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  13  <h1>
  14      <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  15
  16  </h1>
  17
  18 </div>
  19
  20
  21     <h3>Entries tagged "english".</h3>
  22
  23     <div class="entry">
  24       <div class="title">
  25         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_init_d_boot_script_example_for_rsyslog.html">Debian init.d boot script example for rsyslog</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28          2nd November 2013
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
  32 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
  33 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
  34 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
  35 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
  36
  37 <p><pre>
  38 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
  39 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
  40 # Provides:          rsyslog
  41 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
  42 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
  43 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
  44 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
  45 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
  46 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
  47 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
  48 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
  49 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
  50 ### END INIT INFO
  51 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
  52 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
  53 </pre></p>
  54
  55 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
  56 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of the meta
  57 info/comments.</p>
  58
  59 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
  60 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
  61
  62 <p><pre>
  63 #!/bin/sh
  64
  65 # Define LSB log_* functions.
  66 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
  67 # and status_of_proc is working.
  68 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
  69
  70 #
  71 # Function that starts the daemon/service
  72
  73 #
  74 do_start()
  75 {
  76         # Return
  77         #   0 if daemon has been started
  78         #   1 if daemon was already running
  79         #   2 if daemon could not be started
  80         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
  81                 || return 1
  82         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
  83                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
  84                 || return 2
  85         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
  86         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
  87         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
  88 }
  89
  90 #
  91 # Function that stops the daemon/service
  92 #
  93 do_stop()
  94 {
  95         # Return
  96         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
  97         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
  98         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
  99         #   other if a failure occurred
 100         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
 101         RETVAL="$?"
 102         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
 103         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
 104         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
 105         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
 106         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
 107         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
 108         # sleep for some time.
 109         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
 110         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
 111         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
 112         rm -f $PIDFILE
 113         return "$RETVAL"
 114 }
 115
 116 #
 117 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
 118 #
 119 do_reload() {
 120         #
 121         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
 122         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
 123         # then implement that here.
 124         #
 125         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
 126         return 0
 127 }
 128
 129 SCRIPTNAME=$1
 130 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
 131 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
 132 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
 133     script="$1"
 134     shift
 135     . $script
 136 else
 137     exit 0
 138 fi
 139
 140 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
 141 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
 142
 143 # Exit if the package is not installed
 144 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
 145
 146 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
 147 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
 148
 149 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
 150 . /lib/init/vars.sh
 151
 152 case "$1" in
 153   start)
 154         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
 155         do_start
 156         case "$?" in
 157                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
 158                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
 159         esac
 160         ;;
 161   stop)
 162         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
 163         do_stop
 164         case "$?" in
 165                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
 166                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
 167         esac
 168         ;;
 169   status)
 170         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
 171         ;;
 172   #reload|force-reload)
 173         #
 174         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
 175         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
 176         #
 177         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
 178         #do_reload
 179         #log_end_msg $?
 180         #;;
 181   restart|force-reload)
 182         #
 183         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
 184         # 'force-reload' alias
 185         #
 186         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
 187         do_stop
 188         case "$?" in
 189           0|1)
 190                 do_start
 191                 case "$?" in
 192                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
 193                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
 194                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
 195                 esac
 196                 ;;
 197           *)
 198                 # Failed to stop
 199                 log_end_msg 1
 200                 ;;
 201         esac
 202         ;;
 203   *)
 204         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
 205         exit 3
 206         ;;
 207 esac
 208
 209 :
 210 </pre></p>
 211
 212 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
 213 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
 214 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
 215 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
 216
 217 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
 218 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
 219 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
 220 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
 221 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in year.</p>
 222
 223       </div>
 224       <div class="tags">
 225
 226
 227         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>.
 228
 229
 230       </div>
 231     </div>
 232     <div class="padding"></div>
 233
 234     <div class="entry">
 235       <div class="title">
 236         <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>
 237       </div>
 238       <div class="date">
 239          1st November 2013
 240       </div>
 241       <div class="body">
 242         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
 243 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
 244 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
 245 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
 246 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
 247 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
 248 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
 249 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
 250 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
 251 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
 252 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
 253 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
 254
 255 <p>The source is now available from
 256 <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>
 257
 258       </div>
 259       <div class="tags">
 260
 261
 262         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 263
 264
 265       </div>
 266     </div>
 267     <div class="padding"></div>
 268
 269     <div class="entry">
 270       <div class="title">
 271         <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>
 272       </div>
 273       <div class="date">
 274         27th October 2013
 275       </div>
 276       <div class="body">
 277         <p>The
 278 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
 279 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
 280 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
 281 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
 282 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
 283 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
 284 of a plan to simplify the build system for
 285 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
 286 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
 287 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
 288 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
 289 Raspberry Pi.</p>
 290
 291 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
 292 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
 293 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
 294 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
 295 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
 296 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
 297 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
 298 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
 299 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
 300 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
 301 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
 302 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
 303 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
 304 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
 305 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
 306 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
 307 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
 308 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
 309 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
 310 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
 311 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
 312 available from
 313 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
 314 upstream project page</a>.</p>
 315
 316 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
 317 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
 318 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
 319 list:</p>
 320
 321 <p><pre>
 322 #!/bin/sh
 323 set -e # Exit on first error
 324 rootdir="$1"
 325 cd "$rootdir"
 326 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
 327 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
 328 EOF
 329 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
 330 # install a kernel somewhere too.
 331 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
 332     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
 333 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
 334 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
 335 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
 336 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
 337 </pre></p>
 338
 339 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
 340 to build the image:</p>
 341
 342 <pre>
 343 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
 344     --variant minbase \
 345     --arch armel \
 346     --distribution jessie \
 347     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
 348     --image test.img \
 349     --size 600M \
 350     --bootsize 64M \
 351     --boottype vfat \
 352     --log-level debug \
 353     --verbose \
 354     --no-kernel \
 355     --no-extlinux \
 356     --root-password raspberry \
 357     --hostname raspberrypi \
 358     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
 359     --customize `pwd`/customize \
 360     --package netbase \
 361     --package git-core \
 362     --package binutils \
 363     --package ca-certificates \
 364     --package wget \
 365     --package kmod
 366 </pre></p>
 367
 368 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
 369 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
 370 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
 371 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
 372 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
 373 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
 374 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
 375
 376 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
 377 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
 378 build dependency list.</p>
 379
 380 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
 381 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
 382 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
 383 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
 384
 385       </div>
 386       <div class="tags">
 387
 388
 389         Tags: <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>.
 390
 391
 392       </div>
 393     </div>
 394     <div class="padding"></div>
 395
 396     <div class="entry">
 397       <div class="title">
 398         <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>
 399       </div>
 400       <div class="date">
 401         21st October 2013
 402       </div>
 403       <div class="body">
 404         <p>The last few days I have been experimenting with
 405 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki">the
 406 batman-adv mesh technology</a>.  I want to gain some experience to see
 407 if it will fit <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the
 408 Freedombox project</a>, and together with my neighbors try to build a
 409 mesh network around the park where I live.  Batman-adv is a layer 2
 410 mesh system ("ethernet" in other words), where the mesh network appear
 411 as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch.</p>
 412
 413 <p>My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying
 414 around, but I've been unable to get them working with batman-adv.  So
 415 instead, I started playing with a
 416 <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org/">Raspberry Pi</a>, and tried to
 417 get it working as a mesh node.  My idea is to use it to create a mesh
 418 node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to
 419 the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh
 420 network.  This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys
 421 WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow
 422 non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh.  This in turn is useful for
 423 Android phones using <a href="http://servalproject.org/">the Serval
 424 Project</a> voip client, allowing every one around the playground to
 425 phone and message each other for free.  The reason is that Android
 426 phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from
 427 the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted.  But if
 428 they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to
 429 every client on the local network.</p>
 430
 431 <p>To get this working, I've created a debian package
 432 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node">meshfx-node</a>
 433 and a script
 434 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/build-rpi-mesh-node">build-rpi-mesh-node</a>
 435 to create the Raspberry Pi boot image.  I'm using Debian Jessie (and
 436 not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available.
 437 Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot
 438 image to get it booting, but I'll ignore that for now.  Also, as
 439 Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry
 440 Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit.  I hope
 441 the routing performance isn't affected by the lack of hardware FPU
 442 support.</p>
 443
 444 <p>To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user
 445 after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:</p>
 446
 447 <p><pre>
 448 % wget -O build-rpi-mesh-node \
 449     https://raw.github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
 450 % sudo bash -x ./build-rpi-mesh-node > build.log 2>&1
 451 % dd if=/root/rpi/rpi_basic_jessie_$(date +%Y%m%d).img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M
 452 %
 453 </pre></p>
 454
 455 <p>Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB
 456 wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node.  At least it does for
 457 me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the
 458 ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in
 459 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">an
 460 earlier blog post about this mesh testing</a>.</p>
 461
 462 <p>The mesh node was not horribly expensive either.  I bought
 463 everything over the counter in shops nearby.  If I had ordered online
 464 from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:</p>
 465
 466 <p><table>
 467
 468 <tr><th>Supplier</th><th>Model</th><th>NOK</th></tr>
 469 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi model B</td><td>349.90</td></tr>
 470 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi type B case</td><td>99.90</td></tr>
 471 <tr><td>Lefdal</td><td>Jensen Air:Link 25150</td><td>295.-</td></tr>
 472 <tr><td>Clas Ohlson</td><td>Kingston 16 GB SD card</td><td>199.-</td></tr>
 473 <tr><td>Total cost</td><td></td><td>943.80</td></tr>
 474
 475 </table></p>
 476
 477 <p>Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement
 478 connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the 1th
 479 floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one
 480 play-node I use to develop the image building script.  And some times
 481 I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it.  I look forward
 482 to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give,
 483 and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)</p>
 484
 485       </div>
 486       <div class="tags">
 487
 488
 489         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>.
 490
 491
 492       </div>
 493     </div>
 494     <div class="padding"></div>
 495
 496     <div class="entry">
 497       <div class="title">
 498         <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>
 499       </div>
 500       <div class="date">
 501         19th October 2013
 502       </div>
 503       <div class="body">
 504         <p>Back in 2010, I created a Perl library to talk to
 505 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spykee">the Spykee robot</a>
 506 (with two belts, wifi, USB and Linux) and made it available from my
 507 web page.  Today I concluded that it should move to a site that is
 508 easier to use to cooperate with others, and moved it to github.  If
 509 you got a Spykee robot, you might want to check out
 510 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/libspykee-perl">the
 511 libspykee-perl github repository</a>.</p>
 512
 513       </div>
 514       <div class="tags">
 515
 516
 517         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>.
 518
 519
 520       </div>
 521     </div>
 522     <div class="padding"></div>
 523
 524     <div class="entry">
 525       <div class="title">
 526         <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>
 527       </div>
 528       <div class="date">
 529         15th October 2013
 530       </div>
 531       <div class="body">
 532         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
 533 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
 534 these. :)</p>
 535
 536 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
 537 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
 538 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
 539 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
 540 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
 541 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
 542 hope you will to. :)</p>
 543
 544 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
 545 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
 546 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
 547 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
 548 donated.  Are you next?</p>
 549
 550 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
 551 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
 552 statement under the heading
 553 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
 554 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
 555 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
 556 too.</p>
 557
 558       </div>
 559       <div class="tags">
 560
 561
 562         Tags: <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>.
 563
 564
 565       </div>
 566     </div>
 567     <div class="padding"></div>
 568
 569     <div class="entry">
 570       <div class="title">
 571         <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>
 572       </div>
 573       <div class="date">
 574         11th October 2013
 575       </div>
 576       <div class="body">
 577         <p>Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
 578 networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
 579 areas, depending on the radio technology used.  Normal wifi equipment
 580 can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
 581 successful examples like
 582 <a href="http://www.freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a> and
 583 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network</a>
 584 (see
 585 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece">wikipedia
 586 for a large list</a>) around the globe.  To give you an idea how it
 587 work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
 588 can be seen from their
 589 <a href="http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html">dynamically
 590 updated node graph and map</a>, where one can see how the mesh nodes
 591 automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
 592 There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
 593 and that is the main topic of this blog post.</p>
 594
 595 <p>I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
 596 to do it as part of my involvement with the <a
 597 href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member organisation</a> community, and
 598 my recent involvement in
 599 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the Freedombox project</a>
 600 finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
 601 Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
 602 when possible, given that most communication between people are
 603 between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
 604 communication patterns).  It also allow people to communicate without
 605 any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
 606 private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
 607 important over the years.</p>
 608
 609 <p>So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
 610 working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
 611 <a href="http://hackeriet.no/">Hackeriet</a> at Husmania.  They seem to
 612 have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
 613 <a href="http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page">the Oslo
 614 Freifunk project</a>, but that effort is now dead and the people
 615 behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
 616 <a href="http://meshfx.org/trac">meshfx</a>.  Unfortunately the wiki
 617 site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
 618 reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to
 619 the new project.  A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
 620 from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks.  I
 621 came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
 622 speakers about this talk (from
 623 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Kd7CLkhSY">youtube</a>):</p>
 624
 625 <p><iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
 626
 627 <p>I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
 628 There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
 629 figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but
 630 given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
 631 is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
 632 completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
 633 batman-adv for now.  It sure help me to  know that the very cool
 634 <a href="http://www.servalproject.org/">Serval project in Australia</a>
 635 is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
 636 organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
 637 less industrialized communities.  Check out this cool video presenting
 638 that project (from
 639 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30qNfzJCQOA">youtube</a>):</p>
 640
 641 <p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/30qNfzJCQOA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
 642
 643 <p>According to the wikipedia page on
 644 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network">Wireless
 645 mesh network</a> there are around 70 competing schemes for routing
 646 packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
 647 B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
 648 based community mesh networks.</p>
 649
 650 <p>The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer 2
 651 (as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
 652 network.  One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
 653 vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
 654 computer.  The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
 655 least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up.  A
 656 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide">good
 657 introduction</a> is available from the Open Mesh project.  These are
 658 the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:</p>
 659
 660 <p><table>
 661 <tr><th>Setting</th><th>Value</th></tr>
 662 <tr><td>Protocol / kernel module</td><td>batman-adv</td></tr>
 663 <tr><td>ESSID</td><td>meshfx@hackeriet</td></tr>
 664 <td>Channel / Frequency</td><td>11 / 2462</td></tr>
 665 <td>Cell ID</td><td>02:BA:00:00:00:01</td>
 666 </table></p>
 667
 668 <p>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
 669 in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers.  (See a nice post from
 670 VillageTelco about
 671 "<a href="http://tiebing.blogspot.no/2009/12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html">Information
 672 about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!</a>
 673 for details.)  When these settings are activated and you have some
 674 other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
 675 network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
 676 any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)</p>
 677
 678 <p>My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
 679 but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
 680 firmware supporting batman-adv.  If anyone know how to use that old
 681 wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.</p>
 682
 683 <p>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
 684 us on IRC, either channel
 685 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace">#oslohackerspace</a>
 686 or <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug">#nuug</a> on
 687 irc.freenode.net.</p>
 688
 689 <p>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
 690 research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
 691 and Innovation called
 692 <a href="http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-2008.pdf">The
 693 reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks</a> and elsewhere
 694 learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
 695 Grünerløkka in Oslo.  So mesh networks are also interesting for
 696 commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
 697 to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
 698 know have closed down the experiment.  Perhaps Telenor or others would
 699 be interested in a cooperation?</p>
 700
 701 <p><strong>Update 2013-10-12</strong>: I was just
 702 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2013-October/005900.html">told
 703 by the Serval project developers</a> that they no longer use
 704 batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
 705 mesh system.</p>
 706
 707       </div>
 708       <div class="tags">
 709
 710
 711         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>.
 712
 713
 714       </div>
 715     </div>
 716     <div class="padding"></div>
 717
 718     <div class="entry">
 719       <div class="title">
 720         <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>
 721       </div>
 722       <div class="date">
 723          8th October 2013
 724       </div>
 725       <div class="body">
 726         <p>The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
 727 Salvador had published a
 728 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GgpdqgLFc">video on
 729 Youtube</a> showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu /
 730 Skolelinux profile.  This is the profile intended for use at home or
 731 on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network
 732 services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc,
 733 in other word a single user machine).  The result is 11 minutes long,
 734 and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked).
 735 Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium
 736 showing the <a href="http://www.zygotebody.com/">Zygote Body 3D model
 737 of the human body</a>, but I guess he did not know about those or find
 738 other programs more interesting. :) And the video do not show the
 739 advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian
 740 Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of
 741 computers without hard drives by installing one central
 742 <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP server</a>.</p>
 743
 744 <p>Anyway, check out the video, embedded below and linked to above:</p>
 745
 746 <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/w-GgpdqgLFc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
 747
 748 <p>Are there other nice videos demonstrating Skolelinux?  Please let
 749 me know. :)</p>
 750
 751       </div>
 752       <div class="tags">
 753
 754
 755         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>.
 756
 757
 758       </div>
 759     </div>
 760     <div class="padding"></div>
 761
 762     <div class="entry">
 763       <div class="title">
 764         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Finally__Debian_Edu_Wheezy_is_released_today_.html">Finally, Debian Edu Wheezy is released today!</a>
 765       </div>
 766       <div class="date">
 767         29th September 2013
 768       </div>
 769       <div class="body">
 770         <p>A few hours ago, the announcement for the first stable release of
 771 Debian Edu Wheezy went out from the Debian publicity team.  The
 772 complete announcement text can be found at
 773 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130928">the Debian News
 774 section</a>, translated to several languages.  Please check it out.</p>
 775
 776 <p>There is one minor known problem that we will fix very soon.  One
 777 can not install a amd64 Thin Client Server using PXE, as the /var/
 778 partition is too small.  A workaround is to extend the partition (use
 779 lvresize + resize2fs in tty 2 while installing).</p>
 780
 781       </div>
 782       <div class="tags">
 783
 784
 785         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>.
 786
 787
 788       </div>
 789     </div>
 790     <div class="padding"></div>
 791
 792     <div class="entry">
 793       <div class="title">
 794         <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>
 795       </div>
 796       <div class="date">
 797         27th September 2013
 798       </div>
 799       <div class="body">
 800         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
 801 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
 802 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
 803 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
 804
 805 <ul>
 806
 807 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
 808 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
 809
 810 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
 811 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
 812
 813 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
 814 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
 815 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
 816 (Youtube)</li>
 817
 818 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
 819 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
 820
 821 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
 822 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
 823
 824 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
 825 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
 826 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
 827
 828 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
 829 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
 830 (Youtube)</li>
 831
 832 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
 833 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
 834
 835 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
 836 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
 837
 838 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
 839 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
 840 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
 841
 842 </ul>
 843
 844 <p>A larger list is available from
 845 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
 846 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
 847
 848 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
 849 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
 850 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
 851 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
 852 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
 853 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
 854 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
 855 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
 856 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
 857 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
 858 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
 859
 860       </div>
 861       <div class="tags">
 862
 863
 864         Tags: <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>.
 865
 866
 867       </div>
 868     </div>
 869     <div class="padding"></div>
 870
 871     <div class="entry">
 872       <div class="title">
 873         <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>
 874       </div>
 875       <div class="date">
 876         16th September 2013
 877       </div>
 878       <div class="body">
 879         <p>The third wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
 880 today.  This is the release announcement from Holger Levsen:</p>
 881
 882 <blockquote>
 883 <p>Hi,</p>
 884
 885 <p>it is my pleasure to announce the third beta release (beta 2 for
 886 short) of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
 887 Skolelinux</a> based on Debian Wheezy!</p>
 888
 889 <p>Please test these images extensivly, if no new problems are found
 890 we plan to do this final Debian Edu Wheezy release this coming
 891 weekend.  We are not aware of any major problems or blockers in beta2,
 892 if you find something, please notify us immediately!</p>
 893
 894 <p>(More about the remaining steps for the Edu Wheezy release in
 895 another mail to the edu list tonight or tomorrow...)</p>
 896
 897 <p>Noteworthy changes and software updates for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b2
 898 compared to beta1:</p>
 899
 900 <ul>
 901
 902 <li>The KDE proxy setup has been adjusted to use the provided wpad.dat. This
 903 also gets Chromium to use this proxy.</li>
 904 <li>Install kdepim-groupware with KDE desktops to make sure korganizer
 905 understand ical/dav sources.</li>
 906 <li>Increased default maximum size of /var/spool/squid and /skole/backup on the
 907 main server.</li>
 908 <li>A source DVD image containing all source packages is now available as well.</li>
 909 <li>Updates for chromium (29.0.1547.57-1~deb7u1), imagemagick
 910 (6.7.7.10-5+deb7u2), php5 (5.4.4-14+deb7u4), libmodplug
 911 (0.8.8.4-3+deb7u1+git20130828), tiff (4.0.2-6+deb7u2), linux-image
 912 (3.2.0-4-486_3.2.46-1+deb7u1).</li>
 913
 914 </ul>
 915
 916 <p>Where to get it:</p>
 917
 918 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
 919
 920 <ul>
 921 <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>
 922 <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>
 923 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso .</li>
 924 </ul>
 925
 926 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is:  3a1c89f4666df80eebcd46c5bf5fedb866f9472f</p>
 927
 928 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
 929 <ul>
 930 <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>
 931 <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>
 932 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso .</li>
 933 </ul>
 934
 935 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 702d1718548f401c74bfa6df9f032cc3ee16597e</p>
 936
 937 <p>The Source DVD image has the filename
 938 debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-source-DVD.iso and the SHA1SUM
 939 089eed8b3f962db47aae1f6a9685e9bb2fa30ca5 and is available the same way
 940 as the other isos.</p>
 941
 942 <p>How to report bugs</p>
 943
 944 <p>For information how to report bugs please see
 945 <br><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
 946
 947
 948 <p>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</p>
 949
 950 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
 951 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
 952 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
 953 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
 954 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
 955 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
 956 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
 957 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
 958 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
 959 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
 960 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
 961 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
 962 can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
 963
 964 <p>This is the seventh test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
 965 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
 966 Squeeze release.</p>
 967
 968 <p>Notes for upgrades from Alpha Prereleases</p>
 969
 970 <p>Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
 971 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
 972 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
 973 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
 974 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (2)
 975 Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin
 976 password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one
 977 (backup copy!). In both cases all users need to change their password
 978 to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home
 979 directory.</p>
 980
 981
 982 <p>cheers,
 983 <br>        Holger</p>
 984 </blockquote>
 985
 986       </div>
 987       <div class="tags">
 988
 989
 990         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>.
