back in
4495 November to clarify.  Ann-Christine Savlid (ann-christine.savlid (at)
4496 visma.com) replied that Visma had not applied for patent or trademark
4497 protection for this format, and that there were no copyright based
4498 usage limitations for the format.  I urged her to make sure this was
4499 explicitly written on the web pages and in the specification, but
4500 unfortunately this has not happened yet.  So I guess if there is
4501 submarine patents, hidden trademarks or a will to sue for copyright
4502 infringements, those starting to use the UsingQR format might be at
4503 risk, but if this happen there is some legal defense in the fact that
4504 the people behind the format claimed it was safe to do so.  At least
4505 with patents, there is always
4506 <a href="http://www.paperspecs.com/paper-news/beware-the-qr-code-patent-trap/">a
4507 chance of getting sued...</a></p>
4508
4509 <p>I also asked if they planned to maintain the format in an
4510 independent standard organization to give others more confidence that
4511 they would participate in the standardization process on equal terms
4512 with Visma, but they had no immediate plans for this.  Their plan was
4513 to work with banks to try to get more users of the format, and
4514 evaluate the way forward if the format proved to be popular.  I hope
4515 they conclude that using an open standard organisation like
4516 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> is the correct place to
4517 maintain such specification.</p>
4518
4519 <p><strong>Update 2016-03-20</strong>: Via Twitter I became aware of
4520 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11319492">some comments
4521 about this blog post</a> that had several useful links and references to
4522 similar systems.  In the Czech republic, the Czech Banking Association
4523 standard #26, with short name SPAYD, uses QR codes with payment
4524 information.  More information is available from the Wikipedia page on
4525 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Payment_Descriptor">Short
4526 Payment Descriptor</a>.  And in Germany, there is a system named
4527 <a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/">BezahlCode</a>,
4528 (<a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/wp-content/uploads/BezahlCode_TechDok.pdf">specification
4529 v1.8 2013-12-05 available as PDF</a>), which uses QR codes with
4530 URL-like formatting using "bank:" as the URI schema/protocol to
4531 provide the payment information.  There is also the
4532 <a href="http://www.ferd-net.de/front_content.php?idcat=231">ZUGFeRD</a>
4533 file format that perhaps could be transfered using QR codes, but I am
4534 not sure if it is done already.  Last, in Bolivia there are reports
4535 that tax information since november 2014 need to be printed in QR
4536 format on invoices.  I have not been able to track down a
4537 specification for this format, because of my limited language skill
4538 sets.</p>
4539
4540       </div>
4541       <div class="tags">
4542
4543
4544         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>.
4545
4546
4547       </div>
4548     </div>
4549     <div class="padding"></div>
4550
4551     <div class="entry">
4552       <div class="title">
4553         <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>
4554       </div>
4555       <div class="date">
4556         15th March 2016
4557       </div>
4558       <div class="body">
4559         <p>Back in September, I blogged about
4560 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">the
4561 system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery</a>, and
4562 how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced).  I
4563 created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing,
4564 but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already
4565 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">a battery-stats
4566 package in Debian</a> that should do the same thing, and I did not see
4567 a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be
4568 fixed instead.  I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and
4569 hoped someone would step in and fix it.  But no-one did.</p>
4570
4571 <p>I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own
4572 hands.  The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of
4573 battery stats (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">available from github</a>) and part of the team maintaining
4574 battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally
4575 able to collect battery status using the <tt>/sys/class/power_supply/</tt>
4576 information provided by the Linux kernel.  If you install the
4577 battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a
4578 graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the
4579 status of the battery.  The source package build and work just fine in
4580 Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not
4581 tested).  The default graph you get for that system look like this:</p>
4582
4583 <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>
4584
4585 <p>My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
4586 battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
4587 about the battery.  The scripts are merged into the upstream
4588 battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
4589 yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way.  Will have to test a
4590 bit more before I make a new release.</p>
4591
4592 <p>I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
4593 suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
4594 impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
4595 and graphing.</p>
4596
4597 <p>If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
4598 battery, check out the battery-stats package in
4599 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">Debian</a> and
4600 on
4601 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
4602 I would love some help to improve the system further.</p>
4603
4604       </div>
4605       <div class="tags">
4606
4607
4608         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>.
4609
4610
4611       </div>
4612     </div>
4613     <div class="padding"></div>
4614
4615     <div class="entry">
4616       <div class="title">
4617         <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>
4618       </div>
4619       <div class="date">
4620         19th February 2016
4621       </div>
4622       <div class="body">
4623         <p>Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to
4624 details.  And one of the details is the content of the
4625 debian/copyright file, which should list all relevant licenses used by
4626 the code in the package in question, preferably in
4627 <a href="https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/">machine
4628 readable DEP5 format</a>.</p>
4629
4630 <p>For large packages with lots of contributors it is hard to write
4631 and update this file manually, and if you get some detail wrong, the
4632 package is normally rejected by the ftpmasters.  So getting it right
4633 the first time around get the package into Debian faster, and save
4634 both you and the ftpmasters some work..  Today, while trying to figure
4635 out what was wrong with
4636 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=686447">the
4637 zfsonlinux copyright file</a>, I decided to spend some time on
4638 figuring out the options for doing this job automatically, or at least
4639 semi-automatically.</p>
4640
4641 <p>Lucikly, there are at least two tools available for generating the
4642 file based on the code in the source package,
4643 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debmake">debmake</a></tt>
4644 and <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cme">cme</a></tt>.  I'm
4645 not sure which one of them came first, but both seem to be able to
4646 create a sensible draft file.  As far as I can tell, none of them can
4647 be trusted to get the result just right, so the content need to be
4648 polished a bit before the file is OK to upload.  I found the debmake
4649 option in
4650 <a href="http://goofying-with-debian.blogspot.com/2014/07/debmake-checking-source-against-dep-5.html">a
4651 blog posts from 2014</a>.
4652
4653 <p>To generate using debmake, use the -cc option:
4654
4655 <p><pre>
4656 debmake -cc > debian/copyright
4657 </pre></p>
4658
4659 <p>Note there are some problems with python and non-ASCII names, so
4660 this might not be the best option.</p>
4661
4662 <p>The cme option is based on a config parsing library, and I found
4663 this approach in
4664 <a href="https://ddumont.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/improving-creation-of-debian-copyright-file/">a
4665 blog post from 2015</a>.  To generate using cme, use the 'update
4666 dpkg-copyright' option:
4667
4668 <p><pre>
4669 cme update dpkg-copyright
4670 </pre></p>
4671
4672 <p>This will create or update debian/copyright.  The cme tool seem to
4673 handle UTF-8 names better than debmake.</p>
4674
4675 <p>When the copyright file is created, I would also like some help to
4676 check if the file is correct.  For this I found two good options,
4677 <tt>debmake -k</tt> and <tt>license-reconcile</tt>.  The former seem
4678 to focus on license types and file matching, and is able to detect
4679 ineffective blocks in the copyright file.  The latter reports missing
4680 copyright holders and years, but was confused by inconsistent license
4681 names (like CDDL vs. CDDL-1.0).  I suspect it is good to use both and
4682 fix all issues reported by them before uploading.  But I do not know
4683 if the tools and the ftpmasters agree on what is important to fix in a
4684 copyright file, so the package might still be rejected.</p>
4685
4686 <p>The devscripts tool <tt>licensecheck</tt> deserve mentioning.  It
4687 will read through the source and try to find all copyright statements.
4688 It is not comparing the result to the content of debian/copyright, but
4689 can be useful when verifying the content of the copyright file.</p>
4690
4691 <p>Are you aware of better tools in Debian to create and update
4692 debian/copyright file.  Please let me know, or blog about it on
4693 planet.debian.org.</p>
4694
4695 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4696 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4697 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4698
4699 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-20</strong>: I got a tip from Mike Gabriel
4700 on how to use licensecheck and cdbs to create a draft copyright file
4701
4702 <p><pre>
4703 licensecheck --copyright -r `find * -type f` | \
4704   /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5 > debian/copyright.auto
4705 </pre></p>
4706
4707 <p>He mentioned that he normally check the generated file into the
4708 version control system to make it easier to discover license and
4709 copyright changes in the upstream source.  I will try to do the same
4710 with my packages in the future.</p>
4711
4712 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-21</strong>: The cme author recommended
4713 against using -quiet for new users, so I removed it from the proposed
4714 command line.</p>
4715
4716       </div>
4717       <div class="tags">
4718
4719
4720         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>.
4721
4722
4723       </div>
4724     </div>
4725     <div class="padding"></div>
4726
4727     <div class="entry">
4728       <div class="title">
4729         <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>
4730       </div>
4731       <div class="date">
4732          4th February 2016
4733       </div>
4734       <div class="body">
4735         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">appstream system</a>
4736 is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very
4737 convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given
4738 firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it.  This can
4739 be done using apt-file too, but that is for someone else to blog
4740 about. :)</p>
4741
4742 <p>Here is a small recipe to find the package with a given firmware
4743 file, in this example I am looking for ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin, randomly
4744 picked from the set of firmware announced using appstream in Debian
4745 unstable.  In general you would be looking for the firmware requested
4746 by the kernel during kernel module loading.  To find the package
4747 providing the example file, do like this:</p>
4748
4749 <blockquote><pre>
4750 % apt install appstream
4751 [...]
4752 % apt update
4753 [...]
4754 % appstreamcli what-provides firmware:runtime ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin | \
4755   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
4756 firmware-qlogic
4757 %
4758 </pre></blockquote>
4759
4760 <p>See <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">the
4761 appstream wiki</a> page to learn how to embed the package metadata in
4762 a way appstream can use.</p>
4763
4764 <p>This same approach can be used to find any package supporting a
4765 given MIME type.  This is very useful when you get a file you do not
4766 know how to handle.  First find the mime type using <tt>file
4767 --mime-type</tt>, and next look up the package providing support for
4768 it.  Lets say you got an SVG file.  Its MIME type is image/svg+xml,
4769 and you can find all packages handling this type like this:</p>
4770
4771 <blockquote><pre>
4772 % apt install appstream
4773 [...]
4774 % apt update
4775 [...]
4776 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype image/svg+xml | \
4777   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
4778 bkchem
4779 phototonic
4780 inkscape
4781 shutter
4782 tetzle
4783 geeqie
4784 xia
4785 pinta
4786 gthumb
4787 karbon
4788 comix
4789 mirage
4790 viewnior
4791 postr
4792 ristretto
4793 kolourpaint4
4794 eog
4795 eom
4796 gimagereader
4797 midori
4798 %
4799 </pre></blockquote>
4800
4801 <p>I believe the MIME types are fetched from the desktop file for
4802 packages providing appstream metadata.</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/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/Creepy__visualise_geotagged_social_media_information___nice_free_software.html">Creepy, visualise geotagged social media information - nice free software</a>
4818       </div>
4819       <div class="date">
4820         24th January 2016
4821       </div>
4822       <div class="body">
4823         <p>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
4824 with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
4825 position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
4826 time (like every time a SMS is received or sent).  And if their
4827 computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
4828 mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
4829 also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
4830 during installation).  And when these programs send out information to
4831 central collection points, the location is often included, unless
4832 extra care is taken to not send the location.  The provided
4833 information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
4834 good and bad, depend on your point of view).  What is certain, is that
4835 the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
4836 perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
4837 when they share their whereabouts with private and public
4838 entities.</p>
4839
4840 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-01-24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png"></p>
4841
4842 <p>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
4843 when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing.  It is
4844 unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
4845 officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
4846 unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information.  But the
4847 public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
4848 tool to do so is called
4849 <a href="http://www.geocreepy.com/">Creepy or Cree.py</a>.  I
4850 discovered it when I read
4851 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-7787884.html">an
4852 article about Creepy</a> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
4853 November 2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
4854 The python program was in Debian, but
4855 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy">the version in
4856 Debian</a> was completely broken and practically unmaintained.  I
4857 uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
4858 have time to fix it then.  This Christmas I decided to finally try to
4859 get Creepy operational in Debian.  Now a fixed version is available in
4860 Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
4861 are now included
4862 <a href="https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy">upstream</a>.</p>
4863
4864 <p>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
4865 Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
4866 complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
4867 given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
4868 these services.  Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
4869 least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
4870 days it is impossible.  This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
4871 configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
4872 information to them about your search interests.  This should be taken
4873 into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
4874 about yourself with the services.</p>
4875
4876 <p>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
4877 geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
4878 of Norway.  One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
4879 information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
4880 information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
4881 I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
4882 twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
4883 Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
4884 making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
4885 things.  A similar technique have been
4886 <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl">used
4887 to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine</a>, and it is both a powerful
4888 tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
4889 understand the value of the private information they provide to the
4890 public.</p>
4891
4892 <p>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
4893 it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
4894 least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
4895 python-requests-toolbelt).</p>
4896
4897 <p>(I have uploaded
4898 <a href="https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy">the image to
4899 screenshots.debian.net</a> and licensed it under the same terms as the
4900 Creepy program in Debian.)</p>
4901
4902       </div>
4903       <div class="tags">
4904
4905
4906         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>.
4907
4908
4909       </div>
4910     </div>
4911     <div class="padding"></div>
4912
4913     <div class="entry">
4914       <div class="title">
4915         <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>
4916       </div>
4917       <div class="date">
4918         15th January 2016
4919       </div>
4920       <div class="body">
4921         <p>During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum
4922 <a href="https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/331/what-is-to-be-done/">observed
4923 that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to
4924 believe a computer have a given security hole</a> if it download a
4925 security fix from a Debian mirror.  This is a good reason to always
4926 use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those
4927 listening do not know which IP address to attack.  In August, Richard
4928 Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible
4929 to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that
4930 download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and
4931 <a href="http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2015/08/24-Tor-enabled_Debian_mirror/">proposed
4932 to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror</a>.  He
4933 was not the first to propose this, as the
4934 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/apt-transport-tor">apt-transport-tor</a></tt>
4935 package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt
4936 to use <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a>, but I was not
4937 aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.</p>
4938
4939 <p>Richard discussed the idea with Peter Palfrader, one of the Debian
4940 sysadmins, and he set up a Tor hidden service on one of the central
4941 Debian mirrors using the address vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion, thus making
4942 it possible to download packages directly between two tor nodes,
4943 making sure the network traffic always were encrypted.</p>
4944
4945 <p>Here is a short recipe for enabling this on your machine, by
4946 installing <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> and replacing http and https
4947 urls with tor+http and tor+https, and using the hidden service instead
4948 of the official Debian mirror site.  I recommend installing
4949 <tt>etckeeper</tt> before you start to have a history of the changes
4950 done in /etc/.</p>
4951
4952 <blockquote><pre>
4953 apt install apt-transport-tor
4954 sed -i 's% http://ftp.debian.org/% tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/%' /etc/apt/sources.list
4955 sed -i 's% http% tor+http%' /etc/apt/sources.list
4956 </pre></blockquote>
4957
4958 <p>If you have more sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, run
4959 the sed commands for these too.  The sed command is assuming your are
4960 using the ftp.debian.org Debian mirror.  Adjust the command (or just
4961 edit the file manually) to match your mirror.</p>
4962
4963 <p>This work in Debian Jessie and later.  Note that tools like
4964 <tt>apt-file</tt> only recently started using the apt transport
4965 system, and do not work with these tor+http URLs.  For
4966 <tt>apt-file</tt> you need the version currently in experimental,
4967 which need a recent apt version currently only in unstable.  So if you
4968 need a working <tt>apt-file</tt>, this is not for you.</p>
4969
4970 <p>Another advantage from this change is that your machine will start
4971 using Tor regularly and at fairly random intervals (every time you
4972 update the package lists or upgrade or install a new package), thus
4973 masking other Tor traffic done from the same machine.  Using Tor will
4974 become normal for the machine in question.</p>
4975
4976 <p>On <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox</a>, APT
4977 is set up by default to use <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> when Tor is
4978 enabled.  It would be great if it was the default on any Debian
4979 system.</p>
4980
4981       </div>
4982       <div class="tags">
4983
4984
4985         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>.
4986
4987
4988       </div>
4989     </div>
4990     <div class="padding"></div>
4991
4992     <div class="entry">
4993       <div class="title">
4994         <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>
4995       </div>
4996       <div class="date">
4997         23rd December 2015
4998       </div>
4999       <div class="body">
5000         <p>When I was a kid, we used to collect "car numbers", as we used to
5001 call the car license plate numbers in those days.  I would write the
5002 numbers down in my little book and compare notes with the other kids
5003 to see how many region codes we had seen and if we had seen some
5004 exotic or special region codes and numbers.  It was a fun game to pass
5005 time, as we kids have plenty of it.</p>
5006
5007 <p>A few days I came across
5008 <a href="https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr">the OpenALPR
5009 project</a>, a free software project to automatically discover and
5010 report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the
5011 "car numbers" in a machine readable format.  I've been looking for
5012 such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the
5013 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition">automatic
5014 number plate recognition</a> tool only is available in the hands of
5015 the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to
5016 even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance.  I
5017 discovered the developer
5018 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/747509">wanted to get the tool into
5019 Debian</a>, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to
5020 help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian
5021 archive.</p>
5022
5023 <p>Today we finally managed to get the package into shape and uploaded
5024 it into Debian, where it currently
5025 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org//new/openalpr_2.2.1-1.html">waits
5026 in the NEW queue</a> for review by the Debian ftpmasters.</p>
5027
5028 <p>I guess you are wondering why on earth such tool would be useful
5029 for the common folks, ie those not running a large government
5030 surveillance system?  Well, I plan to put it in a computer on my bike
5031 and in my car, tracking the cars nearby and allowing me to be notified
5032 when number plates on my watch list are discovered.  Another use case
5033 was suggested by a friend of mine, who wanted to set it up at his home
5034 to open the car port automatically when it discovered the plate on his
5035 car.  When I mentioned it perhaps was a bit foolhardy to allow anyone
5036 capable of placing his license plate number of a piece of cardboard to
5037 open his car port, men replied that it was always unlocked anyway.  I
5038 guess for such use case it make sense.  I am sure there are other use
5039 cases too, for those with imagination and a vision.</p>
5040
5041 <p>If you want to build your own version of the Debian package, check
5042 out the upstream git source and symlink ./distros/debian to ./debian/
5043 before running "debuild" to build the source.  Or wait a bit until the
5044 package show up in unstable.</p>
5045
5046       </div>
5047       <div class="tags">
5048
5049
5050         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>.
5051
5052
5053       </div>
5054     </div>
5055     <div class="padding"></div>
5056
5057     <div class="entry">
5058       <div class="title">
5059         <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>
5060       </div>
5061       <div class="date">
5062         20th December 2015
5063       </div>
5064       <div class="body">
5065         <p>Around three years ago, I created
5066 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the isenkram
5067 system</a> to get a more practical solution in Debian for handing
5068 hardware related packages.  A GUI system in the isenkram package will
5069 present a pop-up dialog when some hardware dongle supported by
5070 relevant packages in Debian is inserted into the machine.  The same
5071 lookup mechanism to detect packages is available as command line
5072 tools in the isenkram-cli package.  In addition to mapping hardware,
5073 it will also map kernel firmware files to packages and make it easy to
5074 install needed firmware packages automatically.  The key for this
5075 system to work is a good way to map hardware to packages, in other
5076 words, allow packages to announce what hardware they will work
5077 with.</p>
5078
5079 <p>I started by providing data files in the isenkram source, and
5080 adding code to download the latest version of these data files at run
5081 time, to ensure every user had the most up to date mapping available.
5082 I also added support for storing the mapping in the Packages file in
5083 the apt repositories, but did not push this approach because while I
5084 was trying to figure out how to best store hardware/package mappings,
5085 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
5086 appstream system</a> was announced.  I got in touch and suggested to
5087 add the hardware mapping into that data set to be able to use
5088 appstream as a data source, and this was accepted at least for the
5089 Debian version of appstream.</p>
5090
5091 <p>A few days ago using appstream in Debian for this became possible,
5092 and today I uploaded a new version 0.20 of isenkram adding support for
5093 appstream as a data source for mapping hardware to packages.  The only
5094 package so far using appstream to announce its hardware support is my
5095 pymissile package.  I got help from Matthias Klumpp with figuring out
5096 how do add the required
5097 <a href="https://appstream.debian.org/html/sid/main/metainfo/pymissile.html">metadata
5098 in pymissile</a>.  I added a file debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml with
5099 this content:</p>
5100
5101 <blockquote><pre>
5102 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
5103 &lt;component&gt;
5104   &lt;id&gt;pymissile&lt;/id&gt;
5105   &lt;metadata_license&gt;MIT&lt;/metadata_license&gt;
5106   &lt;name&gt;pymissile&lt;/name&gt;
5107   &lt;summary&gt;Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher&lt;/summary&gt;
5108   &lt;description&gt;
5109     &lt;p&gt;
5110       Pymissile provides a curses interface to control an original
5111       Marks and Spencer / Striker USB Missile Launcher, as well as a
5112       motion control script to allow a webcamera to control the
5113       launcher.
5114     &lt;/p&gt;
5115   &lt;/description&gt;
5116   &lt;provides&gt;
5117     &lt;modalias&gt;usb:v1130p0202d*&lt;/modalias&gt;
5118   &lt;/provides&gt;
5119 &lt;/component&gt;
5120 </pre></blockquote>
5121
5122 <p>The key for isenkram is the component/provides/modalias value,
5123 which is a glob style match rule for hardware specific strings
5124 (modalias strings) provided by the Linux kernel.  In this case, it
5125 will map to all USB devices with vendor code 1130 and product code
5126 0202.</p>
5127
5128 <p>Note, it is important that the license of all the metadata files
5129 are compatible to have permissions to aggregate them into archive wide
5130 appstream files.  Matthias suggested to use MIT or BSD licenses for
5131 these files.  A challenge is figuring out a good id for the data, as
5132 it is supposed to be globally unique and shared across distributions
5133 (in other words, best to coordinate with upstream what to use).  But
5134 it can be changed later or, so we went with the package name as
5135 upstream for this project is dormant.</p>
5136
5137 <p>To get the metadata file installed in the correct location for the
5138 mirror update scripts to pick it up and include its content the
5139 appstream data source, the file must be installed in the binary
5140 package under /usr/share/appdata/.  I did this by adding the following
5141 line to debian/pymissile.install:</p>
5142
5143 <blockquote><pre>
5144 debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml usr/share/appdata
5145 </pre></blockquote>
5146
5147 <p>With that in place, the command line tool isenkram-lookup will list
5148 all packages useful on the current computer automatically, and the GUI
5149 pop-up handler will propose to install the package not already
5150 installed if a hardware dongle is inserted into the machine in
5151 question.</p>
5152
5153 <p>Details of the modalias field in appstream is available from the
5154 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a> proposal.</p>
5155
5156 <p>To locate the modalias values of all hardware present in a machine,
5157 try running this command on the command line:</p>
5158
5159 <blockquote><pre>
5160 cat $(find /sys/devices/|grep modalias)
5161 </pre></blockquote>
5162
5163 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
5164 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
5165 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
5166
5167       </div>
5168       <div class="tags">
5169
5170
5171         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>.
5172
5173
5174       </div>
5175     </div>
5176     <div class="padding"></div>
5177
5178     <div class="entry">
5179       <div class="title">
5180         <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>
5181       </div>
5182       <div class="date">
5183         30th November 2015
5184       </div>
5185       <div class="body">
5186         <p>A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled
5187 "<a href="http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2015/11/27/sfc-supporter/">The
5188 GPL is not magic pixie dust</a>" explain the importance of making sure
5189 the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GPL</a> is enforced.
5190 I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:<p>
5191
5192 <blockquote>
5193
5194 <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>
5195
5196 <blockquote>
5197 The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.<br/>
5198
5199 The first step is to choose a
5200 <a href="https://copyleft.org/">copyleft</a> license for your
5201 code.<br/>
5202
5203 The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license,
5204 <b>it must be enforced</b><br/>
5205
5206 and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of
5207 work<br/>
5208
5209 is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.
5210 </blockquote>
5211
5212 <p><small>-- <a href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/">Bradley Kuhn</a>, in
5213 <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in Freedom">FaiF</a>
5214 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode
5215 0x57</a></small></p>
5216
5217 <p>As the Debian Website
5218 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/794116">used</a>
5219 <a href="https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/intro/free.wml?r1=1.24&amp;r2=1.25">to</a>
5220 imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to
5221 the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful
5222 software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or
5223 software products.  Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created
5224 to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but
5225 such licenses are not enough.  With the ongoing adoption of Free
5226 Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's
5227 expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of
5228 ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always.  As Karen
5229 and Bradley explained in <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in
5230 Freedom">FaiF</a>
5231 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode 0x57</a>,
5232 copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court
5233 to protect it.  The reality of today's world is that legal
5234 representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming.  With
5235 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/">gpl-violations.org</a> in hiatus
5236 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/news/20151027-homepage-recovers/">until</a>
5237 some time in 2016, the <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/">Software
5238 Freedom Conservancy</a> (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender
5239 of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations.
5240 In March the SFC supported a
5241 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">lawsuit
5242 by Christoph Hellwig</a> against VMware for refusing to
5243 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html">comply
5244 with the GPL</a> in relation to their use of parts of the Linux
5245 kernel.  Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and
5246 conferences
5247 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">blocked
5248 or cancelled their talks</a>.  As a result they have decided to rely
5249 less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of
5250 individuals who support Free Software and copyleft.  So the SFC has
5251 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/23/2015fundraiser/">launched</a>
5252 a <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">campaign</a> to create
5253 a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by
5254 supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free
5255 Software.</p>
5256
5257 <p>If you support Free Software,
5258 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/26/like-what-I-do/">like</a>
5259 what the SFC do, agree with their
5260 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/principles.html">compliance
5261 principles</a>, are happy about their
5262 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">successes</a> in 2015,
5263 work on a project that is an SFC
5264 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/members/current/">member</a> and or
5265 just want to stand up for copyleft, please join
5266 <a href="https://identi.ca/cwebber/image/JQGPA4qbTyyp3-MY8QpvuA">Christopher
5267 Allan Webber</a>,
5268 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">Carol
5269 Smith</a>,
5270 <a href="http://www.jonobacon.org/2015/11/25/supporting-software-freedom-conservancy/">Jono
5271 Bacon</a>, myself and
5272 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/#supporters">others</a> in
5273 becoming a
5274 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">supporter</a>.  For the
5275 next week your donation will be
5276 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/27/black-friday/">matched</a>
5277 by an anonymous donor.  Please also consider asking your employer to
5278 match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC.  Don't forget to
5279 spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or
5280 social media accounts.</p>
5281
5282 </blockquote>
5283
5284 <p>I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter
5285 of Software Freedom Conservancy myself.  Perhaps you should be a
5286 supporter too?</p>
5287
5288       </div>
5289       <div class="tags">
5290
5291
5292         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>.
5293
5294
5295       </div>
5296     </div>
5297     <div class="padding"></div>
5298
5299     <div class="entry">
5300       <div class="title">
5301         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html">PGP key transition statement for key EE4E02F9</a>
5302       </div>
5303       <div class="date">
5304         17th November 2015
5305       </div>
5306       <div class="body">
5307         <p>I've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to
5308 set it up properly.  I wanted to generate it offline and have it
5309 available on <a href="http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/#openpgp">a OpenPGP
5310 smart card</a> for daily use, and learning how to do it and finding
5311 time to sit down with an offline machine almost took forever.  But
5312 finally I've been able to complete the process, and have now moved
5313 from my old GPG key to a new GPG key.  See
5314 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-11-17-new-gpg-key-transition.txt">the
5315 full transition statement, signed with both my old and new key</a> for
5316 the details.  This is my new key:</p>
5317
5318 <pre>
5319 pub   3936R/<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/111D6B29EE4E02F9.html">111D6B29EE4E02F9</a> 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-14]
5320       Key fingerprint = 3AC7 B2E3 ACA5 DF87 78F1  D827 111D 6B29 EE4E 02F9
5321 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@hungry.com&gt;
5322 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@debian.org&gt;
5323 sub   4096R/87BAFB0E 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
5324 sub   4096R/F91E6DE9 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
5325 sub   4096R/A0439BAB 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
5326 </pre>
5327
5328 <p>The key can be downloaded from the OpenPGP key servers, signed by
5329 my old key.</p>
5330
5331 <p>If you signed my old key
5332 (<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/DB4CCC4B2A30D729.html">DB4CCC4B2A30D729</a>),
5333 I'd very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and
5334 instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if
5335 you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.</p>
5336
5337       </div>
5338       <div class="tags">
5339
5340
5341         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>.
5342
5343
5344       </div>
5345     </div>
5346     <div class="padding"></div>
5347
5348     <div class="entry">
5349       <div class="title">
5350         <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>
5351       </div>
5352       <div class="date">
5353          3rd November 2015
5354       </div>
5355       <div class="body">
5356         <p>In Norway, all government offices are required by law to keep a
5357 list of every document or letter arriving and leaving their offices.
5358 Internal notes should also be documented.  The document list (called a mail
5359 journal - "postjournal" in Norwegian) is public information and thanks
5360 to the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (Offentleglova) the mail
5361 journal is available for everyone.  Most offices even publish the mail
5362 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
5363 <a href="https://www.oep.no/">Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal -
5364 OEP</a>) to make it possible to search the entries in the list.  Not
5365 all journal entries show up on OEP, and the search service is hard to
5366 use, but OEP does make it easier to find at least some interesting
5367 journal entries .</p>
5368
5369 <p>In 2012 I came across a document in the mail journal for the
5370 Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications on OEP that
5371 piqued my interest.  The title of the document was
5372 "<a href="https://www.oep.no/search/resultSingle.html?journalPostId=4192362">Internet
5373 Governance and how it affects national security</a>" (Norwegian:
5374 "Internet Governance og påvirkning på nasjonal sikkerhet").  The
5375 document date was 2012-05-22, and it was said to be sent from the
5376 "Permanent Mission of Norway to the United Nations".  I asked for a
5377 copy, but my request was rejected with a reference to a legal clause said to authorize them to reject it
5378 (<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20,
5379 letter c</a>) and an explanation that the document was exempt because
5380 of foreign policy interests as it contained information related to the
5381 Norwegian negotiating position, negotiating strategies or similar.  I
5382 was told the information in the document related to the ongoing
5383 negotiation in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).  The
5384 explanation made sense to me in early January 2013, as a ITU
5385 conference in Dubay discussing Internet Governance
5386 (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunication_Union#World_Conference_on_International_Telecommunications_2012_.28WCIT-12.29">World
5387 Conference on International Telecommunications - WCIT-12</a>) had just
5388 ended,
5389 <a href="http://www.digi.no/kommentarer/2012/12/18/tvil-om-usas-rolle-pa-teletoppmote">reportedly
5390 in chaos</a> when USA walked out of the negotiations and 25 countries
5391 including Norway refused to sign the new treaty.  It seemed
5392 reasonable to believe talks were still going on a few weeks later.
5393 Norway was represented at the ITU meeting by two authorities, the
5394 <a href="http://www.nkom.no/">Norwegian Communications Authority</a>
5395 and the <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dep/sd/">Ministry of
5396 Transport and Communications</a>.  This might be the reason the letter
5397 was sent to the ministry.  As I was unable to find the document in the
5398 mail journal of any Norwegian UN mission, I asked the ministry who had
5399 sent the document to the ministry, and was told that it was the Deputy
5400 Permanent Representative with the Permanent Mission of Norway in
5401 Geneva.</p>
5402
5403 <p>Three years later, I was still curious about the content of that
5404 document, and again asked for a copy, believing the negotiation was
5405 over now.  This time
5406 <a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/kopi_av_dokumenter_i_sak_2012914">I
5407 asked both the Ministry of Transport and Communications as the
5408 receiver</a> and
5409 <a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/brev_om_internet_governance_og_p">asked
5410 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva as the sender</a> for a
5411 copy, to see if they both agreed that it should be withheld from the
5412 public.  The ministry upheld its rejection quoting the same law
5413 reference as before, while the permanent mission rejected it quoting a
5414 different clause
5415 (<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20
5416 letter b</a>), claiming that they were required to keep the
5417 content of the document from the public because it contained
5418 information given to Norway with the expressed or implied expectation
5419 that the information should not be made public.  I asked the permanent
5420 mission for an explanation, and was told that the document contained
5421 an account from a meeting held in the Pentagon for a limited group of NATO
5422 nations where the organiser of the meeting did not intend the content
5423 of the meeting to be publicly known.  They explained that giving me a
5424 copy might cause Norway to not get access to similar information in
5425 the future and thus hurt the future foreign interests of Norway.  They
5426 also explained that the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was not
5427 the author of the document, they only got a copy of it, and because of
5428 this had not listed it in their mail journal.</p>
5429
5430 <p>Armed with this
5431 knowledge I asked the Ministry to reconsider and asked who was the
5432 author of the document, now realising that it was not same as the
5433 "sender" according to Ministry of Transport and Communications.  The
5434 ministry upheld its rejection but told me the name of the author of
5435 the document.  According to
5436 <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/unga69_rapport1/id2001204/">a
5437 government report</a> the author was with the Permanent Mission of
5438 Norway in New York a bit more than a year later (2014-09-22), so I
5439 guessed that might be the office responsible for writing and sending
5440 the report initially and
5441 <a href="https://www.mimesbronn.no/request/mote_2012_i_pentagon_om_itu">asked
5442 them for a copy</a> but I was obviously wrong as I was told that the
5443 document was unknown to them and that the author did not work there
5444 when the document was written.  Next, I asked the Permanent Mission of
5445 Norway in Geneva and the Foreign Ministry to reconsider and at least
5446 tell me who sent the document to Deputy Permanent Representative with
5447 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva.  The Foreign Ministry also
5448 upheld its rejection, but told me that the person sending the document
5449 to Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was the defence attaché with
5450 the Norwegian Embassy in Washington.  I do not know if this is the
5451 same person as the author of the document.</p>
5452
5453 <p>If I understand the situation correctly, someone capable of
5454 inviting selected NATO nations to a meeting in Pentagon organised a
5455 meeting where someone representing the Norwegian defence attaché in
5456 Washington attended, and the account from this meeting is interpreted
5457 by the Ministry of Transport and Communications to expose Norways
5458 negotiating position, negotiating strategies and similar regarding the
5459 ITU negotiations on Internet Governance.  It is truly amazing what can
5460 be derived from mere meta-data.</p>
5461
5462 <p>I wonder which NATO countries besides Norway attended this meeting?
5463 And what exactly was said and done at the meeting?  Anyone know?</p>
5464
5465       </div>
5466       <div class="tags">
5467
5468
5469         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>.
5470
5471
5472       </div>
5473     </div>
5474     <div class="padding"></div>
5475
5476     <div class="entry">
5477       <div class="title">
5478         <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>
5479       </div>
5480       <div class="date">
5481         31st October 2015
5482       </div>
5483       <div class="body">
5484         <p>People keep asking me where to get the various forms of the book I
5485 published last week, the Norwegian Bokmål edition of Lawrence Lessigs
5486 book <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>.  It was
5487 published on paper via lulu.com, and is also available in PDF, ePub
5488 and MOBI format.  I currently sell the paper edition for self cost
5489 from lulu.com, but might extend the distribution to book stores like
5490 Amazon and Barnes & Noble later.  This will double the price and force
5491 me to make a profit from selling the book.  Anyway, here are links to
5492 get the book in different formats:</p>
5493
5494 <ul>
5495
5496   <li><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22406445.html">Buy
5497     paper edition from lulu.com</a></li>
5498
5499   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf">Download
5500     PDF, size 7.9 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
5501
5502   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub">Download
5503     ePub, size 11 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
5504
5505   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.mobi">Download
5506     MOBI, size 3.8 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
5507
5508 </ul>
5509
5510 <p>Note that the MOBI version have problems with the table of content,
5511 at least with the viewers I have been able to test.  And the ePub file
5512 have several problems according to
5513 <a href="https://github.com/IDPF/epubcheck">epubcheck</a>, but seem
5514 to display fine in the viewers I have tested.  All the files needed to
5515 create the book in various forms are available from
5516 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">the
5517 github project page</a>.</p>
5518
5519 <p>The project got press coverage from the Norwegian IT news site
5520 digi.no.  Check out the article
5521 "<a href="http://www.digi.no/juss_og_samfunn/2015/10/29/vil-apne-politikernes-oyne-for-creative-commons">Vil
5522 åpne politikernes øyne for Creative Commons</a>".</li>
5523
5524 <p>I've <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">blogged
5525 about the project</a> as it moved along.  The blogs document the translation
5526 progress and insights I had along the way.</p>
5527
5528       </div>
5529       <div class="tags">
5530
5531
5532         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>.
5533
5534
5535       </div>
5536     </div>
5537     <div class="padding"></div>
5538
5539     <div class="entry">
5540       <div class="title">
5541         <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>
5542       </div>
5543       <div class="date">
5544         23rd October 2015
5545       </div>
5546       <div class="body">
5547         <p><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">Click
5548 here to buy the book</a>.</p>
5549
5550 <p>In 2004, as the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons
5551 movement</a> gained momentum, its creator Lawrence Lessig wrote the
5552 book <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)">Free
5553 Culture</a> to explain the problems with increasing copyright
5554 regulation and suggest some solutions.  I read the book back then and
5555 was very moved by it.  Reading the book inspired me and changed the
5556 way I looked on copyright law, and I would love it if more people
5557 would read it too.</p>
5558
5559 <p>Because of this, I decided in the summer of 2012 to translate it to
5560 Norwegian Bokmål and publish it for those of my friends and family
5561 that prefer to read books in Norwegian.  I translated the book using
5562 docbook and a gettext PO file, and a byproduct of this process is a
5563 new edition of the English original.  I've been in touch with the
5564 author during by work, and he said it was fine with him if I also
5565 published an English version.  So I decided to do so.  Today, I made
5566 this edition
5567 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">available
5568 for sale on Lulu.com</a>, for those interested in a paper book.  This
5569 is the cover:
5570
5571 <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>
5572
5573 <p>The Norwegian Bokmål version will be available for purchase in a
5574 few days.  I also plan to publish a French version in a few weeks or
5575 months, depending on the amount of people with knowledge of French to
5576 join the translation project.  So far there is only one active
5577 person, but the French book is almost completely translated but
5578 need some proof reading.</p>
5579
5580 <p>The book is also available in PDF, ePub and MOBI formats from
5581 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
5582 github project page</a>.  Note the ePub and MOBI versions have some
5583 formatting problems I believe is due to bugs in the docbook tool
5584 dbtoepub (Debian BTS issues
5585 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=795842">#795842</a>
5586 and
5587 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=796871">#796871</a>),
5588 but I have not taken the time to investigate.  I recommend the PDF and
5589 ePub version for now, as they seem to show up fine in the viewers I
5590 have available.</p>
5591
5592 <p>After the translation to Norwegian Bokmål was complete, I was able
5593 to secure some sponsoring from
5594 <a href="http://www.nuugfoundation.no/">the NUUG Foundation</a> to
5595 print the book.  This is the reason their logo is located on the back
5596 cover. I am very grateful for their contribution, and will use it to
5597 give a copy of the Norwegian edition to members of the Norwegian
5598 Parliament and other decision makers here in Norway.</p>
5599
5600       </div>
5601       <div class="tags">
5602
5603
5604         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>.
5605
5606
5607       </div>
5608     </div>
5609     <div class="padding"></div>
5610
5611     <div class="entry">
5612       <div class="title">
5613         <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>
5614       </div>
5615       <div class="date">
5616         19th October 2015
5617       </div>
5618       <div class="body">
5619         <p>Last year, <a href="https://lessig2016.us/">US president candidate
5620 in the Democratic Party</a> Lawrence interviewed Edward Snowden.  The
5621 one hour interview was
5622 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Sr96TFQQE">published by
5623 Harvard Law School 2014-10-23 on Youtube</a>, and the meeting took
5624 place 2014-10-20.</p>
5625
5626 <p>The questions are very good, and there is lots of useful
5627 information to be learned and very interesting issues to think about
5628 being raised.  Please check it out.</p>
5629
5630 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/o_Sr96TFQQE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
5631
5632 <p>I find it especially interesting to hear again that Snowden did try
5633 to bring up his reservations through the official channels without any
5634 luck.  It is in sharp contrast to the answers made 2013-11-06 by the
5635 Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg to the Norwegian Parliament,
5636 <a href="https://tale.holderdeord.no/speeches/s131106/68">claiming
5637 Snowden is no Whistle-Blower</a> because he should have taken up his
5638 concerns internally and using official channels.  It make me sad
5639 that this is the political leadership we have here in Norway.</p>
5640
5641       </div>
5642       <div class="tags">
5643
5644
5645         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>.
5646
5647
5648       </div>
5649     </div>
5650     <div class="padding"></div>
5651
5652     <div class="entry">
5653       <div class="title">
5654         <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>
5655       </div>
5656       <div class="date">
5657          8th October 2015
5658       </div>
5659       <div class="body">
5660         <p>The movie "<a href="http://www.takepart.com/internets-own-boy">The
5661 Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz</a>" is both inspiring
5662 and depressing at the same time.  The work of Aaron Swartz has
5663 inspired me in my work, and I am grateful of all the improvements he
5664 was able to initiate or complete.  I wish I am able to do as much good
5665 in my life as he did in his.  Every minute of this 1:45 long movie is
5666 inspiring in documenting how much impact a single person can have on
5667 improving the society and this world.  And it is depressing in
5668 documenting how the law enforcement of USA (and other countries) is
5669 corrupted to a point where they can push a bright kid to his death for
5670 downloading too many scientific articles.  Aaron is dead.  Let us all
5671 weep.</p>
5672
5673 <p>The movie is also available on
5674 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXr-2hwTk58">Youtube</a>.  I
5675 wish there were Norwegian subtitles available, so I could show it to
5676 my parents.</p>
5677
5678       </div>
5679       <div class="tags">
5680
5681
5682         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>.
5683
5684
5685       </div>
5686     </div>
5687     <div class="padding"></div>
5688
5689     <div class="entry">
5690       <div class="title">
5691         <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>
5692       </div>
5693       <div class="date">
5694          1st October 2015
5695       </div>
5696       <div class="body">
5697         <p>As I wrap up the Norwegian version of
5698 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
5699 Culture</a> book by Lawrence Lessig (still waiting for my final proof
5700 reading copy to arrive in the mail), my great
5701 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a> helper and
5702 developer of the dblatex docbook processor, Benoît Guillon, decided a
5703 to try to create a French version of the book.  He started with the
5704 French translation available from the
5705 <a href="http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre">Wikilivres wiki
5706 pages</a>, and wrote a program to convert it into a PO file, allowing
5707 the translation to be integrated into the po4a based framework I use
5708 to create the Norwegian translation from the English edition.  We meet
5709 on the <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23dblatex">#dblatex IRC
5710 channel</a> to discuss the work.  If you want to help create a French
5711 edition, check out
5712 <a href="https://github.com/marsgui/free-culture-lessig">his git
5713 repository</a> and join us on IRC.  If the French edition look good,
5714 we might publish it as a paper book on lulu.com.  A French version of
5715 the drawings and the cover need to be provided for this to happen.</p>
5716
5717       </div>
5718       <div class="tags">
5719
5720
5721         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>.
5722
5723
5724       </div>
5725     </div>
5726     <div class="padding"></div>
5727
5728     <div class="entry">
5729       <div class="title">
5730         <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>
5731       </div>
5732       <div class="date">
5733         24th September 2015
5734       </div>
5735       <div class="body">
5736         <p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
5737 But this do not last.  The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
5738 within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
5739 and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
5740 all the time.  Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
5741 about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
5742 more hard facts when the battery started to fail.</p>
5743
5744 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
5745
5746 <p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
5747 battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
5748 by someone else.  I found
5749 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
5750 which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
5751 broken.  I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
5752 write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
5753 from him.  Via
5754 <a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
5755 blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
5756 discovered
5757 <a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
5758 available in Debian.</p>
5759
5760 <p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
5761 battery stats ever since. Now my
5762 /var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around 115,000
5763 measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
5764 when it is unable to charge above 7% of original capacity.  My
5765 collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:</p>
5766
5767 <pre>
5768 #!/bin/sh
5769 # Inspired by
5770 # http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
5771 # See also
5772 # http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2013/01/02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
5773 logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
5774
5775 files="manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
5776     energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status"
5777
5778 if [ ! -e "$logfile" ] ; then
5779     (
5780         printf "timestamp,"
5781         for f in $files; do
5782             printf "%s," $f
5783         done
5784         echo
5785     ) > "$logfile"
5786 fi
5787
5788 log_battery() {
5789     # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
5790     # when several log processes run in parallel.
5791     msg=$(printf "%s," $(date +%s); \
5792         for f in $files; do \
5793             printf "%s," $(cat $f); \
5794         done)
5795     echo "$msg"
5796 }
5797
5798 cd /sys/class/power_supply
5799
5800 for bat in BAT*; do
5801     (cd $bat && log_battery >> "$logfile")
5802 done
5803 </pre>
5804
5805 <p>The script is called when the power management system detect a
5806 change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
5807 and out of hibernation and suspend.  In addition, it collect a value
5808 every 10 minutes.  This make it possible for me know when the battery
5809 is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
5810 The code for the Debian package
5811 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
5812 available on github</a>.</p>
5813
5814 <p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
5815
5816 <pre>
5817 timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
5818 1376591133,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,62800000,62160000,39050000,0,Discharging,
5819 [...]
5820 1443090528,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
5821 1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
5822 </pre>
5823
5824 <p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
5825 over time.  This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
5826 battery.</p>
5827
5828 <p>But why is this happening?  Why are my laptop batteries always
5829 dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
5830 satellites keep working year after year.  If we are to believe
5831 <a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
5832 University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
5833 chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
5834 all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
5835 I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
5836 <a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
5837 the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
5838 100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
5839 like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
5840 story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
5841 Linux too.</p>
5842
5843 <p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
5844 stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
5845 preparation for a longer trip?  I found
5846 <a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
5847 recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
5848 80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
5849 load).</p>
5850
5851 <p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
5852 at the start.  I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
5853 times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
5854 back to design capacity.  And I wonder if the discharge and charge
5855 speed change over time, or if this stay the same.  I did not yet try
5856 to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
5857 level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
5858 those.</p>
5859
5860 <p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
5861 acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
5862 packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
5863 initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
5864 and stop.  I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
5865 and need to be replaced.  The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
5866 specific.</p>
5867
5868       </div>
5869       <div class="tags">
5870
5871
5872         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>.
5873
5874
5875       </div>
5876     </div>
5877     <div class="padding"></div>
5878
5879     <div class="entry">
5880       <div class="title">
5881         <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>
5882       </div>
5883       <div class="date">
5884          3rd September 2015
5885       </div>
5886       <div class="body">
5887         <p>Creating a good looking book cover proved harder than I expected.
5888 I wanted to create a cover looking similar to the original cover of
5889 the
5890 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
5891 Culture</a> book we are translating to Norwegian, and I wanted it in
5892 vector format for high resolution printing.  But my inkscape knowledge
5893 were not nearly good enough to pull that off.
5894
5895 <p>But thanks to the great inkscape community, I was able to wrap up
5896 the cover yesterday evening.  I asked on the
5897 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23inkscape">#inkscape IRC channel</a>
5898 on Freenode for help and clues, and Marc Jeanmougin (Mc-) volunteered
5899 to try to recreate it based on the PDF of the cover from the HTML
5900 version.  Not only did he create a
5901 <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/copy1.svg ">SVG document with
5902 the original and his vector version side by side</a>, he even provided
5903 an <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/out-1.ogv">instruction
5904 video</a> explaining how he did it</a>.  But the instruction video is
5905 not easy to follow for an untrained inkscape user. The video is a
5906 recording on how he did it, and he is obviously very experienced as
5907 the menu selections are very quick and he mentioned on IRC that he did
5908 use some keyboard shortcuts that can't be seen on the video, but it
5909 give a good idea about the inkscape operations to use to create the
5910 stripes with the embossed copyright sign in the center.</p>
5911
5912 <p>I took his SVG file, copied the vector image and re-sized it to fit
5913 on the cover I was drawing.  I am happy with the end result, and the
5914 current english version look like this:</p>
5915
5916 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-03-free-culture-cover.png" width="70%" align="center"/>
5917
5918 <p>I am not quite sure about the text on the back, but guess it will
5919 do.  I picked three quotes from the official site for the book, and
5920 hope it will work to trigger the interest of potential readers.  The
5921 Norwegian cover will look the same, but with the texts and bar code
5922 replaced with the Norwegian version.</p>
5923
5924 <p>The book is very close to being ready for publication, and I expect
5925 to upload the final draft to Lulu in the next few days and order a
5926 final proof reading copy to verify that everything look like it should
5927 before allowing everyone to order their own copy of Free Culture, in
5928 English or Norwegian Bokmål.  I'm waiting to give the the productive
5929 proof readers a chance to complete their work.</p>
5930
5931       </div>
5932       <div class="tags">
5933
5934
5935         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>.
5936
5937
5938       </div>
5939     </div>
5940     <div class="padding"></div>
5941
5942     <div class="entry">
5943       <div class="title">
5944         <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>
5945       </div>
5946       <div class="date">
5947         19th August 2015
5948       </div>
5949       <div class="body">
5950         <p>Today, finally, my first printed draft edition of the Norwegian
5951 translation of Free Culture I have been working on for the last few
5952 years arrived in the mail.  I had to fake a cover to get the interior
5953 printed, and the exterior of the book look awful, but that is
5954 irrelevant at this point.  I asked for a printed pocket book version
5955 to get an idea about the font sizes and paper format as well as how
5956 good the figures and images look in print, but also to test what the
5957 pocket book version would look like.  After receiving the 500 page
5958 pocket book, it became obvious to me that that pocket book size is too
5959 small for this book.  I believe the book is too thick, and several
5960 tables and figures do not look good in the size they get with that
5961 small page sizes.  I believe I will go with the 5.5x8.5 inch size
5962 instead.  A surprise discovery from the paper version was how bad the
5963 URLs look in print.  They are very hard to read in the colophon page.
5964 The URLs are red in the PDF, but light gray on paper.  I need to
5965 change the color of links somehow to look better.  But there is a
5966 printed book in my hand, and it feels great. :)</p>
5967
5968 <p>Now I only need to fix the cover, wrap up the postscript with the
5969 store behind the book, and collect the last corrections from the proof
5970 readers before the book is ready for proper printing.  Cover artists
5971 willing to work for free and create a Creative Commons licensed vector
5972 file looking similar to the original is most welcome, as my skills as
5973 a graphics designer are mostly missing.</p>
5974
5975       </div>
5976       <div class="tags">
5977
5978
5979         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>.
5980
5981
5982       </div>
5983     </div>
5984     <div class="padding"></div>
5985
5986     <div class="entry">
5987       <div class="title">
5988         <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>
5989       </div>
5990       <div class="date">
5991          9th August 2015
5992       </div>
5993       <div class="body">
5994         <p>Typesetting a book is harder than I hoped.  As the translation is
5995 mostly done, and a volunteer proof reader was going to check the text
5996 on paper, it was time this summer to focus on formatting my translated
5997 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> based version of the
5998 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> book by Lawrence
5999 Lessig.  I've been trying to get both docboox-xsl+fop and dblatex to
6000 give me a good looking PDF, but in the end I went with dblatex, because
6001 its Debian maintainer and upstream developer were responsive and very
6002 helpful in solving my formatting challenges.</p>
6003
6004 <p>Last night, I finally managed to create a PDF that no longer made
6005 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/">Lulu.com</a> complain after uploading,
6006 and I ordered a text version of the book on paper.  It is lacking a
6007 proper book cover and is not tagged with the correct ISBN number, but
6008 should give me an idea what the finished book will look like.</p>
6009
6010 <p>Instead of using Lulu, I did consider printing the book using
6011 <a href="http://www.createspace.com/">CreateSpace</a>, but ended up
6012 using Lulu because it had smaller book size options (CreateSpace seem
6013 to lack pocket book with extended distribution).  I looked for a
6014 similar service in Norway, but have not seen anything so far.  Please
6015 let me know if I am missing out on something here.</p>
6016
6017 <p>But I still struggle to decide the book size.  Should I go for
6018 pocket book (4.25x6.875 inches / 10.8x17.5 cm) with 556 pages, Digest
6019 (5.5x8.5 inches / 14x21.6 cm) with 323 pages or US Trade (6x8 inches /
6020 15.3x22.9 cm) with 280 pages?  Fewer pager give a cheaper book, and a
6021 smaller book is easier to carry around.  The test book I ordered was
6022 pocket book sized, to give me an idea how well that fit in my hand,
6023 but I suspect I will end up using a digest sized book in the end to
6024 bring the prize down further.</p>
6025
6026 <p>My biggest challenge at the moment is making nice cover art.  My
6027 inkscape skills are not yet up to the task of replicating the original
6028 cover in SVG format.  I also need to figure out what to write about
6029 the book on the back (will most likely use the same text as the
6030 description on web based book stores).  I would love help with this,
6031 if you are willing to license the art source and final version using
6032 the same CC license as the book.  My artistic skills are not really up
6033 to the task.</p>
6034
6035 <p>I plan to publish the book in both English and Norwegian and on
6036 paper, in PDF form as well as EPUB and MOBI format.  The current
6037 status can as usual be found on
6038 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
6039 in the archive/ directory.  So far I have spent all time on making the
6040 PDF version look good.  Someone should probably do the same with the
6041 dbtoepub generated e-book.  Help is definitely needed here, as I
6042 expect to run out of steem before I find time to improve the epub
6043 formatting.</p>
6044
6045 <p>Please let me know via github if you find typos in the book or
6046 discover translations that should be improved.  The final proof
6047 reading is being done right now, and I expect to publish the finished
6048 result in a few months.</p>
6049
6050       </div>
6051       <div class="tags">
6052
6053
6054         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>.
6055
6056
6057       </div>
6058     </div>
6059     <div class="padding"></div>
6060
6061     <div class="entry">
6062       <div class="title">
6063         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_DocBook_footnotes_as_endnotes_with_dblatex.html">Typesetting DocBook footnotes as endnotes with dblatex</a>
6064       </div>
6065       <div class="date">
6066         16th July 2015
6067       </div>
6068       <div class="body">
6069         <p>I'm still working on the Norwegian version of the
6070 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture book by Lawrence
6071 Lessig</a>, and is now working on the final typesetting and layout.
6072 One of the features I want to get the structure similar to the
6073 original book is to typeset the footnotes as endnotes in the notes
6074 chapter.  Based on the
6075 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/685063">feedback from the Debian
6076 maintainer and the dblatex developer</a>, I came up with this recipe I
6077 would like to share with you.  The proposal was to create a new LaTeX
6078 class file and add the LaTeX code there, but this is not always
6079 practical, when I want to be able to replace the class using a make
6080 file variable.  So my proposal misuses the latex.begindocument XSL
6081 parameter value, to get a small fragment into the correct location in
6082 the generated LaTeX File.</p>
6083
6084 <p>First, decide where in the DocBook document to place the endnotes,
6085 and add this text there:</p>
6086
6087 <pre>
6088 &lt;?latex \theendnotes ?&gt;
6089 </pre>
6090
6091 <p>Next, create a xsl stylesheet file dblatex-endnotes.xsl to add the
6092 code needed to add the endnote instructions in the preamble of the
6093 generated LaTeX document, with content like this:</p>
6094
6095 <pre>
6096 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
6097 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
6098   &lt;xsl:param name="latex.begindocument"&gt;
6099     &lt;xsl:text&gt;
6100 \usepackage{endnotes}
6101 \let\footnote=\endnote
6102 \def\enoteheading{\mbox{}\par\vskip-\baselineskip }
6103 \begin{document}
6104     &lt;/xsl:text&gt;
6105   &lt;/xsl:param&gt;
6106 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
6107 </pre>
6108
6109 <p>Finally, load this xsl file when running dblatex, for example like
6110 this:</p>
6111
6112 <pre>
6113 dblatex --xsl-user=dblatex-endnotes.xsl freeculture.nb.xml
6114 </pre>
6115
6116 <p>The end result can be seen on github, where
6117 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
6118 book project</a> is located.</p>
6119
6120       </div>
6121       <div class="tags">
6122
6123
6124         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>.
6125
6126
6127       </div>
6128     </div>
6129     <div class="padding"></div>
6130
6131     <div class="entry">
6132       <div class="title">
6133         <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>
6134       </div>
6135       <div class="date">
6136          7th July 2015
6137       </div>
6138       <div class="body">
6139         <p>After asking the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK)
6140 <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
6141 they can broadcast and stream H.264 video without an agreement with
6142 the MPEG LA</a>, I was wiser, but still confused.  So I asked MPEG LA
6143 if their understanding matched that of NRK.  As far as I can tell, it
6144 does not.</p>
6145
6146 <p>I started by asking for more information about the various
6147 licensing classes and what exactly is covered by the "Internet
6148 Broadcast AVC Video" class that NRK pointed me at to explain why NRK
6149 did not need a license for streaming H.264 video:
6150
6151 <p><blockquote>
6152
6153 <p>According to
6154 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/226/n-10-02-02.pdf">a
6155 MPEG LA press release dated 2010-02-02</a>, there is no charge when
6156 using MPEG AVC/H.264 according to the terms of "Internet Broadcast AVC
6157 Video".  I am trying to understand exactly what the terms of "Internet
6158 Broadcast AVC Video" is, and wondered if you could help me.  What
6159 exactly is covered by these terms, and what is not?</p>
6160
6161 <p>The only source of more information I have been able to find is a
6162 PDF named
6163 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avcweb.pdf">AVC
6164 Patent Portfolio License Briefing</a>, which states this about the
6165 fees:</p>
6166
6167 <ul>
6168  <li>Where End User pays for AVC Video
6169   <ul>
6170    <li>Subscription (not limited by title) – 100,000 or fewer
6171      subscribers/yr = no royalty; &gt; 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers/yr =
6172      $25,000; &gt;250,000 to 500,000 subscribers/yr = $50,000; &gt;500,000 to
6173      1M subscribers/yr = $75,000; &gt;1M subscribers/yr = $100,000</li>
6174
6175    <li>Title-by-Title - 12 minutes or less = no royalty; &gt;12 minutes in
6176      length = lower of (a) 2% or (b) $0.02 per title</li>
6177   </ul></li>
6178
6179  <li>Where remuneration is from other sources
6180   <ul>
6181    <li>Free Television - (a) one-time $2,500 per transmission encoder or
6182      (b) annual fee starting at $2,500 for &gt; 100,000 HH rising to
6183      maximum $10,000 for &gt;1,000,000 HH</li>
6184
6185    <li>Internet Broadcast AVC Video (not title-by-title, not subscription)
6186      – no royalty for life of the AVC Patent Portfolio License</li>
6187   </ul></li>
6188 </ul>
6189
6190 <p>Am I correct in assuming that the four categories listed is the
6191 categories used when selecting licensing terms, and that "Internet
6192 Broadcast AVC Video" is the category for things that do not fall into
6193 one of the other three categories?  Can you point me to a good source
6194 explaining what is ment by "title-by-title" and "Free Television" in
6195 the license terms for AVC/H.264?</p>
6196
6197 <p>Will a web service providing H.264 encoded video content in a
6198 "video on demand" fashing similar to Youtube and Vimeo, where no
6199 subscription is required and no payment is required from end users to
6200 get access to the videos, fall under the terms of the "Internet
6201 Broadcast AVC Video", ie no royalty for life of the AVC Patent
6202 Portfolio license?  Does it matter if some users are subscribed to get
6203 access to personalized services?</p>
6204
6205 <p>Note, this request and all answers will be published on the
6206 Internet.</p>
6207 </blockquote></p>
6208
6209 <p>The answer came quickly from Benjamin J. Myers, Licensing Associate
6210 with the MPEG LA:</p>
6211
6212 <p><blockquote>
6213 <p>Thank you for your message and for your interest in MPEG LA.  We
6214 appreciate hearing from you and I will be happy to assist you.</p>
6215
6216 <p>As you are aware, MPEG LA offers our AVC Patent Portfolio License
6217 which provides coverage under patents that are essential for use of
6218 the AVC/H.264 Standard (MPEG-4 Part 10).  Specifically, coverage is
6219 provided for end products and video content that make use of AVC/H.264
6220 technology.  Accordingly, the party offering such end products and
6221 video to End Users concludes the AVC License and is responsible for
6222 paying the applicable royalties.</p>
6223
6224 <p>Regarding Internet Broadcast AVC Video, the AVC License generally
6225 defines such content to be video that is distributed to End Users over
6226 the Internet free-of-charge.  Therefore, if a party offers a service
6227 which allows users to upload AVC/H.264 video to its website, and such
6228 AVC Video is delivered to End Users for free, then such video would
6229 receive coverage under the sublicense for Internet Broadcast AVC
6230 Video, which is not subject to any royalties for the life of the AVC
6231 License.  This would also apply in the scenario where a user creates a
6232 free online account in order to receive a customized offering of free
6233 AVC Video content.  In other words, as long as the End User is given
6234 access to or views AVC Video content at no cost to the End User, then
6235 no royalties would be payable under our AVC License.</p>
6236
6237 <p>On the other hand, if End Users pay for access to AVC Video for a
6238 specific period of time (e.g., one month, one year, etc.), then such
6239 video would constitute Subscription AVC Video.  In cases where AVC
6240 Video is delivered to End Users on a pay-per-view basis, then such
6241 content would constitute Title-by-Title AVC Video.  If a party offers
6242 Subscription or Title-by-Title AVC Video to End Users, then they would
6243 be responsible for paying the applicable royalties you noted below.</p>
6244
6245 <p>Finally, in the case where AVC Video is distributed for free
6246 through an "over-the-air, satellite and/or cable transmission", then
6247 such content would constitute Free Television AVC Video and would be
6248 subject to the applicable royalties.</p>
6249
6250 <p>For your reference, I have attached
6251 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-07-07-mpegla.pdf">a
6252 .pdf copy of the AVC License</a>. You will find the relevant
6253 sublicense information regarding AVC Video in Sections 2.2 through
6254 2.5, and the corresponding royalties in Section 3.1.2 through 3.1.4.
6255 You will also find the definitions of Title-by-Title AVC Video,
6256 Subscription AVC Video, Free Television AVC Video, and Internet
6257 Broadcast AVC Video in Section 1 of the License.  Please note that the
6258 electronic copy is provided for informational purposes only and cannot
6259 be used for execution.</p>
6260
6261 <p>I hope the above information is helpful.  If you have additional
6262 questions or need further assistance with the AVC License, please feel
6263 free to contact me directly.</p>
6264 </blockquote></p>
6265
6266 <p>Having a fresh copy of the license text was useful, and knowing
6267 that the definition of Title-by-Title required payment per title made
6268 me aware that my earlier understanding of that phrase had been wrong.
6269 But I still had a few questions:</p>
6270
6271 <p><blockquote>
6272 <p>I have a small followup question.  Would it be possible for me to get
6273 a license with MPEG LA even if there are no royalties to be paid?  The
6274 reason I ask, is that some video related products have a copyright
6275 clause limiting their use without a license with MPEG LA.  The clauses
6276 typically look similar to this:
6277
6278 <p><blockquote>
6279   This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
6280   the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer to (a) encode
6281   video in compliance with the AVC standard ("AVC video") and/or (b)
6282   decode AVC video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a
6283   personal and non-commercial activity and/or AVC video that was
6284   obtained from a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No
6285   license is granted or shall be implied for any other use. additional
6286   information may be obtained from MPEG LA L.L.C.
6287 </blockquote></p>
6288
6289 <p>It is unclear to me if this clause mean that I need to enter into
6290 an agreement with MPEG LA to use the product in question, even if
6291 there are no royalties to be paid to MPEG LA.  I suspect it will
6292 differ depending on the jurisdiction, and mine is Norway.  What is
6293 MPEG LAs view on this?</p>
6294 </blockquote></p>
6295
6296 <p>According to the answer, MPEG LA believe those using such tools for
6297 non-personal or commercial use need a license with them:</p>
6298
6299 <p><blockquote>
6300
6301 <p>With regard to the Notice to Customers, I would like to begin by
6302 clarifying that the Notice from Section 7.1 of the AVC License
6303 reads:</p>
6304
6305 <p>THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR
6306 THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT
6307 RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC
6308 STANDARD ("AVC VIDEO") AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED
6309 BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM
6310 A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED
6311 OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE
6312 OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM</p>
6313
6314 <p>The Notice to Customers is intended to inform End Users of the
6315 personal usage rights (for example, to watch video content) included
6316 with the product they purchased, and to encourage any party using the
6317 product for commercial purposes to contact MPEG LA in order to become
6318 licensed for such use (for example, when they use an AVC Product to
6319 deliver Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free Television or Internet
6320 Broadcast AVC Video to End Users, or to re-Sell a third party's AVC
6321 Product as their own branded AVC Product).</p>
6322
6323 <p>Therefore, if a party is to be licensed for its use of an AVC
6324 Product to Sell AVC Video on a Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free
6325 Television or Internet Broadcast basis, that party would need to
6326 conclude the AVC License, even in the case where no royalties were
6327 payable under the License.  On the other hand, if that party (either a
6328 Consumer or business customer) simply uses an AVC Product for their
6329 own internal purposes and not for the commercial purposes referenced
6330 above, then such use would be included in the royalty paid for the AVC
6331 Products by the licensed supplier.</p>
6332
6333 <p>Finally, I note that our AVC License provides worldwide coverage in
6334 countries that have AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, including
6335 Norway.</p>
6336
6337 <p>I hope this clarification is helpful.  If I may be of any further
6338 assistance, just let me know.</p>
6339 </blockquote></p>
6340
6341 <p>The mentioning of Norwegian patents made me a bit confused, so I
6342 asked for more information:</p>
6343
6344 <p><blockquote>
6345
6346 <p>But one minor question at the end.  If I understand you correctly,
6347 you state in the quote above that there are patents in the AVC Patent
6348 Portfolio that are valid in Norway.  This make me believe I read the
6349 list available from &lt;URL:
6350 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx">http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx</a>
6351 &gt; incorrectly, as I believed the "NO" prefix in front of patents
6352 were Norwegian patents, and the only one I could find under Mitsubishi
6353 Electric Corporation expired in 2012.  Which patents are you referring
6354 to that are relevant for Norway?</p>
6355
6356 </blockquote></p>
6357
6358 <p>Again, the quick answer explained how to read the list of patents
6359 in that list:</p>
6360
6361 <p><blockquote>
6362
6363 <p>Your understanding is correct that the last AVC Patent Portfolio
6364 Patent in Norway expired on 21 October 2012.  Therefore, where AVC
6365 Video is both made and Sold in Norway after that date, then no
6366 royalties would be payable for such AVC Video under the AVC License.
6367 With that said, our AVC License provides historic coverage for AVC
6368 Products and AVC Video that may have been manufactured or Sold before
6369 the last Norwegian AVC patent expired.  I would also like to clarify
6370 that coverage is provided for the country of manufacture and the
6371 country of Sale that has active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents.</p>
6372
6373 <p>Therefore, if a party offers AVC Products or AVC Video for Sale in
6374 a country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents (for example,
6375 Sweden, Denmark, Finland, etc.), then that party would still need
6376 coverage under the AVC License even if such products or video are
6377 initially made in a country without active AVC Patent Portfolio
6378 Patents (for example, Norway).  Similarly, a party would need to
6379 conclude the AVC License if they make AVC Products or AVC Video in a
6380 country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, but eventually Sell
6381 such AVC Products or AVC Video in a country without active AVC Patent
6382 Portfolio Patents.</p>
6383 </blockquote></p>
6384
6385 <p>As far as I understand it, MPEG LA believe anyone using Adobe
6386 Premiere and other video related software with a H.264 distribution
6387 license need a license agreement with MPEG LA to use such tools for
6388 anything non-private or commercial, while it is OK to set up a
6389 Youtube-like service as long as no-one pays to get access to the
6390 content.  I still have no clear idea how this applies to Norway, where
6391 none of the patents MPEG LA is licensing are valid.  Will the
6392 copyright terms take precedence or can those terms be ignored because
6393 the patents are not valid in Norway?</p>
6394
6395       </div>
6396       <div class="tags">
6397
6398
6399         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>.
6400
6401
6402       </div>
6403     </div>
6404     <div class="padding"></div>
6405
6406     <div class="entry">
6407       <div class="title">
6408         <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>
6409       </div>
6410       <div class="date">
6411          5th July 2015
6412       </div>
6413       <div class="body">
6414         <p>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
6415 need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback.  I wish to
6416 thank every one of these.  Several pointed me to the possibility of
6417 fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
6418 do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
6419 machine.  But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
6420 with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
6421 for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement.  If I did
6422 not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
6423 using <a href="http://www.francecrans.com/">FrancEcrans</a>, but it
6424 might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.</p>
6425
6426 <p>One tip I got was to use the
6427 <a href="https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb">Skinflint</a> web service to
6428 compare laptop models.  It seem to have more models available than
6429 prisjakt.no.  Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
6430 keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook 840 keyboard is not
6431 very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
6432 keyboards I tested.  Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
6433
6434 <p>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
6435 newest Thinkpad X model.  The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
6436 (which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
6437 Debian Sid/Unstable according to
6438 <a href="http://www.corsac.net/X250/">Corsac.net</a>.  The reports I
6439 got on the keyboard quality are not consistent.  Some say the keyboard
6440 is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
6441 Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
6442 keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
6443 keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
6444 replace it.  I'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
6445 activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230.  I'm
6446 also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
6447 noisy.  In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
6448 Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.</p>
6449
6450 <p>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
6451 <a href="http://pro-star.com">Pro-Star</a>, another was
6452 <a href="http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/">Libreboot</a>.
6453 The latter look very attractive to me.</p>
6454
6455 <p>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback.  It help a lot
6456 as I keep looking for a replacement.</p>
6457
6458 <p>Update 2015-07-06: I was recommended to check out the
6459 <a href="">lapstore.de</a> web shop for used laptops.  They got several
6460 different
6461 <a href="http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/">old
6462 thinkpad X models</a>, and provide one year warranty.</p>
6463
6464       </div>
6465       <div class="tags">
6466
6467
6468         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>.
6469
6470
6471       </div>
6472     </div>
6473     <div class="padding"></div>
6474
6475     <div class="entry">
6476       <div class="title">
6477         <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>
6478       </div>
6479       <div class="date">
6480          3rd July 2015
6481       </div>
6482       <div class="body">
6483         <p>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
6484 replacement soon.  The left 5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
6485 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
6486 cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
6487 flickering.</p>
6488
6489 <p>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
6490 still as
6491 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">I
6492 described them in 2013</a>.  The last time I bought a laptop, I had
6493 good help from
6494 <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=353">prisjakt.no</a>
6495 where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
6496 wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually.  Three button mouse
6497 and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
6498 laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook 820 G1 and
6499 G2) lack three mouse buttons).  It is also unclear to me how good the
6500 keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are.  I hope Lenovo have not messed up
6501 the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
6502 deteriorated since X41.</p>
6503
6504 <p>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
6505 seem sensible to me?  Are there better services around to search the
6506 set of available laptops for features?  Please send me an email if you
6507 have suggestions.</p>
6508
6509 <p>Update 2015-07-23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
6510 <a href="http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom">list
6511 of endorsed hardware</a>, which is useful background information.</p>
6512
6513       </div>
6514       <div class="tags">
6515
6516
6517         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>.
6518
6519
6520       </div>
6521     </div>
6522     <div class="padding"></div>
6523
6524     <div class="entry">
6525       <div class="title">
6526         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MakerCon_Nordic_videos_now_available_on_Frikanalen.html">MakerCon Nordic videos now available on Frikanalen</a>
6527       </div>
6528       <div class="date">
6529          2nd July 2015
6530       </div>
6531       <div class="body">
6532         <p>Last oktober I was involved on behalf of
6533 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> with recording the talks at
6534 <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">MakerCon Nordic</a>, a conference for
6535 the Maker movement.  Since then it has been the plan to publish the
6536 recordings on <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, which
6537 finally happened the last few days.  A few talks are missing because
6538 the speakers asked the organizers to not publish them, but most of the
6539 talks are available.  The talks are being broadcasted on RiksTV
6540 channel 50 and using multicast on Uninett, as well as being available
6541 from the Frikanalen web site.  The unedited recordings are
6542 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">available on
6543 Youtube too</a>.</p>
6544
6545 <p>This is the list of talks available at the moment.  Visit the
6546 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/?q=makercon">Frikanalen video
6547 pages</a> to view them.</p>
6548
6549 <ul>
6550
6551   <li>Evolutionary algorithms as a design tool - from art
6552       to robotics (Kyrre Glette)</li>
6553
6554   <li>Make and break (Hans Gerhard Meier)</li>
6555
6556   <li>Making a one year school course for young makers
6557       (Olav Helland)</li>
6558
6559   <li>Innovation Inspiration - IPR Databases as a Source of
6560       Inspiration (Hege Langlo)</li>
6561
6562   <li>Making a toy for makers (Erik Torstensson)</li>
6563
6564   <li>How to make 3D printer electronics (Elias Bakken)</li>
6565
6566   <li>Hovering Clouds: Looking at online tool offerings for Product
6567       Design and 3D Printing (William Kempton)</li>
6568
6569   <li>Travelling maker stories (Øyvind Nydal Dahl)</li>
6570
6571   <li>Making the first Maker Faire in Sweden (Nils Olander)</li>
6572
6573   <li>Breaking the mold: Printing 1000’s of parts (Espen Sivertsen)</li>
6574
6575   <li>Ultimaker — and open source 3D printing (Erik de Bruijn)</li>
6576
6577   <li>Autodesk’s 3D Printing Platform: Sparking innovation (Hilde
6578       Sevens)</li>
6579
6580   <li>How Making is Changing the World – and How You Can Too!
6581       (Jennifer Turliuk)</li>
6582
6583   <li>Open-Source Adventuring: OpenROV, OpenExplorer and the Future of
6584       Connected Exploration (David Lang)</li>
6585
6586   <li>Making in Norway (Haakon Karlsen Jr., Graham Hayward and Jens
6587       Dyvik)</li>
6588
6589   <li>The Impact of the Maker Movement (Mike Senese)</li>
6590
6591 </ul>
6592
6593 <p>Part of the reason this took so long was that the scripts NUUG had
6594 to prepare a recording for publication were five years old and no
6595 longer worked with the current video processing tools (command line
6596 argument changes).  In addition, we needed better audio normalization,
6597 which sent me on a detour to
6598 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html">package
6599 bs1770gain for Debian</a>.  Now this is in place and it became a lot
6600 easier to publish NUUG videos on Frikanalen.</p>
6601
6602       </div>
6603       <div class="tags">
6604
6605
6606         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>.
6607
6608
6609       </div>
6610     </div>
6611     <div class="padding"></div>
6612
6613     <div class="entry">
6614       <div class="title">
6615         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Graphing_the_Norwegian_company_ownership_structure.html">Graphing the Norwegian company ownership structure</a>
6616       </div>
6617       <div class="date">
6618         15th June 2015
6619       </div>
6620       <div class="body">
6621         <p>It is a bit work to figure out the ownership structure of companies
6622 in Norway.  The information is publicly available, but one need to
6623 recursively look up ownership for all owners to figure out the complete
6624 ownership graph of a given set of companies.  To save me the work in
6625 the future, I wrote a script to do this automatically, outputting the
6626 ownership structure using the Graphviz/dotty format.  The data source
6627 is web scraping from <a href="http://www.proff.no/">Proff</a>, because
6628 I failed to find a useful source directly from the official keepers of
6629 the ownership data, <a href="http://www.brreg.no/">Brønnøysundsregistrene</a>.</p>
6630
6631 <p>To get an ownership graph for a set of companies, fetch
6632 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/brreg-norway-ownership-graph">the code from git</a> and run it using the organisation number.  I'm
6633 using the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet as an example here, as its
6634 ownership structure is very simple:</p>
6635
6636 <pre>
6637 % time ./bin/eierskap-dotty 958033540 > dagbladet.dot
6638
6639 real    0m2.841s
6640 user    0m0.184s
6641 sys     0m0.036s
6642 %
6643 </pre>
6644
6645 <p>The script accept several organisation numbers on the command line,
6646 allowing a cluster of companies to be graphed in the same image.  The
6647 resulting dot file for the example above look like this.  The edges
6648 are labeled with the ownership percentage, and the nodes uses the
6649 organisation number as their name and the name as the label:</p>
6650
6651 <pre>
6652 digraph ownership {
6653 rankdir = LR;
6654 "Aller Holding A/s" -> "910119877" [label="100%"]
6655 "910119877" -> "998689015" [label="100%"]
6656 "998689015" -> "958033540" [label="99%"]
6657 "974530600" -> "958033540" [label="1%"]
6658 "958033540" [label="AS DAGBLADET"]
6659 "998689015" [label="Berner Media Holding AS"]
6660 "974530600" [label="Dagbladets Stiftelse"]
6661 "910119877" [label="Aller Media AS"]
6662 }
6663 </pre>
6664
6665 <p>To view the ownership graph, run "<tt>dotty dagbladet.dot</tt>" or
6666 convert it to a PNG using "<tt>dot -T png dagbladet.dot >
6667 dagbladet.png</tt>".  The result can be seen below:</p>
6668
6669 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-06-15-ownership-graphs-norway-dagbladet.png" width="80%">
6670
6671 <p>Note that I suspect the "Aller Holding A/S" entry to be incorrect
6672 data in the official ownership register, as that name is not
6673 registered in the official company register for Norway.  The ownership
6674 register is sensitive to typos and there seem to be no strict checking
6675 of the ownership links.</p>
6676
6677 <p>Let me know if you improve the script or find better data sources.
6678 The code is licensed according to GPL 2 or newer.</p>
6679
6680 <p>Update 2015-06-15: Since the initial post I've been told that
6681 "<a href="http://www.proff.dk/firma/carl-allers-etablissement-aktieselskab/københavn-v/hovedkontorer/13624518-3/">Aller
6682 Holding A/S</a>" is a Danish company, which explain why it did not
6683 have a Norwegian organisation number.  I've also been told that there
6684 is a <a href="http://www.brreg.no/automatiske/webservices/">web
6685 services API available</a> from Brønnøysundsregistrene, for those
6686 willing to accept the terms or pay the price.</p>
6687
6688       </div>
6689       <div class="tags">
6690
6691
6692         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>.