 991
 992
 993       </div>
 994     </div>
 995     <div class="padding"></div>
 996
 997     <div class="entry">
 998       <div class="title">
 999         <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>
1000       </div>
1001       <div class="date">
1002         10th September 2013
1003       </div>
1004       <div class="body">
1005         <p>I was introduced to the
1006 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
1007 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
1008 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
1009 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
1010 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
1011 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
1012 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
1013 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
1014
1015 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
1016 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
1017 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
1018 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
1019 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
1020
1021 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
1022 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
1023 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
1024 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
1025 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
1026 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
1027 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
1028 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
1029 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
1030 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
1031 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
1032 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
1033 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
1034 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
1035 missing in Debian).</p>
1036
1037 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
1038 scripts
1039 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
1040 and a administrative web interface
1041 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
1042 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
1043 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
1044 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
1045 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
1046 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
1047 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
1048 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
1049 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
1050 this is really working yet, see
1051 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
1052 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
1053 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
1054 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
1055 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
1056 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
1057 with lots of half baked features.</p>
1058
1059 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
1060 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
1061 at.</p>
1062
1063 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
1064
1065 <ol>
1066
1067 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
1068 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
1069 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
1070 to the Debian installer:<p>
1071 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
1072
1073 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
1074 install on.</li>
1075
1076 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
1077 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
1078
1079 </ol>
1080
1081 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
1082
1083 <ol>
1084
1085 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
1086 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
1087 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
1088 <pre>
1089 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
1090 </pre></li>
1091 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
1092 <pre>
1093 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
1094    apt-key add -
1095 apt-get update
1096 apt-get install freedombox-setup
1097 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
1098 </pre></li>
1099 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
1100
1101 </ol>
1102
1103 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
1104 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
1105 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
1106 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
1107 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
1108
1109 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
1110 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
1111 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
1112 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
1113
1114 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
1115 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
1116 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
1117 irc.debian.org and the
1118 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
1119 mailing list</a>.</p>
1120
1121 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
1122 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
1123 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
1124 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
1125 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
1126 default password is 'secret'.</p>
1127
1128       </div>
1129       <div class="tags">
1130
1131
1132         Tags: <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>.
1133
1134
1135       </div>
1136     </div>
1137     <div class="padding"></div>
1138
1139     <div class="entry">
1140       <div class="title">
1141         <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>
1142       </div>
1143       <div class="date">
1144         22nd August 2013
1145       </div>
1146       <div class="body">
1147         <p>The second wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
1148 today, slightly delayed because of some bugs in the initial Windows
1149 integration fixes .  This is the release announcement:</p>
1150
1151 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b1 released 2013-08-22</strong></p>
1152
1153 <p>These are the release notes for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
1154 7.1+edu0~b1, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
1155
1156 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
1157
1158 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
1159 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
1160 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
1161 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
1162 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
1163 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
1164 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
1165 the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be
1166 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
1167 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
1168 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
1169 desktop contains
1170 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
1171 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
1172 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
1173 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
1174
1175 <p>This is the sixth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically this
1176 is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze
1177 release.</p>
1178
1179 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
1180 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
1181 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
1182 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
1183 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined
1184 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/08/msg00127.html">on
1185 the mailing list</a>. (2) Accept the new version of gosa.conf and
1186 replace both contained admin password placeholders with the password
1187 hashes found in the old one (backup copy!). In both cases every user
1188 need to change their their password to make sure a password is set for
1189 CIFS access to their home directory.</p>
1190
1191 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
1192
1193 <ul>
1194
1195 <li>Added ssh askpass packages to default installation, to ensure ssh
1196     work also without a attached tty.</li>
1197 <li>Add the command-not-found package to the default installation to
1198     make it easier to figure out where to find missing command line
1199     tools. Please note, that the command 'update-command-not-found'
1200     has to be run as root to actually make it useful (internet access
1201     required).</li>
1202
1203 </ul>
1204
1205 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
1206
1207 <ul>
1208
1209 <li>Adjusted the USB stick ISO image build to include every tool
1210 needed for desktop=xfce installations.</li>
1211 <li>Adjust thin-client-server task to work when installing from USB
1212 stick ISO image.</li>
1213 <li>Made new grub artwork (changed png from indexed to RGB format).</li>
1214 <li>Minor cleanup in the CUPS setup.</li>
1215 <li>Make sure that bootstrapping of the Samba domain really happens
1216     during installation of the main server and adjust SID handling to
1217     cope with this.</li>
1218 <li>Make Samba passwords changeable (again) via GOsa².</li>
1219 <li>Fix generation of LM and NT password hashes via GOsa² to avoid
1220     empty password hashes.</li>
1221 <li>Adapted Samba machine domain joining to latest change in the
1222     smbldap-tools Perl package, fixing bugs blocking Windows machines
1223     from joining the Samba domain.</li>
1224
1225 </ul>
1226
1227 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
1228
1229 <ul>
1230
1231 <li>KDE fails to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
1232     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
1233 <li>Chromium also fails to use the proxy when using the KDE desktop
1234     (using the KDE configuration).</li>
1235
1236 </ul>
1237
1238 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
1239
1240 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
1241
1242 <ul>
1243
1244 <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>
1245
1246 <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>
1247
1248 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso .</li>
1249
1250 </ul>
1251
1252 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 1e357f80b55e703523f2254adde6d78b
1253 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 7157f9be5fd27c7694d713c6ecfed61c3edda3b2</p>
1254
1255 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
1256
1257 <ul>
1258
1259 <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>
1260 <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>
1261 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso .</li>
1262
1263 </ul>
1264
1265 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 7a8408ead59cf7e3cef25afb6e91590b
1266 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: f1817c031f02790d5edb3bfa0dcf8451088ad119</p>
1267
1268
1269 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
1270
1271 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
1272
1273       </div>
1274       <div class="tags">
1275
1276
1277         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>.
1278
1279
1280       </div>
1281     </div>
1282     <div class="padding"></div>
1283
1284     <div class="entry">
1285       <div class="title">
1286         <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>
1287       </div>
1288       <div class="date">
1289         18th August 2013
1290       </div>
1291       <div class="body">
1292         <p>Earlier, I reported about
1293 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
1294 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
1295 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
1296 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
1297 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
1298 currently on the disk.</p>
1299
1300 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
1301 <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>
1302 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
1303 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
1304 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
1305 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
1306 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
1307 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
1308 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
1309 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
1310 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
1311 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
1312 the broken disks.</p>
1313
1314       </div>
1315       <div class="tags">
1316
1317
1318         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1319
1320
1321       </div>
1322     </div>
1323     <div class="padding"></div>
1324
1325     <div class="entry">
1326       <div class="title">
1327         <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>
1328       </div>
1329       <div class="date">
1330          2nd August 2013
1331       </div>
1332       <div class="body">
1333         <p>It has been a while since my last update.  Since last summer, I
1334 have worked on a Norwegian
1335 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
1336 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
1337 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright
1338 law.  Yesterday, I finally broken the 90% mark, when counting the
1339 number of strings to translate.  Due to real life constraints, I have
1340 not had time to work on it since March, but when the summer broke out,
1341 I found time to work on it again.  Still lots of work left, but the
1342 first draft is nearing completion.  I created a graph to show the
1343 progress of the translation:</p>
1344
1345 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
1346
1347 <p>When the first draft is done, the translated text need to be
1348 proof read, and the remaining formatting problems with images and SVG
1349 drawings need to be fixed.  There are probably also some index entries
1350 missing that need to be added.  This can be done by comparing the
1351 index entries listed in the SiSU version of the book, or comparing the
1352 English docbook version with the paper version.  Last, the colophon
1353 page with ISBN numbers etc need to be wrapped up before the release is
1354 done.  I should also figure out how to get correct Norwegian sorting
1355 of the index pages.  All docbook tools I have tried so far (xmlto,
1356 docbook-xsl, dblatex) get the order of symbols and the special
1357 Norwegian letters ÆØÅ wrong.</p>
1358
1359 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
1360 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
1361 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
1362 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
1363 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
1364 around?  There are also some legal terms that are unfamiliar to me.
1365 If you want to help, please get in touch with me, and check out the
1366 project files currently available from
1367 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
1368
1369 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
1370 the updated
1371 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
1372 and
1373 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
1374 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
1375 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
1376 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
1377
1378       </div>
1379       <div class="tags">
1380
1381
1382         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>.
1383
1384
1385       </div>
1386     </div>
1387     <div class="padding"></div>
1388
1389     <div class="entry">
1390       <div class="title">
1391         <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>
1392       </div>
1393       <div class="date">
1394         27th July 2013
1395       </div>
1396       <div class="body">
1397         <p>The first wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
1398 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
1399
1400 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b0 released
1401 2013-07-27</strong></p>
1402
1403 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
1404 7.1+edu0~b0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
1405
1406 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
1407
1408 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
1409 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
1410 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
1411 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
1412 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
1413 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
1414 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
1415 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
1416 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
1417 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
1418 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
1419 desktop contains
1420 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
1421 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
1422 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
1423 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
1424
1425 <p>This is the fifth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
1426 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
1427 Squeeze release.</p>
1428
1429 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
1430 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
1431 release.</p>
1432
1433 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
1434
1435 <ul>
1436
1437 <li>Switched roaming workstation profiles from wicd to network-manager
1438    for network configuration, as wicd didn't work any more.</li>
1439 <li>Changed version numbers of patched gosa and libpam-mklocaluser
1440    packages to make sure our locally patched versions will be replaced
1441    by the official packages when they are released from Debian. Those
1442    installing alpha version need to reinstall or manually downgrade gosa
1443    and libpam-mklocaluser.</li>
1444 <li>Added bluetooth tools to the default desktop (bluedevil, blueman).</li>
1445 <li>Added tools for sharing the desktop on KDE (krdc, krfb).</li>
1446 <li>Added valgrind to the default installation for easier debugging of
1447    crash bugs.</li>
1448
1449 </ul>
1450
1451 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
1452
1453 <ul>
1454
1455 <li>Fixed artwork package to work with gnome, no longer break
1456    desktop=gnome installations.</li>
1457 <li>Adjusted installer to now work when forced to use a proxy with the
1458    netinst CD.</li>
1459 <li>Fixed code detecting and setting/loading hardware specific
1460    setup/firmware to work more robust out of the box.</li>
1461 <li>Adjusted Kerberos setup to detect realm and server settings at
1462    install time instead of dynamically at run time. This avoid a crash
1463    with krb5-auth-dialog on diskless workstations without a DNS name.</li>
1464 <li>Worked around misfeature in network-manager not calling the dhclient
1465    exit hooks, causing automatic proxy configuration and automatic host
1466    name setting at run time to work again.</li>
1467 <li>Fixed feature setting the default Iceweasel start page from URL
1468    fetched from LDAP, to allow schools to set the global default by
1469    updating the dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no LDAP object.</li>
1470 <li>Changed default host name on all networked machines to be unique
1471    (generated from MAC or reverse DNS) after boot.</li>
1472 <li>Adjusted partition sizes to make sure they are big enough.</li>
1473
1474 </ul>
1475
1476 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
1477
1478 <ul>
1479
1480 <li>Grub is missing the new artwork.</li>
1481 <li>KDE fail to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
1482     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
1483 <li>Chromium also fail to use the proxy.</li>
1484
1485 </ul>
1486
1487 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
1488
1489 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
1490
1491 <ul>
1492
1493 <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>
1494
1495 <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>
1496
1497 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso .</li>
1498
1499 </ul>
1500
1501 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 55d5de9765b6dccd5d9ec33cf1a07109
1502 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 996a1d9517740e4d627d100de2d12b23dd545a3f</p>
1503
1504 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
1505
1506 <ul>
1507
1508 <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>
1509 <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>
1510 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso .</li>
1511
1512 </ul>
1513
1514 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: d8f0818c51a78d357de794066f289f69
1515 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 49185ca354e8d0543240423746924f76a6cee733</p>
1516
1517
1518 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
1519
1520 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
1521
1522       </div>
1523       <div class="tags">
1524
1525
1526         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>.
1527
1528
1529       </div>
1530     </div>
1531     <div class="padding"></div>
1532
1533     <div class="entry">
1534       <div class="title">
1535         <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>
1536       </div>
1537       <div class="date">
1538         17th July 2013
1539       </div>
1540       <div class="body">
1541         <p>Today I switched to
1542 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
1543 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
1544 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
1545 <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
1546 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
1547 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
1548 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
1549 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
1550 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
1551 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
1552 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
1553 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
1554 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
1555 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
1556 station from now on.</p>
1557
1558 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
1559 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
1560 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
1561 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
1562 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
1563 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
1564 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
1565 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
1566 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
1567 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
1568 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
1569 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
1570
1571 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
1572 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
1573 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
1574 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
1575 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
1576 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
1577 parameters are tuned:</p>
1578
1579 <ul>
1580
1581 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
1582     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
1583
1584 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
1585     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
1586     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
1587
1588 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
1589     systems.</li>
1590
1591 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
1592     /etc/fstab.</li>
1593
1594 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
1595
1596 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
1597     cron.daily).</li>
1598
1599 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
1600     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
1601
1602 </ul>
1603
1604 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
1605 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
1606 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
1607 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
1608 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
1609 from getting the data on the disk (see
1610 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
1611 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
1612 right thing to do.</p>
1613
1614 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
1615 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
1616 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
1617
1618 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
1619 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
1620 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
1621 instead of during my work.</p>
1622
1623 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
1624 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
1625
1626 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
1627 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
1628 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
1629
1630 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
1631 there.</p>
1632
1633 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
1634 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
1635 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
1636 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
1637 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
1638 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
1639 back.</p>
1640
1641       </div>
1642       <div class="tags">
1643
1644
1645         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1646
1647
1648       </div>
1649     </div>
1650     <div class="padding"></div>
1651
1652     <div class="entry">
1653       <div class="title">
1654         <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>
1655       </div>
1656       <div class="date">
1657         10th July 2013
1658       </div>
1659       <div class="body">
1660         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
1661 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
1662 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
1663 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
1664 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
1665 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
1666 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
1667 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
1668
1669 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
1670 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
1671 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
1672 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
1673 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
1674 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
1675 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
1676 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
1677 lock up when I download a new
1678 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
1679 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
1680 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
1681
1682 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
1683 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
1684 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
1685 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
1686 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
1687 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
1688
1689 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
1690 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
1691 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
1692 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
1693 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
1694 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
1695
1696 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
1697 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
1698 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
1699 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
1700 exist).</p>
1701
1702       </div>
1703       <div class="tags">
1704
1705
1706         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1707
1708
1709       </div>
1710     </div>
1711     <div class="padding"></div>
1712
1713     <div class="entry">
1714       <div class="title">
1715         <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>
1716       </div>
1717       <div class="date">
1718          9th July 2013
1719       </div>
1720       <div class="body">
1721         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
1722 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
1723 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
1724 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
1725 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
1726 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
1727 Bitraf</a>.</p>
1728
1729 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
1730 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
1731 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
1732 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
1733 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
1734
1735       </div>
1736       <div class="tags">
1737
1738
1739         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>.
1740
1741
1742       </div>
1743     </div>
1744     <div class="padding"></div>
1745
1746     <div class="entry">
1747       <div class="title">
1748         <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>
1749       </div>
1750       <div class="date">
1751          5th July 2013
1752       </div>
1753       <div class="body">
1754         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
1755 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
1756 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
1757 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
1758 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
1759 ended up picking a
1760 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
1761 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
1762 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
1763 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
1764 on that below.</p>
1765
1766 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
1767 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
1768 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
1769 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
1770 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
1771 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
1772 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
1773 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
1774 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
1775
1776 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
1777 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
1778 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
1779 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
1780 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
1781 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
1782 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
1783
1784 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
1785 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
1786
1787 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
1788 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
1789 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
1790 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
1791 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
1792 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
1793 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
1794 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
1795 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
1796 kernel developers as
1797 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
1798 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
1799 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
1800 Lenovo forums, both for
1801 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
1802 2012-11-10</a> and for
1803 <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
1804 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
1805 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
1806 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
1807 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
1808 There is even a
1809 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
1810 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
1811 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
1812
1813 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
1814 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
1815 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
1816 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
1817 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
1818 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
1819 fixed. :)</p>
1820
1821       </div>
1822       <div class="tags">
1823
1824
1825         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1826
1827
1828       </div>
1829     </div>
1830     <div class="padding"></div>
1831
1832     <div class="entry">
1833       <div class="title">
1834         <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>
1835       </div>
1836       <div class="date">
1837          4th July 2013
1838       </div>
1839       <div class="body">
1840         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
1841 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
1842 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
1843 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
1844 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
1845 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
1846 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
1847 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
1848 with an expencive door stop.</p>
1849
1850 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
1851 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
1852 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
1853 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
1854 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
1855 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
1856 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
1857
1858 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
1859 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
1860 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
1861 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
1862 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
1863 new laptop now. :)</p>
1864
1865 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
1866
1867       </div>
1868       <div class="tags">
1869
1870
1871         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1872
1873
1874       </div>
1875     </div>
1876     <div class="padding"></div>
1877
1878     <div class="entry">
1879       <div class="title">
1880         <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>
1881       </div>
1882       <div class="date">
1883          3rd July 2013
1884       </div>
1885       <div class="body">
1886         <p>The fourth wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
1887 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
1888
1889 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~alpha3 released
1890 2013-07-03</strong></p>
1891
1892 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
1893 7.1+edu0~alpha3, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
1894
1895 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
1896
1897 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
1898 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
1899 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
1900 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
1901 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
1902 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
1903 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
1904 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
1905 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
1906 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
1907 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
1908 desktop contains
1909 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
1910 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
1911 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
1912 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
1913
1914 <p>This is the fourth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
1915 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
1916 Squeeze release.</p>
1917
1918 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
1919 <ul>
1920   <li>Dropped ispell dictionaries from our default installation.</li>
1921   <li>Dropped menu-xdg from the KDE desktop option, to drop the Debian
1922     submenu.  It was not included with Gnome, LXDE or Xfce, so this
1923     brings KDE in line with the others.</li>
1924   <li>Dropped xdrawchem, xjig and xsok from our default installation as
1925     they don't have a desktop menu entry and thus won't show up in the
1926     menu now that menu-xdg was removed.</li>
1927   <li>Removed the killer system to kill left behind processes on
1928     multi-user machines, as it was no longer able to understand when a
1929     X display was in use and killed the processes of the active users
1930     too.</li>
1931   <li>Dropped the golearn (from goplay) package as the debtags in wheezy
1932     are too few to make the package useful.</li>
1933 </ul>
1934 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
1935 <ul>
1936   <li>Updated artwork matching http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Joy
1937   <li>Multi-arch i386/amd64 USB stick ISO available.</li>
1938   <li>Got rid of ispell/wordlist related debconf questions that showed
1939     up for some language options.</li>
1940   <li>Switched to using http.debian.net as APT source by default.</li>
1941   <li>Fixed proxy configuration on Main Server installations.</li>
1942   <li>Changed LTSP setup to ask dpkg to use force-unsafe-io the same way
1943     d-i is doing it.</li>
1944   <li>Made sure root and user passwords were not left behind in the
1945     debconf database after installation on Main Server installations.</li>
1946   <li>Made Roaming Workstation dynamic setup more robust and added draft
1947     script setup-ad-client to hook a Roaming Workstation up to a
1948     Active Directory server instead of a Debian Edu Main Server.</li>
1949   <li>Update system to install needed firmware packages during
1950     installation, to work properly in Wheezy.</li>
1951   <li>Update system to handle hardware quirks (debian-edu-hwsetup).</li>
1952   <li>Corrected PXE installation setup to properly pass selected desktop
1953     and keymap settings to PXE installation clients.</li>
1954   <li>LTSP diskless workstations use sshfs by default, allowing them to
1955     work without adding them to DNS and NIS netgroups for NFS access.</li>
1956 </ul>
1957 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
1958 <ul>
1959   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
1960     available yet (698840).</li>
1961   <li>Artwork not enabled for all desktops.</li>
1962 </ul>
1963 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
1964
1965 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
1966 <ul>
1967   <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>
1968   <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>
1969   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso .</li>
1970 </ul>
1971
1972 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 2b161a99d2a848c376d8d04e3854e30c
1973 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 498922e9c508c0a7ee9dbe1dfe5bf830d779c3c8</p>
1974
1975 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
1976 <ul>
1977   <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>
1978   <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>
1979   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso .</li>
1980 </ul>
1981
1982 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 25e808e403a4c15dbef1d13c37d572ac
1983 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 15ecfc93eb6b4f453b7eb0bc04b6a279262d9721</p>
1984
1985 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
1986
1987 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
1988
1989       </div>
1990       <div class="tags">
1991
1992
1993         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>.
1994
1995
1996       </div>
1997     </div>
1998     <div class="padding"></div>
1999
2000     <div class="entry">
2001       <div class="title">
2002         <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>
2003       </div>
2004       <div class="date">
2005         25th June 2013
2006       </div>
2007       <div class="body">
2008         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
2009 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
2010 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
2011 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
2012 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
2013 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
2014 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
2015 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
2016 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
2017 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
2018 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
2019
2020 <p><pre>
2021 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
2022 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
2023 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
2024 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
2025 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
2026 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
2027 firmware-ipw2x00
2028 firmware-ipw2x00
2029 Preconfiguring packages ...
2030 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
2031 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
2032 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
2033 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
2034 #
2035 </pre></p>
2036
2037 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
2038 printed instead:</p>
2039
2040 <p><pre>
2041 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
2042 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
2043 #
2044 </pre></p>
2045
2046 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
2047 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
2048
2049 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
2050 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
2051 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
2052 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
2053 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
2054 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
2055 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
2056 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
2057 machine.</p>
2058
2059 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
2060 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
2061 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
2062 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
2063 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
2064 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
2065
2066       </div>
2067       <div class="tags">
2068
2069
2070         Tags: <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>.
2071
2072
2073       </div>
2074     </div>
2075     <div class="padding"></div>
2076
2077     <div class="entry">
2078       <div class="title">
2079         <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>
2080       </div>
2081       <div class="date">
2082         22nd June 2013
2083       </div>
2084       <div class="body">
2085         <p>In the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
2086 Skolelinux</a> project, we include a post-installation test suite,
2087 which check that services are running, working, and return the
2088 expected results.  It runs automatically just after the first boot on
2089 test installations (using test ISOs), but not on production
2090 installations (using non-test ISOs).  It test that the LDAP service is
2091 operating, Kerberos is responding, DNS is replying, file systems are
2092 online resizable, etc, etc.  And it check that the PXE service is
2093 configured, which is the topic of this post.</p>
2094
2095 <p>The last week I've fixed the DVD and USB stick ISOs for our Debian
2096 Edu Wheezy release.  These ISOs are supposed to be able to install a
2097 complete system without any Internet connection, but for that to
2098 happen all the needed packages need to be on them.  Thanks to our test
2099 suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
2100 cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
2101 When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
2102 using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
2103 working packages to get it working.  And the packages changed name
2104 from debian-installer-6.0-netboot-$arch to
2105 debian-installer-7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
2106 packages during installation.  Without our test suite, I suspect we
2107 would never have discovered this before release.  Now it is fixed
2108 right after we got the ISOs operational.</p>
2109
2110 <p>Another by-product of the test suite is that we can ask system
2111 administrators with problems getting Debian Edu to work, to run the
2112 test suite using <tt>/usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install</tt> and see if
2113 any errors are detected.  This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
2114 the problem.</p>
2115
2116 <p>If you want to help us help kids learn how to share and create,
2117 please join us on
2118 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
2119 irc.debian.org</a> and the
2120 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@</a> mailing
2121 list.</p>
2122
2123       </div>
2124       <div class="tags">
2125
2126
2127         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>.
2128
2129
2130       </div>
2131     </div>
2132     <div class="padding"></div>
2133
2134     <div class="entry">
2135       <div class="title">
2136         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html">Debian Edu interview: Victor Nițu</a>
2137       </div>
2138       <div class="date">
2139         17th June 2013
2140       </div>
2141       <div class="body">
2142         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
2143 Skolelinux</a> distribution have users and contributors all around the
2144 globe.  And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
2145 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">our IRC channel
2146 #debian-edu</a> and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
2147 worked.  We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
2148 help us with translations.  And today I managed to get an interview
2149 with him, to learn more about him.</p>
2150
2151 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
2152
2153 <p>I'm a 25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
2154 which is also my country of origin. Back in 2009, at a New Year's Eve
2155 party, I had a very nice <strike>beer</strike> discussion with a
2156 friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
2157 country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
2158 community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
2159 began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
2160 constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
2161 field.</p>
2162
2163 <p>A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
2164 provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
2165 activities. For the last 13 months, I have been the Technical Director
2166 of <a href="http://ceata.org/">Fundația Ceata</a>, which is a free
2167 software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
2168 the only one we have in our country.</p>
2169
2170 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
2171 project?</strong></p>
2172
2173 <p>The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
2174 even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
2175 it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
2176 educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
2177 love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
2178 technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
2179 ways to contribute.</p>
2180
2181 <p>My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
2182 configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
2183 haven't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
2184 areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
2185 software in my country is pretty low, I'll be happy to be the first
2186 one around here advocating for the project's adoption in educational
2187 environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
2188 for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
2189 from now on, time will tell what I'll be doing next, but I think I
2190 have a pretty consistent starting point.</p>
2191
2192 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
2193 Edu?</strong></p>
2194
2195 <p>Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
2196 maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
2197 took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
2198 Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
2199 time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
2200 with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
2201 out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
2202 it comes to managing a school's network, for example.</p>
2203
2204 <p>Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
2205 availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
2206 scenarios is something I can't wait to experiment "into the wild" (I
2207 only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
2208 lot more I haven't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
2209 project.</p>
2210
2211 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
2212 Edu?</strong></p>
2213
2214 <p>As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
2215 disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
2216 project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
2217 a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story.  I'd like to see
2218 Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
2219 ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
2220 lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
2221 opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project's dynamics. Not
2222 to mention it's a very fun blend to work on!</p>
2223
2224 <p>Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
2225 with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
2226 to all blends and derivatives, but it's an issue we can all work
2227 on.</p>
2228
2229 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
2230
2231 <p>I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
2232 daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
2233 am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
2234 Enlightenment project a lot!),
2235 <a href="http://www.claws-mail.org/‎">Claws Mail</a> due to its ease of
2236 use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
2237 <a href="https://launchpad.net/redshift">Redshift</a>, which helps me
2238 get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
2239 stuff in this bag, but I'll need a blog on my own for doing this!</p>
2240
2241 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
2242 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
2243
2244 <p>Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
2245 now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
2246 that:</p>
2247
2248 <ul>
2249
2250 <li>schools would like to get rid of proprietary software</li>
2251
2252 <li>students will love the openness of the system, and will want to
2253     experiment with it - maybe we need to harvest the native curiosity
2254     of teenagers more?</li>
2255
2256 <li>there is no "right one" when it comes to strategies, but it would
2257     be useful to have some success stories published somewhere, so
2258     other can get some inspiration from them (I know I'd promote
2259     them!)</li>
2260
2261 <li>more active promotion - talks, conferences, even small school
2262     lectures can do magical things if they encounter at least one
2263     person interested. Who knows who that person might be? ;-)</li>
2264
2265 </ul>
2266
2267 <p>I also see some problems in getting Skolelinux into schools; for
2268 example, in our country we have a great deal of corruption issues, so
2269 it might be hard(er) to fight against proprietary solutions. Also,
2270 people who relied on commercial software for all their lives, would be
2271 very hard to convert against their will.</p>
2272
2273       </div>
2274       <div class="tags">
2275
2276
2277         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>.
2278
2279
2280       </div>
2281     </div>
2282     <div class="padding"></div>
2283
2284     <div class="entry">
2285       <div class="title">
2286         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jonathan_Carter.html">Debian Edu interview: Jonathan Carter</a>
2287       </div>
2288       <div class="date">
2289         12th June 2013
2290       </div>
2291       <div class="body">
2292         <p>There is a certain cross-over between the
2293 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
2294 project</a> and <a href="http://www.edubuntu.org/">the Edubuntu
2295 project</a>, and for example the LTSP packages in Debian are a joint
2296 effort between the projects.  One person with a foot in both camps is
2297 Jonathan Carter, which I am now happy to present to you.</p>
2298
2299 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
2300
2301 <p>I'm a South-African free software geek who lives in Cape Town. My
2302 days vary quite a bit since I'm involved in too many things. As I'm
2303 getting older I'm learning how to focus a bit more :)</p>
2304
2305 <p>I'm also an Edubuntu contributor and I love when there are
2306 opportunities for the Edubuntu and Debian Edu projects to benefit from
2307 each other.</p>
2308
2309 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
2310 project?</strong></p>
2311
2312 <p>I've been somewhat familiar with the project before, but I think my
2313 first direct exposure to the project was when I met Petter
2314 [Reinholdtsen] and Knut [Yrvin] at the Edubuntu summit in 2005 in
2315 London. They provided great feedback that helped the bootstrapping of
2316 Edubuntu. Back then Edubuntu (and even Ubuntu) was still very new and
2317 it was great getting input from people who have been around longer. I
2318 was also still very excitable and said yes to everything and to this
2319 day I have a big todo list backlog that I'm catching up with. I think
2320 over the years the relationship between Edubuntu and Debian-Edu has
2321 been gradually improving, although I think there's a lot that we could
2322 still improve on in terms of working together on packages. I'm sure
2323 we'll get there one day.</p>
2324
2325 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
2326 Edu?</strong></p>
2327
2328 <p>Debian itself already has so many advantages. I could go on about
2329 it for pages, but in essence I love that it's a very honest project
2330 that puts its users first with no hidden agendas and also produces
2331 very high quality work.</p>
2332
2333 <p>I think the advantage of Debian Edu is that it makes many common
2334 set-up tasks simpler so that administrators can get up and running
2335 with a lot less effort and frustration. At the same time I think it
2336 helps to standardise installations in schools so that it's easier for
2337 community members and commercial suppliers to support.</p>
2338
2339 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
2340 Edu?</strong></p>
2341
2342 <p>I had to re-type this one a few times because I'm trying to
2343 separate "disadvantages" from "areas that need improvement" (which is
2344 what I originally rambled on about)</p>
2345
2346 <p>The biggest disadvantage I can think of is lack of manpower. The
2347 project could do so much more if there were more good contributors. I
2348 think some of the problems are external too. Free software and free
2349 content in education is a no-brainer but it takes some time to catch
2350 on. When you've been working with the same proprietary eco-system for
2351 years and have gotten used to it, it can be hard to adjust to some
2352 concepts in the free software world. It would be nice if there were
2353 more Debian Edu consultants across the world. I'd love to be one
2354 myself but I'm already so over-committed that it's just not possible
2355 currently.</p>
2356
2357 <p>I think the best short-term solution to that large-scale problem is
2358 for schools to be pro-active and share their experiences and grow
2359 their skills in-house. I'm often saddened to see how much money
2360 educational institutions spend on 3rd party solutions that they don't
2361 have access to after the service has ended and they could've gotten so
2362 much more value otherwise by being more self-sustainable and
2363 autonomous.</p>
2364
2365 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
2366
2367 <p>My main laptop dual-boots between Debian and Windows 7. I was
2368 Windows free for years but started dual-booting again last year for
2369 some games which help me focus and relax (Starcraft II in
2370 particular). Gaming support on Linux is improving in leaps and bounds
2371 so I suppose I'll soon be able to regain that disk space :)</p>
2372
2373 <p>Besides that I rely on Icedove, Chromium, Terminator, Byobu, irssi,
2374 git, Tomboy, KVM, VLC and LibreOffice. Recently I've been torn on
2375 which desktop environment I like and I'm taking some refuge in Xfce
2376 while I figure that out. I like tools that keep things simple. I enjoy
2377 Python and shell scripting. I went to an Arduino workshop recently and
2378 it was awesome seeing how easy and simple the IDE software was to get
2379 up and running in Debian compared to the users running Windows and OS
2380 X.</p>
2381
2382 <p>I also use mc which some people frown upon slightly. I got used to
2383 using Norton Commander in the early 90's and it stuck (I think the
2384 people who sneer at it is just jealous that they don't know how to use
2385 it :p)
2386
2387 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
2388 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
2389
2390 <p>I think trying to force it is unproductive. I also think that in
2391 many cases it's appropriate for schools to use non-free systems and I
2392 don't think that there's any particular moral or ethical problem with
2393 that.</p>
2394
2395 <p>I do think though that free software can already solve so so many
2396 problems in educational institutions and it's just a shame not taking
2397 advantage of that.</p>
2398
2399 <p>I also think that some curricula need serious review. For example,
2400 some areas of the world rely heavily on very specific versions of MS
2401 Office, teaching students to parrot menu items instead of learning the
2402 general concepts. I think that's very unproductive because firstly, MS
2403 Office's interface changes drastically every few years and on top of
2404 that it also locks in a generation to a product that might not be the
2405 best solution for them.</p>
2406
2407 <p>To answer your question, I believe that the right strategy is to
2408 educate and inform, giving someone the information they require to
2409 make a decision that would work for them.</p>
2410
2411       </div>
2412       <div class="tags">
2413
2414
2415         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>.
2416
2417
2418       </div>
2419     </div>
2420     <div class="padding"></div>
2421
2422     <div class="entry">
2423       <div class="title">
2424         <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>
2425       </div>
2426       <div class="date">
2427         11th June 2013
2428       </div>
2429       <div class="body">
2430         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
2431 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
2432 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
2433 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
2434 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
2435 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
2436 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
2437 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
2438 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
2439 i915 driver used by the
2440 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
2441 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
2442
2443 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
2444 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
2445 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
2446 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
2447 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
2448
2449 <pre>
2450 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
2451 update-initramfs -u -k all
2452 </pre>
2453
2454 <p>Since March 2012 there is
2455 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
2456 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
2457 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
2458 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
2459 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
2460 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
2461 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
2462 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
2463 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
2464 number.</p>
2465
2466 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
2467 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
2468
2469 <p><pre>
2470 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
2471     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
2472     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
2473  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
2474  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
2475     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
2476  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
2477     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
2478  Latency: 0
2479  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
2480  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
2481  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
2482  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
2483  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
2484  Capabilities: <access denied>
2485  Kernel driver in use: i915
2486 </pre></p>
2487
2488 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
2489
2490 <p><pre>
2491 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
2492        ...
2493         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
2494         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
2495        ...
2496 }
2497 </pre></p>
2498
2499 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
2500 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
2501 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
2502 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
2503 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
2504 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
2505 yet shown up in
2506 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
2507 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
2508 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
2509 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
2510 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
2511 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
2512
2513 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
2514 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
2515 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
2516 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
2517 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
2518 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
2519 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
2520 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
2521 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
2522 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
2523 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
2524 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
2525
2526 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
2527 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
2528 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
2529 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
2530 backlight.</p>
2531
2532       </div>
2533       <div class="tags">
2534
2535
2536         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2537
2538
2539       </div>
2540     </div>
2541     <div class="padding"></div>
2542
2543     <div class="entry">
2544       <div class="title">
2545         <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>
2546       </div>
2547       <div class="date">
2548         10th June 2013
2549       </div>
2550       <div class="body">
2551         <p>The third wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
2552 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
2553
2554 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha2 released
2555 2013-06-10</strong></p>
2556
2557 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
2558 alpha2, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
2559
2560 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
2561
2562 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
2563 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
2564 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
2565 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
2566 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
2567 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
2568 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
2569 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
2570 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
2571 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
2572 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
2573 desktop contains
2574 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
2575 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
2576 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
2577 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
2578
2579 <p>This is the third test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
2580 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
2581 Squeeze release.</p>
2582
2583 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
2584
2585 <ul>
2586
2587 <li>Iceweasel was updated from 10 to 17. (DSA 2699-1)
2588 <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).
2589 <li>Switched xrdp on thin client servers to use tightvncserver instead of xvnc4.
2590 <li>Now install software oscilloscope xoscope by default.
2591 <li>Now install music tools gtick, lingot and pianobooster by default.
2592
2593 </ul>
2594
2595 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
2596
2597 <ul>
2598
2599 <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.
2600 <li>Updated translation of the installation.
2601 <li>New Romanian translation.
2602 <li>Fix security problem causing root and first user password to no longer show up in /var/cache/debconf/templates.dat.
2603 <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).
2604 <li>Made roaming workstation setup more robust in non-Debian Edu environments.
2605 <li>New script debian-edu-bless to transform a Debian installation to a Debian Edu profile.
2606 <li>Adjust Iceweasel setup to improve performance when $HOME is on NFS.
2607 <li>More testsuite tests.
2608 <li>Make automatic proxy configuration more robust.
2609 <li>Adjust GOsa² GUI configuration.
2610
2611 <li>Update thin client and diskless workstation setup to work with
2612 LTSP in Wheezy.</li>
2613
2614 <li>Diskless workstations now run out of the box -- no need to set
2615 them up with GOsa².</li>
2616
2617 <li>Update IMAP server setup. </li>
2618
2619 <li>Fix login into Skolelinux Backup Tool (Closed in
2620 slbackup-php/0.4.4-1: #700257: slbackup-php: Fails to submit correctly
2621 entered password). </li>
2622
2623 </ul>
2624
2625 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
2626
2627 <ul>
2628
2629 <li>DVD binary and source images are not yet ready.</li>
2630
2631 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
2632 available yet (Open in gosa/2.7.4-4: #698840: gosa-plugin-ldapmanager:
2633 missing import feature).</li>
2634
2635 <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others). </li>
2636
2637 <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons (Closed: #502192: menu-xdg: invents
2638 own icon names instead of using existing). This will remain
2639 unfixed.</li>
2640
2641 </ul>
2642
2643 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
2644
2645 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
2646
2647 <ul>
2648
2649 <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>
2650
2651 <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>
2652
2653 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso .</li>
2654
2655 </ul>
2656
2657 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 27bbcace407743382f3c42c08dbe8178
2658 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: e35f7d7908566cd3075375b3721fa10ee420d419</p>
2659
2660 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
2661
2662 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
2663
2664       </div>
2665       <div class="tags">
2666
2667
2668         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>.
2669
2670
2671       </div>
2672     </div>
2673     <div class="padding"></div>
2674
2675     <div class="entry">
2676       <div class="title">
2677         <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>
2678       </div>
2679       <div class="date">
2680          5th June 2013
2681       </div>
2682       <div class="body">
2683         <p>Here is a call for help from the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project.
2684 We have two problems blocking the release of the Wheezy version we
2685 hope to get released soon.  The two problems require some with PHP
2686 skills, and we seem to lack anyone with both time and PHP skills in
2687 the project:
2688
2689 <ol>
2690
2691 <li>It is impossible to log into the slbackup web interface
2692   (slbackup-php) using the root user and password.  This is
2693   <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">BTS report #700257</a>.
2694   This used to work, but stopped working some time since Squeeze.
2695   Perhaps some obsolete PHP feature was used?</li>
2696
2697 <li>It is not possible to "mass import" user lists in Gosa, neither
2698   using ldif nor using CSV files.  The feature was disabled after a
2699   major rewrite of Gosa, and need to be ported to the new system.
2700   This is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">BTS report
2701   #698840</a>.</li>
2702
2703 </ol>
2704
2705 <p>If you can help us, please join us on IRC
2706 (<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
2707 irc.debian.org</a>) and provide patches via the BTS.</p>
2708
2709       </div>
2710       <div class="tags">
2711
2712
2713         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>.
2714
2715
2716       </div>
2717     </div>
2718     <div class="padding"></div>
2719
2720     <div class="entry">
2721       <div class="title">
2722         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html">Debian Edu interview: Cédric Boutillier</a>
2723       </div>
2724       <div class="date">
2725          4th June 2013
2726       </div>
2727       <div class="body">
2728         <p>It has been a while since my last English
2729 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
2730 interview last November.  But the developers and translators are still
2731 pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this
2732 time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators
2733 in the project, Cédric Boutillier.</p>
2734
2735 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
2736
2737 <p>I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
2738 professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
2739 mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
2740 probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.</p>
2741
2742 <p>I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
2743 and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
2744 packaging, publicity and translation.</p>
2745
2746 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
2747 project?</strong></p>
2748
2749 <p>I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
2750 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Manuals">the
2751 Debian Edu manual</a> for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
2752 then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
2753 manual.
2754
2755 <p>I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
2756 virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
2757 shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
2758 how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.</p>
2759
2760 <p>What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
2761 ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
2762 by <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa²</a>.  What pleased
2763 me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
2764 there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages,
2765 to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
2766 artistic skills with music (<a href="http://ardour.org/">Ardour</a>,
2767 <a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a>) and
2768 movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
2769 <a href="http://linuxstopmotion.sourceforge.net/">Stopmotion</a>).</p>
2770
2771 <p>I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
2772 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>.
2773 Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this
2774 beautiful project.</p>
2775
2776 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
2777 Edu?</strong></p>
2778
2779 <p>For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
2780 community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
2781 fact that it provides a solution ready to use.</p>
2782
2783 <p>I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
2784 distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
2785 of educational free software.</p>
2786
2787 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
2788 Edu?</strong></p>
2789
2790 <p>Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
2791 project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
2792 not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
2793 solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
2794 is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.</p>
2795
2796 <p>One can find support from a company by looking at
2797 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Help/ProfessionalHelp">the
2798 wiki dokumentation</a>, where some countries already have a number of
2799 companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
2800 Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
2801 for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
2802 consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
2803 support for Debian Edu as well.</p>
2804
2805 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
2806
2807 <p>I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
2808 most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
2809 scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice.  I am
2810 also using the mathematical software
2811 <a href="http://www.scilab.org/en/scilab/about‎">Scilab</a> and
2812 <a href="http://www.sagemath.org/index.html‎">Sage</a> (built from
2813 source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).
2814
2815 <p><strong>Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
2816 using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
2817 statistics?</strong></p>
2818
2819 <p>I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our
2820 university, we use both <a href="http://www.r-project.org/‎">R</a> and
2821 Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
2822 geometry, there are nice programs:</p>
2823
2824 <ul>
2825
2826 <li><a href="http://www.drgeo.eu/">drgeo</a> and
2827 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/kig‎">kig</a> to do
2828 constructions in planar geometry
2829
2830 <li><a href="http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/software/download/kali.html">kali</a>
2831 to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze
2832 groups), although the interface looks a bit old.</li>
2833
2834 </ul>
2835
2836 <p>I like also
2837 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/cantor">cantor</a>, which
2838 provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage,
2839 <a href="http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Octave‎">Octave</a>, etc...</p>
2840
2841 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
2842 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
2843
2844 <p>My suggestions would be to</p>
2845
2846 <ul>
2847
2848 <li>advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.</li>
2849
2850 <li>communicate about the quality of free software projects, using
2851     well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and
2852     OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.</li>
2853
2854 <li>advertise the living and strong community around the project.</li>
2855
2856 <li>show that it is not more difficult to use than any other
2857     system.</li>
2858
2859 </ul>
2860
2861       </div>
2862       <div class="tags">
2863
2864
2865         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>.