6693
6694
6695       </div>
6696     </div>
6697     <div class="padding"></div>
6698
6699     <div class="entry">
6700       <div class="title">
6701         <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>
6702       </div>
6703       <div class="date">
6704         11th June 2015
6705       </div>
6706       <div class="body">
6707         <p>Television loudness is the source of frustration for viewers
6708 everywhere.  Some channels are very load, others are less loud, and
6709 ads tend to shout very high to get the attention of the viewers, and
6710 the viewers do not like this.  This fact is well known to the TV
6711 channels.  See for example the BBC white paper
6712 "<a href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp-pdf-files/WHP202.pdf">Terminology
6713 for loudness and level dBTP, LU, and all that</a>" from 2011 for a
6714 summary of the problem domain.  To better address the need for even
6715 loadness, the TV channels got together several years ago to agree on a
6716 new way to measure loudness in digital files as one step in
6717 standardizing loudness.  From this came the ITU-R standard BS.1770,
6718 "<a href="http://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-BS.1770/en">Algorithms to
6719 measure audio programme loudness and true-peak audio level</a>".</p>
6720
6721 <p>The ITU-R BS.1770 specification describe an algorithm to measure
6722 loadness in LUFS (Loudness Units, referenced to Full Scale). But
6723 having a way to measure is not enough.  To get the same loudness
6724 across TV channels, one also need to decide which value to standardize
6725 on.  For European TV channels, this was done in the EBU Recommondaton
6726 R128, "<a href="https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf">Loudness
6727 normalisation and permitted maximum level of audio signals</a>", which
6728 specifies a recommended level of -23 LUFS.  In Norway, I have been
6729 told that NRK, TV2, MTG and SBS have decided among themselves to
6730 follow the R128 recommondation for playout from 2016-03-01.</p>
6731
6732 <p>There are free software available to measure and adjust the loudness
6733 level using the LUFS.  In Debian, I am aware of a library named
6734 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libebur128">libebur128</a>
6735 able to measure the loudness and since yesterday morning a new binary
6736 named <a href="http://bs1770gain.sourceforge.net">bs1770gain</a>
6737 capable of both measuring and adjusting was uploaded and is waiting
6738 for NEW processing.  I plan to maintain the latter in Debian under the
6739 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=pkg-multimedia-maintainers%40lists.alioth.debian.org">Debian
6740 multimedia</a> umbrella.</p>
6741
6742 <p>The free software based TV channel I am involved in,
6743 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, plan to follow the
6744 R128 recommondation ourself as soon as we can adjust the software to
6745 do so, and the bs1770gain tool seem like a good fit for that part of
6746 the puzzle to measure loudness on new video uploaded to Frikanalen.
6747 Personally, I plan to use bs1770gain to adjust the loudness of videos
6748 I upload to Frikanalen on behalf of <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
6749 NUUG member organisation</a>.  The program seem to be able to measure
6750 the LUFS value of any media file handled by ffmpeg, but I've only
6751 successfully adjusted the LUFS value of WAV files.  I suspect it
6752 should be able to adjust it for all the formats handled by ffmpeg.</p>
6753
6754       </div>
6755       <div class="tags">
6756
6757
6758         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>.
6759
6760
6761       </div>
6762     </div>
6763     <div class="padding"></div>
6764
6765     <div class="entry">
6766       <div class="title">
6767         <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>
6768       </div>
6769       <div class="date">
6770         10th May 2015
6771       </div>
6772       <div class="body">
6773         <p>5 days ago, the Norwegian Parliament decided, unanimously, that all
6774 citizens of Norway, no matter if they are suspected of something
6775 criminal or not, are
6776 <a href="https://www.holderdeord.no/votes/1430838871e">required to
6777 give fingerprints to the police</a> (vote details from Holder de
6778 ord).  The law make it sound like it will be optional, but in a few
6779 years there will be no option any more.  The ID will be required to
6780 vote, to get a bank account, a bank card, to change address on the
6781 post office, to receive an electronic ID or to get a drivers license
6782 and many other tasks required to function in Norway.  The banks plan
6783 to stop providing their own ID on the bank cards when this new
6784 national ID is introduced, and the national road authorities plan to
6785 change the drivers license to no longer be usable as identity cards.
6786 In effect, to function as a citizen in Norway a national ID card will
6787 be required, and to get it one need to provide the fingerprints to
6788 the police.</p>
6789
6790 <p>In addition to handing the fingerprint to the police (which
6791 promised to not make a copy of the fingerprint image at that point in
6792 time, but say nothing about doing it later), a picture of the
6793 fingerprint will be stored on the RFID chip, along with a picture of
6794 the face and other information about the person.  Some of the
6795 information will be encrypted, but the encryption will be the same
6796 system as currently used in the passports.  The codes to decrypt will
6797 be available to a lot of government offices and their suppliers around
6798 the globe, but for those that do not know anyone in those circles it
6799 is good to know that
6800 <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/nov/17/news.homeaffairs">the
6801 encryption is already broken</a>.  And they
6802 <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/article/2215057/wireless/bad-guys-could-read-rfid-passports-at-217-feet--maybe-a-lot-more.html">can
6803 be read from 70 meters away</a>.  This can be mitigated a bit by
6804 keeping it in a Faraday cage (metal box or metal wire container), but
6805 one will be required to take it out of there often enough to expose
6806 ones private and personal information to a lot of people that have no
6807 business getting access to that information.</p>
6808
6809 <p>The new Norwegian national IDs are a vehicle for identity theft,
6810 and I feel sorry for us all having politicians accepting such invasion
6811 of privacy without any objections.  So are the Norwegian passports,
6812 but it has been possible to function in Norway without those so far.
6813 That option is going away with the passing of the new law.  In this, I
6814 envy the Germans, because for them it is optional how much biometric
6815 information is stored in their national ID.</p>
6816
6817 <p>And if forced collection of fingerprints was not bad enough, the
6818 information collected in the national ID card register can be handed
6819 over to foreign intelligence services and police authorities, "when
6820 extradition is not considered disproportionate".</p>
6821
6822 <p>Update 2015-05-12: For those unable to believe that the Parliament
6823 really could make such decision, I wrote
6824 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Blir_det_virkelig_krav_om_fingeravtrykk_i_nasjonale_ID_kort_.html">a
6825 summary of the sources I have</a> for concluding the way I do
6826 (Norwegian Only, as the sources are all in Norwegian).</p>
6827
6828       </div>
6829       <div class="tags">
6830
6831
6832         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>.
6833
6834
6835       </div>
6836     </div>
6837     <div class="padding"></div>
6838
6839     <div class="entry">
6840       <div class="title">
6841         <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>
6842       </div>
6843       <div class="date">
6844          1st May 2015
6845       </div>
6846       <div class="body">
6847         <p>Many years ago, a friend of mine calculated how much it would cost
6848 to store the sound of all phone calls in Norway, and came up with the
6849 cost of around 20 million NOK (2.4 mill EUR) for all the calls in a
6850 year.  I got curious and wondered what the same calculation would look
6851 like today.  To do so one need an idea of how much data storage is
6852 needed for each minute of sound, how many minutes all the calls in
6853 Norway sums up to, and the cost of data storage.</p>
6854
6855 <p>The 2005 numbers are from
6856 <a href="http://www.digi.no/analyser/2005/10/04/vi-prater-stadig-mindre-i-roret">digi.no</a>,
6857 the 2012 numbers are from
6858 <a href="http://www.nkom.no/aktuelt/nyheter/fortsatt-vekst-i-det-norske-ekommarkedet">a
6859 NKOM report</a>, and I got the 2013 numbers after asking NKOM via
6860 email.  I was told the numbers for 2014 will be presented May 20th,
6861 and decided not to wait for those, as I doubt they will be very
6862 different from the numbers from 2013.</p>
6863
6864 <p>The amount of data storage per minute sound depend on the wanted
6865 quality, and for phone calls it is generally believed that 8 Kbit/s is
6866 enough.  See for example a
6867 <a href="http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/voice/voice-quality/7934-bwidth-consume.html#topic1">summary
6868 on voice quality from Cisco</a> for some alternatives.  8 Kbit/s is 60
6869 Kbytes/min, and this can be multiplied with the number of call minutes
6870 to get the storage requirements.</p>
6871
6872 <p>Storage prices varies a lot, depending on speed, backup strategies,
6873 availability requirements etc.  But a simple way to calculate can be
6874 to use the price of a TiB-disk (around 1000 NOK / 120 EUR) and double
6875 it to take space, power and redundancy into account.  It could be much
6876 higher with high speed and good redundancy requirements.</p>
6877
6878 <p>But back to the question, What would it cost to store all phone
6879 calls in Norway?  Not much.  Here is a small table showing the
6880 estimated cost, which is within the budget constraint of most medium
6881 and large organisations:</p>
6882
6883 <table border="1">
6884 <tr><th>Year</th><th>Call minutes</th><th>Size</th><th>Price in NOK / EUR</th></tr>
6885 <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>
6886 <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>
6887 <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>
6888 </table>
6889
6890 <p>This is the cost of buying the storage.  Maintenance need to be
6891 taken into account too, but calculating that is left as an exercise
6892 for the reader.  But it is obvious to me from those numbers that
6893 recording the sound of all phone calls in Norway is not going to be
6894 stopped because it is too expensive.  I wonder if someone already is
6895 collecting the data?</p>
6896
6897       </div>
6898       <div class="tags">
6899
6900
6901         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>.
6902
6903
6904       </div>
6905     </div>
6906     <div class="padding"></div>
6907
6908     <div class="entry">
6909       <div class="title">
6910         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_beta_release.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu beta release</a>
6911       </div>
6912       <div class="date">
6913         26th April 2015
6914       </div>
6915       <div class="body">
6916         <p>I am happy to report that the Debian Edu team sent out
6917 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2015/04/msg00000.html">this
6918 announcement today</a>:</p>
6919
6920 <pre>
6921 the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is pleased to announce the first
6922 *beta* release of Debian Edu "Jessie" 8.0+edu0~b1, which for the first
6923 time is composed entirely of packages from the current Debian stable
6924 release, Debian 8 "Jessie".
6925
6926 (As most reading this will know, Debian "Jessie" hasn't actually been
6927 released by now. The release is still in progress but should finish
6928 later today ;)
6929
6930 We expect to make a final release of Debian Edu "Jessie" in the coming
6931 weeks, timed with the first point release of Debian Jessie. Upgrades
6932 from this beta release of Debian Edu Jessie to the final release will
6933 be possible and encouraged!
6934
6935 Please report feedback to debian-edu@lists.debian.org and/or submit
6936 bugs: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
6937
6938 Debian Edu - sometimes also known as "Skolelinux" - is a complete
6939 operating system for schools, universities and other
6940 organisations. Through its pre- prepared installation profiles
6941 administrators can install servers, workstations and laptops which
6942 will work in harmony on the school network.  With Debian Edu, the
6943 teachers themselves or their technical support staff can roll out a
6944 complete multi-user, multi-machine study environment within hours or
6945 days.
6946
6947 Debian Edu is already in use at several hundred schools all over the
6948 world, particularly in Germany, Spain and Norway. Installations come
6949 with hundreds of applications pre-installed, plus the whole Debian
6950 archive of thousands of compatible packages within easy reach.
6951
6952 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
6953 installation instructions are available, including detailed
6954 instructions in the manual explaining the first steps, such as setting
6955 up a network or adding users.  Please note that the password for the
6956 user your prompted for during installation must have a length of at
6957 least 5 characters!
6958
6959 == Where to download ==
6960
6961 A multi-architecture CD / usbstick image (649 MiB) for network booting
6962 can be downloaded at the following locations:
6963
6964     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso
6965     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso .
6966
6967 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 54a524d16246cddd8d2cfd6ea52f2dd78c47ee0a
6968
6969 Alternatively an extended DVD / usbstick image (4.9 GiB) is also
6970 available, with more software included (saving additional download
6971 time):
6972
6973     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
6974     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
6975
6976 The SHA1SUM of this image is: fb1f1504a490c077a48653898f9d6a461cb3c636
6977
6978 Sources are available from the Debian archive, see
6979 http://ftp.debian.org/debian-cd/8.0.0/source/ for some download
6980 options.
6981
6982 == Debian Edu Jessie manual in seven languages ==
6983
6984 Please see https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/ for
6985 the English version of the Debian Edu jessie manual.
6986
6987 This manual has been fully translated to German, French, Italian,
6988 Danish, Dutch and Norwegian Bokmål. A partly translated version exists
6989 for Spanish.  See http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/ for
6990 online version of the translated manual.
6991
6992 More information about Debian 8 "Jessie" itself is provided in the
6993 release notes and the installation manual:
6994 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes
6995 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual
6996
6997
6998 == Errata / known problems ==
6999
7000     It takes up to 15 minutes for a changed hostname to be updated via
7001     DHCP (#780461).
7002
7003     The hostname script fails to update LTSP server hostname (#783087).
7004
7005 Workaround: run update-hostname-from-ip on the client to update the
7006 hostname immediately.
7007
7008 Check https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie for a possibly
7009 more current and complete list.
7010
7011 == Some more details about Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~b1 Codename Jessie released 2015-04-25 ==
7012
7013 === Software updates ===
7014
7015 Everything which is new in Debian 8 Jessie, e.g.:
7016
7017  * Linux kernel 3.16.7-ctk9; for the i386 architecture, support for
7018    i486 processors has been dropped; oldest supported ones: i586 (like
7019    Intel Pentium and AMD K5).
7020
7021  * Desktop environments KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11.13, GNOME 3.14,
7022    Xfce 4.12, LXDE 0.5.6
7023    * new optional desktop environment: MATE 1.8
7024    * KDE Plasma Workspaces is installed by default; to choose one of
7025      the others see the manual.
7026  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 41
7027  * LibreOffice 4.3.3
7028  * GOsa 2.7.4
7029  * LTSP 5.5.4
7030  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
7031  * new boot framework: systemd
7032  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.12
7033  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
7034  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
7035  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.1
7036  * golearn 0.9
7037  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
7038  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
7039  * Debian Jessie includes about 43000 packages available for installation.
7040  * More information about Debian 8 Jessie is provided in its release
7041    notes and the installation manual, see the link above.
7042
7043 === Installation changes ===
7044
7045     Installations done via PXE now also install firmware automatically
7046     for the hardware present.
7047
7048 === Fixed bugs ===
7049
7050 A number of bugs have been fixed in this release; the most noticeable
7051 from a user perspective:
7052
7053  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
7054    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
7055    information is corrected (710362)
7056
7057  * shutdown-at-night now shuts the system down if gdm3 is used (775608).
7058
7059 === Sugar desktop removed ===
7060
7061 As the Sugar desktop was removed from Debian Jessie, it is also not
7062 available in Debian Edu jessie.
7063
7064
7065 == About Debian Edu / Skolelinux ==
7066
7067 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on
7068 Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
7069 configured school network. Directly after installation a school server
7070 running all services needed for a school network is set up just
7071 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
7072 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
7073 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
7074 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
7075 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
7076 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
7077 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
7078 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
7079 can choose between KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
7080 environment.
7081
7082 == About Debian ==
7083
7084 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
7085 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
7086 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
7087 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
7088 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
7089 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
7090 operating system.
7091
7092 == Thanks ==
7093
7094 Thanks to everyone making Debian and Debian Edu / Skolelinux happen!
7095 You rock.
7096 </pre>
7097
7098       </div>
7099       <div class="tags">
7100
7101
7102         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>.
7103
7104
7105       </div>
7106     </div>
7107     <div class="padding"></div>
7108
7109     <div class="entry">
7110       <div class="title">
7111         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Shirish_Agarwal.html">Debian Edu interview: Shirish Agarwal</a>
7112       </div>
7113       <div class="date">
7114         15th April 2015
7115       </div>
7116       <div class="body">
7117         <p>It was a surprise to me to learn that project to create a complete
7118 computer system for schools I've involved in,
7119 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, was
7120 being used in India.  But apparently it is, and I managed to get an
7121 interview with one of the friends of the project there, Shirish
7122 Agarwal.</p>
7123
7124 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
7125
7126 <p>My name is Shirish Agarwal. Based out of the educational and
7127 historical city of Pune, from the western state of Maharashtra, India.
7128 My bread comes from giving training, giving policy tips,
7129 installations on free software to mom and pop shops in different
7130 fields from Desktop publishing to retail shops as well as work with
7131 few software start-ups as well.</p>
7132
7133 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
7134 project?</strong></p>
7135
7136 <p>It started innocently enough. I have been using Debian for a few
7137 years and in one local minidebconf / debutsav I was asked if there was
7138 anything for schools or education. I had worked / played with free
7139 educational softwares such as Gcompris and Stellarium for my many
7140 nieces and nephews so researched and found Debian Edu or Skolelinux as
7141 it was known then.  Since then I have started using the various
7142 education meta-packages provided by the project.</p>
7143
7144 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
7145 Edu?</strong></p>
7146
7147 <p>It's closest I have seen where a package full of educational
7148 software are packed, which are free and open (both literally and
7149 figuratively).  Even if I take the simplest software which is
7150 gcompris, the number of activities therein are amazing. Another one of
7151 the softwares that I have liked for a long time is stellarium. Even
7152 pysycache is cool except for couple of issues I encountered
7153 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781841">#781841</a> and
7154 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781842">#781842</a>.</p>
7155
7156 <p>I prefer software installed on the system over web based solutions,
7157 as a web site can disappear any time but the software on disk has the
7158 possibility of a larger life span.  Of course with both it's more a
7159 question if it has enough users who make it fun or sustainable or both
7160 for the developer per-se.</p>
7161
7162 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
7163 Edu?</strong></p>
7164
7165 <p>I do see that the Debian Edu team seems to be short-handed and I
7166 think more efforts should be made to make it popular and ask and take
7167 help from people and the larger community wherever possible.</p>
7168
7169 <p>I don't see any disadvantage to use Skolelinux apart from the fact
7170 that most apps. are generic which is good or bad how you see it.
7171 However, saying that I do acknowledge the fact that the canvas is
7172 pretty big and there are lot of interesting ideas that could be done
7173 but for reasons not known not done or if done I don't know about them.
7174 Let me share some of the ideas (these are more upstream based but
7175 still) I have had for a long time :</p>
7176
7177 <p>1. Classical maths question of two trains in opposing directions
7178 each running @x kmph/mph at y distance, when they will meet and how
7179 far would each travel and similar questions like these.
7180
7181 <p>The computer is a fantastic system where questions like these can
7182 be drawn, animated and the methodology and answers teased out in
7183 interactive manner. While sites such as the
7184 <a href="http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.two.trains.html">Ask
7185 Dr. Math FAQ on The Two Trains problem</a> (as an example or point of
7186 inspiration) can be used there is lot more that can be done.  I dunno
7187 if there is a free software which does something like this.  The idea
7188 being a blend of objects + animation + interaction which does
7189 this. The whole interaction could be gamified with points or sounds or
7190 colourful celebration whenever the user gets even part of the question
7191 or/and methodology right. That would help reinforce good behaviour.
7192 This understanding could be used to share/showcase everything from how
7193 the first wheel came to be, to evolution to how astronomy started,
7194 psychics and everything in-between.</p>
7195
7196 <p>One specific idea in the train part was having the Linux mascot on
7197 one train and the BSD or GNU mascot on the other train and they
7198 meeting somewhere in-between. Characters from blender movies could
7199 also be used.</p>
7200
7201 <p>2. Loads of crossword-puzzles with reference to subjects: We have
7202 enormous data sets in Wikipedia and Wikitionary.  I don't think it
7203 should be a big job to design crossword puzzles. Using categories and
7204 sub-categories it should be doable to have Q&A single word answers
7205 from the existing data-sets. What would make it easy or hard could be
7206 the length of the word + existence of many or few vowels depending on
7207 the user's input.</p>
7208
7209 <p>3. Jigsaw puzzles - We already have a great software called
7210 palapeli with number of slicers making it pretty interesting. What
7211 needs to be done is to download large number of public domain and
7212 copyleft images, tease and use IPTC tags to categorise them into
7213 nature, history etc.  and let it loose. This could turn to be really
7214 huge collection of images. One source could be taken from
7215 commons.wikimedia.org, others could be huge collection of royalty-free
7216 stock photos. Potential is immense.</p>
7217
7218 <p>Apart from this, free software suffers in two directions, we lag
7219 both in development (of using new features per-se) and maintenance a
7220 lot.  This is more so in educational software as these applications
7221 need to be timely and the opportunity cost of missing deadlines is
7222 immense. If we are able to solve issues of funding for development and
7223 maintenance of such software I don't see any big difficulties. I know
7224 of few start-ups in and around India who would love to develop and
7225 maintain such software if funding issues could be solved.</p>
7226
7227 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
7228
7229 <p>That would be huge list. Some of the softwares are obviously apt,
7230 aptitude, debdelta, leafpad, the shell of course (zsh nowadays),
7231 quassel for IRC. In games I use shisen-sho while card-games are evenly
7232 between kpat and Aiselriot.  In desktops it's a tie between
7233 gnome-flashback and mate.</p>
7234
7235 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
7236 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
7237
7238 <p>I think it should first start with using specific FOSS apps. in
7239 whatever environment they are. If it's MS-Windows or Mac so be it.
7240 Once they are habitual with the apps. and there is buy-in from the
7241 school management then it could be installed anywhere. Most of the
7242 people now understand the concept of a repository because of the
7243 various online stores so it isn't hard to convince on that front.</p>
7244
7245 <p>What is harder is having enough people with technical skills and
7246 passion to service them. If you get buy-in from one or two teachers
7247 then ideas like above could also be asked to be done as a project as
7248 well.</p>
7249
7250 <p>I think where we fall short more than anything is in marketing. For
7251 instance, Debian has this whole range of fonts in its archive but
7252 there isn't even a page where all those different fonts in the La
7253 Ipsum format could be tried out for newcomers.</p>
7254
7255 <p>One of the issues faced constantly in installations is with updates
7256 and upgrades.  People have this myth that each update and upgrade
7257 means the user interface will / has to change. I have seen this
7258 innumerable times.  That perhaps is one of the reasons which browsers
7259 like Iceweasel / Firefox change user interfaces so much, not because
7260 it might be needed or be functional but because people believe that
7261 changed user interfaces are better. This, can easily be pointed with
7262 the user interfaces changed with almost every MS-Windows and Mac OS
7263 releases.</p>
7264
7265 <p>The problems with Debian Edu for deployment are many. The biggest
7266 is the huge gap between what is taught in schools and what Debian Edu
7267 is aimed at.
7268
7269 <p>Me and my friends did teach on week-ends in a government school for
7270 around 2 years, and
7271 <a href="https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/sharings/">gathered
7272 some experience</a> there.  Some of the things we learnt/discovered
7273 there was :</p>
7274
7275 <ol>
7276
7277   <li>Most of the teachers are very territorial about their subjects
7278    and they do not want you to teach anything out of the
7279    portion/syllabus given.</li>
7280
7281   <li>They want any activity on the system in accordance to whatever
7282    is in the syllabus.</li>
7283
7284   <li>There are huge barriers both with the English language and at
7285    times with objects or whatever. An example, let's say in gcompris
7286    you have objects falling down and you have to name them and let's
7287    say the falling object is a hat or a fedora hat, this would not be
7288    as recognizable as say a
7289    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puneri_Pagadi">Puneri
7290    Pagdi</a> so there is need to inject local objects, words wherever
7291    possible. Especially for word-games there are so many hindi words
7292    which have become part of english vocabulary (for instance in
7293    parley), those could be made into a hinglish collection or
7294    something but that is something for upstream to do.</li>
7295
7296 </ol>
7297
7298       </div>
7299       <div class="tags">
7300
7301
7302         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>.
7303
7304
7305       </div>
7306     </div>
7307     <div class="padding"></div>
7308
7309     <div class="entry">
7310       <div class="title">
7311         <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>
7312       </div>
7313       <div class="date">
7314          7th April 2015
7315       </div>
7316       <div class="body">
7317         <p>I am happy to let you all know that I'm going to the <a
7318 href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/">Open Source Developers'
7319 Conference Nordic 2015</a>!</p>
7320
7321 <p>It take place Friday 8th to Sunday 10th of May in Oslo next to
7322 where I work, and I finally got around to submitting
7323 <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talk/6192">a talk proposal for
7324 it</a> (dead link for most people until the talk is accepted).  As
7325 part of my involvement with the
7326 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group member
7327 association</a> I have been slightly involved in the planning of this
7328 conference for a while now, with a focus on organising a Civic Hacking
7329 Hackathon with our friends
7330 over at <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> and
7331 <a href="http://www.holderdeord.no/">Holder de ord</a>.  This part is
7332 named the 'My Society' track in the program.  There is still space for
7333 more talks and participants.  I hope to see you there.</p>
7334
7335 <p>Check out <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talks">the talks
7336 submitted and accepted so far</a>.</p>
7337
7338       </div>
7339       <div class="tags">
7340
7341
7342         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>.
7343
7344
7345       </div>
7346     </div>
7347     <div class="padding"></div>
7348
7349     <div class="entry">
7350       <div class="title">
7351         <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>
7352       </div>
7353       <div class="date">
7354          4th April 2015
7355       </div>
7356       <div class="body">
7357         <p>During eastern I had some time to continue working on the Norwegian
7358 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
7359 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
7360 At the moment I am proof reading the finished text, looking for typos,
7361 inconsistent wordings and sentences that do not flow as they should.
7362 I'm more than two thirds done with the text, and welcome others to
7363 check the text up to chapter 13.  The current status is available on the
7364 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
7365 project pages.  You can also check out the
7366 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
7367 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
7368 and HTML version available in the
7369 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
7370 directory</a>.</p>
7371
7372 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
7373 you find any.</p>
7374
7375       </div>
7376       <div class="tags">
7377
7378
7379         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>.
7380
7381
7382       </div>
7383     </div>
7384     <div class="padding"></div>
7385
7386     <div class="entry">
7387       <div class="title">
7388         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen__Norwegian_TV_channel_for_technical_topics.html">Frikanalen, Norwegian TV channel for technical topics</a>
7389       </div>
7390       <div class="date">
7391          9th March 2015
7392       </div>
7393       <div class="body">
7394         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a>,
7395 where I am a member, and where people interested in free software,
7396 open standards and UNIX like operating systems like Linux and the BSDs
7397 come together, record our monthly technical presentations on video.
7398 The purpose is to document the talks and spread them to a wider
7399 audience.  For this, the the Norwegian nationwide open channel
7400 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is a useful venue.
7401 Since a few days ago, when I figured out the
7402 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/api/">REST API</a> to program the
7403 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/guide/">channel time schedule</a>,
7404 the channel has been filled with NUUG talks, related recordings and
7405 some Creative Commons licensed TED talks (from archive.org).  I fill
7406 all "leftover bits" on the channel with content from NUUG, which at
7407 the moment is almost 17 of 24 hours every day.</p>
7408
7409 <p>The list of NUUG videos
7410 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/organization/82">uploaded so far</a>
7411 include things like a
7412 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/625090">one hour talk by John
7413 Perry Barlow when he visited Oslo</a>, a presentation of
7414 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624275">Haiku, the BeOS
7415 re-implementation</a>, the
7416 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624493">history of FiksGataMi,
7417 the Norwegian version of FixMyStreet</a>, the good old
7418 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/623566">Warriors of the net
7419 video</A> and many others.</p>
7420
7421 <p>We have a large backlog of NUUG talks not yet uploaded to
7422 Frikanalen, and plan to upload every useful bit to the channel to
7423 spread the word there.  I also hope to find useful recordings from the
7424 Chaos Computer Club and Debian conferences and spread them on the
7425 channel as well.  But this require locating the videos and their meta
7426 information (title, description, license, etc), and preparing the
7427 recordings for broadcast, and I have not yet had the spare time to
7428 focus on this.  Perhaps you want to help.  Please join us on IRC,
7429 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
7430 if you want to help make this happen.</p>
7431
7432 <p>But as I said, already the channel is already almost exclusively
7433 filled with technical topics, and if you want to learn something new
7434 today, check out the <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">Ogg Theora
7435 web stream</a> or use one of the other ways to get access to the
7436 channel.  Unfortunately the Ogg Theora recoding for distribution still
7437 do not properly sync the video and sound.  It is generated by recoding
7438 a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to
7439 Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and we have not been able to find a way that
7440 produces acceptable quality.  Help needed, please get in touch if you
7441 know how to fix it using free software.</p>
7442
7443       </div>
7444       <div class="tags">
7445
7446
7447         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>.
7448
7449
7450       </div>
7451     </div>
7452     <div class="padding"></div>
7453
7454     <div class="entry">
7455       <div class="title">
7456         <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>
7457       </div>
7458       <div class="date">
7459         28th February 2015
7460       </div>
7461       <div class="body">
7462         <p>Today I was happy to learn that the documentary
7463 <a href="https://citizenfourfilm.com/">Citizenfour</a> by
7464 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Poitras">Laura Poitras</a>
7465 finally will show up in Norway.  According to the magazine
7466 <a href="http://montages.no/">Montages</a>, a deal has finally been
7467 made for
7468 <a href="http://montages.no/nyheter/snowden-dokumentaren-citizenfour-far-norsk-kinodistribusjon/">Cinema
7469 distribution in Norway</a> and the movie will have its premiere soon.
7470 This is great news.  As part of my involvement with
7471 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User Group</a>, me and
7472 a friend have
7473 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_til_Norge_.shtml">tried
7474 to get the movie to Norway</a> ourselves, but obviously
7475 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_endelig_til_Norge_.shtml">we
7476 were too late</a> and Tor Fosse beat us to it.  I am happy he did, as
7477 the movie will make its way to the public and we do not have to make
7478 it happen ourselves.
7479 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwAvd5mvM">The trailer</a>
7480 can be seen on youtube, if you are curious what kind of film this
7481 is.</p>
7482
7483 <p>The whistle blower Edward Snowden really deserve political asylum
7484 here in Norway, but I am afraid he would not be safe.</p>
7485
7486       </div>
7487       <div class="tags">
7488
7489
7490         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>.
7491
7492
7493       </div>
7494     </div>
7495     <div class="padding"></div>
7496
7497     <div class="entry">
7498       <div class="title">
7499         <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>
7500       </div>
7501       <div class="date">
7502         25th February 2015
7503       </div>
7504       <div class="body">
7505         <p>The Norwegian nationwide open channel
7506 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is still going
7507 strong.  It allow everyone to send the video they want on national
7508 television.  It is a TV station administrated completely using a web
7509 browser, running only <ahref="https://github.com/Frikanalen">Free
7510 Software</a>, providing <ahref="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api">a REST
7511 api</a> for administrators and members, and with distribution on the
7512 national DVB-T distribution network RiksTV.  But only between 12:00
7513 and 17:30 Norwegian time.  This has finally changed, after many years
7514 with limited distribution.  A few weeks ago, we set up a Ogg Theora
7515 stream via icecast to allow everyone with Internet access to check out
7516 the channel the rest of the day.  This is presented on
7517 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">the Frikanalen web site now</a>.  And
7518 since a few days ago, the channel is also available
7519 via <a href="https://www.uninett.no/iptv-tilgang">multicast on
7520 UNINETT</a>, available for those using IPTV TVs and set-top boxes in
7521 the Norwegian National Research and Education network.</p>
7522
7523 <p>If you want to see what is on the channel, point your media player
7524 to one of these sources.  The first should work with most players and
7525 browsers, while as far as I know, the multicast UDP stream only work
7526 with VLC.</p>
7527
7528 <ul>
7529   <li><a href="http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv">http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv</a></li>
7530   <li>udp://@224.17.43.129:1234</li>
7531 </ul>
7532
7533 <p>The Ogg Theora / icecast stream is not working well, as the video
7534 and audio is slightly out of sync.  We have not been able to figure
7535 out how to fix it.  It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG
7536 transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to Ogg Theora /
7537 Vorbis, and the result is less then stellar.  If you have ideas how to
7538 fix it, please let us know on frikanalen (at) nuug.no.  We currently
7539 use this with ffmpeg2theora 0.29:</p>
7540
7541 <blockquote><pre>
7542 ./ffmpeg2theora.linux &lt;OBE_gemini_URL.ts&gt; -F 25 -x 720 -y 405 \
7543  --deinterlace --inputfps 25 -c 1 -H 48000 --keyint 8 --buf-delay 100 \
7544  --nosync -V 700 -o - | oggfwd video.nuug.no 8000 &lt;pw&gt; /frikanalen.ogv
7545 </pre></blockquote>
7546
7547 <p>If you get the multicast UDP stream working, please let me know, as
7548 I am curious how far the multicast stream reach.  It do not make it to
7549 my home network, nor any other commercially available network in
7550 Norway that I am aware of.</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/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>.
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/Nude_body_scanner_now_present_on_Norwegian_airport.html">Nude body scanner now present on Norwegian airport</a>
7566       </div>
7567       <div class="date">
7568         10th February 2015
7569       </div>
7570       <div class="body">
7571         <p>Aftenposten, one of the largest newspapers in Norway, today report
7572 that
7573 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/reise/Slik-skannes-kroppen-din-i-fremtidens-sikkerhetskontroll-490666_1.snd">three
7574 of the nude body scanners now is put to use at Gardermoen</a>, the
7575 main airport in Norway.  This way the travelers can have their body
7576 photographed without cloths when visiting Norway.  Of course this
7577 horrible news is presented with a positive spin, stating that "now
7578 travelers can move past the security check point faster and more
7579 efficiently", but fail to mention that the machines in question take
7580 pictures of their nude bodies and store them internally in the
7581 computer, while only presenting sketch figure of the body to the
7582 public.  The article is written in a way that leave the impression
7583 that the new machines do not take these nude pictures and only create
7584 the sketch figures.  In reality the same nude pictures are still
7585 taken, but not presented to everyone.  They are still available for
7586 the owners of the system and the people doing maintenance of the
7587 scanners, as long as they are taken and stored.</p>
7588
7589 <p>Wikipedia have a more on
7590 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_body_scanner">Full body
7591 scanners</a>, including example images and a summary of the
7592 controversy about these scanners.</p>
7593
7594 <p>Personally I will decline to use these machines, as I believe strip
7595 searches of my body is a very intrusive attack on my privacy, and not
7596 something everyone should have to accept to travel.</p>
7597
7598       </div>
7599       <div class="tags">
7600
7601
7602         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>.
7603
7604
7605       </div>
7606     </div>
7607     <div class="padding"></div>
7608
7609     <div class="entry">
7610       <div class="title">
7611         <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>
7612       </div>
7613       <div class="date">
7614          8th February 2015
7615       </div>
7616       <div class="body">
7617         <p>When running a TV station with both broadcast and web stream
7618 distribution, it is useful to know that the stream is working.  As I
7619 am involved in the Norwegian open channel
7620 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> as part of my
7621 activity in the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member
7622 organisation</a>, I wrote a script to use mplayer to connect to a
7623 video stream, pick two images 35 seconds apart and compare them.  If
7624 the images are missing or identical, something is probably wrong with
7625 the stream and an alarm should be triggered.  The script is written as
7626 a Nagios plugin, allowing us to use Nagios to run the check regularly
7627 and sound the alarm when something is wrong.  It is able to detect
7628 both a hanging and a broken video stream.</p>
7629
7630 <p>I just uploaded the code for the script into the
7631 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen/frikanalen/blob/master/nagios-plugin/check_video_stream_images">Frikanalen
7632 git repository</a> on github.  If you run a TV station with web
7633 streaming, perhaps you can find it useful too.</p>
7634
7635 <p>Last year, the Frikanalen public TV station transformed into using
7636 only Linux based free software to administrate, schedule and
7637 distribute the TV content.  The
7638 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen">source code for the entire TV
7639 station</a> is available from the Github project page.  Everyone can
7640 use it to send their content on national TV, and we provide both a web
7641 GUI and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api/">a web API</a> to
7642 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/login/?next=/members/video/">add</a>
7643 and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/members/plan/">schedule
7644 content</a>.  And thanks to last weeks developer gathering and
7645 following activity, we now have the schedule
7646 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/xmltv/2015/01/01">available as
7647 XMLTV</a> too.  Still a lot of work left to do, especially with the
7648 process to add videos and with the scheduling, so your contribution is
7649 most welcome.  Perhaps you want to set up your own TV station?</p>
7650
7651 <p>Update 2015-02-25: Got a tip from Uninett about their
7652 <a href="https://scm.uninett.no/maalepaaler/qstream/">qstream
7653 monitoring system</a>, which gather connection time, jitter, packet
7654 loss and burst bandwidth usage.  It look useful to check if UDP
7655 streams are working as they should.</p>
7656
7657       </div>
7658       <div class="tags">
7659
7660
7661         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>.
7662
7663
7664       </div>
7665     </div>
7666     <div class="padding"></div>
7667
7668     <div class="entry">
7669       <div class="title">
7670         <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>
7671       </div>
7672       <div class="date">
7673         12th January 2015
7674       </div>
7675       <div class="body">
7676         <p>A few days ago, the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/">Free Software
7677 Foundation</a> announced a new video
7678 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">explaining
7679 Free software</a> in simple terms.  The video named User Liberation is
7680 3 minutes long, and I recommend showing it to everyone you know as a
7681 way to explain what Free Software is all about.  Unfortunately several
7682 of the people I know do not understand English and Spanish, so it did
7683 not make sense to show it to them.</p>
7684
7685 <p>But today I was told that
7686 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">English
7687 subtitles were available</a> and set out to provide Norwegian Bokmål
7688 subtitles based on these.  The result has been sent to FSF and made
7689 available in
7690 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/fsf-video-user-liberation-subtitles">a
7691 git repository</a> provided by Github.  Please let me know if you find
7692 errors or have improvements to the subtitles.</p>
7693
7694 <p>Update 2015-02-03: Since I publised this post, FSF created a
7695 Libreplanet
7696 <a href="http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:FSF/User_Liberation_Video_Translation">project
7697 to track subtitles</A> for the video.</p>
7698
7699       </div>
7700       <div class="tags">
7701
7702
7703         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>.
7704
7705
7706       </div>
7707     </div>
7708     <div class="padding"></div>
7709
7710     <div class="entry">
7711       <div class="title">
7712         <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>
7713       </div>
7714       <div class="date">
7715         30th December 2014
7716       </div>
7717       <div class="body">
7718         <p>I am very happy that we in the
7719 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group (NUUG)</a>,
7720 spearheaded by Marius Halden from NUUG and Matthew Somerville from
7721 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>, finally managed to
7722 upgrade the code base for the Norwegian version of
7723 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org/">FixMyStreet</a>.  This
7724 was the first major update since 2011. The refurbished
7725 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is already live, and
7726 seem to hold up the pressure.  The
7727 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__FiksGataMi_i_oppdatert_og_mobilvennlig_klesdrakt.shtml">press
7728 release and announcement</a> went out this morning.</p>
7729
7730 <p>FixMyStreet is a web platform for allowing the citizens to easily
7731 report problems with public infrastructure to the responsible
7732 authorities.  Think of it as a shared mail client with map support,
7733 allowing everyone to see what already was reported and comment on the
7734 reports in public.</p>
7735
7736       </div>
7737       <div class="tags">
7738
7739
7740         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>.
7741
7742
7743       </div>
7744     </div>
7745     <div class="padding"></div>
7746
7747     <div class="entry">
7748       <div class="title">
7749         <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>
7750       </div>
7751       <div class="date">
7752         19th December 2014
7753       </div>
7754       <div class="body">
7755         <p>So, Sony caved in
7756 (<a href="https://twitter.com/RobLowe/status/545338568512917504">according
7757 to Rob Lowe</a>) and demonstrated that America lost its first cyberwar
7758 (<a href="https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/status/545339074975109122">according
7759 to Newt Gingrich</a>).  It should not surprise anyone, after the
7760 whistle blower Edward Snowden documented that the government of USA
7761 and their allies for many years have done their best to make sure the
7762 technology used by its citizens is filled with security holes allowing
7763 the secret services to spy on its own population.  No one in their
7764 right minds could believe that the ability to snoop on the people all
7765 over the globe could only be used by the personnel authorized to do so
7766 by the president of the United States of America.  If the capabilities
7767 are there, they will be used by friend and foe alike, and now they are
7768 being used to bring Sony on its knees.</p>
7769
7770 <p>I doubt it will a lesson learned, and expect USA to lose its next
7771 cyber war too, given how eager the western intelligence communities
7772 (and probably the non-western too, but it is less in the news) seem to
7773 be to continue its current dragnet surveillance practice.</p>
7774
7775 <p>There is a reason why China and others are trying to move away from
7776 Windows to Linux and other alternatives, and it is not to avoid
7777 sending its hard earned dollars to Cayman Islands (or whatever
7778 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven">tax haven</a>
7779 Microsoft is using these days to collect the majority of its
7780 income. :)</p>
7781
7782       </div>
7783       <div class="tags">
7784
7785
7786         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>.
7787
7788
7789       </div>
7790     </div>
7791     <div class="padding"></div>
7792
7793     <div class="entry">
7794       <div class="title">
7795         <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>
7796       </div>
7797       <div class="date">
7798         22nd November 2014
7799       </div>
7800       <div class="body">
7801         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
7802 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
7803 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
7804 courtesy of
7805 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
7806 Schubert</a> and
7807 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
7808 McVittie</a>.
7809
7810 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
7811 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
7812 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
7813 you upgrade:</p>
7814
7815 <p><blockquote><pre>
7816 Package: systemd-sysv
7817 Pin: release o=Debian
7818 Pin-Priority: -1
7819 </pre></blockquote><p>
7820
7821 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
7822 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
7823 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
7824 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
7825 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
7826
7827 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
7828 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
7829 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
7830 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
7831 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
7832 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
7833
7834 <p><blockquote><pre>
7835 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
7836 </pre></blockquote><p>
7837
7838 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
7839
7840 <p><blockquote><pre>
7841 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
7842 </pre></blockquote><p>
7843
7844 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
7845 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
7846
7847 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
7848 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
7849 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
7850 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
7851 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
7852 Jessie is released.</p>
7853
7854 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
7855 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
7856 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
7857 line.</p>
7858
7859       </div>
7860       <div class="tags">
7861
7862
7863         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>.
7864
7865
7866       </div>
7867     </div>
7868     <div class="padding"></div>
7869
7870     <div class="entry">
7871       <div class="title">
7872         <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>
7873       </div>
7874       <div class="date">
7875         10th November 2014
7876       </div>
7877       <div class="body">
7878         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
7879 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
7880 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
7881
7882 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
7883 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
7884 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
7885 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
7886 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
7887 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
7888 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
7889 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
7890 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
7891 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
7892 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
7893 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
7894 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
7895 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
7896 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
7897
7898 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
7899 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
7900 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
7901 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
7902 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
7903 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
7904 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
7905 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
7906 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
7907 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
7908 were fairly easy, and
7909 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
7910 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
7911 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
7912 useful approach.</p>
7913
7914 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
7915 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
7916 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
7917 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
7918 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
7919 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
7920 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
7921 this:</p>
7922
7923 <p><blockquote><pre>
7924 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
7925   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
7926 </pre></blockquote></p>
7927
7928 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
7929 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
7930
7931 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
7932 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
7933 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
7934 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
7935 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
7936 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
7937 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
7938 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
7939 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
7940 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
7941 system.</p>
7942
7943 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
7944 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
7945 SMTorP. :)</p>
7946
7947       </div>
7948       <div class="tags">
7949
7950
7951         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>.
7952
7953
7954       </div>
7955     </div>
7956     <div class="padding"></div>
7957
7958     <div class="entry">
7959       <div class="title">
7960         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_released__alpha0_.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu released (alpha0)</a>
7961       </div>
7962       <div class="date">
7963         27th October 2014
7964       </div>
7965       <div class="body">
7966         <p>I am happy to report that I on behalf of the Debian Edu team just
7967 sent out
7968 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2014/10/msg00000.html">this
7969 announcement</a>:</p>
7970
7971 <pre>
7972 The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu
7973 Jessie 8.0+edu0~alpha0
7974
7975 Debian Edu is a complete operating system for schools. Through its
7976 various installation profiles you can install servers, workstations
7977 and laptops which will work together on the school network. With
7978 Debian Edu, the teachers themselves or their technical support can
7979 roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within
7980 hours or a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications
7981 pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.
7982
7983 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
7984 installation instructions are available, including detailed
7985 instructions in the manual[1] explaining the first steps, such as
7986 setting up a network or adding users. Please note that the password
7987 for the user your prompted for during installation must have a length
7988 of at least 5 characters!
7989
7990  [1] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie</a> &gt;
7991
7992 Would you like to give your school's computer a longer life? Are you
7993 tired of sneaker administration, running from computer to computer
7994 reinstalling the operating system? Would you like to administrate all
7995 the computers in your school using only a couple of hours every week?
7996 Check out Debian Edu Jessie!
7997
7998 Skolelinux is used by at least two hundred schools all over the world,
7999 mostly in Germany and Norway.
8000
8001 About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
8002 ===============================
8003
8004 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux[2], is a Linux distribution based
8005 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
8006 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
8007 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
8008 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
8009 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
8010 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
8011 machines can be installed via the network.  The provided school server
8012 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
8013 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
8014 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
8015 packages[3] and more are available from the Debian archive, and
8016 schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
8017 environment.
8018
8019  [2] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">http://www.skolelinux.org/</a> &gt;
8020  [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;
8021
8022 Full release notes and manual
8023 =============================
8024
8025 Below the download URLs there is a list of some of the new features
8026 and bugfixes of Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie. The full
8027 list is part of the manual. (See the feature list in the manual[4] for
8028 the English version.) For some languages manual translations are
8029 available, see the manual translation overview[5].
8030
8031  [4] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features</a> &gt;
8032  [5] &lt;URL: <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/</a> &gt;
8033
8034 Where to get it
8035 ---------------
8036
8037 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release (624 MiB) you can use
8038
8039  * <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>
8040  * <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>
8041  * rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso .
8042
8043 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 361188818e036ce67280a572f757de82ebfeb095
8044
8045 New features for Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie released 2014-10-27
8046 ===============================================================================
8047
8048
8049 Installation changes
8050 --------------------
8051
8052  * PXE installation now installs firmware automatically for the hardware present.
8053
8054 Software updates
8055 ----------------
8056
8057 Everything which is new in Debian Jessie 8.0, eg:
8058
8059  * Linux kernel 3.16.x
8060  * Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.11.12, GNOME 3.14, Xfce 4.10,
8061    LXDE 0.5.6 and MATE 1.8 (KDE "Plasma" is installed by default; to
8062    choose one of the others see manual.)
8063  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 38
8064  * !LibreOffice 4.3.3
8065  * GOsa 2.7.4
8066  * LTSP 5.5.4
8067  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
8068  * new boot framework: systemd
8069  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.07
8070  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
8071  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
8072  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.0
8073  * golearn 0.9
8074  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
8075  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
8076  * Debian Jessie includes about 42000 packages available for
8077    installation.
8078  * More information about Debian Jessie 8.0 is provided in the release
8079    notes[6] and the installation manual[7].
8080
8081  [6] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes</a> &gt;
8082  [7] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual</a> &gt;
8083
8084 Fixed bugs
8085 ----------
8086
8087  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
8088    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
8089    information is corrected (Debian bug #710362)
8090  * and many others.
8091
8092 Documentation and translation updates
8093 -------------------------------------
8094
8095  * The Debian Edu Jessie Manual is fully translated to German, French,
8096    Italian, Danish and Dutch. Partly translated versions exist for
8097    Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
8098
8099 Other changes
8100 -------------
8101
8102  * Due to new Squid settings, powering off or rebooting the main
8103    server takes more time.
8104  * To manage printers localhost:631 has to be used, currently www:631
8105    doesn't work.
8106
8107 Regressions / known problems
8108 ----------------------------
8109
8110  * Installing LTSP chroot fails with a bug related to eatmydata about
8111    exim4-config failing to run its postinst (see Debian bug #765694
8112    and Debian bug #762103).
8113  * Munin collection is not properly configured on clients (Debian bug
8114    #764594).  The fix is available in a newer version of munin-node.
8115  * PXE setup for Main Server and Thin Client Server setup does not
8116    work when installing on a machine without direct Internet access.
8117    Will be fixed when Debian bug #766960 is fixed in Jessie.
8118
8119 See the status page[8] for the complete list.
8120
8121  [8] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie</a> &gt;
8122
8123 How to report bugs
8124 ------------------
8125
8126 &lt;URL: <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a> &gt;
8127
8128 About Debian
8129 ============
8130
8131 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
8132 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
8133 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
8134 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
8135 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
8136 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
8137 operating system.
8138
8139 Contact Information
8140 For further information, please visit the Debian web pages[9] or send
8141 mail to press@debian.org.
8142
8143  [9] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a> &gt;
8144 </pre>
8145
8146       </div>
8147       <div class="tags">
8148
8149
8150         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>.
8151
8152
8153       </div>
8154     </div>
8155     <div class="padding"></div>
8156
8157     <div class="entry">
8158       <div class="title">
8159         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html">I spent last weekend recording MakerCon Nordic</a>
8160       </div>
8161       <div class="date">
8162         23rd October 2014
8163       </div>
8164       <div class="body">
8165         <p>I spent last weekend at <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">Makercon
8166 Nordic</a>, a great conference and workshop for makers in Norway and
8167 the surrounding countries.  I had volunteered on behalf of the
8168 Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG) to video record the talks, and we
8169 had a great and exhausting time recording the entire day, two days in
8170 a row.  There were only two of us, Hans-Petter and me, and we used the
8171 regular video equipment for NUUG, with a
8172 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">dvswitch</a>, a
8173 camera and a VGA to DV convert box, and mixed video and slides
8174 live.</p>
8175
8176 <p>Hans-Petter did the post-processing, consisting of uploading the
8177 around 180 GiB of raw video to Youtube, and the result is
8178 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">now becoming
8179 public</a> on the MakerConNordic account.  The videos have the license
8180 NUUG always use on our recordings, which is
8181 <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/no/">Creative
8182 Commons Navngivelse-Del på samme vilkår 3.0 Norge</a>.  Many great
8183 talks available.  Check it out! :)</p>
8184
8185       </div>
8186       <div class="tags">
8187
8188
8189         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>.
8190
8191
8192       </div>
8193     </div>
8194     <div class="padding"></div>
8195
8196     <div class="entry">
8197       <div class="title">
8198         <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>
8199       </div>
8200       <div class="date">
8201         22nd October 2014
8202       </div>
8203       <div class="body">
8204         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
8205 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
8206 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
8207 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
8208 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
8209 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
8210 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
8211 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
8212 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
8213 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
8214 lists I recently took over:</p>
8215
8216 <p><blockquote><pre>
8217 % time listadmin xiph
8218 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
8219 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
8220
8221 real    0m1.709s
8222 user    0m0.232s
8223 sys     0m0.012s
8224 %
8225 </pre></blockquote></p>
8226
8227 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
8228 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
8229 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
8230 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
8231 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
8232 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
8233 program.</p>
8234
8235 <p>If you install
8236 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
8237 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
8238 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
8239
8240 <p><blockquote><pre>
8241 username username@example.org
8242 spamlevel 23
8243 default discard
8244 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
8245
8246 password secret
8247 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
8248 mailman-list@lists.example.com
8249
8250 password hidden
8251 other-list@otherserver.example.org
8252 </pre></blockquote></p>
8253
8254 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
8255 learn the details.</p>
8256
8257 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
8258 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
8259 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
8260 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
8261
8262 <p><blockquote><pre>
8263 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
8264 </pre></blockquote></p>
8265
8266 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
8267 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
8268 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
8269 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
8270 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
8271 email.</p>
8272
8273 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
8274 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
8275 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
8276 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
8277 software.</p>
8278
8279 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
8280 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
8281 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
8282
8283 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
8284 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
8285 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
8286 sure why.</p>
8287
8288       </div>
8289       <div class="tags">
8290
8291
8292         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>.
8293
8294
8295       </div>
8296     </div>
8297     <div class="padding"></div>
8298
8299     <div class="entry">
8300       <div class="title">
8301         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
8302       </div>
8303       <div class="date">
8304         17th October 2014
8305       </div>
8306       <div class="body">
8307         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
8308 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
8309 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
8310 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
8311 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
8312 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
8313 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
8314
8315 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
8316 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
8317 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
8318 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
8319 of this story.)</p>
8320
8321 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
8322 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
8323 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
8324 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
8325 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
8326 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
8327 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
8328 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
8329 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
8330 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
8331
8332 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
8333 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
8334 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
8335 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
8336
8337 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
8338 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
8339
8340 <p><blockquote><pre>
8341 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
8342 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
8343 </pre></blockquote></p>
8344
8345 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
8346 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
8347 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
8348 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
8349 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
8350 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
8351 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
8352 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
8353
8354 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
8355 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
8356
8357 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
8358 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
8359 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
8360 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
8361 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
8362
8363 <p><blockquote><pre>
8364 Task: isenkram-packages
8365 Section: hardware
8366 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
8367  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
8368  proposed.
8369 Test-new-install: show show
8370 Relevance: 8
8371 Packages: for-current-hardware
8372
8373 Task: isenkram-firmware
8374 Section: hardware
8375 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
8376  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
8377  packages are proposed.
8378 Test-new-install: mark show
8379 Relevance: 8
8380 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
8381 </pre></blockquote></p>
8382
8383 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
8384 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
8385 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
8386 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
8387 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
8388
8389 <p><blockquote><pre>
8390 #!/bin/sh
8391 #
8392 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
8393 export PATH
8394 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
8395 </pre></blockquote></p>
8396
8397 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
8398 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
8399
8400 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
8401 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
8402 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
8403 install.</p>
8404
8405 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
8406 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
8407 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
8408
8409       </div>
8410       <div class="tags">
8411
8412
8413         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>.
8414
8415
8416       </div>
8417     </div>
8418     <div class="padding"></div>
8419
8420     <div class="entry">
8421       <div class="title">
8422         <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>
8423       </div>
8424       <div class="date">
8425          4th October 2014
8426       </div>
8427       <div class="body">
8428         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
8429 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
8430 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
8431 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
8432
8433 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
8434
8435 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
8436 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
8437 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
8438
8439       </div>
8440       <div class="tags">
8441
8442
8443         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>.
8444
8445
8446       </div>
8447     </div>
8448     <div class="padding"></div>
8449
8450     <div class="entry">
8451       <div class="title">
8452         <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>
8453       </div>
8454       <div class="date">
8455          4th October 2014
8456       </div>
8457       <div class="body">
8458         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
8459 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
8460 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
8461 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
8462 Dibb.</p>
8463
8464 <p>I just wrapped up
8465 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
8466 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
8467 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
8468 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
8469 0.17.</p>
8470
8471 <ul>
8472
8473  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
8474  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
8475    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
8476  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
8477  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
8478  <li>Fix include orders</li>
8479  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
8480  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
8481  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
8482    the palette size is the same.</li>
8483  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
8484  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
8485  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
8486  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
8487    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
8488
8489 </ul>
8490
8491 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
8492 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
8493 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
8494
8495       </div>
8496       <div class="tags">
8497
8498
8499         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>.
8500
8501
8502       </div>
8503     </div>
8504     <div class="padding"></div>
8505
8506     <div class="entry">
8507       <div class="title">
8508         <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>
8509       </div>
8510       <div class="date">
8511         26th September 2014
8512       </div>
8513       <div class="body">
8514         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
8515 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
8516 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
8517 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
8518 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
8519 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
8520 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
8521 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
8522 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
8523 future.  The
8524 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
8525 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
8526 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
8527 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
8528 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
8529
8530 <p>First, download the test ISO via
8531 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
8532 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
8533 or rsync (use
8534 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
8535 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
8536 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
8537 install with some tweaking.</p>
8538
8539 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
8540 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
8541
8542 <p><blockquote><pre>
8543 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
8544 </pre></blockquote></p>
8545
8546 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
8547 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
8548 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
8549 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
8550
8551 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
8552 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
8553 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
8554 your need.</p>
8555
8556 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
8557 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
8558 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
8559 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
8560 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
8561 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
8562 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
8563 days.</p>
8564
8565 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
8566 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
8567 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
8568 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
8569 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
8570 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
8571 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
8572 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
8573 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
8574
8575 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
8576 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
8577 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
8578
8579       </div>
8580       <div class="tags">
8581
8582
8583         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>.
8584
8585
8586       </div>
8587     </div>
8588     <div class="padding"></div>
8589
8590     <div class="entry">
8591       <div class="title">
8592         <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>
8593       </div>
8594       <div class="date">
8595         25th September 2014
8596       </div>
8597       <div class="body">
8598         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
8599 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
8600 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
8601 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
8602 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
8603 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
8604 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
8605 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
8606 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
8607 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
8608 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
8609 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
8610 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
8611
8612 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
8613 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
8614 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
8615 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
8616 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
8617 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
8618 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
8619 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
8620 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
8621 list</a>. :)</p>
8622
8623       </div>
8624       <div class="tags">
8625
8626
8627         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>.
8628
8629
8630       </div>
8631     </div>
8632     <div class="padding"></div>
8633
8634     <div class="entry">
8635       <div class="title">
8636         <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>
8637       </div>
8638       <div class="date">
8639         16th September 2014
8640       </div>
8641       <div class="body">
8642         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
8643 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
8644 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
8645 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
8646 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
8647 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
8648 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
8649 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
8650 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
8651 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
8652 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
8653 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
8654 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
8655 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
8656
8657 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
8658 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
8659 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
8660 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
8661 depend on the small and clever package
8662 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
8663 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
8664 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
8665 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
8666 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
8667 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
8668 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
8669 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
8670 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
8671 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
8672 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
8673
8674 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
8675 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
8676 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
8677 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
8678 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
8679 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
8680 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
8681 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
8682 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
8683 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
8684 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
8685 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
8686 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
8687 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
8688 dialog.</p>
8689
8690 <p><table>
8691
8692 <tr>
8693 <th>Machine/setup</th>
8694 <th>Original tasksel</th>
8695 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
8696 <th>Reduction</th>
8697 </tr>
8698
8699 <tr>
8700 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
8701 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
8702 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
8703 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
8704 </tr>
8705
8706 <tr>
8707 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
8708 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
8709 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
8710 <td>23 min 40%</td>
8711 </tr>
8712
8713 <tr>
8714 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
8715 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
8716 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
8717 <td>11 min 50%</td>
8718 </tr>
8719
8720 <tr>
8721 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
8722 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
8723 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
8724 <td>2 min 33%</td>
8725 </tr>
8726
8727 <tr>
8728 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
8729 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
8730 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
8731 <td>4 min 21%</td>
8732 </tr>
8733
8734 </table></p>
8735
8736 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
8737 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
8738 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
8739 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
8740 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
8741 installed.</p>
8742
8743 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
8744 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
8745 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
8746 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
8747 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
8748 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
8749 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
8750 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
8751 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
8752 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
8753 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
8754 for the entire installation.</p>
8755
8756 <p>I've implemented this in the
8757 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
8758 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
8759 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
8760 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
8761 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
8762
8763 <p><blockquote><pre>
8764 #!/bin/sh
8765 set -e
8766 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
8767 info() {
8768     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
8769 }
8770 error() {
8771     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
8772 }
8773 override_install() {
8774     apt-install eatmydata || true
8775     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
8776         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
8777             file=/usr/bin/$bin
8778             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
8779             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
8780                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
8781                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
8782                     > /target$file.edu
8783                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
8784                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
8785                     --rename --quiet --add $file
8786                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
8787             else
8788                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
8789             fi
8790         done
8791     else
8792         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
8793     fi
8794 }
8795
8796 override_install
8797 </pre></blockquote></p>
8798
8799 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
8800 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
8801
8802 <p><blockquote><pre>
8803 #! /bin/sh -e
8804 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
8805 error() {
8806     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
8807 }
8808 remove_install_override() {
8809     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
8810         file=/usr/bin/$bin
8811         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
8812             rm /target$file
8813             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
8814                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
8815             rm /target$file.edu
8816         else
8817             error "Missing divert for $file."
8818         fi
8819     done
8820     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
8821 }
8822
8823 remove_install_override
8824 </pre></blockquote></p>
8825
8826 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
8827 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
8828 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
8829
8830 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
8831 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
8832 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
8833 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
8834 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
8835 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
8836 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
8837 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
8838 everyone.</p>
8839
8840 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
8841 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
8842 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
8843 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
8844
8845 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
8846 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
8847 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
8848 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
8849 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
8850
8851 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
8852 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
8853 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
8854 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
8855 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
8856
8857       </div>
8858       <div class="tags">
8859
8860
8861         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>.
8862
8863
8864       </div>
8865     </div>
8866     <div class="padding"></div>
8867
8868     <div class="entry">
8869       <div class="title">
8870         <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>
8871       </div>
8872       <div class="date">
8873         10th September 2014
8874       </div>
8875       <div class="body">
8876         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
8877 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
8878 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
8879 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
8880 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
8881 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
8882 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
8883 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
8884 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
8885 those problems are gone now.</p>
8886
8887 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
8888 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
8889 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
8890 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
8891 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
8892
8893 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
8894 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
8895 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
8896
8897 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
8898 line:</p>
8899
8900 <p><blockquote><pre>
8901 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
8902 </pre></blockquote></p>
8903
8904 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
8905 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
8906 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
8907 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
8908
8909 <p><blockquote><pre>
8910 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
8911 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
8912 %
8913 </pre></blockquote></p>
8914
8915 <p>Now if only
8916 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
8917 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
8918 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
8919 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
8920 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
8921 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
8922 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
8923 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
8924 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
8925
8926       </div>
8927       <div class="tags">
8928
8929
8930         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>.
8931
8932
8933       </div>
8934     </div>
8935     <div class="padding"></div>
8936
8937     <div class="entry">
8938       <div class="title">
8939         <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>
8940       </div>
8941       <div class="date">
8942         25th August 2014
8943       </div>
8944       <div class="body">
8945         <p>Two years later, I am still not sure if it is legal here in Norway
8946 to use or publish a video in H.264 or MPEG4 format edited by the
8947 commercially licensed video editors, without limiting the use to
8948 create "personal" or "non-commercial" videos or get a license
8949 agreement with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com">MPEG LA</a>.  If one
8950 want to publish and broadcast video in a non-personal or commercial
8951 setting, it might be that those tools can not be used, or that video
8952 format can not be used, without breaking their copyright license.  I
8953 am not sure.
8954 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Trenger_en_avtale_med_MPEG_LA_for___publisere_og_kringkaste_H_264_video_.html">Back
8955 then</a>, I found that the copyright license terms for Adobe Premiere
8956 and Apple Final Cut Pro both specified that one could not use the
8957 program to produce anything else without a patent license from MPEG
8958 LA.  The issue is not limited to those two products, though.  Other
8959 much used products like those from Avid and Sorenson Media have terms
8960 of use are similar to those from Adobe and Apple.  The complicating
8961 factor making me unsure if those terms have effect in Norway or not is
8962 that the patents in question are not valid in Norway, but copyright
8963 licenses are.</p>
8964
8965 <p>These are the terms for Avid Artist Suite, according to their
8966 <a href="http://www.avid.com/US/about-avid/legal-notices/legal-enduserlicense2">published
8967 end user</a>
8968 <a href="http://www.avid.com/static/resources/common/documents/corporate/LICENSE.pdf">license
8969 text</a> (converted to lower case text for easier reading):</p>
8970
8971 <p><blockquote>
8972 <p>18.2. MPEG-4. MPEG-4 technology may be included with the
8973 software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice: </p>
8974
8975 <p>This product is licensed under the MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio
8976 license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer for (i)
8977 encoding video in compliance with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4
8978 video”) and/or (ii) decoding MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a
8979 consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or was
8980 obtained from a video provider licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4
8981 video.  No license is granted or shall be implied for any other
8982 use. Additional information including that relating to promotional,
8983 internal and commercial uses and licensing may be obtained from MPEG
8984 LA, LLC.  See http://www.mpegla.com. This product is licensed under
8985 the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license for encoding in compliance
8986 with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except that an additional license
8987 and payment of royalties are necessary for encoding in connection with
8988 (i) data stored or replicated in physical media which is paid for on a
8989 title by title basis and/or (ii) data which is paid for on a title by
8990 title basis and is transmitted to an end user for permanent storage
8991 and/or use, such additional license may be obtained from MPEG LA,
8992 LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for additional details.</p>
8993
8994 <p>18.3. H.264/AVC. H.264/AVC technology may be included with the
8995 software.  MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:</p>
8996
8997 <p>This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
8998 the personal use of a consumer or other uses in which it does not
8999 receive remuneration to (i) encode video in compliance with the AVC
9000 standard (“AVC video”) and/or (ii) decode AVC video that was encoded
9001 by a consumer engaged in a personal activity and/or was obtained from
9002 a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No license is granted
9003 or shall be implied for any other use. Additional information may be
9004 obtained from MPEG LA, L.L.C. See http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
9005 </blockquote></p>
9006
9007 <p>Note the requirement that the videos created can only be used for
9008 personal or non-commercial purposes.</p>
9009
9010 <p>The Sorenson Media software have
9011 <a href="http://www.sorensonmedia.com/terms/">similar terms</a>:</p>
9012
9013 <p><blockquote>
9014
9015 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4 Video
9016 Decoders and/or Encoders: Any such product is licensed under the
9017 MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio license for the personal and
9018 non-commercial use of a consumer for (i) encoding video in compliance
9019 with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4 video”) and/or (ii) decoding
9020 MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and
9021 non-commercial activity and/or was obtained from a video provider
9022 licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4 video. No license is granted or
9023 shall be implied for any other use. Additional information including
9024 that relating to promotional, internal and commercial uses and
9025 licensing may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See
9026 http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
9027
9028 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4
9029 Consumer Recorded Data Encoder, MPEG-4 Systems Internet Data Encoder,
9030 MPEG-4 Mobile Data Encoder, and/or MPEG-4 Unique Use Encoder: Any such
9031 product is licensed under the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license
9032 for encoding in compliance with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except
9033 that an additional license and payment of royalties are necessary for
9034 encoding in connection with (i) data stored or replicated in physical
9035 media which is paid for on a title by title basis and/or (ii) data
9036 which is paid for on a title by title basis and is transmitted to an
9037 end user for permanent storage and/or use. Such additional license may
9038 be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for
9039 additional details.</p>
9040
9041 </blockquote></p>
9042
9043 <p>Some free software like
9044 <a href="https://handbrake.fr/">Handbrake</A> and
9045 <a href="http://ffmpeg.org/">FFMPEG</a> uses GPL/LGPL licenses and do
9046 not have any such terms included, so for those, there is no
9047 requirement to limit the use to personal and non-commercial.</p>
9048
9049       </div>
9050       <div class="tags">
9051
9052
9053         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>.
9054
9055
9056       </div>
9057     </div>
9058     <div class="padding"></div>
9059
9060     <div class="entry">
9061       <div class="title">
9062         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html">Debian Edu interview: Bernd Zeitzen</a>
9063       </div>
9064       <div class="date">
9065         31st July 2014
9066       </div>
9067       <div class="body">
9068         <p>The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for
9069 schools, <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
9070 Skolelinux</a>, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
9071 involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
9072 from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
9073 the setup.  I managed to interview him this summer.</p>
9074
9075 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
9076
9077 <p>My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I'm married with Hedda, a self
9078 employed physiotherapist.  My former profession is tool maker, but I
9079 haven't worked for 30 years in this job.  30 years ago I started to
9080 support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
9081 administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
9082 Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
9083 Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
9084 works with Windows . :-(</p>
9085
9086 <p>In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
9087 Windows 98, 2000, XP, …, 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX.  Today we are running a
9088 Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of
9089 children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
9090 psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
9091 work with the documentations of our patients.</p>
9092
9093 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
9094 project?</strong></p>
9095
9096 <p>Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
9097 his school (<a href="http://www.gymnasium-harsewinkel.de/">Gymnasium
9098 Harsewinkel</a>).  They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
9099 were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
9100 software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
9101 computer skills in optional lessons.  I'm spending 4-6 hours a week
9102 with this job.</p>
9103
9104 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
9105 Edu?</strong></p>
9106
9107 <p>The independence.</p>
9108
9109 <p>First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
9110 software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
9111 included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.</p>
9112
9113 <p>Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
9114 possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices.  The
9115 servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
9116 working reliable. </p>
9117
9118 <p>We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45
9119 workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
9120 solution for all classrooms.  These machines are all booting from the
9121 terminal server.  In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile
9122 workstations.  Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
9123 machines in their classrooms.  Internet access is realized by a WLAN
9124 router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
9125 dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.</p>
9126
9127 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
9128 Edu?</strong></p>
9129
9130 <p>Teachers and pupils are Windows users.  &lt;Irony on&gt; And Linux
9131 isn't cool. It's software for freaks using the command line. &lt;Irony
9132 off&gt; They don't realize the stability of the system. </p>
9133
9134 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
9135
9136 <p>Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Samba,
9137 Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, … and Skolelinux / Debian Edu)</p>
9138
9139 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
9140 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
9141
9142 <p>In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
9143 which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
9144 teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
9145 Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
9146 Office. They don't know about the possibility to use Free Software
9147 instead.  Another problem are the publisher of school books.  They
9148 develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.</p>
9149
9150       </div>
9151       <div class="tags">
9152
9153
9154         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>.
9155
9156
9157       </div>
9158     </div>
9159     <div class="padding"></div>
9160
9161     <div class="entry">
9162       <div class="title">
9163         <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>
9164       </div>
9165       <div class="date">
9166         23rd July 2014
9167       </div>
9168       <div class="body">
9169         <p>This summer I finally had time to continue working on the Norwegian
9170 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
9171 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
9172 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with todays copyright
9173 law.  Yesterday, I finally completed translated the book text.  There
9174 are still some foot/end notes left to translate, the colophon page
9175 need to be rewritten, and a few words and phrases still need to be
9176 translated, but the Norwegian text is ready for the first proof
9177 reading. :) More spell checking is needed, and several illustrations
9178 need to be cleaned up.  The work stopped up because I had to give
9179 priority to other projects the last year, and the progress graph of
9180 the translation show this very well:</p>
9181
9182 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
9183
9184 <p>If you want to read the result, check out the
9185 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
9186 project pages and the
9187 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
9188 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
9189 and HTML version available in the
9190 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
9191 directory</a>.</p>
9192
9193 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
9194 you find any.</p>
9195
9196       </div>
9197       <div class="tags">
9198
9199
9200         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>.
9201
9202
9203       </div>
9204     </div>
9205     <div class="padding"></div>
9206
9207     <div class="entry">
9208       <div class="title">
9209         <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>
9210       </div>
9211       <div class="date">
9212         17th June 2014
9213       </div>
9214       <div class="body">
9215         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
9216 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
9217 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
9218 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
9219 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
9220
9221 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
9222 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
9223 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
9224 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
9225 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
9226 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
9227 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
9228 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
9229 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
9230 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
9231 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
9232 goals.</p>
9233
9234 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
9235 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
9236 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
9237 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
9238 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
9239 chapters together into one large web page (aka
9240 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
9241 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
9242 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
9243 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
9244 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
9245 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
9246 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
9247 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
9248 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
9249 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
9250 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
9251 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
9252 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
9253 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
9254 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
9255 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
9256 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
9257 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
9258
9259 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
9260 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
9261 track the English original.  For this we use the
9262 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
9263 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
9264 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
9265 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
9266 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
9267 files), which the translations update with the native language
9268 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
9269 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
9270 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
9271 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
9272 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
9273 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
9274 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
9275 of the documentation.</p>
9276
9277 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
9278 recommend using
9279 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
9280 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
9281 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
9282 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
9283 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
9284 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
9285 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
9286 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
9287
9288 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
9289 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
9290 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
9291 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
9292 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
9293 translated images by storing translated versions in
9294 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
9295 package maintainers know more.</p>
9296
9297 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
9298 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
9299 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
9300 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
9301 PDF version</a> or the
9302 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
9303 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
9304 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
9305
9306 <p>To learn more, check out
9307 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
9308 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
9309 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
9310 manual on the wiki</a> and
9311 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
9312 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
9313
9314       </div>
9315       <div class="tags">
9316
9317
9318         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>.
9319
9320
9321       </div>
9322     </div>
9323     <div class="padding"></div>
9324
9325     <div class="entry">
9326       <div class="title">
9327         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_car_computer_solution_.html">Free software car computer solution?</a>
9328       </div>
9329       <div class="date">
9330         29th May 2014
9331       </div>
9332       <div class="body">
9333         <p>Dear lazyweb.  I'm planning to set up a small Raspberry Pi computer
9334 in my car, connected to
9335 <a href="http://www.dx.com/p/400a-4-0-tft-lcd-digital-monitor-for-vehicle-parking-reverse-camera-1440x272-12v-dc-57776">a
9336 small screen</a> next to the rear mirror.  I plan to hook it up with a
9337 GPS and a USB wifi card too.  The idea is to get my own
9338 "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carputer">Carputer</a>".  But I
9339 wonder if someone already created a good free software solution for
9340 such car computer.</p>
9341
9342 <p>This is my current wish list for such system:</p>
9343
9344 <ul>
9345
9346  <li>Work on Raspberry Pi.</li>
9347
9348  <li>Show current speed limit based on location, and warn if going too
9349    fast (for example using color codes yellow and red on the screen,
9350    or make a sound).  This could be done either using either data from
9351    <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">Openstreetmap</a> or OCR
9352    info gathered from a dashboard camera.</li>
9353
9354  <li>Track automatic toll road passes and their cost, show total spent
9355    and make it possible to calculate toll costs for planned
9356    route.</li>
9357
9358  <li>Collect GPX tracks for use with OpenStreetMap.</li>
9359
9360  <li>Automatically detect and use any wireless connection to connect
9361    to home server.  Try IP over DNS
9362    (<a href="http://dev.kryo.se/iodine/">iodine</a>) or ICMP
9363    (<a href="http://code.gerade.org/hans/">Hans</a>) if direct
9364    connection do not work.</li>
9365
9366  <li>Set up mesh network to talk to other cars with the same system,
9367    or some standard car mesh protocol.</li>
9368
9369  <li>Warn when approaching speed cameras and speed camera ranges
9370    (speed calculated between two cameras).</li>
9371
9372  <li>Suport dashboard/front facing camera to discover speed limits and
9373    run OCR to track registration number of passing cars.</li>
9374
9375 </ul>
9376
9377 <p>If you know of any free software car computer system supporting
9378 some or all of these features, please let me know.</p>
9379
9380       </div>
9381       <div class="tags">
9382
9383
9384         Tags: <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/Half_the_Coverity_issues_in_Gnash_fixed_in_the_next_release.html">Half the Coverity issues in Gnash fixed in the next release</a>
9394       </div>
9395       <div class="date">
9396         29th April 2014
9397       </div>
9398       <div class="body">
9399         <p>I've been following <a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">the Gnash
9400 project</a> for quite a while now.  It is a free software
9401 implementation of Adobe Flash, both a standalone player and a browser
9402 plugin.  Gnash implement support for the AVM1 format (and not the
9403 newer AVM2 format - see
9404 <a href="http://lightspark.github.io/">Lightspark</a> for that one),
9405 allowing several flash based sites to work.  Thanks to the friendly
9406 developers at Youtube, it also work with Youtube videos, because the
9407 Javascript code at Youtube detect Gnash and serve a AVM1 player to
9408 those users. :) Would be great if someone found time to implement AVM2
9409 support, but it has not happened yet.  If you install both Lightspark
9410 and Gnash, Lightspark will invoke Gnash if it find a AVM1 flash file,
9411 so you can get both handled as free software.  Unfortunately,
9412 Lightspark so far only implement a small subset of AVM2, and many
9413 sites do not work yet.</p>
9414
9415 <p>A few months ago, I started looking at
9416 <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/">Coverity</a>, the static source
9417 checker used to find heaps and heaps of bugs in free software (thanks
9418 to the donation of a scanning service to free software projects by the
9419 company developing this non-free code checker), and Gnash was one of
9420 the projects I decided to check out.  Coverity is able to find lock
9421 errors, memory errors, dead code and more.  A few days ago they even
9422 extended it to also be able to find the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.
9423 There are heaps of checks being done on the instrumented code, and the
9424 amount of bogus warnings is quite low compared to the other static
9425 code checkers I have tested over the years.</p>
9426
9427 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I've been working with the other Gnash
9428 developers squashing bugs discovered by Coverity.  I was quite happy
9429 today when I checked the current status and saw that of the 777 issues
9430 detected so far, 374 are marked as fixed.  This make me confident that
9431 the next Gnash release will be more stable and more dependable than
9432 the previous one.  Most of the reported issues were and are in the
9433 test suite, but it also found a few in the rest of the code.</p>
9434
9435 <p>If you want to help out, you find us on
9436 <a href="https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev">the
9437 gnash-dev mailing list</a> and on
9438 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#gnash">the #gnash channel on
9439 irc.freenode.net IRC server</a>.</p>
9440
9441       </div>
9442       <div class="tags">
9443
9444
9445         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>.
9446
9447
9448       </div>
9449     </div>
9450     <div class="padding"></div>
9451
9452     <div class="entry">
9453       <div class="title">
9454         <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>
9455       </div>
9456       <div class="date">
9457         23rd April 2014
9458       </div>
9459       <div class="body">
9460         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
9461 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
9462 So I implemented one, using
9463 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
9464 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
9465 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
9466 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
9467 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
9468 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
9469
9470 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
9471 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
9472 packages to install.  The first part is in
9473 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
9474 this:</p>
9475
9476 <p><blockquote><pre>
9477 Task: isenkram
9478 Section: hardware
9479 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
9480  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
9481  proposed.