2866
2867
2868       </div>
2869     </div>
2870     <div class="padding"></div>
2871
2872     <div class="entry">
2873       <div class="title">
2874         <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>
2875       </div>
2876       <div class="date">
2877          1st June 2013
2878       </div>
2879       <div class="body">
2880         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
2881 Skolelinux</a>, there are quite a lot of educational software.
2882 Created to help teachers teach, and pupils learn.  We have tried to
2883 tag them all using debtags use::learning and role::program, and using
2884 the debtags I was happy to be able to create a collage of the
2885 educational software packages installed by default, sorted by the
2886 debtag field.  Here it is.  Click on a image to learn more about the
2887 program.</p>
2888
2889 <!-- 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 -->
2890
2891 <p><strong>field::arts</strong></p>
2892 <p>
2893 <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>
2894 <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>
2895 <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>
2896 <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>
2897 <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>
2898 <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>
2899 <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>
2900 <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>
2901 <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>
2902 <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>
2903 <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>
2904 <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>
2905 <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>
2906 <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>
2907 </p>
2908
2909 <p><strong>field::astronomy</strong></p>
2910 <p>
2911 <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>
2912 <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>
2913 <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>
2914 <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>
2915 <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>
2916 <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>
2917 </p>
2918
2919 <p><strong>field::biology:structural</strong></p>
2920 <p>
2921 <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>
2922 </p>
2923
2924 <p><strong>field::chemistry</strong></p>
2925 <p>
2926 <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>
2927 <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>
2928 <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>
2929 <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>
2930 <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>
2931 <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>
2932 <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>
2933 <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>
2934 <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>
2935 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=viewmol'>[viewmol]</a>
2936 <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>
2937 </p>
2938
2939 <p><strong>field::electronics</strong></p>
2940 <p>
2941 <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>
2942 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gpsim'>[gpsim]</a>
2943 </p>
2944
2945 <p><strong>field::geography</strong></p>
2946 <p>
2947 <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>
2948 <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>
2949 <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>
2950 </p>
2951
2952 <p><strong>field::linguistics</strong></p>
2953 <p>
2954 <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>
2955 <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>
2956 <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>
2957 <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>
2958 <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>
2959 </p>
2960
2961 <p><strong>field::mathematics</strong></p>
2962 <p>
2963 <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>
2964 <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>
2965 <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>
2966 <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>
2967 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=geomview'>[geomview]</a>
2968 <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>
2969 <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>
2970 <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>
2971 <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>
2972 <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>
2973 <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>
2974 <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>
2975 <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>
2976 <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>
2977 <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>
2978 <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>
2979 <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>
2980 </p>
2981
2982 <p><strong>field::physics</strong></p>
2983 <p>
2984 <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>
2985 <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>
2986 </p>
2987
2988 <p><strong>field::TODO</strong></p>
2989 <p>
2990 <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>
2991 <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>
2992 <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>
2993 <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>
2994 <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>
2995 <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>
2996 <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>
2997 <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>
2998 <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>
2999 <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>
3000 </p>
3001
3002 <p>In total, 61 applications.  3 of them lacked screen shots on
3003 <a href="http://screenshot.debian.net">screenshot.debian.net</a>.  If
3004 you know of some packages we should install by default, please let us
3005 know on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu
3006 on irc.debian.org</a>, or our
3007 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">mailing list
3008 debian-edu@</a>.</p>
3009
3010       </div>
3011       <div class="tags">
3012
3013
3014         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>.
3015
3016
3017       </div>
3018     </div>
3019     <div class="padding"></div>
3020
3021     <div class="entry">
3022       <div class="title">
3023         <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>
3024       </div>
3025       <div class="date">
3026         27th May 2013
3027       </div>
3028       <div class="body">
3029         <p>Two days ago, I asked
3030 <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
3031 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
3032 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
3033 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
3034 and Windows 8.</p>
3035
3036 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
3037 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
3038 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
3039 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
3040 enough to tell.</p>
3041
3042 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
3043 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
3044 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
3045 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
3046 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
3047 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
3048 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
3049 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
3050 to follow.</p>
3051
3052 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
3053 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
3054 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
3055 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
3056 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
3057 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
3058 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
3059 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
3060
3061 <p>I've updated the
3062 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
3063 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
3064 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
3065 machine.</p>
3066
3067 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
3068 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
3069
3070       </div>
3071       <div class="tags">
3072
3073
3074         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3075
3076
3077       </div>
3078     </div>
3079     <div class="padding"></div>
3080
3081     <div class="entry">
3082       <div class="title">
3083         <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>
3084       </div>
3085       <div class="date">
3086         25th May 2013
3087       </div>
3088       <div class="body">
3089         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
3090 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
3091 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
3092 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
3093 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
3094 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
3095
3096 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
3097 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
3098 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
3099 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
3100 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
3101 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
3102 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
3103 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
3104 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
3105 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
3106
3107 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
3108 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
3109 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
3110 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
3111 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
3112 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
3113
3114 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
3115 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
3116 on new Laptops?</p>
3117
3118       </div>
3119       <div class="tags">
3120
3121
3122         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3123
3124
3125       </div>
3126     </div>
3127     <div class="padding"></div>
3128
3129     <div class="entry">
3130       <div class="title">
3131         <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>
3132       </div>
3133       <div class="date">
3134         17th May 2013
3135       </div>
3136       <div class="body">
3137         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
3138 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
3139 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
3140 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
3141 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
3142 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
3143 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
3144 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
3145 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
3146 donate some money</a>.
3147
3148 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
3149 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
3150 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
3151 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
3152 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
3153
3154 <p>The script,
3155 <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/>
3156 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
3157 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
3158 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
3159
3160 <ol>
3161
3162 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
3163 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
3164 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
3165     our configuration.</li>
3166 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
3167     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
3168     according to the profile specified in the config above,
3169     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
3170 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
3171     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
3172 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
3173
3174 </ol>
3175
3176 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
3177 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
3178 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
3179 the needed packages.</p>
3180
3181 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
3182 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
3183 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
3184 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
3185 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
3186 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
3187
3188 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
3189 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
3190 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
3191
3192 <p><pre>
3193 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
3194 DESKTOP="lxde"
3195 </pre></p>
3196
3197 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
3198 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
3199 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
3200 boot.</p>
3201
3202       </div>
3203       <div class="tags">
3204
3205
3206         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>.
3207
3208
3209       </div>
3210     </div>
3211     <div class="padding"></div>
3212
3213     <div class="entry">
3214       <div class="title">
3215         <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>
3216       </div>
3217       <div class="date">
3218         14th May 2013
3219       </div>
3220       <div class="body">
3221         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
3222 project</a> is making great progress and made its second Wheezy based
3223 release today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
3224
3225 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha1 released
3226 2013-05-14</strong></p>
3227
3228 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
3229 alpha1, based on <a href="http://www.debian.org">Debian</a> with
3230 codename "Wheezy".</p>
3231
3232 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
3233
3234 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
3235 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
3236 configured school network. Immediatly after installation a school
3237 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
3238 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
3239 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
3240 initial installation of the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all
3241 other machines can be installed via the network.</p>
3242
3243 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
3244 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
3245 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
3246
3247 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
3248 <ul>
3249   <li>Install freemind (0.9.0) by default, and stop installing vym by
3250     default.</li>
3251   <li>Install chromium (26.0.1410.43) by default.</li>
3252   <li>Install goplay (0.5-1.1) to make golearn available by default.</li>
3253   <li>Updated support for Japanese input methods, now based on
3254     ibus-anthy.</li>
3255 </ul>
3256
3257 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
3258 <ul>
3259
3260   <li>Switched default file system from ext3 to ext4 for speed and
3261     reliability improvements.</li>
3262   <li>Got rid of unwanted winbind daemon and PAM setup activated because
3263     of <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706434">706434</a>.</li>
3264   <li>Extended and improved the testsuite tests to detect more possible
3265     problems.</li>
3266   <li>Corrected proxy handling to not set http_proxy to a bogus
3267     direct:// URL.</li>
3268   <li>Corrected proxy setup for diskless workstations.</li>
3269   <li>Corrected PXE setup to use our updated udebs during installation.</li>
3270   <li>Made installation handling of low entropy level more robust.</li>
3271   <li>Create larger partitions for Roaming workstations and Thin client
3272     servers, to make room for all the software installed.</li>
3273   <li>Fix bug in Roaming workstation PAM setup, making it impossible to
3274     log in (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706753">706753</a>).</li>
3275 </ul>
3276
3277 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
3278 <ul>
3279
3280   <li>IP resolution for the local hostname give useless IPv6 address
3281     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/705900">705900</a>).  Only install
3282     libnss-myhostname on roaming workstations until it is fixed.</li>
3283   <li>DVD images are not yet ready.</li>
3284   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
3285     available yet (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">698840</a>).</li>
3286   <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others).</li>
3287   <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons.</li>
3288   <li>LXDE menu lacks entry for changing GOsa password
3289     (website). Installing gosa-desktop will be an option.</li>
3290   <li>Backup configuration via web interface is impossible due to
3291     password submission problem
3292     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">700257</a>).</li>
3293
3294 </ul>
3295
3296 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
3297
3298 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
3299 <ul>
3300
3301   <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>
3302   <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>
3303   <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>
3304
3305 </ul>
3306
3307 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 685ed76c1aa8e44b12d3fde21faf450b</p>
3308
3309 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 6c874de157024da13e115bab29c068080a11ec4c</p>
3310
3311 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
3312
3313 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
3314
3315       </div>
3316       <div class="tags">
3317
3318
3319         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>.
3320
3321
3322       </div>
3323     </div>
3324     <div class="padding"></div>
3325
3326     <div class="entry">
3327       <div class="title">
3328         <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>
3329       </div>
3330       <div class="date">
3331         11th May 2013
3332       </div>
3333       <div class="body">
3334         <P>In January,
3335 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
3336 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
3337 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
3338 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
3339 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
3340 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
3341 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
3342 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
3343 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
3344 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
3345 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
3346 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
3347
3348 <p><table>
3349 <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>
3350 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
3351 <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>
3352 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
3353 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
3354 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
3355 <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>
3356 <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>
3357 <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>
3358 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
3359 </table></p>
3360
3361 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
3362 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
3363 available in experimental.</p>
3364
3365 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
3366 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
3367 for LEGO designers.</p>
3368
3369       </div>
3370       <div class="tags">
3371
3372
3373         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
3374
3375
3376       </div>
3377     </div>
3378     <div class="padding"></div>
3379
3380     <div class="entry">
3381       <div class="title">
3382         <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>
3383       </div>
3384       <div class="date">
3385          5th May 2013
3386       </div>
3387       <div class="body">
3388         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
3389 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
3390 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
3391 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
3392 soon.</p>
3393
3394 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
3395 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
3396 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
3397 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
3398 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
3399 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
3400 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
3401 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
3402 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
3403 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
3404 Edu.</a>
3405
3406 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
3407 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
3408 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
3409 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
3410 follow.<p>
3411
3412       </div>
3413       <div class="tags">
3414
3415
3416         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>.
3417
3418
3419       </div>
3420     </div>
3421     <div class="padding"></div>
3422
3423     <div class="entry">
3424       <div class="title">
3425         <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>
3426       </div>
3427       <div class="date">
3428         26th April 2013
3429       </div>
3430       <div class="body">
3431         <p>The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is still going strong and made
3432 its first Wheezy based release today.  This is the release
3433 announcement:</p>
3434
3435 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu ~7.0.0 alpha0 released
3436 2013-04-26</strong></p>
3437
3438 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux ~7.0.0
3439 edu alpha0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
3440
3441 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
3442
3443 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
3444 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
3445 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
3446 network. Immediatly after installation a school server running all
3447 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
3448 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
3449 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
3450 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
3451 installed via the network.</p>
3452
3453 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
3454 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
3455 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
3456
3457 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
3458
3459 <ul>
3460 <li>Everything which is new in Debian Wheezy, eg:
3461   <ul>
3462      <li>Linux kernel 3.2.x</li>
3463      <li>Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.8.4, GNOME 3.4, and LXDE 4
3464          (KDE is installed by default; to choose GNOME or LXDE: see
3465          manual.)</li>
3466      <li>Web browser Iceweasel 10 ESR</li>
3467      <li>LibreOffice 3.5.4</li>
3468      <li>LTSP 5.4.2</li>
3469      <li>GOsa 2.7.4</li>
3470      <li>CUPS print system 1.5.3</li>
3471      <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 12.01</li>
3472      <li>Music creator Rosegarden 12.04</li>
3473      <li>Image editor Gimp 2.8.2</li>
3474      <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.1</li>
3475      <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.11.3</li>
3476      <li>Scratch visual programming environment 1.4.0.6</li>
3477      <li>New version of debian-installer from Debian Wheezy, see
3478          <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual">installation
3479          manual</a> for more details.</li>
3480      <li>Debian Wheezy includes about 37000 packages available for
3481          installation.</li>
3482      <li>More information about Debian Wheezy 7.0 is provided in the
3483          <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>
3484   </ul></li>
3485 </ul>
3486
3487 <p><strong>Documentation</strong></p>
3488 <ul>
3489 <li>The (<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy">English</a>) Debian Edu Wheezy Manual is fully translated to
3490     German, French, Italian and Danish. Partly translated versions exist
3491     for Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.</li>
3492 </ul>
3493
3494 <p><Strong>LDAP related changes</strong></p>
3495 <ul>
3496 <li>Slight changes to some objects and acls to have more types to
3497     choose from when adding systems in GOsa. Now systems can be of type
3498     server, workstation, printer, terminal or netdevice.</li>
3499 </ul>
3500
3501 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
3502 <ul>
3503 <li>LTSP clients start as diskless workstation / thin client can be
3504     configured via command line argument -- or individually adding an
3505     entry in lts.conf or LDAP.<li>
3506 <li>GOsa gui: Now some options that seemed to be available, but are non
3507     functional, are greyed out (or are not clickable). Some tabs are
3508     completely hidden to the end user, others even to the GOsa admin.</li>
3509 </ul>
3510
3511 <p><strong>Regressions</strong></p>
3512 <ul>
3513 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv) available
3514     yet.</li>
3515 </ul>
3516
3517 <p><strong>No updated artwork</strong></p>
3518
3519 <ul>
3520 <li>Updated artwork which is visible during installation, in the login
3521     screen and as desktop wallpaper is still missing or the same as we
3522     had for our Squeeze based release.</li>
3523 </ul>
3524
3525 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
3526
3527 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
3528 <ul>
3529 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
3530 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
3531 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</li>
3532 </ul>
3533
3534 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: c5e773ddafdaa4f48c409c682f598b6c</p>
3535
3536 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 25934fabb9b7d20235499a0a51f08ce6c54215f2</p>
3537
3538 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
3539
3540 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
3541
3542       </div>
3543       <div class="tags">
3544
3545
3546         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>.
3547
3548
3549       </div>
3550     </div>
3551     <div class="padding"></div>
3552
3553     <div class="entry">
3554       <div class="title">
3555         <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>
3556       </div>
3557       <div class="date">
3558         16th April 2013
3559       </div>
3560       <div class="body">
3561         <p>This years first <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux /
3562 Debian Edu</a> developer gathering take place the coming weekend in Trondheim.
3563 Details about the gathering can be found
3564 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2013-04-19-21-Trondheim">on
3565 the FRiSK wiki</a>.  The dates are 19-21th of April 2013, and online
3566 participation for those unable to make it in person is very welcome,
3567 and I plan to participate online myself as I could not leave Oslo this
3568 weekend.</p>
3569
3570 <p>The focus of the gathering is to work on the web pages and project
3571 infrastructure, and to continue the work on the Wheezy based Debian
3572 Edu release.</p>
3573
3574 <p>See you on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu on irc.debian.org,</a> then?</p>
3575
3576       </div>
3577       <div class="tags">
3578
3579
3580         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>.
3581
3582
3583       </div>
3584     </div>
3585     <div class="padding"></div>
3586
3587     <div class="entry">
3588       <div class="title">
3589         <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>
3590       </div>
3591       <div class="date">
3592          3rd April 2013
3593       </div>
3594       <div class="body">
3595         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
3596 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
3597 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
3598 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
3599
3600 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
3601 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
3602 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
3603 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
3604 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
3605 BTS. :)</p>
3606
3607       </div>
3608       <div class="tags">
3609
3610
3611         Tags: <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>.
3612
3613
3614       </div>
3615     </div>
3616     <div class="padding"></div>
3617
3618     <div class="entry">
3619       <div class="title">
3620         <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>
3621       </div>
3622       <div class="date">
3623         26th March 2013
3624       </div>
3625       <div class="body">
3626         <p>Would you like to help the environment and save money at the same
3627 time, without much sacrifice?  A small step could be to change the
3628 font you use when printing.</p>
3629
3630 <p>Three years ago,
3631 <a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/04/last-year-printer-comparison-website/">Ars
3632 Technica</a> reported how the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
3633 changed their default front from
3634 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial">Arial</a> to
3635 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Gothic">Century
3636 Gothic</a> to save money.  The Century Gothic font uses 30% less toner
3637 than Arial to print the same text.  In other word, you could cut your
3638 toner costs by 30% (or actually, increase your toner supply life time
3639 by more than 30%), by simply changing the default font used in your
3640 prints.</p>
3641
3642 <p>But it is not quite obvious how much one will save by switching.
3643 The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay said it used $100,000 per year
3644 on ink and toner cartridges, according to
3645 <a href="http://www.twincities.com/ci_14833097">a report from
3646 TwinCities.com</a>, and expected to save between $5,000 and $10,000
3647 per year by asking staff and students to use a different font.  Not
3648 all PDFs and documents are created internally, and those from external
3649 sources will most likely still use a different font.  Also, the
3650 Century Gothic font is slightly wider than Arial, and thus might use
3651 more sheets of paper to print the same text, so the total saving
3652 depend on the documents printed.</p>
3653
3654 <p>But it is definitely something to consider, if you want to reduce
3655 the amount of trash, decrease the amount of toner used in the world,
3656 and save some money in the process.</p>
3657
3658 <p>Update 2013-04-10: If you want to know how much ink/toner could be
3659 saved when switching between fonts, Inkfarm got a
3660 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/What-the-Font">service to calculate the
3661 difference between font pairs</a>.  They also
3662 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/Recommended-Ink-Saving-Fonts---">recommend
3663 which fonts to use</a> to save ink.  Check it out. :) While updating
3664 this blog post, I also came across a blog post from InkCloners,
3665 <a href="http://inkcloners.com/blog/ink-cartridges/change-fonts-to-save-ink-costs/">listing
3666 the fonts they recommend</a>, with Centory Gothic at the top.</p>
3667
3668       </div>
3669       <div class="tags">
3670
3671
3672         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3673
3674
3675       </div>
3676     </div>
3677     <div class="padding"></div>
3678
3679     <div class="entry">
3680       <div class="title">
3681         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_a_short_story_using_docbook_for_PDF__HTML_and_EPUB.html">Typesetting a short story using docbook for PDF, HTML and EPUB</a>
3682       </div>
3683       <div class="date">
3684         24th March 2013
3685       </div>
3686       <div class="body">
3687         <p>A few days ago, during a discussion in
3688 <a href="http://www.efn.no/">EFN</a> about interesting books to read
3689 about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
3690 the 1968 short story Kodémus by
3691 <a href="http://web2.gyldendal.no/toraage/">Tore Åge Bringsværd</a>
3692 came up.  The text was only available in old paper books, and thus not
3693 easily available for current and future generations.  Some of the
3694 people participating in the discussion contacted the author, and
3695 reported back 2013-03-19 that the author was OK with releasing the
3696 short story using a <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org/">Creative
3697 Commons</a> license.  The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
3698 were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.</p>
3699
3700 <p>As I already had some experience formatting text in my project to
3701 provide a Norwegian version of the Free Culture book by Lawrence
3702 Lessig, I chipped in and set up a
3703 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">DocBook</a> processing framework to
3704 generate PDF, HTML and EPUB version of the short story.  The tools to
3705 transform DocBook to different formats are already in my Linux
3706 distribution of choice, <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>, so
3707 all I had to do was to use the
3708 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a>,
3709 <a href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/epub/README">dbtoepub</a>
3710 and <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/xmlto/">xmlto</a> tools to do the
3711 conversion.  After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
3712 xsltproc/fop (aka
3713 <a href="http://wiki.docbook.org/DocBookXslStylesheets">docbook-xsl</a>),
3714 to get the copyright information to show up in the PDF and to get a
3715 nicer &lt;variablelist&gt; typesetting, but that is just a minor
3716 technical detail.</p>
3717
3718 <p>There were a few challenges, of course.  We want to typeset the
3719 short story to look like the original, and that require fairly good
3720 control over the layout.  The original short story have three
3721 parts/scenes separated by a single horizontally centred star (*), and
3722 the paragraphs do not contain only flowing text, but dialogs and text
3723 that started on a new line in the middle of the paragraph.</p>
3724
3725 <p>I initially solved the first challenge by using a paragraph with a
3726 single star in it, ie &lt;para&gt;*&lt;/para&gt;, but it made sure a
3727 placeholder indicated where the scene shifted.  This did not look too
3728 good without the centring.  The next approach was to create a new
3729 preprocessor directive &lt;?newscene?&gt;, mapping to "&lt;hr/&gt;"
3730 for HTML and "&lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;&lt;fo:leader
3731 leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;&lt;/fo:block&gt;"
3732 for FO/PDF output (did not try to implement this in dblatex, as we had
3733 switched at this time).  The HTML XSL file looked like this:</p>
3734
3735 <p><blockquote><pre>
3736 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
3737 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
3738   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
3739     &lt;hr/&gt;
3740   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
3741 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
3742 </pre></blockquote></p>
3743
3744 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
3745
3746 <p><blockquote><pre>
3747 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
3748 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
3749   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
3750     &lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;
3751       &lt;fo:leader leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;
3752     &lt;/fo:block&gt;
3753   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
3754 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
3755 </pre></blockquote></p>
3756
3757 <p>Finally, I came across the &lt;bridgehead&gt; tag, which seem to be
3758 a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced &lt;?newscene?&gt;
3759 with &lt;bridgehead&gt;*&lt;/bridgehead&gt;.  It isn't centred, but we
3760 can fix it with some XSL rule if the current visual layout isn't
3761 enough.</p>
3762
3763 <p>I did not find a good DocBook compliant way to solve the
3764 linebreak/paragraph challenge, so I ended up creating a new processor
3765 directive &lt;?linebreak?&gt;, mapping to &lt;br/&gt; in HTML, and
3766 &lt;fo:block/&gt; in FO/PDF.  I suspect there are better ways to do
3767 this, and welcome ideas and patches on github.  The HTML XSL file now
3768 look like this:</p>
3769
3770 <p><blockquote><pre>
3771 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
3772 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
3773   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
3774     &lt;br/&gt;
3775   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
3776 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
3777 </pre></blockquote></p>
3778
3779 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
3780
3781 <p><blockquote><pre>
3782 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
3783 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'
3784   xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"&gt;
3785   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
3786     &lt;fo:block/&gt;
3787   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
3788 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
3789 </pre></blockquote></p>
3790
3791 <p>One unsolved challenge is our wish to expose different ISBN numbers
3792 per publication format, while keeping all of them in some conditional
3793 structure in the DocBook source.  No idea how to do this, so we ended
3794 up listing all the ISBN numbers next to their format in the colophon
3795 page.</p>
3796
3797 <p>If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
3798 <a href="https://github.com/sickel/kodemus">source repository at
3799 github</a>
3800 (<a href="https://github.com/EFN/kodemus">future/new/official
3801 repository</a>).  We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
3802 days.</p>
3803
3804       </div>
3805       <div class="tags">
3806
3807
3808         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>.
3809
3810
3811       </div>
3812     </div>
3813     <div class="padding"></div>
3814
3815     <div class="entry">
3816       <div class="title">
3817         <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>
3818       </div>
3819       <div class="date">
3820         17th March 2013
3821       </div>
3822       <div class="body">
3823         <p>Via
3824 <a href="https://twitter.com/pcwizz/status/313044373262716930">twitter</a>
3825 I just discovered that <a href="http://pcwizz.net/">Pcwizz</a> have
3826 done a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPzTZ61Pcuc">video
3827 review</a> on Youtube of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
3828 / Debian Edu</a> version 6.  He installed the standalone profile and
3829 the video show a walk-through of of the menu content, demonstration of
3830 a few programs and his view of our distribution.</p>
3831
3832 <p>There is also some really nice quotes (transcribed by me, might
3833 have heard wrong).  While looking thought the Graphics menu:</p>
3834
3835 <blockquote>
3836 "Basically everything you ever need in a school environment."
3837 </blockquote>
3838
3839 <p>And as a general evaluation of the entire distribution:</p>
3840
3841 <blockquote>
3842 "So, yeah, a bit bloated.  It kept all the Debian stuff in there, just
3843 to keep it nice and GNU.  So, I do not want to go on about it, but
3844 lets give it 7 out of 10.  I am not going to use it.  That is because
3845 I am not deploying a school network.  There may be some mythical
3846 feature to help you deploy Skolelinux on a school network."
3847 </blockquote>
3848
3849 <p>To bad he did not test the server profile, and discovered the PXE
3850 installation option.  It make it possible to install only the main
3851 server from CD, and the rest of the machines via the net, and might be
3852 considered the mythical feature he talk about. :)</p>
3853
3854 <p>While looking through the menus, there is also this funny comment
3855 about the part of the K menu generated from the Debian menu subsystem:
3856
3857 <blockquote>
3858 "[The K menu] have a special Debian section for software that no-one
3859 is going to look at, because it contain lots of junky stuff that you
3860 actually don't need in the education distribution, but have just been
3861 included because it isn't stripped out for some reason."
3862 </blockquote>
3863
3864 <p>I guess it is yet another argument for merging the Debian menu and
3865 Gnome/KDE desktop menu entries into
3866 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/DebianMenuUsingDesktopEntries">one
3867 consistent menu system</a> instead of two incomplete and partly
3868 inconsistent menu systems.</p>
3869
3870 <p>The entire video is available below for those accepting iframe
3871 embedding:</p>
3872
3873 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wPzTZ61Pcuc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
3874
3875       </div>
3876       <div class="tags">
3877
3878
3879         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>.
3880
3881
3882       </div>
3883     </div>
3884     <div class="padding"></div>
3885
3886     <div class="entry">
3887       <div class="title">
3888         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_update_released.html">First Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze update released</a>
3889       </div>
3890       <div class="date">
3891          8th March 2013
3892       </div>
3893       <div class="body">
3894         <p>Last Sunday, 2013-03-03,, Holger Levsen announced the first update
3895 of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
3896 based on Debian Squeeze.  This is the first update since
3897 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
3898 initial release 2012-03-11</a>.  This is the
3899 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2013/03/msg00000.html">release
3900 announcement email from Holger</a>:</p>
3901
3902 <blockquote><p>Hi,</p>
3903
3904 <p>it's my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of Debian
3905 Edu 6.0.7+r1 ("Debian Edu Squeeze").</p>
3906
3907 <p>Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 is an incremental update to Debian Edu
3908 6.0.4+r0, containing all the changes between Debian 6.0.4 and 6.0.7 as
3909 well Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements. See below (in this
3910 mail) for the full list of (edu) changes.  Please see
3911 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311">http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311</a>
3912 for more information on "Debian Edu Squeeze".</p>
3913
3914 <p>Images are available for download at
3915 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/</a></p>
3916
3917 <p>md5sums:
3918 <br>1fe79eb4f0f9ae1c58fc318e26cc1e2e  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
3919 <br>a6ddd924a8bd9a1b5ca122e8fe1c34ec  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
3920 <br>ac6c72cd7925ccec51bfbf58e2a7c69c  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
3921
3922 <p>sha1sums:
3923 <br>a4b58233b672a99c7df8dc24fb6de3327654a5c3  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
3924 <br>9b524915e0ff2aa793f13d93123e5bd2bab2dbaa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
3925 <br>43997614893fc5e9e59ad6ce066b05d07fd836fa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
3926
3927 <p>These images are suitable for amd64+i386.</p>
3928
3929 <p>Changes for Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 Codename "Squeeze", released
3930 2013-03-03:</p>
3931
3932 <ul>
3933   <li>sitesummary was updated from 0.1.3 to 0.1.8
3934   <ul>
3935         <li>Make Nagios configuration more robust and efficient</li>
3936         <li>Comply with 3.X kernel</li>
3937   </ul></li>
3938   <li>debian-edu-doc from 1.4~20120310~6.0.4+r0 to 1.4~20130228~6.0.7+r1
3939   <ul>
3940         <li>Minor updates from the wiki</li>
3941         <li>Danish translation now complete</li>
3942   </ul></li>
3943   <li>debian-edu-config from 1.453 to 1.455
3944      <ul>
3945         <li>Fix /etc/hosts for LTSP diskless workstations. Closes: #699880</li>
3946         <li>Make ltsp_local_mount script work for multiple devices.</li>
3947         <li>Correct Kerberos user policy: don't expire password after 2 days.
3948                 Closes: #664596</li>
3949         <li>Handle '#' characters in the root or first users password.
3950                 Closes: #664976</li>
3951         <li>Fixes for gosa-sync:
3952            <ul>
3953                 <li>Don't fail if password contains "</li>
3954                 <li>Don't disclose new password string in syslog</li>
3955            </ul></li>
3956         <li>Fixes for gosa-create:
3957            <ul>
3958                 <li>Invalidate libnss cache before applying changes</li>
3959                 <li>Multiple failures during mass user import into GOsa²</li>
3960                 <li>gosa-netgroups plugin: don't erase entries of attribute type
3961                          "memberNisNetgroup". Closes: #687256</li>
3962                 <li>First user now uses the same Kerberos policy as all other users</li>
3963            </ul></li>
3964         <li>Add Danish web page</li>
3965     </ul>
3966   <li>debian-edu-install from 1.528 to 1.530
3967     <ul>
3968         <li>Improve preseeding support and documentation</li>
3969     </ul></li>
3970 </ul>
3971
3972 <p>End-user documentation in English is available at
3973 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/</a>
3974 - translations to French, Italian, Danish and German are available in
3975 the debian-edu-doc package. (Other languages could use your help!)</p>
3976
3977 <p>If you want to contribute to Debian Edu, please join our
3978 mailinglist
3979 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@lists.debian.org</a>!
3980 </p></blockquote>
3981
3982 <p>I am very happy to see the fruits of a year of hard work. :)</p>
3983
3984       </div>
3985       <div class="tags">
3986
3987
3988         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>.
3989
3990
3991       </div>
3992     </div>
3993     <div class="padding"></div>
3994
3995     <div class="entry">
3996       <div class="title">
3997         <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>
3998       </div>
3999       <div class="date">
4000          3rd March 2013
4001       </div>
4002       <div class="body">
4003         <p>Do you want to set up your own TV station, schedule videos and
4004 broadcast them on the air?  Using free software?  With video on demand
4005 support using
4006 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
4007 open standards</a>?  Included a web based video stream as well?  And
4008 administrate it all in your web browser from anywhere in the world?  A
4009 few years now the Norwegian public access TV-channel
4010 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> have been building a
4011 system to do just this.  The source code for the solution is licensed
4012 using the GNU LGPL, and
4013 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from github</a>.</p>
4014
4015 <p>The idea is simple.  You upload a video file over the web, and
4016 attach meta information to the file.  You select a time slot in the
4017 program schedule, and when the time come it is played on the air and
4018 in the web stream.  It is also made available in a video on demand
4019 solution for anyone to see it also outside its scheduled time.  All
4020 you need to run a TV station - using your web browser.</p>
4021
4022 <p>There are several parts to this web based solution.  I'll mention
4023 the three most important ones.  The first part is the database of
4024 videos and the schedule.  This is written in Django and include a REST
4025 API.  The current database is SQLite, but the plan is to migrate it to
4026 PostgreSQL.  At the moment this system can be tested on
4027 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/">beta.frikanalen.tv</a>.  The
4028 second part is the video playout, taking the schedule information from
4029 the database and providing a video stream to broadcast.  This is done
4030 using <a href="http://www.casparcg.com/">CasparCG from SVT</a> and
4031 <a href="http://www.mltframework.org/">Media Lovin' Toolkit</a>.  Video
4032 signal distribution is handled using
4033 <a href="http://www.ob-encoder.com/">Open Broadcast Encoder</a>.  The
4034 third part is the converter, handling the transformation of uploaded
4035 video files to a format useful for broadcasting, streaming and video
4036 on demand.  It is still very much work in progress, so it is not yet
4037 decided what it will end up using.  Note that the source of the latter
4038 two parts are not yet pushed to github.  The lead author want to clean
4039 them up a bit more first.</p>
4040
4041 <p>The development is coordinated on the
4042 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23frikanalen">#frikanalen IRC
4043 channel</a> (irc.freenode.net), and discussed on
4044 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/frikanalen">the
4045 frikanalen mailing list</a>. The lead developer is Benjamin Bruheim
4046 (phed on IRC).  Anyone is welcome to participate in the
4047 development.</p>
4048
4049       </div>
4050       <div class="tags">
4051
4052
4053         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>.
4054
4055
4056       </div>
4057     </div>
4058     <div class="padding"></div>
4059
4060     <div class="entry">
4061       <div class="title">
4062         <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>
4063       </div>
4064       <div class="date">
4065         27th February 2013
4066       </div>
4067       <div class="body">
4068         <p>Dr. <a href="http://www.stallman.org/">Richard Stallman</a>,
4069 founder of <a href="http://www.fsf.org/">Free Software Foundation</a>,
4070 is giving <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">a
4071 talk in Oslo March 1st 2013 17:00 to 19:00</a>.  The event is public
4072 and organised by <a href="">Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG)</a>
4073 (where I am the chair of the board) and
4074 <a href="http://www.friprog.no/">The Norwegian Open Source Competence
4075 Center</a>.  The title of the talk is «The Free Software Movement and
4076 GNU», with this description:
4077
4078 <p><blockquote>
4079 The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users' freedom to
4080 cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software Movement
4081 developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the
4082 kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms possible.
4083 </blockquote></p>
4084
4085 <p>The meeting is open for everyone.  Due to space limitations, the
4086 doors opens for NUUG members at 16:15, and everyone else at 16:45.  I
4087 am really curious how many will show up.  See
4088 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">the event
4089 page</a> for the location details.</p>
4090
4091       </div>
4092       <div class="tags">
4093
4094
4095         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>.
4096
4097
4098       </div>
4099     </div>
4100     <div class="padding"></div>
4101
4102     <div class="entry">
4103       <div class="title">
4104         <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>
4105       </div>
4106       <div class="date">
4107         15th February 2013
4108       </div>
4109       <div class="body">
4110         <p>If you, like me, want an updated a map for your Garmin GPS, there is
4111 now a great source of free maps available from
4112 <a href="http://www.frikart.no/garmin/index.html">Frikart</a>.  To
4113 download a map, just click on the country you are interested in, and
4114 download the map type you want.  There are 8 different maps available,
4115 using different colours and data selection.  Pick one of Roadmap, Topo
4116 Summer, Topo Winter, Roadmap II, Topo Summer II, Topo Winter II,
4117 "Trails - overlay map" and "Cross country - overlay map" (see the web
4118 page for descriptions).</p>
4119
4120 <p>The maps are updated weekly, so if you find something wrong in the
4121 map you can just edit the
4122 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> map source
4123 (anyone can contribute) and fetch a fixed map a week later. :)</p>
4124
4125       </div>
4126       <div class="tags">
4127
4128
4129         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>.
4130
4131
4132       </div>
4133     </div>
4134     <div class="padding"></div>
4135
4136     <div class="entry">
4137       <div class="title">
4138         <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>
4139       </div>
4140       <div class="date">
4141         12th February 2013
4142       </div>
4143       <div class="body">
4144         <p>Here in Norway, electronic invoices are spreading, and the
4145 <a href="http://www.anskaffelser.no/e-handel/faktura">solution promoted
4146 by the Norwegian government</a> require that invoices are sent through
4147 one of the approved facilitators, and it is not possible to send
4148 electronic invoices without an agreement with one of these
4149 facilitators.  This seem like a needless limitation to be able to
4150 transfer invoice information between buyers and sellers.  My preferred
4151 solution would be to just transfer the invoice information directly
4152 between seller and buyer, for example using SMTP, or some HTTP based
4153 protocol like REST or SOAP.  But this might also be overkill, as the
4154 "electronic" information can be transferred using paper invoices too,
4155 using a simple bar code.  My bar code encoding of choice would be QR
4156 codes, as this encoding can be read by any smart phone out there.  The
4157 content of the code could be anything, but I would go with
4158 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard">the vCard format</a>, as
4159 it too is supported by a lot of computer equipment these days.</p>
4160
4161 <p>The vCard format support extentions, and the invoice specific
4162 information can be included using such extentions.  For example an
4163 invoice from SLX Debian Labs (picked because we
4164 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">ask
4165 for donations to the Debian Edu project</a> and thus have bank account
4166 information publicly available) for NOK 1000.00 could have these extra
4167 fields:</p>
4168
4169 <p><pre>
4170 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
4171 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
4172 X-INVOICE-KID:123412341234
4173 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
4174 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
4175 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
4176 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
4177 </pre></p>
4178
4179 <p>The X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER field was proposed in a stackoverflow
4180 answer regarding
4181 <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10045664/storing-bank-account-in-vcard-file">how
4182 to put bank account information into a vCard</a>.  For payments in
4183 Norway, either X-INVOICE-KID (payment ID) or X-INVOICE-MSG could be
4184 used to pass on information to the seller when paying the invoice.</p>
4185
4186 <p>The complete vCard could look like this:</p>
4187
4188 <p><pre>
4189 BEGIN:VCARD
4190 VERSION:2.1
4191 ORG:SLX Debian Labs Foundation
4192 ADR;WORK:;;Gunnar Schjelderups vei 29D;OSLO;;0485;Norway
4193 URL;WORK:http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/
4194 EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:sdl-styret@rt.nuug.no
4195 REV:20130212T095000Z
4196 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
4197 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
4198 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
4199 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
4200 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
4201 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
4202 END:VCARD
4203 </pre></p>
4204
4205 <p>The resulting QR code created using
4206 <a href="http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/">qrencode</a> would look
4207 like this, and should be readable (and thus checkable) by any smart
4208 phone, or for example the <a href="http://zbar.sourceforge.net/">zbar
4209 bar code reader</a> and feed right into the approval and accounting
4210 system.</p>
4211
4212 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-12-qr-invoice.png"></p>
4213
4214 <p>The extension fields will most likely not show up in any normal
4215 vCard reader, so those parts would have to go directly into a system
4216 handling invoices.  I am a bit unsure how vCards without name parts
4217 are handled, but a simple test indicate that this work just fine.</p>
4218
4219 <p><strong>Update 2013-02-12 11:30</strong>: Added KID to the proposal
4220 based on feedback from Sturle Sunde.</p>
4221
4222       </div>
4223       <div class="tags">
4224
4225
4226         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>.
4227
4228
4229       </div>
4230     </div>
4231     <div class="padding"></div>
4232
4233     <div class="entry">
4234       <div class="title">
4235         <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>
4236       </div>
4237       <div class="date">
4238         10th February 2013
4239       </div>
4240       <div class="body">
4241         <p><img align="left" style="margin-right:25px;" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-10-morning-light.jpeg"></p>
4242
4243 <p>With kids in the house, one challenge is getting them to sleep
4244 during the night and wake up when it is morning.  I mean, when I
4245 believe it is morning, and not two hours earlier.  In our household we
4246 have decided that 07:00 is the turning point, but getting the kids to
4247 sleep until 07:00 is a small challenge every day.  They have adapted
4248 quite well, and rarely wake up at 05:00 any more, but some times wake
4249 up at times like 05:50, 06:15, 06:30 or 06:45, and it is hard to put
4250 the awake one to bed again without disturbing and waking the rest.
4251 And I understand perfectly well that they fail to sleep until 07:00
4252 some times, as there is no way for them to know if it is before or
4253 after the magic moment without coming and asking us parents.</p>
4254
4255 <p>But yesterday I came up with a method to solve this problem.  It
4256 involve home automation.  A few years ago I bought a
4257 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick">Tellstick</a> and RF
4258 switches at the local <a href="http://www.clasohlson.com/">Clas
4259 Ohlson</a> shop, allowing me to control lights and other electrical
4260 gadgets using my Linux server.  When I moved from the old flat to a
4261 small house, I put away all this equipment as most of the lighting in
4262 the house was not using wall sockets and thus not easy to connect to
4263 the gadgets I had.  But recently I bought a
4264 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick_net">Tellstick
4265 Net</a> to be able to read sensor input as well as control power
4266 sockets.  I want to control ovens in the basement to avoid the pipes
4267 to freeze, and monitor the humidity to detect flooding.  The default
4268 setup for Tellstick Net is to be controlled by the vendor web service,
4269 which to me is a security problem, but it is also possible to build
4270 ones own
4271 <a href="http://developer.telldus.com/blog/2012/03/02/help-us-develop-local-access-using-tellstick-net-build-your-own-firmware">firmware
4272 with local access</A> instead of being controlled by a Swedish
4273 company, thanks to the release of the GPL licensed firmware source
4274 code.  I plan to get that running before I let it control anything
4275 important.  But while working on this, one idea to make it easier for
4276 the kids came to me yesterday.  We can set up a night light controlled
4277 by the computer, and turn it automatically on at 07:00.  The kids can
4278 then check the light in the morning to know if they are supposed to
4279 get up or not.  They joined me in setting everything up, and I
4280 repeated the concept several times before bed times to make sure they
4281 remembered to check the light before getting up in the morning.</p>
4282
4283 <p>We tested it this morning, and all the kids stayed in bed until
4284 after 07:00, and every one of them commented on the fact that the
4285 "morning light" was turned on and signalled that the morning had
4286 arrived.  So this look like a success, and I am excited to see how
4287 this develops the next few days. :) I really hope this can allow us
4288 all to sleep a bit longer in the morning.</p>
4289
4290 <p>A nice advantage of this setup is that we can remote control when
4291 to tell the kids to get up.  We do not have to wait until 07:00, and
4292 can also delay it if we want to.</p>
4293
4294       </div>
4295       <div class="tags">
4296
4297
4298         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4299
4300
4301       </div>
4302     </div>
4303     <div class="padding"></div>
4304
4305     <div class="entry">
4306       <div class="title">
4307         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Bitcoin_GUI_now_available_from_Debian_unstable__and_Ubuntu_raring_.html">Bitcoin GUI now available from Debian/unstable (and Ubuntu/raring)</a>
4308       </div>
4309       <div class="date">
4310          2nd February 2013
4311       </div>
4312       <div class="body">
4313         <p>My
4314 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
4315 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
4316 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
4317 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
4318 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
4319 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
4320 version too.</p>
4321
4322 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
4323 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
4324 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
4325 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
4326 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
4327 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
4328 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
4329 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
4330
4331 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
4332 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
4333 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
4334 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
4335 it. :)</p>
4336
4337 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4338 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4339 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4340
4341       </div>
4342       <div class="tags">
4343
4344
4345         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>.
4346
4347
4348       </div>
4349     </div>
4350     <div class="padding"></div>
4351
4352     <div class="entry">
4353       <div class="title">
4354         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
4355       </div>
4356       <div class="date">
4357         22nd January 2013
4358       </div>
4359       <div class="body">
4360         <p>Yesterday, I
4361 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
4362 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
4363 pluggable hardware devices, which I
4364 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
4365 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
4366 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
4367 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
4368 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
4369 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
4370 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
4371 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
4372 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
4373 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
4374
4375 <pre>
4376 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
4377 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
4378 </pre>
4379
4380 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
4381 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
4382 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
4383 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
4384
4385 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
4386 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
4387 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
4388 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
4389 word.</p>
4390
4391 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
4392 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
4393 process.</p>
4394
4395 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
4396 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
4397
4398       </div>
4399       <div class="tags">
4400
4401
4402         Tags: <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>.
4403
4404
4405       </div>
4406     </div>
4407     <div class="padding"></div>
4408
4409     <div class="entry">
4410       <div class="title">
4411         <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>
4412       </div>
4413       <div class="date">
4414         21st January 2013
4415       </div>
4416       <div class="body">
4417         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
4418 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
4419 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
4420 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
4421 it, fetch the
4422 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
4423 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
4424 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
4425 autostart script.</p>
4426
4427 <p>The design is simple:</p>
4428
4429 <ul>
4430
4431 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
4432 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
4433
4434 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
4435 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
4436 initially did.</li>
4437
4438 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
4439 the APT database, a database
4440 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
4441 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
4442
4443 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
4444 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
4445 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
4446 package or packages.</li>
4447
4448 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
4449 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
4450
4451 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
4452 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
4453
4454 </ul>
4455
4456 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
4457 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
4458 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
4459 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
4460
4461 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
4462 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
4463 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
4464 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
4465 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
4466
4467 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
4468 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
4469 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
4470 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
4471 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
4472 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
4473 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
4474 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
4475
4476 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
4477 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
4478 '<tt>svn checkout
4479 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
4480 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
4481 devscripts package.</p>
4482
4483 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
4484 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
4485 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
4486 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
4487 instructions</a> for details.</p>
4488
4489       </div>
4490       <div class="tags">
4491
4492
4493         Tags: <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>.
4494
4495
4496       </div>
4497     </div>
4498     <div class="padding"></div>
4499
4500     <div class="entry">
4501       <div class="title">
4502         <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>
4503       </div>
4504       <div class="date">
4505         19th January 2013
4506       </div>
4507       <div class="body">
4508         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
4509 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
4510 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
4511 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
4512 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
4513 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
4514 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
4515 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
4516 not a durable solution.