9482 Test-new-install: mark show
9483 Relevance: 8
9484 Packages: for-current-hardware
9485 </pre></blockquote></p>
9486
9487 <p>The second part is in
9488 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
9489 this:</p>
9490
9491 <p><blockquote><pre>
9492 #!/bin/sh
9493 #
9494 (
9495     isenkram-lookup
9496     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
9497 ) | sort -u
9498 </pre></blockquote></p>
9499
9500 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
9501 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
9502 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
9503 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
9504 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
9505 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
9506
9507 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
9508 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
9509 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
9510 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
9511 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
9512 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
9513 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
9514 the python-apt code (bug
9515 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
9516 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
9517 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
9518 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
9519 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
9520 unstable today.</p>
9521
9522 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
9523 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
9524 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
9525 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
9526 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
9527 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
9528 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
9529 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
9530 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
9531
9532 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
9533 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
9534 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
9535 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
9536 package.  See also
9537 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
9538 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
9539 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
9540 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
9541
9542       </div>
9543       <div class="tags">
9544
9545
9546         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
9547
9548
9549       </div>
9550     </div>
9551     <div class="padding"></div>
9552
9553     <div class="entry">
9554       <div class="title">
9555         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/FreedomBox_milestone___all_packages_now_in_Debian_Sid.html">FreedomBox milestone - all packages now in Debian Sid</a>
9556       </div>
9557       <div class="date">
9558         15th April 2014
9559       </div>
9560       <div class="body">
9561         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
9562 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
9563 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
9564 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
9565 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
9566 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
9567
9568 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
9569 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
9570 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
9571 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
9572 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
9573 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
9574 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
9575
9576 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
9577 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
9578 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
9579 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
9580 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
9581 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
9582 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
9583 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
9584 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
9585 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
9586 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
9587 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
9588
9589 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
9590 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
9591 become root:</p>
9592
9593 <p><pre>
9594 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
9595   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
9596   u-boot-tools
9597 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
9598   freedom-maker
9599 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
9600 </pre></p>
9601
9602 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
9603 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
9604 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
9605 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
9606 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
9607 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
9608 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
9609 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
9610
9611 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
9612 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
9613 the preseed values:</p>
9614
9615 <p><pre>
9616 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
9617 </pre></p>
9618
9619 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
9620 it still work.</p>
9621
9622 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
9623 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
9624 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
9625 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
9626 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
9627 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
9628 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
9629
9630 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
9631 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
9632 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
9633 irc.debian.org)</a> and
9634 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
9635 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
9636
9637       </div>
9638       <div class="tags">
9639
9640
9641         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>.
9642
9643
9644       </div>
9645     </div>
9646     <div class="padding"></div>
9647
9648     <div class="entry">
9649       <div class="title">
9650         <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>
9651       </div>
9652       <div class="date">
9653          9th April 2014
9654       </div>
9655       <div class="body">
9656         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
9657 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
9658 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
9659 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
9660 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
9661 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
9662 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
9663 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
9664 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
9665 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
9666 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
9667 have looked at a system called
9668 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
9669 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
9670
9671 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
9672 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
9673 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
9674 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
9675 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
9676 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
9677 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
9678 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
9679 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
9680 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
9681 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
9682 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
9683 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
9684
9685 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
9686 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
9687 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
9688 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
9689 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
9690 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
9691 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
9692 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
9693 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
9694 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
9695 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
9696 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
9697 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
9698 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
9699 account.</p>
9700
9701 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
9702 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
9703 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
9704 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
9705 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
9706 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
9707 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
9708
9709 <p><blockquote><pre>
9710 [s3c]
9711 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
9712 backend-login: API-login
9713 backend-password: API-password
9714 fs-passphrase: local-password
9715 </pre></blockquote></p>
9716
9717 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
9718 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
9719 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
9720 details and password to create it:</p>
9721
9722 <p><blockquote><pre>
9723 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
9724 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
9725   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
9726 Enter backend login:
9727 Enter backend password:
9728 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
9729 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
9730 Enter encryption password:
9731 Confirm encryption password:
9732 Generating random encryption key...
9733 Creating metadata tables...
9734 Dumping metadata...
9735 ..objects..
9736 ..blocks..
9737 ..inodes..
9738 ..inode_blocks..
9739 ..symlink_targets..
9740 ..names..
9741 ..contents..
9742 ..ext_attributes..
9743 Compressing and uploading metadata...
9744 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
9745 # </pre></blockquote></p>
9746
9747 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
9748
9749 <p><blockquote><pre>
9750 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
9751   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
9752 Using 4 upload threads.
9753 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
9754 Reading metadata...
9755 ..objects..
9756 ..blocks..
9757 ..inodes..
9758 ..inode_blocks..
9759 ..symlink_targets..
9760 ..names..
9761 ..contents..
9762 ..ext_attributes..
9763 Mounting filesystem...
9764 # df -h /s3ql
9765 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
9766 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
9767 #
9768 </pre></blockquote></p>
9769
9770 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
9771 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
9772 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
9773 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
9774 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
9775 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
9776
9777 <p><blockquote><pre>
9778 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
9779 #
9780 </pre></blockquote></p>
9781
9782 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
9783 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
9784 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
9785 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
9786 file system:</p>
9787
9788 <p><blockquote><pre>
9789 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
9790 Using cached metadata.
9791 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
9792 Checking DB integrity...
9793 Creating temporary extra indices...
9794 Checking lost+found...
9795 Checking cached objects...
9796 Checking names (refcounts)...
9797 Checking contents (names)...
9798 Checking contents (inodes)...
9799 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
9800 Checking objects (reference counts)...
9801 Checking objects (backend)...
9802 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
9803 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
9804 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
9805 Checking objects (sizes)...
9806 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
9807 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
9808 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
9809 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
9810 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
9811 Checking inodes (sizes)...
9812 Checking extended attributes (names)...
9813 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
9814 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
9815 Checking directory reachability...
9816 Checking unix conventions...
9817 Checking referential integrity...
9818 Dropping temporary indices...
9819 Backing up old metadata...
9820 Dumping metadata...
9821 ..objects..
9822 ..blocks..
9823 ..inodes..
9824 ..inode_blocks..
9825 ..symlink_targets..
9826 ..names..
9827 ..contents..
9828 ..ext_attributes..
9829 Compressing and uploading metadata...
9830 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
9831 #
9832 </pre></blockquote></p>
9833
9834 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
9835 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
9836 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
9837 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
9838 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
9839 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
9840 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
9841 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
9842 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
9843 working set.</p>
9844
9845 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
9846 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
9847 busy:</p>
9848
9849 <p><blockquote><pre>
9850 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
9851   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
9852 Using 8 upload threads.
9853 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
9854 #
9855 </pre></blockquote></p>
9856
9857 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
9858 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
9859 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
9860 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
9861 s3qlctrl:
9862
9863 <p><blockquote><pre>
9864 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
9865 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
9866 #
9867 </pre></blockquote></p>
9868
9869 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
9870 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
9871 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
9872 a report:</p>
9873
9874 <p><blockquote><pre>
9875 # s3qlstat /s3ql
9876 Directory entries:    9141
9877 Inodes:               9143
9878 Data blocks:          8851
9879 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
9880 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
9881 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
9882 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
9883 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
9884 #
9885 </pre></blockquote></p>
9886
9887 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
9888 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
9889 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
9890 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
9891 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
9892 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
9893 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
9894 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
9895 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
9896 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
9897 best.</p>
9898
9899 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
9900 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
9901 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
9902 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
9903 poster is titled
9904 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
9905 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
9906 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
9907 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
9908 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
9909
9910 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
9911 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
9912 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
9913 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
9914 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
9915 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
9916 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
9917 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
9918
9919 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
9920 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
9921 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
9922 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
9923 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
9924 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
9925 only read from it.</p>
9926
9927 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
9928 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
9929 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
9930
9931       </div>
9932       <div class="tags">
9933
9934
9935         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>.
9936
9937
9938       </div>
9939     </div>
9940     <div class="padding"></div>
9941
9942     <div class="entry">
9943       <div class="title">
9944         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ReactOS_Windows_clone___nice_free_software.html">ReactOS Windows clone - nice free software</a>
9945       </div>
9946       <div class="date">
9947          1st April 2014
9948       </div>
9949       <div class="body">
9950         <p>Microsoft have announced that Windows XP reaches its end of life
9951 2014-04-08, in 7 days.  But there are heaps of machines still running
9952 Windows XP, and depending on Windows XP to run their applications, and
9953 upgrading will be expensive, both when it comes to money and when it
9954 comes to the amount of effort needed to migrate from Windows XP to a
9955 new operating system.  Some obvious options (buy new a Windows
9956 machine, buy a MacOSX machine, install Linux on the existing machine)
9957 are already well known and covered elsewhere.  Most of them involve
9958 leaving the user applications installed on Windows XP behind and
9959 trying out replacements or updated versions. In this blog post I want
9960 to mention one strange bird that allow people to keep the hardware and
9961 the existing Windows XP applications and run them on a free software
9962 operating system that is Windows XP compatible.</p>
9963
9964 <p><a href="http://www.reactos.org/">ReactOS</a> is a free software
9965 operating system (GNU GPL licensed) working on providing a operating
9966 system that is binary compatible with Windows, able to run windows
9967 programs directly and to use Windows drivers for hardware directly.
9968 The project goal is for Windows user to keep their existing machines,
9969 drivers and software, and gain the advantages from user a operating
9970 system without usage limitations caused by non-free licensing.  It is
9971 a Windows clone running directly on the hardware, so quite different
9972 from the approach taken by <a href="http://www.winehq.org/">the Wine
9973 project</a>, which make it possible to run Windows binaries on
9974 Linux.</p>
9975
9976 <p>The ReactOS project share code with the Wine project, so most
9977 shared libraries available on Windows are already implemented already.
9978 There is also a software manager like the one we are used to on Linux,
9979 allowing the user to install free software applications with a simple
9980 click directly from the Internet.  Check out the
9981 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/screenshots">screen shots on the
9982 project web site</a> for an idea what it look like (it looks just like
9983 Windows before metro).</p>
9984
9985 <p>I do not use ReactOS myself, preferring Linux and Unix like
9986 operating systems.  I've tested it, and it work fine in a virt-manager
9987 virtual machine.  The browser, minesweeper, notepad etc is working
9988 fine as far as I can tell.  Unfortunately, my main test application
9989 is the software included on a CD with the Lego Mindstorms NXT, which
9990 seem to install just fine from CD but fail to leave any binaries on
9991 the disk after the installation.  So no luck with that test software.
9992 No idea why, but hope someone else figure out and fix the problem.
9993 I've tried the ReactOS Live ISO on a physical machine, and it seemed
9994 to work just fine.  If you like Windows and want to keep running your
9995 old Windows binaries, check it out by
9996 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/download">downloading</a> the
9997 installation CD, the live CD or the preinstalled virtual machine
9998 image.</p>
9999
10000       </div>
10001       <div class="tags">
10002
10003
10004         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>.
10005
10006
10007       </div>
10008     </div>
10009     <div class="padding"></div>
10010
10011     <div class="entry">
10012       <div class="title">
10013         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Roger_Marsal.html">Debian Edu interview: Roger Marsal</a>
10014       </div>
10015       <div class="date">
10016         30th March 2014
10017       </div>
10018       <div class="body">
10019         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
10020 keep gaining new users.  Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC,
10021 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>, with a
10022 wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great
10023 contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background.</p>
10024
10025 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
10026
10027 <p>My name is Roger Marsal, I'm 27 years old (1986 generation) and I
10028 live in Barcelona, Spain. I've got a strong business background and I
10029 work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent.  Additionally,
10030 I've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the
10031 last development phase of a new social networking concept.</p>
10032
10033 <p>I'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years
10034 ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability
10035 and as a necessary step to gain expertise.</p>
10036
10037 <p>In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I
10038 can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux
10039 hunger.</p>
10040
10041 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
10042 project?</strong></p>
10043
10044 <p>I discovered the <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP</a> advantages
10045 with "Ubuntu 12.04 alternate install" and after a year of use I
10046 started looking for an alternative.  Even though I highly value and
10047 respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to
10048 change to a more robust and stable alternative.  As far as I was using
10049 Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install
10050 Debian and configure an LTSP server myself.  Surprised, I discovered
10051 that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent,
10052 and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and
10053 running.  I just loved it.</p>
10054
10055 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10056 Edu?</strong></p>
10057
10058 <p>I found a main advantage in that, once you know "the tips and
10059 tricks", a new installation just works out of the box. It's the most
10060 complete alternative I've found to create an LTSP network. All the
10061 other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to
10062 be made of steel.</p>
10063
10064 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10065 Edu?</strong></p>
10066
10067 <p>I found two main disadvantages.</p>
10068
10069 <p>I'm not an expert but I've got notions and I had to spent a considerable
10070 amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I'm quite
10071 stubborn and I just worked until I did but I'm sure many people with few
10072 resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched
10073 or dropped.</p>
10074
10075 <p>It's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved
10076 this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets
10077 more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can
10078 discourage many people too.</p>
10079
10080 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
10081
10082 <p>I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and
10083 Virtualbox.</p>
10084
10085
10086 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10087 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
10088
10089 <p>I don't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free
10090 attribute in both "freedom" and "no price" meanings is what will
10091 really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of
10092 the <a href="http://www.r-project.org/">"R" statistical language</a>; a
10093 few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people.
10094 Today it's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many
10095 different level of studies.  I believe free and open software will
10096 increasingly gain popularity, but I'm sure schools will be one of the
10097 first scenarios where this will happen.</p>
10098
10099       </div>
10100       <div class="tags">
10101
10102
10103         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>.
10104
10105
10106       </div>
10107     </div>
10108     <div class="padding"></div>
10109
10110     <div class="entry">
10111       <div class="title">
10112         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">Public Trusted Timestamping services for everyone</a>
10113       </div>
10114       <div class="date">
10115         25th March 2014
10116       </div>
10117       <div class="body">
10118         <p>Did you ever need to store logs or other files in a way that would
10119 allow it to be used as evidence in court, and needed a way to
10120 demonstrate without reasonable doubt that the file had not been
10121 changed since it was created?  Or, did you ever need to document that
10122 a given document was received at some point in time, like some
10123 archived document or the answer to an exam, and not changed after it
10124 was received?  The problem in these settings is to remove the need to
10125 trust yourself and your computers, while still being able to prove
10126 that a file is the same as it was at some given time in the past.</p>
10127
10128 <p>A solution to these problems is to have a trusted third party
10129 "stamp" the document and verify that at some given time the document
10130 looked a given way.  Such
10131 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notarius">notarius</a> service
10132 have been around for thousands of years, and its digital equivalent is
10133 called a
10134 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
10135 timestamping service</a>.  <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">The Internet
10136 Engineering Task Force</a> standardised how such service could work a
10137 few years ago as <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC
10138 3161</a>.  The mechanism is simple.  Create a hash of the file in
10139 question, send it to a trusted third party which add a time stamp to
10140 the hash and sign the result with its private key, and send back the
10141 signed hash + timestamp.  Both email, FTP and HTTP can be used to
10142 request such signature, depending on what is provided by the service
10143 used. Anyone with the document and the signature can then verify that
10144 the document matches the signature by creating their own hash and
10145 checking the signature using the trusted third party public key.
10146 There are several commercial services around providing such
10147 timestamping.  A quick search for
10148 "<a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rfc+3161+service">rfc 3161
10149 service</a>" pointed me to at least
10150 <a href="https://www.digistamp.com/technical/how-a-digital-time-stamp-works/">DigiStamp</a>,
10151 <a href="http://www.quovadisglobal.co.uk/CertificateServices/SigningServices/TimeStamp.aspx">Quo
10152 Vadis</a>,
10153 <a href="https://www.globalsign.com/timestamp-service/">Global Sign</a>
10154 and <a href="http://www.globaltrustfinder.com/TSADefault.aspx">Global
10155 Trust Finder</a>.  The system work as long as the private key of the
10156 trusted third party is not compromised.</p>
10157
10158 <p>But as far as I can tell, there are very few public trusted
10159 timestamp services available for everyone.  I've been looking for one
10160 for a while now. But yesterday I found one over at
10161 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">Deutches
10162 Forschungsnetz</a> mentioned in
10163 <a href="http://www.d-mueller.de/blog/dealing-with-trusted-timestamps-in-php-rfc-3161/">a
10164 blog by David Müller</a>.  I then found
10165 <a href="http://www.rz.uni-greifswald.de/support/dfn-pki-zertifikate/zeitstempeldienst.html">a
10166 good recipe on how to use the service</a> over at the University of
10167 Greifswald.</p>
10168
10169 <p><a href="http://www.openssl.org/">The OpenSSL library</a> contain
10170 both server and tools to use and set up your own signing service.  See
10171 the ts(1SSL), tsget(1SSL) manual pages for more details.  The
10172 following shell script demonstrate how to extract a signed timestamp
10173 for any file on the disk in a Debian environment:</p>
10174
10175 <p><blockquote><pre>
10176 #!/bin/sh
10177 set -e
10178 url="http://zeitstempel.dfn.de"
10179 caurl="https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt"
10180 reqfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsq)
10181 resfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsr)
10182 cafile=chain.txt
10183 if [ ! -f $cafile ] ; then
10184     wget -O $cafile "$caurl"
10185 fi
10186 openssl ts -query -data "$1" -cert | tee "$reqfile" \
10187     | /usr/lib/ssl/misc/tsget -h "$url" -o "$resfile"
10188 openssl ts -reply -in "$resfile" -text 1>&2
10189 openssl ts -verify -data "$1" -in "$resfile" -CAfile "$cafile" 1>&2
10190 base64 < "$resfile"
10191 rm "$reqfile" "$resfile"
10192 </pre></blockquote></p>
10193
10194 <p>The argument to the script is the file to timestamp, and the output
10195 is a base64 encoded version of the signature to STDOUT and details
10196 about the signature to STDERR.  Note that due to
10197 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=742553">a bug
10198 in the tsget script</a>, you might need to modify the included script
10199 and remove the last line.  Or just write your own HTTP uploader using
10200 curl. :) Now you too can prove and verify that files have not been
10201 changed.</p>
10202
10203 <p>But the Internet need more public trusted timestamp services.
10204 Perhaps something for <a href="http://www.uninett.no/">Uninett</a> or
10205 my work place the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
10206 to set up?</p>
10207
10208       </div>
10209       <div class="tags">
10210
10211
10212         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>.
10213
10214
10215       </div>
10216     </div>
10217     <div class="padding"></div>
10218
10219     <div class="entry">
10220       <div class="title">
10221         <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>
10222       </div>
10223       <div class="date">
10224         21st March 2014
10225       </div>
10226       <div class="body">
10227         <p>Keeping your DVD collection safe from scratches and curious
10228 children fingers while still having it available when you want to see a
10229 movie is not straight forward.  My preferred method at the moment is
10230 to store a full copy of the ISO on a hard drive, and use VLC, Popcorn
10231 Hour or other useful players to view the resulting file.  This way the
10232 subtitles and bonus material are still available and using the ISO is
10233 just like inserting the original DVD record in the DVD player.</p>
10234
10235 <p>Earlier I used dd for taking security copies, but it do not handle
10236 DVDs giving read errors (which are quite a few of them).  I've also
10237 tried using
10238 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">dvdbackup
10239 and genisoimage</a>, but these days I use the marvellous python library
10240 and program
10241 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">python-dvdvideo</a>
10242 written by Bastian Blank.  It is
10243 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/python-dvdvideo.html">in Debian
10244 already</a> and the binary package name is python3-dvdvideo. Instead
10245 of trying to read every block from the DVD, it parses the file
10246 structure and figure out which block on the DVD is actually in used,
10247 and only read those blocks from the DVD.  This work surprisingly well,
10248 and I have been able to almost backup my entire DVD collection using
10249 this method.</p>
10250
10251 <p>So far, python-dvdvideo have failed on between 10 and
10252 20 DVDs, which is a small fraction of my collection.  The most common
10253 problem is
10254 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=720831">DVDs
10255 using UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 characters</a>, which according to
10256 Bastian is against the DVD specification (and seem to cause some
10257 players to fail too).  A rarer problem is what seem to be inconsistent
10258 DVD structures, as the python library
10259 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=723079">claim
10260 there is a overlap between objects</a>.  An equally rare problem claim
10261 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=741878">some
10262 value is out of range</a>.  No idea what is going on there.  I wish I
10263 knew enough about the DVD format to fix these, to ensure my movie
10264 collection will stay with me in the future.</p>
10265
10266 <p>So, if you need to keep your DVDs safe, back them up using
10267 python-dvdvideo. :)</p>
10268
10269       </div>
10270       <div class="tags">
10271
10272
10273         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>.
10274
10275
10276       </div>
10277     </div>
10278     <div class="padding"></div>
10279
10280     <div class="entry">
10281       <div class="title">
10282         <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>
10283       </div>
10284       <div class="date">
10285         14th March 2014
10286       </div>
10287       <div class="body">
10288         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
10289 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
10290 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
10291 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
10292 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
10293 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
10294 release (0.2).</p>
10295
10296 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
10297 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
10298 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
10299 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
10300 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
10301 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
10302 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
10303 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
10304 and build using
10305 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
10306 with a user with sudo access to become root:
10307
10308 <pre>
10309 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
10310   freedom-maker
10311 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
10312   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
10313   u-boot-tools
10314 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
10315 </pre>
10316
10317 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
10318 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
10319 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
10320 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
10321 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
10322 kpartx call.</p>
10323
10324 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
10325 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
10326 the preseed values:</p>
10327
10328 <pre>
10329 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
10330 </pre>
10331
10332 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
10333 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
10334 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
10335 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
10336 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
10337 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
10338
10339 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
10340 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
10341 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
10342 irc.debian.org)</a> and
10343 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
10344 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
10345
10346       </div>
10347       <div class="tags">
10348
10349
10350         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>.
10351
10352
10353       </div>
10354     </div>
10355     <div class="padding"></div>
10356
10357     <div class="entry">
10358       <div class="title">
10359         <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>
10360       </div>
10361       <div class="date">
10362         12th March 2014
10363       </div>
10364       <div class="body">
10365         <p>On larger sites, it is useful to use a dedicated storage server for
10366 storing user home directories and data.  The design for handling this
10367 in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, is
10368 to update the automount rules in LDAP and let the automount daemon on
10369 the clients take care of the rest.  I was reminded about the need to
10370 document this better when one of the customers of
10371 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a>, where I am
10372 on the board of directors, asked about how to do this.  The steps to
10373 get this working are the following:</p>
10374
10375 <p><ol>
10376
10377 <li>Add new storage server in DNS.  I use nas-server.intern as the
10378 example host here.</li>
10379
10380 <li>Add automoun LDAP information about this server in LDAP, to allow
10381 all clients to automatically mount it on reqeust.</li>
10382
10383 <li>Add the relevant entries in tjener.intern:/etc/fstab, because
10384 tjener.intern do not use automount to avoid mounting loops.</li>
10385
10386 </ol></p>
10387
10388 <p>DNS entries are added in GOsa², and not described here.  Follow the
10389 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/GettingStarted">instructions
10390 in the manual</a> (Machine Management with GOsa² in section Getting
10391 started).</p>
10392
10393 <p>Ensure that the NFS export points on the server are exported to the
10394 relevant subnets or machines:</p>
10395
10396 <p><blockquote><pre>
10397 root@tjener:~# showmount -e nas-server
10398 Export list for nas-server:
10399 /storage         10.0.0.0/8
10400 root@tjener:~#
10401 </pre></blockquote></p>
10402
10403 <p>Here everything on the backbone network is granted access to the
10404 /storage export.  With NFSv3 it is slightly better to limit it to
10405 netgroup membership or single IP addresses to have some limits on the
10406 NFS access.</p>
10407
10408 <p>The next step is to update LDAP.  This can not be done using GOsa²,
10409 because it lack a module for automount.  Instead, use ldapvi and add
10410 the required LDAP objects using an editor.</p>
10411
10412 <p><blockquote><pre>
10413 ldapvi --ldap-conf -ZD '(cn=admin)' -b ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
10414 </pre></blockquote></p>
10415
10416 <p>When the editor show up, add the following LDAP objects at the
10417 bottom of the document.  The "/&" part in the last LDAP object is a
10418 wild card matching everything the nas-server exports, removing the
10419 need to list individual mount points in LDAP.</p>
10420
10421 <p><blockquote><pre>
10422 add cn=nas-server,ou=auto.skole,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
10423 objectClass: automount
10424 cn: nas-server
10425 automountInformation: -fstype=autofs --timeout=60 ldap:ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
10426
10427 add ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
10428 objectClass: top
10429 objectClass: automountMap
10430 ou: auto.nas-server
10431
10432 add cn=/,ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
10433 objectClass: automount
10434 cn: /
10435 automountInformation: -fstype=nfs,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,rw,intr,hard,nodev,nosuid,noatime nas-server.intern:/&
10436 </pre></blockquote></p>
10437
10438 <p>The last step to remember is to mount the relevant mount points in
10439 tjener.intern by adding them to /etc/fstab, creating the mount
10440 directories using mkdir and running "mount -a" to mount them.</p>
10441
10442 <p>When this is done, your users should be able to access the files on
10443 the storage server directly by just visiting the
10444 /tjener/nas-server/storage/ directory using any application on any
10445 workstation, LTSP client or LTSP server.</p>
10446
10447       </div>
10448       <div class="tags">
10449
10450
10451         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>.
10452
10453
10454       </div>
10455     </div>
10456     <div class="padding"></div>
10457
10458     <div class="entry">
10459       <div class="title">
10460         <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>
10461       </div>
10462       <div class="date">
10463         22nd February 2014
10464       </div>
10465       <div class="body">
10466         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
10467 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
10468 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
10469 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
10470 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
10471 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
10472 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
10473 proper home since then.</p>
10474
10475 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
10476 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
10477 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
10478 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
10479 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
10480
10481 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
10482 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
10483 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
10484 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
10485 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
10486 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
10487 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
10488 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
10489 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
10490
10491       </div>
10492       <div class="tags">
10493
10494
10495         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>.
10496
10497
10498       </div>
10499     </div>
10500     <div class="padding"></div>
10501
10502     <div class="entry">
10503       <div class="title">
10504         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
10505       </div>
10506       <div class="date">
10507          3rd February 2014
10508       </div>
10509       <div class="body">
10510         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
10511 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
10512 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
10513 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
10514 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
10515 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
10516 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
10517 <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>,
10518 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
10519
10520 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
10521 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
10522 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
10523 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
10524 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
10525 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
10526
10527 <p><blockquote><pre>
10528 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
10529 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
10530 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
10531 dhclient /dev/eth0
10532 </pre></blockquote></p>
10533
10534 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
10535 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
10536 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
10537
10538 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
10539 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
10540 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
10541 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
10542 side.</p>
10543
10544 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
10545 stuff:</p>
10546
10547 <p><blockquote><pre>
10548 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
10549 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
10550 EOF
10551 apt-get update
10552 apt-get dist-upgrade
10553 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
10554     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
10555 update-alternatives --config runsystem
10556 </pre></blockquote></p>
10557
10558 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
10559 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
10560 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
10561 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
10562 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
10563 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
10564 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
10565 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
10566 ssh instead.
10567
10568 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
10569 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
10570 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
10571 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
10572 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
10573 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
10574
10575 <p><blockquote><pre>
10576 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
10577 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
10578 EOF
10579 </pre></blockquote></p>
10580
10581 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
10582 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
10583 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
10584 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
10585
10586 <p><blockquote><pre>
10587 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
10588 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
10589 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
10590 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
10591 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
10592 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
10593 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
10594 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
10595 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
10596 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
10597 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
10598 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
10599 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
10600 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
10601 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
10602 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
10603 #
10604 </pre></blockquote></p>
10605
10606 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
10607 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
10608 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
10609 command line stuff.<p>
10610
10611       </div>
10612       <div class="tags">
10613
10614
10615         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>.
10616
10617
10618       </div>
10619     </div>
10620     <div class="padding"></div>
10621
10622     <div class="entry">
10623       <div class="title">
10624         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_fist_full_of_non_anonymous_Bitcoins.html">A fist full of non-anonymous Bitcoins</a>
10625       </div>
10626       <div class="date">
10627         29th January 2014
10628       </div>
10629       <div class="body">
10630         <p>Bitcoin is a incredible use of peer to peer communication and
10631 encryption, allowing direct and immediate money transfer without any
10632 central control.  It is sometimes claimed to be ideal for illegal
10633 activity, which I believe is quite a long way from the truth.  At least
10634 I would not conduct illegal money transfers using a system where the
10635 details of every transaction are kept forever.  This point is
10636 investigated in
10637 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">USENIX ;login:</a>
10638 from December 2013, in the article
10639 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/03_meiklejohn-online.pdf">A
10640 Fistful of Bitcoins - Characterizing Payments Among Men with No
10641 Names</a>" by Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole,Grant Jordan, Kirill
10642 Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage.  They
10643 analyse the transaction log in the Bitcoin system, using it to find
10644 addresses belong to individuals and organisations and follow the flow
10645 of money from both Bitcoin theft and trades on Silk Road to where the
10646 money end up.  This is how they wrap up their article:</p>
10647
10648 <p><blockquote>
10649 <p>"To demonstrate the usefulness of this type of analysis, we turned
10650 our attention to criminal activity. In the Bitcoin economy, criminal
10651 activity can appear in a number of forms, such as dealing drugs on
10652 Silk Road or simply stealing someone else’s bitcoins. We followed the
10653 flow of bitcoins out of Silk Road (in particular, from one notorious
10654 address) and from a number of highly publicized thefts to see whether
10655 we could track the bitcoins to known services. Although some of the
10656 thieves attempted to use sophisticated mixing techniques (or possibly
10657 mix services) to obscure the flow of bitcoins, for the most part
10658 tracking the bitcoins was quite straightforward, and we ultimately saw
10659 large quantities of bitcoins flow to a variety of exchanges directly
10660 from the point of theft (or the withdrawal from Silk Road).</p>
10661
10662 <p>As acknowledged above, following stolen bitcoins to the point at
10663 which they are deposited into an exchange does not in itself identify
10664 the thief; however, it does enable further de-anonymization in the
10665 case in which certain agencies can determine (through, for example,
10666 subpoena power) the real-world owner of the account into which the
10667 stolen bitcoins were deposited.  Because such exchanges seem to serve
10668 as chokepoints into and out of the Bitcoin economy (i.e., there are
10669 few alternative ways to cash out), we conclude that using Bitcoin for
10670 money laundering or other illicit purposes does not (at least at
10671 present) seem to be particularly attractive."</p>
10672 </blockquote><p>
10673
10674 <p>These researches are not the first to analyse the Bitcoin
10675 transaction log.  The 2011 paper
10676 "<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524">An Analysis of Anonymity in
10677 the Bitcoin System</A>" by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan is
10678 summarized like this:</p>
10679
10680 <p><blockquote>
10681 "Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a
10682 complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by
10683 public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will
10684 attempt to construct the one-to-many mapping between users and
10685 public-keys and associate information external to the system with the
10686 users. Bitcoin tries to prevent this attack by storing the mapping of
10687 a user to his or her public-keys on that user's node only and by
10688 allowing each user to generate as many public-keys as required. In
10689 this chapter we consider the topological structure of two networks
10690 derived from Bitcoin's public transaction history. We show that the
10691 two networks have a non-trivial topological structure, provide
10692 complementary views of the Bitcoin system and have implications for
10693 anonymity. We combine these structures with external information and
10694 techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate
10695 an alleged theft of Bitcoins, which, at the time of the theft, had a
10696 market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars."
10697 </blockquote></p>
10698
10699 <p>I hope these references can help kill the urban myth that Bitcoin
10700 is anonymous.  It isn't really a good fit for illegal activites.  Use
10701 cash if you need to stay anonymous, at least until regular DNA
10702 sampling of notes and coins become the norm. :)</p>
10703
10704 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
10705 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
10706 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
10707
10708       </div>
10709       <div class="tags">
10710
10711
10712         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>.
10713
10714
10715       </div>
10716     </div>
10717     <div class="padding"></div>
10718
10719     <div class="entry">
10720       <div class="title">
10721         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
10722       </div>
10723       <div class="date">
10724         14th January 2014
10725       </div>
10726       <div class="body">
10727         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
10728 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
10729 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
10730 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
10731 the source.  The company behind it provide
10732 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
10733 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
10734 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
10735 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
10736 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
10737 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
10738 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
10739 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
10740 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
10741 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
10742 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
10743 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
10744 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
10745 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
10746 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
10747 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
10748 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
10749 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
10750 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
10751
10752 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
10753
10754 <ul>
10755
10756   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
10757   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
10758   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
10759
10760 </ul>
10761
10762 <p>You can
10763 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
10764 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
10765 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
10766 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
10767 include a test suite check.</p>
10768
10769       </div>
10770       <div class="tags">
10771
10772
10773         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>.
10774
10775
10776       </div>
10777     </div>
10778     <div class="padding"></div>
10779
10780     <div class="entry">
10781       <div class="title">
10782         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html">Debian Edu interview: Dominik George</a>
10783       </div>
10784       <div class="date">
10785         25th December 2013
10786       </div>
10787       <div class="body">
10788         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
10789 project</a> consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
10790 was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
10791 up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
10792 successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School.  Say hello
10793 to <a href="https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Natureshadow">Dominik
10794 George</a>.</p>
10795
10796 <!-- http://www.dominik-george.de/images/foto.jpg -->
10797
10798 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
10799
10800 <p>I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
10801 life with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a
10802 student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
10803 Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
10804 voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
10805 a bit vacant right now however.</p>
10806
10807 <p>I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
10808 (public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
10809 around 2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
10810 it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
10811 network of that school together with a team of very interested and
10812 talented students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to
10813 learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
10814 to help building another school's informational education concept from
10815 scratch.</p>
10816
10817 <p>That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids
10818 and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
10819 ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.</p>
10820
10821 <p>When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
10822 and cycling.</p>
10823
10824 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
10825 project?</strong></p>
10826
10827 <p>I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
10828 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">FrOSCon</a> and visited the project
10829 booth. I think I wasn't too interested back then because I used to
10830 have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
10831 own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
10832 "out-of-the-box" solution ;).</p>
10833
10834 <p>The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
10835 <a href="http://www.openrheinruhr.de">OpenRheinRuhr</a> 2011 when the
10836 BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
10837 really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
10838 ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
10839 a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
10840 guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
10841 small demonstration, but there wasn't any real feedback and the guys
10842 seemed rather uninterested.</p>
10843
10844 <p>After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
10845 mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
10846 reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
10847 basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!</p>
10848
10849 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10850 Edu?</strong></p>
10851
10852 <p>The most important advantage seems to be that it "just
10853 works". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
10854 in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
10855 without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
10856 from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't
10857 have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
10858 and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
10859 server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
10860 notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
10861 and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
10862 it. I could use 8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
10863 tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that's enough to say
10864 that it rocks!</p>
10865
10866 <p>Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no
10867 politician will ever permit a setup described as "Debian, an universal
10868 operating system, with some really cool educational tools" while they
10869 will be jsut fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
10870 school network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
10871 this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
10872 too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).</p>
10873
10874 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10875 Edu?</strong></p>
10876
10877 <p>I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
10878 answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
10879 other words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I
10880 can list a few points about that:</p>
10881
10882 <ul>
10883
10884  <li>always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
10885  <li>be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
10886  <li>be helpful at being helpful ;)
10887
10888 </ul>
10889
10890 <p>I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!</p>
10891
10892 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
10893
10894 <p>First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
10895 all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
10896 year.</p>
10897
10898 <p>I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
10899 run text tools. I use
10900 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm">mksh</a> as shell,
10901 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/jupp.htm">jupp</a> as very advanced
10902 text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
10903 based full-featured student management software with the two),
10904 <a href="http://mcabber.com/">mcabber</a> for XMPP and
10905 <a href="http://www.irssi.org/">irssi</a> for IRC. For that overly
10906 coloured world called the WWW, I use
10907 <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/">Iceweasel
10908 (Firefox)</a>. Oh, and <a href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a> for
10909 e-mail.</p>
10910
10911 <p>However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
10912 are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
10913 least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
10914 kids. One of these things is <a href="http://jappix.org/">Jappix</a>,
10915 which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
10916 Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
10917 Facebook now ;).</p>
10918
10919 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10920 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
10921
10922 <p>Well, that's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
10923 side is what I have experienced.</p>
10924
10925 <p>I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
10926 that won't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
10927 grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
10928 to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
10929 see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
10930 students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
10931 desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
10932 they jsut refused to use it because "Linux sucks". It is something
10933 that makes the council of our city spend around 600000 € to buy
10934 software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
10935 networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
10936 not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
10937 already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
10938 if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
10939 that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
10940 plain criminal.</p>
10941
10942 <p>That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
10943 method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
10944 founded an association named
10945 <a href="https://www.teckids.org">Teckids</a> here in Germany that does
10946 just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
10947 area of free and open source software, for example the
10948 <a href="http://kids.froscon.org">FrogLabs</a>, which share staff with
10949 Teckids and are the youth programme of
10950 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">the Free and Open Source Software
10951 Conference (FrOSCon)</a>. We do a lot more than most other conferences
10952 - this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
10953 aged 10 to 16. It was a huge success, with approx. 30 kids taking part
10954 and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
10955 of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.</p>
10956
10957 <p>Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
10958 the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
10959 their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
10960 Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
10961 clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
10962 it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
10963 who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
10964 We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
10965 open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
10966 software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
10967 group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
10968 Skolelinux in the future ;)!</p>
10969
10970 <p>So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren't for the world
10971 being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
10972 that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
10973 but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.</p>
10974
10975 <!--
10976
10977 >  * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
10978
10979 That's probably the hardest question of them all, as I do not know the
10980 community. However, I would be willing to do the following:
10981
10982  <li>Run an interview with a German headteacher who is very open to
10983    free software, and also prefers it, but cannot really use it because
10984    of the decision makers above;
10985  <li>Run interviews with some kids, both with and without previous
10986    knowledge about free software
10987
10988 If that is wanted, just let me know ;).
10989
10990 -->
10991
10992       </div>
10993       <div class="tags">
10994
10995
10996         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>.
10997
10998
10999       </div>
11000     </div>
11001     <div class="padding"></div>
11002
11003     <div class="entry">
11004       <div class="title">
11005         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html">Debian Edu interview: Klaus Knopper</a>
11006       </div>
11007       <div class="date">
11008          6th December 2013
11009       </div>
11010       <div class="body">
11011         <p>It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview,
11012 but the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
11013 Skolelinux</a> community is still going strong, and yesterday we even
11014 had a new school administrator show up on
11015 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a> to share
11016 his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school.  This
11017 time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of
11018 Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in
11019 Germany a few years ago.</p>
11020
11021 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
11022
11023 <p>I am Klaus Knopper.  I have a master degree in electrical
11024 engineering, and is currently professor in information management at
11025 the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and
11026 freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.</p>
11027
11028 <p>All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart
11029 from teaching, I'm also conducting some more or less experimental
11030 projects like the <a href="http://www.knoppix.org">Knoppix GNU/Linux live
11031 system</a> (Debian-based like Skolelinux),
11032 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html">ADRIANE</a>
11033 (a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and
11034 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/linbo/index-en.html">LINBO</a>
11035 (Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair
11036 system supporting various operating systems).</p>
11037
11038 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
11039 project?</strong></p>
11040
11041 <p>The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German
11042 coordinator for Skolelinux.  We were looking for an all-in-one open
11043 source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt
11044 introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.</p>
11045
11046 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
11047 Edu?</strong></p>
11048
11049 <ul>
11050   <li>Quick installation,</li>
11051   <li>works (almost) out of the box,</li>
11052   <li>contains many useful software packages for teaching and learning,</li>
11053   <li>is a purely community-based distro and not controlled by a
11054     single company,</li>
11055   <li>has a large number of supporters and teachers who share their
11056     experience and problem solutions.</li>
11057 </ul>
11058
11059 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
11060 Edu?</strong></p>
11061
11062 <ul>
11063   <li>Skolelinux is - as we had to learn - not easily upgradable to
11064   the next version.  Opposed to its genuine Debian base, upgrading to
11065   a new version means a full new installation from scratch to get it
11066   working again reliably.
11067
11068   <li>Skolelinux is based on Debian/stable, and therefore always a
11069   little outdated in terms of program versions compared to Edubuntu or
11070   similar educational Linux distros, which rather use Debian/testing
11071   as their base.
11072
11073   <li>Skolelinux has some very self-opinionated and stubborn default
11074   configuration which in my opinion adds unnecessary complexity and is
11075   not always suitable for a schools needs, the preset network
11076   configuration is actually a core definition feature of Skolelinux
11077   and not easy to change, so schools sometimes have to change their
11078   network configuration to make it "Skolelinux-compatible".
11079
11080   <li>Some proposed extensions, which were made available as
11081   contribution, like secure examination mode and lecture material
11082   distribution and collection, were not accepted into the mainline
11083   Skolelinux development and are now not easy to maintain in the
11084   future because of Skolelinux somewhat undeterministic update
11085   schemes.</li>
11086
11087   <li>Skolelinux has only a very tiny number of base developers
11088   compared to Debian.</li>
11089
11090 </ul>
11091
11092 <p>For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now
11093 rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until
11094 Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes
11095 upgradeable without reinstallation.</p>
11096
11097 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
11098
11099 <p>GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and
11100 programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence,
11101 occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various
11102 programming languages for teaching.</p>
11103
11104 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
11105 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
11106
11107 <p>Strong arguments are</p>
11108
11109 <ul>
11110
11111   <li>Knowledge is free, and so should be methods and tools for
11112     teaching and learning.</li>
11113
11114   <li>Students can learn with and use the same software at school, at
11115     home, and at their working place without running into license or
11116     conversion problems.</li>
11117
11118   <li>Closed source or proprietary software hides knowledge rather
11119     than exposing it, and proprietary software vendors try to bind
11120     customers to certain products.  But teachers need to teach
11121     science, not products.</li>
11122
11123   <li>If you have everything you for daily work as open source, what
11124     would you need proprietary software for?</li>
11125
11126 </ul>
11127
11128       </div>
11129       <div class="tags">
11130
11131
11132         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>.
11133
11134
11135       </div>
11136     </div>
11137     <div class="padding"></div>
11138
11139     <div class="entry">
11140       <div class="title">
11141         <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>
11142       </div>
11143       <div class="date">
11144         30th November 2013
11145       </div>
11146       <div class="body">
11147         <p>If you want the ability to electronically communicate directly with
11148 your neighbors and friends using a network controlled by your peers in
11149 stead of centrally controlled by a few corporations, or would like to
11150 experiment with interesting network technology, the
11151 <a href="http://www.dugnadsnett.no/">Dugnasnett for alle i Oslo</a>
11152 might be project for you.  39 mesh nodes are currently being planned,
11153 in the freshly started initiative from NUUG and Hackeriet to create a
11154 wireless community network.  The work is inspired by
11155 <a href="http://freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a>,
11156 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan
11157 Network</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet">Roofnet</a>
11158 and other successful mesh networks around the globe.  Two days ago we
11159 held a workshop to try to get people started on setting up their own
11160 mesh node, and there we decided to create a new mailing list
11161 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/dugnadsnett">dugnadsnett
11162 (at) nuug.no</a> and IRC channel
11163 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#dugnadsnett.no">#dugnadsnett.no</a> to
11164 coordinate the work.  See also the NUUG blog post
11165 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/E_postliste_og_IRC_kanal_for_Dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">announcing
11166 the mailing list and IRC channel</a>.</p>
11167
11168       </div>
11169       <div class="tags">
11170
11171
11172         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>.
11173
11174
11175       </div>
11176     </div>
11177     <div class="padding"></div>
11178
11179     <div class="entry">
11180       <div class="title">
11181         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
11182       </div>
11183       <div class="date">
11184         24th November 2013
11185       </div>
11186       <div class="body">
11187         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
11188 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
11189 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
11190 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
11191 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
11192 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
11193 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
11194 is working on.  I checked the
11195 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
11196 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
11197 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
11198 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
11199 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
11200 These are the release notes:</p>
11201
11202 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
11203
11204 <ul>
11205
11206   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
11207    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
11208    up.</li>
11209
11210   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
11211
11212   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
11213    Matthias Klose.</li>
11214
11215   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
11216    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
11217
11218   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
11219    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
11220    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
11221
11222 </ul>
11223
11224 <p>You can
11225 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
11226 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
11227 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
11228 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
11229 include a testsuite check.</p>
11230
11231       </div>
11232       <div class="tags">
11233
11234
11235         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>.
11236
11237
11238       </div>
11239     </div>
11240     <div class="padding"></div>
11241
11242     <div class="entry">
11243       <div class="title">
11244         <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>
11245       </div>
11246       <div class="date">
11247         21st November 2013
11248       </div>
11249       <div class="body">
11250         <p>Drones, flying robots, are getting more and more popular.  The most
11251 know ones are the killer drones used by some government to murder
11252 people they do not like without giving them the chance of a fair
11253 trial, but the technology have many good uses too, from mapping and
11254 forest maintenance to photography and search and rescue.  I am sure it
11255 is just a question of time before "bad drones" are in the hands of
11256 private enterprises and not only state criminals but petty criminals
11257 too.  The drone technology is very useful and very dangerous.  To have
11258 some control over the use of drones, I agree with Daniel Suarez in his
11259 TED talk
11260 "<a href="https://archive.org/details/DanielSuarez_2013G">The kill
11261 decision shouldn't belong to a robot</a>", where he suggested this
11262 little gem to keep the good while limiting the bad use of drones:</p>
11263
11264 <blockquote>
11265
11266 <p>Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed
11267 I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement
11268 through public spaces. We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on
11269 aircraft. This is no different. And every citizen should be able to
11270 download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous
11271 vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and
11272 historically. And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones
11273 to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their
11274 own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their
11275 presence. And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic
11276 drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility.</p>
11277
11278 <p>But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. It
11279 would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles
11280 and drones while still preserving our open, civil society.</p>
11281
11282 </blockquote>
11283
11284 <p>The key is that <em>every citizen</em> should be able to read the
11285 radio beacons sent from the drones in the area, to be able to check
11286 both the government and others use of drones.  For such control to be
11287 effective, everyone must be able to do it.  What should such beacon
11288 contain?  At least formal owner, purpose, contact information and GPS
11289 location.  Probably also the origin and target position of the current
11290 flight.  And perhaps some registration number to be able to look up
11291 the drone in a central database tracking their movement.  Robots
11292 should not have privacy.  It is people who need privacy.</p>
11293
11294       </div>
11295       <div class="tags">
11296
11297
11298         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>.
11299
11300
11301       </div>
11302     </div>
11303     <div class="padding"></div>
11304
11305     <div class="entry">
11306       <div class="title">
11307         <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>
11308       </div>
11309       <div class="date">
11310         13th November 2013
11311       </div>
11312       <div class="body">
11313         <p>Today NUUG and Hackeriet announced
11314 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Bli_med___bygge_dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">our
11315 plans to join forces and create a wireless community network in
11316 Oslo</a>.  The workshop to help people get started will take place
11317 Thursday 2013-11-28, but we already are collecting the geolocation of
11318 people joining forces to make this happen.  We have
11319 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/oslo-nodes.geojson">9
11320 locations plotted on the map</a>, but we will need more before we have
11321 a connected mesh spread across Oslo.  If this sound interesting to
11322 you, please join us at the workshop.  If you are too impatient to wait
11323 15 days, please join us on the IRC channel
11324 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
11325 right away. :)</p>
11326
11327       </div>
11328       <div class="tags">
11329
11330
11331         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>.
11332
11333
11334       </div>
11335     </div>
11336     <div class="padding"></div>
11337
11338     <div class="entry">
11339       <div class="title">
11340         <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>
11341       </div>
11342       <div class="date">
11343         10th November 2013
11344       </div>
11345       <div class="body">
11346         <p>Continuing my research into mesh networking, I was recommended to
11347 use TP-Link 3040 and 3600 access points as mesh nodes, and the pair I
11348 bought arrived on Friday.  Here are my notes on how to set up the
11349 MR3040 as a mesh node using
11350 <a href="http://www.openwrt.org/">OpenWrt</a>.</p>
11351
11352 <p>I started by following the instructions on the OpenWRT wiki for
11353 <a href="http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3040">TL-MR3040</a>,
11354 and downloaded
11355 <a href="http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin">the
11356 recommended firmware image</a>
11357 (openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin) and
11358 uploaded it into the original web interface.  The flashing went fine,
11359 and the machine was available via telnet on the ethernet port.  After
11360 logging in and setting the root password, ssh was available and I
11361 could start to set it up as a batman-adv mesh node.</p>
11362
11363 <p>I started off by reading the instructions from
11364 <a href="http://wirelessafrica.meraka.org.za/wiki/index.php?title=Antoine's_Research">Wireless
11365 Africa</a>, which had quite a lot of useful information, but
11366 eventually I followed the recipe from the Open Mesh wiki for
11367 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Batman-adv-openwrt-config">using
11368 batman-adv on OpenWrt</a>.  A small snag was the fact that the
11369 <tt>opkg install kmod-batman-adv</tt> command did not work as it
11370 should.  The batman-adv kernel module would fail to load because its
11371 dependency crc16 was not already loaded.  I
11372 <a href="https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/14452">reported the bug</a> to
11373 the openwrt project and hope it will be fixed soon.  But the problem
11374 only seem to affect initial testing of batman-adv, as configuration
11375 seem to work when booting from scratch.</p>
11376
11377 <p>The setup is done using files in /etc/config/.  I did not bridge
11378 the Ethernet and mesh interfaces this time, to be able to hook up the
11379 box on my local network and log into it for configuration updates.
11380 The following files were changed and look like this after modifying
11381 them:</p>
11382
11383 <p><tt>/etc/config/network</tt></p>
11384
11385 <pre>
11386
11387 config interface 'loopback'
11388         option ifname 'lo'
11389         option proto 'static'
11390         option ipaddr '127.0.0.1'
11391         option netmask '255.0.0.0'
11392
11393 config globals 'globals'
11394         option ula_prefix 'fdbf:4c12:3fed::/48'
11395
11396 config interface 'lan'
11397         option ifname 'eth0'
11398         option type 'bridge'
11399         option proto 'dhcp'
11400         option ipaddr '192.168.1.1'
11401         option netmask '255.255.255.0'
11402         option hostname 'tl-mr3040'
11403         option ip6assign '60'
11404
11405 config interface 'mesh'
11406         option ifname 'adhoc0'
11407         option mtu '1528'
11408         option proto 'batadv'
11409         option mesh 'bat0'
11410 </pre>
11411
11412 <p><tt>/etc/config/wireless</tt></p>
11413 <pre>
11414
11415 config wifi-device 'radio0'
11416         option type 'mac80211'
11417         option channel '11'
11418         option hwmode '11ng'
11419         option path 'platform/ar933x_wmac'
11420         option htmode 'HT20'
11421         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-20'
11422         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-40'
11423         list ht_capab 'RX-STBC1'
11424         list ht_capab 'DSSS_CCK-40'
11425         option disabled '0'
11426
11427 config wifi-iface 'wmesh'
11428         option device 'radio0'
11429         option ifname 'adhoc0'
11430         option network 'mesh'
11431         option encryption 'none'
11432         option mode 'adhoc'
11433         option bssid '02:BA:00:00:00:01'
11434         option ssid 'meshfx@hackeriet'
11435 </pre>
11436 <p><tt>/etc/config/batman-adv</tt></p>
11437 <pre>
11438
11439 config 'mesh' 'bat0'
11440         option interfaces 'adhoc0'
11441         option 'aggregated_ogms'
11442         option 'ap_isolation'
11443         option 'bonding'
11444         option 'fragmentation'
11445         option 'gw_bandwidth'
11446         option 'gw_mode'
11447         option 'gw_sel_class'
11448         option 'log_level'
11449         option 'orig_interval'
11450         option 'vis_mode'
11451         option 'bridge_loop_avoidance'
11452         option 'distributed_arp_table'
11453         option 'network_coding'
11454         option 'hop_penalty'
11455
11456 # yet another batX instance
11457 # config 'mesh' 'bat5'
11458 #       option 'interfaces' 'second_mesh'
11459 </pre>
11460
11461 <p>The mesh node is now operational.  I have yet to test its range,
11462 but I hope it is good.  I have not yet tested the TP-Link 3600 box
11463 still wrapped up in plastic.</p>
11464
11465       </div>
11466       <div class="tags">
11467
11468
11469         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>.
11470
11471
11472       </div>
11473     </div>
11474     <div class="padding"></div>
11475
11476     <div class="entry">
11477       <div class="title">
11478         <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>
11479       </div>
11480       <div class="date">
11481          2nd November 2013
11482       </div>
11483       <div class="body">
11484         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
11485 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
11486 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
11487 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
11488 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
11489
11490 <p><pre>
11491 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
11492 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
11493 # Provides:          rsyslog
11494 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
11495 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
11496 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
11497 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
11498 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
11499 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
11500 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
11501 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
11502 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
11503 ### END INIT INFO
11504 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
11505 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
11506 </pre></p>
11507
11508 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
11509 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
11510 info/comments.</p>
11511
11512 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
11513 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
11514
11515 <p><pre>
11516 #!/bin/sh
11517
11518 # Define LSB log_* functions.
11519 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
11520 # and status_of_proc is working.
11521 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
11522
11523 #
11524 # Function that starts the daemon/service
11525
11526 #
11527 do_start()
11528 {
11529         # Return
11530         #   0 if daemon has been started
11531         #   1 if daemon was already running
11532         #   2 if daemon could not be started
11533         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
11534                 || return 1
11535         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
11536                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
11537                 || return 2
11538         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
11539         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
11540         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
11541 }
11542
11543 #
11544 # Function that stops the daemon/service
11545 #
11546 do_stop()
11547 {
11548         # Return
11549         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
11550         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
11551         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
11552         #   other if a failure occurred
11553         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
11554         RETVAL="$?"
11555         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
11556         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
11557         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
11558         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
11559         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
11560         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
11561         # sleep for some time.
11562         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
11563         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
11564         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
11565         rm -f $PIDFILE
11566         return "$RETVAL"
11567 }
11568
11569 #
11570 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
11571 #
11572 do_reload() {
11573         #
11574         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
11575         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
11576         # then implement that here.
11577         #
11578         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
11579         return 0
11580 }
11581
11582 SCRIPTNAME=$1
11583 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
11584 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
11585 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
11586     script="$1"
11587     shift
11588     . $script
11589 else
11590     exit 0
11591 fi
11592
11593 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
11594 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
11595
11596 # Exit if the package is not installed
11597 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
11598
11599 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
11600 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
11601
11602 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
11603 . /lib/init/vars.sh
11604
11605 case "$1" in
11606   start)
11607         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
11608         do_start
11609         case "$?" in
11610                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
11611                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
11612         esac
11613         ;;
11614   stop)
11615         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
11616         do_stop
11617         case "$?" in
11618                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
11619                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
11620         esac
11621         ;;
11622   status)
11623         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
11624         ;;
11625   #reload|force-reload)
11626         #
11627         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
11628         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
11629         #
11630         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
11631         #do_reload
11632         #log_end_msg $?
11633         #;;
11634   restart|force-reload)
11635         #
11636         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
11637         # 'force-reload' alias
11638         #
11639         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
11640         do_stop
11641         case "$?" in
11642           0|1)
11643                 do_start
11644                 case "$?" in
11645                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
11646                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
11647                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
11648                 esac
11649                 ;;
11650           *)
11651                 # Failed to stop
11652                 log_end_msg 1
11653                 ;;
11654         esac
11655         ;;
11656   *)
11657         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
11658         exit 3
11659         ;;
11660 esac
11661
11662 :
11663 </pre></p>
11664
11665 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
11666 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
11667 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
11668 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
11669
11670 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
11671 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
11672 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
11673 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
11674 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
11675
11676       </div>
11677       <div class="tags">
11678
11679
11680         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>.
11681
11682
11683       </div>
11684     </div>
11685     <div class="padding"></div>
11686
11687     <div class="entry">
11688       <div class="title">
11689         <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>
11690       </div>
11691       <div class="date">
11692          1st November 2013
11693       </div>
11694       <div class="body">
11695         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
11696 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
11697 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
11698 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
11699 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
11700 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
11701 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
11702 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
11703 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
11704 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
11705 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
11706 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
11707
11708 <p>The source is now available from
11709 <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>
11710
11711       </div>
11712       <div class="tags">
11713
11714
11715         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>.
11716
11717
11718       </div>
11719     </div>
11720     <div class="padding"></div>
11721
11722     <div class="entry">
11723       <div class="title">
11724         <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>
11725       </div>
11726       <div class="date">
11727         27th October 2013
11728       </div>
11729       <div class="body">
11730         <p>The
11731 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
11732 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
11733 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
11734 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
11735 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
11736 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
11737 of a plan to simplify the build system for
11738 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
11739 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
11740 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
11741 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
11742 Raspberry Pi.</p>
11743
11744 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
11745 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
11746 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
11747 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
11748 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
11749 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
11750 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
11751 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
11752 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
11753 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
11754 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
11755 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
11756 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
11757 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
11758 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
11759 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
11760 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
11761 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
11762 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
11763 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
11764 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
11765 available from
11766 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
11767 upstream project page</a>.</p>
11768
11769 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
11770 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
11771 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
11772 list:</p>
11773
11774 <p><pre>
11775 #!/bin/sh
11776 set -e # Exit on first error
11777 rootdir="$1"
11778 cd "$rootdir"
11779 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
11780 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
11781 EOF
11782 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
11783 # install a kernel somewhere too.
11784 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
11785     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
11786 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
11787 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
11788 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
11789 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
11790 </pre></p>
11791
11792 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
11793 to build the image:</p>
11794
11795 <pre>
11796 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
11797     --variant minbase \
11798     --arch armel \
11799     --distribution jessie \
11800     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
11801     --image test.img \
11802     --size 600M \
11803     --bootsize 64M \
11804     --boottype vfat \
11805     --log-level debug \
11806     --verbose \
11807     --no-kernel \
11808     --no-extlinux \
11809     --root-password raspberry \
11810     --hostname raspberrypi \
11811     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
11812     --customize `pwd`/customize \
11813     --package netbase \
11814     --package git-core \
11815     --package binutils \
11816     --package ca-certificates \
11817     --package wget \
11818     --package kmod
11819 </pre></p>
11820
11821 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
11822 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
11823 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
11824 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
11825 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
11826 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
11827 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
11828
11829 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
11830 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
11831 build dependency list.</p>
11832
11833 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
11834 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
11835 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
11836 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
11837
11838       </div>
11839       <div class="tags">
11840
11841
11842         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>.
11843
11844
11845       </div>
11846     </div>
11847     <div class="padding"></div>
11848
11849     <div class="entry">
11850       <div class="title">
11851         <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>
11852       </div>
11853       <div class="date">
11854         21st October 2013
11855       </div>
11856       <div class="body">
11857         <p>The last few days I have been experimenting with
11858 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki">the
11859 batman-adv mesh technology</a>.  I want to gain some experience to see
11860 if it will fit <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the
11861 Freedombox project</a>, and together with my neighbors try to build a
11862 mesh network around the park where I live.  Batman-adv is a layer 2
11863 mesh system ("ethernet" in other words), where the mesh network appear
11864 as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch.</p>
11865
11866 <p>My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying
11867 around, but I've been unable to get them working with batman-adv.  So
11868 instead, I started playing with a
11869 <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org/">Raspberry Pi</a>, and tried to
11870 get it working as a mesh node.  My idea is to use it to create a mesh
11871 node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to
11872 the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh
11873 network.  This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys
11874 WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow
11875 non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh.  This in turn is useful for
11876 Android phones using <a href="http://servalproject.org/">the Serval
11877 Project</a> voip client, allowing every one around the playground to
11878 phone and message each other for free.  The reason is that Android
11879 phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from
11880 the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted.  But if
11881 they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to
11882 every client on the local network.</p>
11883
11884 <p>To get this working, I've created a debian package
11885 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node">meshfx-node</a>
11886 and a script
11887 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/build-rpi-mesh-node">build-rpi-mesh-node</a>
11888 to create the Raspberry Pi boot image.  I'm using Debian Jessie (and
11889 not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available.
11890 Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot
11891 image to get it booting, but I'll ignore that for now.  Also, as
11892 Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry
11893 Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit.  I hope
11894 the routing performance isn't affected by the lack of hardware FPU
11895 support.</p>
11896
11897 <p>To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user
11898 after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:</p>
11899
11900 <p><pre>
11901 % wget -O build-rpi-mesh-node \
11902     https://raw.github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
11903 % sudo bash -x ./build-rpi-mesh-node > build.log 2>&1
11904 % dd if=/root/rpi/rpi_basic_jessie_$(date +%Y%m%d).img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M
11905 %
11906 </pre></p>
11907
11908 <p>Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB
11909 wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node.  At least it does for
11910 me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the
11911 ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in
11912 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">an
11913 earlier blog post about this mesh testing</a>.</p>
11914
11915 <p>The mesh node was not horribly expensive either.  I bought
11916 everything over the counter in shops nearby.  If I had ordered online
11917 from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:</p>
11918
11919 <p><table>
11920
11921 <tr><th>Supplier</th><th>Model</th><th>NOK</th></tr>
11922 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi model B</td><td>349.90</td></tr>
11923 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi type B case</td><td>99.90</td></tr>
11924 <tr><td>Lefdal</td><td>Jensen Air:Link 25150</td><td>295.-</td></tr>
11925 <tr><td>Clas Ohlson</td><td>Kingston 16 GB SD card</td><td>199.-</td></tr>
11926 <tr><td>Total cost</td><td></td><td>943.80</td></tr>
11927
11928 </table></p>
11929
11930 <p>Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement
11931 connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the 1th
11932 floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one
11933 play-node I use to develop the image building script.  And some times
11934 I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it.  I look forward
11935 to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give,
11936 and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)</p>
11937
11938       </div>
11939       <div class="tags">
11940
11941
11942         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>.
11943
11944
11945       </div>
11946     </div>
11947     <div class="padding"></div>
11948
11949     <div class="entry">
11950       <div class="title">
11951         <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>
11952       </div>
11953       <div class="date">
11954         19th October 2013
11955       </div>
11956       <div class="body">
11957         <p>Back in 2010, I created a Perl library to talk to
11958 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spykee">the Spykee robot</a>
11959 (with two belts, wifi, USB and Linux) and made it available from my
11960 web page.  Today I concluded that it should move to a site that is
11961 easier to use to cooperate with others, and moved it to github.  If
11962 you got a Spykee robot, you might want to check out
11963 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/libspykee-perl">the
11964 libspykee-perl github repository</a>.</p>
11965
11966       </div>
11967       <div class="tags">
11968
11969
11970         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>.
11971
11972
11973       </div>
11974     </div>
11975     <div class="padding"></div>
11976
11977     <div class="entry">
11978       <div class="title">
11979         <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>
11980       </div>
11981       <div class="date">
11982         15th October 2013
11983       </div>
11984       <div class="body">
11985         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
11986 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
11987 these. :)</p>
11988
11989 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
11990 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
11991 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
11992 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
11993 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
11994 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
11995 hope you will to. :)</p>
11996
11997 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
11998 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
11999 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
12000 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
12001 donated.  Are you next?</p>
12002
12003 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
12004 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
12005 statement under the heading
12006 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
12007 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
12008 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
12009 too.</p>
12010
12011       </div>
12012       <div class="tags">
12013
12014
12015         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>.
12016
12017
12018       </div>
12019     </div>
12020     <div class="padding"></div>
12021
12022     <div class="entry">
12023       <div class="title">
12024         <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>
12025       </div>
12026       <div class="date">
12027         11th October 2013
12028       </div>
12029       <div class="body">
12030         <p>Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
12031 networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
12032 areas, depending on the radio technology used.  Normal wifi equipment
12033 can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
12034 successful examples like
12035 <a href="http://www.freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a> and
12036 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network</a>
12037 (see
12038 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece">wikipedia
12039 for a large list</a>) around the globe.  To give you an idea how it
12040 work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
12041 can be seen from their
12042 <a href="http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html">dynamically
12043 updated node graph and map</a>, where one can see how the mesh nodes
12044 automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
12045 There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
12046 and that is the main topic of this blog post.</p>
12047
12048 <p>I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
12049 to do it as part of my involvement with the <a
12050 href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member organisation</a> community, and
12051 my recent involvement in
12052 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the Freedombox project</a>
12053 finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
12054 Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
12055 when possible, given that most communication between people are
12056 between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
12057 communication patterns).  It also allow people to communicate without
12058 any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
12059 private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
12060 important over the years.</p>
12061
12062 <p>So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
12063 working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
12064 <a href="http://hackeriet.no/">Hackeriet</a> at Husmania.  They seem to
12065 have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
12066 <a href="http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page">the Oslo
12067 Freifunk project</a>, but that effort is now dead and the people
12068 behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
12069 <a href="http://meshfx.org/trac">meshfx</a>.  Unfortunately the wiki
12070 site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
12071 reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to
12072 the new project.  A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
12073 from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks.  I
12074 came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
12075 speakers about this talk (from
12076 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Kd7CLkhSY">youtube</a>):</p>
12077
12078 <p><iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
12079
12080 <p>I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
12081 There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
12082 figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but
12083 given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
12084 is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
12085 completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
12086 batman-adv for now.  It sure help me to  know that the very cool
12087 <a href="http://www.servalproject.org/">Serval project in Australia</a>
12088 is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
12089 organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
12090 less industrialized communities.  Check out this cool video presenting
12091 that project (from
12092 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30qNfzJCQOA">youtube</a>):</p>
12093
12094 <p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/30qNfzJCQOA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
12095
12096 <p>According to the wikipedia page on
12097 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network">Wireless
12098 mesh network</a> there are around 70 competing schemes for routing
12099 packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
12100 B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
12101 based community mesh networks.</p>
12102
12103 <p>The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer 2
12104 (as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
12105 network.  One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
12106 vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
12107 computer.  The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
12108 least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up.  A
12109 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide">good
12110 introduction</a> is available from the Open Mesh project.  These are
12111 the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:</p>
12112
12113 <p><table>
12114 <tr><th>Setting</th><th>Value</th></tr>
12115 <tr><td>Protocol / kernel module</td><td>batman-adv</td></tr>
12116 <tr><td>ESSID</td><td>meshfx@hackeriet</td></tr>
12117 <td>Channel / Frequency</td><td>11 / 2462</td></tr>
12118 <td>Cell ID</td><td>02:BA:00:00:00:01</td>
12119 </table></p>
12120
12121 <p>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
12122 in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers.  (See a nice post from
12123 VillageTelco about
12124 "<a href="http://tiebing.blogspot.no/2009/12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html">Information
12125 about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!</a>
12126 for details.)  When these settings are activated and you have some
12127 other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
12128 network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
12129 any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)</p>
12130
12131 <p>My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
12132 but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
12133 firmware supporting batman-adv.  If anyone know how to use that old
12134 wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.</p>
12135
12136 <p>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
12137 us on IRC, either channel
12138 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace">#oslohackerspace</a>
12139 or <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug">#nuug</a> on
12140 irc.freenode.net.</p>
12141
12142 <p>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
12143 research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
12144 and Innovation called
12145 <a href="http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-2008.pdf">The
12146 reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks</a> and elsewhere
12147 learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
12148 Grünerløkka in Oslo.  So mesh networks are also interesting for
12149 commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
12150 to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
12151 know have closed down the experiment.  Perhaps Telenor or others would
12152 be interested in a cooperation?</p>
12153
12154 <p><strong>Update 2013-10-12</strong>: I was just
12155 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2013-October/005900.html">told
12156 by the Serval project developers</a> that they no longer use
12157 batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
12158 mesh system.</p>
12159
12160       </div>
12161       <div class="tags">
12162
12163
12164         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>.
12165
12166
12167       </div>
12168     </div>
12169     <div class="padding"></div>
12170
12171     <div class="entry">
12172       <div class="title">
12173         <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>
12174       </div>
12175       <div class="date">
12176          8th October 2013
12177       </div>
12178       <div class="body">
12179         <p>The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
12180 Salvador had published a
12181 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GgpdqgLFc">video on
12182 Youtube</a> showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu /
12183 Skolelinux profile.  This is the profile intended for use at home or
12184 on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network
12185 services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc,
12186 in other word a single user machine).  The result is 11 minutes long,
12187 and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked).
12188 Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium
12189 showing the <a href="http://www.zygotebody.com/">Zygote Body 3D model
12190 of the human body</a>, but I guess he did not know about those or find
12191 other programs more interesting. :) And the video do not show the
12192 advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian
12193 Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of
12194 computers without hard drives by installing one central
12195 <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP server</a>.</p>
12196
12197 <p>Anyway, check out the video, embedded below and linked to above:</p>
12198
12199 <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/w-GgpdqgLFc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
12200
12201 <p>Are there other nice videos demonstrating Skolelinux?  Please let
12202 me know. :)</p>
12203
12204       </div>
12205       <div class="tags">
12206
12207
12208         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>.
12209
12210
12211       </div>
12212     </div>
12213     <div class="padding"></div>
12214
12215     <div class="entry">
12216       <div class="title">
12217         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Finally__Debian_Edu_Wheezy_is_released_today_.html">Finally, Debian Edu Wheezy is released today!</a>
12218       </div>
12219       <div class="date">
12220         29th September 2013
12221       </div>
12222       <div class="body">
12223         <p>A few hours ago, the announcement for the first stable release of
12224 Debian Edu Wheezy went out from the Debian publicity team.  The
12225 complete announcement text can be found at
12226 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130928">the Debian News
12227 section</a>, translated to several languages.  Please check it out.</p>
12228
12229 <p>There is one minor known problem that we will fix very soon.  One
12230 can not install a amd64 Thin Client Server using PXE, as the /var/
12231 partition is too small.  A workaround is to extend the partition (use
12232 lvresize + resize2fs in tty 2 while installing).</p>
12233
12234       </div>
12235       <div class="tags">
12236
12237
12238         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>.
12239
12240
12241       </div>
12242     </div>
12243     <div class="padding"></div>
12244
12245     <div class="entry">
12246       <div class="title">
12247         <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>
12248       </div>
12249       <div class="date">
12250         27th September 2013
12251       </div>
12252       <div class="body">
12253         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
12254 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
12255 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
12256 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
12257
12258 <ul>
12259
12260 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
12261 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
12262
12263 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
12264 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
12265
12266 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
12267 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
12268 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
12269 (Youtube)</li>
12270
12271 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
12272 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
12273
12274 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
12275 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
12276
12277 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
12278 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
12279 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
12280
12281 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
12282 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
12283 (Youtube)</li>
12284
12285 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
12286 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
12287
12288 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
12289 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
12290
12291 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
12292 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
12293 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
12294
12295 </ul>
12296
12297 <p>A larger list is available from
12298 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
12299 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
12300
12301 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
12302 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
12303 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
12304 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
12305 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
12306 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
12307 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
12308 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
12309 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
12310 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
12311 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
12312
12313       </div>
12314       <div class="tags">
12315
12316
12317         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>.
12318
12319
12320       </div>
12321     </div>
12322     <div class="padding"></div>
12323
12324     <div class="entry">
12325       <div class="title">
12326         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Third_and_probably_last_beta_release_of_Debian_Edu_Wheezy.html">Third and probably last beta release of Debian Edu Wheezy</a>
12327       </div>
12328       <div class="date">
12329         16th September 2013
12330       </div>
12331       <div class="body">
12332         <p>The third wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
12333 today.  This is the release announcement from Holger Levsen:</p>
12334
12335 <blockquote>
12336 <p>Hi,</p>
12337
12338 <p>it is my pleasure to announce the third beta release (beta 2 for
12339 short) of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
12340 Skolelinux</a> based on Debian Wheezy!</p>
12341
12342 <p>Please test these images extensivly, if no new problems are found
12343 we plan to do this final Debian Edu Wheezy release this coming
12344 weekend.  We are not aware of any major problems or blockers in beta2,
12345 if you find something, please notify us immediately!</p>
12346
12347 <p>(More about the remaining steps for the Edu Wheezy release in
12348 another mail to the edu list tonight or tomorrow...)</p>
12349
12350 <p>Noteworthy changes and software updates for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b2
12351 compared to beta1:</p>
12352
12353 <ul>
12354
12355 <li>The KDE proxy setup has been adjusted to use the provided wpad.dat. This
12356 also gets Chromium to use this proxy.</li>
12357 <li>Install kdepim-groupware with KDE desktops to make sure korganizer
12358 understand ical/dav sources.</li>
12359 <li>Increased default maximum size of /var/spool/squid and /skole/backup on the
12360 main server.</li>
12361 <li>A source DVD image containing all source packages is now available as well.</li>
12362 <li>Updates for chromium (29.0.1547.57-1~deb7u1), imagemagick
12363 (6.7.7.10-5+deb7u2), php5 (5.4.4-14+deb7u4), libmodplug
12364 (0.8.8.4-3+deb7u1+git20130828), tiff (4.0.2-6+deb7u2), linux-image
12365 (3.2.0-4-486_3.2.46-1+deb7u1).</li>
12366
12367 </ul>
12368
12369 <p>Where to get it:</p>
12370
12371 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
12372
12373 <ul>
12374 <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>
12375 <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>
12376 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso .</li>
12377 </ul>
12378
12379 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is:  3a1c89f4666df80eebcd46c5bf5fedb866f9472f</p>
12380
12381 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
12382 <ul>
12383 <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>
12384 <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>
12385 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso .</li>
12386 </ul>
12387
12388 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 702d1718548f401c74bfa6df9f032cc3ee16597e</p>
12389
12390 <p>The Source DVD image has the filename
12391 debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-source-DVD.iso and the SHA1SUM
12392 089eed8b3f962db47aae1f6a9685e9bb2fa30ca5 and is available the same way
12393 as the other isos.</p>
12394
12395 <p>How to report bugs</p>
12396
12397 <p>For information how to report bugs please see
12398 <br><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
12399
12400
12401 <p>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</p>
12402
12403 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
12404 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
12405 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
12406 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
12407 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
12408 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
12409 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
12410 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
12411 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
12412 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
12413 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
12414 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
12415 can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
12416
12417 <p>This is the seventh test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
12418 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
12419 Squeeze release.</p>
12420
12421 <p>Notes for upgrades from Alpha Prereleases</p>
12422
12423 <p>Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
12424 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
12425 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
12426 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
12427 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (2)
12428 Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin
12429 password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one
12430 (backup copy!). In both cases all users need to change their password
12431 to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home
12432 directory.</p>
12433
12434
12435 <p>cheers,
12436 <br>        Holger</p>
12437 </blockquote>
12438
12439       </div>
12440       <div class="tags">
12441
12442
12443         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>.
12444
12445
12446       </div>
12447     </div>
12448     <div class="padding"></div>
12449
12450     <div class="entry">
12451       <div class="title">
12452         <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>
12453       </div>
12454       <div class="date">
12455         10th September 2013
12456       </div>
12457       <div class="body">
12458         <p>I was introduced to the
12459 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
12460 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
12461 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
12462 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
12463 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
12464 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
12465 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
12466 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
12467
12468 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
12469 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
12470 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
12471 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
12472 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
12473
12474 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
12475 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
12476 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
12477 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
12478 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
12479 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
12480 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
12481 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
12482 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
12483 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
12484 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
12485 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
12486 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
12487 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
12488 missing in Debian).</p>
12489
12490 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
12491 scripts
12492 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
12493 and a administrative web interface
12494 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
12495 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
12496 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
12497 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
12498 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
12499 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
12500 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
12501 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
12502 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
12503 this is really working yet, see
12504 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
12505 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
12506 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
12507 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
12508 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
12509 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
12510 with lots of half baked features.</p>
12511
12512 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
12513 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
12514 at.</p>
12515
12516 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
12517
12518 <ol>
12519
12520 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
12521 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
12522 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
12523 to the Debian installer:<p>
12524 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
12525
12526 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
12527 install on.</li>
12528
12529 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
12530 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
12531
12532 </ol>
12533
12534 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
12535
12536 <ol>
12537
12538 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
12539 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
12540 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
12541 <pre>
12542 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
12543 </pre></li>
12544 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
12545 <pre>
12546 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
12547    apt-key add -
12548 apt-get update
12549 apt-get install freedombox-setup
12550 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
12551 </pre></li>
12552 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
12553
12554 </ol>
12555
12556 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
12557 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
12558 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
12559 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
12560 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
12561
12562 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
12563 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
12564 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
12565 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
12566
12567 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
12568 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
12569 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
12570 irc.debian.org and the
12571 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
12572 mailing list</a>.</p>
12573
12574 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
12575 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
12576 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
12577 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
12578 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
12579 default password is 'secret'.</p>
12580
12581       </div>
12582       <div class="tags">
12583
12584
12585         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>.