4517
4518 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
4519 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
4520
4521 <ul>
4522
4523 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
4524   than A4).</li>
4525 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
4526 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
4527 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
4528 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
4529 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
4530 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
4531 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
4532 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
4533 size).</li>
4534 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
4535   X.org packages.</li>
4536 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
4537   the time).
4538
4539 </ul>
4540
4541 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
4542 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
4543 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
4544 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
4545 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
4546 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
4547 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
4548 still be useful.</p>
4549
4550 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
4551 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
4552 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
4553 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
4554 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
4555 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
4556
4557       </div>
4558       <div class="tags">
4559
4560
4561         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4562
4563
4564       </div>
4565     </div>
4566     <div class="padding"></div>
4567
4568     <div class="entry">
4569       <div class="title">
4570         <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>
4571       </div>
4572       <div class="date">
4573         18th January 2013
4574       </div>
4575       <div class="body">
4576         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
4577 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
4578 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
4579 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
4580 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
4581 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
4582 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
4583
4584 <pre>
4585 #!/usr/bin/python
4586 import sys
4587 import apt
4588 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
4589     cache = apt.Cache()
4590     cache.open(None)
4591     thepkgs = []
4592     for pkg in cache:
4593         version = pkg.candidate
4594         if version is None:
4595             version = pkg.installed
4596         if version is None:
4597             continue
4598         record = version.record
4599         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
4600             continue
4601         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
4602         for t in mime_types:
4603             t = t.rstrip().strip()
4604             if t == mimetype:
4605                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
4606     return thepkgs
4607 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
4608 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
4609     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
4610 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
4611 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
4612     print "  %s" %pkg
4613 </pre>
4614
4615 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
4616
4617 <pre>
4618 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
4619 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
4620   gecko-mediaplayer
4621 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
4622 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
4623   browser-plugin-gnash
4624 %
4625 </pre>
4626
4627 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
4628 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
4629 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
4630 anyone working on adding it?</p>
4631
4632 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
4633 request for icweasel support for this feature is
4634 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
4635 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
4636 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
4637 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
4638
4639       </div>
4640       <div class="tags">
4641
4642
4643         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4644
4645
4646       </div>
4647     </div>
4648     <div class="padding"></div>
4649
4650     <div class="entry">
4651       <div class="title">
4652         <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>
4653       </div>
4654       <div class="date">
4655         16th January 2013
4656       </div>
4657       <div class="body">
4658         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
4659 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
4660 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
4661 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
4662 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
4663 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
4664 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
4665 downloaded by the browser.</p>
4666
4667 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
4668 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
4669 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
4670 can be found on the
4671 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
4672 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
4673 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
4674 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
4675 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
4676
4677 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
4678
4679 <pre>
4680   count MIME type
4681   ----- -----------------------
4682      32 text/plain
4683      30 audio/mpeg
4684      29 image/png
4685      28 image/jpeg
4686      27 application/ogg
4687      26 audio/x-mp3
4688      25 image/tiff
4689      25 image/gif
4690      22 image/bmp
4691      22 audio/x-wav
4692      20 audio/x-flac
4693      19 audio/x-mpegurl
4694      18 video/x-ms-asf
4695      18 audio/x-musepack
4696      18 audio/x-mpeg
4697      18 application/x-ogg
4698      17 video/mpeg
4699      17 audio/x-scpls
4700      17 audio/ogg
4701      16 video/x-ms-wmv
4702 </pre>
4703
4704 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
4705
4706 <pre>
4707   count MIME type
4708   ----- -----------------------
4709      33 text/plain
4710      32 image/png
4711      32 image/jpeg
4712      29 audio/mpeg
4713      27 image/gif
4714      26 image/tiff
4715      26 application/ogg
4716      25 audio/x-mp3
4717      22 image/bmp
4718      21 audio/x-wav
4719      19 audio/x-mpegurl
4720      19 audio/x-mpeg
4721      18 video/mpeg
4722      18 audio/x-scpls
4723      18 audio/x-flac
4724      18 application/x-ogg
4725      17 video/x-ms-asf
4726      17 text/html
4727      17 audio/x-musepack
4728      16 image/x-xbitmap
4729 </pre>
4730
4731 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
4732
4733 <pre>
4734   count MIME type
4735   ----- -----------------------
4736      31 text/plain
4737      31 image/png
4738      31 image/jpeg
4739      29 audio/mpeg
4740      28 application/ogg
4741      27 image/gif
4742      26 image/tiff
4743      26 audio/x-mp3
4744      23 audio/x-wav
4745      22 image/bmp
4746      21 audio/x-flac
4747      20 audio/x-mpegurl
4748      19 audio/x-mpeg
4749      18 video/x-ms-asf
4750      18 video/mpeg
4751      18 audio/x-scpls
4752      18 application/x-ogg
4753      17 audio/x-musepack
4754      16 video/x-ms-wmv
4755      16 video/x-msvideo
4756 </pre>
4757
4758 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
4759 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
4760 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
4761 issues.</p>
4762
4763 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
4764 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
4765
4766       </div>
4767       <div class="tags">
4768
4769
4770         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4771
4772
4773       </div>
4774     </div>
4775     <div class="padding"></div>
4776
4777     <div class="entry">
4778       <div class="title">
4779         <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>
4780       </div>
4781       <div class="date">
4782         15th January 2013
4783       </div>
4784       <div class="body">
4785         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
4786 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
4787 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
4788 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
4789 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
4790 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
4791 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
4792 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
4793 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
4794 packages.</p>
4795
4796 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
4797 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
4798 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
4799 modalias.</p>
4800
4801 <p><blockquote>
4802 Package: package-name
4803 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
4804 </blockquote></p>
4805
4806 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
4807 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
4808
4809 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
4810 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
4811
4812 <p><blockquote>
4813 Package: cheese
4814 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
4815 </blockquote></p>
4816
4817 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
4818 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
4819
4820 <p><blockquote>
4821 Package: pcmciautils
4822 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
4823 </blockquote></p>
4824
4825 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
4826 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
4827
4828 <p><blockquote>
4829 Package: colorhug-client
4830 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
4831 </blockquote></p>
4832
4833 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
4834 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
4835 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
4836
4837 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
4838 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
4839 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
4840 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
4841 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
4842 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
4843 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
4844 Raring.</p>
4845
4846 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
4847 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
4848 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
4849 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
4850 try the
4851 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
4852 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
4853 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
4854 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
4855
4856 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
4857 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
4858
4859 <p><blockquote>
4860 % ./hw-support-lookup
4861 <br>yubikey-personalization
4862 <br>%
4863 </blockquote></p>
4864
4865 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
4866 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
4867
4868 <p><blockquote>
4869 % ./hw-support-lookup
4870 <br>pcmciautils
4871 <br>%
4872 </blockquote></p>
4873
4874 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
4875 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
4876 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
4877
4878 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
4879 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
4880 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
4881 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
4882 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
4883 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
4884 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
4885 see if it work.</p>
4886
4887 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
4888 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
4889 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
4890 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
4891
4892       </div>
4893       <div class="tags">
4894
4895
4896         Tags: <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>.
4897
4898
4899       </div>
4900     </div>
4901     <div class="padding"></div>
4902
4903     <div class="entry">
4904       <div class="title">
4905         <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>
4906       </div>
4907       <div class="date">
4908         14th January 2013
4909       </div>
4910       <div class="body">
4911         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
4912 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
4913 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
4914 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
4915 in
4916 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
4917 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
4918
4919 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
4920
4921 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
4922 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
4923 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
4924 &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;,
4925 &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
4926 &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;.
4927
4928 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
4929 this shell script:</p>
4930
4931 <pre>
4932 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
4933 </pre>
4934
4935 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
4936 using modinfo:</p>
4937
4938 <pre>
4939 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
4940 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
4941 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
4942 %
4943 </pre>
4944
4945 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
4946
4947 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
4948 Bridge memory controller:</p>
4949
4950 <p><blockquote>
4951 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
4952 </blockquote></p>
4953
4954 <p>This represent these values:</p>
4955
4956 <pre>
4957  v   00008086  (vendor)
4958  d   00002770  (device)
4959  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
4960  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
4961  bc  06        (bus class)
4962  sc  00        (bus subclass)
4963  i   00        (interface)
4964 </pre>
4965
4966 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
4967 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
4968 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
4969 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
4970
4971 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
4972 means.</p>
4973
4974 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
4975
4976 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
4977 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
4978
4979 <p><blockquote>
4980 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
4981 </blockquote></p>
4982
4983 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
4984
4985 <pre>
4986  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
4987  p    0001  (device product)
4988  d    0206  (bcddevice)
4989  dc     09  (device class)
4990  dsc    00  (device subclass)
4991  dp     00  (device protocol)
4992  ic     09  (interface class)
4993  isc    00  (interface subclass)
4994  ip     00  (interface protocol)
4995 </pre>
4996
4997 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
4998 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
4999 these alias entries show up:</p>
5000
5001 <p><blockquote>
5002 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
5003 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
5004 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
5005 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
5006 </blockquote></p>
5007
5008 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
5009 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
5010 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
5011
5012 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
5013
5014 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
5015 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
5016
5017 <p><blockquote>
5018 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
5019 </blockquote></p>
5020
5021 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
5022
5023 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
5024
5025 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
5026 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
5027 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
5028
5029 <p><blockquote>
5030 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
5031 </blockquote></p>
5032
5033 <p>The values present are</p>
5034
5035 <pre>
5036  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
5037  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
5038  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
5039  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
5040  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
5041  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
5042  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
5043  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
5044  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
5045  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
5046  ct   10             (chassis type)
5047  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
5048 </pre>
5049
5050 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
5051 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
5052
5053 <pre>
5054   3 Desktop
5055   4 Low Profile Desktop
5056   5 Pizza Box
5057   6 Mini Tower
5058   7 Tower
5059   8 Portable
5060   9 Laptop
5061  10 Notebook
5062  11 Hand Held
5063  12 Docking Station
5064  13 All In One
5065  14 Sub Notebook
5066  15 Space-saving
5067  16 Lunch Box
5068  17 Main Server Chassis
5069  18 Expansion Chassis
5070  19 Sub Chassis
5071  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
5072  21 Peripheral Chassis
5073  22 RAID Chassis
5074  23 Rack Mount Chassis
5075  24 Sealed-case PC
5076  25 Multi-system
5077  26 CompactPCI
5078  27 AdvancedTCA
5079  28 Blade
5080  29 Blade Enclosing
5081 </pre>
5082
5083 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
5084 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
5085 claim it is a desktop.</p>
5086
5087 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
5088
5089 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
5090 test machine:</p>
5091
5092 <p><blockquote>
5093 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
5094 </blockquote></p>
5095
5096 <p>The values present are</p>
5097
5098 <pre>
5099   ty  01  (type)
5100   pr  00  (prototype)
5101   id  00  (id)
5102   ex  00  (extra)
5103 </pre>
5104
5105 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
5106 the valid values are.</p>
5107
5108 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
5109
5110 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
5111 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
5112 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
5113 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
5114 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
5115 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
5116 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
5117
5118 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
5119
5120 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
5121 one can use the following shell script:</p>
5122
5123 <pre>
5124   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
5125     echo "$id" ; \
5126     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
5127   done
5128 </pre>
5129
5130 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
5131 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
5132
5133 <pre>
5134   acpi:ACPI0003:
5135     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
5136   acpi:device:
5137   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
5138   acpi:IBM0068:
5139     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
5140     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
5141     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
5142     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
5143   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
5144     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
5145     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
5146     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
5147   [...]
5148 </pre>
5149
5150 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
5151 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
5152 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
5153 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
5154
5155 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
5156 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
5157 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
5158
5159       </div>
5160       <div class="tags">
5161
5162
5163         Tags: <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>.
5164
5165
5166       </div>
5167     </div>
5168     <div class="padding"></div>
5169
5170     <div class="entry">
5171       <div class="title">
5172         <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>
5173       </div>
5174       <div class="date">
5175         10th January 2013
5176       </div>
5177       <div class="body">
5178         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
5179 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
5180 Launcher and updated the Debian package
5181 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
5182 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
5183 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
5184 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
5185 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
5186 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
5187 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
5188 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
5189 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
5190 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
5191 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
5192 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
5193 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
5194 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
5195 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
5196
5197       </div>
5198       <div class="tags">
5199
5200
5201         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
5202
5203
5204       </div>
5205     </div>
5206     <div class="padding"></div>
5207
5208     <div class="entry">
5209       <div class="title">
5210         <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>
5211       </div>
5212       <div class="date">
5213          9th January 2013
5214       </div>
5215       <div class="body">
5216         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
5217 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
5218 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
5219 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
5220 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
5221 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
5222 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
5223 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
5224 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
5225 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
5226 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
5227
5228 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
5229 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
5230 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
5231 simple:
5232
5233 <ul>
5234
5235 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
5236   starting when a user log in.</li>
5237
5238 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
5239   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
5240
5241 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
5242   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
5243   packages.</li>
5244
5245 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
5246   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
5247
5248 </ul>
5249
5250 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
5251 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
5252 discover database to find packages and
5253 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
5254 packages.</p>
5255
5256 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
5257 draft package is now checked into
5258 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
5259 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
5260 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
5261 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
5262 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
5263 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
5264 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
5265 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
5266 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
5267 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
5268 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
5269 because of the freeze).</p>
5270
5271 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
5272 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
5273 inserted):</p>
5274
5275 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
5276
5277 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
5278 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
5279 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
5280
5281 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
5282 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
5283 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
5284 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
5285 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
5286 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
5287 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
5288
5289 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
5290 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
5291 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
5292 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
5293 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
5294 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
5295 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
5296 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
5297 not be installed?</p>
5298
5299 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
5300 please send me an email. :)</p>
5301
5302       </div>
5303       <div class="tags">
5304
5305
5306         Tags: <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>.
5307
5308
5309       </div>
5310     </div>
5311     <div class="padding"></div>
5312
5313     <div class="entry">
5314       <div class="title">
5315         <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>
5316       </div>
5317       <div class="date">
5318          2nd January 2013
5319       </div>
5320       <div class="body">
5321         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
5322 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
5323 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
5324 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
5325 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
5326 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
5327 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
5328 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
5329 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
5330 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
5331
5332 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
5333 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
5334 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
5335
5336       </div>
5337       <div class="tags">
5338
5339
5340         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
5341
5342
5343       </div>
5344     </div>
5345     <div class="padding"></div>
5346
5347     <div class="entry">
5348       <div class="title">
5349         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html">A Christmas present for Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
5350       </div>
5351       <div class="date">
5352         28th December 2012
5353       </div>
5354       <div class="body">
5355         <p>I was happy to discover a few days ago that the
5356 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
5357 project also this year received a Christmas present from Another
5358 Agency in Trondheim.  NOK 1000,- showed up on our donation account
5359 December 24th.  I want to express our thanks for this very welcome
5360 present.  As the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is very short on
5361 funding these days, and thus lack the money to do regular developer
5362 gatherings, this donation was most welcome.  One developer gathering
5363 cost around NOK 15&nbsp;000,-, so we need quite a lot more to keep the
5364 development pace we want.  Thus, I hope their example this year is
5365 followed by many others. :)</p>
5366
5367 <p>The public list of donors can be found on
5368 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">the
5369 donation page</a> for the project, which also contain instructions if
5370 you want to donate to the project.</p>
5371
5372       </div>
5373       <div class="tags">
5374
5375
5376         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>.
5377
5378
5379       </div>
5380     </div>
5381     <div class="padding"></div>
5382
5383     <div class="entry">
5384       <div class="title">
5385         <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>
5386       </div>
5387       <div class="date">
5388         25th December 2012
5389       </div>
5390       <div class="body">
5391         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
5392 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
5393
5394 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
5395 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
5396 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
5397 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
5398 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
5399 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
5400 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
5401 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
5402 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
5403 name.</p>
5404
5405 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
5406 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
5407 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
5408
5409 <blockquote><pre>
5410 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
5411 cd bitcoin
5412 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
5413 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
5414 </pre></blockquote>
5415
5416 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
5417 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
5418 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
5419 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
5420 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
5421 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
5422 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
5423 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
5424 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
5425
5426 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5427 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5428 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5429
5430       </div>
5431       <div class="tags">
5432
5433
5434         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>.
5435
5436
5437       </div>
5438     </div>
5439     <div class="padding"></div>
5440
5441     <div class="entry">
5442       <div class="title">
5443         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
5444       </div>
5445       <div class="date">
5446         21st December 2012
5447       </div>
5448       <div class="body">
5449         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
5450 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
5451 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
5452 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
5453 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
5454 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
5455 is now maintained by a
5456 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
5457 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
5458 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
5459 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
5460 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
5461 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
5462 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
5463 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
5464 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
5465 Corallo in a
5466 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
5467 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
5468 Debian package.</p>
5469
5470 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
5471 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
5472 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
5473 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
5474 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
5475 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
5476 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
5477 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
5478 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
5479 new version to unstable.
5480
5481 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
5482 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
5483 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
5484 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
5485 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
5486 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
5487 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
5488 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
5489 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
5490 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
5491 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
5492 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
5493 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
5494 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
5495 have not tested them.</p>
5496
5497 <p>My
5498 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
5499 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
5500 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
5501 years ago, as can be
5502 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
5503 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
5504 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
5505 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
5506 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
5507 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
5508 the same address as last time,
5509 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5510
5511       </div>
5512       <div class="tags">
5513
5514
5515         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>.
5516
5517
5518       </div>
5519     </div>
5520     <div class="padding"></div>
5521
5522     <div class="entry">
5523       <div class="title">
5524         <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>
5525       </div>
5526       <div class="date">
5527         18th December 2012
5528       </div>
5529       <div class="body">
5530         <p>A few days ago I came across
5531 <a href="http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/hledger/">a blog post from Joey
5532 Hess</a> describing <a href="http://ledger-cli.org/">ledger</a> and
5533 hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting.  I found it
5534 interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
5535 accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
5536 the different web based systems we use.  I find it hard to find what I
5537 look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
5538 the systems.  Ledger seem different.  The accounting data is kept in
5539 text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
5540
5541 are at least <a href="https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Ports">five
5542 different implementations</a> able to read the format.  An example
5543 entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
5544 generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:</p>
5545
5546 <blockquote><pre>
5547 2004-05-27 Book Store
5548       Expenses:Books                 $20.00
5549       Liabilities:Visa
5550 </pre></blockquote>
5551
5552 <p>The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
5553 look for others using it.  I found blog posts from
5554 <a href="http://blog.spang.cc/posts/hledger_rocks_my_world/">Christine
5555 Spang</a>,
5556 <a href="http://bugsplat.info/2010-05-23-keeping-finances-with-ledger.html">Pete
5557 Keen</a>,
5558 <a href="http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2010/11/06/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/">Andrew
5559 Cantino</a> and
5560 <a href="http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/2012/11/29/command-line-double-entry-accounting/">Ronald
5561 Ip</a> describing how they use it, as well as a post from
5562 <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ledger-cli/r0oWjwbQ9Bo">Bradley
5563 M. Kuhn</a> at the Software Freedom Conservancy.  All seemed like good
5564 recommendations fitting my need.</p>
5565
5566 <p>The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/ledger.html">ledger</a>
5567 package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
5568 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/haskell-hledger.html">hledger</a>
5569 package only is available in Debian Sid.  As I use Squeeze, ledger
5570 seemed the best choice to get started.</p>
5571
5572 <p>To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
5573 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/tools/lodo2ledger">web scraper</a> for
5574 <a href="http://www.lodo.no/">LODO</a>, the accounting system used by
5575 the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> association, and started to
5576 play with the data set.  I'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
5577 am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
5578 using the "<tt>ledger balance</tt>" command.  But I will have to
5579 gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
5580 for the organisations I am involved in.</p>
5581
5582       </div>
5583       <div class="tags">
5584
5585
5586         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>.
5587
5588
5589       </div>
5590     </div>
5591     <div class="padding"></div>
5592
5593     <div class="entry">
5594       <div class="title">
5595         <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>
5596       </div>
5597       <div class="date">
5598          6th December 2012
5599       </div>
5600       <div class="body">
5601         <p>Where I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of
5602 Oslo</a>, we use the
5603 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/cerebrum/">Cerebrum user
5604 administration system</a> to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
5605 I've known since the system was written that the server is providing
5606 an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC">XML-RPC</a> API, but
5607 I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we
5608 always use the bofh command line client at work.  Until today.  I want
5609 to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up
5610 virtual machines.  Here are a few notes on how to use it with
5611 Python.</p>
5612
5613 <p>I started by looking at the source of the Java
5614 <a href="http://cerebrum.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cerebrum/trunk/cerebrum/clients/jbofh/">bofh
5615 client</a>, to figure out how it connected to the API server.  I also
5616 googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
5617 <a href="http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XML-RPC-HOWTO/xmlrpc-howto-python.html">a
5618 simple example in</a> the XML-RPC howto.</p>
5619
5620 <p>This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
5621 commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
5622 user currently logged in:</p>
5623
5624 <blockquote><pre>
5625 #!/usr/bin/env python
5626 import getpass
5627 import xmlrpclib
5628 server_url = 'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:8000';
5629 username = getpass.getuser()
5630 password = getpass.getpass()
5631 server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
5632 #print server.get_commands(sessionid)
5633 sessionid = server.login(username, password)
5634 print server.run_command(sessionid, "user_info", username)
5635 result = server.logout(sessionid)
5636 print result
5637 </pre></blockquote>
5638
5639 <p>Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
5640 and DHCP updates I wanted to do.</p>
5641
5642       </div>
5643       <div class="tags">
5644
5645
5646         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>.
5647
5648
5649       </div>
5650     </div>
5651     <div class="padding"></div>
5652
5653     <div class="entry">
5654       <div class="title">
5655         <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>
5656       </div>
5657       <div class="date">
5658         17th November 2012
5659       </div>
5660       <div class="body">
5661         <p>While working on a
5662 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Norwegian
5663 translation of the Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig</a> (76% done),
5664 which cover the problems with todays copyright law and how it stifles
5665 creativity, one idea occurred to me.  The idea is to get the tax
5666 office to help make more works enter the public domain and also help
5667 make it easier to clear rights for using copyrighted works.</p>
5668
5669 <p>I mentioned this idea briefly during Yesterdays
5670 <a href="http://www.farmann.no/2012/11/14/john-perry-barlow-in-oslo-friday-nov-16
5671 -15-30-19-00/">presentation
5672 by John Perry Barlow</a>, and concluded that it was best to put it
5673 in writing for a wider audience.  The idea is not really based on the
5674 argument that copyrighted works are "intellectual property", as the
5675 core requirement is that copyrighted work have value for the copyright
5676 holder and the tax office like to collect their share from any value
5677 controlled by the citizens in a country.  I'm sharing the idea here to
5678 let others consider it and perhaps shoot it down with a fresh set of
5679 arguments.</p>
5680
5681 <p>Most valuables are taxed by the government.  At least here in
5682 Norway, the amount of money you have, the value of our land property,
5683 the value of your house, the value of your car, the value of our
5684 stocks and other valuables are all added together.  If the tax value
5685 of these values exceed your debt, you have to pay the tax office some
5686 taxes for these values.  And copyrighted work have value.  It have
5687 value for the rights holder, who can earn money selling access to the
5688 work.  But it is not included in the tax calculations?  Why not?</p>
5689
5690 <p>If the government want to tax copyrighted works, it would want to
5691 maintain a database of all the copyrighted works and who are the
5692 rights holders for a given works, to be able to associate the works
5693 value to the right citizen or company for tax purposes.  If such
5694 database exist, it will become a lot easier to find out who to talk to
5695 for clearing permissions to use a copyrighted work, which is a very
5696 hard operation with todays copyright law.  To ensure that copyright
5697 holders keep the database up-to-date, it would have to become a
5698 requirement to be able to collect money for granting access to
5699 copyrighted works that the work is listed in the database with the
5700 correct right holder.</p>
5701
5702 <p>If copyright causes copyright holders to have to pay more taxes,
5703 they will have a small incentive to "disown" their copyright, and let
5704 the work enter the public domain. For works with several right holders
5705 one of the right holders could state (and get it registered in the
5706 database) that she do not need to be consulted when clearing rights to
5707 use the work in question and thus will not get any income from that
5708 work.  Stating this would have to be impossible to revert and stop the
5709 tax office from adding the value of that work to the given citizens
5710 tax calculation.  I assume the copyright law would stay the same,
5711 allowing creators to pick a license of their choosing, and also
5712 allowing them to put their work directly in the public domain.  The
5713 existence of such database will make it even easier to clear rights,
5714 and if the right holders listed in the database is taxed, this system
5715 would increase the amount of works that enter the public domain.</p>
5716
5717 <p>The effect would be that the tax office help to make it easier to
5718 get rights to use the works that have not yet entered the public
5719 domain and help to get more work into the public domain and .</p>
5720
5721 <p>Why have such taxing not happened yet?  I am sure the tax office
5722 would like to tax copyrighted work values if they could.</p>
5723
5724       </div>
5725       <div class="tags">
5726
5727
5728         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>.
5729
5730
5731       </div>
5732     </div>
5733     <div class="padding"></div>
5734
5735     <div class="entry">
5736       <div class="title">
5737         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html">Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß</a>
5738       </div>
5739       <div class="date">
5740         14th November 2012
5741       </div>
5742       <div class="body">
5743         <p>Here is another interview with one of the people in the <a
5744 href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
5745 community.  I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
5746 if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
5747 After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
5748 the people behind the German
5749 "<a href="http://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/">IT-Zukunft Schule</a>"
5750 project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview.  Give a warm
5751 welcome to Angela Fuß. :)</p>
5752
5753 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
5754
5755 <p>I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
5756 Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my
5757 two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.
5758
5759 <p>At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
5760 the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
5761 Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
5762 growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
5763 system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-).  We are also
5764 in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.</p>
5765
5766 <p>In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
5767 nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there.  Besides
5768 that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
5769 working in our own school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" in North
5770 Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
5771 relationship management and the communication processes in the
5772 project.</p>
5773
5774 <p>Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
5775 and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
5776 and a yoga teacher.</p>
5777
5778 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
5779 project?</strong></p>
5780
5781 <p>I fell in love with Mike ;-).</p>
5782
5783 <p>Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
5784 Free Software.  At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
5785 founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
5786 their IT environment.  Often when Mike came home from working at the
5787 newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
5788 several points where the communication with the schools head or the
5789 teachers did not work.  So we were clear that he would not work for
5790 one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
5791 between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
5792 parents.</p>
5793
5794 <p>Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
5795 started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
5796 schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
5797 Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
5798 networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
5799 Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
5800 Germany.</p>
5801
5802 <p>For information about our school project you can read
5803 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">the
5804 interview with Mike Gabriel</a>.</p>
5805
5806 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
5807 Edu?</strong></p>
5808
5809 <p>First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
5810 answer comes rather from a social point of view.</p>
5811
5812 <p>The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
5813 and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
5814 background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
5815 and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
5816 something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
5817 ;-). This is of course a user experience.  What I also get as a big
5818 advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
5819 works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
5820 teachers, parents...</p>
5821
5822 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
5823 Edu?</strong></p>
5824
5825 <p>I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
5826 Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
5827
5828 <p>What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
5829 the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
5830 marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
5831 schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
5832 I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
5833
5834 <p>Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
5835 do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
5836 democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
5837 and helpful.  I am also missing some kind of contact between the
5838 Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
5839 level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
5840 different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
5841
5842 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
5843
5844 <p>On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
5845 on.  As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
5846 LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
5847 my N900 running with Maemo.</p>
5848
5849 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
5850 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
5851
5852 <p>I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft
5853 Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
5854 schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
5855 that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
5856 strategy has three crucial pillars:</p>
5857
5858 <ul>
5859
5860 <li>We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
5861 concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
5862 kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.</li>
5863
5864 <li>Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
5865 are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
5866 beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
5867 they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
5868 they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
5869 needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
5870 we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.</li>
5871
5872 <li>Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
5873 co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
5874 contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
5875 offer to become more and more independent from us.</li>
5876
5877 </ul>
5878
5879       </div>
5880       <div class="tags">
5881
5882
5883         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>.
5884
5885
5886       </div>
5887     </div>
5888     <div class="padding"></div>
5889
5890     <div class="entry">
5891       <div class="title">
5892         <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>
5893       </div>
5894       <div class="date">
5895          4th November 2012
5896       </div>
5897       <div class="body">
5898         <p>Slashdot just ran a story about the European Central Bank (ECB)
5899 <a href="http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemes201210en.pdf">releasing
5900 a report (PDF)</a> about virtual currencies and
5901 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>.  It is interesting to
5902 see how a member of the bitcoin community
5903 <a href="http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/10/30/the-ecb-report-on-bitcoin-and-virtual-currencies.html">receive
5904 the report</a>.  As for the future, I suspect the central banks and
5905 the governments will outlaw bitcoin if it gain any popularity, to avoid
5906 competition.  My thoughts go to the
5907 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wörgl">Wörgl experiment</a> with
5908 negative inflation on cash which was such a success that it was
5909 terminated by the Austrian National Bank in 1933.  A successful
5910 alternative would be a threat to the current money system and gain
5911 powerful forces to work against it.</p>
5912
5913 <p>While checking out the current status of bitcoin, I also discovered
5914 that the community already seem to have
5915 <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/27/3271637/bitcoin-savings-trust-pyramid-scheme-shuts-down">experienced
5916 its first pyramid game / Ponzi scheme</a>.  Not very surprising, given
5917 how members of "small" communities tend to trust each other.  I guess
5918 enterprising crocks will try again and again, as they do anywhere
5919 wealth is available.</p>
5920
5921       </div>
5922       <div class="tags">
5923
5924
5925         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>.
5926
5927
5928       </div>
5929     </div>
5930     <div class="padding"></div>
5931
5932     <div class="entry">
5933       <div class="title">
5934         <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>
5935       </div>
5936       <div class="date">
5937         26th October 2012
5938       </div>
5939       <div class="body">
5940         <p>I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
5941 looking after the computers, mostly on the unix side, but in general
5942 all over the place.  I am also a member (and currently leader) of
5943 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG association</a>, which in turn
5944 make me a member of <a href="http://www.usenix.org/">USENIX</a>.  NUUG
5945 is an member organisation for us in Norway interested in free
5946 software, open standards and unix like operating systems, and USENIX
5947 is a US based member organisation with similar targets.  And thanks to
5948 these memberships, I get all issues of the great USENIX magazine
5949 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">;login:</a> in the
5950 mail several times a year.  The magazine is great, and I read most of
5951 it every time.</p>
5952
5953 <p>In the last issue of the USENIX magazine ;login:, there is an
5954 article by <a href="http://www.skendric.com/">Stuart Kendrick</a> from
5955 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center titled
5956 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/october-2012-volume-37-number-5/what-takes-us-down">What
5957 Takes Us Down</a>" (longer version also
5958 <a href="http://www.skendric.com/problem/incident-analysis/2012-06-30/What-Takes-Us-Down.pdf">available
5959 from his own site</a>), where he report what he found when he
5960 processed the outage reports (both planned and unplanned) from the
5961 last twelve years and classified them according to cause, time of day,
5962 etc etc.  The article is a good read to get some empirical data on
5963 what kind of problems affect a data centre, but what really inspired
5964 me was the kind of reporting they had put in place since 2000.<p>
5965
5966 <p>The centre set up a mailing list, and started to send fairly
5967 standardised messages to this list when a outage was planned or when
5968 it already occurred, to announce the plan and get feedback on the
5969 assumtions on scope and user impact.  Here is the two example from the
5970 article: First the unplanned outage:
5971
5972 <blockquote><pre>
5973 Subject:     Exchange 2003 Cluster Issues
5974 Severity:    Critical (Unplanned)
5975 Start:       Monday, May 7, 2012, 11:58
5976 End:         Monday, May 7, 2012, 12:38
5977 Duration:    40 minutes
5978 Scope:       Exchange 2003
5979 Description: The HTTPS service on the Exchange cluster crashed, triggering
5980              a cluster failover.
5981
5982 User Impact: During this period, all Exchange users were unable to
5983              access e-mail. Zimbra users were unaffected.
5984 Technician:  [xxx]
5985 </pre></blockquote>
5986
5987 Next the planned outage:
5988
5989 <blockquote><pre>
5990 Subject:     H Building Switch Upgrades
5991 Severity:    Major (Planned)
5992 Start:       Saturday, June 16, 2012, 06:00
5993 End:         Saturday, June 16, 2012, 16:00
5994 Duration:    10 hours
5995 Scope:       H2 Transport
5996 Description: Currently, Catalyst 4006s provide 10/100 Ethernet to end-
5997              stations. We will replace these with newer Catalyst
5998              4510s.
5999 User Impact: All users on H2 will be isolated from the network during
6000              this work. Afterward, they will have gigabit
6001              connectivity.
6002 Technician:  [xxx]
6003 </pre></blockquote>
6004
6005 <p>He notes in his article that the date formats and other fields have
6006 been a bit too free form to make it easy to automatically process them
6007 into a database for further analysis, and I would have used ISO 8601
6008 dates myself to make it easier to process (in other words I would ask
6009 people to write '2012-06-16 06:00 +0000' instead of the start time
6010 format listed above).  There are also other issues with the format
6011 that could be improved, read the article for the details.</p>
6012
6013 <p>I find the idea of standardising outage messages seem to be such a
6014 good idea that I would like to get it implemented here at the
6015 university too.  We do register
6016 <a href="http://www.uio.no/tjenester/it/aktuelt/planlagte-tjenesteavbrudd/">planned
6017 changes and outages in a calendar</a>, and report the to a mailing
6018 list, but we do not do so in a structured format and there is not a
6019 report to the same location for unplanned outages.  Perhaps something
6020 for other sites to consider too?</p>
6021
6022       </div>
6023       <div class="tags">
6024
6025
6026         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>.
6027
6028
6029       </div>
6030     </div>
6031     <div class="padding"></div>
6032
6033     <div class="entry">
6034       <div class="title">
6035         <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>
6036       </div>
6037       <div class="date">
6038         22nd October 2012
6039       </div>
6040       <div class="body">
6041         <p>A blog post from Martin Bekkelund today tell the story of
6042 <a href="http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/">how
6043 Amazon erased the books from a customer's kindle, locked the account
6044 and refuse to tell the customer why</a>.  If a real book store did
6045 this to a customer, it would be called breaking into private property
6046 and theft.  The story has spread around the net today.  A bit more
6047 background information is available in Norwegian from
6048 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904658/hun-ble-kastet-ut-av-amazon">digi.no</a>.
6049 It is no surprise that digital restriction mechanisms (DRM) are used
6050 this way, as it has been warned about such abuse since DRM was
6051 introduced many years back.  And Amazon proved in 2009 that it was
6052 willing to
6053 <a href="http://boingboing.net/2009/07/20/amazons-orwellian-de.html">
6054 break into customers equipment and remove the books</a> people had
6055 bought, when it removed the book 1984 by George Orwell from all the
6056 customers who had bought it.  From the official comments, it even
6057 sounded like
6058 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html">Amazon
6059 would never do that again</a>.  And here we are, three years
6060 later.</p>
6061
6062 <p>And thought this action is
6063 <a href="http://www.itavisen.no/904648/forbrukerraadet-helt-haarreisende">against
6064 Norwegian regulations and law</a>, it is according to the terms of use
6065 as written by Amazon, and it is hard to hold Amazon accountable to
6066 Norwegian laws.  It is just yet another example of unacceptable terms
6067 of use on the web, and how they are used to remove customer
6068 rights.</p>
6069
6070 <p>Luckily for electronic books, there are alternatives without
6071 unacceptable terms.  For example
6072 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about 40,000
6073 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a> (1,652
6074 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The Internet
6075 Archive</a> (3,641,797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which
6076 can read by anyone and shared with anyone.</p>
6077
6078 <p>Update 2012-10-23: This story broke in the morning on Monday. In
6079 the evening after the story had spread all across the Internet, Amazon
6080 restored the account of the user, as reported by
6081 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904675/helomvending-fra-amazon">digi.no</a>
6082 and <a href="http://nrk.no/kultur-og-underholdning/1.8368487">NRK</a>.
6083 Apparently public pressure work.  The story from Martin have seen
6084 several twitter messages per minute the last 24 hours, which is quite
6085 a lot, and is still drawing a lot of attention.  But even when the
6086 account is restored, the fundamental problem still exist.  I recommend
6087 reading two opinions from
6088 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm">Simon
6089 Phipps</a> and
6090 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/10/is-amazon-playing-fair/index.htm">Glen
6091 Moody</a> if you want to learn more about the fundamentals and more
6092 details about the original story.</p>
6093
6094       </div>
6095       <div class="tags">
6096
6097
6098         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>.
6099
6100
6101       </div>
6102     </div>
6103     <div class="padding"></div>
6104
6105     <div class="entry">
6106       <div class="title">
6107         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_fight_for_freedom_and_privacy.html">The fight for freedom and privacy</a>
6108       </div>
6109       <div class="date">
6110         18th October 2012
6111       </div>
6112       <div class="body">
6113         <p>Civil liberties and privacy in the western world are going down the
6114 drain, and it is hard to fight against it.  I try to do my best, but
6115 time is limited.  I hope you do your best too.  A few years ago I came
6116 across a marvellous drawing by
6117 <a href="http://www.claybennett.com/about.html">Clay Bennett</a>
6118 visualising some of what is going on.
6119
6120 <p><a href="http://www.claybennett.com/pages/security_fence.html">
6121 <img src="http://www.claybennett.com/images/archivetoons/security_fence.jpg"></a></p>
6122
6123 <blockquote>
6124 «They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
6125 safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.» - Benjamin Franklin
6126 </blockquote>
6127
6128 <p>Do you feel safe at the airport?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when
6129 you see a surveillance camera?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when you
6130 leave electronic traces of your behaviour and opinions?  I do not.  I
6131 just remember <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon">the
6132 Panopticon</a>, and can not help to think that we are slowly
6133 transforming our society to a huge Panopticon on our own.</p>
6134
6135       </div>
6136       <div class="tags">
6137
6138
6139         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>.
6140
6141
6142       </div>
6143     </div>
6144     <div class="padding"></div>
6145
6146     <div class="entry">
6147       <div class="title">
6148         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColonHelp_produser_sue_WordPress_to_silence_critic.html">ColonHelp produser sue WordPress to silence critic</a>
6149       </div>
6150       <div class="date">
6151         12th October 2012
6152       </div>
6153       <div class="body">
6154         <p>Thanks to a blog post by
6155 <a href="http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.no/2012/10/a-shitstorm-is-comming.html">Eddy
6156 Petrișor</a>, I became aware of yet another "alternative medicine"
6157 company using legal intimidation tactics to scare off critics.
6158 According to the originating blog post about the detox "cure"
6159 <a href="http://insulaindoielii.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/colon-help-sues-wordpress/">ColonHelp
6160 and its producers Zenyth Pharmaceuticals actions</a>, the producer
6161 sues Wordpress to get rid of the critical information.  To check if
6162 the story was for real, I contacted Automattic, the company behind
6163 wordpress.com, and they reply was "We can confirm that Zenyth is
6164 seeking a court order against WordPress / Automattic.  However, we
6165 don't believe the Terms of Service have been violated in this
6166 matter".</p>
6167
6168 <p>The story seem to be simply that a blogger checked the scientific
6169 foundation for a popular health product in Rumania, ColonHelp, and
6170 reported that there was no reason at all to believe it improved the
6171 health of its users.  This caused the company behind the product,
6172 Zenyth Pharmaceuticals, to use legal intimidation to try to silence
6173 the critic, instead of presenting its views and scientific foundation
6174 to argue its side.</p>
6175
6176 <p>This is the usual story, and the Zenyth Pharmaceuticals company
6177 deserve everyone to know how it failed to act properly.  Lets hope the
6178 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect">Streisand
6179 effect</a> can make it rethink its strategy.</p>
6180
6181 <p>What is the harm, you might think.  I suggest you take a look at
6182 <a href="http://www.whatstheharm.net/detoxification.html">a list of
6183 victims of detoxification</a>.</p>
6184
6185       </div>
6186       <div class="tags">
6187
6188
6189         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>.
6190
6191
6192       </div>
6193     </div>
6194     <div class="padding"></div>
6195
6196     <div class="entry">
6197       <div class="title">
6198         <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>
6199       </div>
6200       <div class="date">
6201          3rd October 2012
6202       </div>
6203       <div class="body">
6204         <p>I just read the blog post from Tim Retout
6205 <a href="http://retout.co.uk/blog/2012/10/02/the-library-challenge">about
6206 the computer science book collection available in his local
6207 library</a>, and just wanted to share my comment on his theory about
6208 computer books becoming obsolete so soon.  That is part of the reason
6209 why the selection is so sad in almost any local library (it is in mine
6210 too), but I believe the major contributing factor is that the people
6211 buying books to the library have no way to know a good and future
6212 computer classic from trash.  And they need to know which one will
6213 become a classic in the future, as they would normally buy one of the
6214 recently published books.</p>
6215
6216 <p>During my university years, I worked for a while at the university
6217 library, and even there the person in charge of buying computer
6218 related books (and in fact any natural science related book), did not
6219 know enough about computers to make a good educated guess.  Once, just
6220 before Christmas, they had some leftover money on the book budget and
6221 I was asked if I could pick out a lot of computer books in the
6222 university book store, for the library to buy for their collection.  I
6223 had a great time picking all the books I dreamt of buying and reading,
6224 and the books I knew were classics (like most of the
6225 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens">Stevens
6226 collection</a>).  I picked several of the generic O'Reilly books (ie
6227 documenting protocols, formats and systems, not specific versions of
6228 products) and stayed away from the 'teach yourself X in N days' class.
6229 I had a great time, and probably picked out more than a hundred books
6230 for the library that evening.</p>
6231
6232 <p>The sad fact is that there is no way a overworked librarian is
6233 going to know that for example
6234 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming">The
6235 Practice of Programming</a> is a must-have in any computer library,
6236 and they will most of the time end up picking the wrong books to buy.
6237 Perhaps you can help your local library make better choices by giving
6238 the suggestions for books to get?  I know they would love to hear from
6239 you, even if their budget might block them from getting your favourite
6240 book right away.</p>
6241
6242       </div>
6243       <div class="tags">
6244
6245
6246         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6247
6248
6249       </div>
6250     </div>
6251     <div class="padding"></div>
6252
6253     <div class="entry">
6254       <div class="title">
6255         <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>
6256       </div>
6257       <div class="date">
6258         23rd September 2012
6259       </div>
6260       <div class="body">
6261         <p>Since this summer, I have worked in my spare time on a Norwegian <a
6262 href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book <a
6263 href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
6264 The reason is that this book is a great primer on what problems exist
6265 in the current copyright laws, and I want it to be available also for
6266 those that are reluctant do read an English book.
6267
6268 When I started, I
6269 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
6270 for volunteers</a> to help me, but too few have volunteered so far,
6271 and progress is a bit slow.  Anyway, today I broken the 70 percent
6272 mark for the first rough translation.  At the moment, less than 700
6273 strings (paragraphs, index terms, titles) are left to translate.  With
6274 my current progress of 10-20 strings per day, it will take a while to
6275 complete the translation.  This graph show the updated progress:</p>
6276
6277 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
6278
6279 <p>Progress have slowed down lately due to family and work
6280 commitments.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out
6281 the project files currently available from
6282 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
6283
6284 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
6285 the updated
6286 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
6287 and
6288 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
6289 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
6290 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
6291 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
6292
6293       </div>
6294       <div class="tags">
6295
6296
6297         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>.