12586
12587
12588       </div>
12589     </div>
12590     <div class="padding"></div>
12591
12592     <div class="entry">
12593       <div class="title">
12594         <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>
12595       </div>
12596       <div class="date">
12597         22nd August 2013
12598       </div>
12599       <div class="body">
12600         <p>The second wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
12601 today, slightly delayed because of some bugs in the initial Windows
12602 integration fixes .  This is the release announcement:</p>
12603
12604 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b1 released 2013-08-22</strong></p>
12605
12606 <p>These are the release notes for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
12607 7.1+edu0~b1, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
12608
12609 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
12610
12611 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
12612 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
12613 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
12614 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
12615 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
12616 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
12617 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
12618 the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be
12619 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
12620 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
12621 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
12622 desktop contains
12623 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
12624 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
12625 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
12626 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
12627
12628 <p>This is the sixth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically this
12629 is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze
12630 release.</p>
12631
12632 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
12633 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
12634 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
12635 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
12636 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined
12637 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/08/msg00127.html">on
12638 the mailing list</a>. (2) Accept the new version of gosa.conf and
12639 replace both contained admin password placeholders with the password
12640 hashes found in the old one (backup copy!). In both cases every user
12641 need to change their their password to make sure a password is set for
12642 CIFS access to their home directory.</p>
12643
12644 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
12645
12646 <ul>
12647
12648 <li>Added ssh askpass packages to default installation, to ensure ssh
12649     work also without a attached tty.</li>
12650 <li>Add the command-not-found package to the default installation to
12651     make it easier to figure out where to find missing command line
12652     tools. Please note, that the command 'update-command-not-found'
12653     has to be run as root to actually make it useful (internet access
12654     required).</li>
12655
12656 </ul>
12657
12658 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
12659
12660 <ul>
12661
12662 <li>Adjusted the USB stick ISO image build to include every tool
12663 needed for desktop=xfce installations.</li>
12664 <li>Adjust thin-client-server task to work when installing from USB
12665 stick ISO image.</li>
12666 <li>Made new grub artwork (changed png from indexed to RGB format).</li>
12667 <li>Minor cleanup in the CUPS setup.</li>
12668 <li>Make sure that bootstrapping of the Samba domain really happens
12669     during installation of the main server and adjust SID handling to
12670     cope with this.</li>
12671 <li>Make Samba passwords changeable (again) via GOsa².</li>
12672 <li>Fix generation of LM and NT password hashes via GOsa² to avoid
12673     empty password hashes.</li>
12674 <li>Adapted Samba machine domain joining to latest change in the
12675     smbldap-tools Perl package, fixing bugs blocking Windows machines
12676     from joining the Samba domain.</li>
12677
12678 </ul>
12679
12680 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
12681
12682 <ul>
12683
12684 <li>KDE fails to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
12685     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
12686 <li>Chromium also fails to use the proxy when using the KDE desktop
12687     (using the KDE configuration).</li>
12688
12689 </ul>
12690
12691 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
12692
12693 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
12694
12695 <ul>
12696
12697 <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>
12698
12699 <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>
12700
12701 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso .</li>
12702
12703 </ul>
12704
12705 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 1e357f80b55e703523f2254adde6d78b
12706 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 7157f9be5fd27c7694d713c6ecfed61c3edda3b2</p>
12707
12708 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
12709
12710 <ul>
12711
12712 <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>
12713 <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>
12714 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso .</li>
12715
12716 </ul>
12717
12718 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 7a8408ead59cf7e3cef25afb6e91590b
12719 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: f1817c031f02790d5edb3bfa0dcf8451088ad119</p>
12720
12721
12722 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
12723
12724 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
12725
12726       </div>
12727       <div class="tags">
12728
12729
12730         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>.
12731
12732
12733       </div>
12734     </div>
12735     <div class="padding"></div>
12736
12737     <div class="entry">
12738       <div class="title">
12739         <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>
12740       </div>
12741       <div class="date">
12742         18th August 2013
12743       </div>
12744       <div class="body">
12745         <p>Earlier, I reported about
12746 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
12747 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
12748 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
12749 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
12750 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
12751 currently on the disk.</p>
12752
12753 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
12754 <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>
12755 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
12756 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
12757 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
12758 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
12759 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
12760 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
12761 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
12762 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
12763 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
12764 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
12765 the broken disks.</p>
12766
12767       </div>
12768       <div class="tags">
12769
12770
12771         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>.
12772
12773
12774       </div>
12775     </div>
12776     <div class="padding"></div>
12777
12778     <div class="entry">
12779       <div class="title">
12780         <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>
12781       </div>
12782       <div class="date">
12783          2nd August 2013
12784       </div>
12785       <div class="body">
12786         <p>It has been a while since my last update.  Since last summer, I
12787 have worked on a Norwegian
12788 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
12789 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
12790 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright
12791 law.  Yesterday, I finally broken the 90% mark, when counting the
12792 number of strings to translate.  Due to real life constraints, I have
12793 not had time to work on it since March, but when the summer broke out,
12794 I found time to work on it again.  Still lots of work left, but the
12795 first draft is nearing completion.  I created a graph to show the
12796 progress of the translation:</p>
12797
12798 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
12799
12800 <p>When the first draft is done, the translated text need to be
12801 proof read, and the remaining formatting problems with images and SVG
12802 drawings need to be fixed.  There are probably also some index entries
12803 missing that need to be added.  This can be done by comparing the
12804 index entries listed in the SiSU version of the book, or comparing the
12805 English docbook version with the paper version.  Last, the colophon
12806 page with ISBN numbers etc need to be wrapped up before the release is
12807 done.  I should also figure out how to get correct Norwegian sorting
12808 of the index pages.  All docbook tools I have tried so far (xmlto,
12809 docbook-xsl, dblatex) get the order of symbols and the special
12810 Norwegian letters ÆØÅ wrong.</p>
12811
12812 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
12813 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
12814 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
12815 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
12816 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
12817 around?  There are also some legal terms that are unfamiliar to me.
12818 If you want to help, please get in touch with me, and check out the
12819 project files currently available from
12820 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
12821
12822 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
12823 the updated
12824 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
12825 and
12826 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
12827 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
12828 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
12829 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
12830
12831       </div>
12832       <div class="tags">
12833
12834
12835         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>.
12836
12837
12838       </div>
12839     </div>
12840     <div class="padding"></div>
12841
12842     <div class="entry">
12843       <div class="title">
12844         <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>
12845       </div>
12846       <div class="date">
12847         27th July 2013
12848       </div>
12849       <div class="body">
12850         <p>The first wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
12851 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
12852
12853 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b0 released
12854 2013-07-27</strong></p>
12855
12856 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
12857 7.1+edu0~b0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
12858
12859 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
12860
12861 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
12862 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
12863 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
12864 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
12865 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
12866 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
12867 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
12868 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
12869 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
12870 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
12871 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
12872 desktop contains
12873 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
12874 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
12875 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
12876 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
12877
12878 <p>This is the fifth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
12879 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
12880 Squeeze release.</p>
12881
12882 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
12883 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
12884 release.</p>
12885
12886 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
12887
12888 <ul>
12889
12890 <li>Switched roaming workstation profiles from wicd to network-manager
12891    for network configuration, as wicd didn't work any more.</li>
12892 <li>Changed version numbers of patched gosa and libpam-mklocaluser
12893    packages to make sure our locally patched versions will be replaced
12894    by the official packages when they are released from Debian. Those
12895    installing alpha version need to reinstall or manually downgrade gosa
12896    and libpam-mklocaluser.</li>
12897 <li>Added bluetooth tools to the default desktop (bluedevil, blueman).</li>
12898 <li>Added tools for sharing the desktop on KDE (krdc, krfb).</li>
12899 <li>Added valgrind to the default installation for easier debugging of
12900    crash bugs.</li>
12901
12902 </ul>
12903
12904 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
12905
12906 <ul>
12907
12908 <li>Fixed artwork package to work with gnome, no longer break
12909    desktop=gnome installations.</li>
12910 <li>Adjusted installer to now work when forced to use a proxy with the
12911    netinst CD.</li>
12912 <li>Fixed code detecting and setting/loading hardware specific
12913    setup/firmware to work more robust out of the box.</li>
12914 <li>Adjusted Kerberos setup to detect realm and server settings at
12915    install time instead of dynamically at run time. This avoid a crash
12916    with krb5-auth-dialog on diskless workstations without a DNS name.</li>
12917 <li>Worked around misfeature in network-manager not calling the dhclient
12918    exit hooks, causing automatic proxy configuration and automatic host
12919    name setting at run time to work again.</li>
12920 <li>Fixed feature setting the default Iceweasel start page from URL
12921    fetched from LDAP, to allow schools to set the global default by
12922    updating the dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no LDAP object.</li>
12923 <li>Changed default host name on all networked machines to be unique
12924    (generated from MAC or reverse DNS) after boot.</li>
12925 <li>Adjusted partition sizes to make sure they are big enough.</li>
12926
12927 </ul>
12928
12929 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
12930
12931 <ul>
12932
12933 <li>Grub is missing the new artwork.</li>
12934 <li>KDE fail to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
12935     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
12936 <li>Chromium also fail to use the proxy.</li>
12937
12938 </ul>
12939
12940 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
12941
12942 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
12943
12944 <ul>
12945
12946 <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>
12947
12948 <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>
12949
12950 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso .</li>
12951
12952 </ul>
12953
12954 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 55d5de9765b6dccd5d9ec33cf1a07109
12955 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 996a1d9517740e4d627d100de2d12b23dd545a3f</p>
12956
12957 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
12958
12959 <ul>
12960
12961 <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>
12962 <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>
12963 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso .</li>
12964
12965 </ul>
12966
12967 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: d8f0818c51a78d357de794066f289f69
12968 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 49185ca354e8d0543240423746924f76a6cee733</p>
12969
12970
12971 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
12972
12973 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
12974
12975       </div>
12976       <div class="tags">
12977
12978
12979         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>.
12980
12981
12982       </div>
12983     </div>
12984     <div class="padding"></div>
12985
12986     <div class="entry">
12987       <div class="title">
12988         <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>
12989       </div>
12990       <div class="date">
12991         17th July 2013
12992       </div>
12993       <div class="body">
12994         <p>Today I switched to
12995 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
12996 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
12997 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
12998 <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
12999 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
13000 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
13001 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
13002 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
13003 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
13004 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
13005 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
13006 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
13007 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
13008 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
13009 station from now on.</p>
13010
13011 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
13012 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
13013 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
13014 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
13015 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
13016 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
13017 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
13018 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
13019 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
13020 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
13021 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
13022 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
13023
13024 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
13025 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
13026 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
13027 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
13028 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
13029 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
13030 parameters are tuned:</p>
13031
13032 <ul>
13033
13034 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
13035     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
13036
13037 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
13038     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
13039     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
13040
13041 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
13042     systems.</li>
13043
13044 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
13045     /etc/fstab.</li>
13046
13047 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
13048
13049 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
13050     cron.daily).</li>
13051
13052 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
13053     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
13054
13055 </ul>
13056
13057 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
13058 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
13059 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
13060 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
13061 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
13062 from getting the data on the disk (see
13063 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
13064 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
13065 right thing to do.</p>
13066
13067 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
13068 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
13069 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
13070
13071 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
13072 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
13073 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
13074 instead of during my work.</p>
13075
13076 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
13077 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
13078
13079 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
13080 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
13081 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
13082
13083 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
13084 there.</p>
13085
13086 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
13087 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
13088 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
13089 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
13090 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
13091 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
13092 back.</p>
13093
13094       </div>
13095       <div class="tags">
13096
13097
13098         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>.
13099
13100
13101       </div>
13102     </div>
13103     <div class="padding"></div>
13104
13105     <div class="entry">
13106       <div class="title">
13107         <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>
13108       </div>
13109       <div class="date">
13110         10th July 2013
13111       </div>
13112       <div class="body">
13113         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
13114 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
13115 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
13116 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
13117 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
13118 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
13119 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
13120 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
13121
13122 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
13123 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
13124 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
13125 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
13126 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
13127 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
13128 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
13129 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
13130 lock up when I download a new
13131 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
13132 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
13133 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
13134
13135 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
13136 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
13137 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
13138 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
13139 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
13140 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
13141
13142 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
13143 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
13144 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
13145 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
13146 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
13147 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
13148
13149 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
13150 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
13151 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
13152 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
13153 exist).</p>
13154
13155       </div>
13156       <div class="tags">
13157
13158
13159         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>.
13160
13161
13162       </div>
13163     </div>
13164     <div class="padding"></div>
13165
13166     <div class="entry">
13167       <div class="title">
13168         <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>
13169       </div>
13170       <div class="date">
13171          9th July 2013
13172       </div>
13173       <div class="body">
13174         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
13175 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
13176 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
13177 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
13178 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
13179 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
13180 Bitraf</a>.</p>
13181
13182 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
13183 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
13184 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
13185 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
13186 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
13187
13188       </div>
13189       <div class="tags">
13190
13191
13192         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>.
13193
13194
13195       </div>
13196     </div>
13197     <div class="padding"></div>
13198
13199     <div class="entry">
13200       <div class="title">
13201         <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>
13202       </div>
13203       <div class="date">
13204          5th July 2013
13205       </div>
13206       <div class="body">
13207         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
13208 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
13209 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
13210 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
13211 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
13212 ended up picking a
13213 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
13214 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
13215 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
13216 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
13217 on that below.</p>
13218
13219 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
13220 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
13221 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
13222 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
13223 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
13224 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
13225 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
13226 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
13227 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
13228
13229 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
13230 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
13231 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
13232 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
13233 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
13234 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
13235 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
13236
13237 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
13238 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
13239
13240 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
13241 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
13242 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
13243 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
13244 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
13245 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
13246 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
13247 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
13248 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
13249 kernel developers as
13250 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
13251 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
13252 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
13253 Lenovo forums, both for
13254 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
13255 2012-11-10</a> and for
13256 <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
13257 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
13258 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
13259 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
13260 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
13261 There is even a
13262 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
13263 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
13264 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
13265
13266 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
13267 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
13268 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
13269 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
13270 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
13271 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
13272 fixed. :)</p>
13273
13274       </div>
13275       <div class="tags">
13276
13277
13278         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>.
13279
13280
13281       </div>
13282     </div>
13283     <div class="padding"></div>
13284
13285     <div class="entry">
13286       <div class="title">
13287         <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>
13288       </div>
13289       <div class="date">
13290          4th July 2013
13291       </div>
13292       <div class="body">
13293         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
13294 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
13295 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
13296 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
13297 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
13298 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
13299 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
13300 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
13301 with an expencive door stop.</p>
13302
13303 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
13304 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
13305 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
13306 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
13307 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
13308 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
13309 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
13310
13311 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
13312 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
13313 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
13314 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
13315 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
13316 new laptop now. :)</p>
13317
13318 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
13319
13320       </div>
13321       <div class="tags">
13322
13323
13324         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>.
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/Fourth_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">Fourth alpha release of Debian Edu/Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
13334       </div>
13335       <div class="date">
13336          3rd July 2013
13337       </div>
13338       <div class="body">
13339         <p>The fourth wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
13340 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
13341
13342 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~alpha3 released
13343 2013-07-03</strong></p>
13344
13345 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
13346 7.1+edu0~alpha3, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
13347
13348 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
13349
13350 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
13351 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
13352 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
13353 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
13354 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
13355 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
13356 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
13357 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
13358 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
13359 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
13360 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
13361 desktop contains
13362 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
13363 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
13364 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
13365 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
13366
13367 <p>This is the fourth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
13368 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
13369 Squeeze release.</p>
13370
13371 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
13372 <ul>
13373   <li>Dropped ispell dictionaries from our default installation.</li>
13374   <li>Dropped menu-xdg from the KDE desktop option, to drop the Debian
13375     submenu.  It was not included with Gnome, LXDE or Xfce, so this
13376     brings KDE in line with the others.</li>
13377   <li>Dropped xdrawchem, xjig and xsok from our default installation as
13378     they don't have a desktop menu entry and thus won't show up in the
13379     menu now that menu-xdg was removed.</li>
13380   <li>Removed the killer system to kill left behind processes on
13381     multi-user machines, as it was no longer able to understand when a
13382     X display was in use and killed the processes of the active users
13383     too.</li>
13384   <li>Dropped the golearn (from goplay) package as the debtags in wheezy
13385     are too few to make the package useful.</li>
13386 </ul>
13387 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
13388 <ul>
13389   <li>Updated artwork matching http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Joy
13390   <li>Multi-arch i386/amd64 USB stick ISO available.</li>
13391   <li>Got rid of ispell/wordlist related debconf questions that showed
13392     up for some language options.</li>
13393   <li>Switched to using http.debian.net as APT source by default.</li>
13394   <li>Fixed proxy configuration on Main Server installations.</li>
13395   <li>Changed LTSP setup to ask dpkg to use force-unsafe-io the same way
13396     d-i is doing it.</li>
13397   <li>Made sure root and user passwords were not left behind in the
13398     debconf database after installation on Main Server installations.</li>
13399   <li>Made Roaming Workstation dynamic setup more robust and added draft
13400     script setup-ad-client to hook a Roaming Workstation up to a
13401     Active Directory server instead of a Debian Edu Main Server.</li>
13402   <li>Update system to install needed firmware packages during
13403     installation, to work properly in Wheezy.</li>
13404   <li>Update system to handle hardware quirks (debian-edu-hwsetup).</li>
13405   <li>Corrected PXE installation setup to properly pass selected desktop
13406     and keymap settings to PXE installation clients.</li>
13407   <li>LTSP diskless workstations use sshfs by default, allowing them to
13408     work without adding them to DNS and NIS netgroups for NFS access.</li>
13409 </ul>
13410 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
13411 <ul>
13412   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
13413     available yet (698840).</li>
13414   <li>Artwork not enabled for all desktops.</li>
13415 </ul>
13416 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
13417
13418 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
13419 <ul>
13420   <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>
13421   <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>
13422   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso .</li>
13423 </ul>
13424
13425 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 2b161a99d2a848c376d8d04e3854e30c
13426 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 498922e9c508c0a7ee9dbe1dfe5bf830d779c3c8</p>
13427
13428 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
13429 <ul>
13430   <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>
13431   <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>
13432   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso .</li>
13433 </ul>
13434
13435 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 25e808e403a4c15dbef1d13c37d572ac
13436 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 15ecfc93eb6b4f453b7eb0bc04b6a279262d9721</p>
13437
13438 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
13439
13440 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
13441
13442       </div>
13443       <div class="tags">
13444
13445
13446         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>.
13447
13448
13449       </div>
13450     </div>
13451     <div class="padding"></div>
13452
13453     <div class="entry">
13454       <div class="title">
13455         <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>
13456       </div>
13457       <div class="date">
13458         25th June 2013
13459       </div>
13460       <div class="body">
13461         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
13462 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
13463 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
13464 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
13465 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
13466 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
13467 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
13468 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
13469 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
13470 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
13471 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
13472
13473 <p><pre>
13474 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
13475 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
13476 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
13477 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
13478 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
13479 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
13480 firmware-ipw2x00
13481 firmware-ipw2x00
13482 Preconfiguring packages ...
13483 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
13484 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
13485 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
13486 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
13487 #
13488 </pre></p>
13489
13490 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
13491 printed instead:</p>
13492
13493 <p><pre>
13494 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
13495 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
13496 #
13497 </pre></p>
13498
13499 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
13500 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
13501
13502 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
13503 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
13504 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
13505 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
13506 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
13507 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
13508 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
13509 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
13510 machine.</p>
13511
13512 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
13513 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
13514 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
13515 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
13516 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
13517 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
13518
13519       </div>
13520       <div class="tags">
13521
13522
13523         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>.
13524
13525
13526       </div>
13527     </div>
13528     <div class="padding"></div>
13529
13530     <div class="entry">
13531       <div class="title">
13532         <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>
13533       </div>
13534       <div class="date">
13535         22nd June 2013
13536       </div>
13537       <div class="body">
13538         <p>In the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
13539 Skolelinux</a> project, we include a post-installation test suite,
13540 which check that services are running, working, and return the
13541 expected results.  It runs automatically just after the first boot on
13542 test installations (using test ISOs), but not on production
13543 installations (using non-test ISOs).  It test that the LDAP service is
13544 operating, Kerberos is responding, DNS is replying, file systems are
13545 online resizable, etc, etc.  And it check that the PXE service is
13546 configured, which is the topic of this post.</p>
13547
13548 <p>The last week I've fixed the DVD and USB stick ISOs for our Debian
13549 Edu Wheezy release.  These ISOs are supposed to be able to install a
13550 complete system without any Internet connection, but for that to
13551 happen all the needed packages need to be on them.  Thanks to our test
13552 suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
13553 cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
13554 When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
13555 using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
13556 working packages to get it working.  And the packages changed name
13557 from debian-installer-6.0-netboot-$arch to
13558 debian-installer-7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
13559 packages during installation.  Without our test suite, I suspect we
13560 would never have discovered this before release.  Now it is fixed
13561 right after we got the ISOs operational.</p>
13562
13563 <p>Another by-product of the test suite is that we can ask system
13564 administrators with problems getting Debian Edu to work, to run the
13565 test suite using <tt>/usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install</tt> and see if
13566 any errors are detected.  This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
13567 the problem.</p>
13568
13569 <p>If you want to help us help kids learn how to share and create,
13570 please join us on
13571 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
13572 irc.debian.org</a> and the
13573 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@</a> mailing
13574 list.</p>
13575
13576       </div>
13577       <div class="tags">
13578
13579
13580         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>.
13581
13582
13583       </div>
13584     </div>
13585     <div class="padding"></div>
13586
13587     <div class="entry">
13588       <div class="title">
13589         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html">Debian Edu interview: Victor Nițu</a>
13590       </div>
13591       <div class="date">
13592         17th June 2013
13593       </div>
13594       <div class="body">
13595         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
13596 Skolelinux</a> distribution have users and contributors all around the
13597 globe.  And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
13598 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">our IRC channel
13599 #debian-edu</a> and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
13600 worked.  We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
13601 help us with translations.  And today I managed to get an interview
13602 with him, to learn more about him.</p>
13603
13604 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13605
13606 <p>I'm a 25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
13607 which is also my country of origin. Back in 2009, at a New Year's Eve
13608 party, I had a very nice <strike>beer</strike> discussion with a
13609 friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
13610 country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
13611 community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
13612 began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
13613 constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
13614 field.</p>
13615
13616 <p>A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
13617 provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
13618 activities. For the last 13 months, I have been the Technical Director
13619 of <a href="http://ceata.org/">Fundația Ceata</a>, which is a free
13620 software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
13621 the only one we have in our country.</p>
13622
13623 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
13624 project?</strong></p>
13625
13626 <p>The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
13627 even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
13628 it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
13629 educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
13630 love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
13631 technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
13632 ways to contribute.</p>
13633
13634 <p>My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
13635 configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
13636 haven't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
13637 areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
13638 software in my country is pretty low, I'll be happy to be the first
13639 one around here advocating for the project's adoption in educational
13640 environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
13641 for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
13642 from now on, time will tell what I'll be doing next, but I think I
13643 have a pretty consistent starting point.</p>
13644
13645 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13646 Edu?</strong></p>
13647
13648 <p>Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
13649 maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
13650 took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
13651 Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
13652 time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
13653 with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
13654 out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
13655 it comes to managing a school's network, for example.</p>
13656
13657 <p>Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
13658 availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
13659 scenarios is something I can't wait to experiment "into the wild" (I
13660 only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
13661 lot more I haven't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
13662 project.</p>
13663
13664 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
13665 Edu?</strong></p>
13666
13667 <p>As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
13668 disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
13669 project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
13670 a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story.  I'd like to see
13671 Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
13672 ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
13673 lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
13674 opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project's dynamics. Not
13675 to mention it's a very fun blend to work on!</p>
13676
13677 <p>Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
13678 with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
13679 to all blends and derivatives, but it's an issue we can all work
13680 on.</p>
13681
13682 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13683
13684 <p>I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
13685 daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
13686 am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
13687 Enlightenment project a lot!),
13688 <a href="http://www.claws-mail.org/‎">Claws Mail</a> due to its ease of
13689 use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
13690 <a href="https://launchpad.net/redshift">Redshift</a>, which helps me
13691 get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
13692 stuff in this bag, but I'll need a blog on my own for doing this!</p>
13693
13694 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13695 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13696
13697 <p>Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
13698 now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
13699 that:</p>
13700
13701 <ul>
13702
13703 <li>schools would like to get rid of proprietary software</li>
13704
13705 <li>students will love the openness of the system, and will want to
13706     experiment with it - maybe we need to harvest the native curiosity
13707     of teenagers more?</li>
13708
13709 <li>there is no "right one" when it comes to strategies, but it would
13710     be useful to have some success stories published somewhere, so
13711     other can get some inspiration from them (I know I'd promote
13712     them!)</li>
13713
13714 <li>more active promotion - talks, conferences, even small school
13715     lectures can do magical things if they encounter at least one
13716     person interested. Who knows who that person might be? ;-)</li>
13717
13718 </ul>
13719
13720 <p>I also see some problems in getting Skolelinux into schools; for
13721 example, in our country we have a great deal of corruption issues, so
13722 it might be hard(er) to fight against proprietary solutions. Also,
13723 people who relied on commercial software for all their lives, would be
13724 very hard to convert against their will.</p>
13725
13726       </div>
13727       <div class="tags">
13728
13729
13730         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>.
13731
13732
13733       </div>
13734     </div>
13735     <div class="padding"></div>
13736
13737     <div class="entry">
13738       <div class="title">
13739         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jonathan_Carter.html">Debian Edu interview: Jonathan Carter</a>
13740       </div>
13741       <div class="date">
13742         12th June 2013
13743       </div>
13744       <div class="body">
13745         <p>There is a certain cross-over between the
13746 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
13747 project</a> and <a href="http://www.edubuntu.org/">the Edubuntu
13748 project</a>, and for example the LTSP packages in Debian are a joint
13749 effort between the projects.  One person with a foot in both camps is
13750 Jonathan Carter, which I am now happy to present to you.</p>
13751
13752 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13753
13754 <p>I'm a South-African free software geek who lives in Cape Town. My
13755 days vary quite a bit since I'm involved in too many things. As I'm
13756 getting older I'm learning how to focus a bit more :)</p>
13757
13758 <p>I'm also an Edubuntu contributor and I love when there are
13759 opportunities for the Edubuntu and Debian Edu projects to benefit from
13760 each other.</p>
13761
13762 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
13763 project?</strong></p>
13764
13765 <p>I've been somewhat familiar with the project before, but I think my
13766 first direct exposure to the project was when I met Petter
13767 [Reinholdtsen] and Knut [Yrvin] at the Edubuntu summit in 2005 in
13768 London. They provided great feedback that helped the bootstrapping of
13769 Edubuntu. Back then Edubuntu (and even Ubuntu) was still very new and
13770 it was great getting input from people who have been around longer. I
13771 was also still very excitable and said yes to everything and to this
13772 day I have a big todo list backlog that I'm catching up with. I think
13773 over the years the relationship between Edubuntu and Debian-Edu has
13774 been gradually improving, although I think there's a lot that we could
13775 still improve on in terms of working together on packages. I'm sure
13776 we'll get there one day.</p>
13777
13778 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
13779 Edu?</strong></p>
13780
13781 <p>Debian itself already has so many advantages. I could go on about
13782 it for pages, but in essence I love that it's a very honest project
13783 that puts its users first with no hidden agendas and also produces
13784 very high quality work.</p>
13785
13786 <p>I think the advantage of Debian Edu is that it makes many common
13787 set-up tasks simpler so that administrators can get up and running
13788 with a lot less effort and frustration. At the same time I think it
13789 helps to standardise installations in schools so that it's easier for
13790 community members and commercial suppliers to support.</p>
13791
13792 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
13793 Edu?</strong></p>
13794
13795 <p>I had to re-type this one a few times because I'm trying to
13796 separate "disadvantages" from "areas that need improvement" (which is
13797 what I originally rambled on about)</p>
13798
13799 <p>The biggest disadvantage I can think of is lack of manpower. The
13800 project could do so much more if there were more good contributors. I
13801 think some of the problems are external too. Free software and free
13802 content in education is a no-brainer but it takes some time to catch
13803 on. When you've been working with the same proprietary eco-system for
13804 years and have gotten used to it, it can be hard to adjust to some
13805 concepts in the free software world. It would be nice if there were
13806 more Debian Edu consultants across the world. I'd love to be one
13807 myself but I'm already so over-committed that it's just not possible
13808 currently.</p>
13809
13810 <p>I think the best short-term solution to that large-scale problem is
13811 for schools to be pro-active and share their experiences and grow
13812 their skills in-house. I'm often saddened to see how much money
13813 educational institutions spend on 3rd party solutions that they don't
13814 have access to after the service has ended and they could've gotten so
13815 much more value otherwise by being more self-sustainable and
13816 autonomous.</p>
13817
13818 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13819
13820 <p>My main laptop dual-boots between Debian and Windows 7. I was
13821 Windows free for years but started dual-booting again last year for
13822 some games which help me focus and relax (Starcraft II in
13823 particular). Gaming support on Linux is improving in leaps and bounds
13824 so I suppose I'll soon be able to regain that disk space :)</p>
13825
13826 <p>Besides that I rely on Icedove, Chromium, Terminator, Byobu, irssi,
13827 git, Tomboy, KVM, VLC and LibreOffice. Recently I've been torn on
13828 which desktop environment I like and I'm taking some refuge in Xfce
13829 while I figure that out. I like tools that keep things simple. I enjoy
13830 Python and shell scripting. I went to an Arduino workshop recently and
13831 it was awesome seeing how easy and simple the IDE software was to get
13832 up and running in Debian compared to the users running Windows and OS
13833 X.</p>
13834
13835 <p>I also use mc which some people frown upon slightly. I got used to
13836 using Norton Commander in the early 90's and it stuck (I think the
13837 people who sneer at it is just jealous that they don't know how to use
13838 it :p)
13839
13840 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13841 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13842
13843 <p>I think trying to force it is unproductive. I also think that in
13844 many cases it's appropriate for schools to use non-free systems and I
13845 don't think that there's any particular moral or ethical problem with
13846 that.</p>
13847
13848 <p>I do think though that free software can already solve so so many
13849 problems in educational institutions and it's just a shame not taking
13850 advantage of that.</p>
13851
13852 <p>I also think that some curricula need serious review. For example,
13853 some areas of the world rely heavily on very specific versions of MS
13854 Office, teaching students to parrot menu items instead of learning the
13855 general concepts. I think that's very unproductive because firstly, MS
13856 Office's interface changes drastically every few years and on top of
13857 that it also locks in a generation to a product that might not be the
13858 best solution for them.</p>
13859
13860 <p>To answer your question, I believe that the right strategy is to
13861 educate and inform, giving someone the information they require to
13862 make a decision that would work for them.</p>
13863
13864       </div>
13865       <div class="tags">
13866
13867
13868         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>.
13869
13870
13871       </div>
13872     </div>
13873     <div class="padding"></div>
13874
13875     <div class="entry">
13876       <div class="title">
13877         <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>
13878       </div>
13879       <div class="date">
13880         11th June 2013
13881       </div>
13882       <div class="body">
13883         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
13884 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
13885 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
13886 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
13887 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
13888 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
13889 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
13890 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
13891 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
13892 i915 driver used by the
13893 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
13894 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
13895
13896 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
13897 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
13898 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
13899 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
13900 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
13901
13902 <pre>
13903 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
13904 update-initramfs -u -k all
13905 </pre>
13906
13907 <p>Since March 2012 there is
13908 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
13909 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
13910 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
13911 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
13912 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
13913 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
13914 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
13915 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
13916 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
13917 number.</p>
13918
13919 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
13920 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
13921
13922 <p><pre>
13923 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
13924     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
13925     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
13926  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
13927  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
13928     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
13929  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
13930     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
13931  Latency: 0
13932  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
13933  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
13934  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
13935  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
13936  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
13937  Capabilities: <access denied>
13938  Kernel driver in use: i915
13939 </pre></p>
13940
13941 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
13942
13943 <p><pre>
13944 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
13945        ...
13946         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
13947         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
13948        ...
13949 }
13950 </pre></p>
13951
13952 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
13953 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
13954 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
13955 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
13956 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
13957 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
13958 yet shown up in
13959 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
13960 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
13961 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
13962 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
13963 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
13964 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
13965
13966 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
13967 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
13968 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
13969 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
13970 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
13971 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
13972 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
13973 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
13974 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
13975 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
13976 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
13977 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
13978
13979 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
13980 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
13981 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
13982 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
13983 backlight.</p>
13984
13985       </div>
13986       <div class="tags">
13987
13988
13989         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>.
13990
13991
13992       </div>
13993     </div>
13994     <div class="padding"></div>
13995
13996     <div class="entry">
13997       <div class="title">
13998         <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>
13999       </div>
14000       <div class="date">
14001         10th June 2013
14002       </div>
14003       <div class="body">
14004         <p>The third wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
14005 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
14006
14007 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha2 released
14008 2013-06-10</strong></p>
14009
14010 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
14011 alpha2, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
14012
14013 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
14014
14015 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
14016 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
14017 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
14018 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
14019 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
14020 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
14021 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
14022 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
14023 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
14024 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
14025 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
14026 desktop contains
14027 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
14028 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
14029 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
14030 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
14031
14032 <p>This is the third test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
14033 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
14034 Squeeze release.</p>
14035
14036 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
14037
14038 <ul>
14039
14040 <li>Iceweasel was updated from 10 to 17. (DSA 2699-1)
14041 <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).
14042 <li>Switched xrdp on thin client servers to use tightvncserver instead of xvnc4.
14043 <li>Now install software oscilloscope xoscope by default.
14044 <li>Now install music tools gtick, lingot and pianobooster by default.
14045
14046 </ul>
14047
14048 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
14049
14050 <ul>
14051
14052 <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.
14053 <li>Updated translation of the installation.
14054 <li>New Romanian translation.
14055 <li>Fix security problem causing root and first user password to no longer show up in /var/cache/debconf/templates.dat.
14056 <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).
14057 <li>Made roaming workstation setup more robust in non-Debian Edu environments.
14058 <li>New script debian-edu-bless to transform a Debian installation to a Debian Edu profile.
14059 <li>Adjust Iceweasel setup to improve performance when $HOME is on NFS.
14060 <li>More testsuite tests.
14061 <li>Make automatic proxy configuration more robust.
14062 <li>Adjust GOsa² GUI configuration.
14063
14064 <li>Update thin client and diskless workstation setup to work with
14065 LTSP in Wheezy.</li>
14066
14067 <li>Diskless workstations now run out of the box -- no need to set
14068 them up with GOsa².</li>
14069
14070 <li>Update IMAP server setup. </li>
14071
14072 <li>Fix login into Skolelinux Backup Tool (Closed in
14073 slbackup-php/0.4.4-1: #700257: slbackup-php: Fails to submit correctly
14074 entered password). </li>
14075
14076 </ul>
14077
14078 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
14079
14080 <ul>
14081
14082 <li>DVD binary and source images are not yet ready.</li>
14083
14084 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
14085 available yet (Open in gosa/2.7.4-4: #698840: gosa-plugin-ldapmanager:
14086 missing import feature).</li>
14087
14088 <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others). </li>
14089
14090 <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons (Closed: #502192: menu-xdg: invents
14091 own icon names instead of using existing). This will remain
14092 unfixed.</li>
14093
14094 </ul>
14095
14096 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
14097
14098 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
14099
14100 <ul>
14101
14102 <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>
14103
14104 <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>
14105
14106 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso .</li>
14107
14108 </ul>
14109
14110 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 27bbcace407743382f3c42c08dbe8178
14111 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: e35f7d7908566cd3075375b3721fa10ee420d419</p>
14112
14113 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
14114
14115 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
14116
14117       </div>
14118       <div class="tags">
14119
14120
14121         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>.
14122
14123
14124       </div>
14125     </div>
14126     <div class="padding"></div>
14127
14128     <div class="entry">
14129       <div class="title">
14130         <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>
14131       </div>
14132       <div class="date">
14133          5th June 2013
14134       </div>
14135       <div class="body">
14136         <p>Here is a call for help from the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project.
14137 We have two problems blocking the release of the Wheezy version we
14138 hope to get released soon.  The two problems require some with PHP
14139 skills, and we seem to lack anyone with both time and PHP skills in
14140 the project:
14141
14142 <ol>
14143
14144 <li>It is impossible to log into the slbackup web interface
14145   (slbackup-php) using the root user and password.  This is
14146   <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">BTS report #700257</a>.
14147   This used to work, but stopped working some time since Squeeze.
14148   Perhaps some obsolete PHP feature was used?</li>
14149
14150 <li>It is not possible to "mass import" user lists in Gosa, neither
14151   using ldif nor using CSV files.  The feature was disabled after a
14152   major rewrite of Gosa, and need to be ported to the new system.
14153   This is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">BTS report
14154   #698840</a>.</li>
14155
14156 </ol>
14157
14158 <p>If you can help us, please join us on IRC
14159 (<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
14160 irc.debian.org</a>) and provide patches via the BTS.</p>
14161
14162       </div>
14163       <div class="tags">
14164
14165
14166         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>.
14167
14168
14169       </div>
14170     </div>
14171     <div class="padding"></div>
14172
14173     <div class="entry">
14174       <div class="title">
14175         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html">Debian Edu interview: Cédric Boutillier</a>
14176       </div>
14177       <div class="date">
14178          4th June 2013
14179       </div>
14180       <div class="body">
14181         <p>It has been a while since my last English
14182 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
14183 interview last November.  But the developers and translators are still
14184 pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this
14185 time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators
14186 in the project, Cédric Boutillier.</p>
14187
14188 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
14189
14190 <p>I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
14191 professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
14192 mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
14193 probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.</p>
14194
14195 <p>I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
14196 and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
14197 packaging, publicity and translation.</p>
14198
14199 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
14200 project?</strong></p>
14201
14202 <p>I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
14203 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Manuals">the
14204 Debian Edu manual</a> for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
14205 then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
14206 manual.
14207
14208 <p>I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
14209 virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
14210 shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
14211 how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.</p>
14212
14213 <p>What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
14214 ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
14215 by <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa²</a>.  What pleased
14216 me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
14217 there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages,
14218 to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
14219 artistic skills with music (<a href="http://ardour.org/">Ardour</a>,
14220 <a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a>) and
14221 movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
14222 <a href="http://linuxstopmotion.sourceforge.net/">Stopmotion</a>).</p>
14223
14224 <p>I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
14225 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>.
14226 Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this
14227 beautiful project.</p>
14228
14229 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
14230 Edu?</strong></p>
14231
14232 <p>For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
14233 community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
14234 fact that it provides a solution ready to use.</p>
14235
14236 <p>I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
14237 distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
14238 of educational free software.</p>
14239
14240 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
14241 Edu?</strong></p>
14242
14243 <p>Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
14244 project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
14245 not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
14246 solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
14247 is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.</p>
14248
14249 <p>One can find support from a company by looking at
14250 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Help/ProfessionalHelp">the
14251 wiki dokumentation</a>, where some countries already have a number of
14252 companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
14253 Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
14254 for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
14255 consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
14256 support for Debian Edu as well.</p>
14257
14258 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
14259
14260 <p>I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
14261 most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
14262 scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice.  I am
14263 also using the mathematical software
14264 <a href="http://www.scilab.org/en/scilab/about‎">Scilab</a> and
14265 <a href="http://www.sagemath.org/index.html‎">Sage</a> (built from
14266 source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).
14267
14268 <p><strong>Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
14269 using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
14270 statistics?</strong></p>
14271
14272 <p>I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our
14273 university, we use both <a href="http://www.r-project.org/‎">R</a> and
14274 Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
14275 geometry, there are nice programs:</p>
14276
14277 <ul>
14278
14279 <li><a href="http://www.drgeo.eu/">drgeo</a> and
14280 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/kig‎">kig</a> to do
14281 constructions in planar geometry
14282
14283 <li><a href="http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/software/download/kali.html">kali</a>
14284 to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze
14285 groups), although the interface looks a bit old.</li>
14286
14287 </ul>
14288
14289 <p>I like also
14290 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/cantor">cantor</a>, which
14291 provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage,
14292 <a href="http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Octave‎">Octave</a>, etc...</p>
14293
14294 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
14295 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
14296
14297 <p>My suggestions would be to</p>
14298
14299 <ul>
14300
14301 <li>advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.</li>
14302
14303 <li>communicate about the quality of free software projects, using
14304     well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and
14305     OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.</li>
14306
14307 <li>advertise the living and strong community around the project.</li>
14308
14309 <li>show that it is not more difficult to use than any other
14310     system.</li>
14311
14312 </ul>
14313
14314       </div>
14315       <div class="tags">
14316
14317
14318         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>.
14319
14320
14321       </div>
14322     </div>
14323     <div class="padding"></div>
14324
14325     <div class="entry">
14326       <div class="title">
14327         <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>
14328       </div>
14329       <div class="date">
14330          1st June 2013
14331       </div>
14332       <div class="body">
14333         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
14334 Skolelinux</a>, there are quite a lot of educational software.
14335 Created to help teachers teach, and pupils learn.  We have tried to
14336 tag them all using debtags use::learning and role::program, and using
14337 the debtags I was happy to be able to create a collage of the
14338 educational software packages installed by default, sorted by the
14339 debtag field.  Here it is.  Click on a image to learn more about the
14340 program.</p>
14341
14342 <!-- 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 -->
14343
14344 <p><strong>field::arts</strong></p>
14345 <p>
14346 <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>
14347 <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>
14348 <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>
14349 <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>
14350 <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>
14351 <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>
14352 <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>
14353 <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>
14354 <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>
14355 <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>
14356 <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>
14357 <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>
14358 <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>
14359 <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>
14360 </p>
14361
14362 <p><strong>field::astronomy</strong></p>
14363 <p>
14364 <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>
14365 <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>
14366 <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>
14367 <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>
14368 <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>
14369 <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>
14370 </p>
14371
14372 <p><strong>field::biology:structural</strong></p>
14373 <p>
14374 <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>
14375 </p>
14376
14377 <p><strong>field::chemistry</strong></p>
14378 <p>
14379 <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>
14380 <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>
14381 <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>
14382 <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>
14383 <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>
14384 <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>
14385 <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>
14386 <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>
14387 <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>
14388 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=viewmol'>[viewmol]</a>
14389 <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>
14390 </p>
14391
14392 <p><strong>field::electronics</strong></p>
14393 <p>
14394 <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>
14395 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gpsim'>[gpsim]</a>
14396 </p>
14397
14398 <p><strong>field::geography</strong></p>
14399 <p>
14400 <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>
14401 <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>
14402 <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>
14403 </p>
14404
14405 <p><strong>field::linguistics</strong></p>
14406 <p>
14407 <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>
14408 <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>
14409 <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>
14410 <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>
14411 <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>
14412 </p>
14413
14414 <p><strong>field::mathematics</strong></p>
14415 <p>
14416 <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>
14417 <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>
14418 <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>
14419 <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>
14420 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=geomview'>[geomview]</a>
14421 <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>
14422 <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>
14423 <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>
14424 <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>
14425 <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>
14426 <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>
14427 <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>
14428 <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>
14429 <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>
14430 <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>
14431 <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>
14432 <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>
14433 </p>
14434
14435 <p><strong>field::physics</strong></p>
14436 <p>
14437 <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>
14438 <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>
14439 </p>
14440
14441 <p><strong>field::TODO</strong></p>
14442 <p>
14443 <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>
14444 <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>
14445 <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>
14446 <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>
14447 <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>
14448 <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>
14449 <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>
14450 <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>
14451 <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>
14452 <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>
14453 </p>
14454
14455 <p>In total, 61 applications.  3 of them lacked screen shots on
14456 <a href="http://screenshot.debian.net">screenshot.debian.net</a>.  If
14457 you know of some packages we should install by default, please let us
14458 know on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu
14459 on irc.debian.org</a>, or our
14460 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">mailing list
14461 debian-edu@</a>.</p>
14462
14463       </div>
14464       <div class="tags">
14465
14466
14467         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>.
14468
14469
14470       </div>
14471     </div>
14472     <div class="padding"></div>
14473
14474     <div class="entry">
14475       <div class="title">
14476         <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>
14477       </div>
14478       <div class="date">
14479         27th May 2013
14480       </div>
14481       <div class="body">
14482         <p>Two days ago, I asked
14483 <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
14484 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
14485 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
14486 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
14487 and Windows 8.</p>
14488
14489 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
14490 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
14491 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
14492 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
14493 enough to tell.</p>
14494
14495 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
14496 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
14497 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
14498 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
14499 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
14500 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
14501 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
14502 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
14503 to follow.</p>
14504
14505 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
14506 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
14507 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
14508 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
14509 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
14510 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
14511 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
14512 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
14513
14514 <p>I've updated the
14515 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
14516 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
14517 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
14518 machine.</p>
14519
14520 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
14521 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
14522
14523       </div>
14524       <div class="tags">
14525
14526
14527         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>.
14528
14529
14530       </div>
14531     </div>
14532     <div class="padding"></div>
14533
14534     <div class="entry">
14535       <div class="title">
14536         <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>
14537       </div>
14538       <div class="date">
14539         25th May 2013
14540       </div>
14541       <div class="body">
14542         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
14543 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
14544 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
14545 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
14546 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
14547 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
14548
14549 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
14550 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
14551 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
14552 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
14553 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
14554 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
14555 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
14556 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
14557 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
14558 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
14559
14560 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
14561 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
14562 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
14563 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
14564 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
14565 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
14566
14567 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
14568 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
14569 on new Laptops?</p>
14570
14571       </div>
14572       <div class="tags">
14573
14574
14575         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>.
14576
14577
14578       </div>
14579     </div>
14580     <div class="padding"></div>
14581
14582     <div class="entry">
14583       <div class="title">
14584         <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>
14585       </div>
14586       <div class="date">
14587         17th May 2013
14588       </div>
14589       <div class="body">
14590         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
14591 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
14592 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
14593 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
14594 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
14595 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
14596 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
14597 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
14598 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
14599 donate some money</a>.
14600
14601 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
14602 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
14603 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
14604 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
14605 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
14606
14607 <p>The script,
14608 <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/>
14609 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
14610 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
14611 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
14612
14613 <ol>
14614
14615 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
14616 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
14617 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
14618     our configuration.</li>
14619 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
14620     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
14621     according to the profile specified in the config above,
14622     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
14623 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
14624     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
14625 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
14626
14627 </ol>
14628
14629 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
14630 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
14631 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
14632 the needed packages.</p>
14633
14634 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
14635 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
14636 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
14637 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
14638 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
14639 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
14640
14641 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
14642 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
14643 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
14644
14645 <p><pre>
14646 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
14647 DESKTOP="lxde"
14648 </pre></p>
14649
14650 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
14651 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
14652 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
14653 boot.</p>
14654
14655       </div>
14656       <div class="tags">
14657
14658
14659         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>.
14660
14661
14662       </div>
14663     </div>
14664     <div class="padding"></div>
14665
14666     <div class="entry">
14667       <div class="title">
14668         <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>
14669       </div>
14670       <div class="date">
14671         14th May 2013
14672       </div>
14673       <div class="body">
14674         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
14675 project</a> is making great progress and made its second Wheezy based
14676 release today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
14677
14678 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha1 released
14679 2013-05-14</strong></p>
14680
14681 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
14682 alpha1, based on <a href="http://www.debian.org">Debian</a> with
14683 codename "Wheezy".</p>
14684
14685 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
14686
14687 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
14688 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
14689 configured school network. Immediatly after installation a school
14690 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
14691 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
14692 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
14693 initial installation of the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all
14694 other machines can be installed via the network.</p>
14695
14696 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
14697 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
14698 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
14699
14700 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
14701 <ul>
14702   <li>Install freemind (0.9.0) by default, and stop installing vym by
14703     default.</li>
14704   <li>Install chromium (26.0.1410.43) by default.</li>
14705   <li>Install goplay (0.5-1.1) to make golearn available by default.</li>
14706   <li>Updated support for Japanese input methods, now based on
14707     ibus-anthy.</li>
14708 </ul>
14709
14710 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
14711 <ul>
14712
14713   <li>Switched default file system from ext3 to ext4 for speed and
14714     reliability improvements.</li>
14715   <li>Got rid of unwanted winbind daemon and PAM setup activated because
14716     of <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706434">706434</a>.</li>
14717   <li>Extended and improved the testsuite tests to detect more possible
14718     problems.</li>
14719   <li>Corrected proxy handling to not set http_proxy to a bogus
14720     direct:// URL.</li>
14721   <li>Corrected proxy setup for diskless workstations.</li>
14722   <li>Corrected PXE setup to use our updated udebs during installation.</li>
14723   <li>Made installation handling of low entropy level more robust.</li>
14724   <li>Create larger partitions for Roaming workstations and Thin client
14725     servers, to make room for all the software installed.</li>
14726   <li>Fix bug in Roaming workstation PAM setup, making it impossible to
14727     log in (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706753">706753</a>).</li>
14728 </ul>
14729
14730 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
14731 <ul>
14732
14733   <li>IP resolution for the local hostname give useless IPv6 address
14734     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/705900">705900</a>).  Only install
14735     libnss-myhostname on roaming workstations until it is fixed.</li>
14736   <li>DVD images are not yet ready.</li>
14737   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
14738     available yet (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">698840</a>).</li>
14739   <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others).</li>
14740   <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons.</li>
14741   <li>LXDE menu lacks entry for changing GOsa password
14742     (website). Installing gosa-desktop will be an option.</li>
14743   <li>Backup configuration via web interface is impossible due to
14744     password submission problem
14745     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">700257</a>).</li>
14746
14747 </ul>
14748
14749 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
14750
14751 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
14752 <ul>
14753
14754   <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>
14755   <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>
14756   <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>
14757
14758 </ul>
14759
14760 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 685ed76c1aa8e44b12d3fde21faf450b</p>
14761
14762 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 6c874de157024da13e115bab29c068080a11ec4c</p>
14763
14764 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
14765
14766 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
14767
14768       </div>
14769       <div class="tags">
14770
14771
14772         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>.
14773
14774
14775       </div>
14776     </div>
14777     <div class="padding"></div>
14778
14779     <div class="entry">
14780       <div class="title">
14781         <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>
14782       </div>
14783       <div class="date">
14784         11th May 2013
14785       </div>
14786       <div class="body">
14787         <P>In January,
14788 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
14789 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
14790 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
14791 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
14792 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
14793 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
14794 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
14795 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
14796 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
14797 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
14798 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
14799 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
14800
14801 <p><table>
14802 <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>
14803 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
14804 <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>
14805 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
14806 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
14807 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
14808 <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>
14809 <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>
14810 <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>
14811 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
14812 </table></p>
14813
14814 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
14815 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
14816 available in experimental.</p>
14817
14818 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
14819 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
14820 for LEGO designers.</p>
14821
14822       </div>
14823       <div class="tags">
14824
14825
14826         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
14827
14828
14829       </div>
14830     </div>
14831     <div class="padding"></div>
14832
14833     <div class="entry">
14834       <div class="title">
14835         <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>
14836       </div>
14837       <div class="date">
14838          5th May 2013
14839       </div>
14840       <div class="body">
14841         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
14842 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
14843 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
14844 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
14845 soon.</p>
14846
14847 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
14848 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
14849 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
14850 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
14851 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
14852 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
14853 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
14854 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
14855 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
14856 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
14857 Edu.</a>
14858
14859 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
14860 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
14861 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
14862 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
14863 follow.<p>
14864
14865       </div>
14866       <div class="tags">
14867
14868
14869         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>.
14870
14871
14872       </div>
14873     </div>
14874     <div class="padding"></div>
14875
14876     <div class="entry">
14877       <div class="title">
14878         <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>
14879       </div>
14880       <div class="date">
14881         26th April 2013
14882       </div>
14883       <div class="body">
14884         <p>The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is still going strong and made
14885 its first Wheezy based release today.  This is the release
14886 announcement:</p>
14887
14888 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu ~7.0.0 alpha0 released
14889 2013-04-26</strong></p>
14890
14891 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux ~7.0.0
14892 edu alpha0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
14893
14894 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
14895
14896 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
14897 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
14898 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
14899 network. Immediatly after installation a school server running all
14900 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
14901 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
14902 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
14903 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
14904 installed via the network.</p>
14905
14906 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
14907 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
14908 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
14909
14910 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
14911
14912 <ul>
14913 <li>Everything which is new in Debian Wheezy, eg:
14914   <ul>
14915      <li>Linux kernel 3.2.x</li>
14916      <li>Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.8.4, GNOME 3.4, and LXDE 4
14917          (KDE is installed by default; to choose GNOME or LXDE: see
14918          manual.)</li>
14919      <li>Web browser Iceweasel 10 ESR</li>
14920      <li>LibreOffice 3.5.4</li>
14921      <li>LTSP 5.4.2</li>
14922      <li>GOsa 2.7.4</li>
14923      <li>CUPS print system 1.5.3</li>
14924      <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 12.01</li>
14925      <li>Music creator Rosegarden 12.04</li>
14926      <li>Image editor Gimp 2.8.2</li>
14927      <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.1</li>
14928      <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.11.3</li>
14929      <li>Scratch visual programming environment 1.4.0.6</li>
14930      <li>New version of debian-installer from Debian Wheezy, see
14931          <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual">installation
14932          manual</a> for more details.</li>
14933      <li>Debian Wheezy includes about 37000 packages available for
14934          installation.</li>
14935      <li>More information about Debian Wheezy 7.0 is provided in the
14936          <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>
14937   </ul></li>
14938 </ul>
14939
14940 <p><strong>Documentation</strong></p>
14941 <ul>
14942 <li>The (<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy">English</a>) Debian Edu Wheezy Manual is fully translated to
14943     German, French, Italian and Danish. Partly translated versions exist
14944     for Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.</li>
14945 </ul>
14946
14947 <p><Strong>LDAP related changes</strong></p>
14948 <ul>
14949 <li>Slight changes to some objects and acls to have more types to
14950     choose from when adding systems in GOsa. Now systems can be of type
14951     server, workstation, printer, terminal or netdevice.</li>
14952 </ul>
14953
14954 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
14955 <ul>
14956 <li>LTSP clients start as diskless workstation / thin client can be
14957     configured via command line argument -- or individually adding an
14958     entry in lts.conf or LDAP.<li>
14959 <li>GOsa gui: Now some options that seemed to be available, but are non
14960     functional, are greyed out (or are not clickable). Some tabs are
14961     completely hidden to the end user, others even to the GOsa admin.</li>
14962 </ul>
14963
14964 <p><strong>Regressions</strong></p>
14965 <ul>
14966 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv) available
14967     yet.</li>
14968 </ul>
14969
14970 <p><strong>No updated artwork</strong></p>
14971
14972 <ul>
14973 <li>Updated artwork which is visible during installation, in the login
14974     screen and as desktop wallpaper is still missing or the same as we
14975     had for our Squeeze based release.</li>
14976 </ul>
14977
14978 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
14979
14980 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
14981 <ul>
14982 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
14983 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
14984 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</li>
14985 </ul>
14986
14987 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: c5e773ddafdaa4f48c409c682f598b6c</p>
14988
14989 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 25934fabb9b7d20235499a0a51f08ce6c54215f2</p>
14990
14991 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
14992
14993 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
14994
14995       </div>
14996       <div class="tags">
14997
14998
14999         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>.
15000
15001
15002       </div>
15003     </div>
15004     <div class="padding"></div>
15005
15006     <div class="entry">
15007       <div class="title">
15008         <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>
15009       </div>
15010       <div class="date">
15011         16th April 2013
15012       </div>
15013       <div class="body">
15014         <p>This years first <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux /
15015 Debian Edu</a> developer gathering take place the coming weekend in Trondheim.
15016 Details about the gathering can be found
15017 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2013-04-19-21-Trondheim">on
15018 the FRiSK wiki</a>.  The dates are 19-21th of April 2013, and online
15019 participation for those unable to make it in person is very welcome,
15020 and I plan to participate online myself as I could not leave Oslo this
15021 weekend.</p>
15022
15023 <p>The focus of the gathering is to work on the web pages and project
15024 infrastructure, and to continue the work on the Wheezy based Debian
15025 Edu release.</p>
15026
15027 <p>See you on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu on irc.debian.org,</a> then?</p>
15028
15029       </div>
15030       <div class="tags">
15031
15032
15033         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>.
15034
15035
15036       </div>
15037     </div>
15038     <div class="padding"></div>
15039
15040     <div class="entry">
15041       <div class="title">
15042         <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>
15043       </div>
15044       <div class="date">
15045          3rd April 2013
15046       </div>
15047       <div class="body">
15048         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
15049 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
15050 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
15051 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
15052
15053 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
15054 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
15055 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
15056 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
15057 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
15058 BTS. :)</p>
15059
15060       </div>
15061       <div class="tags">
15062
15063
15064         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>.
15065
15066
15067       </div>
15068     </div>
15069     <div class="padding"></div>
15070
15071     <div class="entry">
15072       <div class="title">
15073         <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>
15074       </div>
15075       <div class="date">
15076         26th March 2013
15077       </div>
15078       <div class="body">
15079         <p>Would you like to help the environment and save money at the same
15080 time, without much sacrifice?  A small step could be to change the
15081 font you use when printing.</p>
15082
15083 <p>Three years ago,
15084 <a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/04/last-year-printer-comparison-website/">Ars
15085 Technica</a> reported how the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
15086 changed their default front from
15087 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial">Arial</a> to
15088 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Gothic">Century
15089 Gothic</a> to save money.  The Century Gothic font uses 30% less toner
15090 than Arial to print the same text.  In other word, you could cut your
15091 toner costs by 30% (or actually, increase your toner supply life time
15092 by more than 30%), by simply changing the default font used in your
15093 prints.</p>
15094
15095 <p>But it is not quite obvious how much one will save by switching.
15096 The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay said it used $100,000 per year
15097 on ink and toner cartridges, according to
15098 <a href="http://www.twincities.com/ci_14833097">a report from
15099 TwinCities.com</a>, and expected to save between $5,000 and $10,000
15100 per year by asking staff and students to use a different font.  Not
15101 all PDFs and documents are created internally, and those from external
15102 sources will most likely still use a different font.  Also, the
15103 Century Gothic font is slightly wider than Arial, and thus might use
15104 more sheets of paper to print the same text, so the total saving
15105 depend on the documents printed.</p>
15106
15107 <p>But it is definitely something to consider, if you want to reduce
15108 the amount of trash, decrease the amount of toner used in the world,
15109 and save some money in the process.</p>
15110
15111 <p>Update 2013-04-10: If you want to know how much ink/toner could be
15112 saved when switching between fonts, Inkfarm got a
15113 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/What-the-Font">service to calculate the
15114 difference between font pairs</a>.  They also
15115 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/Recommended-Ink-Saving-Fonts---">recommend
15116 which fonts to use</a> to save ink.  Check it out. :) While updating
15117 this blog post, I also came across a blog post from InkCloners,
15118 <a href="http://inkcloners.com/blog/ink-cartridges/change-fonts-to-save-ink-costs/">listing
15119 the fonts they recommend</a>, with Centory Gothic at the top.</p>
15120
15121       </div>
15122       <div class="tags">
15123
15124
15125         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15126
15127
15128       </div>
15129     </div>
15130     <div class="padding"></div>
15131
15132     <div class="entry">
15133       <div class="title">
15134         <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>
15135       </div>
15136       <div class="date">
15137         24th March 2013
15138       </div>
15139       <div class="body">
15140         <p>A few days ago, during a discussion in
15141 <a href="http://www.efn.no/">EFN</a> about interesting books to read
15142 about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
15143 the 1968 short story Kodémus by
15144 <a href="http://web2.gyldendal.no/toraage/">Tore Åge Bringsværd</a>
15145 came up.  The text was only available in old paper books, and thus not
15146 easily available for current and future generations.  Some of the
15147 people participating in the discussion contacted the author, and
15148 reported back 2013-03-19 that the author was OK with releasing the
15149 short story using a <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org/">Creative
15150 Commons</a> license.  The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
15151 were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.</p>
15152
15153 <p>As I already had some experience formatting text in my project to
15154 provide a Norwegian version of the Free Culture book by Lawrence
15155 Lessig, I chipped in and set up a
15156 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">DocBook</a> processing framework to
15157 generate PDF, HTML and EPUB version of the short story.  The tools to
15158 transform DocBook to different formats are already in my Linux
15159 distribution of choice, <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>, so
15160 all I had to do was to use the
15161 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a>,
15162 <a href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/epub/README">dbtoepub</a>
15163 and <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/xmlto/">xmlto</a> tools to do the
15164 conversion.  After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
15165 xsltproc/fop (aka
15166 <a href="http://wiki.docbook.org/DocBookXslStylesheets">docbook-xsl</a>),
15167 to get the copyright information to show up in the PDF and to get a
15168 nicer &lt;variablelist&gt; typesetting, but that is just a minor
15169 technical detail.</p>
15170
15171 <p>There were a few challenges, of course.  We want to typeset the
15172 short story to look like the original, and that require fairly good
15173 control over the layout.  The original short story have three
15174 parts/scenes separated by a single horizontally centred star (*), and
15175 the paragraphs do not contain only flowing text, but dialogs and text
15176 that started on a new line in the middle of the paragraph.</p>
15177
15178 <p>I initially solved the first challenge by using a paragraph with a
15179 single star in it, ie &lt;para&gt;*&lt;/para&gt;, but it made sure a
15180 placeholder indicated where the scene shifted.  This did not look too
15181 good without the centring.  The next approach was to create a new
15182 preprocessor directive &lt;?newscene?&gt;, mapping to "&lt;hr/&gt;"
15183 for HTML and "&lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;&lt;fo:leader
15184 leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;&lt;/fo:block&gt;"
15185 for FO/PDF output (did not try to implement this in dblatex, as we had
15186 switched at this time).  The HTML XSL file looked like this:</p>
15187
15188 <p><blockquote><pre>
15189 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
15190 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
15191   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
15192     &lt;hr/&gt;
15193   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
15194 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
15195 </pre></blockquote></p>
15196
15197 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
15198
15199 <p><blockquote><pre>
15200 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
15201 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
15202   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
15203     &lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;
15204       &lt;fo:leader leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;
15205     &lt;/fo:block&gt;
15206   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
15207 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
15208 </pre></blockquote></p>
15209
15210 <p>Finally, I came across the &lt;bridgehead&gt; tag, which seem to be
15211 a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced &lt;?newscene?&gt;
15212 with &lt;bridgehead&gt;*&lt;/bridgehead&gt;.  It isn't centred, but we
15213 can fix it with some XSL rule if the current visual layout isn't
15214 enough.</p>
15215
15216 <p>I did not find a good DocBook compliant way to solve the
15217 linebreak/paragraph challenge, so I ended up creating a new processor
15218 directive &lt;?linebreak?&gt;, mapping to &lt;br/&gt; in HTML, and
15219 &lt;fo:block/&gt; in FO/PDF.  I suspect there are better ways to do
15220 this, and welcome ideas and patches on github.  The HTML XSL file now
15221 look like this:</p>
15222
15223 <p><blockquote><pre>
15224 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
15225 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
15226   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
15227     &lt;br/&gt;
15228   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
15229 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
15230 </pre></blockquote></p>
15231
15232 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
15233
15234 <p><blockquote><pre>
15235 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
15236 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'
15237   xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"&gt;
15238   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
15239     &lt;fo:block/&gt;
15240   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
15241 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
15242 </pre></blockquote></p>
15243
15244 <p>One unsolved challenge is our wish to expose different ISBN numbers
15245 per publication format, while keeping all of them in some conditional
15246 structure in the DocBook source.  No idea how to do this, so we ended
15247 up listing all the ISBN numbers next to their format in the colophon
15248 page.</p>
15249
15250 <p>If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
15251 <a href="https://github.com/sickel/kodemus">source repository at
15252 github</a>
15253 (<a href="https://github.com/EFN/kodemus">future/new/official
15254 repository</a>).  We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
15255 days.</p>
15256
15257       </div>
15258       <div class="tags">
15259
15260
15261         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>.
15262
15263
15264       </div>
15265     </div>
15266     <div class="padding"></div>
15267
15268     <div class="entry">
15269       <div class="title">
15270         <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>
15271       </div>
15272       <div class="date">
15273         17th March 2013
15274       </div>
15275       <div class="body">
15276         <p>Via
15277 <a href="https://twitter.com/pcwizz/status/313044373262716930">twitter</a>
15278 I just discovered that <a href="http://pcwizz.net/">Pcwizz</a> have
15279 done a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPzTZ61Pcuc">video
15280 review</a> on Youtube of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
15281 / Debian Edu</a> version 6.  He installed the standalone profile and
15282 the video show a walk-through of of the menu content, demonstration of
15283 a few programs and his view of our distribution.</p>
15284
15285 <p>There is also some really nice quotes (transcribed by me, might
15286 have heard wrong).  While looking thought the Graphics menu:</p>
15287
15288 <blockquote>
15289 "Basically everything you ever need in a school environment."
15290 </blockquote>
15291
15292 <p>And as a general evaluation of the entire distribution:</p>
15293
15294 <blockquote>
15295 "So, yeah, a bit bloated.  It kept all the Debian stuff in there, just
15296 to keep it nice and GNU.  So, I do not want to go on about it, but
15297 lets give it 7 out of 10.  I am not going to use it.  That is because
15298 I am not deploying a school network.  There may be some mythical
15299 feature to help you deploy Skolelinux on a school network."
15300 </blockquote>
15301
15302 <p>To bad he did not test the server profile, and discovered the PXE
15303 installation option.  It make it possible to install only the main
15304 server from CD, and the rest of the machines via the net, and might be
15305 considered the mythical feature he talk about. :)</p>
15306
15307 <p>While looking through the menus, there is also this funny comment
15308 about the part of the K menu generated from the Debian menu subsystem:
15309
15310 <blockquote>
15311 "[The K menu] have a special Debian section for software that no-one
15312 is going to look at, because it contain lots of junky stuff that you
15313 actually don't need in the education distribution, but have just been
15314 included because it isn't stripped out for some reason."
15315 </blockquote>
15316
15317 <p>I guess it is yet another argument for merging the Debian menu and
15318 Gnome/KDE desktop menu entries into
15319 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/DebianMenuUsingDesktopEntries">one
15320 consistent menu system</a> instead of two incomplete and partly
15321 inconsistent menu systems.</p>
15322
15323 <p>The entire video is available below for those accepting iframe
15324 embedding:</p>
15325
15326 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wPzTZ61Pcuc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
15327
15328       </div>
15329       <div class="tags">
15330
15331
15332         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>.
15333
15334
15335       </div>
15336     </div>
15337     <div class="padding"></div>
15338
15339     <div class="entry">
15340       <div class="title">
15341         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_update_released.html">First Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze update released</a>
15342       </div>
15343       <div class="date">
15344          8th March 2013
15345       </div>
15346       <div class="body">
15347         <p>Last Sunday, 2013-03-03,, Holger Levsen announced the first update
15348 of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
15349 based on Debian Squeeze.  This is the first update since
15350 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
15351 initial release 2012-03-11</a>.  This is the
15352 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2013/03/msg00000.html">release
15353 announcement email from Holger</a>:</p>
15354
15355 <blockquote><p>Hi,</p>
15356
15357 <p>it's my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of Debian
15358 Edu 6.0.7+r1 ("Debian Edu Squeeze").</p>
15359
15360 <p>Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 is an incremental update to Debian Edu
15361 6.0.4+r0, containing all the changes between Debian 6.0.4 and 6.0.7 as
15362 well Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements. See below (in this
15363 mail) for the full list of (edu) changes.  Please see
15364 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311">http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311</a>
15365 for more information on "Debian Edu Squeeze".</p>
15366
15367 <p>Images are available for download at
15368 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/</a></p>
15369
15370 <p>md5sums:
15371 <br>1fe79eb4f0f9ae1c58fc318e26cc1e2e  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
15372 <br>a6ddd924a8bd9a1b5ca122e8fe1c34ec  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
15373 <br>ac6c72cd7925ccec51bfbf58e2a7c69c  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
15374
15375 <p>sha1sums:
15376 <br>a4b58233b672a99c7df8dc24fb6de3327654a5c3  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
15377 <br>9b524915e0ff2aa793f13d93123e5bd2bab2dbaa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
15378 <br>43997614893fc5e9e59ad6ce066b05d07fd836fa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
15379
15380 <p>These images are suitable for amd64+i386.</p>
15381
15382 <p>Changes for Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 Codename "Squeeze", released
15383 2013-03-03:</p>
15384
15385 <ul>
15386   <li>sitesummary was updated from 0.1.3 to 0.1.8
15387   <ul>
15388         <li>Make Nagios configuration more robust and efficient</li>
15389         <li>Comply with 3.X kernel</li>
15390   </ul></li>
15391   <li>debian-edu-doc from 1.4~20120310~6.0.4+r0 to 1.4~20130228~6.0.7+r1
15392   <ul>
15393         <li>Minor updates from the wiki</li>
15394         <li>Danish translation now complete</li>
15395   </ul></li>
15396   <li>debian-edu-config from 1.453 to 1.455
15397      <ul>
15398         <li>Fix /etc/hosts for LTSP diskless workstations. Closes: #699880</li>
15399         <li>Make ltsp_local_mount script work for multiple devices.</li>
15400         <li>Correct Kerberos user policy: don't expire password after 2 days.
15401                 Closes: #664596</li>
15402         <li>Handle '#' characters in the root or first users password.
15403                 Closes: #664976</li>
15404         <li>Fixes for gosa-sync:
15405            <ul>
15406                 <li>Don't fail if password contains "</li>
15407                 <li>Don't disclose new password string in syslog</li>
15408            </ul></li>
15409         <li>Fixes for gosa-create:
15410            <ul>
15411                 <li>Invalidate libnss cache before applying changes</li>
15412                 <li>Multiple failures during mass user import into GOsa²</li>
15413                 <li>gosa-netgroups plugin: don't erase entries of attribute type
15414                          "memberNisNetgroup". Closes: #687256</li>
15415                 <li>First user now uses the same Kerberos policy as all other users</li>
15416            </ul></li>
15417         <li>Add Danish web page</li>
15418     </ul>
15419   <li>debian-edu-install from 1.528 to 1.530
15420     <ul>
15421         <li>Improve preseeding support and documentation</li>
15422     </ul></li>
15423 </ul>
15424
15425 <p>End-user documentation in English is available at
15426 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/</a>
15427 - translations to French, Italian, Danish and German are available in
15428 the debian-edu-doc package. (Other languages could use your help!)</p>
15429
15430 <p>If you want to contribute to Debian Edu, please join our
15431 mailinglist
15432 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@lists.debian.org</a>!
15433 </p></blockquote>
15434
15435 <p>I am very happy to see the fruits of a year of hard work. :)</p>
15436
15437       </div>
15438       <div class="tags">
15439
15440
15441         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>.
15442
15443
15444       </div>
15445     </div>
15446     <div class="padding"></div>
15447
15448     <div class="entry">
15449       <div class="title">
15450         <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>
15451       </div>
15452       <div class="date">
15453          3rd March 2013
15454       </div>
15455       <div class="body">
15456         <p>Do you want to set up your own TV station, schedule videos and
15457 broadcast them on the air?  Using free software?  With video on demand
15458 support using
15459 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
15460 open standards</a>?  Included a web based video stream as well?  And
15461 administrate it all in your web browser from anywhere in the world?  A
15462 few years now the Norwegian public access TV-channel
15463 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> have been building a
15464 system to do just this.  The source code for the solution is licensed
15465 using the GNU LGPL, and
15466 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from github</a>.</p>
15467
15468 <p>The idea is simple.  You upload a video file over the web, and
15469 attach meta information to the file.  You select a time slot in the
15470 program schedule, and when the time come it is played on the air and
15471 in the web stream.  It is also made available in a video on demand
15472 solution for anyone to see it also outside its scheduled time.  All
15473 you need to run a TV station - using your web browser.</p>
15474
15475 <p>There are several parts to this web based solution.  I'll mention
15476 the three most important ones.  The first part is the database of
15477 videos and the schedule.  This is written in Django and include a REST
15478 API.  The current database is SQLite, but the plan is to migrate it to
15479 PostgreSQL.  At the moment this system can be tested on
15480 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/">beta.frikanalen.tv</a>.  The
15481 second part is the video playout, taking the schedule information from
15482 the database and providing a video stream to broadcast.  This is done
15483 using <a href="http://www.casparcg.com/">CasparCG from SVT</a> and
15484 <a href="http://www.mltframework.org/">Media Lovin' Toolkit</a>.  Video
15485 signal distribution is handled using
15486 <a href="http://www.ob-encoder.com/">Open Broadcast Encoder</a>.  The
15487 third part is the converter, handling the transformation of uploaded
15488 video files to a format useful for broadcasting, streaming and video
15489 on demand.  It is still very much work in progress, so it is not yet
15490 decided what it will end up using.  Note that the source of the latter
15491 two parts are not yet pushed to github.  The lead author want to clean
15492 them up a bit more first.</p>
15493
15494 <p>The development is coordinated on the
15495 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23frikanalen">#frikanalen IRC
15496 channel</a> (irc.freenode.net), and discussed on
15497 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/frikanalen">the
15498 frikanalen mailing list</a>. The lead developer is Benjamin Bruheim
15499 (phed on IRC).  Anyone is welcome to participate in the
15500 development.</p>
15501
15502       </div>
15503       <div class="tags">
15504
15505
15506         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>.
15507
15508
15509       </div>
15510     </div>
15511     <div class="padding"></div>
15512
15513     <div class="entry">
15514       <div class="title">
15515         <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>
15516       </div>
15517       <div class="date">
15518         27th February 2013
15519       </div>
15520       <div class="body">
15521         <p>Dr. <a href="http://www.stallman.org/">Richard Stallman</a>,
15522 founder of <a href="http://www.fsf.org/">Free Software Foundation</a>,
15523 is giving <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">a
15524 talk in Oslo March 1st 2013 17:00 to 19:00</a>.  The event is public
15525 and organised by <a href="">Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG)</a>
15526 (where I am the chair of the board) and
15527 <a href="http://www.friprog.no/">The Norwegian Open Source Competence
15528 Center</a>.  The title of the talk is «The Free Software Movement and
15529 GNU», with this description:
15530
15531 <p><blockquote>
15532 The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users' freedom to
15533 cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software Movement
15534 developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the
15535 kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms possible.
15536 </blockquote></p>
15537
15538 <p>The meeting is open for everyone.  Due to space limitations, the
15539 doors opens for NUUG members at 16:15, and everyone else at 16:45.  I
15540 am really curious how many will show up.  See
15541 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">the event
15542 page</a> for the location details.</p>
15543
15544       </div>
15545       <div class="tags">
15546
15547
15548         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>.
15549
15550
15551       </div>
15552     </div>
15553     <div class="padding"></div>
15554
15555     <div class="entry">
15556       <div class="title">
15557         <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>
15558       </div>
15559       <div class="date">
15560         15th February 2013
15561       </div>
15562       <div class="body">
15563         <p>If you, like me, want an updated a map for your Garmin GPS, there is
15564 now a great source of free maps available from
15565 <a href="http://www.frikart.no/garmin/index.html">Frikart</a>.  To
15566 download a map, just click on the country you are interested in, and
15567 download the map type you want.  There are 8 different maps available,
15568 using different colours and data selection.  Pick one of Roadmap, Topo
15569 Summer, Topo Winter, Roadmap II, Topo Summer II, Topo Winter II,
15570 "Trails - overlay map" and "Cross country - overlay map" (see the web
15571 page for descriptions).</p>
15572
15573 <p>The maps are updated weekly, so if you find something wrong in the
15574 map you can just edit the
15575 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> map source
15576 (anyone can contribute) and fetch a fixed map a week later. :)</p>
15577
15578       </div>
15579       <div class="tags">
15580
15581
15582         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>.
15583
15584
15585       </div>
15586     </div>
15587     <div class="padding"></div>
15588
15589     <div class="entry">
15590       <div class="title">
15591         <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>
15592       </div>
15593       <div class="date">
15594         12th February 2013
15595       </div>
15596       <div class="body">
15597         <p>Here in Norway, electronic invoices are spreading, and the
15598 <a href="http://www.anskaffelser.no/e-handel/faktura">solution promoted
15599 by the Norwegian government</a> require that invoices are sent through
15600 one of the approved facilitators, and it is not possible to send
15601 electronic invoices without an agreement with one of these
15602 facilitators.  This seem like a needless limitation to be able to
15603 transfer invoice information between buyers and sellers.  My preferred
15604 solution would be to just transfer the invoice information directly
15605 between seller and buyer, for example using SMTP, or some HTTP based
15606 protocol like REST or SOAP.  But this might also be overkill, as the
15607 "electronic" information can be transferred using paper invoices too,
15608 using a simple bar code.  My bar code encoding of choice would be QR
15609 codes, as this encoding can be read by any smart phone out there.  The
15610 content of the code could be anything, but I would go with
15611 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard">the vCard format</a>, as
15612 it too is supported by a lot of computer equipment these days.</p>
15613
15614 <p>The vCard format support extentions, and the invoice specific
15615 information can be included using such extentions.  For example an
15616 invoice from SLX Debian Labs (picked because we
15617 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">ask
15618 for donations to the Debian Edu project</a> and thus have bank account
15619 information publicly available) for NOK 1000.00 could have these extra
15620 fields:</p>
15621
15622 <p><pre>
15623 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
15624 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
15625 X-INVOICE-KID:123412341234
15626 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
15627 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
15628 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
15629 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
15630 </pre></p>
15631
15632 <p>The X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER field was proposed in a stackoverflow
15633 answer regarding
15634 <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10045664/storing-bank-account-in-vcard-file">how
15635 to put bank account information into a vCard</a>.  For payments in
15636 Norway, either X-INVOICE-KID (payment ID) or X-INVOICE-MSG could be
15637 used to pass on information to the seller when paying the invoice.</p>
15638
15639 <p>The complete vCard could look like this:</p>
15640
15641 <p><pre>
15642 BEGIN:VCARD
15643 VERSION:2.1
15644 ORG:SLX Debian Labs Foundation
15645 ADR;WORK:;;Gunnar Schjelderups vei 29D;OSLO;;0485;Norway
15646 URL;WORK:http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/
15647 EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:sdl-styret@rt.nuug.no
15648 REV:20130212T095000Z
15649 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
15650 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
15651 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
15652 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
15653 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
15654 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
15655 END:VCARD
15656 </pre></p>
15657
15658 <p>The resulting QR code created using
15659 <a href="http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/">qrencode</a> would look
15660 like this, and should be readable (and thus checkable) by any smart
15661 phone, or for example the <a href="http://zbar.sourceforge.net/">zbar
15662 bar code reader</a> and feed right into the approval and accounting
15663 system.</p>
15664
15665 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-12-qr-invoice.png"></p>
15666
15667 <p>The extension fields will most likely not show up in any normal
15668 vCard reader, so those parts would have to go directly into a system
15669 handling invoices.  I am a bit unsure how vCards without name parts
15670 are handled, but a simple test indicate that this work just fine.</p>
15671
15672 <p><strong>Update 2013-02-12 11:30</strong>: Added KID to the proposal
15673 based on feedback from Sturle Sunde.</p>
15674
15675       </div>
15676       <div class="tags">
15677
15678
15679         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>.
15680
15681
15682       </div>
15683     </div>
15684     <div class="padding"></div>
15685
15686     <div class="entry">
15687       <div class="title">
15688         <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>
15689       </div>
15690       <div class="date">
15691         10th February 2013
15692       </div>
15693       <div class="body">
15694         <p><img align="left" style="margin-right:25px;" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-10-morning-light.jpeg"></p>
15695
15696 <p>With kids in the house, one challenge is getting them to sleep
15697 during the night and wake up when it is morning.  I mean, when I
15698 believe it is morning, and not two hours earlier.  In our household we
15699 have decided that 07:00 is the turning point, but getting the kids to
15700 sleep until 07:00 is a small challenge every day.  They have adapted
15701 quite well, and rarely wake up at 05:00 any more, but some times wake
15702 up at times like 05:50, 06:15, 06:30 or 06:45, and it is hard to put
15703 the awake one to bed again without disturbing and waking the rest.
15704 And I understand perfectly well that they fail to sleep until 07:00
15705 some times, as there is no way for them to know if it is before or
15706 after the magic moment without coming and asking us parents.</p>
15707
15708 <p>But yesterday I came up with a method to solve this problem.  It
15709 involve home automation.  A few years ago I bought a
15710 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick">Tellstick</a> and RF
15711 switches at the local <a href="http://www.clasohlson.com/">Clas
15712 Ohlson</a> shop, allowing me to control lights and other electrical
15713 gadgets using my Linux server.  When I moved from the old flat to a
15714 small house, I put away all this equipment as most of the lighting in
15715 the house was not using wall sockets and thus not easy to connect to
15716 the gadgets I had.  But recently I bought a
15717 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick_net">Tellstick
15718 Net</a> to be able to read sensor input as well as control power
15719 sockets.  I want to control ovens in the basement to avoid the pipes
15720 to freeze, and monitor the humidity to detect flooding.  The default
15721 setup for Tellstick Net is to be controlled by the vendor web service,
15722 which to me is a security problem, but it is also possible to build
15723 ones own
15724 <a href="http://developer.telldus.com/blog/2012/03/02/help-us-develop-local-access-using-tellstick-net-build-your-own-firmware">firmware
15725 with local access</A> instead of being controlled by a Swedish
15726 company, thanks to the release of the GPL licensed firmware source
15727 code.  I plan to get that running before I let it control anything
15728 important.  But while working on this, one idea to make it easier for
15729 the kids came to me yesterday.  We can set up a night light controlled
15730 by the computer, and turn it automatically on at 07:00.  The kids can
15731 then check the light in the morning to know if they are supposed to
15732 get up or not.  They joined me in setting everything up, and I
15733 repeated the concept several times before bed times to make sure they
15734 remembered to check the light before getting up in the morning.</p>
15735
15736 <p>We tested it this morning, and all the kids stayed in bed until
15737 after 07:00, and every one of them commented on the fact that the
15738 "morning light" was turned on and signalled that the morning had
15739 arrived.  So this look like a success, and I am excited to see how
15740 this develops the next few days. :) I really hope this can allow us
15741 all to sleep a bit longer in the morning.</p>
15742
15743 <p>A nice advantage of this setup is that we can remote control when
15744 to tell the kids to get up.  We do not have to wait until 07:00, and
15745 can also delay it if we want to.</p>
15746
15747       </div>
15748       <div class="tags">
15749
15750
15751         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15752
15753
15754       </div>
15755     </div>
15756     <div class="padding"></div>
15757
15758     <div class="entry">
15759       <div class="title">
15760         <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>
15761       </div>
15762       <div class="date">
15763          2nd February 2013
15764       </div>
15765       <div class="body">
15766         <p>My
15767 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
15768 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
15769 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
15770 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
15771 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
15772 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
15773 version too.</p>
15774
15775 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
15776 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
15777 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
15778 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
15779 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
15780 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
15781 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
15782 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
15783
15784 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
15785 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
15786 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
15787 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
15788 it. :)</p>
15789
15790 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
15791 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
15792 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
15793
15794       </div>
15795       <div class="tags">
15796
15797
15798         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>.
15799
15800
15801       </div>
15802     </div>
15803     <div class="padding"></div>
15804
15805     <div class="entry">
15806       <div class="title">
15807         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
15808       </div>
15809       <div class="date">
15810         22nd January 2013
15811       </div>
15812       <div class="body">
15813         <p>Yesterday, I
15814 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
15815 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
15816 pluggable hardware devices, which I
15817 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
15818 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
15819 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
15820 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
15821 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
15822 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
15823 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
15824 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
15825 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
15826 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
15827
15828 <pre>
15829 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
15830 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
15831 </pre>
15832
15833 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
15834 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
15835 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
15836 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
15837
15838 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
15839 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
15840 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
15841 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
15842 word.</p>
15843
15844 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
15845 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
15846 process.</p>
15847
15848 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
15849 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
15850
15851       </div>
15852       <div class="tags">
15853
15854
15855         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>.
15856
15857
15858       </div>
15859     </div>
15860     <div class="padding"></div>
15861
15862     <div class="entry">
15863       <div class="title">
15864         <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>
15865       </div>
15866       <div class="date">
15867         21st January 2013
15868       </div>
15869       <div class="body">
15870         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
15871 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
15872 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
15873 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
15874 it, fetch the
15875 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
15876 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
15877 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
15878 autostart script.</p>
15879
15880 <p>The design is simple:</p>
15881
15882 <ul>
15883
15884 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
15885 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
15886
15887 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
15888 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
15889 initially did.</li>
15890
15891 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
15892 the APT database, a database
15893 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
15894 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
15895
15896 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
15897 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
15898 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
15899 package or packages.</li>
15900
15901 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
15902 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
15903
15904 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
15905 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
15906
15907 </ul>
15908
15909 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
15910 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
15911 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
15912 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
15913
15914 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
15915 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
15916 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
15917 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
15918 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
15919
15920 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
15921 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
15922 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
15923 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
15924 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
15925 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
15926 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
15927 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
15928
15929 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
15930 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
15931 '<tt>svn checkout
15932 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
15933 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
15934 devscripts package.</p>
15935
15936 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
15937 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
15938 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
15939 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
15940 instructions</a> for details.</p>
15941
15942       </div>
15943       <div class="tags">
15944
15945
15946         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>.
15947
15948
15949       </div>
15950     </div>
15951     <div class="padding"></div>
15952
15953     <div class="entry">
15954       <div class="title">
15955         <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>
15956       </div>
15957       <div class="date">
15958         19th January 2013
15959       </div>
15960       <div class="body">
15961         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
15962 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
15963 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
15964 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
15965 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
15966 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
15967 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
15968 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
15969 not a durable solution.
15970
15971 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
15972 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
15973
15974 <ul>
15975
15976 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
15977   than A4).</li>
15978 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
15979 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
15980 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
15981 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
15982 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
15983 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
15984 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
15985 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
15986 size).</li>
15987 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
15988   X.org packages.</li>
15989 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
15990   the time).
15991
15992 </ul>
15993
15994 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
15995 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
15996 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
15997 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
15998 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
15999 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
16000 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
16001 still be useful.</p>
16002
16003 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
16004 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
16005 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
16006 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
16007 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
16008 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
16009
16010       </div>
16011       <div class="tags">
16012
16013
16014         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>.
16015
16016
16017       </div>
16018     </div>
16019     <div class="padding"></div>
16020
16021     <div class="entry">
16022       <div class="title">
16023         <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>
16024       </div>
16025       <div class="date">
16026         18th January 2013
16027       </div>
16028       <div class="body">
16029         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
16030 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
16031 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
16032 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
16033 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
16034 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
16035 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
16036
16037 <pre>
16038 #!/usr/bin/python
16039 import sys
16040 import apt
16041 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
16042     cache = apt.Cache()
16043     cache.open(None)
16044     thepkgs = []
16045     for pkg in cache:
16046         version = pkg.candidate
16047         if version is None:
16048             version = pkg.installed
16049         if version is None:
16050             continue
16051         record = version.record
16052         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
16053             continue
16054         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
16055         for t in mime_types:
16056             t = t.rstrip().strip()
16057             if t == mimetype:
16058                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
16059     return thepkgs
16060 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
16061 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
16062     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
16063 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
16064 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
16065     print "  %s" %pkg
16066 </pre>
16067
16068 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
16069
16070 <pre>
16071 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
16072 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
16073   gecko-mediaplayer
16074 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
16075 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
16076   browser-plugin-gnash
16077 %
16078 </pre>
16079
16080 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
16081 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
16082 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
16083 anyone working on adding it?</p>
16084
16085 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
16086 request for icweasel support for this feature is
16087 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
16088 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
16089 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
16090 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
16091
16092       </div>
16093       <div class="tags">
16094
16095
16096         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>.
16097
16098
16099       </div>
16100     </div>
16101     <div class="padding"></div>
16102
16103     <div class="entry">
16104       <div class="title">
16105         <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>
16106       </div>
16107       <div class="date">
16108         16th January 2013
16109       </div>
16110       <div class="body">
16111         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
16112 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
16113 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
16114 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
16115 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
16116 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
16117 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
16118 downloaded by the browser.</p>
16119
16120 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
16121 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
16122 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
16123 can be found on the
16124 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
16125 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
16126 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
16127 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
16128 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
16129
16130 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
16131
16132 <pre>
16133   count MIME type
16134   ----- -----------------------
16135      32 text/plain
16136      30 audio/mpeg
16137      29 image/png
16138      28 image/jpeg
16139      27 application/ogg
16140      26 audio/x-mp3
16141      25 image/tiff
16142      25 image/gif
16143      22 image/bmp
16144      22 audio/x-wav
16145      20 audio/x-flac
16146      19 audio/x-mpegurl
16147      18 video/x-ms-asf
16148      18 audio/x-musepack
16149      18 audio/x-mpeg
16150      18 application/x-ogg
16151      17 video/mpeg
16152      17 audio/x-scpls
16153      17 audio/ogg
16154      16 video/x-ms-wmv
16155 </pre>
16156
16157 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
16158
16159 <pre>
16160   count MIME type
16161   ----- -----------------------
16162      33 text/plain
16163      32 image/png
16164      32 image/jpeg
16165      29 audio/mpeg
16166      27 image/gif
16167      26 image/tiff
16168      26 application/ogg
16169      25 audio/x-mp3
16170      22 image/bmp
16171      21 audio/x-wav
16172      19 audio/x-mpegurl
16173      19 audio/x-mpeg
16174      18 video/mpeg
16175      18 audio/x-scpls
16176      18 audio/x-flac
16177      18 application/x-ogg
16178      17 video/x-ms-asf
16179      17 text/html
16180      17 audio/x-musepack
16181      16 image/x-xbitmap
16182 </pre>
16183
16184 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
16185
16186 <pre>
16187   count MIME type
16188   ----- -----------------------
16189      31 text/plain
16190      31 image/png
16191      31 image/jpeg
16192      29 audio/mpeg
16193      28 application/ogg
16194      27 image/gif
16195      26 image/tiff
16196      26 audio/x-mp3
16197      23 audio/x-wav
16198      22 image/bmp
16199      21 audio/x-flac
16200      20 audio/x-mpegurl
16201      19 audio/x-mpeg
16202      18 video/x-ms-asf
16203      18 video/mpeg
16204      18 audio/x-scpls
16205      18 application/x-ogg
16206      17 audio/x-musepack
16207      16 video/x-ms-wmv
16208      16 video/x-msvideo
16209 </pre>
16210
16211 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
16212 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
16213 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
16214 issues.</p>
16215
16216 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
16217 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
16218
16219       </div>
16220       <div class="tags">
16221
16222
16223         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>.
16224
16225
16226       </div>
16227     </div>
16228     <div class="padding"></div>
16229
16230     <div class="entry">
16231       <div class="title">
16232         <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>
16233       </div>
16234       <div class="date">
16235         15th January 2013
16236       </div>
16237       <div class="body">
16238         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
16239 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
16240 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
16241 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
16242 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
16243 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
16244 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
16245 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
16246 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
16247 packages.</p>
16248
16249 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
16250 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
16251 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
16252 modalias.</p>
16253
16254 <p><blockquote>
16255 Package: package-name
16256 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
16257 </blockquote></p>
16258
16259 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
16260 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
16261
16262 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
16263 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
16264
16265 <p><blockquote>
16266 Package: cheese
16267 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
16268 </blockquote></p>
16269
16270 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
16271 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
16272
16273 <p><blockquote>
16274 Package: pcmciautils
16275 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
16276 </blockquote></p>
16277
16278 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
16279 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
16280
16281 <p><blockquote>
16282 Package: colorhug-client
16283 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
16284 </blockquote></p>
16285
16286 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
16287 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
16288 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
16289
16290 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
16291 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
16292 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
16293 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
16294 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
16295 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
16296 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
16297 Raring.</p>
16298
16299 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
16300 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
16301 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
16302 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
16303 try the
16304 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
16305 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
16306 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
16307 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
16308
16309 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
16310 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
16311
16312 <p><blockquote>
16313 % ./hw-support-lookup
16314 <br>yubikey-personalization
16315 <br>%
16316 </blockquote></p>
16317
16318 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
16319 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
16320
16321 <p><blockquote>
16322 % ./hw-support-lookup
16323 <br>pcmciautils
16324 <br>%
16325 </blockquote></p>
16326
16327 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
16328 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
16329 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
16330
16331 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
16332 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
16333 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
16334 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
16335 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
16336 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
16337 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
16338 see if it work.</p>
16339
16340 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
16341 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
16342 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
16343 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
16344
16345       </div>
16346       <div class="tags">
16347
16348
16349         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>.
16350
16351
16352       </div>
16353     </div>
16354     <div class="padding"></div>
16355
16356     <div class="entry">
16357       <div class="title">
16358         <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>
16359       </div>
16360       <div class="date">
16361         14th January 2013
16362       </div>
16363       <div class="body">
16364         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
16365 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
16366 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
16367 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
16368 in
16369 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
16370 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
16371
16372 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
16373
16374 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
16375 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
16376 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
16377 &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;,
16378 &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
16379 &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;.
16380
16381 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
16382 this shell script:</p>
16383
16384 <pre>
16385 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
16386 </pre>
16387
16388 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
16389 using modinfo:</p>
16390
16391 <pre>
16392 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
16393 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
16394 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
16395 %
16396 </pre>
16397
16398 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
16399
16400 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
16401 Bridge memory controller:</p>
16402
16403 <p><blockquote>
16404 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
16405 </blockquote></p>
16406
16407 <p>This represent these values:</p>
16408
16409 <pre>
16410  v   00008086  (vendor)
16411  d   00002770  (device)
16412  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
16413  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
16414  bc  06        (bus class)
16415  sc  00        (bus subclass)
16416  i   00        (interface)
16417 </pre>
16418
16419 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
16420 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
16421 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
16422 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
16423
16424 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
16425 means.</p>
16426
16427 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
16428
16429 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
16430 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
16431
16432 <p><blockquote>
16433 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
16434 </blockquote></p>
16435
16436 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
16437
16438 <pre>
16439  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
16440  p    0001  (device product)
16441  d    0206  (bcddevice)
16442  dc     09  (device class)
16443  dsc    00  (device subclass)
16444  dp     00  (device protocol)
16445  ic     09  (interface class)
16446  isc    00  (interface subclass)
16447  ip     00  (interface protocol)
16448 </pre>
16449
16450 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
16451 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
16452 these alias entries show up:</p>
16453
16454 <p><blockquote>
16455 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
16456 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
16457 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
16458 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
16459 </blockquote></p>
16460
16461 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
16462 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
16463 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
16464
16465 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
16466
16467 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
16468 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
16469
16470 <p><blockquote>
16471 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
16472 </blockquote></p>
16473
16474 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
16475
16476 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
16477
16478 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
16479 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
16480 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
16481
16482 <p><blockquote>
16483 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
16484 </blockquote></p>
16485
16486 <p>The values present are</p>
16487
16488 <pre>
16489  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
16490  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
16491  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
16492  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
16493  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
16494  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
16495  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
16496  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
16497  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
16498  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
16499  ct   10             (chassis type)
16500  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
16501 </pre>
16502
16503 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
16504 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
16505
16506 <pre>
16507   3 Desktop
16508   4 Low Profile Desktop
16509   5 Pizza Box
16510   6 Mini Tower
16511   7 Tower
16512   8 Portable
16513   9 Laptop
16514  10 Notebook
16515  11 Hand Held
16516  12 Docking Station
16517  13 All In One
16518  14 Sub Notebook
16519  15 Space-saving
16520  16 Lunch Box
16521  17 Main Server Chassis
16522  18 Expansion Chassis
16523  19 Sub Chassis
16524  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
16525  21 Peripheral Chassis
16526  22 RAID Chassis
16527  23 Rack Mount Chassis
16528  24 Sealed-case PC
16529  25 Multi-system
16530  26 CompactPCI
16531  27 AdvancedTCA
16532  28 Blade
16533  29 Blade Enclosing
16534 </pre>
16535
16536 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
16537 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
16538 claim it is a desktop.</p>
16539
16540 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
16541
16542 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
16543 test machine:</p>
16544
16545 <p><blockquote>
16546 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
16547 </blockquote></p>
16548
16549 <p>The values present are</p>
16550
16551 <pre>
16552   ty  01  (type)
16553   pr  00  (prototype)
16554   id  00  (id)
16555   ex  00  (extra)
16556 </pre>
16557
16558 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
16559 the valid values are.</p>
16560
16561 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
16562
16563 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
16564 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
16565 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
16566 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
16567 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
16568 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
16569 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
16570
16571 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
16572
16573 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
16574 one can use the following shell script:</p>
16575
16576 <pre>
16577   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
16578     echo "$id" ; \
16579     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
16580   done
16581 </pre>
16582
16583 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
16584 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
16585
16586 <pre>
16587   acpi:ACPI0003:
16588     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
16589   acpi:device:
16590   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
16591   acpi:IBM0068:
16592     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
16593     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
16594     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
16595     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
16596   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
16597     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
16598     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
16599     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
16600   [...]
16601 </pre>
16602
16603 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
16604 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
16605 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
16606 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
16607
16608 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
16609 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
16610 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
16611
16612       </div>
16613       <div class="tags">
16614
16615
16616         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>.
16617
16618
16619       </div>
16620     </div>
16621     <div class="padding"></div>
16622
16623     <div class="entry">
16624       <div class="title">
16625         <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>
16626       </div>
16627       <div class="date">
16628         10th January 2013
16629       </div>
16630       <div class="body">
16631         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
16632 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
16633 Launcher and updated the Debian package
16634 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
16635 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
16636 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
16637 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
16638 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
16639 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
16640 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
16641 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
16642 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
16643 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
16644 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
16645 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
16646 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
16647 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
16648 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
16649
16650       </div>
16651       <div class="tags">
16652
16653
16654         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>.
16655
16656
16657       </div>
16658     </div>
16659     <div class="padding"></div>
16660
16661     <div class="entry">
16662       <div class="title">
16663         <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>
16664       </div>
16665       <div class="date">
16666          9th January 2013
16667       </div>
16668       <div class="body">
16669         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
16670 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
16671 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
16672 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
16673 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
16674 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
16675 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
16676 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
16677 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
16678 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
16679 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
16680
16681 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
16682 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
16683 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
16684 simple:
16685
16686 <ul>
16687
16688 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
16689   starting when a user log in.</li>
16690
16691 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
16692   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
16693
16694 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
16695   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
16696   packages.</li>
16697
16698 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
16699   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
16700
16701 </ul>
16702
16703 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
16704 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
16705 discover database to find packages and
16706 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
16707 packages.</p>
16708
16709 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
16710 draft package is now checked into
16711 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
16712 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
16713 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
16714 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
16715 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
16716 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
16717 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
16718 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
16719 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
16720 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
16721 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
16722 because of the freeze).</p>
16723
16724 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
16725 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
16726 inserted):</p>
16727
16728 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
16729
16730 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
16731 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
16732 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
16733
16734 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
16735 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
16736 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
16737 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
16738 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
16739 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
16740 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
16741
16742 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
16743 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
16744 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
16745 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
16746 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
16747 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
16748 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
16749 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
16750 not be installed?</p>
16751
16752 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
16753 please send me an email. :)</p>
16754
16755       </div>
16756       <div class="tags">
16757
16758
16759         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>.
16760
16761
16762       </div>
16763     </div>
16764     <div class="padding"></div>
16765
16766     <div class="entry">
16767       <div class="title">
16768         <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>
16769       </div>
16770       <div class="date">
16771          2nd January 2013
16772       </div>
16773       <div class="body">
16774         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
16775 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
16776 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
16777 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
16778 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
16779 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
16780 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
16781 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
16782 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
16783 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
16784
16785 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
16786 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
16787 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
16788
16789       </div>
16790       <div class="tags">
16791
16792
16793         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
16794
16795
16796       </div>
16797     </div>
16798     <div class="padding"></div>
16799
16800     <div class="entry">
16801       <div class="title">
16802         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html">A Christmas present for Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
16803       </div>
16804       <div class="date">
16805         28th December 2012
16806       </div>
16807       <div class="body">
16808         <p>I was happy to discover a few days ago that the
16809 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
16810 project also this year received a Christmas present from Another
16811 Agency in Trondheim.  NOK 1000,- showed up on our donation account
16812 December 24th.  I want to express our thanks for this very welcome
16813 present.  As the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is very short on
16814 funding these days, and thus lack the money to do regular developer
16815 gatherings, this donation was most welcome.  One developer gathering
16816 cost around NOK 15&nbsp;000,-, so we need quite a lot more to keep the
16817 development pace we want.  Thus, I hope their example this year is
16818 followed by many others. :)</p>
16819
16820 <p>The public list of donors can be found on
16821 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">the
16822 donation page</a> for the project, which also contain instructions if
16823 you want to donate to the project.</p>
16824
16825       </div>
16826       <div class="tags">
16827
16828
16829         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>.
16830
16831
16832       </div>
16833     </div>
16834     <div class="padding"></div>
16835
16836     <div class="entry">
16837       <div class="title">
16838         <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>
16839       </div>
16840       <div class="date">
16841         25th December 2012
16842       </div>
16843       <div class="body">
16844         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
16845 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
16846
16847 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
16848 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
16849 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
16850 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
16851 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
16852 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
16853 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
16854 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
16855 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
16856 name.</p>
16857
16858 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
16859 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
16860 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
16861
16862 <blockquote><pre>
16863 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
16864 cd bitcoin
16865 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
16866 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
16867 </pre></blockquote>
16868
16869 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
16870 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
16871 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
16872 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
16873 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
16874 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
16875 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
16876 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
16877 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
16878
16879 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
16880 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
16881 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
16882
16883       </div>
16884       <div class="tags">
16885
16886
16887         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>.
16888
16889
16890       </div>
16891     </div>
16892     <div class="padding"></div>
16893
16894     <div class="entry">
16895       <div class="title">
16896         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
16897       </div>
16898       <div class="date">
16899         21st December 2012
16900       </div>
16901       <div class="body">
16902         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
16903 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
16904 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
16905 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
16906 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
16907 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
16908 is now maintained by a
16909 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
16910 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
16911 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
16912 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
16913 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
16914 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
16915 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
16916 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
16917 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
16918 Corallo in a
16919 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
16920 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
16921 Debian package.</p>
16922
16923 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
16924 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
16925 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
16926 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
16927 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
16928 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
16929 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
16930 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
16931 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
16932 new version to unstable.
16933
16934 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
16935 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
16936 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
16937 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
16938 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
16939 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
16940 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
16941 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
16942 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
16943 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
16944 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
16945 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
16946 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
16947 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
16948 have not tested them.</p>
16949
16950 <p>My
16951 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
16952 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
16953 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
16954 years ago, as can be
16955 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
16956 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
16957 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
16958 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
16959 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
16960 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
16961 the same address as last time,
16962 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
16963
16964       </div>
16965       <div class="tags">
16966
16967
16968         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>.
16969
16970
16971       </div>
16972     </div>
16973     <div class="padding"></div>
16974
16975     <div class="entry">
16976       <div class="title">
16977         <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>
16978       </div>
16979       <div class="date">
16980         18th December 2012
16981       </div>
16982       <div class="body">
16983         <p>A few days ago I came across
16984 <a href="http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/hledger/">a blog post from Joey
16985 Hess</a> describing <a href="http://ledger-cli.org/">ledger</a> and
16986 hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting.  I found it
16987 interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
16988 accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
16989 the different web based systems we use.  I find it hard to find what I
16990 look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
16991 the systems.  Ledger seem different.  The accounting data is kept in
16992 text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
16993
16994 are at least <a href="https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Ports">five
16995 different implementations</a> able to read the format.  An example
16996 entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
16997 generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:</p>
16998
16999 <blockquote><pre>
17000 2004-05-27 Book Store
17001       Expenses:Books                 $20.00
17002       Liabilities:Visa
17003 </pre></blockquote>
17004
17005 <p>The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
17006 look for others using it.  I found blog posts from
17007 <a href="http://blog.spang.cc/posts/hledger_rocks_my_world/">Christine
17008 Spang</a>,
17009 <a href="http://bugsplat.info/2010-05-23-keeping-finances-with-ledger.html">Pete
17010 Keen</a>,
17011 <a href="http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2010/11/06/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/">Andrew
17012 Cantino</a> and
17013 <a href="http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/2012/11/29/command-line-double-entry-accounting/">Ronald
17014 Ip</a> describing how they use it, as well as a post from
17015 <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ledger-cli/r0oWjwbQ9Bo">Bradley
17016 M. Kuhn</a> at the Software Freedom Conservancy.  All seemed like good
17017 recommendations fitting my need.</p>
17018
17019 <p>The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/ledger.html">ledger</a>
17020 package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
17021 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/haskell-hledger.html">hledger</a>
17022 package only is available in Debian Sid.  As I use Squeeze, ledger
17023 seemed the best choice to get started.</p>
17024
17025 <p>To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
17026 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/tools/lodo2ledger">web scraper</a> for
17027 <a href="http://www.lodo.no/">LODO</a>, the accounting system used by
17028 the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> association, and started to
17029 play with the data set.  I'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
17030 am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
17031 using the "<tt>ledger balance</tt>" command.  But I will have to
17032 gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
17033 for the organisations I am involved in.</p>
17034
17035       </div>
17036       <div class="tags">
17037
17038
17039         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>.
17040
17041
17042       </div>
17043     </div>
17044     <div class="padding"></div>
17045
17046     <div class="entry">
17047       <div class="title">
17048         <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>
17049       </div>
17050       <div class="date">
17051          6th December 2012
17052       </div>
17053       <div class="body">
17054         <p>Where I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of
17055 Oslo</a>, we use the
17056 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/cerebrum/">Cerebrum user
17057 administration system</a> to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
17058 I've known since the system was written that the server is providing
17059 an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC">XML-RPC</a> API, but
17060 I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we
17061 always use the bofh command line client at work.  Until today.  I want
17062 to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up
17063 virtual machines.  Here are a few notes on how to use it with
17064 Python.</p>
17065
17066 <p>I started by looking at the source of the Java
17067 <a href="http://cerebrum.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cerebrum/trunk/cerebrum/clients/jbofh/">bofh
17068 client</a>, to figure out how it connected to the API server.  I also
17069 googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
17070 <a href="http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XML-RPC-HOWTO/xmlrpc-howto-python.html">a
17071 simple example in</a> the XML-RPC howto.</p>
17072
17073 <p>This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
17074 commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
17075 user currently logged in:</p>
17076
17077 <blockquote><pre>
17078 #!/usr/bin/env python
17079 import getpass
17080 import xmlrpclib
17081 server_url = 'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:8000';
17082 username = getpass.getuser()
17083 password = getpass.getpass()
17084 server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
17085 #print server.get_commands(sessionid)
17086 sessionid = server.login(username, password)
17087 print server.run_command(sessionid, "user_info", username)
17088 result = server.logout(sessionid)
17089 print result
17090 </pre></blockquote>
17091
17092 <p>Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
17093 and DHCP updates I wanted to do.</p>
17094
17095       </div>
17096       <div class="tags">
17097
17098
17099         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>.
17100
17101
17102       </div>
17103     </div>
17104     <div class="padding"></div>
17105
17106     <div class="entry">
17107       <div class="title">
17108         <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>
17109       </div>
17110       <div class="date">
17111         17th November 2012
17112       </div>
17113       <div class="body">
17114         <p>While working on a
17115 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Norwegian
17116 translation of the Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig</a> (76% done),
17117 which cover the problems with todays copyright law and how it stifles
17118 creativity, one idea occurred to me.  The idea is to get the tax
17119 office to help make more works enter the public domain and also help
17120 make it easier to clear rights for using copyrighted works.</p>
17121
17122 <p>I mentioned this idea briefly during Yesterdays
17123 <a href="http://www.farmann.no/2012/11/14/john-perry-barlow-in-oslo-friday-nov-16
17124 -15-30-19-00/">presentation
17125 by John Perry Barlow</a>, and concluded that it was best to put it
17126 in writing for a wider audience.  The idea is not really based on the
17127 argument that copyrighted works are "intellectual property", as the
17128 core requirement is that copyrighted work have value for the copyright
17129 holder and the tax office like to collect their share from any value
17130 controlled by the citizens in a country.  I'm sharing the idea here to
17131 let others consider it and perhaps shoot it down with a fresh set of
17132 arguments.</p>
17133
17134 <p>Most valuables are taxed by the government.  At least here in
17135 Norway, the amount of money you have, the value of our land property,
17136 the value of your house, the value of your car, the value of our
17137 stocks and other valuables are all added together.  If the tax value
17138 of these values exceed your debt, you have to pay the tax office some
17139 taxes for these values.  And copyrighted work have value.  It have
17140 value for the rights holder, who can earn money selling access to the
17141 work.  But it is not included in the tax calculations?  Why not?</p>
17142
17143 <p>If the government want to tax copyrighted works, it would want to
17144 maintain a database of all the copyrighted works and who are the
17145 rights holders for a given works, to be able to associate the works
17146 value to the right citizen or company for tax purposes.  If such
17147 database exist, it will become a lot easier to find out who to talk to
17148 for clearing permissions to use a copyrighted work, which is a very
17149 hard operation with todays copyright law.  To ensure that copyright
17150 holders keep the database up-to-date, it would have to become a
17151 requirement to be able to collect money for granting access to
17152 copyrighted works that the work is listed in the database with the
17153 correct right holder.</p>
17154
17155 <p>If copyright causes copyright holders to have to pay more taxes,
17156 they will have a small incentive to "disown" their copyright, and let
17157 the work enter the public domain. For works with several right holders
17158 one of the right holders could state (and get it registered in the
17159 database) that she do not need to be consulted when clearing rights to
17160 use the work in question and thus will not get any income from that
17161 work.  Stating this would have to be impossible to revert and stop the
17162 tax office from adding the value of that work to the given citizens
17163 tax calculation.  I assume the copyright law would stay the same,
17164 allowing creators to pick a license of their choosing, and also
17165 allowing them to put their work directly in the public domain.  The
17166 existence of such database will make it even easier to clear rights,
17167 and if the right holders listed in the database is taxed, this system
17168 would increase the amount of works that enter the public domain.</p>
17169
17170 <p>The effect would be that the tax office help to make it easier to
17171 get rights to use the works that have not yet entered the public
17172 domain and help to get more work into the public domain and .</p>
17173
17174 <p>Why have such taxing not happened yet?  I am sure the tax office
17175 would like to tax copyrighted work values if they could.</p>
17176
17177       </div>
17178       <div class="tags">
17179
17180
17181         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>.
17182
17183
17184       </div>
17185     </div>
17186     <div class="padding"></div>
17187
17188     <div class="entry">
17189       <div class="title">
17190         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html">Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß</a>
17191       </div>
17192       <div class="date">
17193         14th November 2012
17194       </div>
17195       <div class="body">
17196         <p>Here is another interview with one of the people in the <a
17197 href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
17198 community.  I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
17199 if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
17200 After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
17201 the people behind the German
17202 "<a href="http://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/">IT-Zukunft Schule</a>"
17203 project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview.  Give a warm
17204 welcome to Angela Fuß. :)</p>
17205
17206 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
17207
17208 <p>I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
17209 Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my
17210 two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.
17211
17212 <p>At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
17213 the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
17214 Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
17215 growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
17216 system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-).  We are also
17217 in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.</p>
17218
17219 <p>In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
17220 nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there.  Besides
17221 that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
17222 working in our own school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" in North
17223 Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
17224 relationship management and the communication processes in the
17225 project.</p>
17226
17227 <p>Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
17228 and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
17229 and a yoga teacher.</p>
17230
17231 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
17232 project?</strong></p>
17233
17234 <p>I fell in love with Mike ;-).</p>
17235
17236 <p>Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
17237 Free Software.  At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
17238 founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
17239 their IT environment.  Often when Mike came home from working at the
17240 newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
17241 several points where the communication with the schools head or the
17242 teachers did not work.  So we were clear that he would not work for
17243 one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
17244 between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
17245 parents.</p>
17246
17247 <p>Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
17248 started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
17249 schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
17250 Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
17251 networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
17252 Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
17253 Germany.</p>
17254
17255 <p>For information about our school project you can read
17256 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">the
17257 interview with Mike Gabriel</a>.</p>
17258
17259 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
17260 Edu?</strong></p>
17261
17262 <p>First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
17263 answer comes rather from a social point of view.</p>
17264
17265 <p>The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
17266 and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
17267 background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
17268 and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
17269 something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
17270 ;-). This is of course a user experience.  What I also get as a big
17271 advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
17272 works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
17273 teachers, parents...</p>
17274
17275 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
17276 Edu?</strong></p>
17277
17278 <p>I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
17279 Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
17280
17281 <p>What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
17282 the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
17283 marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
17284 schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
17285 I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
17286
17287 <p>Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
17288 do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
17289 democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
17290 and helpful.  I am also missing some kind of contact between the
17291 Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
17292 level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
17293 different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
17294
17295 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
17296
17297 <p>On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
17298 on.  As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
17299 LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
17300 my N900 running with Maemo.</p>
17301
17302 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
17303 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
17304
17305 <p>I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft
17306 Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
17307 schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
17308 that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
17309 strategy has three crucial pillars:</p>
17310
17311 <ul>
17312
17313 <li>We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
17314 concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
17315 kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.</li>
17316
17317 <li>Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
17318 are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
17319 beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
17320 they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
17321 they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
17322 needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
17323 we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.</li>
17324
17325 <li>Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
17326 co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
17327 contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
17328 offer to become more and more independent from us.</li>
17329
17330 </ul>
17331
17332       </div>
17333       <div class="tags">
17334
17335
17336         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>.
17337
17338
17339       </div>
17340     </div>
17341     <div class="padding"></div>
17342
17343     <div class="entry">
17344       <div class="title">
17345         <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>
17346       </div>
17347       <div class="date">
17348          4th November 2012
17349       </div>
17350       <div class="body">
17351         <p>Slashdot just ran a story about the European Central Bank (ECB)
17352 <a href="http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemes201210en.pdf">releasing
17353 a report (PDF)</a> about virtual currencies and
17354 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>.  It is interesting to
17355 see how a member of the bitcoin community
17356 <a href="http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/10/30/the-ecb-report-on-bitcoin-and-virtual-currencies.html">receive
17357 the report</a>.  As for the future, I suspect the central banks and
17358 the governments will outlaw bitcoin if it gain any popularity, to avoid
17359 competition.  My thoughts go to the
17360 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wörgl">Wörgl experiment</a> with
17361 negative inflation on cash which was such a success that it was
17362 terminated by the Austrian National Bank in 1933.  A successful
17363 alternative would be a threat to the current money system and gain
17364 powerful forces to work against it.</p>
17365
17366 <p>While checking out the current status of bitcoin, I also discovered
17367 that the community already seem to have
17368 <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/27/3271637/bitcoin-savings-trust-pyramid-scheme-shuts-down">experienced
17369 its first pyramid game / Ponzi scheme</a>.  Not very surprising, given
17370 how members of "small" communities tend to trust each other.  I guess
17371 enterprising crocks will try again and again, as they do anywhere
17372 wealth is available.</p>
17373
17374       </div>
17375       <div class="tags">
17376
17377
17378         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>.
17379
17380
17381       </div>
17382     </div>
17383     <div class="padding"></div>
17384
17385     <div class="entry">
17386       <div class="title">
17387         <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>
17388       </div>
17389       <div class="date">
17390         26th October 2012
17391       </div>
17392       <div class="body">
17393         <p>I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
17394 looking after the computers, mostly on the unix side, but in general
17395 all over the place.  I am also a member (and currently leader) of
17396 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG association</a>, which in turn
17397 make me a member of <a href="http://www.usenix.org/">USENIX</a>.  NUUG
17398 is an member organisation for us in Norway interested in free
17399 software, open standards and unix like operating systems, and USENIX
17400 is a US based member organisation with similar targets.  And thanks to
17401 these memberships, I get all issues of the great USENIX magazine
17402 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">;login:</a> in the
17403 mail several times a year.  The magazine is great, and I read most of
17404 it every time.</p>
17405
17406 <p>In the last issue of the USENIX magazine ;login:, there is an
17407 article by <a href="http://www.skendric.com/">Stuart Kendrick</a> from
17408 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center titled
17409 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/october-2012-volume-37-number-5/what-takes-us-down">What
17410 Takes Us Down</a>" (longer version also
17411 <a href="http://www.skendric.com/problem/incident-analysis/2012-06-30/What-Takes-Us-Down.pdf">available
17412 from his own site</a>), where he report what he found when he
17413 processed the outage reports (both planned and unplanned) from the
17414 last twelve years and classified them according to cause, time of day,
17415 etc etc.  The article is a good read to get some empirical data on
17416 what kind of problems affect a data centre, but what really inspired
17417 me was the kind of reporting they had put in place since 2000.<p>
17418
17419 <p>The centre set up a mailing list, and started to send fairly
17420 standardised messages to this list when a outage was planned or when
17421 it already occurred, to announce the plan and get feedback on the
17422 assumtions on scope and user impact.  Here is the two example from the
17423 article: First the unplanned outage:
17424
17425 <blockquote><pre>
17426 Subject:     Exchange 2003 Cluster Issues
17427 Severity:    Critical (Unplanned)
17428 Start:       Monday, May 7, 2012, 11:58
17429 End:         Monday, May 7, 2012, 12:38
17430 Duration:    40 minutes
17431 Scope:       Exchange 2003
17432 Description: The HTTPS service on the Exchange cluster crashed, triggering
17433              a cluster failover.
17434
17435 User Impact: During this period, all Exchange users were unable to
17436              access e-mail. Zimbra users were unaffected.
17437 Technician:  [xxx]
17438 </pre></blockquote>
17439
17440 Next the planned outage:
17441
17442 <blockquote><pre>
17443 Subject:     H Building Switch Upgrades
17444 Severity:    Major (Planned)
17445 Start:       Saturday, June 16, 2012, 06:00
17446 End:         Saturday, June 16, 2012, 16:00
17447 Duration:    10 hours
17448 Scope:       H2 Transport
17449 Description: Currently, Catalyst 4006s provide 10/100 Ethernet to end-
17450              stations. We will replace these with newer Catalyst
17451              4510s.
17452 User Impact: All users on H2 will be isolated from the network during
17453              this work. Afterward, they will have gigabit
17454              connectivity.
17455 Technician:  [xxx]
17456 </pre></blockquote>
17457
17458 <p>He notes in his article that the date formats and other fields have
17459 been a bit too free form to make it easy to automatically process them
17460 into a database for further analysis, and I would have used ISO 8601
17461 dates myself to make it easier to process (in other words I would ask
17462 people to write '2012-06-16 06:00 +0000' instead of the start time
17463 format listed above).  There are also other issues with the format
17464 that could be improved, read the article for the details.</p>
17465
17466 <p>I find the idea of standardising outage messages seem to be such a
17467 good idea that I would like to get it implemented here at the
17468 university too.  We do register
17469 <a href="http://www.uio.no/tjenester/it/aktuelt/planlagte-tjenesteavbrudd/">planned
17470 changes and outages in a calendar</a>, and report the to a mailing
17471 list, but we do not do so in a structured format and there is not a
17472 report to the same location for unplanned outages.  Perhaps something
17473 for other sites to consider too?</p>
17474
17475       </div>
17476       <div class="tags">
17477
17478
17479         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>.
17480
17481
17482       </div>
17483     </div>
17484     <div class="padding"></div>
17485
17486     <div class="entry">
17487       <div class="title">
17488         <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>
17489       </div>
17490       <div class="date">
17491         22nd October 2012
17492       </div>
17493       <div class="body">
17494         <p>A blog post from Martin Bekkelund today tell the story of
17495 <a href="http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/">how
17496 Amazon erased the books from a customer's kindle, locked the account
17497 and refuse to tell the customer why</a>.  If a real book store did
17498 this to a customer, it would be called breaking into private property
17499 and theft.  The story has spread around the net today.  A bit more
17500 background information is available in Norwegian from
17501 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904658/hun-ble-kastet-ut-av-amazon">digi.no</a>.
17502 It is no surprise that digital restriction mechanisms (DRM) are used
17503 this way, as it has been warned about such abuse since DRM was
17504 introduced many years back.  And Amazon proved in 2009 that it was
17505 willing to
17506 <a href="http://boingboing.net/2009/07/20/amazons-orwellian-de.html">
17507 break into customers equipment and remove the books</a> people had
17508 bought, when it removed the book 1984 by George Orwell from all the
17509 customers who had bought it.  From the official comments, it even
17510 sounded like
17511 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html">Amazon
17512 would never do that again</a>.  And here we are, three years
17513 later.</p>
17514
17515 <p>And thought this action is
17516 <a href="http://www.itavisen.no/904648/forbrukerraadet-helt-haarreisende">against
17517 Norwegian regulations and law</a>, it is according to the terms of use
17518 as written by Amazon, and it is hard to hold Amazon accountable to
17519 Norwegian laws.  It is just yet another example of unacceptable terms
17520 of use on the web, and how they are used to remove customer
17521 rights.</p>
17522
17523 <p>Luckily for electronic books, there are alternatives without
17524 unacceptable terms.  For example
17525 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about 40,000
17526 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a> (1,652
17527 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The Internet
17528 Archive</a> (3,641,797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which
17529 can read by anyone and shared with anyone.</p>
17530
17531 <p>Update 2012-10-23: This story broke in the morning on Monday. In
17532 the evening after the story had spread all across the Internet, Amazon
17533 restored the account of the user, as reported by
17534 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904675/helomvending-fra-amazon">digi.no</a>
17535 and <a href="http://nrk.no/kultur-og-underholdning/1.8368487">NRK</a>.
17536 Apparently public pressure work.  The story from Martin have seen
17537 several twitter messages per minute the last 24 hours, which is quite
17538 a lot, and is still drawing a lot of attention.  But even when the
17539 account is restored, the fundamental problem still exist.  I recommend
17540 reading two opinions from
17541 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm">Simon
17542 Phipps</a> and
17543 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/10/is-amazon-playing-fair/index.htm">Glen
17544 Moody</a> if you want to learn more about the fundamentals and more
17545 details about the original story.</p>
17546
17547       </div>
17548       <div class="tags">
17549
17550
17551         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>.
17552
17553
17554       </div>
17555     </div>
17556     <div class="padding"></div>
17557
17558     <div class="entry">
17559       <div class="title">
17560         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_fight_for_freedom_and_privacy.html">The fight for freedom and privacy</a>
17561       </div>
17562       <div class="date">
17563         18th October 2012
17564       </div>
17565       <div class="body">
17566         <p>Civil liberties and privacy in the western world are going down the
17567 drain, and it is hard to fight against it.  I try to do my best, but
17568 time is limited.  I hope you do your best too.  A few years ago I came
17569 across a marvellous drawing by
17570 <a href="http://www.claybennett.com/about.html">Clay Bennett</a>
17571 visualising some of what is going on.
17572
17573 <p><a href="http://www.claybennett.com/pages/security_fence.html">
17574 <img src="http://www.claybennett.com/images/archivetoons/security_fence.jpg"></a></p>
17575
17576 <blockquote>
17577 «They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
17578 safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.» - Benjamin Franklin
17579 </blockquote>
17580
17581 <p>Do you feel safe at the airport?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when
17582 you see a surveillance camera?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when you
17583 leave electronic traces of your behaviour and opinions?  I do not.  I
17584 just remember <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon">the
17585 Panopticon</a>, and can not help to think that we are slowly
17586 transforming our society to a huge Panopticon on our own.</p>
17587
17588       </div>
17589       <div class="tags">
17590
17591
17592         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>.
17593
17594
17595       </div>
17596     </div>
17597     <div class="padding"></div>
17598
17599     <div class="entry">
17600       <div class="title">
17601         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColonHelp_produser_sue_WordPress_to_silence_critic.html">ColonHelp produser sue WordPress to silence critic</a>
17602       </div>
17603       <div class="date">
17604         12th October 2012
17605       </div>
17606       <div class="body">
17607         <p>Thanks to a blog post by
17608 <a href="http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.no/2012/10/a-shitstorm-is-comming.html">Eddy
17609 Petrișor</a>, I became aware of yet another "alternative medicine"
17610 company using legal intimidation tactics to scare off critics.
17611 According to the originating blog post about the detox "cure"
17612 <a href="http://insulaindoielii.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/colon-help-sues-wordpress/">ColonHelp
17613 and its producers Zenyth Pharmaceuticals actions</a>, the producer
17614 sues Wordpress to get rid of the critical information.  To check if
17615 the story was for real, I contacted Automattic, the company behind
17616 wordpress.com, and they reply was "We can confirm that Zenyth is
17617 seeking a court order against WordPress / Automattic.  However, we
17618 don't believe the Terms of Service have been violated in this
17619 matter".</p>
17620
17621 <p>The story seem to be simply that a blogger checked the scientific
17622 foundation for a popular health product in Rumania, ColonHelp, and
17623 reported that there was no reason at all to believe it improved the
17624 health of its users.  This caused the company behind the product,
17625 Zenyth Pharmaceuticals, to use legal intimidation to try to silence
17626 the critic, instead of presenting its views and scientific foundation
17627 to argue its side.</p>
17628
17629 <p>This is the usual story, and the Zenyth Pharmaceuticals company
17630 deserve everyone to know how it failed to act properly.  Lets hope the
17631 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect">Streisand
17632 effect</a> can make it rethink its strategy.</p>
17633
17634 <p>What is the harm, you might think.  I suggest you take a look at
17635 <a href="http://www.whatstheharm.net/detoxification.html">a list of
17636 victims of detoxification</a>.</p>
17637
17638       </div>
17639       <div class="tags">
17640
17641
17642         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>.
17643
17644
17645       </div>
17646     </div>
17647     <div class="padding"></div>
17648
17649     <div class="entry">
17650       <div class="title">
17651         <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>
17652       </div>
17653       <div class="date">
17654          3rd October 2012
17655       </div>
17656       <div class="body">
17657         <p>I just read the blog post from Tim Retout
17658 <a href="http://retout.co.uk/blog/2012/10/02/the-library-challenge">about
17659 the computer science book collection available in his local
17660 library</a>, and just wanted to share my comment on his theory about
17661 computer books becoming obsolete so soon.  That is part of the reason
17662 why the selection is so sad in almost any local library (it is in mine
17663 too), but I believe the major contributing factor is that the people
17664 buying books to the library have no way to know a good and future
17665 computer classic from trash.  And they need to know which one will
17666 become a classic in the future, as they would normally buy one of the
17667 recently published books.</p>
17668
17669 <p>During my university years, I worked for a while at the university
17670 library, and even there the person in charge of buying computer
17671 related books (and in fact any natural science related book), did not
17672 know enough about computers to make a good educated guess.  Once, just
17673 before Christmas, they had some leftover money on the book budget and
17674 I was asked if I could pick out a lot of computer books in the
17675 university book store, for the library to buy for their collection.  I
17676 had a great time picking all the books I dreamt of buying and reading,
17677 and the books I knew were classics (like most of the
17678 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens">Stevens
17679 collection</a>).  I picked several of the generic O'Reilly books (ie
17680 documenting protocols, formats and systems, not specific versions of
17681 products) and stayed away from the 'teach yourself X in N days' class.
17682 I had a great time, and probably picked out more than a hundred books
17683 for the library that evening.</p>
17684
17685 <p>The sad fact is that there is no way a overworked librarian is
17686 going to know that for example
17687 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming">The
17688 Practice of Programming</a> is a must-have in any computer library,
17689 and they will most of the time end up picking the wrong books to buy.
17690 Perhaps you can help your local library make better choices by giving
17691 the suggestions for books to get?  I know they would love to hear from
17692 you, even if their budget might block them from getting your favourite
17693 book right away.</p>
17694
17695       </div>
17696       <div class="tags">
17697
17698
17699         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17700
17701
17702       </div>
17703     </div>
17704     <div class="padding"></div>
17705
17706     <div class="entry">
17707       <div class="title">
17708         <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>
17709       </div>
17710       <div class="date">
17711         23rd September 2012
17712       </div>
17713       <div class="body">
17714         <p>Since this summer, I have worked in my spare time on a Norwegian <a
17715 href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book <a
17716 href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
17717 The reason is that this book is a great primer on what problems exist
17718 in the current copyright laws, and I want it to be available also for
17719 those that are reluctant do read an English book.
17720
17721 When I started, I
17722 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
17723 for volunteers</a> to help me, but too few have volunteered so far,
17724 and progress is a bit slow.  Anyway, today I broken the 70 percent
17725 mark for the first rough translation.  At the moment, less than 700
17726 strings (paragraphs, index terms, titles) are left to translate.  With
17727 my current progress of 10-20 strings per day, it will take a while to
17728 complete the translation.  This graph show the updated progress:</p>
17729
17730 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
17731
17732 <p>Progress have slowed down lately due to family and work
17733 commitments.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out
17734 the project files currently available from
17735 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
17736
17737 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
17738 the updated
17739 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
17740 and
17741 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
17742 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
17743 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
17744 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
17745
17746       </div>
17747       <div class="tags">
17748
17749
17750         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>.
17751
17752
17753       </div>
17754     </div>
17755     <div class="padding"></div>
17756
17757     <div class="entry">
17758       <div class="title">
17759         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html">Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda</a>
17760       </div>
17761       <div class="date">
17762         17th September 2012
17763       </div>
17764       <div class="body">
17765         <p>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
17766 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
17767 community, I finally found time to wrap up another.  This time it is
17768 Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
17769 this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
17770 administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
17771 conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.</p>
17772
17773 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
17774
17775 <p>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
17776 in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
17777 university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
17778 Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
17779 IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
17780 got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
17781 labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
17782 the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
17783 training is anyway very important</p>
17784
17785 <p>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
17786 <a href="http://www.spse.ch/">SPSE school</a> (secondary) is a very
17787 special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
17788 all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
17789 recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
17790
17791 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
17792 project?</strong></p>
17793
17794 <p>Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
17795 already several years ago. But since the system was still not
17796 Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
17797 use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
17798 next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
17799 hole.</p>
17800
17801 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17802 Edu?</strong></p>
17803
17804 <p>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
17805 very generous for help and hints.  Chat help is crucial, together with
17806 the mailing list.  Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
17807 engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
17808 and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
17809 can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
17810 platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
17811 head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
17812 hassle.</p>
17813
17814 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
17815 Edu?</strong></p>
17816
17817 <p>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
17818 flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
17819 there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
17820 need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
17821 devices that have specific software packages for another specific
17822 distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
17823 Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
17824 and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)</p>
17825
17826 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
17827
17828 <p>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
17829 mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
17830 combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
17831 <a href="http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html">Perceus</a>
17832 has the same...</p>
17833
17834 <p>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
17835 only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
17836 something breaks.  Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
17837 statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.</p>
17838
17839 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
17840 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
17841
17842 <P>I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
17843 cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
17844 just because they are normally not open to change.</p>
17845
17846 <p>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
17847 to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
17848 don't.</p>
17849
17850 <p>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
17851 laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
17852 we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
17853 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
17854 reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
17855 repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
17856 Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.</p>
17857
17858       </div>
17859       <div class="tags">
17860
17861
17862         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>.
17863
17864
17865       </div>
17866     </div>
17867     <div class="padding"></div>
17868
17869     <div class="entry">
17870       <div class="title">
17871         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html">IETF activity to standardise video codec</a>
17872       </div>
17873       <div class="date">
17874         15th September 2012
17875       </div>
17876       <div class="body">
17877         <p>After the
17878 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">Opus
17879 codec made</a> it into <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> as
17880 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716</a>, I had a look
17881 to see if there is any activity in IETF to standardise a video codec
17882 too, and I was happy to discover that there is some activity in this
17883 area.  A non-"working group" mailing list
17884 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/video-codec">video-codec</a>
17885 was
17886 <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
17887 formal working group should be formed.</p>
17888
17889 <p>I look forward to see how this plays out.  There is already
17890 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/video-codec/current/msg00003.html">an
17891 email from someone</a> in the MPEG group at ISO asking people to
17892 participate in the ISO group.  Given how ISO failed with OOXML and given
17893 that it so far (as far as I can remember) only have produced
17894 multimedia formats requiring royalty payments, I suspect
17895 joining the ISO group would be a complete waste of time, but I am not
17896 involved in any codec work and my opinion will not matter much.</p>
17897
17898 <p>If one of my readers is involved with codec work, I hope she will
17899 join this work to standardise a royalty free video codec within
17900 IETF.</p>
17901
17902       </div>
17903       <div class="tags">
17904
17905
17906         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>.
17907
17908
17909       </div>
17910     </div>
17911     <div class="padding"></div>
17912
17913     <div class="entry">
17914       <div class="title">
17915         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">IETF standardize its first multimedia codec: Opus</a>
17916       </div>
17917       <div class="date">
17918         12th September 2012
17919       </div>
17920       <div class="body">
17921         <p>Yesterday, <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> announced the
17922 publication of of
17923 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716, the Definition
17924 of the Opus Audio Codec</a>, a low latency, variable bandwidth, codec
17925 intended for both VoIP, film and music.  This is the first time, as
17926 far as I know, that IETF have standardized a multimedia codec.  In
17927 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3533">RFC 3533</a>, IETF
17928 standardized the OGG container format, and it has proven to be a great
17929 royalty free container for audio, video and movies.  I hope IETF will
17930 continue to standardize more royalty free codeces, after ISO and MPEG
17931 have proven incapable of securing everyone equal rights to publish
17932 multimedia content on the Internet.</p>
17933
17934 <p>IETF require two interoperating independent implementations to
17935 ratify a standard, and have so far ensured to only standardize royalty
17936 free specifications.  Both are key factors to allow everyone (rich and
17937 poor), to compete on equal terms on the Internet.</p>
17938
17939 <p>Visit the <a href="http://opus-codec.org/">Opus project page</a> if
17940 you want to learn more about the solution.</p>
17941
17942       </div>
17943       <div class="tags">
17944
17945
17946         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>.
17947
17948
17949       </div>
17950     </div>
17951     <div class="padding"></div>
17952
17953     <div class="entry">
17954       <div class="title">
17955         <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>
17956       </div>
17957       <div class="date">
17958          7th September 2012
17959       </div>
17960       <div class="body">
17961         <p>As I
17962 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
17963 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
17964 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
17965 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
17966 repository for the project</a>.</p>
17967
17968 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
17969 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
17970 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
17971 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
17972
17973 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
17974 PostScript formats at
17975 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
17976 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
17977
17978       </div>
17979       <div class="tags">
17980
17981
17982         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>.
17983
17984
17985       </div>
17986     </div>
17987     <div class="padding"></div>
17988
17989     <div class="entry">
17990       <div class="title">
17991         <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>
17992       </div>
17993       <div class="date">
17994         23rd August 2012
17995       </div>
17996       <div class="body">
17997         <p>I came across a great comment from Simon Phipps today, about how
17998 <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/how-microsoft-was-forced-open-office-200233">Microsoft
17999 have been forced to open Office</a>, and it made me remember and
18000 revisit the great site
18001 <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">officeshots</a> which allow you
18002 to check out how different programs present the ODF file format.  I
18003 recommend both to those of my readers interested in ODF. :)</p>
18004
18005       </div>
18006       <div class="tags">
18007
18008
18009         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>.
18010
18011
18012       </div>
18013     </div>
18014     <div class="padding"></div>
18015
18016     <div class="entry">
18017       <div class="title">
18018         <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>
18019       </div>
18020       <div class="date">
18021         17th August 2012
18022       </div>
18023       <div class="body">
18024         <p>In my spare time, I currently work on a Norwegian
18025 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
18026 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
18027 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law
18028 I can give to my parents and others that are reluctant to read an
18029 English book.  It is a marvellous set of examples on how the ever
18030 expanding copyright regulations hurt culture and society.  When the
18031 translation is done, I hope to find funding to print and ship a copy
18032 to all the members of the Norwegian parliament, before they sit down
18033 to debate the latest revisions to the Norwegian copyright law.  This
18034 summer I
18035 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
18036 for volunteers</a> to help me, and I have been able to secure the
18037 valuable contribution from at least one other Norwegian.</p>
18038
18039 <p>Two days ago, we finally broke the 50% mark.  Then more than 50% of
18040 the number of strings to translate (normally paragraphs, but also
18041 titles and index entries are also counted).  All parts from the
18042 beginning up to and including chapter four is translated.  So is
18043 chapters six, seven and the conclusion.  I created a graph to show the
18044 progress:</p>
18045
18046 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
18047
18048 <p>The number of strings to translate increase as I insert the index
18049 entries into the docbook.  They were missing with the docbook version
18050 I initially started with.  There are still quite a few index entries
18051 missing, but everyone starting with A, B, O, Z and Y are done.  I
18052 currently focus on completing the index entries, to get a complete
18053 english version of the docbook source.</p>
18054
18055 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
18056 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
18057 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
18058 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
18059 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
18060 around?  I am sure there are some legal terms that are unfamiliar to
18061 me.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out the
18062 project files currently available from <a
18063 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
18064
18065 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
18066 the updated
18067 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
18068 and
18069 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
18070 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
18071 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
18072 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
18073
18074       </div>
18075       <div class="tags">
18076
18077
18078         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>.
18079
18080
18081       </div>
18082     </div>
18083     <div class="padding"></div>
18084
18085     <div class="entry">
18086       <div class="title">
18087         <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>
18088       </div>
18089       <div class="date">
18090         10th August 2012
18091       </div>
18092       <div class="body">
18093         <p>In <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> one can specify
18094 the language used at the top, and the processing pipeline will use
18095 this information to pick the correct translations for 'chapter', 'see
18096 also', 'index' etc.  And for most languages used with docbook, I guess
18097 this work just fine.  For example a German user can start the document
18098 with &lt;book lang="de"&gt;, and the document will show up with the
18099 correct content with any of the docbook processors.  This is not the
18100 case for the language
18101 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html">I
18102 am working with at the moment</a>, Norwegian Bokmål.</p>
18103
18104 <p>For a while, I was confused about which language code to use,
18105 because I was unable to find any language code that would work across
18106 all tools.  I am currently testing dblatex, xmlto, docbook-xsl, and
18107 dbtoepub, and they do not handle Norwegian Bokmål the same way.  Some
18108 of them do not handle it at all.</p>
18109
18110 <p>A bit of background information is probably needed to understand
18111 this mess.  Norwegian is not one, but two written variants.  The
18112 variants are Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål.  There are three
18113 two letter language codes associated with these languages, Norwegian
18114 is 'no', Norwegian Nynorsk is 'nn' and Norwegian Bokmål is 'nb'.
18115 Historically the 'no' language code was used for Norwegian Bokmål, but
18116 many years ago this was found to be å bad idea, and the recommendation
18117 is to use the most specific language code instead, to avoid confusion.
18118 In the transition period it is a good idea to make sure 'no' was an
18119 alias for 'nb'.</p>
18120
18121 <p>Back to docbook processing tools in Debian.  The dblatex tool only
18122 understand 'nn'.  There are translations for 'no', but not 'nb' (BTS
18123 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/684391">#684391</a>), but due to a bug
18124 (BTS <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">#682936</a>) the 'no'
18125 language code is not recognised.  The docbook-xsl tool chain only
18126 recognise 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The xmlto tool only recognise
18127 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The end result that there is no language
18128 code I can use to get the docbook file working with all of these tools
18129 at the same time. :(</p>
18130
18131 <p>The correct solution is to use &lt;book lang="nb"&gt;, but it will
18132 take time before that will work with all the free software docbook
18133 processors. :(</p>
18134
18135 <p>Oh, the joy of well integrated tools. :/</p>
18136
18137       </div>
18138       <div class="tags">
18139
18140
18141         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>.
18142
18143
18144       </div>
18145     </div>
18146     <div class="padding"></div>
18147
18148     <div class="entry">
18149       <div class="title">
18150         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html">Best way to create a docbook book?</a>
18151       </div>
18152       <div class="date">
18153         31st July 2012
18154       </div>
18155       <div class="body">
18156         <p>I tried to send this text to the
18157 <a href="https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/">docbook-apps
18158 mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org</a>, but it only accept messages
18159 from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
18160 bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
18161 try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
18162 out.</p>
18163
18164 <p>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
18165 learning curve at the moment.</p>
18166
18167 <p>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
18168 translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
18169 docbook to handle the process.  The files to build the book are
18170 available from
18171 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.
18172 The book got around 400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
18173 index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
18174 software docbook processors.  My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
18175 Squeeze.</p>
18176
18177 <p>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
18178 tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
18179 formats.  I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
18180 problems.</p>
18181
18182 <ul>
18183
18184 <li>Using dblatex, the &lt;part&gt; handling is not the way I want to,
18185    as &lt;/part&gt; do not really end the &lt;part&gt;. (See
18186    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683166">BTS report #683166</a>), the
18187    xetex backend (needed to process UTF-8) give incorrect hyphens in
18188    index references spanning several pages (See
18189    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682901">BTS report #682901</a>), and
18190    I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
18191    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">BTS report #682936</a>).</li>
18192
18193 <li>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
18194    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683163">BTS report
18195    #683163</a>).</li>
18196
18197 <li>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
18198    show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
18199    footnote and text body, see
18200    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683197">BTS report #683197</a>), and
18201    fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
18202    refs listed are not right).</li>
18203
18204 <li>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.</li>
18205
18206 <li>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
18207    index problems the xmlto + fop processing.</li>
18208
18209 </ul>
18210
18211 <p>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
18212 of this book?  Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
18213 experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?</p>
18214
18215 <p>What about HTML and EPUB versions?</p>
18216
18217       </div>
18218       <div class="tags">
18219
18220
18221         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>.
18222
18223
18224       </div>
18225     </div>
18226     <div class="padding"></div>
18227
18228     <div class="entry">
18229       <div class="title">
18230         <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>
18231       </div>
18232       <div class="date">
18233         21st July 2012
18234       </div>
18235       <div class="body">
18236         <p>I reported earlier that I am working on
18237 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">a
18238 norwegian version</a> of the book
18239 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
18240 Progress is good, and yesterday I got a major contribution from Anders
18241 Hagen Jarmund completing chapter six.  The source files as well as a
18242 PDF and EPUB version of this book are available from
18243 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
18244
18245 <p>I am happy to report that the draft for the first two chapters
18246 (preface, introduction) is complete, and three other chapters are also
18247 completely translated.  This completes 26 percent of the number of
18248 strings (equivalent to paragraphs) in the book, and there is thus 74
18249 percent left to translate.  A graph of the progress is present at the
18250 bottom of the github project page.  There is still room for more
18251 contributors.  Get in touch or send github pull requests with fixes if
18252 you got time and are willing to help make this book make it to
18253 print. :)</p>
18254
18255 <p>The book translation framework could also be a good basis for other
18256 translations, if you want the book to be available in your
18257 language.</p>
18258
18259       </div>
18260       <div class="tags">
18261
18262
18263         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>.
18264
18265
18266       </div>
18267     </div>
18268     <div class="padding"></div>
18269
18270     <div class="entry">
18271       <div class="title">
18272         <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>
18273       </div>
18274       <div class="date">
18275         16th July 2012
18276       </div>
18277       <div class="body">
18278         <p>I am currently working on a
18279 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">project
18280 to translate</a> the book
18281 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig
18282 to Norwegian.  And the source we base our translation on is the
18283 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook">docbook</a> version, to
18284 allow us to use po4a and .po files to handle the translation, and for
18285 this to work well the docbook source document need to be properly
18286 tagged.  The source files of this project is available from
18287 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
18288
18289 <p>The problem is that the docbook source have flaws, and we have
18290 no-one involved in the project that is a docbook expert.  Is there a
18291 docbook expert somewhere that is interested in helping us create a
18292 well tagged docbook version of the book, and adjust our build process
18293 for the PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book?  This will provide a
18294 well tagged English version (our source document), and make it a lot
18295 easier for us to create a good Norwegian version.  If you can and want
18296 to help, please get in touch with me or fork the github project and
18297 send pull requests with fixes. :)</p>
18298
18299       </div>
18300       <div class="tags">
18301
18302
18303         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>.
18304
18305
18306       </div>
18307     </div>
18308     <div class="padding"></div>
18309
18310     <div class="entry">
18311       <div class="title">
18312         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html">Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg</a>
18313       </div>
18314       <div class="date">
18315          9th July 2012
18316       </div>
18317       <div class="body">
18318         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
18319 Skolelinux</a> project have users all over the globe, but until
18320 recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
18321 country Sweden.  This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
18322 this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
18323 to adjust and scale the just released
18324 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
18325 Wheezy</a> setup to his liking.  He granted me an interview, and I am
18326 happy to share his answers with you here.</p>
18327
18328 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
18329
18330 <p>I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
18331 the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
18332 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
18333 "folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups.  In
18334 Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
18335 in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
18336 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
18337 perspective when working with IT.</p>
18338
18339 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
18340 project?</strong></p>
18341
18342 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
18343 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
18344 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
18345 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
18346 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
18347 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
18348
18349 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18350 Edu?</strong></p>
18351
18352 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
18353 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
18354 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
18355 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
18356 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
18357 well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
18358 when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
18359 showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
18360 mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
18361 same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
18362 setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
18363 workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
18364 thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
18365 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
18366 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
18367 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
18368 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
18369 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time.  Our
18370 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
18371 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
18372 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
18373 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
18374 quicker to update.
18375
18376 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18377 Edu?</strong></p>
18378
18379 <p>Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
18380 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
18381 year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
18382 sound from working with them.  It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
18383 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
18384 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.</p>
18385
18386 <p>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
18387 install time.  In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
18388 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
18389 That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
18390 Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
18391 to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
18392 support for single-sign on.  That will make the transition to free
18393 software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
18394 need.  No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
18395 some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
18396 run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes.  We run a journalist
18397 education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
18398 by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association).  Our
18399 education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
18400 are done.  This is important if you want to get a job.</p>
18401
18402 <p>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
18403 magazines.  We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
18404 market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
18405 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
18406 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
18407 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
18408 edit and compile a newspaper.  But politically at our school we are not
18409 there yet.  And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.</p>
18410
18411 <p>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
18412 the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
18413 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
18414 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
18415 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
18416 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
18417 studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
18418 want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise.  Those
18419 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
18420 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
18421 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
18422 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
18423 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
18424 sound file.</p>
18425
18426 <p>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
18427 will try.  The problem is the students have certain expectations when
18428 they start an education towards a profession.  So the programs has to
18429 look and feel professional.  Good thing with radio, there are many
18430 programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
18431 as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
18432 program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
18433 learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
18434 the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.</p>
18435
18436 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
18437
18438 <p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days.  I use almost
18439 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
18440 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
18441 )</p>
18442
18443 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
18444 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
18445
18446 <p>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
18447 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
18448 it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
18449 flawlessly.  The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
18450 will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
18451 students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
18452 clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
18453 idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
18454 the administration.  It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
18455 open source, if the principal has to run Windows.  It also creates a
18456 problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
18457 will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
18458 support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
18459 desktop is essential.  At least at our school, where we have mixed
18460 level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
18461
18462 <p>Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
18463 useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
18464 article <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/481607/">Radio station
18465 management with Airtime</a>,
18466 <a href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/">Airtime</a> which
18467 claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
18468 <a href="http://www.rivendellaudio.org/">Rivendell</a> which claim to
18469 be complete radio broadcast automation solution.  All of them seem
18470 useful to the aspiring radio producer.</p>
18471
18472       </div>
18473       <div class="tags">
18474
18475
18476         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>.
18477
18478
18479       </div>
18480     </div>
18481     <div class="padding"></div>
18482
18483     <div class="entry">
18484       <div class="title">
18485         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html">Why do schools waste money on IT?</a>
18486       </div>
18487       <div class="date">
18488          8th July 2012
18489       </div>
18490       <div class="body">
18491         <p>In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
18492 of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
18493 in schools and municipalities.  We provide what the happy users of
18494 Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
18495 alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution.  I
18496 was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
18497 Steinberg in his blog post
18498 "<a href="http://www.mysociety.org/2012/06/19/can-you-recognize-the-million-pound-chair/">Can
18499 you recognize the million pound chair?</a>".  Read it and weep for the
18500 spending of your tax money.</p>
18501
18502 <p>Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
18503 projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
18504 causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
18505 to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
18506 public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
18507 purchases.</p>
18508
18509       </div>
18510       <div class="tags">
18511
18512
18513         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>.
18514
18515
18516       </div>
18517     </div>
18518     <div class="padding"></div>
18519
18520     <div class="entry">
18521       <div class="title">
18522         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html">Free Timetabling Software - nice free software</a>
18523       </div>
18524       <div class="date">
18525          7th July 2012
18526       </div>
18527       <div class="body">
18528         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
18529 Skolelinux</a> is a large collection of end user and school specific
18530 software.  It is one of the packages not installed by default but
18531 provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
18532 is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
18533 information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
18534 the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
18535 receive.  The software is
18536
18537 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/">named FET</a>, and it provide a
18538 graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
18539 result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
18540 both teachers and students.  It is available both for
18541 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download.html">Linux, MacOSX and
18542 Windows</a>.</p>
18543
18544 <p>This is <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/features.html">the
18545 feature list</a>, liftet from the project web site:</p>
18546
18547 <p><ul>
18548
18549   <li>FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
18550     You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it </li>
18551
18552   <li>Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
18553     (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
18554     (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
18555     (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
18556     (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
18557     (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
18558     sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
18559     (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
18560     </li>
18561
18562   <li>Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
18563     semi-automatic or manual allocation</li>
18564
18565   <li>Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
18566     GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports </li>
18567
18568   <li>Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
18569     with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)</li>
18570
18571   <li>Import/export from CSV format</li>
18572
18573   <li>The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
18574     formats </li>
18575
18576   <li>Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
18577     and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
18578     non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
18579     (as separate sets)</li>
18580
18581   <li>Each constraint has a weight percentage, from 0.0% to 100.0%
18582     (but some special constraints are allowed to have only 100% weight
18583     percentage)</li>
18584
18585   <li>Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
18586     demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
18587     memory):
18588     <ul>
18589       <li>Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day: 60</li>
18590       <li>Maximum number of working days per week: 35</li>
18591       <li>Maximum total number of teachers: 6000</li>
18592       <li>Maximum total number of sets of students: 30000</li>
18593       <li>Maximum total number of subjects: 6000</li>
18594       <li>Virtually unlimited number of activity tags</li>
18595       <li>Maximum number of activities: 30000</li>
18596       <li>Maximum number of rooms: 6000</li>
18597       <li>Maximum number of buildings: 6000</li>
18598       <li>Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
18599           students sets for each activity.  (it is possible
18600           also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
18601           activity)</li>
18602       <li>Virtually unlimited number of time constraints</li>
18603       <li>Virtually unlimited number of space constraints</li>
18604     </ul></li>
18605
18606   <li>A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
18607     <ul>
18608       <li>Break periods</li>
18609       <li>For teacher(s):
18610         <ul>
18611           <li>Not available periods</li>
18612           <li>Max/min days per week</li>
18613           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
18614           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
18615           <li>Min hours daily</li>
18616           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
18617
18618           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
18619             days per week</li>
18620         </ul></li>
18621       <li>For students (sets):
18622         <ul>
18623           <li>Not available periods</li>
18624           <li>Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)</li>
18625           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
18626           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
18627           <li>Min hours daily</li>
18628           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
18629
18630           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
18631             days per week</li>
18632         </ul></li>
18633       <li>For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
18634         <ul>
18635           <li>A single preferred starting time</li>
18636           <li>A set of preferred starting times</li>
18637           <li>A set of preferred time slots</li>
18638           <li>Min/max days between them</li>
18639           <li>End(s) students day</li>
18640           <li>Same starting time/day/hour</li>
18641           <li>Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
18642             flexible constraint, useful in many situations)</li>
18643           <li>Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for 2 or 3 (sub)activities)</li>
18644           <li>Not overlapping</li>
18645           <li>Max simultaneous in selected time slots</li>
18646           <li>Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities</li>
18647         </ul></li>
18648     </ul></li>
18649
18650   <li>A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
18651     <ul>
18652       <li>Room not available periods</li>
18653       <li>For teacher(s):
18654         <ul>
18655           <li>Home room(s)</li>
18656           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
18657           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
18658         </ul>
18659       </li>
18660
18661       <li>For students (sets):
18662         <ul>
18663           <li>Home room(s)</li>
18664           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
18665           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
18666         </ul>
18667       </li>
18668       <li>Preferred room(s):
18669         <ul>
18670           <li>For a subject</li>
18671           <li>For an activity tag</li>
18672           <li>For a subject and an activity tag</li>
18673           <li>Individually for a (sub)activity</li>
18674         </ul>
18675       </li>
18676
18677       <li>For a set of activities:
18678         <ul>
18679           <li>Occupy a maximum number of different rooms</li>
18680         </ul>
18681       </li>
18682     </ul>
18683   </li>
18684 </ul></p>
18685
18686 <p>I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
18687 planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it.  If you
18688 need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
18689 manually, check it out.
18690
18691 A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
18692 <a href="http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/2012/03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/">a
18693 blog post from MarvelSoft</a>.  If you find FET useful, please provide
18694 a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
18695 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos">Debian Edu HowTo
18696 section</a>.</p>
18697
18698       </div>
18699       <div class="tags">
18700
18701
18702         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>.
18703
18704
18705       </div>
18706     </div>
18707     <div class="padding"></div>
18708
18709     <div class="entry">
18710       <div class="title">
18711         <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>
18712       </div>
18713       <div class="date">
18714          3rd July 2012
18715       </div>
18716       <div class="body">
18717         <p>In the NUUG <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a>
18718 project (Norwegian version of
18719 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> from
18720 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>), we have discovered
18721 a problem with the municipalities using
18722 <a href="http://www.zimbra.com/">Zimbra</a>.  When FiksGataMi send a
18723 problem report to the government, the email From: address is set to
18724 the address of the person reporting the problem, while envelope sender
18725 is set to the FiksGataMi contact address.  The intention is to make
18726 sure the municipality send any replies to the person reporting the
18727 problem, while any email delivery problems are sent to us in NUUG.
18728 This work well in most cases, but not for Karmøy municipality using
18729 Zimbra.  Karmøy is using the vacation message function in Zimbra to
18730 send an automatic reply to report that the message has been received,
18731 and this message is sent to the envelope sender and not the address in
18732 the From: header.</p>
18733
18734 <p>This causes the automatic message from Karmøy to go to NUUGs
18735 request-tracker instance instead of to the person reporting the
18736 problem.  We can not really change the envelope sender address, as
18737 this would make it impossible for us to discover when there are
18738 problems with the MTAs receiving problem reports.  We have been in
18739 contact with the people at Karmøy municipality, and they are willing
18740 to adjust Zimbra if something can be changed there to get a better
18741 behaviour.</p>
18742
18743 <p>The default behaviour of Zimbra is as far as I can tell according
18744 to the specification in RFC 3834, which recommend that vacation
18745 messages are sent to the envelope sender and not to the From: address.
18746 But I wonder if it is possible to adjust or configure Zimbra to behave
18747 differently.  Anyone know?  Please let us know at
18748 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
18749 (at) nuug.no</a>.</p>
18750
18751       </div>
18752       <div class="tags">
18753
18754
18755         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>.
18756
18757
18758       </div>
18759     </div>
18760     <div class="padding"></div>
18761
18762     <div class="entry">
18763       <div class="title">
18764         <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>
18765       </div>
18766       <div class="date">
18767         26th June 2012
18768       </div>
18769       <div class="body">
18770         <p>I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
18771 another interview with the people behind
18772 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
18773 This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
18774 helpers from Spain.  His effort was the reason we added support for
18775 several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
18776 Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
18777 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
18778 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
18779
18780 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
18781
18782 <p>I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
18783 ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
18784 ICT in schools</p>
18785
18786 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
18787 project?</strong></p>
18788
18789 <p>At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
18790 project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
18791 similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
18792 I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.</p>
18793
18794 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18795 Edu?</strong></p>
18796
18797 <p>A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
18798 really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
18799 concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
18800 been used everyday inside Debian Edu.</p>
18801
18802 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18803 Edu?</strong></p>
18804
18805 <p>Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
18806 economical and technical resources in the different countries don't
18807 allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
18808 approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
18809 lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
18810 technologies in school.</p>
18811
18812 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
18813
18814 <p>Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
18815 between Iceweasel, <a href="http://www.geany.org/">Geany</a> and
18816 <a href="http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator">Terminator</a>.</p>
18817
18818 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
18819 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
18820
18821 <p>I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
18822 different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
18823 environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
18824 laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.</p>
18825
18826 <p>Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
18827 not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
18828 universities. So different strategies are needed.</p>
18829
18830 <p>But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
18831 we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
18832 our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
18833 multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
18834 more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
18835 using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in
18836 the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
18837 them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
18838 working there.</p>
18839
18840       </div>
18841       <div class="tags">
18842
18843
18844         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>.
18845
18846
18847       </div>
18848     </div>
18849     <div class="padding"></div>
18850
18851     <div class="entry">
18852       <div class="title">
18853         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
18854       </div>
18855       <div class="date">
18856         24th June 2012
18857       </div>
18858       <div class="body">
18859         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
18860 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
18861 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
18862 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
18863 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
18864 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
18865 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
18866 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
18867 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
18868 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
18869 missing in my book.</p>
18870
18871 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
18872 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
18873 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
18874 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
18875 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
18876 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
18877 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
18878
18879       </div>
18880       <div class="tags">
18881
18882
18883         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>.
18884
18885
18886       </div>
18887     </div>
18888     <div class="padding"></div>
18889
18890     <div class="entry">
18891       <div class="title">
18892         <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>
18893       </div>
18894       <div class="date">
18895         11th June 2012
18896       </div>
18897       <div class="body">
18898         <p>During my work on
18899 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.nb.html">Debian Edu
18900 based on Squeeze</a>, I came across some issues that should be
18901 addressed in the Wheezy release.  I finally found time to wrap up my
18902 notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
18903 explanation.</p>
18904
18905 <p><ul>
18906
18907 <li>We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
18908 changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
18909 with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
18910 system depend on tasksel tasks in
18911 /usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
18912 installation.</li>
18913
18914 <li>Enable Kerberos login for more services.  Now with the Kerberos
18915 foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
18916 services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions.  We should
18917 at least try to enable it for these services:
18918 <ul>
18919
18920   <li>CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
18921     quotas.</li>
18922   <li>Nagios for admins checking the system status.</li>
18923   <li>GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.</li>
18924   <li>LDAP for admins updating LDAP.</li>
18925   <li>Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.</li>
18926   <li>ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.</li>
18927
18928 </ul></li>
18929
18930 <li>When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
18931 authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
18932 use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
18933 is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind</li>
18934
18935 <li>Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install.  The split made
18936 sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
18937 inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.</li>
18938
18939 <li>Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
18940 touching the disk if the disk is too small.  This is
18941 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/653305">BTS report #653305</a> and the
18942 d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
18943 it and upload.  After this is done we need to adjust
18944 debian-edu-install to use this new hook.</li>
18945
18946 <li>Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
18947 time config).  LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
18948 packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
18949 in Wheezy.
18950
18951 <li>Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
18952 the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
18953 up KDE login on slow networks.</li>
18954
18955 <li>Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
18956 change on first login.  This is useful when handing out password on
18957 paper, to make sure only the user know the password.  This require
18958 fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.</li>
18959
18960 <li>Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
18961 The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
18962 familiar with GUIs.  This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
18963 have it available where the admin will be looking for it..</li>
18964
18965 <li>We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
18966 actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses).  None of the
18967 Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.</li>
18968
18969 <li>We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
18970 using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
18971 packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.</li>
18972
18973 <li>We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
18974 when changing password using the Kerberos protocol.  The hook was
18975 requested in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/588968">BTS report
18976 #588968</a> and is now available in Wheezy.  We might need to write a
18977 MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.</li>
18978
18979 <li>We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
18980 <ul>
18981
18982 <li>reduce the number of chemistry visualisers</li>
18983 <li>consider dropping xpaint</li>
18984 <li>and probably more?</li>
18985 </ul></li>
18986
18987 <li>Some hardware need external firmware to work properly.  This is
18988 mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
18989 examples too.  For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
18990 firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
18991 some GUI to do this.  Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
18992 could consider using their packages.  At the moment we have some
18993 command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
18994 for the LTSP chroot).</li>
18995
18996
18997 <li>In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options.  We
18998 should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
18999 install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
19000 use.</li>
19001
19002 <li>The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
19003 interesting educational packages.  We should work on the package
19004 tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
19005 packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
19006 new applications with a simple mouse click.</li>
19007
19008 <li>The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
19009 with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
19010 be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
19011 filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled.  We should
19012 implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
19013 instead of the "it is documented" method of today.</li>
19014
19015 <li>A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
19016 "take over" the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
19017 There are at least three implementations,
19018 <a href="italc.sourceforge.net/">italc</a>,
19019 <a href="http://www.itais.net/help/en/">controlaula</a> og
19020 <a href="http://www.epoptes.org/">epoptes</a> and we should pick one of
19021 them and make it trivial to set it up in a school.  The challenges is
19022 how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
19023 and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
19024 given room.</li>
19025
19026 <li>Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
19027 should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
19028 the Debian Edu network.  Not quite sure how.  Perhaps we should
19029 provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
19030 them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
19031 configuration and data with the central server.  This should be
19032 investigated.</li>
19033
19034 </ul></p>
19035
19036 <p>I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
19037 version.</p>
19038
19039       </div>
19040       <div class="tags">
19041
19042
19043         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>.
19044
19045
19046       </div>
19047     </div>
19048     <div class="padding"></div>
19049
19050     <div class="entry">
19051       <div class="title">
19052         <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>
19053       </div>
19054       <div class="date">
19055          9th June 2012
19056       </div>
19057       <div class="body">
19058         <p>Slashdot got a story about Intel planning a
19059 <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
19060 with face recognition</a> to recognise the viewer, and it occurred to
19061 me that it would be more interesting to turn it around, and do face
19062 recognition on the TV image itself.  It could let the viewer know who
19063 is present on the screen, and perhaps look up their credibility,
19064 company affiliation, previous appearances etc for the viewer to better
19065 evaluate what is being said and done.  That would be a feature I would
19066 be willing to pay for.</p>
19067
19068 <p>I would not be willing to pay for a TV that point a camera on my
19069 household, like the big brother feature apparently proposed by Intel.
19070 It is the telescreen idea fetched straight out of the book
19071 <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt">1984 by George
19072 Orwell</a>.</p>
19073
19074       </div>
19075       <div class="tags">
19076
19077
19078         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>.
19079
19080
19081       </div>
19082     </div>
19083     <div class="padding"></div>
19084
19085     <div class="entry">
19086       <div class="title">
19087         <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>
19088       </div>
19089       <div class="date">
19090          6th June 2012
19091       </div>
19092       <div class="body">
19093         <p>A few days ago
19094 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">I
19095 reported how to get</a> the support status out of Dell using an
19096 unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was
19097 <a href="http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2012-February/045959.html">discovered
19098 by Daniel De Marco in february</a>.  Combined with my web scraping
19099 code for HP, Dell and IBM
19100 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">from
19101 2009</a>, I got inspired and wrote
19102 <a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/">a
19103 web service</a> based on Scraperwiki to make it easy to look up the
19104 support status and get a machine readable result back.</p>
19105
19106 <p>This is what it look like at the moment when asking for the JSON
19107 output:
19108
19109 <blockquote><pre>
19110 % 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>
19111 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": ""})
19112 %
19113 </pre></blockquote>
19114
19115 <p>It currently support Dell and HP, and I am hoping for help to add
19116 support for other vendors.  The python source is available on
19117 Scraperwiki and I welcome help with adding more features.</p>
19118
19119       </div>
19120       <div class="tags">
19121
19122
19123         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>.
19124
19125
19126       </div>
19127     </div>
19128     <div class="padding"></div>
19129
19130     <div class="entry">
19131       <div class="title">
19132         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel</a>
19133       </div>
19134       <div class="date">
19135          2nd June 2012
19136       </div>
19137       <div class="body">
19138         <p>Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
19139 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
19140 mailing list.  He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
19141 thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
19142 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
19143 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
19144
19145 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
19146
19147 <p>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
19148 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
19149 (Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
19150 by Angela).</p>
19151
19152 <p>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
19153 and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
19154 touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
19155 the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
19156 becoming an osteopath.</p>
19157
19158 <p>Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
19159 have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
19160 introducing free software into schools. The project's name is
19161 "IT-Zukunft Schule" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
19162 skills with communication skills.</p>
19163
19164 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
19165 project?</strong></p>
19166
19167 <p>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
19168 "IT-Zukunft Schule" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
19169 reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
19170 people said.  From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
19171 distributions that target being used for school networks.</p>
19172
19173 <p>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
19174 commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
19175 Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
19176 went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
19177 and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
19178 Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
19179 got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
19180 attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
19181 the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.</p>
19182
19183 <p>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
19184 people.  People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
19185 protection experts, other IT professionals.</p>
19186
19187 <p>We came to two conclusions:</p>
19188
19189 <p>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
19190 bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
19191 by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
19192 whereas most of each school's requirements could mapped by a standard
19193 IT solution.  The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
19194 customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
19195 possible.  In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
19196 standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
19197 degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
19198 locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
19199 point.</p>
19200
19201 <p>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
19202 all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
19203 for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
19204 has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
19205 of people into using IT and teaching with IT. "IT-Zukunft Schule"
19206 tries to provide an approach for this.</p>
19207
19208 <p>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
19209 defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
19210 Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school's IT
19211 equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
19212 teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
19213 spare time.</p>
19214
19215 <p>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
19216 networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
19217 here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
19218 teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
19219 non-existent until 2010/2011.</p>
19220
19221 <p>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
19222 class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
19223 avoidance do exist.</p>
19224
19225 <p>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
19226 social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
19227 for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
19228 several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
19229 they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
19230 at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
19231 and probably a gain for all.</p>
19232
19233 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19234 Edu?</strong></p>
19235
19236 <p>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
19237 any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
19238 the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
19239 workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
19240 project communication, honest communication within the group of
19241 developers, etc.</p>
19242
19243 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19244 Edu?</strong></p>
19245
19246 <p>Every coin has two sides:</p>
19247
19248 <p>Technically: <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/311188">BTS issue
19249 #311188</a>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
19250 client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
19251 should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
19252 about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
19253 several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
19254 contribute).</p>
19255
19256 <p>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
19257 find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
19258 Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
19259 promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
19260 there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
19261 these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
19262 all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
19263 meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
19264 there being rather disconnected from the development department of
19265 Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
19266
19267 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
19268
19269 <p>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.</p>
19270
19271 <p>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
19272 serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
19273 more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.</p>
19274
19275 <p>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
19276 development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
19277 PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
19278 is being integrated in Ubuntu's software center.</p>
19279
19280 <p>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
19281 as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
19282 I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
19283 the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
19284 whiteboard.</p>
19285
19286 <p>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.</p>
19287
19288 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
19289 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
19290
19291 <p>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
19292 enrol people.</p>
19293
19294       </div>
19295       <div class="tags">
19296
19297
19298         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>.
19299
19300
19301       </div>
19302     </div>
19303     <div class="padding"></div>
19304
19305     <div class="entry">
19306       <div class="title">
19307         <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>
19308       </div>
19309       <div class="date">
19310          1st June 2012
19311       </div>
19312       <div class="body">
19313         <p>A few years ago I wrote
19314 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">how
19315 to extract support status</a> for your Dell and HP servers.  Recently
19316 I have learned from colleges here at the
19317 <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> that Dell have
19318 made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service.  Given
19319 the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
19320 readable information about the support status.  This perl code
19321 demonstrate how to do it:</p>
19322
19323 <p><pre>
19324 use strict;
19325 use warnings;
19326 use SOAP::Lite;
19327 use Data::Dumper;
19328 my $GUID = '11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111';
19329 my $App = 'test';
19330 my $servicetag = $ARGV[0] or die "Please supply a servicetag. $!\n";
19331 my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
19332 my $s = SOAP::Lite
19333     -> uri('http://support.dell.com/WebServices/')
19334     -> on_action( sub { join '', @_ } )
19335     -> proxy('http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx')
19336     ;
19337 my $a = $s->GetAssetInformation(
19338     SOAP::Data->name('guid')->value($GUID)->type(''),
19339     SOAP::Data->name('applicationName')->value($App)->type(''),
19340     SOAP::Data->name('serviceTags')->value($servicetag)->type(''),
19341 );
19342 print Dumper($a -> result) ;
19343 </pre></p>
19344
19345 <p>The output can look like this:</p>
19346
19347 <p><pre>
19348 $VAR1 = {
19349           'Asset' => {
19350                      'Entitlements' => {
19351                                        'EntitlementData' => [
19352                                                             {
19353                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
19354                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
19355                                                               'Provider' => '',
19356                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
19357                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
19358                                                             },
19359                                                             {
19360                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
19361                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
19362                                                               'Provider' => '',
19363                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
19364                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
19365                                                             },
19366                                                             {
19367                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
19368                                                               'EndDate' => '2007-07-29T00:00:00',
19369                                                               'Provider' => '',
19370                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
19371                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
19372                                                             }
19373                                                           ]
19374                                      },
19375                      'AssetHeaderData' => {
19376                                           'SystemModel' => 'GX620',
19377                                           'ServiceTag' => '8DSGD2J',
19378                                           'SystemShipDate' => '2006-07-29T19:00:00-05:00',
19379                                           'Buid' => '2323',
19380                                           'Region' => 'Europe',
19381                                           'SystemID' => 'PLX_GX620',
19382                                           'SystemType' => 'OptiPlex'
19383                                         }
19384                    }
19385         };
19386 </pre></p>
19387
19388 <p>I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
19389 service outside the
19390 <a href="http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation">inline
19391 documentation</a>, and according to
19392 <a href="http://iboyd.net/index.php/2012/02/14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/">one
19393 comment</a> it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
19394 scraping HTML pages. :)</p>
19395
19396 <p>Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service.  If
19397 you know of one, drop me an email. :)</p>
19398
19399       </div>
19400       <div class="tags">
19401
19402
19403         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>.
19404
19405
19406       </div>
19407     </div>
19408     <div class="padding"></div>
19409
19410     <div class="entry">
19411       <div class="title">
19412         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html">First monitor calibration using ColorHug</a>
19413       </div>
19414       <div class="date">
19415         31st May 2012
19416       </div>
19417       <div class="body">
19418         <p>A few days ago my color calibration gadget
19419 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">ColorHug</a> arrived in the
19420 mail, and I've had a few days to test it.  As all my machines are
19421 running Debian Squeeze, where
19422 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">the
19423 calibration software</a> is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid),
19424 I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD.  This worked
19425 just fine.  So far I have only done the quick calibration.  It was
19426 slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for
19427 another day.</p>
19428
19429 <p>After calibration, I get a
19430 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile">ICC color
19431 profile</a> file that can be passed to programs understanding such
19432 tools.  KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched
19433 for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X.
19434 xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single
19435 monitor setups.  But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen
19436 attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct
19437 monitor.  After searching a bit, I
19438 <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347896">discovered</a>
19439 that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted,
19440 and a simple</p>
19441
19442 <p><pre>
19443 dispwin -d 1 profile.icc
19444 </pre></p>
19445
19446 <p>later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor.  The
19447 result was a bit more pink than I expected.  I guess I picked the
19448 wrong monitor type for the "led" monitor I got, but the result is good
19449 enough for now.</p>
19450
19451       </div>
19452       <div class="tags">
19453
19454
19455         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
19456
19457
19458       </div>
19459     </div>
19460     <div class="padding"></div>
19461
19462     <div class="entry">
19463       <div class="title">
19464         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html">Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter</a>
19465       </div>
19466       <div class="date">
19467         27th May 2012
19468       </div>
19469       <div class="body">
19470         <p>In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the
19471 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
19472 mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
19473 up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils.  His name was Ralf
19474 Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
19475 since then, helping to make sure the
19476 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
19477 Squeeze</a> release became as good as it is..</p>
19478
19479 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
19480
19481 <p>I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
19482 Mathematics, and Computer Science ("Informatik"). During the past 12
19483 years (since 2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
19484 also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
19485 O- or A-level ("Abitur").  For quite as long, I've been taking care of
19486 our computer network.</p>
19487
19488 <p>Now, in my early 40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
19489 spare time together with my wife, our son (3 years) and our daughter
19490 (4 months).</p>
19491
19492 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
19493 project?</strong></p>
19494
19495 <p>We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
19496 my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
19497 very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
19498 ("Best Newcomer Distribution", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
19499 to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt, 2005 (IIRC). Few
19500 months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
19501 (Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others.  For more
19502 than 7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
19503 our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
19504 approximately 50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
19505 locally installed Skolelinux image.  As a consequence, I joined quite
19506 a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
19507 (Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
19508 one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.</p>
19509
19510 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19511 Edu?</strong></p>
19512
19513 <p>Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
19514 project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
19515 the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
19516 computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
19517 free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
19518 up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
19519 labs).  Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
19520 administration costs tend towards zero.</p>
19521
19522 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19523 Edu?</strong></p>
19524
19525 <p>While Debian's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
19526 might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
19527 budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
19528 supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
19529 office packages or desktop environments.  These schools have the
19530 option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
19531 capacity to do so.  Another issue is that Debian release cycles
19532 include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
19533 power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
19534 within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
19535 the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
19536 i.e. harder to understand for novices.</p>
19537
19538 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
19539
19540 <p>LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
19541 KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
19542 PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)</p>
19543
19544 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
19545 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
19546
19547 <p><ol>
19548
19549 <li>Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
19550 people really "own" their hardware, to make them understand the
19551 difference between proprietary software products, and free software
19552 developing.</li>
19553
19554 <li>Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany's public schools
19555 there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
19556 licenses), so schools won't benefit from any savings here. This
19557 privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
19558 share among German Skolelinux schools.</li>
19559
19560 <li>Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
19561 trained. In many cases, teachers' software customs are respected by
19562 decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.</li>
19563
19564 <li>Don't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
19565 free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
19566 general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
19567 shared world wide (school books e.g.).</li>
19568
19569 <li>Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
19570 office suites is much above 20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don't
19571 need to know the "ribbon menu" in order to get employed.</li>
19572
19573 <li>Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.</li>
19574
19575 <li>Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
19576 for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
19577 Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials.  And
19578 keep sending documents in ODF formats.</li>
19579
19580 </ol></p>
19581
19582       </div>
19583       <div class="tags">
19584
19585
19586         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>.
19587
19588
19589       </div>
19590     </div>
19591     <div class="padding"></div>
19592
19593     <div class="entry">
19594       <div class="title">
19595         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html">The cost of ODF and OOXML</a>
19596       </div>
19597       <div class="date">
19598         26th May 2012
19599       </div>
19600       <div class="body">
19601         <p>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
19602 claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
19603 government.  I just sent him an email to let him know that his
19604 assumption are most likely wrong.  Sharing it here in case some of my
19605 blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.</p>
19606
19607 <p><blockquote> <p>Hi.  I just noted your
19608 <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>
19609 comment:</p>
19610
19611 <p><blockquote>"They're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
19612 with the help of Google Translate I can't find any figures about the
19613 savings of "moving to a flexible two standard" as claimed by the
19614 Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let's take
19615 it, and the £500 million figure for the UK, on trust."
19616 </blockquote></p>
19617
19618 <p>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated.  I believe it is
19619 the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around 2007,
19620 and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
19621 at the content.  In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
19622 will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
19623 existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
19624 formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
19625 ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
19626 10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver.  In
19627 reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
19628 receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
19629 would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not 20 minutes
19630 of wasted effort.</p>
19631
19632 <p>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
19633 transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending 10
19634 minutes converting to ODF. :)</p>
19635
19636 <p>See
19637 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php</a>
19638 and
19639 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php</a>
19640 for background information.  Norwegian only, sorry. :)</p>
19641 </blockquote></p>
19642
19643       </div>
19644       <div class="tags">
19645
19646
19647         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>.
19648
19649
19650       </div>
19651     </div>
19652     <div class="padding"></div>
19653
19654     <div class="entry">
19655       <div class="title">
19656         <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>
19657       </div>
19658       <div class="date">
19659         18th May 2012
19660       </div>
19661       <div class="body">
19662         <p>In january, I
19663 <a href="http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2012/01/17/colorhug-has-arrived/">discovered
19664 the ColorHug</a>, a USB dongle from
19665 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">Hughski</a> to calibrate
19666 the color on a computer screen.  The software required is
19667 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">included
19668 in Debian</a>, and I decided back then to preorder from the next
19669 batch.  Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the
19670 opportunity to order.  Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the
19671 delivery.  I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it
19672 should go in the mail on monday. :)</p>
19673
19674 <p>If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended
19675 colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software
19676 drivers. :)</p>
19677
19678       </div>
19679       <div class="tags">
19680
19681
19682         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
19683
19684
19685       </div>
19686     </div>
19687     <div class="padding"></div>
19688
19689     <div class="entry">
19690       <div class="title">
19691         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html">Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner</a>
19692       </div>
19693       <div class="date">
19694         13th May 2012
19695       </div>
19696       <div class="body">
19697         <p>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
19698 publish another interview with the people behind
19699 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
19700 This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
19701 years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
19702 details get right before release.
19703
19704 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
19705
19706 <p>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
19707 Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany.  I worked nearly 20 years as
19708 certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
19709 international company for machinery and equipment.  Since 2011 I'm a
19710 certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
19711 documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer.  From April this year
19712 I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
19713 manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.</p>
19714
19715 <p>My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
19716 it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
19717 home since 2006.</p>
19718
19719 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
19720 project?</strong></p>
19721
19722 <p>Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
19723 daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
19724 middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
19725 him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
19726 asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
19727 computers in use. I answered: "Yes".</p>
19728
19729 <p>Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
19730 running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
19731 gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
19732 network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
19733 and with a lot of fun.  About one year later the school was connected
19734 to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
19735 building.  That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
19736 Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
19737 being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
19738 costs for things like licence and software.  So I searched for a
19739 school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
19740 people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
19741 prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school.  I
19742 managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
19743 the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
19744 Bielefeld in December of 2006.</p>
19745
19746 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19747 Edu?</strong></p>
19748
19749 <p>When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
19750 for me as today.</p>
19751
19752 <p>In the past there were advantages like:</p>
19753
19754 <p><ul>
19755
19756 <li>I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
19757 they had little money to spent for computers and software.</li>
19758
19759 <li>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
19760 cost.</li>
19761
19762 <li>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
19763 schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
19764 clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
19765 infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
19766 server</li>
19767
19768 <li>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
19769 school.</li>
19770
19771 </ul></p>
19772
19773 <p>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
19774 came up in this way:</p>
19775
19776 <p><ul>
19777
19778 <li>Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
19779 now.</li>
19780
19781 <li>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
19782 have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
19783 because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.</li>
19784
19785 <li>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
19786 management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
19787 interfaces used in the past.</li>
19788
19789 <li>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
19790 different needs.</li>
19791
19792 <li>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.</li>
19793
19794 <li>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
19795 world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
19796 is sharing knowledge and minds.</li>
19797
19798 <li>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
19799 solved today by Debian Edu. </li>
19800
19801 </ul></p>
19802
19803 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19804 Edu?</strong></p>
19805
19806 <p><ul>
19807
19808 <li>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
19809 their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
19810 whole municipality areas.</li>
19811
19812 <li>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
19813 enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
19814 politicians.</li>
19815
19816 <li>Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.</li>
19817
19818 </ul></p>
19819
19820 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
19821
19822 <p>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
19823 computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
19824 use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
19825 KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
19826 need from the KDE environment.  On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
19827 screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.</p>
19828
19829 <p>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
19830 and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
19831 rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
19832 with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
19833 and the whole family.  I probably forgot something.</p>
19834
19835 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
19836 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
19837
19838 <p>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
19839 Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
19840 countries and areas all over the world.</p>
19841
19842       </div>
19843       <div class="tags">
19844
19845
19846         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>.
19847
19848
19849       </div>
19850     </div>
19851     <div class="padding"></div>
19852
19853     <div class="entry">
19854       <div class="title">
19855         <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>
19856       </div>
19857       <div class="date">
19858         30th April 2012
19859       </div>
19860       <div class="body">
19861         <p><!-- IMG_5869.JPG -->
19862 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-1611.jpeg"></p>
19863
19864 <p>I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a
19865 common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway.
19866 But the last ones have not really been up to the task.  My last
19867 cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the
19868 time, and cutting my head took forever.  And the one before that did
19869 not work very well either.  We have looked for something better for a
19870 while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we
19871 discovered that there are indeed better tools available.  But these
19872 are not marketed and sold to "regular consumers".  The hair saloons
19873 can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell
19874 companies.  The models they sell, are very different from the ones
19875 available from Elkjøp and Lefdal.  The main difference is their
19876 efficiency.  It would cut my hair in 5 minutes, instead of the 30-40
19877 minutes required by my impotent Braun.  The hairdresser I visited had
19878 a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the
19879 producer.  But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.</p>
19880
19881 <p>The next step was to find somewhere to buy it.  This was not
19882 straight forward.  The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser
19883 did not want to sell anything to me.  But searching for the model on
19884 the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for
19885 around NOK 4000,-.  This was a bit much.  We kept searching and
19886 finally found a Danish supplier
19887 <a href="http://nicehair.dk/panasonic-er-1611-professionel-hartrimmer.html">selling
19888 it for around NOK 1800,-</a>.  We ordered one, and it arrived a few
19889 days ago.</p>
19890
19891 <p>The instructions said it had to charge for 8 hours when we started
19892 to use it, so we left it charging over night.  Normally it will only
19893 need one hour to charge.  The following evening we successfully tested
19894 it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair
19895 cutter.  The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter
19896 toys.</p>
19897
19898       </div>
19899       <div class="tags">
19900
19901
19902         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
19903
19904
19905       </div>
19906     </div>
19907     <div class="padding"></div>
19908
19909     <div class="entry">
19910       <div class="title">
19911         <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>
19912       </div>
19913       <div class="date">
19914         26th April 2012
19915       </div>
19916       <div class="body">
19917         <p>In <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article243690.ece">an
19918 article today</a> published by Computerworld Norway, the photographer
19919 <a href="http://www.urke.com/eirik/">Eirik Helland Urke</a> reports
19920 that the video editor application included with
19921 <a href="http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs">HTC One
19922 X</a> have some quite surprising terms of use.  The article is mostly
19923 based on the twitter message from mister Urke, stating:
19924
19925 <p><blockquote>
19926 "<a href="http://twitter.com/urke/status/194062269724897280">Drøy
19927 brukeravtale: HTC kan bruke MINE redigerte videoer kommersielt. Selv
19928 kan jeg KUN bruke dem privat.</a>"
19929 </blockquote></p>
19930
19931 <p>I quickly translated it to this English message:</p>
19932
19933 <p><blockquote>
19934 "Arrogant user agreement: HTC can use MY edited videos
19935 commercially.  Although I can ONLY use them privately."
19936 </blockquote></p>
19937
19938 <p>I've been unable to find the text of the license term myself, but
19939 suspect it is a variation of the MPEG-LA terms I
19940 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html">discovered
19941 with my Canon IXUS 130</a>.  The HTC One X specification specifies that
19942 the recording format of the phone is .amr for audio and .mp3 for
19943 video.  AMR is
19944 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec#Licensing_and_patent_issues">Adaptive
19945 Multi-Rate audio codec</a> with patents which according to the
19946 Wikipedia article require an license agreement with
19947 <a href="http://www.voiceage.com/">VoiceAge</a>.  MP4 is
19948 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing">MPEG4 with
19949 H.264</a>, which according to Wikipedia require a licence agreement
19950 with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/">MPEG-LA</a>.</p>
19951
19952 <p>I know why I prefer
19953 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and open
19954 standards</a> also for video.</p>
19955
19956       </div>
19957       <div class="tags">
19958
19959
19960         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>.
19961
19962
19963       </div>
19964     </div>
19965     <div class="padding"></div>
19966
19967     <div class="entry">
19968       <div class="title">
19969         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html">RAND terms - non-reasonable and discriminatory</a>
19970       </div>
19971       <div class="date">
19972         19th April 2012
19973       </div>
19974       <div class="body">
19975         <p>Here in Norway, the
19976 <a href="http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad.html?id=339"> Ministry of
19977 Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs</a> is behind
19978 a <a href="http://standard.difi.no/forvaltningsstandarder">directory of
19979 standards</a> that are recommended or mandatory for use by the
19980 government.  When the directory was created, the people behind it made
19981 an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the
19982 standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions
19983 to the government.  Free software and non-free software could compete
19984 on the same level.</p>
19985
19986 <p>But recently, some standards with RAND
19987 (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing">Reasonable
19988 And Non-Discriminatory</a>) terms have made their way into the
19989 directory.  And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that
19990 standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from
19991 implementing them.  The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per
19992 user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone
19993 willing to pay will get a license.  Both sound great in theory.  In
19994 practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and
19995 be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user.  By
19996 definition, users of free software do not need to register their use.
19997 So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects.
19998 And given that people will use the software without handing any money
19999 to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free
20000 software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights
20001 to implement a standard when the income available is zero.  The result
20002 in these situations is that free software are locked out from
20003 implementing standards with RAND terms.</p>
20004
20005 <p>Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a
20006 standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is
20007 how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory.  Because free
20008 software developers are working in a global market, it does not really
20009 help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable
20010 in Norway.  The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here.
20011 I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more
20012 attention to these issues in the future.</p>
20013
20014 <p>You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms
20015 from Simon Phipps
20016 (<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/11/rand-not-so-reasonable/">RAND:
20017 Not So Reasonable?</a>).</p>
20018
20019 <p>Update 2012-04-21: Just came across a
20020 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/of-microsoft-netscape-patents-and-open-standards/index.htm">blog
20021 post from Glyn Moody</a> over at Computer World UK warning about the
20022 same issue, and urging people to speak out to the UK government.  I
20023 can only urge Norwegian users to do the same for
20024 <a href="http://www.standard.difi.no/hoyring/hoyring-om-nye-anbefalte-it-standarder">the
20025 hearing taking place at the moment</a> (respond before 2012-04-27).
20026 It proposes to require video conferencing standards including
20027 specifications with RAND terms.</p>
20028
20029       </div>
20030       <div class="tags">
20031
20032
20033         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>.
20034
20035
20036       </div>
20037     </div>
20038     <div class="padding"></div>
20039
20040     <div class="entry">
20041       <div class="title">
20042         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html">Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt</a>
20043       </div>
20044       <div class="date">
20045         15th April 2012
20046       </div>
20047       <div class="body">
20048         <p>Behind <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
20049 Skolelinux</a> there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
20050 setting together all the pieces.  This time I present to you Andreas
20051 Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
20052 years.  He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
20053 up in the recently released
20054 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
20055 Edu Squeeze</a> version.</p>
20056
20057 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
20058
20059 <p>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany.  After
20060 studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
20061 Quantum Optics.  After that I worked some years in an optics company.
20062 Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
20063 teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school.  I teach math, physics,
20064 information technology and science/technology.</p>
20065
20066 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20067 project?</strong></p>
20068
20069 <p>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
20070 project because of my interest in education and Debian.  Within the
20071 qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
20072 contributing.</p>
20073
20074 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20075 Edu?</strong></p>
20076
20077 <p>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
20078 out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
20079 Debian Project!</p>
20080
20081 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20082 Edu?</strong></p>
20083
20084 <p>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
20085 downside, too.  In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
20086 setup, if you need or want that.  Further more, it is not easily
20087 possible to upgrade the system to a new release.  It takes much too
20088 long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
20089 because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
20090 rather small and often busy elsewhere.</p>
20091
20092 <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN">Debian LAN</a>
20093 project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.</p>
20094
20095 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
20096
20097 <p>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
20098 on all my machines.  For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
20099 mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing.  At school I
20100 have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.</p>
20101
20102 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20103 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
20104
20105 <p>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
20106 Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
20107 politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader".  The school
20108 administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
20109 Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats.  Even
20110 free browsers do not work for the school administration.  Publishers
20111 of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.</p>
20112
20113 <p>To change this, political work is very important.  Parts of the
20114 political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
20115 However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free'
20116 the system.  There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and
20117 "Free/Open Standards".  I am not sure if all the involved parties have
20118 a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
20119 fraction takes them seriously.  However it might slowly make free
20120 software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.</p>
20121
20122       </div>
20123       <div class="tags">
20124
20125
20126         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>.
20127
20128
20129       </div>
20130     </div>
20131     <div class="padding"></div>
20132
20133     <div class="entry">
20134       <div class="title">
20135         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html">Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye</a>
20136       </div>
20137       <div class="date">
20138          8th April 2012
20139       </div>
20140       <div class="body">
20141         <p>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
20142 like <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>,
20143 and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
20144 contributor to the
20145 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
20146 Edu Squeeze release manual</a>.
20147
20148 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
20149
20150 <p>I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
20151 occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.</p>
20152
20153 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20154 project?</strong></p>
20155
20156 <p>I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user!  The only
20157 reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
20158 around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
20159 they'd like a native English speaker to proofread...  So I did a sweep
20160 through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
20161 "localisation".</p>
20162
20163 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20164 Edu?</strong></p>
20165
20166 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20167 Edu?</strong></p>
20168
20169 <p>These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it!  In fact I
20170 had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the
20171 education system.</p>
20172
20173 <p>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
20174 as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
20175 everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
20176 money on the latest hardware.</p>
20177
20178 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
20179
20180 <p>I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
20181 software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
20182 words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).</p>
20183
20184 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20185 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
20186
20187 <p>Well, I don't know.  I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning
20188 with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
20189 you would hardly need a strategy.</p>
20190
20191       </div>
20192       <div class="tags">
20193
20194
20195         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>.
20196
20197
20198       </div>
20199     </div>
20200     <div class="padding"></div>
20201
20202     <div class="entry">
20203       <div class="title">
20204         <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>
20205       </div>
20206       <div class="date">
20207          6th April 2012
20208       </div>
20209       <div class="body">
20210         <p>Recently I have spent time with
20211 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a> on speeding
20212 up a <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
20213 Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
20214 process I discovered something very surprising.  The reason the KDE
20215 menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
20216 due to the way KDE find application icons.  I discovered that showing
20217 the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
20218 passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server.  Most of these were
20219
20220 NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response.  Because the
20221 ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
20222 ms, the menus would be very slow.  Looking at the strace of kicker in
20223 Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
20224 the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
20225 non-existing files.  KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
20226 one icon file.  In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
20227 around 230 access(2) calls.</p>
20228
20229 <p>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
20230 directories, and the list of possible directories is large.  In
20231 (almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
20232 and .xpm.  The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
20233 mounted.  Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
20234 requests.  I am not the first one to discover this.  I found a
20235 <a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211416">KDE bug report
20236 from 2009</a> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.</p>
20237
20238 <p>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
20239 kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
20240 used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
20241 for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
20242 icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/.  Finally, I add symlinks to
20243 these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
20244 for them.  This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
20245 one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
20246 almost instantaneous.  I'm not quite sure where to make the package
20247 publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.</p>
20248
20249 <p>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
20250 and icon handling, but also the login process.  Not quite sure how to
20251 speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
20252 that is not really an option at the moment.</p>
20253
20254 <p>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
20255 (at) lists.debian.org.</p>
20256
20257 <p>Update 2015-08-04: The
20258 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-edu/upstream/kde-icon-cache.git/">source
20259 of the scripts and associated Debian package</a> is available from the
20260 Debian Edu github repository.</p>
20261
20262       </div>
20263       <div class="tags">
20264
20265
20266         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>.
20267
20268
20269       </div>
20270     </div>
20271     <div class="padding"></div>
20272
20273     <div class="entry">
20274       <div class="title">
20275         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html">Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News</a>
20276       </div>
20277       <div class="date">
20278          5th April 2012
20279       </div>
20280       <div class="body">
20281         <p>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
20282 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a> by
20283 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News.  The result was made public for
20284 non-subscribers today.  I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
20285 for schools.  Check out his article
20286 <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/488805/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
20287 distribution for education</a> if you want to learn more.</p>
20288
20289       </div>
20290       <div class="tags">
20291
20292
20293         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>.
20294
20295
20296       </div>
20297     </div>
20298     <div class="padding"></div>
20299
20300     <div class="entry">
20301       <div class="title">
20302         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html">Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer</a>
20303       </div>
20304       <div class="date">
20305          1st April 2012
20306       </div>
20307       <div class="body">
20308         <p>Germany is a core area for the
20309 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
20310 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
20311 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
20312
20313 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
20314
20315 <p>I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
20316 Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
20317 "<a href="http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/">Westfalen-Kolleg
20318 Dortmund</a>", a second chance school.  Here, young adults is given
20319 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
20320 examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This
20321 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
20322 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.</p>
20323
20324 <p>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
20325 blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other
20326 information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been
20327 teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my
20328 school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at
20329 the end of April this year.</p>
20330
20331 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20332 project?</strong></p>
20333
20334 <p>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
20335 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
20336 Project).  At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
20337 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
20338 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
20339 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
20340 reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
20341 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
20342 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
20343 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
20344 Skolelinux.</p>
20345
20346 <p>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
20347 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
20348 clients.  The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
20349 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
20350 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
20351 the admin teachers.</p>
20352
20353 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20354 Edu?</strong></p>
20355
20356 <p>It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
20357 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
20358 So it was a perfect choice.</p>
20359
20360 <p>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's
20361 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
20362 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp.  It's of
20363 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
20364 a school and to choose where to get support for this.</p>
20365
20366 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20367 Edu?</strong></p>
20368
20369 <p>Nothing yet.</p>
20370
20371 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
20372
20373 <p>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
20374 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
20375 Annotator).  At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
20376 LibreOffice.</p>
20377
20378 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20379 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
20380
20381 <p>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
20382 that doesn't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
20383 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.</p>
20384
20385       </div>
20386       <div class="tags">
20387
20388
20389         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>.
20390
20391
20392       </div>
20393     </div>
20394     <div class="padding"></div>
20395
20396     <div class="entry">
20397       <div class="title">
20398         <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>
20399       </div>
20400       <div class="date">
20401         25th March 2012
20402       </div>
20403       <div class="body">
20404         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
20405
20406 <p>The same Debian Edu developer that did the last screen cast I
20407 published, Wolfgang Schweer, has created a new screen cast showing how
20408 to set up Kmail in Debian Edu Squeze to authenticate using Kerberos,
20409 allowing users to check their local email account without providing
20410 any password. The video is embedded here in quarter size,
20411 and also available from <a href="https://vimeo.com/38601767">vimeo</a>
20412 and download as a
20413 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg
20414 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
20415
20416 <p><video id="kmail-kerberos-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
20417   <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"' />
20418     <p>Download video as
20419       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
20420 </video></p>
20421
20422       </div>
20423       <div class="tags">
20424
20425
20426         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>.
20427
20428
20429       </div>
20430     </div>
20431     <div class="padding"></div>
20432
20433     <div class="entry">
20434       <div class="title">
20435         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html">Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby</a>
20436       </div>
20437       <div class="date">
20438         19th March 2012
20439       </div>
20440       <div class="body">
20441         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
20442 users are spread all across the globe.  The second inteview after
20443 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
20444 Squeeze release</a> was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
20445 long time Linux user in United Kingdom.</p>
20446
20447 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
20448
20449 <p>I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
20450 Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
20451 author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
20452 contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
20453 encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
20454 years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
20455 weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
20456 installations.</p>
20457
20458 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20459 project?</strong></p>
20460
20461 <p>Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
20462 London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
20463 just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
20464 along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
20465 mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
20466 well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
20467 have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
20468 LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
20469 these things we decided to try it.</p>
20470
20471 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20472 Edu?</strong></p>
20473
20474 <p>By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
20475 from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
20476 goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
20477 would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
20478 low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
20479 that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
20480 Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
20481 proprietary software everywhere.</p>
20482
20483 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20484 Edu?</strong></p>
20485
20486 <p>As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
20487 how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
20488 various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
20489 English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
20490 users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!</p>
20491
20492 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
20493
20494 <p>Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
20495 OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
20496 desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
20497 use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
20498 that counts...)</p>
20499
20500 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20501 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
20502
20503 <p>That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
20504 and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
20505 the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
20506 applications".  However, schools today are experiencing budget
20507 constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
20508 XP.  At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
20509 iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
20510 longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
20511 realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
20512 putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
20513 first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.</p>
20514
20515 <p>I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
20516 free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
20517 Edu users in this country has to be part of it.</p>
20518
20519       </div>
20520       <div class="tags">
20521
20522
20523         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>.
20524
20525
20526       </div>
20527     </div>
20528     <div class="padding"></div>
20529
20530     <div class="entry">
20531       <div class="title">
20532         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html">Writing and translating documentation in Debian Edu</a>
20533       </div>
20534       <div class="date">
20535         16th March 2012
20536       </div>
20537       <div class="body">
20538         <p>Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
20539 it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
20540 translated versions in sync.  To do this we have come up with what we
20541 believe is a very efficient work flow.</p>
20542
20543 <ol>
20544
20545 <li>The documentation is written in a
20546 <a href="http://moinmo.in">moinmoin wiki</a> (see for example
20547 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">the
20548 Squeeze release manual</a>) with support for exporting the content as
20549 docbook XML.</li>
20550
20551 <li>This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
20552 .pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
20553 with the translated text.</li>
20554
20555 <li>The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
20556 which part of the original wiki document is new or changed.  They can
20557 use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
20558 the translation.  There is even a system in place to handle translated
20559 images.</li>
20560
20561 <li>The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
20562 XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.</li>
20563
20564 <li>The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
20565 create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.</li>
20566
20567 </ol>
20568
20569 <p>This setup work very well, but have a few issues.  The biggest
20570 issue is that <a href="http://moinmo.in/DocBook">the docbook support
20571 we use in moinmoin</a> is not actively maintained.  The docbook
20572 support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
20573 make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.</p>
20574
20575 <p>If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
20576 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc">debian-edu-doc
20577 package</a>.</p>
20578
20579       </div>
20580       <div class="tags">
20581
20582
20583         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>.
20584
20585
20586       </div>
20587     </div>
20588     <div class="padding"></div>
20589
20590     <div class="entry">
20591       <div class="title">
20592         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html">Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze is out!</a>
20593       </div>
20594       <div class="date">
20595         11th March 2012
20596       </div>
20597       <div class="body">
20598         <p>This weekend we finally published the first stable release of
20599 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> based
20600 on Debian/Squeeze.  The full announcement is
20601 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">available</a>
20602 from the project announcement list.  Now is a good time to test if it
20603 you have not done so already.</p>
20604
20605 <p>I plan to present the new version at
20606 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20120313-skolelinux/">a NUUG
20607 meeting</a> on tuesday.  I look forward to seeing you there if you are
20608 in Oslo, Norway.</p>
20609
20610       </div>
20611       <div class="tags">
20612
20613
20614         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>.
20615
20616
20617       </div>
20618     </div>
20619     <div class="padding"></div>
20620
20621     <div class="entry">
20622       <div class="title">
20623         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html">Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker</a>
20624       </div>
20625       <div class="date">
20626          9th March 2012
20627       </div>
20628       <div class="body">
20629         <p>Inspired by <a href="http://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/interview/">the
20630 interview series</a> conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
20631 interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
20632 community.  This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
20633 more international audience.</p>
20634
20635 <p>While <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
20636 Skolelinux</a> originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
20637 Europe, there are users all around the globe.  One of those far away
20638 from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
20639 and contributor.  It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
20640 work out of the box in Japan.  I got him to answer a few questions,
20641 and am happy to share the response with you. :)
20642
20643
20644 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
20645
20646 <p>My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
20647 and we have three lovely children, aged 15, 14 and 4(!) I am the IT
20648 Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
20649 teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
20650 Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
20651 I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
20652 primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
20653 so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
20654 also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
20655 to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
20656 appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.</p>
20657
20658 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20659 project?</strong></p>
20660
20661 <p>In around 2004 or 5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
20662 server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
20663 samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
20664 Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn't really improve my setup. I
20665 did various desperate searches for things like "school Linux server"
20666 and ended up in a document called "Drift" something or other. Reading
20667 there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
20668 problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
20669 previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
20670 Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
20671 downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
20672 Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
20673 my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.</p>
20674
20675 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20676 Edu?</strong></p>
20677
20678 <p>For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
20679 workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
20680 ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
20681 designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
20682 doesn't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
20683 school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
20684 Japan.</p>
20685
20686 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20687 Edu?</strong></p>
20688
20689 <p>The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
20690 have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
20691 make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
20692 who don't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
20693 important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
20694 instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
20695 default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
20696 kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
20697 Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is.  A
20698 second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
20699 customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
20700 multiplies. For example, backup wasn't working properly in Lenny. It
20701 took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
20702 I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
20703 help.</p>
20704
20705 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
20706
20707 <p>Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
20708 studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
20709 (customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
20710 still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
20711 house, that's very useful for the family photos and music.  At school
20712 the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
20713 have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
20714 day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
20715 installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS.  We also
20716 have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
20717 and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.</p>
20718
20719 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20720 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
20721
20722 <p>Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
20723 and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
20724 popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
20725 to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
20726 file formats and Word than they did 5 years ago.  The Edu aspect is
20727 also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
20728 Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu?  But of course the main attraction is
20729 budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
20730 compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
20731 is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
20732 are not impressed when their USB drive doesn't work, or their browser
20733 doesn't play flash, for example.</p>
20734
20735       </div>
20736       <div class="tags">
20737
20738
20739         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>.
20740
20741
20742       </div>
20743     </div>
20744     <div class="padding"></div>
20745
20746     <div class="entry">
20747       <div class="title">
20748         <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>
20749       </div>
20750       <div class="date">
20751          7th March 2012
20752       </div>
20753       <div class="body">
20754         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
20755
20756 <p>One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a
20757 screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on
20758 Debian Edu Squeeze.  The video is embedded here in quarter size, and
20759 also available from <a href="http://vimeo.com/37675399">vimeo</a> and
20760 download as a
20761 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg
20762 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
20763
20764 <p><video id="gosa-mass-user-create-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
20765   <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"' />
20766     <p>Download video as
20767       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
20768 </video></p>
20769
20770       </div>
20771       <div class="tags">
20772
20773
20774         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>.
20775
20776
20777       </div>
20778     </div>
20779     <div class="padding"></div>
20780
20781     <div class="entry">
20782       <div class="title">
20783         <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>
20784       </div>
20785       <div class="date">
20786          4th March 2012
20787       </div>
20788       <div class="body">
20789         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the third release
20790 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
20791 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
20792 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00000.html">available</a>
20793 from the project announcement list.  Check it out if you
20794 need a software solution for your school.</p>
20795
20796       </div>
20797       <div class="tags">
20798
20799
20800         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>.
20801
20802
20803       </div>
20804     </div>
20805     <div class="padding"></div>
20806
20807     <div class="entry">
20808       <div class="title">
20809         <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>
20810       </div>
20811       <div class="date">
20812          3rd March 2012
20813       </div>
20814       <div class="body">
20815         <p>Many years ago, the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
20816 / Debian Edu project</a> initiated a student project to create a tool
20817 for making stop motion movies.  The proposal came from a teacher
20818 needing such tool on Skolelinux.  The project, called "stopmotion",
20819 was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a
20820 national aware with this great project.  The project was initiated and
20821 mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bjørn Erik Nilsen
20822 and Fredrik Berg Kjølstad.  They got in touch with people at Aardman
20823 Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like
20824 such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by
20825 animators around the globe.  But as is usual after studying, both got
20826 jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the
20827 project, and it has been lingering for a few years now.  Until last
20828 year...</p>
20829
20830 <p>Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the
20831 project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new
20832 name,
20833 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxstopmotion/">linuxstopmotion</a>.
20834 The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using
20835 Internet search engines (try to search for 'stopmotion' to see what I
20836 mean). I've been following
20837 <a href="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxstopmotion-community">the
20838 mailing list</a> and the improvement already in place and planned for
20839 the future is encouraging.  If you want to make stop motion movies.
20840 Check it out. :)</p>
20841
20842       </div>
20843       <div class="tags">
20844
20845
20846         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>.
20847
20848
20849       </div>
20850     </div>
20851     <div class="padding"></div>
20852
20853     <div class="entry">
20854       <div class="title">
20855         <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>
20856       </div>
20857       <div class="date">
20858         27th February 2012
20859       </div>
20860       <div class="body">
20861         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the second release
20862 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
20863 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement did for some
20864 reason not make it the project announcement list, but is
20865 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/02/msg00015.html">available</a>
20866 from the Debian development announcement list.  Check it out if you
20867 need a software solution for your school.</p>
20868
20869       </div>
20870       <div class="tags">
20871
20872
20873         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>.
20874
20875
20876       </div>
20877     </div>
20878     <div class="padding"></div>
20879
20880     <div class="entry">
20881       <div class="title">
20882         <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>
20883       </div>
20884       <div class="date">
20885         19th February 2012
20886       </div>
20887       <div class="body">
20888         <p>One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
20889 wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
20890 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
20891 on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
20892 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00001.html">available</a>
20893 on the project announcement list.  Check it out if you need a software
20894 solution for your school.</p>
20895
20896       </div>
20897       <div class="tags">
20898
20899
20900         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>.
20901
20902
20903       </div>
20904     </div>
20905     <div class="padding"></div>
20906
20907     <div class="entry">
20908       <div class="title">
20909         <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>
20910       </div>
20911       <div class="date">
20912         14th February 2012
20913       </div>
20914       <div class="body">
20915         <p>Once in a while my home server have disk problems.  Thanks to Linux
20916 Software RAID, I have not lost data yet (but
20917 <a href="http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/34532">I was
20918 close</a> this summer :).  But once a disk is starting to behave
20919 funny, a practical problem present itself.  How to get from the Linux
20920 device name (like /dev/sdd) to something that can be used to identify
20921 the disk when the computer is turned off?  In my case I have SATA
20922 disks with a unique ID printed on the label.  All I need is a way to
20923 figure out how to query the disk to get the ID out.</p>
20924
20925 <p>After fumbling a bit, I
20926 <a href="http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-getting-scsi-ide-harddisk-information/">found
20927 that hdparm -I</a> will report the disk serial number, which is
20928 printed on the disk label.  The following (almost) one-liner can be
20929 used to look up the ID of all the failed disks:</p>
20930
20931 <blockquote><pre>
20932 for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep '(F)'|tr ' ' "\n"|grep '(F)'|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u);
20933 do
20934     printf "Failed disk $d: "
20935     hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep 'Serial Num'
20936 done
20937 </blockquote></pre>
20938
20939 <p>Putting it here to make sure I do not have to search for it the
20940 next time, and in case other find it useful.</p>
20941
20942 <p>At the moment I have two failing disk. :(</p>
20943
20944 <blockquote><pre>
20945 Failed disk sdd1:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
20946 Failed disk sdd2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
20947 Failed disk sde2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1840589
20948 </blockquote></pre>
20949
20950 <p>The last time I had failing disks, I added the serial number on
20951 labels I printed and stuck on the short sides of each disk, to be able
20952 to figure out which disk to take out of the box without having to
20953 remove each disk to look at the physical vendor label.  The vendor
20954 label is at the top of the disk, which is hidden when the disks are
20955 mounted inside my box.</p>
20956
20957 <p>I really wish the check_linux_raid Nagios plugin for checking Linux
20958 Software RAID in the
20959 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nagios-plugins.html">nagios-plugins-standard</a>
20960 debian package would look up this value automatically, as it would
20961 make the plugin a lot more useful when my disks fail.  At the moment
20962 it only report a failure when there are no more spares left (it really
20963 should warn as soon as a disk is failing), and it do not tell me which
20964 disk(s) is failing when the RAID is running short on disks.</p>
20965
20966       </div>
20967       <div class="tags">
20968
20969
20970         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>.
20971
20972
20973       </div>
20974     </div>
20975     <div class="padding"></div>
20976
20977     <div class="entry">
20978       <div class="title">
20979         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">Automatic proxy configuration with Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
20980       </div>
20981       <div class="date">
20982         13th February 2012
20983       </div>
20984       <div class="body">
20985         <p>New in the Squeeze version of
20986 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is the
20987 ability for clients to automatically configure their proxy settings
20988 based on their environment.  We want all systems on the client to use
20989 the WPAD based proxy definition fetched from <tt>http://wpad/wpad.dat</tt>, to
20990 allow sites to control the proxy setting from a central place and make
20991 sure clients do not have hard coded proxy settings.  The schools can
20992 change the global proxy setting by editing
20993 <tt>tjener:/etc/debian-edu/www/wpad.dat</tt> and the change propagate
20994 to all Debian Edu clients in the network.</p>
20995
20996 <p>The problem is that some systems do not understand the WPAD system.
20997 In other words, how do one get from a WPAD file like this (this is a
20998 simple one, they can run arbitrary code):</p>
20999
21000 <blockquote><pre>
21001 function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
21002 {
21003    if (!isResolvable(host) ||
21004        isPlainHostName(host) ||
21005        dnsDomainIs(host, ".intern"))
21006       return "DIRECT";
21007    else
21008       return "PROXY webcache:3128; DIRECT";
21009 }
21010 </pre></blockquote>
21011
21012 <p>to a proxy setting in the process environment looking like this:</p>
21013
21014 <blockquote><pre>
21015 http_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
21016 ftp_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
21017 </pre></blockquote>
21018
21019 <p>To do this conversion I developed a perl script that will execute
21020 the javascript fragment in the WPAD file and return the proxy that
21021 would be used for
21022 <tt><a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a></tt>,
21023 and insert this extracted proxy URL in <tt>/etc/environment</tt> and
21024 <tt>/etc/apt/apt.conf</tt>.  The perl script wpad-extract work just
21025 fine in Squeeze, but in Wheezy the library it need to run the
21026 javascript code is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/631045">no longer
21027 able to build</a> because the C library it depended on is now a C++
21028 library.  I hope someone find a solution to that problem before Wheezy
21029 is frozen.  An alternative would be for us to rewrite wpad-extract to
21030 use some other javascript library currently working in Wheezy, but no
21031 known alternative is known at the moment.</p>
21032
21033 <p>This automatic proxy system allow the roaming workstation (aka
21034 laptop) setup in Debian Edu/Squeeze to use the proxy when the laptop
21035 is connected to the backbone network in a Debian Edu setup, and to
21036 automatically use any proxy present and announced using the WPAD
21037 feature when it is connected to other networks.  And if no proxy is
21038 announced, direct connections will be used instead.</p>
21039
21040 <p>Silently using a proxy announced on the network might be a privacy
21041 or security problem.  But those controlling DHCP and DNS on a network
21042 could just as easily set up a transparent proxy, and force all HTTP
21043 and FTP connections to use a proxy anyway, so I consider that
21044 distinction to be academic.  If you are afraid of using the wrong
21045 proxy, you should avoid connecting to the network in question in the
21046 first place.  In Debian Edu, the proxy setup is updated using dhcp and
21047 ifupdown hooks, to make sure the configuration is updated every time
21048 the network setup changes.</p>
21049
21050 <p>The WPAD system is documented in a
21051 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-01">IETF
21052 draft</a> and a
21053 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol">Wikipedia
21054 page</a> for those that want to learn more.</p>
21055
21056       </div>
21057       <div class="tags">
21058
21059
21060         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>.
21061
21062
21063       </div>
21064     </div>
21065     <div class="padding"></div>
21066
21067     <div class="entry">
21068       <div class="title">
21069         <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>
21070       </div>
21071       <div class="date">
21072          5th February 2012
21073       </div>
21074       <div class="body">
21075         <p>Since the Lenny version of
21076 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, a
21077 feature to save power have been included.  It is as simple as it is
21078 practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again
21079 in the morning.  This is done using the
21080 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/shutdown-at-night.html">shutdown-at-night</a> Debian package.</p>
21081
21082 <p>To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to
21083 the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts.  For Debian Edu, this is done in
21084 LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check
21085 every hour from 16:00 until 06:00 to see if the machine is unused, and
21086 shut it down if it is.  If the hardware in question is supported by
21087 the
21088 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvram-wakeup.html">nvram-wakeup</a>
21089 package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around 07:00 +-
21090 10 minutes.  If this isn't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to
21091 try to turn on the client.  The wake-on-lan option is only documented
21092 and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.</p>
21093
21094 <p>It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can
21095 blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like
21096 the common setup for a classroom.  The nvram-wakeup method only work
21097 for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock.  I've seen old
21098 machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were
21099 starting from 0 (or was it 1990?) every boot.  If you have one of
21100 those, you have to turn on the computer manually.</p>
21101
21102 <p>The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can
21103 also be used outside the Debian Edu environment.  For those without a
21104 central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file
21105 <tt>/etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night</tt> to enable it.
21106 Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?</p>
21107
21108       </div>
21109       <div class="tags">
21110
21111
21112         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>.
21113
21114
21115       </div>
21116     </div>
21117     <div class="padding"></div>
21118
21119     <div class="entry">
21120       <div class="title">
21121         <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>
21122       </div>
21123       <div class="date">
21124          4th February 2012
21125       </div>
21126       <div class="body">
21127         <p>I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and
21128 publish the third beta version of
21129 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
21130 on Squeeze.  If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with
21131 out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and
21132 installing new machines, check it out.  If you need a software
21133 solution for your school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
21134 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00000.html">available</a>
21135 on the project announcement list.</p>
21136
21137 <p>I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since
21138 beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):</p>
21139
21140 <ul>
21141
21142 <li>It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from
21143   10.0.0.0/8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after
21144   the installation.</li>
21145
21146 <li>Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main
21147   Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.</li>
21148
21149 <li>The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all
21150   disabled queues are restarted every hour.  This should cut down on
21151   the amount of manual administration needed for printers.</li>
21152
21153 <li>The set of initial users have been changed.  Now a personal user
21154   for the local system administrator is created during installation
21155   instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users,
21156   and this user is granted administrative privileges using group
21157   membership.  This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep
21158   up to date on the system.</li>
21159
21160 </ul>
21161
21162 <p>The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my
21163 private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home.  I will use it look
21164 for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the
21165 final Squeeze release is published.</p>
21166
21167 <p>Next weekend the project organise a
21168 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00001.html">developer
21169 gathering</a> in Oslo.  We will continue the work on the Squeeze
21170 version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version.  Perhaps I
21171 will see you there?</p>
21172
21173       </div>
21174       <div class="tags">
21175
21176
21177         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>.
21178
21179
21180       </div>
21181     </div>
21182     <div class="padding"></div>
21183
21184     <div class="entry">
21185       <div class="title">
21186         <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>
21187       </div>
21188       <div class="date">
21189         27th January 2012
21190       </div>
21191       <div class="body">
21192         <p>With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
21193 This is the sad fact of todays computers.  In the next version of
21194 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
21195 on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
21196 firmware blobs easier to handle.  The common use case I run into is a
21197 laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
21198 work, but there are other use cases as well.</p>
21199
21200 <p>First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
21201 with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
21202 included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
21203 during installation.  This take care firmware for network devices used
21204 by the installer when installing from from local media.  But for
21205 example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
21206 not taken care of by this.</p>
21207
21208 <p>For non-network devices, we provide the script
21209 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware</tt> which
21210 search through the <tt>dmesg</tt> output for drivers requesting extra
21211 firmware.  The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
21212 file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
21213 the requested firmware file(s) is installed.  I have proposed to do
21214 something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
21215 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">#655507</a>), to allow PXE
21216 installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better.  Run the
21217 script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
21218 firmware packages.</p>
21219
21220 <p>Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
21221 because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
21222 working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
21223 included to be able to install at all.  To fill the PXE installation
21224 initrd with extra firmware, the
21225 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware</tt> script is
21226 provided.  Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
21227 PXE initrd with firmware packages.</p>
21228
21229 <p>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
21230 network cards working.  For this,
21231 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware</tt> is
21232 provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs.  It is used
21233 the same way as the other firmware related tools.</p>
21234
21235 <p>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation.  We
21236 do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
21237 non-free software, and it is their choice.</p>
21238
21239 <p>We plan to release beta3 this weekend.  You might want to give it a
21240 try.</p>
21241
21242       </div>
21243       <div class="tags">
21244
21245
21246         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>.
21247
21248
21249       </div>
21250     </div>
21251     <div class="padding"></div>
21252
21253     <div class="entry">
21254       <div class="title">
21255         <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>
21256       </div>
21257       <div class="date">
21258         25th January 2012
21259       </div>
21260       <div class="body">
21261         <p>The next version of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu
21262 / Skolelinux</a> will include a new tool
21263 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp</tt>, which can be used to quickly set up all
21264 the computers in a school without much manual labour.  Here is a short
21265 summary on how to use it to set up a new school.</p>
21266
21267 <p>First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
21268 central server in the network.  Next, PXE boot all the client machines
21269 as thin clients and wait 5 minutes after the last client booted to
21270 allow the clients to report their existence to the central server.  When
21271 this is done, log on to the central server and run
21272 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a</tt> in the <tt>konsole</tt> to use the
21273 collected information to generate system objects in LDAP.  The output
21274 will look similar to this:</p>
21275
21276 <p><blockquote><pre>
21277 % sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
21278 info: Updating machine tjener.intern [10.0.2.2] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:05.
21279 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.
21280
21281 Enter password if you want to activate these changes, and ^c to abort.
21282
21283 Connecting to LDAP as cn=admin,ou=ldap-access,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
21284 enter password: *******
21285 %
21286 </pre></blockquote></p>
21287
21288 <p>After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
21289 root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
21290 populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
21291 automatically generated names.  The final step to set up the school is
21292 then to log into <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa</a>,
21293 the web based user, group and system administration system to change
21294 system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
21295 enable DHCP and DNS for the systems.  All clients that should be used
21296 as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
21297 group.  After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
21298 and get their assigned names and group based configuration
21299 automatically.</p>
21300
21301 <p>We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
21302 enabled this weekend.  You might want to give it a try.</p>
21303
21304 <p>Update 2012-01-28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
21305 hosts, one need to add the option -a.  I forgot to mention this in my
21306 original text, and have added it to the text now.</p>
21307
21308       </div>
21309       <div class="tags">
21310
21311
21312         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>.
21313
21314
21315       </div>
21316     </div>
21317     <div class="padding"></div>
21318
21319     <div class="entry">
21320       <div class="title">
21321         <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>
21322       </div>
21323       <div class="date">
21324         10th January 2012
21325       </div>
21326       <div class="body">
21327         <p>In the Squeeze version of
21328 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> soon
21329 to be released, users of the system will get their default browser
21330 start page set from LDAP, allowing the system administrator to point
21331 all users to the school web page by updating one setting in LDAP.  In
21332 addition to setting the default start page when a machine boots, users
21333 are shown the same page as a welcome page when they log in for the
21334 first time.</p>
21335
21336 <p>The LDAP object dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no have an attribute
21337 labeledURI with "http://www/ LDAP for Debian Edu/Skolelinux" as the
21338 default content.  By changing this value to another URL, all users get
21339 to see the page behind this new URL.</p>
21340
21341 <p>An easy way to update it is by using the ldapvi tool.  It can be
21342 called as "<tt>ldapvi -ZD '(cn=admin)'</tt>' to update LDAP with the
21343 new setting.</p>
21344
21345 <p>We have written the code to adjust the default start page and show
21346 the welcome page, and I wonder if there is an easier way to do this
21347 from within Iceweasel instead.</p>
21348
21349       </div>
21350       <div class="tags">
21351
21352
21353         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>.
21354
21355
21356       </div>
21357     </div>
21358     <div class="padding"></div>
21359
21360     <div class="entry">
21361       <div class="title">
21362         <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>
21363       </div>
21364       <div class="date">
21365          7th January 2012
21366       </div>
21367       <div class="body">
21368         <p>I am happy to announce that today we managed to wrap up and publish
21369 the second beta version of
21370 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>.  If
21371 you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE
21372 configuration for running diskless machines and installing new
21373 machines, check it out.  If you need a software solution for your
21374 school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
21375 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00000.html">available</a>
21376 on the project announcement list.</p>
21377
21378       </div>
21379       <div class="tags">
21380
21381
21382         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>.
21383
21384
21385       </div>
21386     </div>
21387     <div class="padding"></div>
21388
21389     <div class="entry">
21390       <div class="title">
21391         <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>
21392       </div>
21393       <div class="date">
21394          3rd January 2012
21395       </div>
21396       <div class="body">
21397         <p>During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of
21398 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ready
21399 for release.  The initial problem I looked at was particularly
21400 interesting.</p>
21401
21402 <P>The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it
21403 post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find
21404 the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I
21405 integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from
21406 scratch.  I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors,
21407 remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and
21408 wrap up its tasks.</p>
21409
21410 <p>Eventually the cause was found.  The kernel was simply running out
21411 of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more.
21412 Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries
21413 to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but
21414 because I was typing.</P>
21415
21416 <p>The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at
21417 the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking
21418 /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the
21419 installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do 'find /' to
21420 generate some disk IO.  Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is
21421 one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to
21422 generate entropy.</p>
21423
21424 <p>The fix is in
21425 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/Installation">beta1
21426 of the Debian Edu/Squeeze</a> version, and we
21427 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu">welcome more testers and
21428 developers</a>.  We plan to release beta2 this weekend.</p>
21429
21430       </div>
21431       <div class="tags">
21432
21433
21434         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>.
21435
21436
21437       </div>
21438     </div>
21439     <div class="padding"></div>
21440
21441     <div class="entry">
21442       <div class="title">
21443         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
21444       </div>
21445       <div class="date">
21446         21st November 2011
21447       </div>
21448       <div class="body">
21449         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
21450 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
21451 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
21452 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
21453 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
21454 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
21455 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
21456 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
21457 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
21458 the tools to do so.</p>
21459
21460 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
21461 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
21462 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
21463 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
21464
21465 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
21466 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
21467 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
21468 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
21469 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
21470 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
21471 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
21472 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
21473
21474 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
21475 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
21476 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
21477
21478 <p><pre>
21479 #!/usr/bin/perl
21480 use strict;
21481 use warnings;
21482 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
21483 BEGIN {
21484     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
21485     my %rhelmodules = (
21486         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
21487         );
21488     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
21489         eval "use $module;";
21490         if ($@) {
21491             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
21492             system("yum install -y $pkg");
21493             eval "use $module;";
21494         }
21495     }
21496 }
21497 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
21498
21499 upgrade_dell();
21500
21501 exit 0;
21502
21503 sub run_firmware_script {
21504     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
21505     unless ($script) {
21506         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
21507         exit 1
21508     }
21509     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
21510
21511     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
21512         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
21513     } else {
21514         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
21515     }
21516 }
21517
21518 sub run_firmware_scripts {
21519     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
21520     # Run firmware packages
21521     for my $dir (@dirs) {
21522         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
21523         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
21524         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
21525             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
21526             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
21527         }
21528         closedir $dh;
21529     }
21530 }
21531
21532 sub download {
21533     my $url = shift;
21534     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
21535     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
21536 }
21537
21538 sub upgrade_dell {
21539     my @dirs;
21540     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
21541     chomp $product;
21542
21543     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
21544
21545         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
21546         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
21547
21548         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
21549             CLEANUP => 1
21550             );
21551         chdir($tmpdir);
21552         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
21553         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
21554         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
21555         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
21556         my $fwopts = "-q";
21557         if (@paths) {
21558             for my $url (@paths) {
21559                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
21560             }
21561             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
21562         } else {
21563             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
21564             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
21565         }
21566         chdir('/');
21567     } else {
21568         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
21569         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
21570     }
21571 }
21572
21573 sub fetch_dell_fw {
21574     my $path = shift;
21575     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
21576     download($url);
21577 }
21578
21579 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
21580 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
21581 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
21582 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
21583     my $filename = shift;
21584
21585     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
21586     chomp $product;
21587     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
21588
21589     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
21590
21591     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
21592     my @paths;
21593     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
21594         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
21595         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
21596         my $oscode;
21597         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
21598             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
21599         } else {
21600             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
21601         }
21602         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
21603         {
21604             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
21605         }
21606     }
21607     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
21608         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
21609
21610         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
21611         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
21612
21613         my $cpath = $component->{path};
21614         for my $path (@paths) {
21615             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
21616                 push(@paths, $cpath);
21617             }
21618         }
21619     }
21620     return @paths;
21621 }
21622 </pre>
21623
21624 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
21625 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
21626 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
21627 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
21628 outdated.</p>
21629
21630       </div>
21631       <div class="tags">
21632
21633
21634         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>.
21635
21636
21637       </div>
21638     </div>
21639     <div class="padding"></div>
21640
21641     <div class="entry">
21642       <div class="title">
21643         <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>
21644       </div>
21645       <div class="date">
21646          7th October 2011
21647       </div>
21648       <div class="body">
21649         <p>Here in Norway the public libraries are debating with the
21650 publishing houses how to handle electronic books.  Surprisingly, the
21651 libraries seem to be willing to accept digital restriction mechanisms
21652 (DRM) on books and renting e-books with artificial scarcity from the
21653 publishing houses.  Time limited renting (2-3 years) is one proposed
21654 model, and only allowing X borrowers for each book is another.
21655 Personally I find it amazing that libraries are even considering such
21656 models.</p>
21657
21658 <p>Anyway, while reading <a href="http://boklaben.no/?p=220">part of
21659 this debate</a>, it occurred to me that someone should present a more
21660 sensible approach to the libraries, to allow its borrowers to get used
21661 to a better model.  The idea is simple:</p>
21662
21663 <p>Create a computer system for the libraries, either in the form of a
21664 Live DVD or a installable distribution, that provide a simple kiosk
21665 solution to hand out free e-books.  As a start, the books distributed
21666 by <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about
21667 36,000 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a>
21668 (1149 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The
21669 Internet Archive</a> (3,033,748 books) could be included, but any book
21670 where the copyright has expired or with a free licence could be
21671 distributed.</p>
21672
21673 <p>The computer system would make it easy to:</p>
21674
21675 <ul>
21676
21677 <li>Copy e-books into a USB stick, reading tablets, cell phones and
21678   other relevant equipment.</li>
21679
21680 <li>Show the books for reading on the the screen in the library.</li>
21681
21682 </ul>
21683
21684 <p>In addition to such kiosk solution, there should probably be a web
21685 site as well to allow people easy access to these books without
21686 visiting the library.  The site would be the distribution point for
21687 the kiosk systems, which would connect regularly to fetch any new
21688 books available.</p>
21689
21690 <p>Are there anyone working on a system like this?  I guess it would
21691 fit any library in the world, and not just the Norwegian public
21692 libraries. :)</p>
21693
21694       </div>
21695       <div class="tags">
21696
21697
21698         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>.
21699
21700
21701       </div>
21702     </div>
21703     <div class="padding"></div>
21704
21705     <div class="entry">
21706       <div class="title">
21707         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">Ripping problematic DVDs using dvdbackup and genisoimage</a>
21708       </div>
21709       <div class="date">
21710         17th September 2011
21711       </div>
21712       <div class="body">
21713         <p>For convenience, I want to store copies of all my DVDs on my file
21714 server.  It allow me to save shelf space flat while still having my
21715 movie collection easily available.  It also make it possible to let
21716 the kids see their favourite DVDs without wearing the physical copies
21717 down.  I prefer to store the DVDs as ISOs to keep the DVD menu and
21718 subtitle options intact.  It also ensure that the entire film is one
21719 file on the disk.  As this is for personal use, the ripping is
21720 perfectly legal here in Norway.</p>
21721
21722 <p>Normally I rip the DVDs using dd like this:</p>
21723
21724 <blockquote><pre>
21725 #!/bin/sh
21726 # apt-get install lsdvd
21727 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
21728 dd if=/dev/dvd of=/storage/dvds/$title.iso bs=1M
21729 </pre></blockquote>
21730
21731 <p>But some DVDs give a input/output error when I read it, and I have
21732 been looking for a better alternative.  I have no idea why this I/O
21733 error occur, but suspect my DVD drive, the Linux kernel driver or
21734 something fishy with the DVDs in question.  Or perhaps all three.</p>
21735
21736 <p>Anyway, I believe I found a solution today using dvdbackup and
21737 genisoimage.  This script gave me a working ISO for a problematic
21738 movie by first extracting the DVD file system and then re-packing it
21739 back as an ISO.
21740
21741 <blockquote><pre>
21742 #!/bin/sh
21743 # apt-get install lsdvd dvdbackup genisoimage
21744 set -e
21745 tmpdir=/storage/dvds/
21746 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
21747 dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M -o $tmpdir -n$title
21748 genisoimage -dvd-video -o $tmpdir/$title.iso $tmpdir/$title
21749 rm -rf $tmpdir/$title
21750 </pre></blockquote>
21751
21752 <p>Anyone know of a better way available in Debian/Squeeze?</p>
21753
21754 <p>Update 2011-09-18: I got a tip from Konstantin Khomoutov about the
21755 readom program from the wodim package.  It is specially written to
21756 read optical media, and is called like this: <tt>readom dev=/dev/dvd
21757 f=image.iso</tt>.  It got 6 GB along with the problematic Cars DVD
21758 before it failed, and failed right away with a Timmy Time DVD.</p>
21759
21760 <p>Next, I got a tip from Bastian Blank about
21761 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">his
21762 program python-dvdvideo</a>, which seem to be just what I am looking
21763 for.  Tested it with my problematic Timmy Time DVD, and it succeeded
21764 creating a ISO image.  The git source built and installed just fine in
21765 Squeeze, so I guess this will be my tool of choice in the future.</p>
21766
21767       </div>
21768       <div class="tags">
21769
21770
21771         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>.
21772
21773
21774       </div>
21775     </div>
21776     <div class="padding"></div>
21777
21778     <div class="entry">
21779       <div class="title">
21780         <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>
21781       </div>
21782       <div class="date">
21783          4th August 2011
21784       </div>
21785       <div class="body">
21786         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
21787 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
21788 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
21789 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
21790 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
21791 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
21792 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
21793 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
21794 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
21795
21796 <p><blockquote>
21797 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
21798 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
21799 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
21800 </blockquote></p>
21801
21802 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
21803 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
21804 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
21805 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
21806 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
21807 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
21808 hard to explain.</p>
21809
21810 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
21811 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
21812 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
21813 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
21814 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
21815 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
21816 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
21817 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
21818 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
21819 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
21820 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
21821 mode).</p>
21822
21823 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
21824 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
21825 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
21826 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
21827 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
21828 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
21829 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
21830 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
21831 after visiting single user mode.</p>
21832
21833 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
21834 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
21835 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
21836 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
21837 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
21838 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
21839 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
21840 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
21841
21842 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
21843 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
21844 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
21845
21846       </div>
21847       <div class="tags">
21848
21849
21850         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>.
21851
21852
21853       </div>
21854     </div>
21855     <div class="padding"></div>
21856
21857     <div class="entry">
21858       <div class="title">
21859         <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>
21860       </div>
21861       <div class="date">
21862         30th July 2011
21863       </div>
21864       <div class="body">
21865         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
21866 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
21867 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
21868 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
21869 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
21870 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
21871 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
21872 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
21873 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
21874 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
21875 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
21876 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
21877 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
21878
21879 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
21880 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
21881 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
21882 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
21883 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
21884 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
21885 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
21886 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
21887 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
21888
21889 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
21890 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
21891 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
21892 is presented.</p>
21893
21894 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
21895 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
21896 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
21897 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
21898 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
21899 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
21900 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
21901 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
21902 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
21903 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
21904 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
21905 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
21906 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
21907 find time to push this forward.</p>
21908
21909       </div>
21910       <div class="tags">
21911
21912
21913         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>.
21914
21915
21916       </div>
21917     </div>
21918     <div class="padding"></div>
21919
21920     <div class="entry">
21921       <div class="title">
21922         <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>
21923       </div>
21924       <div class="date">
21925         29th July 2011
21926       </div>
21927       <div class="body">
21928         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
21929 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
21930 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
21931 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
21932 issues.</p>
21933
21934 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
21935 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
21936 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
21937
21938 <ol>
21939
21940 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
21941 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
21942 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
21943 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
21944 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
21945 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
21946 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
21947 Debian.</li>
21948
21949 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
21950 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
21951 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
21952 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
21953 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
21954 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
21955 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
21956 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
21957 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
21958 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
21959 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
21960 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
21961 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
21962
21963 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
21964 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
21965 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
21966 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
21967 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
21968 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
21969 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
21970 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
21971 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
21972 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
21973
21974 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
21975 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
21976 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
21977 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
21978 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
21979 latter behaviour.</li>
21980
21981 </ol>
21982
21983 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
21984 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
21985 it do not matter much.</p>
21986
21987 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
21988 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
21989 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
21990
21991       </div>
21992       <div class="tags">
21993
21994
21995         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>.
21996
21997
21998       </div>
21999     </div>
22000     <div class="padding"></div>
22001
22002     <div class="entry">
22003       <div class="title">
22004         <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>
22005       </div>
22006       <div class="date">
22007         26th July 2011
22008       </div>
22009       <div class="body">
22010         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
22011 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
22012 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
22013 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
22014 security support for a few years.</p>
22015
22016 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
22017 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
22018 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
22019 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
22020 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
22021 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
22022 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
22023 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
22024 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
22025 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
22026 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
22027 easier in the future.</p>
22028
22029 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
22030 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
22031 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
22032 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
22033 do not have time for.</p>
22034
22035       </div>
22036       <div class="tags">
22037
22038
22039         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>.
22040
22041
22042       </div>
22043     </div>
22044     <div class="padding"></div>
22045
22046     <div class="entry">
22047       <div class="title">
22048         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html">Free Software vs. proprietary softare...</a>
22049       </div>
22050       <div class="date">
22051         20th June 2011
22052       </div>
22053       <div class="body">
22054         <p>Reading
22055 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/06/20/open-source-vs-closed-source-eulas/">the
22056 thingiverse blog</a>, I came across two highlights of interesting
22057 parts of the
22058 <a href="http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Autodesk_EULA">Autodesk</a>
22059 and
22060 <a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/06/things-you-cant-do-with-the-microsoft-kinect-sdk.html">Microsoft
22061 Kinect</a> End User License Agreements (EULAs), which illustrates
22062 quite well why I stay away from software with EULAs.  Whenever I take
22063 the time to read their content, the terms are simply unacceptable.</p>
22064
22065       </div>
22066       <div class="tags">
22067
22068
22069         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>.
22070
22071
22072       </div>
22073     </div>
22074     <div class="padding"></div>
22075
22076     <div class="entry">
22077       <div class="title">
22078         <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>
22079       </div>
22080       <div class="date">
22081         30th April 2011
22082       </div>
22083       <div class="body">
22084         <p>Today, the first draft implementation of an
22085 <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> for the Norwegian
22086 service <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> started to
22087 work.  It is only available on the developer server for now, and I
22088 have not tested it using any existing Open311 client (I lack the
22089 platforms needed to run the clients I have found so far), but it is
22090 able to query the database and extract a list of open and closed
22091 requests within a given category and reported to a given municipality.
22092 I believe that is a good start to create a useful service for those
22093 that want to do data mining on the requests submitted so far.</p>
22094
22095 <p>Where is it?  Visit
22096 <a href="http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/">http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/</a>
22097 to have a look.  Please send feedback to the
22098 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
22099 (at) nuug.no</a> mailing list.</p>
22100
22101       </div>
22102       <div class="tags">
22103
22104
22105         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>.
22106
22107
22108       </div>
22109     </div>
22110     <div class="padding"></div>
22111
22112     <div class="entry">
22113       <div class="title">
22114         <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>
22115       </div>
22116       <div class="date">
22117         29th April 2011
22118       </div>
22119       <div class="body">
22120         <p>The last few days I have spent some time trying to add support for
22121 the <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> in the
22122 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">Norwegian FixMyStreet service</a>.
22123 Earlier I believed Open311 would be a useful API to use to submit
22124 reports to the municipalities, but when I noticed that the
22125 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org.nz/">New Zealand version</a> of
22126 FixMyStreet had implemented Open311 on the server side, it occurred to
22127 me that this was a nice way to allow the public, press and
22128 municipalities to do data mining directly in the FixMyStreet service.
22129 Thus I went to work implementing the Open311 specification for
22130 FixMyStreet.  The implementation is not yet ready, but I am starting
22131 to get a draft limping along.  In the process, I have discovered a few
22132 issues with the Open311 specification.</p>
22133
22134 <p>One obvious missing feature is the lack of natural language
22135 handling in the specification.  The specification seem to assume all
22136 reports will be written in English, and do not provide a way for the
22137 receiving end to specify which languages are understood there.  To be
22138 able to use the same client and submit to several Open311 receivers,
22139 it would be useful to know which language to use when writing reports.
22140 I believe the specification should be extended to allow the receivers
22141 of problem reports to specify which language they accept, and the
22142 submitter to specify which language the report is written in.
22143 Language of a text can also be automatically guessed using statistical
22144 methods, but for multi-lingual persons like myself, it is useful to
22145 know which language to use when writing a problem report.  I suspect
22146 some lang=nb,nn kind of attribute would solve it.</p>
22147
22148 <p>A key part of the Open311 API is the list of services provided,
22149 which is similar to the categories used by FixMyStreet.  One issue I
22150 run into is the need to specify both name and unique identifier for
22151 each category.  The specification do not state that the identifier
22152 should be numeric, but all example implementations have used numbers
22153 here.  In FixMyStreet, there is no number associated with each
22154 category.  As the specification do not forbid it, I will use the name
22155 as the unique identifier for now and see how open311 clients handle
22156 it.</p>
22157
22158 <p>The report format in open311 and the report format in FixMyStreet
22159 differ in a key part.  FixMyStreet have a title and a description,
22160 while Open311 only have a description and lack the title.  I'm not
22161 quite sure how to best handle this yet.  When asking for a FixMyStreet
22162 report in Open311 format, I just merge title an description into the
22163 open311 description, but this is not going to work if the open311 API
22164 should be used for submitting new reports to FixMyStreet.</p>
22165
22166 <p>The search feature in Open311 is missing a way to ask for problems
22167 near a geographic location.  I believe this is important if one is to
22168 use Open311 as the query language for mobile units.  The specification
22169 should be extended to handle this, probably using some new lat=, lon=
22170 and range= options.</p>
22171
22172 <p>The final challenge I see is that the FixMyStreet code handle
22173 several administrations in one interface, while the Open311 API seem
22174 to assume only one administration.  For FixMyStreet, this mean a
22175 report can be sent to several administrations, and the categories
22176 available depend on the location of the problem.  Not quite sure how
22177 to best handle this.  I've noticed
22178 <a href="http://seeclickfix.com/open311/">SeeClickFix</a> added
22179 latitude and longitude options to the services request, but it do not
22180 solve the problem of what to return when no location is specified.
22181 Will have to investigate this a bit more.</p>
22182
22183 <p>My distaste for web forums have kept me from bringing these issues
22184 up with the open311 developer group.  I really wish they had a email
22185 list available via <a href="http://www.gmane.org/">Gmane</a> to use for
22186 discussions instead of only
22187 <a href="http://lists.open311.org/groups/discuss">a forum<a/>.  Oh,
22188 well.  That will probably resolve itself, one way or another.  I've
22189 also tried visiting the IRC channel #open311 on FreeNode, but no-one
22190 seem to reply to my questions there.  This make me wonder if I just
22191 fail to understand how the open311 community work.  It sure do not
22192 work like the free software project communities I am used to.</p>
22193
22194       </div>
22195       <div class="tags">
22196
22197
22198         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>.
22199
22200
22201       </div>
22202     </div>
22203     <div class="padding"></div>
22204
22205     <div class="entry">
22206       <div class="title">
22207         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html">Gnash enteres Google Summer of Code 2011</a>
22208       </div>
22209       <div class="date">
22210          6th April 2011
22211       </div>
22212       <div class="body">
22213         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is still
22214 the most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation.
22215 A few days ago the project
22216 <a href="http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/2011-04/msg00011.html">announced</a>
22217 that it will participate in Google Summer of Code.  I hope many
22218 students apply, and that some of them succeed in getting AVM2 support
22219 into Gnash.</p>
22220
22221       </div>
22222       <div class="tags">
22223
22224
22225         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>.
22226
22227
22228       </div>
22229     </div>
22230     <div class="padding"></div>
22231
22232     <div class="entry">
22233       <div class="title">
22234         <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>
22235       </div>
22236       <div class="date">
22237          3rd April 2011
22238       </div>
22239       <div class="body">
22240         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
22241 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
22242 update in English.</p>
22243
22244 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
22245 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
22246 of the British service
22247 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
22248 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
22249 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
22250 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
22251 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
22252 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
22253 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
22254 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
22255 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
22256 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
22257 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
22258 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
22259 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
22260
22261 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
22262 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
22263 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
22264 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
22265 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
22266 public infrastructure.</p>
22267
22268 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
22269 such service?</p>
22270
22271       </div>
22272       <div class="tags">
22273
22274
22275         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>.
22276
22277
22278       </div>
22279     </div>
22280     <div class="padding"></div>
22281
22282     <div class="entry">
22283       <div class="title">
22284         <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>
22285       </div>
22286       <div class="date">
22287         28th January 2011
22288       </div>
22289       <div class="body">
22290         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
22291 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
22292 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
22293 available on the Internet, and check our locally
22294 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
22295 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
22296 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
22297 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
22298 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
22299 out which security holes were present in our free software
22300 collection.</p>
22301
22302 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
22303 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
22304 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
22305 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
22306 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
22307 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
22308 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
22309 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
22310 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
22311 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
22312 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
22313 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
22314 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
22315 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
22316 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
22317 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
22318
22319 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
22320 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
22321 check out, one could look up
22322 <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
22323 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
22324 The most recent one is
22325 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
22326 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
22327 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
22328
22329 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
22330 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
22331 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
22332 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
22333 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
22334 security issues out.</p>
22335
22336 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
22337 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
22338 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
22339 RHEL is providing
22340 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
22341 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
22342 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
22343
22344 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
22345 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
22346 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
22347 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
22348 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
22349 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
22350 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
22351 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
22352 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
22353 established soon.</p>
22354
22355 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
22356 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
22357 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
22358 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
22359 for their packages.</p>
22360
22361       </div>
22362       <div class="tags">
22363
22364
22365         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>.
22366
22367
22368       </div>
22369     </div>
22370     <div class="padding"></div>
22371
22372     <div class="entry">
22373       <div class="title">
22374         <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>
22375       </div>
22376       <div class="date">
22377         23rd January 2011
22378       </div>
22379       <div class="body">
22380         <p>In the
22381 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
22382 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
22383 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
22384 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
22385 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
22386 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
22387 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
22388 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
22389 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
22390 one of my machines like this:</p>
22391
22392 <pre>
22393 loaded modules:
22394 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
22395 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
22396 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
22397 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
22398 10de:03ec pata_amd
22399 10de:03f6 sata_nv
22400 1022:1103 k8temp
22401 109e:036e bttv
22402 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
22403 11ab:4364 sky2
22404 </pre>
22405
22406 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
22407 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
22408
22409 <pre>
22410 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
22411     echo loaded pci modules:
22412     (
22413         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
22414         for address in * ; do
22415             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
22416                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
22417                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
22418                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
22419                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
22420                     echo "$id $module"
22421                 fi
22422             fi
22423         done
22424     )
22425     echo
22426 fi
22427 </pre>
22428
22429 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
22430 mappings:</p>
22431
22432 <pre>
22433 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
22434     echo loaded usb modules:
22435     (
22436         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
22437         for address in * ; do
22438             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
22439                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
22440                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
22441                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
22442                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
22443                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
22444                         echo "$id $module"
22445                     fi
22446                 fi
22447             fi
22448         done
22449     )
22450     echo
22451 fi
22452 </pre>
22453
22454 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
22455 well.</p>
22456
22457       </div>
22458       <div class="tags">
22459
22460
22461         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>.
22462
22463
22464       </div>
22465     </div>
22466     <div class="padding"></div>
22467
22468     <div class="entry">
22469       <div class="title">
22470         <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>
22471       </div>
22472       <div class="date">
22473         16th January 2011
22474       </div>
22475       <div class="body">
22476         <p>The video format struggle on the web continues, and the three
22477 contenders seem to be Ogg Theora, H.264 and WebM.  Most video sites
22478 seem to use H.264, while others use Ogg Theora.  Interestingly enough,
22479 the comments I see give me the feeling that a lot of people believe
22480 H.264 is the most supported video format in browsers, but according to
22481 the Wikipedia article on
22482 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">HTML5 video</a>,
22483 this is not true.  Check out the nice table of supprted formats in
22484 different browsers there.  The format supported by most browsers is
22485 Ogg Theora, supported by released versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google
22486 Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Origyn Web Browser and
22487 BOLT browser, while not supported by Internet Explorer nor Safari.
22488 The runner up is WebM supported by released versions of Google Chrome
22489 Chromium Opera and Origyn Web Browser, and test versions of Mozilla
22490 Firefox.  H.264 is supported by released versions of Safari, Origyn
22491 Web Browser and BOLT browser, and the test version of Internet
22492 Explorer.  Those wanting Ogg Theora support in Internet Explorer and
22493 Safari can install plugins to get it.</p>
22494
22495 <p>To me, the simple conclusion from this is that to reach most users
22496 without any extra software installed, one uses Ogg Theora with the
22497 HTML5 video tag.   Of course to reach all those without a browser
22498 handling HTML5, one need fallback mechanisms.  In
22499 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a>, we provide first fallback to a
22500 plugin capable of playing MPEG1 video, and those without such support
22501 we have a second fallback to the Cortado java applet playing Ogg
22502 Theora.  This seem to work quite well, as can be seen in an <a
22503 href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20110111-semantic-web/">example
22504 from last week</a>.</p>
22505
22506 <p>The reason Ogg Theora is the most supported format, and H.264 is
22507 the least supported is simple.  Implementing and using H.264
22508 require royalty payment to MPEG-LA, and the terms of use from MPEG-LA
22509 are incompatible with free software licensing.  If you believed H.264
22510 was without royalties and license terms, check out
22511 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
22512 Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps.</p>
22513
22514 <p>A incomplete list of sites providing video in Ogg Theora is
22515 available from
22516 <a href="http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_Theora_videos">the
22517 Xiph.org wiki</a>, if you want to have a look.  I'm not aware of a
22518 similar list for WebM nor H.264.</p>
22519
22520 <p>Update 2011-01-16 09:40: A question from Tollef on IRC made me
22521 realise that I failed to make it clear enough this text is about the
22522 &lt;video&gt; tag support in browsers and not the video support
22523 provided by external plugins like the Flash plugins.</p>
22524
22525       </div>
22526       <div class="tags">
22527
22528
22529         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>.
22530
22531
22532       </div>
22533     </div>
22534     <div class="padding"></div>
22535
22536     <div class="entry">
22537       <div class="title">
22538         <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>
22539       </div>
22540       <div class="date">
22541         12th January 2011
22542       </div>
22543       <div class="body">
22544         <p>Today I discovered
22545 <a href="http://www.digi.no/860070/google-dropper-h264-stotten-i-chrome">via
22546 digi.no</a> that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
22547 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html">yesterday
22548 announced</a> plans to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt; in
22549 the browser.  The argument used is that H.264 is not a "completely
22550 open" codec technology.  If you believe H.264 was free for everyone
22551 to use, I recommend having a look at the essay
22552 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
22553 Free That Matters</a>".  It is not free of cost for creators of video
22554 tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the
22555 terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from
22556 licensing the patents needed for H.264.  Some background information
22557 on the Google announcement is available from
22558 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24243/Google_To_Drop_H264_Support_from_Chrome">OSnews</a>.
22559 A good read. :)</p>
22560
22561 <p>Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to
22562 promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on
22563 the Internet.  This can only be done by publishing using free and open
22564 standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support
22565 for these free and open standards.  At the moment there seem to be two
22566 camps in the web browser world when it come to video support.  Some
22567 browsers support H.264, and others support
22568 <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg Theora</a> and
22569 <a href="http://www.webmproject.org/">WebM</a>
22570 (<a href="http://www.diracvideo.org/">Dirac</a> is not really an option
22571 yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet
22572 and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for
22573 H.264 to not reach all potential viewers.
22574 Wikipedia keep <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">an
22575 updated summary</a> of the current browser support.</p>
22576
22577 <p>Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
22578 promoting H.264, and John Gruber
22579 <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/simple_questions">presents
22580 the mind set</a> of these people quite well.  His rhetorical questions
22581 provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
22582 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24245/10_Questions_for_John_Gruber_Regarding_H_264_WebM">presenting
22583 the issues with H.264</a>. Both are worth a read.</p>
22584
22585 <p>Some argue that if Google is dropping H.264 because it isn't free,
22586 they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin.  This
22587 argument was covered by Simon Phipps in
22588 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/01/google-and-h264---far-from-hypocritical/index.htm">todays
22589 blog post</a>, which I find to put the issue in context.  To me it
22590 make perfect sense to drop native H.264 support for HTML5 in the
22591 browser while still allowing plugins.</p>
22592
22593 <p>I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest,
22594 is that all the users and promoters of H.264 suddenly get an uneasy
22595 feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse.  A lot of TV
22596 broadcasters have been moving to H.264 the last few years, and a lot
22597 of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they
22598 could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web
22599 publishing.  Suddenly this belief is shaken.</p>
22600
22601 <p>An interesting question is why Google is doing this.  While the
22602 presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only
22603 present the argument if the change make sense from a business
22604 perspective.  One reason might be that they are currently negotiating
22605 with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the
22606 feeling that dropping H.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and
22607 Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google.
22608 Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having
22609 to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a
22610 video format not requiring royalties at all.  A third reason might be
22611 that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the
22612 Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome.
22613 I guess time will tell.</p>
22614
22615 <p>Update 2011-01-15: The Google Chrome team provided
22616 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html">more
22617 background and information on the move</a> it a blog post yesterday.</p>
22618
22619       </div>
22620       <div class="tags">
22621
22622
22623         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>.
22624
22625
22626       </div>
22627     </div>
22628     <div class="padding"></div>
22629
22630     <div class="entry">
22631       <div class="title">
22632         <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>
22633       </div>
22634       <div class="date">
22635         30th December 2010
22636       </div>
22637       <div class="body">
22638         <p>After trying to
22639 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html">compare
22640 Ogg Theora</a> to
22641 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the Digistan
22642 definition</a> of a free and open standard, I concluded that this need
22643 to be done for more standards and started on a framework for doing
22644 this.  As a start, I want to get the status for all the standards in
22645 the Norwegian reference directory, which include UTF-8, HTML, PDF, ODF,
22646 JPEG, PNG, SVG and others.  But to be able to complete this in a
22647 reasonable time frame, I will need help.</p>
22648
22649 <p>If you want to help out with this work, please visit
22650 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/standard/digistan-analyse">the
22651 wiki pages I have set up for this</a>, and let me know that you want
22652 to help out.  The IRC channel #nuug on irc.freenode.net is a good
22653 place to coordinate this for now, as it is the IRC channel for the
22654 NUUG association where I have created the framework (I am the leader
22655 of the Norwegian Unix User Group).</p>
22656
22657 <p>The framework is still forming, and a lot is left to do.  Do not be
22658 scared by the sketchy form of the current pages. :)</p>
22659
22660       </div>
22661       <div class="tags">
22662
22663
22664         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>.
22665
22666
22667       </div>
22668     </div>
22669     <div class="padding"></div>
22670
22671     <div class="entry">
22672       <div class="title">
22673         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html">The many definitions of a open standard</a>
22674       </div>
22675       <div class="date">
22676         27th December 2010
22677       </div>
22678       <div class="body">
22679         <p>One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of
22680 "<a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">Free and
22681 Open Standard</a>" is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of
22682 the term has been decided by Digistan.  The term "Open Standard" has
22683 become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking
22684 about standards.  One end up discussing which definition is the best
22685 one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of
22686 de-facto standards and proprietary solutions.</p>
22687
22688 <p>But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open
22689 standards, here are a few that I know about.  This list is not
22690 complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a
22691 complete survey.  More definitions are available on the
22692 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard">wikipedia
22693 page</a>.</p>
22694
22695 <p>First off is my favourite, the definition from the European
22696 Interoperability Framework version 1.0.  Really sad to notice that BSA
22697 and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version 2.0 of the
22698 framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with
22699 their own people.  Anyway, the definition is still available and it
22700 include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a
22701 specification on equal terms.</p>
22702
22703 <blockquote>
22704
22705 <p>The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification
22706 and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an
22707 open standard:</p>
22708
22709 <ul>
22710
22711 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
22712 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
22713 open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties
22714 (consensus or majority decision etc.).</li>
22715
22716 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
22717 document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be
22718 permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a
22719 nominal fee.</li>
22720
22721 <li>The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of
22722 (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-
22723 free basis.</li>
22724
22725 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
22726
22727 </ul>
22728 </blockquote>
22729
22730 <p>Another one originates from my friends over at
22731 <a href="http://www.dkuug.dk/">DKUUG</a>, who coined and gathered
22732 support for <a href="http://www.aaben-standard.dk/">this
22733 definition</a> in 2004.  It even made it into the Danish parlament as
22734 <a href="http://www.ft.dk/dokumenter/tingdok.aspx?/samling/20051/beslutningsforslag/B103/som_fremsat.htm">their
22735 definition of a open standard</a>.  Another from a different part of
22736 the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.</p>
22737
22738 <blockquote>
22739
22740 <p>En åben standard opfylder følgende krav:</p>
22741
22742 <ol>
22743
22744 <li>Veldokumenteret med den fuldstændige specifikation offentligt
22745 tilgængelig.</li>
22746
22747 <li>Frit implementerbar uden økonomiske, politiske eller juridiske
22748 begrænsninger på implementation og anvendelse.</li>
22749
22750 <li>Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et åbent forum (en såkaldt
22751 "standardiseringsorganisation") via en åben proces.</li>
22752
22753 </ol>
22754
22755 </blockquote>
22756
22757 <p>Then there is <a href="http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/def.html">the
22758 definition</a> from Free Software Foundation Europe.</p>
22759
22760 <blockquote>
22761
22762 <p>An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is</p>
22763
22764 <ol>
22765
22766 <li>subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a
22767 manner equally available to all parties;</li>
22768
22769 <li>without any components or extensions that have dependencies on
22770 formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open
22771 Standard themselves;</li>
22772
22773 <li>free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by
22774 any party or in any business model;</li>
22775
22776 <li>managed and further developed independently of any single vendor
22777 in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third
22778 parties;</li>
22779
22780 <li>available in multiple complete implementations by competing
22781 vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all
22782 parties.</li>
22783
22784 </ol>
22785
22786 </blockquote>
22787
22788 <p>A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created
22789 its
22790 <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/dennisding/resource/Open%20Standard%20Definition.pdf">Open
22791 Standards Checklist</a> with a fairly detailed description.</p>
22792
22793 <blockquote>
22794 <p>Creation and Management of an Open Standard
22795
22796 <ul>
22797
22798 <li>Its development and management process must be collaborative and
22799   democratic:
22800
22801          <ul>
22802
22803          <li>Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to
22804             participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria
22805             imposed by the organization under which it is developed
22806             and managed.</li>
22807
22808          <li>The processes must be documented and, through a known
22809             method, can be changed through input from all
22810             participants.</li>
22811
22812          <li>The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for
22813             the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.</li>
22814
22815          <li>Development and management should strive for consensus,
22816             and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.</li>
22817
22818          <li>The standard specification must be open to extensive
22819             public review at least once in its life-cycle, with
22820             comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.</li>
22821
22822          </ul>
22823
22824 </li>
22825
22826 </ul>
22827
22828 <p>Use and Licensing of an Open Standard</p>
22829 <ul>
22830
22831 <li>The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation,
22832   and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing
22833   implementations to the interface described in the standard without
22834   undue or restrictive constraints.  Interfaces include APIs,
22835   protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.</li>
22836
22837 <li> The standard must not contain any proprietary "hooks" that create
22838   a technical or economic barriers</li>
22839
22840 <li>Faithful implementations of the standard must
22841   interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer
22842   program to communicate and exchange information with other computer
22843   programs and mutually to use the information which has been
22844   exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange
22845   file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or
22846   conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other
22847   computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are
22848   intended to function.</li>
22849
22850 <li>It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the
22851   standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it
22852   must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.</li>
22853
22854 <li>It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or
22855   fees; also known as "royalty free"), worldwide, non-exclusive and
22856   perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and
22857   sell products based on the standard.  The only exceptions are
22858   terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms
22859   outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished
22860   patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is
22861   only for the exact scope of the standard in question.
22862
22863       <ul>
22864
22865       <li> May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of
22866         licensees' patent claims essential to practice that standard
22867         (also known as a reciprocity clause)</li>
22868
22869       <li> May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor
22870         or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims
22871         essential to practice that standard (also known as a
22872         "defensive suspension" clause)</li>
22873
22874       <li> The same licensing terms are available to every potential
22875         licensor</li>
22876
22877       </ul>
22878 </li>
22879
22880 <li>The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude
22881   implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms
22882   or restricted licensing terms</li>
22883
22884 </ul>
22885
22886 </blockquote>
22887
22888 <p>It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that
22889 there are so many of them.  As you can see, the same holds true for
22890 open standard definitions.  Most of the definitions have a lot in
22891 common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open
22892 standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it
22893 possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real
22894 competition to downplay the significance of open standards.  I hope we
22895 can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open
22896 Standards.</p>
22897
22898       </div>
22899       <div class="tags">
22900
22901
22902         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>.
22903
22904
22905       </div>
22906     </div>
22907     <div class="padding"></div>
22908
22909     <div class="entry">
22910       <div class="title">
22911         <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>
22912       </div>
22913       <div class="date">
22914         25th December 2010
22915       </div>
22916       <div class="body">
22917         <p><a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">The
22918 Digistan definition</a> of a free and open standard reads like this:</p>
22919
22920 <blockquote>
22921
22922 <p>The Digital Standards Organization defines free and open standard
22923 as follows:</p>
22924
22925 <ol>
22926
22927 <li>A free and open standard is immune to vendor capture at all stages
22928 in its life-cycle. Immunity from vendor capture makes it possible to
22929 freely use, improve upon, trust, and extend a standard over time.</li>
22930
22931 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
22932 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
22933 open decision-making procedure available to all interested
22934 parties.</li>
22935
22936 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
22937 document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy,
22938 distribute, and use it freely.</li>
22939
22940 <li>The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made
22941 irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.</li>
22942
22943 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
22944
22945 </ol>
22946
22947 <p>The economic outcome of a free and open standard, which can be
22948 measured, is that it enables perfect competition between suppliers of
22949 products based on the standard.</p>
22950 </blockquote>
22951
22952 <p>For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free
22953 and open standard according to this definition.  Here is a short
22954 writeup of what I have been able to gather so far.  I brought up the
22955 topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list
22956 <a href="http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/advocacy/2009-July/001632.html">in
22957 July 2009</a>, for those that want to see some background information.
22958 According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list
22959 the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.</p>
22960
22961 <p><strong>Free from vendor capture?</strong></p>
22962
22963 <p>As far as I can see, there is no single vendor that can control the
22964 Ogg Theora specification.  It can be argued that the
22965 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/">Xiph foundation</A> is such vendor, but
22966 given that it is a non-profit foundation with the expressed goal
22967 making free and open protocols and standards available, it is not
22968 obvious that this is a real risk.  One issue with the Xiph
22969 foundation is that its inner working (as in board member list, or who
22970 control the foundation) are not easily available on the web.  I've
22971 been unable to find out who is in the foundation board, and have not
22972 seen any accounting information documenting how money is handled nor
22973 where is is spent in the foundation.  It is thus not obvious for an
22974 external observer who control The Xiph foundation, and for all I know
22975 it is possible for a single vendor to take control over the
22976 specification.  But it seem unlikely.</p>
22977
22978 <p><strong>Maintained by open not-for-profit organisation?</strong></p>
22979
22980 <p>Assuming that the Xiph foundation is the organisation its web pages
22981 claim it to be, this point is fulfilled.  If Xiph foundation is
22982 controlled by a single vendor, it isn't, but I have not found any
22983 documentation indicating this.</p>
22984
22985 <p>According to
22986 <a href="http://media.hiof.no/diverse/fad/rapport_4.pdf">a report</a>
22987 prepared by Audun Vaaler og Børre Ludvigsen for the Norwegian
22988 government, the Xiph foundation is a non-commercial organisation and
22989 the development process is open, transparent and non-Discrimatory.
22990 Until proven otherwise, I believe it make most sense to believe the
22991 report is correct.</p>
22992
22993 <p><strong>Specification freely available?</strong></p>
22994
22995 <p>The specification for the <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/">Ogg
22996 container format</a> and both the
22997 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/">Vorbis</a> and
22998 <a href="http://theora.org/doc/">Theora</a> codeces are available on
22999 the web.  This are the terms in the Vorbis and Theora specification:
23000
23001 <blockquote>
23002
23003 Anyone may freely use and distribute the Ogg and [Vorbis/Theora]
23004 specifications, whether in private, public, or corporate
23005 capacity. However, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the Ogg project reserve
23006 the right to set the Ogg [Vorbis/Theora] specification and certify
23007 specification compliance.
23008
23009 </blockquote>
23010
23011 <p>The Ogg container format is specified in IETF
23012 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/rfc3533.txt">RFC 3533</a>, and
23013 this is the term:<p>
23014
23015 <blockquote>
23016
23017 <p>This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
23018 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
23019 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
23020 distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
23021 provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
23022 included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
23023 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
23024 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
23025 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
23026 Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
23027 in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to
23028 translate it into languages other than English.</p>
23029
23030 <p>The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
23031 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.</p>
23032 </blockquote>
23033
23034 <p>All these terms seem to allow unlimited distribution and use, an
23035 this term seem to be fulfilled.  There might be a problem with the
23036 missing permission to distribute modified versions of the text, and
23037 thus reuse it in other specifications.  Not quite sure if that is a
23038 requirement for the Digistan definition.</p>
23039
23040 <p><strong>Royalty-free?</strong></p>
23041
23042 <p>There are no known patent claims requiring royalties for the Ogg
23043 Theora format.
23044 <a href="http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=65782">MPEG-LA</a>
23045 and
23046 <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/237238/Steve-Jobs-Hints-At-Theora-Lawsuit">Steve
23047 Jobs</a> in Apple claim to know about some patent claims (submarine
23048 patents) against the Theora format, but no-one else seem to believe
23049 them.  Both Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation have looked into
23050 this and decided to implement Ogg Theora support in their browsers
23051 without paying any royalties.  For now the claims from MPEG-LA and
23052 Steve Jobs seem more like FUD to scare people to use the H.264 codec
23053 than any real problem with Ogg Theora.</p>
23054
23055 <p><strong>No constraints on re-use?</strong></p>
23056
23057 <p>I am not aware of any constraints on re-use.</p>
23058
23059 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
23060
23061 <p>3 of 5 requirements seem obviously fulfilled, and the remaining 2
23062 depend on the governing structure of the Xiph foundation.  Given the
23063 background report used by the Norwegian government, I believe it is
23064 safe to assume the last two requirements are fulfilled too, but it
23065 would be nice if the Xiph foundation web site made it easier to verify
23066 this.</p>
23067
23068 <p>It would be nice to see other analysis of other specifications to
23069 see if they are free and open standards.</p>
23070
23071       </div>
23072       <div class="tags">
23073
23074
23075         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>.
23076
23077
23078       </div>
23079     </div>
23080     <div class="padding"></div>
23081
23082     <div class="entry">
23083       <div class="title">
23084         <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>
23085       </div>
23086       <div class="date">
23087         25th December 2010
23088       </div>
23089       <div class="body">
23090         <p>A few days ago
23091 <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article189879.ece">an
23092 article</a> in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version
23093 2.0 of
23094 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Framework">European
23095 Interoperability Framework</a> has been successfully lobbied by the
23096 proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software.
23097 Nothing very surprising there, given
23098 <a href="http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/29/2115235/Open-Source-Open-Standards-Under-Attack-In-Europe">earlier
23099 reports</a> on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in
23100 this work.  But I find this very sad.   The definition of
23101 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dokumenter/standard-presse-def-200506.txt">an
23102 open standard from version 1</a> was very good, and something I
23103 believe should be used also in the future, alongside
23104 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the
23105 definition from Digistan</A>.  Version 2 have removed the open
23106 standard definition from its content.</p>
23107
23108 <p>Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar
23109 Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply
23110 to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software
23111 in the public sector in Peru.  As the text was not available from a
23112 few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from
23113 <a href="http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/articles/en/reponseperou/villanueva_to_ms.html">my
23114 source</a> to ensure it is available also in the future.  Some
23115 background information about that story is available in
23116 <a href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6099">an article</a> from
23117 Linux Journal in 2002.</p>
23118
23119 <blockquote>
23120 <p>Lima, 8th of April, 2002<br>
23121 To: Señor JUAN ALBERTO GONZÁLEZ<br>
23122 General Manager of Microsoft Perú</p>
23123
23124 <p>Dear Sir:</p>
23125
23126 <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>
23127
23128 <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>
23129
23130 <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>
23131
23132 <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>
23133
23134 <p>
23135 <ul>
23136 <li>Free access to public information by the citizen. </li>
23137 <li>Permanence of public data. </li>
23138 <li>Security of the State and citizens.</li>
23139 </ul>
23140 </p>
23141
23142 <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>
23143
23144 <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>
23145
23146 <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>
23147
23148 <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>
23149
23150 <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>
23151
23152
23153 <p>From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:<br>
23154 <li>the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software</li>
23155 <li>the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software</li>
23156 <li>the law does not specify which concrete software to use</li>
23157 <li>the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought</li>
23158 <li>the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.</li>
23159
23160 </p>
23161
23162 <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>
23163
23164 <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>
23165
23166 <p>As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail:</p>
23167
23168 <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>
23169
23170 <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>
23171
23172 <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>
23173
23174 <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>
23175
23176 <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>
23177
23178 <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>
23179
23180 <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>
23181
23182 <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>
23183
23184 <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>
23185
23186 <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>
23187
23188 <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>
23189
23190 <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>
23191
23192 <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>
23193
23194 <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>
23195
23196 <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>
23197
23198 <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>
23199
23200 <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>
23201
23202 <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>
23203
23204 <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>
23205
23206 <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>
23207
23208 <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>
23209
23210 <p>On security:</p>
23211
23212 <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>
23213
23214 <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>
23215
23216 <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>
23217
23218 <p>In respect of the guarantee:</p>
23219
23220 <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>
23221
23222 <p>On Intellectual Property:</p>
23223
23224 <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>
23225
23226 <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>
23227
23228 <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>
23229
23230 <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>
23231
23232 <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>
23233
23234 <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>
23235
23236 <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>
23237
23238 <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>
23239
23240 <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>
23241
23242 <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>
23243
23244 <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>
23245
23246 <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>
23247
23248 <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>
23249
23250 <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>
23251
23252 <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>
23253
23254 <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>
23255
23256 <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>
23257
23258 <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>
23259
23260 <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>
23261
23262 <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>
23263
23264 <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>
23265
23266 <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>
23267
23268 <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>
23269
23270 <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>
23271
23272 <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>
23273
23274 <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>
23275
23276 <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>
23277
23278 <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>
23279
23280 <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>
23281
23282 <p>Cordially,<br>
23283 DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NUÑEZ<br>
23284 Congressman of the Republic of Perú.</p>
23285 </blockquote>
23286
23287       </div>
23288       <div class="tags">
23289
23290
23291         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>.
23292
23293
23294       </div>
23295     </div>
23296     <div class="padding"></div>
23297
23298     <div class="entry">
23299       <div class="title">
23300         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html">Officeshots still going strong</a>
23301       </div>
23302       <div class="date">
23303         25th December 2010
23304       </div>
23305       <div class="body">
23306         <p>Half a year ago I
23307 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">wrote
23308 a bit</a> about <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>,
23309 a web service to allow anyone to test how ODF documents are handled by
23310 the different programs reading and writing the ODF format.</p>
23311
23312 <p>I just had a look at the service, and it seem to be going strong.
23313 Very interesting to see the results reported in the gallery, how
23314 different Office implementations handle different ODF features.  Sad
23315 to see that KOffice was not doing it very well, and happy to see that
23316 LibreOffice has been tested already (but sadly not listed as a option
23317 for OfficeShots users yet).  I am glad to see that the ODF community
23318 got such a great test tool available.</p>
23319
23320       </div>
23321       <div class="tags">
23322
23323
23324         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>.
23325
23326
23327       </div>
23328     </div>
23329     <div class="padding"></div>
23330
23331     <div class="entry">
23332       <div class="title">
23333         <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>
23334       </div>
23335       <div class="date">
23336         22nd December 2010
23337       </div>
23338       <div class="body">
23339         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
23340 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
23341 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
23342 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
23343 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
23344 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
23345 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
23346 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
23347 university.</p>
23348
23349 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
23350 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
23351 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
23352 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
23353 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
23354 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
23355 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
23356 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
23357
23358 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
23359 I perform on a new model.</p>
23360
23361 <ul>
23362
23363 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
23364 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
23365 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
23366
23367 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
23368 installation, X.org is working.</li>
23369
23370 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
23371 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
23372 reported by the program.</li>
23373
23374 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
23375 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
23376 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
23377 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
23378 normally test this by playing
23379 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
23380 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
23381
23382 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
23383 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
23384
23385 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
23386 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
23387
23388 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
23389 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
23390
23391 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
23392 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
23393 few.</li>
23394
23395 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
23396 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
23397 notice this.</li>
23398
23399 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
23400 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
23401 resume.</li>
23402
23403 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
23404 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
23405 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
23406 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
23407 not.</li>
23408
23409 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
23410 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
23411 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
23412 existence.</li>
23413
23414 </ul>
23415
23416 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
23417 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
23418 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
23419 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
23420 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
23421 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
23422 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
23423 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
23424
23425       </div>
23426       <div class="tags">
23427
23428
23429         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>.
23430
23431
23432       </div>
23433     </div>
23434     <div class="padding"></div>
23435
23436     <div class="entry">
23437       <div class="title">
23438         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
23439       </div>
23440       <div class="date">
23441         11th December 2010
23442       </div>
23443       <div class="body">
23444         <p>As I continue to explore
23445 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
23446 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
23447 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
23448
23449 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
23450 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
23451 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
23452 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
23453 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
23454 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
23455 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
23456 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
23457 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
23458 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
23459 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
23460 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
23461 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
23462 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
23463 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
23464 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
23465 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
23466 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
23467 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
23468 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
23469
23470 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
23471 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
23472 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
23473 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
23474 If the Skolelinux foundation
23475 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
23476 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
23477 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
23478 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
23479 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
23480 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
23481 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
23482 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
23483
23484 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
23485 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
23486 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
23487 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
23488 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
23489 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
23490 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
23491 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
23492 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
23493 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
23494 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
23495 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
23496 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
23497 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
23498 currencies.</p>
23499
23500 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
23501 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
23502 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
23503 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
23504 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
23505 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
23506 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
23507 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
23508 BitCoins.  Check out
23509 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
23510 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
23511 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
23512 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
23513 yet.</p>
23514
23515 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
23516 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
23517 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
23518 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
23519 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
23520
23521       </div>
23522       <div class="tags">
23523
23524
23525         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>.
23526
23527
23528       </div>
23529     </div>
23530     <div class="padding"></div>
23531
23532     <div class="entry">
23533       <div class="title">
23534         <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>
23535       </div>
23536       <div class="date">
23537         10th December 2010
23538       </div>
23539       <div class="body">
23540         <p>With this weeks lawless
23541 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
23542 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
23543 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
23544 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
23545 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
23546 A blog post from
23547 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
23548 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
23549 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
23550 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
23551 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
23552 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
23553 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
23554
23555 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
23556 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
23557 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
23558 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
23559 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
23560 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
23561 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
23562 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
23563 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
23564 Debian</a> soon.</p>
23565
23566 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
23567 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
23568 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
23569 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
23570 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
23571 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
23572 you can even get
23573 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
23574 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
23575 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
23576 on the current exchange rates.</p>
23577
23578 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
23579 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
23580 donations to the address
23581 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
23582
23583       </div>
23584       <div class="tags">
23585
23586
23587         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>.
23588
23589
23590       </div>
23591     </div>
23592     <div class="padding"></div>
23593
23594     <div class="entry">
23595       <div class="title">
23596         <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>
23597       </div>
23598       <div class="date">
23599          9th December 2010
23600       </div>
23601       <div class="body">
23602         <p>A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot
23603 student assosiation <a href="http://www.robotica.no/">Robotica
23604 Osloensis</a> at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to
23605 get their own 3D printer.  They wanted to learn from me based on my
23606 work in the area.  After having a short lunch meeting with them, I
23607 offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete
23608 the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon.  I look
23609 forward to see how this goes.  This monday their volunteer driver
23610 picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the
23611 last exam is over so they can start work on getting the 3D printer
23612 operational.</p>
23613
23614 <p>The robotic group have already build several robots on their own,
23615 and seem capable of getting the reprap operational.  I really look
23616 forward to being able to print all the cool 3D designs published on
23617 <a href="http://www.thingiverse.com/">Thingiverse</a>.  I even got
23618 some 3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at
23619 the computer science department at the university demonstrated their
23620 very cool 3D scanner.</p>
23621
23622       </div>
23623       <div class="tags">
23624
23625
23626         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>.
23627
23628
23629       </div>
23630     </div>
23631     <div class="padding"></div>
23632
23633     <div class="entry">
23634       <div class="title">
23635         <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>
23636       </div>
23637       <div class="date">
23638         29th November 2010
23639       </div>
23640       <div class="body">
23641         <p>On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
23642 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2010-12-03-05-Oslo">development
23643 gathering</a> in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway.  I
23644 really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
23645 Squeeze release.  The gathering is open for everyone interested in
23646 learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
23647
23648 <p>On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
23649 organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
23650 will hold its
23651 <a href="http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Genfors/2010">General Assembly
23652 for 2010</a>.  Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388
23653 people registered as members.  Last year 32 members cast their vote in
23654 the memberdb based election system.  I hope more people find time to
23655 vote this year.</p>
23656
23657       </div>
23658       <div class="tags">
23659
23660
23661         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>.
23662
23663
23664       </div>
23665     </div>
23666     <div class="padding"></div>
23667
23668     <div class="entry">
23669       <div class="title">
23670         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
23671       </div>
23672       <div class="date">
23673         27th November 2010
23674       </div>
23675       <div class="body">
23676         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
23677 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
23678 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
23679 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
23680 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
23681 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
23682 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
23683 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
23684
23685 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
23686 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
23687 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
23688 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
23689 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
23690 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
23691 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
23692 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
23693 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
23694 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
23695 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
23696
23697 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
23698 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
23699 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
23700 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
23701 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
23702 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
23703 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
23704 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
23705 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
23706 what is going on.</p>
23707
23708       </div>
23709       <div class="tags">
23710
23711
23712         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>.
23713
23714
23715       </div>
23716     </div>
23717     <div class="padding"></div>
23718
23719     <div class="entry">
23720       <div class="title">
23721         <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>
23722       </div>
23723       <div class="date">
23724         22nd November 2010
23725       </div>
23726       <div class="body">
23727         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
23728 upgrade testing of the
23729 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
23730 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
23731 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
23732 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
23733
23734 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
23735
23736 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
23737
23738 <blockquote><p>
23739   apache2.2-bin
23740   aptdaemon
23741   baobab
23742   binfmt-support
23743   browser-plugin-gnash
23744   cheese-common
23745   cli-common
23746   cups-pk-helper
23747   dmz-cursor-theme
23748   empathy
23749   empathy-common
23750   freedesktop-sound-theme
23751   freeglut3
23752   gconf-defaults-service
23753   gdm-themes
23754   gedit-plugins
23755   geoclue
23756   geoclue-hostip
23757   geoclue-localnet
23758   geoclue-manual
23759   geoclue-yahoo
23760   gnash
23761   gnash-common
23762   gnome
23763   gnome-backgrounds
23764   gnome-cards-data
23765   gnome-codec-install
23766   gnome-core
23767   gnome-desktop-environment
23768   gnome-disk-utility
23769   gnome-screenshot
23770   gnome-search-tool
23771   gnome-session-canberra
23772   gnome-system-log
23773   gnome-themes-extras
23774   gnome-themes-more
23775   gnome-user-share
23776   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
23777   gstreamer0.10-tools
23778   gtk2-engines
23779   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
23780   gtk2-engines-smooth
23781   hamster-applet
23782   libapache2-mod-dnssd
23783   libapr1
23784   libaprutil1
23785   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
23786   libaprutil1-ldap
23787   libart2.0-cil
23788   libboost-date-time1.42.0
23789   libboost-python1.42.0
23790   libboost-thread1.42.0
23791   libchamplain-0.4-0
23792   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
23793   libcheese-gtk18
23794   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
23795   libcryptui0
23796   libdiscid0
23797   libelf1
23798   libepc-1.0-2
23799   libepc-common
23800   libepc-ui-1.0-2
23801   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
23802   libfreerdp0
23803   libgconf2.0-cil
23804   libgdata-common
23805   libgdata7
23806   libgdu-gtk0
23807   libgee2
23808   libgeoclue0
23809   libgexiv2-0
23810   libgif4
23811   libglade2.0-cil
23812   libglib2.0-cil
23813   libgmime2.4-cil
23814   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
23815   libgnome2.24-cil
23816   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
23817   libgpod-common
23818   libgpod4
23819   libgtk2.0-cil
23820   libgtkglext1
23821   libgtksourceview2.0-common
23822   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
23823   libmono-addins0.2-cil
23824   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
23825   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
23826   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
23827   libmono-posix2.0-cil
23828   libmono-security2.0-cil
23829   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
23830   libmono-system2.0-cil
23831   libmtp8
23832   libmusicbrainz3-6
23833   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
23834   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
23835   libopal3.6.8
23836   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
23837   libpt2.6.7
23838   libpython2.6
23839   librpm1
23840   librpmio1
23841   libsdl1.2debian
23842   libsrtp0
23843   libssh-4
23844   libtelepathy-farsight0
23845   libtelepathy-glib0
23846   libtidy-0.99-0
23847   media-player-info
23848   mesa-utils
23849   mono-2.0-gac
23850   mono-gac
23851   mono-runtime
23852   nautilus-sendto
23853   nautilus-sendto-empathy
23854   p7zip-full
23855   pkg-config
23856   python-aptdaemon
23857   python-aptdaemon-gtk
23858   python-axiom
23859   python-beautifulsoup
23860   python-bugbuddy
23861   python-clientform
23862   python-coherence
23863   python-configobj
23864   python-crypto
23865   python-cupshelpers
23866   python-elementtree
23867   python-epsilon
23868   python-evolution
23869   python-feedparser
23870   python-gdata
23871   python-gdbm
23872   python-gst0.10
23873   python-gtkglext1
23874   python-gtksourceview2
23875   python-httplib2
23876   python-louie
23877   python-mako
23878   python-markupsafe
23879   python-mechanize
23880   python-nevow
23881   python-notify
23882   python-opengl
23883   python-openssl
23884   python-pam
23885   python-pkg-resources
23886   python-pyasn1
23887   python-pysqlite2
23888   python-rdflib
23889   python-serial
23890   python-tagpy
23891   python-twisted-bin
23892   python-twisted-conch
23893   python-twisted-core
23894   python-twisted-web
23895   python-utidylib
23896   python-webkit
23897   python-xdg
23898   python-zope.interface
23899   remmina
23900   remmina-plugin-data
23901   remmina-plugin-rdp
23902   remmina-plugin-vnc
23903   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
23904   rhythmbox-plugins
23905   rpm-common
23906   rpm2cpio
23907   seahorse-plugins
23908   shotwell
23909   software-center
23910   system-config-printer-udev
23911   telepathy-gabble
23912   telepathy-mission-control-5
23913   telepathy-salut
23914   tomboy
23915   totem
23916   totem-coherence
23917   totem-mozilla
23918   totem-plugins
23919   transmission-common
23920   xdg-user-dirs
23921   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
23922   xserver-xephyr
23923 </p></blockquote>
23924
23925 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
23926
23927 <blockquote><p>
23928   cheese
23929   ekiga
23930   eog
23931   epiphany-extensions
23932   evolution-exchange
23933   fast-user-switch-applet
23934   file-roller
23935   gcalctool
23936   gconf-editor
23937   gdm
23938   gedit
23939   gedit-common
23940   gnome-games
23941   gnome-games-data
23942   gnome-nettool
23943   gnome-system-tools
23944   gnome-themes
23945   gnuchess
23946   gucharmap
23947   guile-1.8-libs
23948   libavahi-ui0
23949   libdmx1
23950   libgalago3
23951   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
23952   libgtksourceview2.0-0
23953   liblircclient0
23954   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
23955   libspeexdsp1
23956   libsvga1
23957   rhythmbox
23958   seahorse
23959   sound-juicer
23960   system-config-printer
23961   totem-common
23962   transmission-gtk
23963   vinagre
23964   vino
23965 </p></blockquote>
23966
23967 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
23968
23969 <blockquote><p>
23970   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
23971 </p></blockquote>
23972
23973 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
23974
23975 <blockquote><p>
23976 [nothing]
23977 </p></blockquote>
23978
23979 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
23980
23981 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
23982
23983 <blockquote><p>
23984   ksmserver
23985 </p></blockquote>
23986
23987 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
23988
23989 <blockquote><p>
23990   kwin
23991   network-manager-kde
23992 </p></blockquote>
23993
23994 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
23995
23996 <blockquote><p>
23997   arts
23998   dolphin
23999   freespacenotifier
24000   google-gadgets-gst
24001   google-gadgets-xul
24002   kappfinder
24003   kcalc
24004   kcharselect
24005   kde-core
24006   kde-plasma-desktop
24007   kde-standard
24008   kde-window-manager
24009   kdeartwork
24010   kdeartwork-emoticons
24011   kdeartwork-style
24012   kdeartwork-theme-icon
24013   kdebase
24014   kdebase-apps
24015   kdebase-workspace
24016   kdebase-workspace-bin
24017   kdebase-workspace-data
24018   kdeeject
24019   kdelibs
24020   kdeplasma-addons
24021   kdeutils
24022   kdewallpapers
24023   kdf
24024   kfloppy
24025   kgpg
24026   khelpcenter4
24027   kinfocenter
24028   konq-plugins-l10n
24029   konqueror-nsplugins
24030   kscreensaver
24031   kscreensaver-xsavers
24032   ktimer
24033   kwrite
24034   libgle3
24035   libkde4-ruby1.8
24036   libkonq5
24037   libkonq5-templates
24038   libnetpbm10
24039   libplasma-ruby
24040   libplasma-ruby1.8
24041   libqt4-ruby1.8
24042   marble-data
24043   marble-plugins
24044   netpbm
24045   nuvola-icon-theme
24046   plasma-dataengines-workspace
24047   plasma-desktop
24048   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
24049   plasma-runners-addons
24050   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
24051   plasma-scriptengine-python
24052   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
24053   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
24054   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
24055   plasma-scriptengines
24056   plasma-wallpapers-addons
24057   plasma-widget-folderview
24058   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
24059   ruby
24060   sweeper
24061   update-notifier-kde
24062   xscreensaver-data-extra
24063   xscreensaver-gl
24064   xscreensaver-gl-extra
24065   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
24066 </p></blockquote>
24067
24068 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
24069
24070 <blockquote><p>
24071   ark
24072   google-gadgets-common
24073   google-gadgets-qt
24074   htdig
24075   kate
24076   kdebase-bin
24077   kdebase-data
24078   kdepasswd
24079   kfind
24080   klipper
24081   konq-plugins
24082   konqueror
24083   ksysguard
24084   ksysguardd
24085   libarchive1
24086   libcln6
24087   libeet1
24088   libeina-svn-06
24089   libggadget-1.0-0b
24090   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
24091   libgps19
24092   libkdecorations4
24093   libkephal4
24094   libkonq4
24095   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
24096   libkscreensaver5
24097   libksgrd4
24098   libksignalplotter4
24099   libkunitconversion4
24100   libkwineffects1a
24101   libmarblewidget4
24102   libntrack-qt4-1
24103   libntrack0
24104   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
24105   libplasmaclock4a
24106   libplasmagenericshell4
24107   libprocesscore4a
24108   libprocessui4a
24109   libqalculate5
24110   libqedje0a
24111   libqtruby4shared2
24112   libqzion0a
24113   libruby1.8
24114   libscim8c2a
24115   libsmokekdecore4-3
24116   libsmokekdeui4-3
24117   libsmokekfile3
24118   libsmokekhtml3
24119   libsmokekio3
24120   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
24121   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
24122   libsmokekparts3
24123   libsmokektexteditor3
24124   libsmokekutils3
24125   libsmokenepomuk3
24126   libsmokephonon3
24127   libsmokeplasma3
24128   libsmokeqtcore4-3
24129   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
24130   libsmokeqtgui4-3
24131   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
24132   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
24133   libsmokeqtscript4-3
24134   libsmokeqtsql4-3
24135   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
24136   libsmokeqttest4-3
24137   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
24138   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
24139   libsmokeqtxml4-3
24140   libsmokesolid3
24141   libsmokesoprano3
24142   libtaskmanager4a
24143   libtidy-0.99-0
24144   libweather-ion4a
24145   libxklavier16
24146   libxxf86misc1
24147   okteta
24148   oxygencursors
24149   plasma-dataengines-addons
24150   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
24151   plasma-widget-lancelot
24152   plasma-widgets-addons
24153   plasma-widgets-workspace
24154   polkit-kde-1
24155   ruby1.8
24156   systemsettings
24157   update-notifier-common
24158 </p></blockquote>
24159
24160 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
24161 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
24162 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
24163 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
24164
24165       </div>
24166       <div class="tags">
24167
24168
24169         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>.
24170
24171
24172       </div>
24173     </div>
24174     <div class="padding"></div>
24175
24176     <div class="entry">
24177       <div class="title">
24178         <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>
24179       </div>
24180       <div class="date">
24181         22nd November 2010
24182       </div>
24183       <div class="body">
24184         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
24185 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
24186 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
24187 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
24188 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
24189 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
24190 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
24191 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
24192 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
24193
24194 <p>I found
24195 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
24196 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
24197 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
24198 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
24199 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
24200 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
24201
24202 <pre>
24203 #!/bin/sh
24204
24205 # Based on
24206 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
24207
24208 set -e
24209 set -x
24210
24211 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
24212     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
24213     exit 1
24214 else
24215     host="$1"
24216 fi
24217
24218 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
24219     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
24220     exit 1
24221 fi
24222
24223 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
24224 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
24225 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
24226 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
24227
24228 img=$host.img
24229 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
24230 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
24231
24232 parted $img mklabel msdos
24233 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
24234 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
24235 parted $img set 1 boot on
24236
24237 modprobe dm-mod
24238 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
24239 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
24240
24241 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
24242 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
24243 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
24244
24245 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
24246 losetup -d /dev/loop0
24247 </pre>
24248
24249 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
24250 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
24251
24252 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
24253 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
24254 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
24255 seem to work just fine.</p>
24256
24257       </div>
24258       <div class="tags">
24259
24260
24261         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>.
24262
24263
24264       </div>
24265     </div>
24266     <div class="padding"></div>
24267
24268     <div class="entry">
24269       <div class="title">
24270         <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>
24271       </div>
24272       <div class="date">
24273         20th November 2010
24274       </div>
24275       <div class="body">
24276         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
24277 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
24278 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
24279 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
24280
24281 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
24282 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
24283 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
24284
24285 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
24286
24287 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
24288
24289 <blockquote><p>
24290   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
24291   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
24292   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
24293   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
24294   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
24295   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
24296   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
24297   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
24298   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
24299   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
24300   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
24301   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
24302   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
24303   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
24304   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
24305   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
24306   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
24307   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
24308   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
24309   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
24310   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
24311   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
24312   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
24313   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
24314   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
24315   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
24316   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
24317   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
24318   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
24319   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
24320   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
24321   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
24322   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
24323   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
24324   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
24325   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
24326   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
24327   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
24328   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
24329   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
24330   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
24331   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
24332   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
24333   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
24334   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
24335   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
24336   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
24337   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
24338   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
24339   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
24340   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
24341   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
24342   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
24343   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
24344   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
24345   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
24346   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
24347   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
24348   zip
24349 </p></blockquote>
24350
24351 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
24352
24353 <blockquote><p>
24354   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
24355   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
24356   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
24357   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
24358   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
24359   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
24360   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
24361   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
24362   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
24363   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
24364   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
24365   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
24366   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
24367   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
24368   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
24369   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
24370   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
24371   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
24372   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
24373   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
24374   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
24375   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
24376   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
24377   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
24378   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
24379   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
24380   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
24381   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
24382   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
24383 </p></blockquote>
24384
24385 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
24386
24387 <blockquote><p>
24388   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
24389 </p></blockquote>
24390
24391 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
24392
24393 <blockquote><p>
24394 [nothing]
24395 </p></blockquote>
24396
24397 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
24398
24399 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
24400
24401 <blockquote><p>
24402   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
24403   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
24404   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
24405   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
24406   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
24407   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
24408   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
24409   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
24410   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
24411   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
24412   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
24413   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
24414   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
24415   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
24416   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
24417   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
24418   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
24419   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
24420   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
24421   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
24422   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
24423   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
24424   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
24425   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
24426   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
24427   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
24428   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
24429   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
24430   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
24431   ttf-sazanami-gothic
24432 </p></blockquote>
24433
24434 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
24435
24436 <blockquote><p>
24437   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
24438   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
24439   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
24440   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
24441   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
24442   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
24443   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
24444   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
24445   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
24446   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
24447   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
24448   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
24449   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
24450   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
24451   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
24452   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
24453   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
24454   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
24455   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
24456   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
24457   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
24458   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
24459   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
24460   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
24461   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
24462   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
24463   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
24464   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
24465   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
24466   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
24467   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
24468   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
24469   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
24470 </p></blockquote>
24471
24472 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
24473
24474 <blockquote><p>
24475   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
24476   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
24477   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
24478   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
24479   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
24480   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
24481   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
24482 </p></blockquote>
24483
24484 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
24485
24486 <blockquote><p>
24487   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
24488 </p></blockquote>
24489
24490       </div>
24491       <div class="tags">
24492
24493
24494         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>.
24495
24496
24497       </div>
24498     </div>
24499     <div class="padding"></div>
24500
24501     <div class="entry">
24502       <div class="title">
24503         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
24504       </div>
24505       <div class="date">
24506         20th November 2010
24507       </div>
24508       <div class="body">
24509         <p>Answering
24510 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
24511 call from the Gnash project</a> for
24512 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
24513 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
24514 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
24515 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
24516 releases out more often.</p>
24517
24518 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
24519 I have considered setting up a <a
24520 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
24521 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
24522 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
24523 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
24524 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
24525 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
24526 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
24527 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
24528 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
24529 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
24530 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
24531 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
24532
24533       </div>
24534       <div class="tags">
24535
24536
24537         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>.
24538
24539
24540       </div>
24541     </div>
24542     <div class="padding"></div>
24543
24544     <div class="entry">
24545       <div class="title">
24546         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
24547       </div>
24548       <div class="date">
24549          9th November 2010
24550       </div>
24551       <div class="body">
24552         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
24553
24554 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
24555 3D linked in from
24556 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
24557 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
24558
24559       </div>
24560       <div class="tags">
24561
24562
24563         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>.
24564
24565
24566       </div>
24567     </div>
24568     <div class="padding"></div>
24569
24570     <div class="entry">
24571       <div class="title">
24572         <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>
24573       </div>
24574       <div class="date">
24575          7th November 2010
24576       </div>
24577       <div class="body">
24578         <p>Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
24579 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> DVD, which is
24580 supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
24581 needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard.  Even
24582 schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
24583 working using this DVD.</p>
24584
24585 <p>The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
24586 installing recommended packages by default.  We want the same set of
24587 packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
24588 that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD.  I created
24589 a patch for debian-cd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/601203">BTS
24590 report #601203</a> to do this, and since this change was applied to
24591 the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.</p>
24592
24593 <p>A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
24594 the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
24595 those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
24596 Debian archive.</p>
24597
24598 <p>Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
24599 were using most space.  A few large packages are well know;
24600 openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont.  But I also
24601 discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB.
24602 The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
24603 when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were
24604 the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
24605 I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
24606 our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
24607 documentation.  Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
24608 which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
24609 free X driver should work.</p>
24610
24611 <p>With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
24612 desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
24613 DVD more useful again.</p>
24614
24615       </div>
24616       <div class="tags">
24617
24618
24619         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>.
24620
24621
24622       </div>
24623     </div>
24624     <div class="padding"></div>
24625
24626     <div class="entry">
24627       <div class="title">
24628         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
24629       </div>
24630       <div class="date">
24631         24th October 2010
24632       </div>
24633       <div class="body">
24634         <p>Some updates.</p>
24635
24636 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
24637 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
24638 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
24639 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
24640 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
24641 :)</p>
24642
24643 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
24644 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
24645 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
24646 It is called
24647 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
24648 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
24649 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
24650 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
24651 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
24652 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
24653
24654 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
24655 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
24656 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
24657 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
24658 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
24659 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
24660 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
24661 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
24662 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
24663 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
24664
24665       </div>
24666       <div class="tags">
24667
24668
24669         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>.
24670
24671
24672       </div>
24673     </div>
24674     <div class="padding"></div>
24675
24676     <div class="entry">
24677       <div class="title">
24678         <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>
24679       </div>
24680       <div class="date">
24681         19th October 2010
24682       </div>
24683       <div class="body">
24684         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is the
24685 most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation. It
24686 has done great so far, but there is still far to go, and recently its
24687 funding has dried up.  I believe AVM2 support in Gnash is vital to the
24688 continued progress of the project, as more and more sites show up with
24689 AVM2 flash files.</p>
24690
24691 <p>To try to get funding for developing such support, I have started
24692 <a href="http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">a pledge</a> with the
24693 following text:</P>
24694
24695 <p><blockquote>
24696
24697   <p>"I will pay 100$ to the Gnash project to develop AVM2 support but
24698   only if 10 other people will do the same."</p>
24699
24700   <p>- Petter Reinholdtsen, free software developer</p>
24701
24702   <p>Deadline to sign up by: 24th December 2010</p>
24703
24704   <p>The Gnash project need to get support for the new Flash file
24705   format AVM2 to work with a lot of sites using Flash on the
24706   web. Gnash already work with a lot of Flash sites using the old AVM1
24707   format, but more and more sites are using the AVM2 format these
24708   days. The project web page is available from
24709   http://www.getgnash.org/ . Gnash is a free software implementation
24710   of Adobe Flash, allowing those of us that do not accept the terms of
24711   the Adobe Flash license to get access to Flash sites.</p>
24712
24713   <p>The project need funding to get developers to put aside enough
24714   time to develop the AVM2 support, and this pledge is my way to try
24715   to get this to happen.</p>
24716
24717   <p>The project accept donations via the OpenMediaNow foundation,
24718   <a href="http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32">http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32</a> .</p>
24719
24720 </blockquote></p>
24721
24722 <p>I hope you will support this effort too.  I hope more than 10
24723 people will participate to make this happen.  The more money the
24724 project gets, the more features it can develop using these funds.
24725 :)</p>
24726
24727       </div>
24728       <div class="tags">
24729
24730
24731         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>.
24732
24733
24734       </div>
24735     </div>
24736     <div class="padding"></div>
24737
24738     <div class="entry">
24739       <div class="title">
24740         <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>
24741       </div>
24742       <div class="date">
24743          9th October 2010
24744       </div>
24745       <div class="body">
24746         <p>This summer I got the chance to buy cheap Spykee robots, and since
24747 then I have worked on getting Linux software in place to control them.
24748 The firmware for the robot is available from the producer, and using
24749 that source it was trivial to figure out the protocol specification.
24750 I've started on a perl library to control it, and made some demo
24751 programs using this perl library to allow one to control the
24752 robots.</p>
24753
24754 <p>The library is quite functional already, and capable of controlling
24755 the driving, fetching video, uploading MP3s and play them.  There are
24756 a few less important features too.</p>
24757
24758 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I ran out of time to spend on this project,
24759 but I never got around to releasing the current source.  I decided
24760 today that it was time to do something about it, and uploaded the
24761 source to my Debian package store at people.skolelinux.org.</p>
24762
24763 <p>Because it was simpler for me, I made a Debian package and
24764 published the source and deb.  If you got a spykee robot, grab the
24765 source or binary package:</p>
24766
24767 <p><ul>
24768 <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>
24769 <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>
24770 <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>
24771 </ul></p>
24772
24773 <p>If you are interested in helping out with developing this library,
24774 please let me know.</p>
24775
24776       </div>
24777       <div class="tags">
24778
24779
24780         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>.
24781
24782
24783       </div>
24784     </div>
24785     <div class="padding"></div>
24786
24787     <div class="entry">
24788       <div class="title">
24789         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html">Links for 2010-10-03</a>
24790       </div>
24791       <div class="date">
24792          3rd October 2010
24793       </div>
24794       <div class="body">
24795         <p><ul>
24796
24797 <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
24798 is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly</a></li>
24799
24800 <li>Scanner looking under clothes
24801 <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/10/03/nyheter/utenriks/reise/overvakingskamera/flyplasser/13667192/">has
24802 already been misused at Heathrow</a>.</li>
24803
24804 <li><a href="http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Landell">Landell
24805 Webcasting</a> - interesting alternative for
24806 <ahref="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">DVSwitch</a> with
24807 simple setup.
24808
24809 </ul></p>
24810
24811       </div>
24812       <div class="tags">
24813
24814
24815         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>.
24816
24817
24818       </div>
24819     </div>
24820     <div class="padding"></div>
24821
24822     <div class="entry">
24823       <div class="title">
24824         <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>
24825       </div>
24826       <div class="date">
24827          9th September 2010
24828       </div>
24829       <div class="body">
24830         <p>A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital
24831 camera, a Canon IXUS 130.  It was instructive and very disturbing to
24832 be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to
24833 specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera.
24834 Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras
24835 are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway.  What is the
24836 problem, you might ask?  It is software patents, MPEG-4, H.264 and the
24837 MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences
24838 without asking for permissions that is at risk.
24839
24840 <p>On page 27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is
24841 written:</p>
24842
24843 <blockquote>
24844 <p>This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard
24845 and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding
24846 MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and
24847 non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the
24848 AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video.</p>
24849
24850 <p>No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4
24851 standard.</p>
24852 </blockquote>
24853
24854 <p>In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology
24855 (MPEG-4/H.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and
24856 non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations
24857 holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.</p>
24858
24859 <p>This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to
24860 read
24861 "<a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA">Why
24862 Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the
24863 MPEG-LA</a>" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and
24864 "<a href="http://webmink.com/2010/09/03/h-264-and-foss/">H.264 Is Not
24865 The Sort Of Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps to learn more about
24866 the issue.  The solution is to support the
24867 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
24868 open standards</a> for video, like <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg
24869 Theora</a>, and avoid MPEG-4 and H.264 if you can.</p>
24870
24871       </div>
24872       <div class="tags">
24873
24874
24875         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>.
24876
24877
24878       </div>
24879     </div>
24880     <div class="padding"></div>
24881
24882     <div class="entry">
24883       <div class="title">
24884         <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>
24885       </div>
24886       <div class="date">
24887          4th September 2010
24888       </div>
24889       <div class="body">
24890         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
24891 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
24892 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
24893 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
24894 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
24895 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
24896 installed.</p>
24897
24898 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
24899 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
24900 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
24901 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
24902 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
24903 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
24904 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
24905 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
24906 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
24907
24908 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
24909 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
24910 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
24911 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
24912 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
24913 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
24914 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
24915 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
24916 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
24917 pages they want to visit.</p>
24918
24919 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
24920 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
24921 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
24922 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
24923 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
24924 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
24925 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
24926 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
24927 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
24928 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
24929 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
24930
24931       </div>
24932       <div class="tags">
24933
24934
24935         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>.
24936
24937
24938       </div>
24939     </div>
24940     <div class="padding"></div>
24941
24942     <div class="entry">
24943       <div class="title">
24944         <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>
24945       </div>
24946       <div class="date">
24947          1st September 2010
24948       </div>
24949       <div class="body">
24950         <p>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application.  The last few
24951 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
24952 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
24953 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
24954 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
24955 allow me to drive the robot around.  I picked PerlQt as I have had
24956 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
24957 browsing the web for examples.  Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
24958 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
24959 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
24960 libqt-perl.  Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
24961 drive around.</p>
24962
24963 <p>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
24964 controlling the robot.  Here is an small example on how to use it:</p>
24965
24966 <p><pre>
24967 use Spykee;
24968 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
24969 my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
24970 my $spykee = Spykee->new();
24971 $spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
24972 $spykee->left();
24973 sleep 2;
24974 $spykee->right();
24975 sleep 2;
24976 $spykee->forward();
24977 sleep 2;
24978 $spykee->back();
24979 sleep 2;
24980 $spykee->stop();
24981 </pre></p>
24982
24983 <p>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
24984 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
24985 implement the protocol used by the robot.  I've implemented several of
24986 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
24987 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote.  First I
24988 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
24989 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
24990 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
24991 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
24992 going. :).</p>
24993
24994 <p>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
24995 where to make it available first.  I will add a link to
24996 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/">the NUUG wiki</a> for
24997 those that want to check back later to find it.</p>
24998
24999       </div>
25000       <div class="tags">
25001
25002
25003         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>.
25004
25005
25006       </div>
25007     </div>
25008     <div class="padding"></div>
25009
25010     <div class="entry">
25011       <div class="title">
25012         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken hard link handling with sshfs</a>
25013       </div>
25014       <div class="date">
25015         30th August 2010
25016       </div>
25017       <div class="body">
25018         <p>Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
25019 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">previous
25020 post about sshfs</a>.  He reported another problem with sshfs.  It
25021 fail to handle hard links properly.  A simple way to spot this is to
25022 look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree.  These should have
25023 a link count >1, but on sshfs the count is 1.  I just tested to see
25024 what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:</p>
25025
25026 <pre>
25027 % ln foo bar
25028 ln: creating hard link `bar' => `foo': Function not implemented
25029 %
25030 </pre>
25031
25032 <p>I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
25033 system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
25034 avoid surprised unix programs.  Not as useful as working file locking
25035 and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
25036 nevertheless. :)</p>
25037
25038 <p>The latest version of the file system test code is available via
25039 git from
25040 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a></p>
25041
25042       </div>
25043       <div class="tags">
25044
25045
25046         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>.
25047
25048
25049       </div>
25050     </div>
25051     <div class="padding"></div>
25052
25053     <div class="entry">
25054       <div class="title">
25055         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken umask handling with sshfs</a>
25056       </div>
25057       <div class="date">
25058         26th August 2010
25059       </div>
25060       <div class="body">
25061         <p>My file system sematics program
25062 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">presented
25063 a few days ago</a> is very useful to verify that a file system can
25064 work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit.  I'm
25065 looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
25066 University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs.  My friend
25067 Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
25068 Edu, but stopped because of problems.  I asked today what the problems
25069 where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
25070 Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
25071 script:</p>
25072
25073 <pre>
25074 mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
25075   mode_t retval = 0;
25076   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
25077   if (-1 != fd) {
25078     unlink(name);
25079     struct stat statbuf;
25080     if (-1 != fstat(fd, &statbuf)) {
25081       retval = statbuf.st_mode & 0x1ff;
25082     }
25083     close(fd);
25084   }
25085   return retval;
25086 }
25087
25088 /* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
25089 int test_umask(void) {
25090   printf("info: testing umask effect on file creation\n");
25091
25092   mode_t orig_umask = umask(000);
25093   mode_t newmode;
25094   if (0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
25095     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 000\n",
25096            newmode);
25097   }
25098   umask(007);
25099   if (0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
25100     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 007\n",
25101            newmode);
25102   }
25103
25104   umask (orig_umask);
25105   return 0;
25106 }
25107
25108 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
25109   [...]
25110   test_umask();
25111   return 0;
25112 }
25113 </pre>
25114
25115 <p>Sure enough.  On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:</p>
25116
25117 <pre>
25118 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
25119 info: testing symlink creation
25120 info: testing subdirectory creation
25121 info: testing fcntl locking
25122   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
25123   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
25124   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
25125   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
25126   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
25127   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
25128 info: testing umask effect on file creation
25129 </pre>
25130
25131 <p>When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this
25132 result:</p>
25133
25134 <pre>
25135 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
25136 info: testing symlink creation
25137 info: testing subdirectory creation
25138 info: testing fcntl locking
25139   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
25140   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
25141   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
25142   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
25143   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
25144   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
25145 info: testing umask effect on file creation
25146   error: Wrong file mode 644 when creating using mode 666 and umask 000
25147   error: Wrong file mode 640 when creating using mode 666 and umask 007
25148 </pre>
25149
25150 <p>So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a
25151 Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home
25152 directory.</p>
25153
25154 <p>Update 2010-08-26: Reported the issue in
25155 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/594498">BTS report #594498</a></p>
25156
25157 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
25158 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
25159 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
25160
25161       </div>
25162       <div class="tags">
25163
25164
25165         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>.
25166
25167
25168       </div>
25169     </div>
25170     <div class="padding"></div>
25171
25172     <div class="entry">
25173       <div class="title">
25174         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html">Rob Weir: How to Crush Dissent</a>
25175       </div>
25176       <div class="date">
25177         15th August 2010
25178       </div>
25179       <div class="body">
25180         <p>I found the notes from Rob Weir on
25181 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/VGb23-kta8c/how-to-crush-dissent.html">how
25182 to crush dissent</a> matching my own thoughts on the matter quite
25183 well.  Highly recommended for those wondering which road our society
25184 should go down.  In my view we have been heading the wrong way for a
25185 long time.</p>
25186
25187       </div>
25188       <div class="tags">
25189
25190
25191         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>.
25192
25193
25194       </div>
25195     </div>
25196     <div class="padding"></div>
25197
25198     <div class="entry">
25199       <div class="title">
25200         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html">No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients</a>
25201       </div>
25202       <div class="date">
25203          9th August 2010
25204       </div>
25205       <div class="body">
25206         <p>As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
25207 Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
25208 configuration settings on the clients.  I believe the work to be
25209 mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
25210 generated configuration.</p>
25211
25212 <p>What is the point, you might ask?  The point is to allow a Debian
25213 Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
25214 without any manual configuration.</p>
25215
25216 <p>This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
25217 the University of Oslo using PXE.  With the PXE installation, I am
25218 asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
25219 layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
25220 accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
25221 popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret).  After answering
25222 these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
25223 after around 50 minutes it is done.  I press enter to finish the
25224 installation, and the machine reboots into KDE.  When the machine is
25225 ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
25226 username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
25227 been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
25228 same username and password to the KDE 4.4 desktop.  At no point during
25229 this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
25230 required configuration was dynamically detected using information
25231 fetched via DHCP and DNS.  The roaming workstation is now ready for
25232 use.</p>
25233
25234 <p>How was this done, you might wonder?  First of all, here is the
25235 list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
25236 working properly out of the box:</p>
25237
25238 <ul>
25239 <li>IP address/netmask and DNS server.</li>
25240 <li>Web proxy URL.</li>
25241 <li>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).</li>
25242 <li>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.</li>
25243 <li>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)</li>
25244 <li>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)</li>
25245 <li>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)</li>
25246 </ul>
25247
25248 <p>(Hm, did I forget anything?  Let me knew if I did.)</p>
25249
25250 <p>The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
25251 machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
25252 administrators to track their machines.  Since yesterday, everything
25253 but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
25254 and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.</p>
25255
25256 <p>The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
25257 When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
25258 http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
25259 configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
25260 /etc/apt/apt.conf.  I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
25261 hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
25262 it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
25263 proxy present on the new network when it moves around.</p>
25264
25265 <p>The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
25266 configuration are generated using DNS information at boot.  First the
25267 installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain.  If
25268 not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead.  If an
25269 LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
25270 attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
25271 determine which LDAP base to use for NSS.  If there are several
25272 namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
25273 LDAP subtree is used as the base.  If defaultNamingContext is missing,
25274 the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
25275 object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
25276 such an object is used as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
25277 search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
25278 for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record.  I've been unable to find a way to
25279 look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
25280 current DNS domain is used.</p>
25281
25282 <p>For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
25283 for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
25284 found.  This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
25285 Oslo.  A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
25286 server, but have not been implemented yet.  I decided to fetch and
25287 save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
25288 different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
25289 log in nor the passwords required to log in.  Usernames and passwords
25290 will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
25291 network, and will not change as the laptop move around.  For a
25292 non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
25293 supposed to stay in place it should not matter much.  Perhaps we
25294 should switch those to use sssd too?</p>
25295
25296 <p>The user's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
25297 located when the user logs in for the first time.  The LDAP server is
25298 consulted to look for the user's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
25299 attribute is used if found.  If it isn't found, the home directory
25300 path fetched from NSS is used instead.  Assuming the path is of the
25301 form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
25302 DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
25303 smb://server.domain/username.  This algorithm works for both Debian
25304 edu and the University of Oslo.  Perhaps there are better attributes
25305 to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
25306 do for now. :)</p>
25307
25308 <p>This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
25309 into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
25310 more flexible than before.  I suspect it will also work for thin
25311 client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
25312 existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
25313 yet.</p>
25314
25315 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
25316 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
25317
25318 <p>Update 2010-08-09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
25319 detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
25320 before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name.  Will have to
25321 implement it for Debian Edu. :)</p>
25322
25323       </div>
25324       <div class="tags">
25325
25326
25327         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>.
25328
25329
25330       </div>
25331     </div>
25332     <div class="padding"></div>
25333
25334     <div class="entry">
25335       <div class="title">
25336         <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>
25337       </div>
25338       <div class="date">
25339          8th August 2010
25340       </div>
25341       <div class="body">
25342         <p>A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
25343 Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
25344 Edu/Skolelinux machines.  This was thought to be no problem, as the
25345 access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
25346 knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
25347 mount home directories without any problems.  But, after months of
25348 struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.</p>
25349
25350 <p>The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
25351 directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
25352 work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
25353 underlying file system is a unix file system.  When using a Windows
25354 file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
25355 and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
25356 want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.</p>
25357
25358 <p>As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
25359 with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
25360 OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
25361 it should.  If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
25362 help you find your way out again.  This is the fs-test.c source:</p>
25363
25364 <pre>
25365 /*
25366  * Some tests to check the file system sematics.  Used to verify that
25367  * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
25368  * directory.
25369  * License: GPL v2 or later
25370  *
25371  * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
25372  * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
25373 */
25374
25375 #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
25376 #define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE 1
25377 #define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE 1
25378
25379 #define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
25380
25381 #include &lt;errno.h>
25382 #include &lt;fcntl.h>
25383 #include &lt;stdio.h>
25384 #include &lt;string.h>
25385 #include &lt;stdlib.h>
25386 #include &lt;sys/file.h>
25387 #include &lt;sys/stat.h>
25388 #include &lt;sys/types.h>
25389 #include &lt;unistd.h>
25390
25391 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
25392 /*
25393  * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
25394  * package and linking with -lsqlite3.  A more low level test is
25395  * below.
25396  * See also &lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 >.
25397  */
25398 #include &lt;sqlite3.h>
25399 #define CREATE_TABLE_USERS                                              \
25400   "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); "
25401 int test_sqlite_open(void) {
25402   char *zErrMsg;
25403   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
25404   sqlite3 *db=NULL;
25405   unlink(name);
25406   int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &db);
25407   if( rc ){
25408     printf("error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
25409     sqlite3_close(db);
25410     return -1;
25411   }
25412
25413   /* create tables */
25414   rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,  0, &zErrMsg);
25415   if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
25416     printf("error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n", zErrMsg);
25417     sqlite3_close(db);
25418     return -1;
25419   }
25420   printf("info: sqlite worked\n");
25421   sqlite3_close(db);
25422   return 0;
25423 }
25424 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
25425
25426 /*
25427  * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3.  This
25428  * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows 2003.  This is
25429  * done in the sqlite3 library.
25430  * See also
25431  * &lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html> and the
25432  * POSIX specification
25433  * &lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html>.
25434  */
25435 int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
25436   struct flock fl;
25437   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
25438   unlink(name);
25439   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
25440   printf("info: testing fcntl locking\n");
25441
25442   fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
25443   fl.l_pid    = getpid();
25444   printf("  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
25445   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
25446   fl.l_len    = 1;
25447   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
25448   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
25449
25450   printf("  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
25451   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
25452   fl.l_len    = 510;
25453   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
25454   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
25455
25456   printf("  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824");
25457   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
25458   fl.l_len    = 1;
25459   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
25460   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
25461
25462   printf("  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
25463   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
25464   fl.l_len    = 1;
25465   fl.l_type   = F_WRLCK;
25466   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
25467
25468   printf("  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
25469   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
25470   fl.l_len    = 510;
25471   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
25472
25473   printf("  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824");
25474   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
25475   fl.l_len    = 2;
25476   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
25477   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
25478
25479   close(fd);
25480   return 0;
25481 }
25482
25483 /*
25484  * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
25485  * below them.  This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
25486  * Mounting with option 'sync' seem to solve this problem while
25487  * slowing down file operations.
25488  */
25489 int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
25490 #define LEVELS 5
25491   char *path = strdup("test");
25492   char *dirs[LEVELS];
25493   int level;
25494   printf("info: testing subdirectory creation\n");
25495   for (level = 0; level &lt; LEVELS; level++) {
25496     char *newpath = NULL;
25497     if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777)) {
25498       printf("  error: Unable to create directory '%s': %s\n",
25499              path, strerror(errno));
25500       break;
25501     }
25502     asprintf(&newpath, "%s/%s", path, "test");
25503     free(path);
25504     path = newpath;
25505   }
25506   return 0;
25507 }
25508
25509 /*
25510  * Test if symlinks can be created.  This was a problem detected with
25511  * KDE.
25512  */
25513 int test_symlinks(void) {
25514   printf("info: testing symlink creation\n");
25515   unlink("symlink");
25516   if (-1 == symlink("file", "symlink"))
25517     printf("  error: Unable to create symlink\n");
25518   return 0;
25519 }
25520
25521 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
25522   printf("Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n");
25523   test_symlinks();
25524   test_subdirectory_creation();
25525 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
25526   test_sqlite_open();
25527 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
25528   test_gcompris_locking();
25529   return 0;
25530 }
25531 </pre>
25532
25533 <p>When everything is working, it should print something like
25534 this:</p>
25535
25536 <pre>
25537 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
25538 info: testing symlink creation
25539 info: testing subdirectory creation
25540 info: sqlite worked
25541 info: testing fcntl locking
25542   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
25543   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
25544   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
25545   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
25546   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
25547   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
25548 </pre>
25549
25550 <p>I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
25551 of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
25552 read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
25553 the read-only lock (while Windows do not).  Another was a bug in the
25554 CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
25555 meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
25556 OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
25557 not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.</p>
25558
25559 <p>Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
25560 it. :)</p>
25561
25562 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
25563 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
25564 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
25565
25566       </div>
25567       <div class="tags">
25568
25569
25570         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>.
25571
25572
25573       </div>
25574     </div>
25575     <div class="padding"></div>
25576
25577     <div class="entry">
25578       <div class="title">
25579         <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>
25580       </div>
25581       <div class="date">
25582          7th August 2010
25583       </div>
25584       <div class="body">
25585         <p>A few days ago, I
25586 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">tried
25587 to install</a> a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
25588 while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
25589 noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
25590 university infrastructure.  It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
25591 that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
25592 connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
25593 itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
25594 around it.  Now I am a huge step further along that road.</p>
25595
25596 <p>With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
25597 workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
25598 university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
25599 servers for Kerberos authentication.  All this without any
25600 configuration at all during installation.  My users home directory got
25601 a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
25602 In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured.  In addition to
25603 this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
25604 proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
25605 /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf.  Iceweasel and KDE is
25606 configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
25607 a proxy when at the university network.  If the machine is moved to a
25608 network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
25609 gave it a IP address.</p>
25610
25611 <p>The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
25612 entry ldap.$domain.  If this do not exist, it look for the
25613 _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
25614 server.  Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
25615 namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
25616 pick the first one as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
25617 algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
25618 uppercase version of $domain.</p>
25619
25620 <p>So, what is not working, you might ask.  SMB mounting my home
25621 directory do not work.  No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
25622 Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
25623 the cause.  These are not properly configured during installation, and
25624 had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
25625 but SMB mounting still do not work. :(</p>
25626
25627 <p>With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
25628 roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
25629 connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
25630 authentication.  It should also work out of the box in a Active
25631 Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
25632 with UID and GID values.</p>
25633
25634 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
25635 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
25636
25637       </div>
25638       <div class="tags">
25639
25640
25641         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>.
25642
25643
25644       </div>
25645     </div>
25646     <div class="padding"></div>
25647
25648     <div class="entry">
25649       <div class="title">
25650         <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>
25651       </div>
25652       <div class="date">
25653          3rd August 2010
25654       </div>
25655       <div class="body">
25656         <p>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
25657 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
25658 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
25659 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
25660 infrastructure.  In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
25661 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
25662 servers.</p>
25663
25664 <p>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
25665 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
25666 /etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
25667 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
25668 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
25669 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
25670 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
25671 .uio.no.</p>
25672
25673 <p>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
25674 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
25675 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
25676 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
25677 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
25678 university servers.</p>
25679
25680 <p>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
25681 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
25682 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
25683 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
25684 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
25685 uses.</p>
25686
25687       </div>
25688       <div class="tags">
25689
25690
25691         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>.
25692
25693
25694       </div>
25695     </div>
25696     <div class="padding"></div>
25697
25698     <div class="entry">
25699       <div class="title">
25700         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
25701       </div>
25702       <div class="date">
25703         27th July 2010
25704       </div>
25705       <div class="body">
25706         <p>I discovered this while doing
25707 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
25708 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
25709 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
25710 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
25711 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
25712
25713 <p>An example is from todays
25714 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
25715 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
25716 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
25717 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
25718 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
25719 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
25720 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
25721
25722 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
25723
25724 <blockquote><pre>
25725 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
25726  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
25727   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
25728 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
25729  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
25730 </pre></blockquote>
25731
25732 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
25733 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
25734 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
25735 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
25736 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
25737 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
25738 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
25739 of dependency loops.</p>
25740
25741 <p>Thanks to
25742 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
25743 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
25744 dependencies
25745 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
25746 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
25747
25748 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
25749 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
25750 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
25751 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
25752 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
25753 it.</p>
25754
25755       </div>
25756       <div class="tags">
25757
25758
25759         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>.
25760
25761
25762       </div>
25763     </div>
25764     <div class="padding"></div>
25765
25766     <div class="entry">
25767       <div class="title">
25768         <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>
25769       </div>
25770       <div class="date">
25771         27th July 2010
25772       </div>
25773       <div class="body">
25774         <p>I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
25775 with the next Debian Edu release.  Not nearly done, but one major step
25776 completed.</p>
25777
25778 <blockquote>
25779 <p>This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
25780 release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
25781 install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
25782 of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
25783 user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
25784 longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
25785 Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
25786 language of choice, please let us know too.</p>
25787
25788 <p>In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
25789 artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
25790 and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.</p>
25791
25792 <p>The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
25793 work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
25794 much.</p>
25795
25796 <p>Changes compared to the lenny based version</p>
25797
25798 <ul>
25799 <li>Everything from Debian Squeeze
25800 <ul>
25801   <li>Desktop environment KDE 4.4 => the new KDE desktop in
25802          combination with some new artwork
25803   <li>Web browser Iceweasel 3.5
25804   <li>OpenOffice.org 3.2
25805   <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3
25806   <li>Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2
25807   <li>Image editor Gimp 2.6.10
25808   <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0
25809   <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4
25810   <li>3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)
25811   <li>Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)
25812 </ul></li>
25813 <li>Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
25814     Enabled for:
25815 <ul>
25816   <li>PAM
25817   <li>LDAP
25818   <li>IMAP
25819   <li>SMTP (sender verification)
25820 </ul>
25821 </li>
25822 <li>New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.</li>
25823 <li>Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
25824     fetched from LDAP.</li>
25825 <li>New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.</li>
25826 <li>General cleanup (not finished)</li>
25827 </ul>
25828 <p>The following features are not working as they should</p>
25829
25830 <ul>
25831 <li>No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
25832     scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
25833     for testing.</li>
25834 <li>DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
25835     and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
25836     clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.</li>
25837 <li>The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.</li>
25838 <li>The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.</li>
25839 <li>The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.</li>
25840 <li>Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
25841     netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.</li>
25842 <li>The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
25843     some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
25844     jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.</li>
25845 <li>Some packages lack translations. See
25846     http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
25847     and help out with translations.</li>
25848 </ul>
25849
25850 <p>To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use</p>
25851
25852 <ul>
25853 <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>
25854 <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>
25855 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
25856 </ul>
25857 <p>To download this multiarch dvd release you can use</p>
25858
25859 <ul>
25860 <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>
25861 <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>
25862 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
25863 </ul>
25864
25865 <p>There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
25866 get closer to the final release.</p>
25867
25868 <p>The MD5SUM of these images are</p>
25869
25870 <ul>
25871 <li>3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
25872 <li>22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
25873 </ul>
25874
25875 <p>The SHA1SUM of these images are</p>
25876 <ul>
25877 <li>c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
25878 <li>2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
25879 </ul>
25880 <p>How to report bugs:
25881 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla</p>
25882
25883 <p>Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org</p>
25884 </blockquote>
25885
25886       </div>
25887       <div class="tags">
25888
25889
25890         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>.
25891
25892
25893       </div>
25894     </div>
25895     <div class="padding"></div>
25896
25897     <div class="entry">
25898       <div class="title">
25899         <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>
25900       </div>
25901       <div class="date">
25902         25th July 2010
25903       </div>
25904       <div class="body">
25905         <p>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
25906 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
25907 Edu/Skolelinux into shape.  This future version will use Kerberos for
25908 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
25909 getting rid of password questions one at the time.</p>
25910
25911 <p>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
25912 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
25913 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
25914 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server.  This
25915 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
25916 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
25917 package.  I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.</p>
25918
25919 <p>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
25920 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
25921 password when mounting the SMB volume.  A simple click on the shortcut
25922 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
25923 up. :)</p>
25924
25925 <p>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
25926 Debian Edu.  We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
25927 also Samba.  Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.</p>
25928
25929 <p>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
25930 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
25931 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
25932 the release.  It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
25933 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
25934 time for a alpha0 release today.  As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
25935 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
25936 release another day.</p>
25937
25938 <p>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
25939 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
25940
25941       </div>
25942       <div class="tags">
25943
25944
25945         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>.
25946
25947
25948       </div>
25949     </div>
25950     <div class="padding"></div>
25951
25952     <div class="entry">
25953       <div class="title">
25954         <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>
25955       </div>
25956       <div class="date">
25957         18th July 2010
25958       </div>
25959       <div class="body">
25960         <p>Thanks to
25961 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home">todays
25962 opengeodata blog entry</a>, I just discovered that the
25963 OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
25964 <a href="http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT">support
25965 for calculating routes</a>.  The support is still experimental and
25966 only available from the development server, until more experience is
25967 gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.</p>
25968
25969 <p>Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
25970 was provided by <a href="http://maps.cloudmade.com/">Cloudmade</a>,
25971 but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
25972 the issue.  I've had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
25973 alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
25974 and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
25975 www.openstreetmap.org front page.</p>
25976
25977       </div>
25978       <div class="tags">
25979
25980
25981         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>.
25982
25983
25984       </div>
25985     </div>
25986     <div class="padding"></div>
25987
25988     <div class="entry">
25989       <div class="title">
25990         <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>
25991       </div>
25992       <div class="date">
25993         17th July 2010
25994       </div>
25995       <div class="body">
25996         <p>This is a
25997 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
25998 on my
25999 <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
26000 work</a> on
26001 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
26002 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
26003
26004 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
26005 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
26006 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
26007 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
26008
26009 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
26010 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
26011 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
26012
26013 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
26014
26015 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
26016 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
26017 the web.
26018
26019 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
26020 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
26021 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
26022 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
26023 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
26024 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
26025
26026 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
26027 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
26028 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
26029 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
26030 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
26031 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
26032 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
26033 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
26034 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
26035 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
26036 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
26037 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
26038 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
26039 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
26040 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
26041 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
26042
26043 <blockquote><pre>
26044 ldapsearch -h ldap \
26045   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
26046   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
26047   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
26048   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
26049   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
26050   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
26051
26052 ldapsearch -h ldap \
26053   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
26054   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
26055   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
26056   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
26057   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
26058 </pre></blockquote>
26059
26060 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
26061 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
26062 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
26063 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26064 also exist.</p>
26065
26066 <blockquote><pre>
26067 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26068 objectclass: top
26069 objectclass: dnsdomain
26070 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
26071 dc: tjener
26072 arecord: 10.0.2.2
26073 associateddomain: tjener.intern
26074
26075 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26076 objectclass: top
26077 objectclass: dnsdomain2
26078 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
26079 dc: 2
26080 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
26081 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
26082 </pre></blockquote>
26083
26084 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
26085 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
26086 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
26087 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
26088 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
26089 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
26090 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
26091 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
26092 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
26093 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
26094 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
26095 instead.</p>
26096
26097 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
26098 like this:</p>
26099
26100 <blockquote><pre>
26101 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
26102   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
26103   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
26104   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
26105   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
26106   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
26107
26108 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
26109   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
26110 </pre></blockquote>
26111
26112 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
26113 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
26114 reverse lookups.</p>
26115
26116 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
26117 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
26118 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
26119 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
26120
26121 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
26122 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
26123 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
26124
26125 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
26126 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
26127 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
26128 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
26129 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
26130
26131 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
26132 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
26133 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
26134 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
26135 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
26136
26137 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
26138 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
26139 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
26140 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
26141 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
26142 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
26143
26144 <blockquote><pre>
26145 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
26146     SUP top
26147     AUXILIARY
26148     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
26149           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
26150           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
26151           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
26152           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
26153     ))
26154 </pre></blockquote>
26155
26156 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
26157 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
26158 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
26159 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
26160 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
26161 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
26162
26163 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
26164
26165 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
26166 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
26167 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
26168 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
26169 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
26170
26171 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
26172 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
26173 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
26174 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
26175
26176 <blockquote><pre>
26177 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
26178 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
26179 </pre></blockquote>
26180
26181 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
26182 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
26183 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
26184 search result is this entry:</p>
26185
26186 <blockquote><pre>
26187 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26188 cn: dhcp
26189 objectClass: top
26190 objectClass: dhcpServer
26191 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26192 </pre></blockquote>
26193
26194 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
26195 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
26196 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
26197 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
26198 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
26199 The search result is this entry:</p>
26200
26201 <blockquote><pre>
26202 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26203 cn: DHCP Config
26204 objectClass: top
26205 objectClass: dhcpService
26206 objectClass: dhcpOptions
26207 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26208 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
26209 dhcpStatements: authoritative
26210 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
26211 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
26212 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
26213 </pre></blockquote>
26214
26215 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
26216 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
26217 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
26218 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
26219 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
26220 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
26221 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
26222 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
26223 related computer objects.</p>
26224
26225 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
26226 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
26227 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
26228 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
26229 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
26230 like:</p>
26231
26232 <blockquote><pre>
26233 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26234 cn: hostname
26235 objectClass: top
26236 objectClass: dhcpHost
26237 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
26238 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
26239 </pre></blockquote>
26240
26241 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
26242 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
26243 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
26244 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
26245 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
26246 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
26247 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
26248 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
26249 structural object class.
26250
26251 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
26252
26253 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
26254 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
26255 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
26256 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
26257 in the configuration.</p>
26258
26259 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
26260 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
26261 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
26262 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
26263 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
26264 structure.</p>
26265
26266 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
26267 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
26268
26269 <blockquote><pre>
26270 ou=services
26271   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
26272     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
26273     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
26274       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
26275         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
26276     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
26277       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
26278         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
26279     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
26280       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
26281 </pre></blockquote>
26282
26283 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
26284 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
26285 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
26286 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
26287
26288 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
26289 like this:</p>
26290
26291 <blockquote><pre>
26292 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26293 dc: hostname
26294 objectClass: top
26295 objectClass: dhcpHost
26296 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
26297 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
26298 associateddomain: hostname.intern
26299 arecord: 10.11.12.13
26300 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
26301 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
26302 </pre></blockquote>
26303
26304 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
26305 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
26306 auxiliary object class.</p>
26307
26308       </div>
26309       <div class="tags">
26310
26311
26312         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>.
26313
26314
26315       </div>
26316     </div>
26317     <div class="padding"></div>
26318
26319     <div class="entry">
26320       <div class="title">
26321         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
26322       </div>
26323       <div class="date">
26324         14th July 2010
26325       </div>
26326       <div class="body">
26327         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
26328 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
26329 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
26330 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
26331 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
26332
26333 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
26334 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
26335
26336 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
26337 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
26338 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
26339 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
26340 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
26341 to a slave DNS server.</p>
26342
26343 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
26344 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
26345 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
26346 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
26347 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
26348 seem to work.</p>
26349
26350 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
26351 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
26352 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
26353 this:</p>
26354
26355 <blockquote><pre>
26356   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26357   cn: hostname
26358   objectClass: dhcphost
26359   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
26360   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
26361   associateddomain: hostname.intern
26362   arecord: 10.11.12.13
26363   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
26364   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
26365   ldapconfigsound: Y
26366 </pre></blockquote>
26367
26368 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
26369 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
26370 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
26371 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
26372
26373 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
26374 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
26375 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
26376 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
26377 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
26378 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
26379 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
26380 might be a good place to put it.</p>
26381
26382 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
26383 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
26384
26385       </div>
26386       <div class="tags">
26387
26388
26389         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>.
26390
26391
26392       </div>
26393     </div>
26394     <div class="padding"></div>
26395
26396     <div class="entry">
26397       <div class="title">
26398         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
26399       </div>
26400       <div class="date">
26401         11th July 2010
26402       </div>
26403       <div class="body">
26404         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
26405 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
26406 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
26407 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
26408
26409 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
26410 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
26411 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
26412 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
26413 LTSP clients.</p>
26414
26415 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
26416 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
26417 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
26418
26419 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
26420 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
26421 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
26422
26423 <blockquote><pre>
26424 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
26425 #
26426 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
26427 #
26428 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
26429 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
26430 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
26431 #
26432 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
26433 # existence of attribute names.
26434 #
26435 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
26436 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
26437 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
26438 #
26439 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
26440 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
26441 #
26442 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
26443 #     SUP top
26444 #     AUXILIARY
26445 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
26446
26447 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
26448 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
26449     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
26450     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
26451         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
26452         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
26453             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
26454             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
26455             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
26456             # bass value on to clients
26457             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
26458         done
26459     done
26460 fi
26461 </pre></blockquote>
26462
26463 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
26464 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
26465 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
26466 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
26467 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
26468
26469 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
26470 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
26471
26472 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
26473 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
26474 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
26475 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
26476 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
26477 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
26478
26479       </div>
26480       <div class="tags">
26481
26482
26483         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>.
26484
26485
26486       </div>
26487     </div>
26488     <div class="padding"></div>
26489
26490     <div class="entry">
26491       <div class="title">
26492         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
26493       </div>
26494       <div class="date">
26495          9th July 2010
26496       </div>
26497       <div class="body">
26498         <p>Since
26499 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
26500 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
26501 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
26502 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
26503 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
26504 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
26505 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
26506 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
26507 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
26508 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
26509 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
26510 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
26511 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
26512
26513       </div>
26514       <div class="tags">
26515
26516
26517         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>.
26518
26519
26520       </div>
26521     </div>
26522     <div class="padding"></div>
26523
26524     <div class="entry">
26525       <div class="title">
26526         <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>
26527       </div>
26528       <div class="date">
26529          3rd July 2010
26530       </div>
26531       <div class="body">
26532         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
26533 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
26534 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
26535 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
26536 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
26537 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
26538 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
26539 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
26540
26541 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
26542 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
26543 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
26544 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
26545 publish the difference.</p>
26546
26547 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
26548
26549 <blockquote><p>
26550   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
26551   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
26552   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
26553   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
26554   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
26555   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
26556   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
26557   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
26558 </p></blockquote>
26559
26560 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
26561
26562 <blockquote><p>
26563   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
26564   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
26565   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
26566   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
26567   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
26568   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
26569   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
26570   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
26571   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
26572   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
26573   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
26574   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
26575   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
26576   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
26577   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
26578   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
26579   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
26580   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
26581   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
26582   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
26583 </p></blockquote>
26584
26585 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
26586
26587 <blockquote><p>
26588   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
26589   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
26590   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
26591   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
26592   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
26593   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
26594   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
26595   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
26596   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
26597   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
26598   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
26599   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
26600   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
26601   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
26602   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
26603   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
26604   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
26605   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
26606   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
26607   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
26608   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
26609 </p></blockquote>
26610
26611 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
26612
26613 <blockquote><p>
26614   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
26615   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
26616   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
26617 </p></blockquote>
26618
26619 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
26620 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
26621 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
26622 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
26623 the difference somewhat.
26624
26625       </div>
26626       <div class="tags">
26627
26628
26629         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>.
26630
26631
26632       </div>
26633     </div>
26634     <div class="padding"></div>
26635
26636     <div class="entry">
26637       <div class="title">
26638         <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>
26639       </div>
26640       <div class="date">
26641          1st July 2010
26642       </div>
26643       <div class="body">
26644         <p>For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
26645 a bit troubling.  Laptops are typically used also when not connected
26646 to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
26647 unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
26648 This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
26649 and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
26650 in Debian.  Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
26651 It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
26652 setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.</p>
26653
26654 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
26655
26656 This is the traditional method with a twist.  The password caching is
26657 provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on
26658 Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd.  The directory
26659 lookup and password checking is done using LDAP.  If one want to use
26660 Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
26661 replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal.  If one is happy having a
26662 local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
26663 pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
26664 using libpam-mklocaluser.  A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
26665 pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
26666 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/568577">bug #568577</a> is in the
26667 archive.  Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
26668 directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
26669 prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/.  This
26670 is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.</p>
26671
26672 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured</p>
26673
26674 <blockquote><pre>
26675 libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
26676 </pre></blockquote>
26677
26678 <p>The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
26679 one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site.  Make sure the
26680 PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
26681 sent in clear text to the LDAP server.  I've been unable to get TLS
26682 certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
26683 LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
26684 is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
26685 on how to get this working.</p>
26686
26687 <p>Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
26688 caching until <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">bug #485282</a>
26689 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
26690 currently in /etc/nscd.conf.  The changes are in the fields
26691 reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
26692 instructions I found in the
26693 <a href="http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/">LDAP for Mobile Laptops</a>
26694 instructions by Flyn Computing.</p>
26695
26696 <blockquote><pre>
26697         debug-level             0
26698         reload-count            unlimited
26699         paranoia                no
26700
26701         enable-cache            passwd          yes
26702         positive-time-to-live   passwd          2592000
26703         negative-time-to-live   passwd          20
26704         suggested-size          passwd          211
26705         check-files             passwd          yes
26706         persistent              passwd          yes
26707         shared                  passwd          yes
26708         max-db-size             passwd          33554432
26709         auto-propagate          passwd          yes
26710
26711         enable-cache            group           yes
26712         positive-time-to-live   group           2592000
26713         negative-time-to-live   group           20
26714         suggested-size          group           211
26715         check-files             group           yes
26716         persistent              group           yes
26717         shared                  group           yes
26718         max-db-size             group           33554432
26719         auto-propagate          group           yes
26720
26721         enable-cache            hosts           no
26722         positive-time-to-live   hosts           2592000
26723         negative-time-to-live   hosts           20
26724         suggested-size          hosts           211
26725         check-files             hosts           yes
26726         persistent              hosts           yes
26727         shared                  hosts           yes
26728         max-db-size             hosts           33554432
26729
26730         enable-cache            services        yes
26731         positive-time-to-live   services        2592000
26732         negative-time-to-live   services        20
26733         suggested-size          services        211
26734         check-files             services        yes
26735         persistent              services        yes
26736         shared                  services        yes
26737         max-db-size             services        33554432
26738 </pre></blockquote>
26739
26740 <p>While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
26741 automatically like the one provided in
26742 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/496915">bug #496915</a>, the file
26743 content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
26744 directory service on the machine.  /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
26745 look like this:</p>
26746
26747 <blockquote><pre>
26748 passwd:         files ldap
26749 group:          files ldap
26750 shadow:         files ldap
26751 hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
26752 networks:       files
26753 protocols:      files
26754 services:       files
26755 ethers:         files
26756 rpc:            files
26757 netgroup:       files ldap
26758 </pre></blockquote>
26759
26760 <p>The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
26761 shadow and netgroup.</p>
26762
26763 <p>With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
26764 in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
26765 directory created and have the password as well as user and group
26766 attributes cached.
26767
26768 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
26769   libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
26770
26771 <p>Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
26772 problems doing proper caching, I've seen suggestions and recipes to
26773 use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
26774 LDAP database is available.  I have not tested such setup, because I
26775 discovered sssd.</p>
26776
26777 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser</h2>
26778
26779 <p>A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
26780 mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
26781 <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/">sssd</a> package from Redhat.
26782 It is part of the <a href="http://www.freeipa.org/">FreeIPA</A> project
26783 to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
26784 machines.  The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
26785 information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
26786 libpam-ccreds.  It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS.  Version
26787 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
26788 in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010.  Because the
26789 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd package</a>
26790 was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
26791 version 1.2 is now in testing.
26792
26793 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
26794 roaming setup I want</p>
26795
26796 <blockquote><pre>
26797 libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
26798 </pre></blockquote>
26799
26800 The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
26801 <tt>/etc/sssd/sssd.conf</tt>.
26802
26803 <blockquote><pre>
26804 [sssd]
26805 config_file_version = 2
26806 reconnection_retries = 3
26807 sbus_timeout = 30
26808 services = nss, pam
26809 domains = INTERN
26810
26811 [nss]
26812 filter_groups = root
26813 filter_users = root
26814 reconnection_retries = 3
26815
26816 [pam]
26817 reconnection_retries = 3
26818
26819 [domain/INTERN]
26820 enumerate = false
26821 cache_credentials = true
26822
26823 id_provider = ldap
26824 auth_provider = ldap
26825 chpass_provider = ldap
26826
26827 ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
26828 ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26829 ldap_tls_reqcert = never
26830 ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
26831 </pre></blockquote>
26832
26833 <p>I got the same problem here with certificate checking.  Had to set
26834 "ldap_tls_reqcert = never" to get it working.</p>
26835
26836 <p>With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
26837 nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
26838 modify it manually.</p>
26839
26840 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
26841 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
26842
26843       </div>
26844       <div class="tags">
26845
26846
26847         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>.
26848
26849
26850       </div>
26851     </div>
26852     <div class="padding"></div>
26853
26854     <div class="entry">
26855       <div class="title">
26856         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
26857       </div>
26858       <div class="date">
26859         28th June 2010
26860       </div>
26861       <div class="body">
26862         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
26863 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
26864 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
26865 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
26866 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
26867 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
26868 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
26869 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
26870 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
26871 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
26872
26873 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
26874 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
26875 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
26876 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
26877 released.</p>
26878
26879 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
26880 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
26881 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
26882 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
26883
26884 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
26885 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
26886
26887 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
26888 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
26889 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
26890 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
26891 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
26892
26893       </div>
26894       <div class="tags">
26895
26896
26897         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>.
26898
26899
26900       </div>
26901     </div>
26902     <div class="padding"></div>
26903
26904     <div class="entry">
26905       <div class="title">
26906         <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>
26907       </div>
26908       <div class="date">
26909         24th June 2010
26910       </div>
26911       <div class="body">
26912         <p>A while back, I
26913 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
26914 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
26915 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
26916 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
26917
26918 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
26919 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
26920 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
26921 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
26922
26923 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
26924 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
26925 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
26926 Debian Edu.</p>
26927
26928 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
26929 the
26930 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
26931 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
26932 available today from IETF.</p>
26933
26934 <pre>
26935 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
26936 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
26937 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
26938  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
26939         NAME 'dhcpHost'
26940         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
26941 -       SUP top
26942 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
26943         MUST cn
26944         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
26945         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
26946 </pre>
26947
26948 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
26949 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
26950 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
26951
26952 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
26953 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
26954
26955       </div>
26956       <div class="tags">
26957
26958
26959         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>.
26960
26961
26962       </div>
26963     </div>
26964     <div class="padding"></div>
26965
26966     <div class="entry">
26967       <div class="title">
26968         <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>
26969       </div>
26970       <div class="date">
26971         16th June 2010
26972       </div>
26973       <div class="body">
26974         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
26975 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
26976 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
26977 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
26978 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
26979 this:
26980
26981 <blockquote><pre>
26982 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
26983 tasksel --new-install
26984 </pre></blockquote>
26985
26986 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
26987 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
26988 any output what so ever.
26989
26990 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
26991 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
26992 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
26993 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
26994 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
26995 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
26996 code like this:
26997
26998 <blockquote><pre>
26999 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
27000 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
27001 $cmd
27002 </pre></blockquote>
27003
27004 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
27005 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
27006 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
27007 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
27008 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
27009 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
27010 installation.</p>
27011
27012 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
27013 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
27014 like this.</p>
27015
27016       </div>
27017       <div class="tags">
27018
27019
27020         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>.
27021
27022
27023       </div>
27024     </div>
27025     <div class="padding"></div>
27026
27027     <div class="entry">
27028       <div class="title">
27029         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">Officeshots taking shape</a>
27030       </div>
27031       <div class="date">
27032         13th June 2010
27033       </div>
27034       <div class="body">
27035         <p>For those of us caring about document exchange and
27036 interoperability, <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>
27037 is a great service.  It is to ODF documents what
27038 <a href="http://browsershots.org/">BrowserShots</a> is for web
27039 pages.</p>
27040
27041 <p>A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
27042 that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
27043 and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
27044 interested in supporting the project.  I helped him to navigate his
27045 request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
27046 a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
27047 arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot.  The machine is
27048 administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
27049 contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
27050 see how the project is doing.</p>
27051
27052 <p>Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
27053 machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
27054 OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
27055 in 17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
27056 Windows.  This is great.</p>
27057
27058       </div>
27059       <div class="tags">
27060
27061
27062         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>.
27063
27064
27065       </div>
27066     </div>
27067     <div class="padding"></div>
27068
27069     <div class="entry">
27070       <div class="title">
27071         <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>
27072       </div>
27073       <div class="date">
27074         13th June 2010
27075       </div>
27076       <div class="body">
27077         <p>My
27078 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
27079 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
27080 finally made the upgrade logs available from
27081 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
27082 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
27083 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
27084 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
27085
27086 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
27087 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
27088 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
27089 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
27090 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
27091 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
27092 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
27093 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
27094
27095 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
27096 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
27097 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
27098 too surprising.</p>
27099
27100 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
27101 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
27102 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
27103 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
27104 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
27105 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
27106 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
27107 continue.</p>
27108
27109 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
27110 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
27111   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
27112   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
27113   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
27114   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
27115   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
27116   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
27117   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
27118   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
27119   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
27120   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
27121   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
27122   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
27123   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
27124   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
27125   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
27126   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
27127   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
27128   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
27129   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
27130   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
27131   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
27132   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
27133   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
27134   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
27135   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
27136   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
27137   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
27138   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
27139
27140 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
27141
27142 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
27143   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
27144   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
27145   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
27146   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
27147   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
27148   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
27149   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
27150   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
27151   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
27152   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
27153   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
27154   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
27155   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
27156   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
27157   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
27158   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
27159   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
27160   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
27161   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
27162   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
27163   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
27164   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
27165   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
27166   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
27167   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
27168   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
27169   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
27170   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
27171   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
27172   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
27173   zip</p>
27174
27175 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
27176
27177 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
27178   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
27179   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
27180   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
27181   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
27182   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
27183   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
27184   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
27185   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
27186   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
27187   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
27188   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
27189   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
27190   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
27191   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
27192   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
27193   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
27194   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
27195   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
27196   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
27197   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
27198   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
27199   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
27200   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
27201   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
27202   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
27203   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
27204   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
27205
27206 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
27207 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
27208   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
27209   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
27210   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
27211   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
27212   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
27213   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
27214   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
27215   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
27216   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
27217   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
27218   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
27219   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
27220   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
27221   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
27222   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
27223   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
27224   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
27225   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
27226   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
27227   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
27228   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
27229   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
27230   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
27231   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
27232   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
27233   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
27234   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
27235   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
27236   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
27237   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
27238   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
27239   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
27240   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
27241   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
27242   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
27243   xulrunner-1.9</p>
27244
27245
27246       </div>
27247       <div class="tags">
27248
27249
27250         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>.
27251
27252
27253       </div>
27254     </div>
27255     <div class="padding"></div>
27256
27257     <div class="entry">
27258       <div class="title">
27259         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
27260       </div>
27261       <div class="date">
27262         11th June 2010
27263       </div>
27264       <div class="body">
27265         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
27266 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
27267 have been discovered and reported in the process
27268 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
27269 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
27270 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
27271 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
27272 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
27273
27274 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
27275 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
27276 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
27277 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
27278 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
27279 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
27280
27281 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
27282 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
27283 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
27284 is created.  The bug report
27285 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
27286 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
27287 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
27288 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
27289 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
27290 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
27291 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
27292 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
27293 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
27294 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
27295 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
27296 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
27297 Debian Squeeze.</p>
27298
27299 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
27300 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
27301 trick:</p>
27302
27303 <blockquote><pre>
27304 #!/bin/sh
27305 set -ex
27306
27307 if [ "$1" ] ; then
27308     desktop=$1
27309 else
27310     desktop=gnome
27311 fi
27312
27313 from=lenny
27314 to=squeeze
27315
27316 exec &lt; /dev/null
27317 unset LANG
27318 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
27319 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
27320 fuser -mv .
27321 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
27322 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
27323 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
27324 #!/bin/sh
27325 exit 101
27326 EOF
27327 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
27328 exit_cleanup() {
27329     umount $tmpdir/proc
27330 }
27331 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
27332 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
27333 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
27334
27335 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
27336
27337 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
27338 # to return the correct answers.
27339 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
27340     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
27341
27342 # Include the desktop and laptop task
27343 for test in desktop laptop ; do
27344     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
27345 #!/bin/sh
27346 exit 2
27347 EOF
27348     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
27349 done
27350
27351 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
27352 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
27353 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
27354 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
27355
27356 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
27357 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
27358 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
27359 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
27360 fuser -mv
27361 </pre></blockquote>
27362
27363 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
27364 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
27365 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
27366 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
27367 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
27368 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
27369
27370 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
27371 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
27372 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
27373 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
27374 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
27375 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
27376 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
27377
27378 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
27379 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
27380 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
27381 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
27382 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
27383 packages.</p>
27384
27385       </div>
27386       <div class="tags">
27387
27388
27389         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>.
27390
27391
27392       </div>
27393     </div>
27394     <div class="padding"></div>
27395
27396     <div class="entry">
27397       <div class="title">
27398         <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>
27399       </div>
27400       <div class="date">
27401          6th June 2010
27402       </div>
27403       <div class="body">
27404         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
27405 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
27406 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
27407 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
27408 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
27409 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
27410 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
27411
27412 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
27413 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
27414 COLUMNS):</p>
27415
27416 <blockquote><pre>
27417 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
27418 previous=N
27419 PREVLEVEL=
27420 RUNLEVEL=
27421 runlevel=S
27422 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
27423 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
27424 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
27425 </pre></blockquote>
27426
27427 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
27428 script.</p>
27429
27430 <blockquote><pre>
27431 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
27432 previous=N
27433 PREVLEVEL=N
27434 RUNLEVEL=S
27435 runlevel=S
27436 </pre></blockquote>
27437
27438 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
27439 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
27440 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
27441
27442 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
27443 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
27444 choice.</p>
27445
27446       </div>
27447       <div class="tags">
27448
27449
27450         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>.
27451
27452
27453       </div>
27454     </div>
27455     <div class="padding"></div>
27456
27457     <div class="entry">
27458       <div class="title">
27459         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
27460       </div>
27461       <div class="date">
27462          6th June 2010
27463       </div>
27464       <div class="body">
27465         <p>Via the
27466 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
27467 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
27468 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
27469 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
27470 following the standards wars of today.</p>
27471
27472       </div>
27473       <div class="tags">
27474
27475
27476         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>.
27477
27478
27479       </div>
27480     </div>
27481     <div class="padding"></div>
27482
27483     <div class="entry">
27484       <div class="title">
27485         <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>
27486       </div>
27487       <div class="date">
27488          3rd June 2010
27489       </div>
27490       <div class="body">
27491         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
27492 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
27493 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
27494 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
27495 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
27496
27497 <blockquote><pre>
27498 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
27499   vendor                    count
27500   Dell Computer Corporation     1
27501     PowerEdge 1750              1
27502   IBM                           1
27503     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
27504   Intel                         2
27505   [no-dmi-info]                 3
27506 maintainer:~#
27507 </pre></blockquote>
27508
27509 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
27510 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
27511 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
27512 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
27513 option to list the individual machines.</p>
27514
27515 <p>A larger list is
27516 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
27517 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
27518 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
27519 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
27520 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
27521 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
27522 collector.</p>
27523
27524       </div>
27525       <div class="tags">
27526
27527
27528         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>.
27529
27530
27531       </div>
27532     </div>
27533     <div class="padding"></div>
27534
27535     <div class="entry">
27536       <div class="title">
27537         <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>
27538       </div>
27539       <div class="date">
27540          1st June 2010
27541       </div>
27542       <div class="body">
27543         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
27544 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
27545 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
27546 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
27547 wait.</p>
27548
27549 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
27550 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
27551 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
27552 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
27553 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
27554 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
27555
27556 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
27557 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
27558 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
27559 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
27560 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
27561 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
27562 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
27563 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
27564
27565 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
27566
27567       </div>
27568       <div class="tags">
27569
27570
27571         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>.
27572
27573
27574       </div>
27575     </div>
27576     <div class="padding"></div>
27577
27578     <div class="entry">
27579       <div class="title">
27580         <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>
27581       </div>
27582       <div class="date">
27583         27th May 2010
27584       </div>
27585       <div class="body">
27586         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
27587 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
27588 issues are known and should be solved:
27589
27590 <p><ul>
27591
27592 <li>The wicd package seen to
27593 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
27594 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
27595 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
27596 seem to be on the case.</li>
27597
27598 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
27599 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
27600 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
27601 maintainer is on the case.</li>
27602
27603 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
27604 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
27605 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
27606 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
27607 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
27608 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
27609 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
27610 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
27611
27612 </ul></p>
27613
27614 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
27615 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
27616 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
27617 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
27618
27619 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
27620 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
27621 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
27622 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
27623
27624 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
27625
27626       </div>
27627       <div class="tags">
27628
27629
27630         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>.
27631
27632
27633       </div>
27634     </div>
27635     <div class="padding"></div>
27636
27637     <div class="entry">
27638       <div class="title">
27639         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
27640       </div>
27641       <div class="date">
27642         22nd May 2010
27643       </div>
27644       <div class="body">
27645         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
27646 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
27647 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
27648 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
27649
27650 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
27651 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
27652 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
27653 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
27654 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
27655 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
27656 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
27657 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
27658 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
27659 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
27660 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
27661 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
27662 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
27663 going to work.</p>
27664
27665 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
27666 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
27667 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
27668 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
27669 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
27670 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
27671 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
27672 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
27673 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
27674 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
27675 Edu.</p>
27676
27677 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
27678 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
27679 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
27680 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
27681 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
27682 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
27683
27684 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
27685 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
27686
27687       </div>
27688       <div class="tags">
27689
27690
27691         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>.
27692
27693
27694       </div>
27695     </div>
27696     <div class="padding"></div>
27697
27698     <div class="entry">
27699       <div class="title">
27700         <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>
27701       </div>
27702       <div class="date">
27703         19th May 2010
27704       </div>
27705       <div class="body">
27706         <p>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
27707 Edu finally entered the Debian archive.  Today, the new
27708 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html">libpam-mklocaluser</a>
27709 package was accepted.  Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
27710 into unstable.  The
27711 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html">pam-python</a>
27712 package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
27713 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd</a> package
27714 passed NEW on Monday.  In addition, the
27715 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
27716 package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
27717 hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.</p>
27718
27719 <p>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
27720 roaming laptops.  The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
27721 nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
27722 which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
27723 for nscd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">BTS report
27724 #485282</a> is implemented.  The alternative setup is to use sssd with
27725 libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
27726 care of the caching of passwords and group information.</p>
27727
27728 <p>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
27729 at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
27730 problem with the server certificate.  I plan to update the Debian
27731 package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
27732 find time to make sure the next release will include both the
27733 Debian/Ubuntu specific patches.  Upstream is friendly and responsive,
27734 and I am sure we will find a good solution.</p>
27735
27736 <p>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
27737 LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
27738 when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
27739 cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
27740 memberhips and other relevant LDAP information.  The
27741 libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
27742 directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
27743 be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used.  To avoid confusion
27744 with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
27745 to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
27746 on the home directory servers.</p>
27747
27748 <p>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
27749 message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
27750 is created.  Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
27751 message.  The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
27752 a bug in gdm.  Have not investigated if there is some other message
27753 type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.</p>
27754
27755 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
27756 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
27757
27758       </div>
27759       <div class="tags">
27760
27761
27762         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>.
27763
27764
27765       </div>
27766     </div>
27767     <div class="padding"></div>
27768
27769     <div class="entry">
27770       <div class="title">
27771         <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>
27772       </div>
27773       <div class="date">
27774         14th May 2010
27775       </div>
27776       <div class="body">
27777         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
27778 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
27779 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
27780 expected, if I am to believe the
27781 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
27782 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
27783 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
27784 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
27785 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
27786 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
27787 version.</p>
27788
27789 More information about
27790 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
27791 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
27792 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
27793 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
27794
27795 <blockquote><pre>
27796 CONCURRENCY=none
27797 </pre></blockquote>
27798
27799 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
27800 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
27801 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
27802 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
27803
27804       </div>
27805       <div class="tags">
27806
27807
27808         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>.
27809
27810
27811       </div>
27812     </div>
27813     <div class="padding"></div>
27814
27815     <div class="entry">
27816       <div class="title">
27817         <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>
27818       </div>
27819       <div class="date">
27820         14th May 2010
27821       </div>
27822       <div class="body">
27823         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
27824 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
27825 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
27826 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
27827 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
27828 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
27829 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
27830 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
27831
27832 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
27833 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
27834 this on the collector host:</p>
27835
27836 <blockquote><pre>
27837 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
27838 </pre></blockquote>
27839
27840 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
27841 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
27842
27843 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
27844 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
27845 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
27846 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
27847 written yet.</p>
27848
27849       </div>
27850       <div class="tags">
27851
27852
27853         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>.
27854
27855
27856       </div>
27857     </div>
27858     <div class="padding"></div>
27859
27860     <div class="entry">
27861       <div class="title">
27862         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
27863       </div>
27864       <div class="date">
27865         13th May 2010
27866       </div>
27867       <div class="body">
27868         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
27869 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
27870 has been
27871 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
27872
27873 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
27874 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
27875 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
27876 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
27877 based boot system.  Tollef is
27878 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
27879 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
27880 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
27881 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
27882 at the moment do not.</p>
27883
27884 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
27885 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
27886 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
27887 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
27888 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
27889 way forward.</p>
27890
27891 <p>In the mean time, based on the
27892 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
27893 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
27894 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
27895 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
27896 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
27897 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
27898 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
27899 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
27900
27901       </div>
27902       <div class="tags">
27903
27904
27905         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>.
27906
27907
27908       </div>
27909     </div>
27910     <div class="padding"></div>
27911
27912     <div class="entry">
27913       <div class="title">
27914         <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>
27915       </div>
27916       <div class="date">
27917          6th May 2010
27918       </div>
27919       <div class="body">
27920         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
27921 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
27922 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
27923 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
27924 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
27925 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
27926 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
27927
27928 <blockquote><pre>
27929 CONCURRENCY=makefile
27930 </pre></blockquote>
27931
27932 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
27933 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
27934 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
27935 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
27936 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
27937 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
27938 make this happen.</p>
27939
27940 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
27941 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
27942 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
27943 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
27944 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
27945
27946 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
27947 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
27948 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
27949 fix the remaining issues.</p>
27950
27951 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
27952 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
27953 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
27954 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
27955
27956       </div>
27957       <div class="tags">
27958
27959
27960         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>.
27961
27962
27963       </div>
27964     </div>
27965     <div class="padding"></div>
27966
27967     <div class="entry">
27968       <div class="title">
27969         <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>
27970       </div>
27971       <div class="date">
27972          2nd May 2010
27973       </div>
27974       <div class="body">
27975         <p>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
27976 create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
27977 change the password on the first login attempt.</p>
27978
27979 <p>I'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
27980 Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account.  The account
27981 and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
27982 unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
27983 passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.</p>
27984
27985 <p>A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
27986 settings in /etc/shadow:</p>
27987
27988 <blockquote><pre>
27989 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
27990 Last password change                                    : May 02, 2010
27991 Password expires                                        : never
27992 Password inactive                                       : never
27993 Account expires                                         : never
27994 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
27995 Maximum number of days between password change          : 99999
27996 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
27997 root@tjener:~#
27998 </pre></blockquote>
27999
28000 <p>The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
28001 account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
28002 lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
28003 to the difference in days between that date and today.  To make it
28004 simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
28005 avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).</p>
28006
28007 <p>After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
28008 intended:</p>
28009
28010 <blockquote><pre>
28011 root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test
28012 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
28013 Last password change                                    : Jan 02, 1970
28014 Password expires                                        : never
28015 Password inactive                                       : never
28016 Account expires                                         : never
28017 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
28018 Maximum number of days between password change          : 10950
28019 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
28020 root@tjener:~#
28021 </pre></blockquote>
28022
28023 <p>So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
28024 Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
28025 user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).</p>
28026
28027 <p>Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
28028 sure only the user itself have the account password?</p>
28029
28030 <p>If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
28031 Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
28032
28033 <p>Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
28034 shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
28035 last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
28036 on the first login.  This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
28037 I did not notice this in my initial testing.  I have tested it on
28038 Squeeze, and '<tt>chage -d 0 username</tt>' do work there.  I have not
28039 tested it on Lenny yet.</p>
28040
28041 <p>Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
28042 equivalent command to expire a password is '<tt>passwd -e
28043 username</tt>', which insert zero into the date of the last password
28044 change.</p>
28045
28046       </div>
28047       <div class="tags">
28048
28049
28050         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>.
28051
28052
28053       </div>
28054     </div>
28055     <div class="padding"></div>
28056
28057     <div class="entry">
28058       <div class="title">
28059         <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>
28060       </div>
28061       <div class="date">
28062         28th April 2010
28063       </div>
28064       <div class="body">
28065         <p>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
28066 Debian Edu.  The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
28067 handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
28068 and go.</p>
28069
28070 <p>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
28071 Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
28072 example called Roaming Workstations.  Here are my thought on this.
28073 The setup would consist of the following:</p>
28074
28075 <ul>
28076
28077  <li>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
28078    the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
28079    the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
28080    server.  This allow the user to work also when offline.  The
28081    central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
28082    request, for example mounted via CIFS.  It could be mounted
28083    automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
28084    and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
28085    hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
28086    request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
28087    can be used to access it when needed.  Perhaps it is enough to use
28088    the fish protocol in KDE?</li>
28089
28090  <li>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
28091    authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
28092    to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
28093    to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server.  This can be done using
28094    <a href="http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
28095    or the Fedora developed
28096    <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD">System
28097    Security Services Daemon</a> packages.</li>
28098
28099  <li>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
28100    using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
28101    directory, using unison.</li>
28102
28103  <li>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
28104    their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
28105    the box with CUPS.  For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
28106    system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
28107    implemented.</li>
28108
28109  <li>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
28110    sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.</li>
28111
28112  <li>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
28113    cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
28114    local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.</li>
28115
28116 </ul>
28117
28118 <p>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
28119 the moment.  If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
28120 in time for the Squeeze release to freeze.  Some of the pieces need
28121 tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
28122 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566718">#566718</a>) and nslcd (or
28123 perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
28124 its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
28125 when disconnected from the net.  If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
28126 to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.</p>
28127
28128 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
28129 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
28130
28131       </div>
28132       <div class="tags">
28133
28134
28135         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>.
28136
28137
28138       </div>
28139     </div>
28140     <div class="padding"></div>
28141
28142     <div class="entry">
28143       <div class="title">
28144         <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>
28145       </div>
28146       <div class="date">
28147         19th April 2010
28148       </div>
28149       <div class="body">
28150         <p>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
28151 thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
28152 touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
28153 conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
28154 book titled "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
28155 Copyright, and the Future of the Future" is available with few
28156 restrictions on the web, for example from
28157 <a href="http://craphound.com/content/">his own site</a>. I read the
28158 epub-version from
28159 <a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2883">feedbooks</a> using
28160 <a href="http://www.fbreader.org/">fbreader</a> and my N810. I
28161 strongly recommend this book.</p>
28162
28163       </div>
28164       <div class="tags">
28165
28166
28167         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>.
28168
28169
28170       </div>
28171     </div>
28172     <div class="padding"></div>
28173
28174     <div class="entry">
28175       <div class="title">
28176         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html">Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?</a>
28177       </div>
28178       <div class="date">
28179         14th April 2010
28180       </div>
28181       <div class="body">
28182         <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/">Yesterdays
28183 NUUG presentation</a> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
28184 about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux.  Setting up a
28185 Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
28186 place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
28187 have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
28188 directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
28189 not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
28190 users and cryptographic keys instead.</p>
28191
28192 <p>A challenge will be integration and administration.  Is there a
28193 Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
28194 administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups?  With it, the
28195 school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
28196 files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.</p>
28197
28198 <p>A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
28199 pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together.  Anyone know?</p>
28200
28201 <p>Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
28202 Nagios.  I have no idea how much work that will be to implement.  We
28203 would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
28204 shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
28205 to work properly.</p>
28206
28207 <p>I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
28208 skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
28209 configuration and integration.  A natural starting point would be
28210 setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
28211 rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
28212 time.</p>
28213
28214 <p>If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
28215 I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
28216 presentation, and start using Kerberos at home.  The video show show
28217 up in a few days.</p>
28218
28219       </div>
28220       <div class="tags">
28221
28222
28223         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>.
28224
28225
28226       </div>
28227     </div>
28228     <div class="padding"></div>
28229
28230     <div class="entry">
28231       <div class="title">
28232         <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>
28233       </div>
28234       <div class="date">
28235          6th March 2010
28236       </div>
28237       <div class="body">
28238         <p>6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
28239 in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
28240 when the user log out.  A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
28241 package in 2004 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/230422">#230422</a>),
28242 and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
28243 Today, this finally paid off.</p>
28244
28245 <p>The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
28246 repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
28247 been updated to use this framework.  Next on my agenda is to make sure
28248 kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.</p>
28249
28250 <p>In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
28251 user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
28252 after a user.  With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
28253 a generic way that work with all display managers using this
28254 framework.  My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
28255 similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.<p>
28256
28257       </div>
28258       <div class="tags">
28259
28260
28261         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>.
28262
28263
28264       </div>
28265     </div>
28266     <div class="padding"></div>
28267
28268     <div class="entry">
28269       <div class="title">
28270         <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>
28271       </div>
28272       <div class="date">
28273         11th February 2010
28274       </div>
28275       <div class="body">
28276         <p>On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
28277 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> was finally
28278 shipped.  This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
28279 pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up.  Work on the first
28280 point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
28281 month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
28282 and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.</p>
28283
28284 <p>Perhaps it even is time for some partying?</p>
28285
28286 <p>After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
28287 next major release, based on Squeeze.  We will try to get as many of
28288 the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
28289 and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.</p>
28290
28291       </div>
28292       <div class="tags">
28293
28294
28295         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>.
28296
28297
28298       </div>
28299     </div>
28300     <div class="padding"></div>
28301
28302     <div class="entry">
28303       <div class="title">
28304         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html">Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration</a>
28305       </div>
28306       <div class="date">
28307         27th January 2010
28308       </div>
28309       <div class="body">
28310         <p>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
28311 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
28312 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
28313 Nagios.  The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
28314 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
28315 further.</p>
28316
28317 <p>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
28318 configured as a Munin and Nagios server.  In addition, it is
28319 configured to be a server for the
28320 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">SiteSummary
28321 system</a> I have written for use in Debian Edu.  The SiteSummary
28322 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
28323 work.  In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
28324 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
28325 computer submitting information to this collector.  This allow for
28326 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
28327 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
28328 packages got etc.  This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
28329 and Nagios configuration.</p>
28330
28331 <p>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
28332 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
28333 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
28334 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.</p>
28335
28336 <p>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
28337 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
28338 services detected).  In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
28339 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
28340 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
28341 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
28342 the machine.</p>
28343
28344 <p>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
28345 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
28346 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
28347 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.</p>
28348
28349 <p>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
28350 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP.  The system
28351 administrator need to run "<tt>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
28352 nagiosadmin</tt>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
28353 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages.  After that,
28354 everything is taken care of.</p>
28355
28356       </div>
28357       <div class="tags">
28358
28359
28360         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>.
28361
28362
28363       </div>
28364     </div>
28365     <div class="padding"></div>
28366
28367     <div class="entry">
28368       <div class="title">
28369         <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>
28370       </div>
28371       <div class="date">
28372         12th August 2009
28373       </div>
28374       <div class="body">
28375         <p>Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
28376 and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
28377 OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage.  I searched using
28378 'filetype:odt' and equvalent terms, and got these results:</P>
28379
28380 <table>
28381 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
28382 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:282000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
28383 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:75600</td> <td>pptx:183000</td></tr>
28384 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:145000</td></tr>
28385 </table>
28386
28387 <p>Next, I added a 'site:no' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
28388 got these numbers:</p>
28389
28390 <table>
28391 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
28392 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480 </td> <td>docx:4460</td></tr>
28393 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:299   </td> <td>pptx:741</td></tr>
28394 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:187       </td> <td>xlsx:372</td></tr>
28395 </table>
28396
28397 <p>I wonder how these numbers change over time.</p>
28398
28399 <p>I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
28400 on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
28401 they are conduced in another country.  Because of this, I did the same
28402 search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
28403 search done from a machine here in Norway.</p>
28404
28405
28406 <table>
28407 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
28408 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:129000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
28409 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:44200</td> <td>pptx:93900</td></tr>
28410 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:82400</td></tr>
28411 </table>
28412
28413 <p>And with 'site:no':
28414
28415 <table>
28416 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
28417 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480</td> <td>docx:3410</td></tr>
28418 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:175</td> <td>pptx:604</td></tr>
28419 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:186       </td> <td>xlsx:296</td></tr>
28420 </table>
28421
28422 <p>Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
28423 numbers.</p>
28424
28425       </div>
28426       <div class="tags">
28427
28428
28429         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>.
28430
28431
28432       </div>
28433     </div>
28434     <div class="padding"></div>
28435
28436     <div class="entry">
28437       <div class="title">
28438         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html">ISO still hope to fix OOXML</a>
28439       </div>
28440       <div class="date">
28441          8th August 2009
28442       </div>
28443       <div class="body">
28444         <p>According to <a
28445 href="http://twerner.blogspot.com/2009/08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html">a
28446 blog post from Torsten Werner</a>, the current defect report for ISO
28447 29500 (ISO OOXML) is 809 pages.  His interesting point is that the
28448 defect report is 71 pages more than the full ODF 1.1 specification.
28449 Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
28450 can be fixed in ISO.  Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
28451 and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
28452 close to solving the problems.  I was part of the Norwegian committee
28453 involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
28454 Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.</p>
28455
28456 <p>These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
28457 with the future ahead of it.  We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
28458 seminar this autumn.</p>
28459
28460       </div>
28461       <div class="tags">
28462
28463
28464         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>.
28465
28466
28467       </div>
28468     </div>
28469     <div class="padding"></div>
28470
28471     <div class="entry">
28472       <div class="title">
28473         <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>
28474       </div>
28475       <div class="date">
28476         27th July 2009
28477       </div>
28478       <div class="body">
28479         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
28480 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
28481 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
28482 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
28483 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
28484 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
28485 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
28486
28487 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
28488 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
28489 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
28490
28491       </div>
28492       <div class="tags">
28493
28494
28495         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>.
28496
28497
28498       </div>
28499     </div>
28500     <div class="padding"></div>
28501
28502     <div class="entry">
28503       <div class="title">
28504         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
28505       </div>
28506       <div class="date">
28507         22nd July 2009
28508       </div>
28509       <div class="body">
28510         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
28511 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
28512 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
28513 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
28514 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
28515 the package up to date.</p>
28516
28517 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
28518 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
28519 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
28520 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
28521 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
28522 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
28523 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
28524 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
28525 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
28526 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
28527 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
28528 working on the future release.</p>
28529
28530 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
28531 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
28532
28533       </div>
28534       <div class="tags">
28535
28536
28537         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>.
28538
28539
28540       </div>
28541     </div>
28542     <div class="padding"></div>
28543
28544     <div class="entry">
28545       <div class="title">
28546         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
28547       </div>
28548       <div class="date">
28549         24th June 2009
28550       </div>
28551       <div class="body">
28552         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
28553 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
28554 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
28555 funded
28556 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
28557 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
28558 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
28559 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
28560 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
28561 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
28562
28563 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
28564 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
28565 boot:</p>
28566
28567 <ul>
28568
28569 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
28570
28571 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
28572    clock is in UTC.</li>
28573
28574 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
28575    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
28576    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
28577
28578 </ul>
28579
28580 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
28581 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
28582 Villegas</a>.
28583
28584 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
28585 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
28586 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
28587 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
28588 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
28589 using this.</p>
28590
28591 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
28592 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
28593 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
28594 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
28595 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
28596 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
28597 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
28598
28599       </div>
28600       <div class="tags">
28601
28602
28603         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>.
28604
28605
28606       </div>
28607     </div>
28608     <div class="padding"></div>
28609
28610     <div class="entry">
28611       <div class="title">
28612         <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>
28613       </div>
28614       <div class="date">
28615          2nd May 2009
28616       </div>
28617       <div class="body">
28618         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
28619 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
28620 do not yet know them.</p>
28621
28622 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
28623 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
28624 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
28625 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
28626 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
28627 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
28628 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
28629 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
28630 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
28631 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
28632 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
28633
28634 <p>The second one is
28635 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
28636 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
28637 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
28638 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
28639 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
28640 and the company behind it is running
28641 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
28642 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
28643 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
28644 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
28645 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
28646 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
28647 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
28648 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
28649
28650 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
28651 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
28652 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
28653 surrounded by today.</p>
28654
28655       </div>
28656       <div class="tags">
28657
28658
28659         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>.
28660
28661
28662       </div>
28663     </div>
28664     <div class="padding"></div>
28665
28666     <div class="entry">
28667       <div class="title">
28668         <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>
28669       </div>
28670       <div class="date">
28671         28th April 2009
28672       </div>
28673       <div class="body">
28674         <p>Julien Blache
28675 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
28676 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
28677 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
28678 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
28679 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
28680 properties.</p>
28681
28682       </div>
28683       <div class="tags">
28684
28685
28686         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>.
28687
28688
28689       </div>
28690     </div>
28691     <div class="padding"></div>
28692
28693     <div class="entry">
28694       <div class="title">
28695         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html">Recording video from cron using VLC</a>
28696       </div>
28697       <div class="date">
28698          5th April 2009
28699       </div>
28700       <div class="body">
28701         <p>One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
28702 run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net.  The
28703 task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
28704 of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
28705 vlc.  I finally found a way to do it today.  I spent an hour or so
28706 searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation.  The
28707 hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
28708 dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:</p>
28709
28710 <blockquote><pre>URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
28711 SAVEFILE=rms.ogg
28712 DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
28713   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
28714   --intf=dummy</pre></blockquote>
28715
28716 <p>The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
28717 duplicating the output stream to "nodisplay" and the file, using the
28718 dummy interface.  The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
28719 sure no X interface is needed.</p>
28720
28721 <p>The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
28722 and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
28723 the vlc process with SIGTERM.  Here is a complete script
28724 <tt>vlc-record</tt> to use from <tt>at</tt> or <tt>cron</tt>:</p>
28725
28726 <blockquote><pre>#!/bin/sh
28727 set -e
28728 URL="$1"
28729 SAVEFILE="$2"
28730 DURATION="$3"
28731 DISPLAY= vlc -q "$URL" \
28732   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
28733   --intf=dummy < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 &
28734 pid=$!
28735 sleep $DURATION
28736 kill $pid
28737 wait $pid</pre></blockquote>
28738
28739       </div>
28740       <div class="tags">
28741
28742
28743         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>.
28744
28745
28746       </div>
28747     </div>
28748     <div class="padding"></div>
28749
28750     <div class="entry">
28751       <div class="title">
28752         <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>
28753       </div>
28754       <div class="date">
28755         30th March 2009
28756       </div>
28757       <div class="body">
28758         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
28759 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
28760 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
28761 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
28762 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
28763 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
28764 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
28765 application.</p>
28766
28767 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
28768 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
28769 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
28770 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
28771 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
28772 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
28773 blocked from doing so.</p>
28774
28775 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
28776 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
28777 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
28778 requirements change.</p>
28779
28780 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
28781 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
28782 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
28783
28784       </div>
28785       <div class="tags">
28786
28787
28788         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>.
28789
28790
28791       </div>
28792     </div>
28793     <div class="padding"></div>
28794
28795     <div class="entry">
28796       <div class="title">
28797         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
28798       </div>
28799       <div class="date">
28800         29th March 2009
28801       </div>
28802       <div class="body">
28803         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
28804 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
28805 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
28806 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
28807 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
28808 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
28809 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
28810 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
28811 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
28812 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
28813 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
28814 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
28815 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
28816 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
28817 now. :)</p>
28818
28819       </div>
28820       <div class="tags">
28821
28822
28823         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>.
28824
28825
28826       </div>
28827     </div>
28828     <div class="padding"></div>
28829
28830     <div class="entry">
28831       <div class="title">
28832         <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>
28833       </div>
28834       <div class="date">
28835         29th March 2009
28836       </div>
28837       <div class="body">
28838         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
28839 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
28840 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
28841 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
28842 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
28843 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
28844
28845 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
28846 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
28847 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
28848 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
28849 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
28850 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
28851 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
28852 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
28853 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
28854 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
28855 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
28856 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
28857 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
28858
28859 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
28860 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
28861 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
28862 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
28863
28864 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
28865 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
28866
28867 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
28868 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
28869 new IETF work group?</p>
28870
28871       </div>
28872       <div class="tags">
28873
28874
28875         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>.
28876
28877
28878       </div>
28879     </div>
28880     <div class="padding"></div>
28881
28882     <div class="entry">
28883       <div class="title">
28884         <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>
28885       </div>
28886       <div class="date">
28887         28th February 2009
28888       </div>
28889       <div class="body">
28890         <p>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
28891 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
28892 contract expire for each server.  We have a machine (and service)
28893 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
28894 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
28895 each machine.  To make it easier for us to track support contract
28896 status, I've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
28897 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
28898 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
28899 machines.  I extended a perl script already being used to import
28900 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
28901 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
28902 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
28903 for the relevant machines.  This make the support status information
28904 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
28905 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
28906 The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
28907 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
28908 them.  27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
28909 using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
28910 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
28911 services.  After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
28912 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
28913 them break down.  When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
28914 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
28915 machine.</p>
28916
28917 <p>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
28918 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
28919 Werner Forsbring.  The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
28920 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
28921 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code.  I know the HTML
28922 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
28923 introduce more dependencies.  This is the current incarnation:</p>
28924
28925 <pre>
28926 use LWP::Simple;
28927 use POSIX;
28928 use WWW::Mechanize;
28929 use Date::Parse;
28930 [...]
28931 sub get_support_info {
28932     my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
28933     my $str;
28934
28935     if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
28936         # fetch website from Dell support
28937         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";
28938         my $webpage = get($url);
28939         return undef unless ($webpage);
28940
28941         my $daysleft = -1;
28942         my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
28943         foreach my $line (@lines) {
28944             next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
28945             $line =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
28946             $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;
28947
28948             my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
28949             @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
28950             my $lastend = "";
28951             while ($f[3] eq "DELL") {
28952                 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];
28953
28954                 my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
28955                                             localtime(str2time($startstr)));
28956                 my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
28957                                           localtime(str2time($endstr)));
28958                 $str .= "$type $start -> $end ";
28959                 @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
28960                 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
28961             }
28962             my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
28963             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
28964                 if ($lastend lt $today);
28965         }
28966     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
28967         my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
28968         my $url =
28969             'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do';
28970         $mech->get($url);
28971         my $fields = {
28972             'BODServiceID' => 'NA',
28973             'RegisteredPurchaseDate' => '',
28974             'country' => 'NO',
28975             'productNumber' => $productnumber,
28976             'serialNumber1' => $serial,
28977         };
28978         $mech->submit_form( form_number => 2,
28979                             fields      => $fields );
28980         # Next step is screen scraping
28981         my $content = $mech->content();
28982
28983         $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
28984         $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
28985         $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
28986         $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
28987
28988         my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
28989
28990         while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
28991             my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
28992                 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
28993             $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
28994             my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
28995                                         localtime(str2time($startstr)));
28996             my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
28997                                       localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
28998
28999             $str .= "$type ($status) $start -> $end ";
29000
29001             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
29002                 if ($end lt $today);
29003         }
29004     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
29005         # This code ignore extended support contracts.
29006         my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
29007         if ($producttype &amp;&amp; $serial) {
29008             my $content =
29009                 get("http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;brandind=5000008&amp;Submit=Submit&amp;type=$producttype&amp;serial=$serial");
29010             if ($content) {
29011                 $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
29012                 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
29013                 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
29014                 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
29015
29016                 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
29017                 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
29018
29019                 $str .= "($status) -> $end ";
29020
29021                 my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
29022                 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
29023                     if ($end lt $today);
29024             }
29025         }
29026     }
29027     return $str;
29028 }
29029 </pre>
29030
29031 <p>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
29032 serial numbers.  The information passed in as arguments are fetched
29033 from dmidecode.</p>
29034
29035 <pre>
29036 print get_support_info("hp.host", "HP ProLiant BL460c G1", "1234567890"
29037                        "447707-B21");
29038 print get_support_info("dell.host", "Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950", "1234567");
29039 print get_support_info("ibm.host", "IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-",
29040                        "1234567");
29041 </pre>
29042
29043 <p>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
29044 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)</p>
29045
29046 <p>Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
29047 contracts, so it is useless in that case.  The original Dell code do
29048 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
29049 do so.</p>
29050
29051       </div>
29052       <div class="tags">
29053
29054
29055         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>.
29056
29057
29058       </div>
29059     </div>
29060     <div class="padding"></div>
29061
29062     <div class="entry">
29063       <div class="title">
29064         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html">Using bar codes at a computing center</a>
29065       </div>
29066       <div class="date">
29067         20th February 2009
29068       </div>
29069       <div class="body">
29070         <p>At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
29071 in our computing center.  This give us a challenge in tracking the
29072 location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
29073 removed.  Some times the location register is not updated when a
29074 computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
29075 the "missing" computer.</p>
29076
29077 <p>In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
29078 <a href="http://www.libdmtx.org/">libdmtx</a> to write and read bar
29079 code blocks as defined in the
29080 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix">The Data Matrix
29081 Standard</a>.  This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
29082 digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
29083 codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture.  The bar code standard
29084 allow up to 2 KiB to be written in the tag.  There is another project
29085 with <a href="http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/">a bar code
29086 writer written in postscript</a> capable of creating such bar codes,
29087 but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
29088 codes.</p>
29089
29090 <p>It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
29091 machines in our computing center.  If both racks and computers are
29092 tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
29093 computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
29094 If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
29095 locations, and can detect movements and removals.</p>
29096
29097 <p>I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
29098 random rack and tagged all the machines with their names.  Next, I
29099 took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
29100 these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read.  This worked
29101 fairly well.  If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
29102 side, all tags in the image could be read.  Because of limited space
29103 between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
29104 rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
29105 about half the rack.  I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
29106 to 60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.</p>
29107
29108 <p>My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
29109 at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
29110 easier automatic tracking of computers.</p>
29111
29112       </div>
29113       <div class="tags">
29114
29115
29116         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>.
29117
29118
29119       </div>
29120     </div>
29121     <div class="padding"></div>
29122
29123     <div class="entry">
29124       <div class="title">
29125         <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>
29126       </div>
29127       <div class="date">
29128         17th January 2009
29129       </div>
29130       <div class="body">
29131         <p>As part of the work we do in <a href="http://www.nuug.no">NUUG</a>
29132 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
29133 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording.  Putting a
29134 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
29135 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy.  I hope this
29136 will become easier when the &lt;video&gt; tag is implemented in all
29137 browsers, but I am not sure.  We provide the recordings in several
29138 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
29139 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
29140 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
29141 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
29142 &lt;video&gt; tag, the &lt;object&gt; tag, the &lt;embed&gt; tag and
29143 the &lt;applet&gt; tag.  All of these take a lot of options, and
29144 finding the best options is a major challenge.</p>
29145
29146 <p>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from <a
29147 href="http://labs.opera.com">labs.opera.com</a>, to see how it handled
29148 a &lt;video&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
29149 I was not very impressed.  The browser start by fetching a picture
29150 from the video stream.  Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
29151 definitely very early in the recording.  So far, so good. Next,
29152 instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
29153 of it, but do not start to play the video.  This mean I have to wait
29154 for several minutes for the downloading to finish.  When the download
29155 is done, the playing of the video do not start!  Waiting for the
29156 download, but I do not get to see the video?  Some testing later, I
29157 discover that I have to add the controls="true" attribute to be able
29158 to get a play button to pres to start the video.  Adding
29159 autoplay="true" did not help.  I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
29160 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
29161 &lt;video&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
29162 playing when the download is done.</p>
29163
29164 <p>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
29165 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/">available
29166 from the nuug site</a>.  Will have to test it with the new Firefox
29167 too.</p>
29168
29169 <p>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature.  I was unable
29170 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
29171 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video.  I
29172 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)</p>
29173
29174       </div>
29175       <div class="tags">
29176
29177
29178         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>.
29179
29180
29181       </div>
29182     </div>
29183     <div class="padding"></div>
29184
29185     <div class="entry">
29186       <div class="title">
29187         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html">Software video mixer on a USB stick</a>
29188       </div>
29189       <div class="date">
29190         28th December 2008
29191       </div>
29192       <div class="body">
29193         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> is
29194 recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
29195 worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
29196 directly with the video stream.  For this, we use the
29197 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/">dvswitch</a> package from
29198 the Debian video team.  As this require quite one computer per video
29199 source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
29200 borrow laptops.  And to avoid having to install extra software on
29201 these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
29202 bootable USB stick.  The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
29203 source, sink and mixer applications and
29204 <a href="http://www.kinodv.org/">dvgrab</a>.  To allow this setup to
29205 work without any configuration, I've patched dvswitch to use
29206 <a href="http://www.avahi.org/">avahi</a> to connect the various parts
29207 together.  And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
29208 upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
29209 with USB sources.  We have not yet tested this setup in a production
29210 setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
29211 video mixer in a very short time frame.  We will need it for
29212 <a href="http://www.goopen.no/">Go Open 2009</a>.</p>
29213
29214 <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz">The
29215 USB image</a> is for a 1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
29216 larger stick as well.</p>
29217
29218       </div>
29219       <div class="tags">
29220
29221
29222         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>.
29223
29224
29225       </div>
29226     </div>
29227     <div class="padding"></div>
29228
29229     <div class="entry">
29230       <div class="title">
29231         <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>
29232       </div>
29233       <div class="date">
29234          7th December 2008
29235       </div>
29236       <div class="body">
29237         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
29238 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
29239 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
29240 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
29241 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
29242 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
29243 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
29244 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
29245
29246 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
29247 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
29248 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
29249 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
29250 of these cards.</p>
29251
29252       </div>
29253       <div class="tags">
29254
29255
29256         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>.
29257
29258
29259       </div>
29260     </div>
29261     <div class="padding"></div>
29262
29263     <div class="entry">
29264       <div class="title">
29265         <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>
29266       </div>
29267       <div class="date">
29268         25th November 2008
29269       </div>
29270       <div class="body">
29271         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
29272 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
29273 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
29274 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
29275 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
29276 notes are available on
29277 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
29278 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
29279 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
29280 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
29281 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
29282 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
29283 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
29284 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
29285 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
29286
29287 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
29288 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
29289
29290       </div>
29291       <div class="tags">
29292
29293
29294         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>.
29295
29296
29297       </div>
29298     </div>
29299     <div class="padding"></div>
29300
29301     <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>
29302     <div id="sidebar">
29303
29304
29305
29306 <h2>Archive</h2>
29307 <ul>
29308
29309 <li>2017
29310 <ul>
29311
29312 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/01/">January (4)</a></li>
29313
29314 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/02/">February (3)</a></li>
29315
29316 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/03/">March (5)</a></li>
29317
29318 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/04/">April (2)</a></li>
29319
29320 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/06/">June (5)</a></li>
29321
29322 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/07/">July (1)</a></li>
29323
29324 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/08/">August (1)</a></li>
29325
29326 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/09/">September (3)</a></li>
29327
29328 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/10/">October (5)</a></li>
29329
29330 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/11/">November (2)</a></li>
29331
29332 </ul></li>
29333
29334 <li>2016
29335 <ul>
29336
29337 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/01/">January (3)</a></li>
29338
29339 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/02/">February (2)</a></li>
29340
29341 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/03/">March (3)</a></li>
29342
29343 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/04/">April (8)</a></li>
29344
29345 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/05/">May (8)</a></li>
29346
29347 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/06/">June (2)</a></li>
29348
29349 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/07/">July (2)</a></li>
29350
29351 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/08/">August (5)</a></li>
29352
29353 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/09/">September (2)</a></li>
29354
29355 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/10/">October (3)</a></li>
29356
29357 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/11/">November (8)</a></li>
29358
29359 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/12/">December (5)</a></li>
29360
29361 </ul></li>
29362
29363 <li>2015
29364 <ul>
29365
29366 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
29367
29368 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (6)</a></li>
29369
29370 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/03/">March (1)</a></li>
29371
29372 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/04/">April (4)</a></li>
29373
29374 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/05/">May (3)</a></li>
29375
29376 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/06/">June (4)</a></li>
29377
29378 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/07/">July (6)</a></li>
29379
29380 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/08/">August (2)</a></li>
29381
29382 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/09/">September (2)</a></li>
29383
29384 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/10/">October (9)</a></li>
29385
29386 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/11/">November (6)</a></li>
29387
29388 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/12/">December (3)</a></li>
29389
29390 </ul></li>
29391
29392 <li>2014
29393 <ul>
29394
29395 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
29396
29397 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
29398
29399 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
29400
29401 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
29402
29403 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
29404
29405 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
29406
29407 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
29408
29409 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
29410
29411 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
29412
29413 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
29414
29415 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
29416
29417 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
29418
29419 </ul></li>
29420
29421 <li>2013
29422 <ul>
29423
29424 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
29425
29426 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
29427
29428 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
29429
29430 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
29431
29432 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
29433
29434 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
29435
29436 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
29437
29438 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
29439
29440 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
29441
29442 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
29443
29444 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
29445
29446 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
29447
29448 </ul></li>
29449
29450 <li>2012
29451 <ul>
29452
29453 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
29454
29455 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
29456
29457 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
29458
29459 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
29460
29461 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
29462
29463 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
29464
29465 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
29466
29467 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
29468
29469 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
29470
29471 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
29472
29473 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
29474
29475 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
29476
29477 </ul></li>
29478
29479 <li>2011
29480 <ul>
29481
29482 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
29483
29484 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
29485
29486 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
29487
29488 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
29489
29490 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
29491
29492 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
29493
29494 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
29495
29496 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
29497
29498 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
29499
29500 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
29501
29502 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
29503
29504 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
29505
29506 </ul></li>
29507
29508 <li>2010
29509 <ul>
29510
29511 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
29512
29513 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
29514
29515 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
29516
29517 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
29518
29519 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
29520
29521 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
29522
29523 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
29524
29525 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
29526
29527 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
29528
29529 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
29530
29531 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
29532
29533 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
29534
29535 </ul></li>
29536
29537 <li>2009
29538 <ul>
29539
29540 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
29541
29542 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
29543
29544 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
29545
29546 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
29547
29548 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
29549
29550 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
29551
29552 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
29553
29554 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
29555
29556 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
29557
29558 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
29559
29560 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
29561
29562 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
29563
29564 </ul></li>
29565
29566 <li>2008
29567 <ul>
29568
29569 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
29570
29571 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
29572
29573 </ul></li>
29574
29575 </ul>
29576
29577
29578
29579 <h2>Tags</h2>
29580 <ul>
29581
29582  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (14)</a></li>
29583
29584  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
29585
29586  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
29587
29588  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
29589
29590  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (9)</a></li>
29591
29592  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (16)</a></li>
29593
29594  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
29595
29596  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
29597
29598  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (154)</a></li>
29599
29600  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (158)</a></li>
29601
29602  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook (4)</a></li>
29603
29604  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (10)</a></li>
29605
29606  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (17)</a></li>
29607
29608  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (24)</a></li>
29609
29610  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
29611
29612  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (359)</a></li>
29613
29614  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (23)</a></li>
29615
29616  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (12)</a></li>
29617
29618  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (30)</a></li>
29619
29620  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
29621
29622  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (18)</a></li>
29623
29624  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264 (20)</a></li>
29625
29626  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (42)</a></li>
29627
29628  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (15)</a></li>
29629
29630  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (20)</a></li>
29631
29632  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
29633
29634  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego (4)</a></li>
29635
29636  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
29637
29638  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
29639
29640  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
29641
29642  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
29643
29644  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (39)</a></li>
29645
29646  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software (9)</a></li>
29647
29648  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (293)</a></li>
29649
29650  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (189)</a></li>
29651
29652  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (33)</a></li>
29653
29654  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
29655
29656  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (66)</a></li>
29657
29658  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (104)</a></li>
29659
29660  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (2)</a></li>
29661
29662  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
29663
29664  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
29665
29666  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
29667
29668  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (10)</a></li>
29669
29670  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
29671
29672  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (5)</a></li>
29673
29674  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
29675
29676  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (53)</a></li>
29677
29678  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
29679
29680  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (5)</a></li>
29681
29682  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (55)</a></li>
29683
29684  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (6)</a></li>
29685
29686  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (12)</a></li>
29687
29688  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (52)</a></li>
29689
29690  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (4)</a></li>
29691
29692  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
29693
29694  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (9)</a></li>
29695
29696  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (59)</a></li>
29697
29698  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
29699
29700  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (40)</a></li>
29701
29702 </ul>
29703
29704
29705     </div>
29706     <p style="text-align: right">
29707  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
29708 </p>
29709
29710   </body>
29711 </html>