6298
6299
6300       </div>
6301     </div>
6302     <div class="padding"></div>
6303
6304     <div class="entry">
6305       <div class="title">
6306         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html">Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda</a>
6307       </div>
6308       <div class="date">
6309         17th September 2012
6310       </div>
6311       <div class="body">
6312         <p>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
6313 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
6314 community, I finally found time to wrap up another.  This time it is
6315 Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
6316 this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
6317 administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
6318 conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.</p>
6319
6320 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
6321
6322 <p>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
6323 in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
6324 university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
6325 Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
6326 IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
6327 got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
6328 labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
6329 the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
6330 training is anyway very important</p>
6331
6332 <p>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
6333 <a href="http://www.spse.ch/">SPSE school</a> (secondary) is a very
6334 special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
6335 all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
6336 recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
6337
6338 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
6339 project?</strong></p>
6340
6341 <p>Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
6342 already several years ago. But since the system was still not
6343 Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
6344 use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
6345 next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
6346 hole.</p>
6347
6348 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
6349 Edu?</strong></p>
6350
6351 <p>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
6352 very generous for help and hints.  Chat help is crucial, together with
6353 the mailing list.  Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
6354 engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
6355 and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
6356 can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
6357 platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
6358 head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
6359 hassle.</p>
6360
6361 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
6362 Edu?</strong></p>
6363
6364 <p>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
6365 flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
6366 there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
6367 need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
6368 devices that have specific software packages for another specific
6369 distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
6370 Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
6371 and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)</p>
6372
6373 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
6374
6375 <p>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
6376 mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
6377 combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
6378 <a href="http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html">Perceus</a>
6379 has the same...</p>
6380
6381 <p>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
6382 only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
6383 something breaks.  Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
6384 statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.</p>
6385
6386 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
6387 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
6388
6389 <P>I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
6390 cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
6391 just because they are normally not open to change.</p>
6392
6393 <p>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
6394 to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
6395 don't.</p>
6396
6397 <p>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
6398 laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
6399 we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
6400 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
6401 reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
6402 repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
6403 Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.</p>
6404
6405       </div>
6406       <div class="tags">
6407
6408
6409         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>.
6410
6411
6412       </div>
6413     </div>
6414     <div class="padding"></div>
6415
6416     <div class="entry">
6417       <div class="title">
6418         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html">IETF activity to standardise video codec</a>
6419       </div>
6420       <div class="date">
6421         15th September 2012
6422       </div>
6423       <div class="body">
6424         <p>After the
6425 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">Opus
6426 codec made</a> it into <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> as
6427 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716</a>, I had a look
6428 to see if there is any activity in IETF to standardise a video codec
6429 too, and I was happy to discover that there is some activity in this
6430 area.  A non-"working group" mailing list
6431 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/video-codec">video-codec</a>
6432 was
6433 <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
6434 formal working group should be formed.</p>
6435
6436 <p>I look forward to see how this plays out.  There is already
6437 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/video-codec/current/msg00003.html">an
6438 email from someone</a> in the MPEG group at ISO asking people to
6439 participate in the ISO group.  Given how ISO failed with OOXML and given
6440 that it so far (as far as I can remember) only have produced
6441 multimedia formats requiring royalty payments, I suspect
6442 joining the ISO group would be a complete waste of time, but I am not
6443 involved in any codec work and my opinion will not matter much.</p>
6444
6445 <p>If one of my readers is involved with codec work, I hope she will
6446 join this work to standardise a royalty free video codec within
6447 IETF.</p>
6448
6449       </div>
6450       <div class="tags">
6451
6452
6453         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>.
6454
6455
6456       </div>
6457     </div>
6458     <div class="padding"></div>
6459
6460     <div class="entry">
6461       <div class="title">
6462         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">IETF standardize its first multimedia codec: Opus</a>
6463       </div>
6464       <div class="date">
6465         12th September 2012
6466       </div>
6467       <div class="body">
6468         <p>Yesterday, <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> announced the
6469 publication of of
6470 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716, the Definition
6471 of the Opus Audio Codec</a>, a low latency, variable bandwidth, codec
6472 intended for both VoIP, film and music.  This is the first time, as
6473 far as I know, that IETF have standardized a multimedia codec.  In
6474 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3533">RFC 3533</a>, IETF
6475 standardized the OGG container format, and it has proven to be a great
6476 royalty free container for audio, video and movies.  I hope IETF will
6477 continue to standardize more royalty free codeces, after ISO and MPEG
6478 have proven incapable of securing everyone equal rights to publish
6479 multimedia content on the Internet.</p>
6480
6481 <p>IETF require two interoperating independent implementations to
6482 ratify a standard, and have so far ensured to only standardize royalty
6483 free specifications.  Both are key factors to allow everyone (rich and
6484 poor), to compete on equal terms on the Internet.</p>
6485
6486 <p>Visit the <a href="http://opus-codec.org/">Opus project page</a> if
6487 you want to learn more about the solution.</p>
6488
6489       </div>
6490       <div class="tags">
6491
6492
6493         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>.
6494
6495
6496       </div>
6497     </div>
6498     <div class="padding"></div>
6499
6500     <div class="entry">
6501       <div class="title">
6502         <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>
6503       </div>
6504       <div class="date">
6505          7th September 2012
6506       </div>
6507       <div class="body">
6508         <p>As I
6509 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
6510 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
6511 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
6512 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
6513 repository for the project</a>.</p>
6514
6515 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
6516 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
6517 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
6518 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
6519
6520 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
6521 PostScript formats at
6522 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
6523 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
6524
6525       </div>
6526       <div class="tags">
6527
6528
6529         Tags: <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>.
6530
6531
6532       </div>
6533     </div>
6534     <div class="padding"></div>
6535
6536     <div class="entry">
6537       <div class="title">
6538         <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>
6539       </div>
6540       <div class="date">
6541         23rd August 2012
6542       </div>
6543       <div class="body">
6544         <p>I came across a great comment from Simon Phipps today, about how
6545 <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/how-microsoft-was-forced-open-office-200233">Microsoft
6546 have been forced to open Office</a>, and it made me remember and
6547 revisit the great site
6548 <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">officeshots</a> which allow you
6549 to check out how different programs present the ODF file format.  I
6550 recommend both to those of my readers interested in ODF. :)</p>
6551
6552       </div>
6553       <div class="tags">
6554
6555
6556         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>.
6557
6558
6559       </div>
6560     </div>
6561     <div class="padding"></div>
6562
6563     <div class="entry">
6564       <div class="title">
6565         <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>
6566       </div>
6567       <div class="date">
6568         17th August 2012
6569       </div>
6570       <div class="body">
6571         <p>In my spare time, I currently work on a Norwegian
6572 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
6573 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
6574 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law
6575 I can give to my parents and others that are reluctant to read an
6576 English book.  It is a marvellous set of examples on how the ever
6577 expanding copyright regulations hurt culture and society.  When the
6578 translation is done, I hope to find funding to print and ship a copy
6579 to all the members of the Norwegian parliament, before they sit down
6580 to debate the latest revisions to the Norwegian copyright law.  This
6581 summer I
6582 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
6583 for volunteers</a> to help me, and I have been able to secure the
6584 valuable contribution from at least one other Norwegian.</p>
6585
6586 <p>Two days ago, we finally broke the 50% mark.  Then more than 50% of
6587 the number of strings to translate (normally paragraphs, but also
6588 titles and index entries are also counted).  All parts from the
6589 beginning up to and including chapter four is translated.  So is
6590 chapters six, seven and the conclusion.  I created a graph to show the
6591 progress:</p>
6592
6593 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
6594
6595 <p>The number of strings to translate increase as I insert the index
6596 entries into the docbook.  They were missing with the docbook version
6597 I initially started with.  There are still quite a few index entries
6598 missing, but everyone starting with A, B, O, Z and Y are done.  I
6599 currently focus on completing the index entries, to get a complete
6600 english version of the docbook source.</p>
6601
6602 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
6603 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
6604 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
6605 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
6606 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
6607 around?  I am sure there are some legal terms that are unfamiliar to
6608 me.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out the
6609 project files currently available from <a
6610 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
6611
6612 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
6613 the updated
6614 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
6615 and
6616 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
6617 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
6618 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
6619 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
6620
6621       </div>
6622       <div class="tags">
6623
6624
6625         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>.
6626
6627
6628       </div>
6629     </div>
6630     <div class="padding"></div>
6631
6632     <div class="entry">
6633       <div class="title">
6634         <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>
6635       </div>
6636       <div class="date">
6637         10th August 2012
6638       </div>
6639       <div class="body">
6640         <p>In <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> one can specify
6641 the language used at the top, and the processing pipeline will use
6642 this information to pick the correct translations for 'chapter', 'see
6643 also', 'index' etc.  And for most languages used with docbook, I guess
6644 this work just fine.  For example a German user can start the document
6645 with &lt;book lang="de"&gt;, and the document will show up with the
6646 correct content with any of the docbook processors.  This is not the
6647 case for the language
6648 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html">I
6649 am working with at the moment</a>, Norwegian Bokmål.</p>
6650
6651 <p>For a while, I was confused about which language code to use,
6652 because I was unable to find any language code that would work across
6653 all tools.  I am currently testing dblatex, xmlto, docbook-xsl, and
6654 dbtoepub, and they do not handle Norwegian Bokmål the same way.  Some
6655 of them do not handle it at all.</p>
6656
6657 <p>A bit of background information is probably needed to understand
6658 this mess.  Norwegian is not one, but two written variants.  The
6659 variants are Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål.  There are three
6660 two letter language codes associated with these languages, Norwegian
6661 is 'no', Norwegian Nynorsk is 'nn' and Norwegian Bokmål is 'nb'.
6662 Historically the 'no' language code was used for Norwegian Bokmål, but
6663 many years ago this was found to be å bad idea, and the recommendation
6664 is to use the most specific language code instead, to avoid confusion.
6665 In the transition period it is a good idea to make sure 'no' was an
6666 alias for 'nb'.</p>
6667
6668 <p>Back to docbook processing tools in Debian.  The dblatex tool only
6669 understand 'nn'.  There are translations for 'no', but not 'nb' (BTS
6670 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/684391">#684391</a>), but due to a bug
6671 (BTS <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">#682936</a>) the 'no'
6672 language code is not recognised.  The docbook-xsl tool chain only
6673 recognise 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The xmlto tool only recognise
6674 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The end result that there is no language
6675 code I can use to get the docbook file working with all of these tools
6676 at the same time. :(</p>
6677
6678 <p>The correct solution is to use &lt;book lang="nb"&gt;, but it will
6679 take time before that will work with all the free software docbook
6680 processors. :(</p>
6681
6682 <p>Oh, the joy of well integrated tools. :/</p>
6683
6684       </div>
6685       <div class="tags">
6686
6687
6688         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>.
6689
6690
6691       </div>
6692     </div>
6693     <div class="padding"></div>
6694
6695     <div class="entry">
6696       <div class="title">
6697         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html">Best way to create a docbook book?</a>
6698       </div>
6699       <div class="date">
6700         31st July 2012
6701       </div>
6702       <div class="body">
6703         <p>I tried to send this text to the
6704 <a href="https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/">docbook-apps
6705 mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org</a>, but it only accept messages
6706 from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
6707 bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
6708 try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
6709 out.</p>
6710
6711 <p>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
6712 learning curve at the moment.</p>
6713
6714 <p>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
6715 translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
6716 docbook to handle the process.  The files to build the book are
6717 available from
6718 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.
6719 The book got around 400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
6720 index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
6721 software docbook processors.  My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
6722 Squeeze.</p>
6723
6724 <p>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
6725 tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
6726 formats.  I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
6727 problems.</p>
6728
6729 <ul>
6730
6731 <li>Using dblatex, the &lt;part&gt; handling is not the way I want to,
6732    as &lt;/part&gt; do not really end the &lt;part&gt;. (See
6733    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683166">BTS report #683166</a>), the
6734    xetex backend (needed to process UTF-8) give incorrect hyphens in
6735    index references spanning several pages (See
6736    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682901">BTS report #682901</a>), and
6737    I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
6738    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">BTS report #682936</a>).</li>
6739
6740 <li>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
6741    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683163">BTS report
6742    #683163</a>).</li>
6743
6744 <li>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
6745    show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
6746    footnote and text body, see
6747    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683197">BTS report #683197</a>), and
6748    fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
6749    refs listed are not right).</li>
6750
6751 <li>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.</li>
6752
6753 <li>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
6754    index problems the xmlto + fop processing.</li>
6755
6756 </ul>
6757
6758 <p>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
6759 of this book?  Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
6760 experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?</p>
6761
6762 <p>What about HTML and EPUB versions?</p>
6763
6764       </div>
6765       <div class="tags">
6766
6767
6768         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>.
6769
6770
6771       </div>
6772     </div>
6773     <div class="padding"></div>
6774
6775     <div class="entry">
6776       <div class="title">
6777         <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>
6778       </div>
6779       <div class="date">
6780         21st July 2012
6781       </div>
6782       <div class="body">
6783         <p>I reported earlier that I am working on
6784 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">a
6785 norwegian version</a> of the book
6786 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
6787 Progress is good, and yesterday I got a major contribution from Anders
6788 Hagen Jarmund completing chapter six.  The source files as well as a
6789 PDF and EPUB version of this book are available from
6790 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
6791
6792 <p>I am happy to report that the draft for the first two chapters
6793 (preface, introduction) is complete, and three other chapters are also
6794 completely translated.  This completes 26 percent of the number of
6795 strings (equivalent to paragraphs) in the book, and there is thus 74
6796 percent left to translate.  A graph of the progress is present at the
6797 bottom of the github project page.  There is still room for more
6798 contributors.  Get in touch or send github pull requests with fixes if
6799 you got time and are willing to help make this book make it to
6800 print. :)</p>
6801
6802 <p>The book translation framework could also be a good basis for other
6803 translations, if you want the book to be available in your
6804 language.</p>
6805
6806       </div>
6807       <div class="tags">
6808
6809
6810         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>.
6811
6812
6813       </div>
6814     </div>
6815     <div class="padding"></div>
6816
6817     <div class="entry">
6818       <div class="title">
6819         <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>
6820       </div>
6821       <div class="date">
6822         16th July 2012
6823       </div>
6824       <div class="body">
6825         <p>I am currently working on a
6826 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">project
6827 to translate</a> the book
6828 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig
6829 to Norwegian.  And the source we base our translation on is the
6830 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook">docbook</a> version, to
6831 allow us to use po4a and .po files to handle the translation, and for
6832 this to work well the docbook source document need to be properly
6833 tagged.  The source files of this project is available from
6834 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
6835
6836 <p>The problem is that the docbook source have flaws, and we have
6837 no-one involved in the project that is a docbook expert.  Is there a
6838 docbook expert somewhere that is interested in helping us create a
6839 well tagged docbook version of the book, and adjust our build process
6840 for the PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book?  This will provide a
6841 well tagged English version (our source document), and make it a lot
6842 easier for us to create a good Norwegian version.  If you can and want
6843 to help, please get in touch with me or fork the github project and
6844 send pull requests with fixes. :)</p>
6845
6846       </div>
6847       <div class="tags">
6848
6849
6850         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>.
6851
6852
6853       </div>
6854     </div>
6855     <div class="padding"></div>
6856
6857     <div class="entry">
6858       <div class="title">
6859         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html">Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg</a>
6860       </div>
6861       <div class="date">
6862          9th July 2012
6863       </div>
6864       <div class="body">
6865         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
6866 Skolelinux</a> project have users all over the globe, but until
6867 recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
6868 country Sweden.  This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
6869 this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
6870 to adjust and scale the just released
6871 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
6872 Wheezy</a> setup to his liking.  He granted me an interview, and I am
6873 happy to share his answers with you here.</p>
6874
6875 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
6876
6877 <p>I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
6878 the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
6879 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
6880 "folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups.  In
6881 Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
6882 in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
6883 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
6884 perspective when working with IT.</p>
6885
6886 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
6887 project?</strong></p>
6888
6889 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
6890 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
6891 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
6892 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
6893 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
6894 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
6895
6896 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
6897 Edu?</strong></p>
6898
6899 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
6900 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
6901 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
6902 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
6903 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
6904 well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
6905 when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
6906 showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
6907 mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
6908 same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
6909 setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
6910 workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
6911 thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
6912 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
6913 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
6914 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
6915 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
6916 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time.  Our
6917 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
6918 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
6919 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
6920 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
6921 quicker to update.
6922
6923 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
6924 Edu?</strong></p>
6925
6926 <p>Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
6927 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
6928 year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
6929 sound from working with them.  It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
6930 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
6931 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.</p>
6932
6933 <p>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
6934 install time.  In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
6935 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
6936 That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
6937 Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
6938 to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
6939 support for single-sign on.  That will make the transition to free
6940 software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
6941 need.  No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
6942 some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
6943 run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes.  We run a journalist
6944 education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
6945 by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association).  Our
6946 education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
6947 are done.  This is important if you want to get a job.</p>
6948
6949 <p>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
6950 magazines.  We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
6951 market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
6952 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
6953 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
6954 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
6955 edit and compile a newspaper.  But politically at our school we are not
6956 there yet.  And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.</p>
6957
6958 <p>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
6959 the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
6960 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
6961 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
6962 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
6963 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
6964 studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
6965 want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise.  Those
6966 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
6967 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
6968 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
6969 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
6970 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
6971 sound file.</p>
6972
6973 <p>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
6974 will try.  The problem is the students have certain expectations when
6975 they start an education towards a profession.  So the programs has to
6976 look and feel professional.  Good thing with radio, there are many
6977 programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
6978 as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
6979 program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
6980 learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
6981 the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.</p>
6982
6983 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
6984
6985 <p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days.  I use almost
6986 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
6987 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
6988 )</p>
6989
6990 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
6991 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
6992
6993 <p>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
6994 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
6995 it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
6996 flawlessly.  The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
6997 will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
6998 students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
6999 clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
7000 idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
7001 the administration.  It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
7002 open source, if the principal has to run Windows.  It also creates a
7003 problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
7004 will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
7005 support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
7006 desktop is essential.  At least at our school, where we have mixed
7007 level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
7008
7009 <p>Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
7010 useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
7011 article <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/481607/">Radio station
7012 management with Airtime</a>,
7013 <a href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/">Airtime</a> which
7014 claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
7015 <a href="http://www.rivendellaudio.org/">Rivendell</a> which claim to
7016 be complete radio broadcast automation solution.  All of them seem
7017 useful to the aspiring radio producer.</p>
7018
7019       </div>
7020       <div class="tags">
7021
7022
7023         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>.
7024
7025
7026       </div>
7027     </div>
7028     <div class="padding"></div>
7029
7030     <div class="entry">
7031       <div class="title">
7032         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html">Why do schools waste money on IT?</a>
7033       </div>
7034       <div class="date">
7035          8th July 2012
7036       </div>
7037       <div class="body">
7038         <p>In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
7039 of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
7040 in schools and municipalities.  We provide what the happy users of
7041 Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
7042 alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution.  I
7043 was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
7044 Steinberg in his blog post
7045 "<a href="http://www.mysociety.org/2012/06/19/can-you-recognize-the-million-pound-chair/">Can
7046 you recognize the million pound chair?</a>".  Read it and weep for the
7047 spending of your tax money.</p>
7048
7049 <p>Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
7050 projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
7051 causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
7052 to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
7053 public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
7054 purchases.</p>
7055
7056       </div>
7057       <div class="tags">
7058
7059
7060         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>.
7061
7062
7063       </div>
7064     </div>
7065     <div class="padding"></div>
7066
7067     <div class="entry">
7068       <div class="title">
7069         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html">Free Timetabling Software - nice free software</a>
7070       </div>
7071       <div class="date">
7072          7th July 2012
7073       </div>
7074       <div class="body">
7075         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
7076 Skolelinux</a> is a large collection of end user and school specific
7077 software.  It is one of the packages not installed by default but
7078 provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
7079 is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
7080 information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
7081 the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
7082 receive.  The software is
7083
7084 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/">named FET</a>, and it provide a
7085 graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
7086 result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
7087 both teachers and students.  It is available both for
7088 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download.html">Linux, MacOSX and
7089 Windows</a>.</p>
7090
7091 <p>This is <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/features.html">the
7092 feature list</a>, liftet from the project web site:</p>
7093
7094 <p><ul>
7095
7096   <li>FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
7097     You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it </li>
7098
7099   <li>Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
7100     (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
7101     (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
7102     (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
7103     (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
7104     (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
7105     sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
7106     (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
7107     </li>
7108
7109   <li>Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
7110     semi-automatic or manual allocation</li>
7111
7112   <li>Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
7113     GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports </li>
7114
7115   <li>Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
7116     with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)</li>
7117
7118   <li>Import/export from CSV format</li>
7119
7120   <li>The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
7121     formats </li>
7122
7123   <li>Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
7124     and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
7125     non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
7126     (as separate sets)</li>
7127
7128   <li>Each constraint has a weight percentage, from 0.0% to 100.0%
7129     (but some special constraints are allowed to have only 100% weight
7130     percentage)</li>
7131
7132   <li>Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
7133     demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
7134     memory):
7135     <ul>
7136       <li>Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day: 60</li>
7137       <li>Maximum number of working days per week: 35</li>
7138       <li>Maximum total number of teachers: 6000</li>
7139       <li>Maximum total number of sets of students: 30000</li>
7140       <li>Maximum total number of subjects: 6000</li>
7141       <li>Virtually unlimited number of activity tags</li>
7142       <li>Maximum number of activities: 30000</li>
7143       <li>Maximum number of rooms: 6000</li>
7144       <li>Maximum number of buildings: 6000</li>
7145       <li>Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
7146           students sets for each activity.  (it is possible
7147           also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
7148           activity)</li>
7149       <li>Virtually unlimited number of time constraints</li>
7150       <li>Virtually unlimited number of space constraints</li>
7151     </ul></li>
7152
7153   <li>A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
7154     <ul>
7155       <li>Break periods</li>
7156       <li>For teacher(s):
7157         <ul>
7158           <li>Not available periods</li>
7159           <li>Max/min days per week</li>
7160           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
7161           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
7162           <li>Min hours daily</li>
7163           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
7164
7165           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
7166             days per week</li>
7167         </ul></li>
7168       <li>For students (sets):
7169         <ul>
7170           <li>Not available periods</li>
7171           <li>Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)</li>
7172           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
7173           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
7174           <li>Min hours daily</li>
7175           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
7176
7177           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
7178             days per week</li>
7179         </ul></li>
7180       <li>For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
7181         <ul>
7182           <li>A single preferred starting time</li>
7183           <li>A set of preferred starting times</li>
7184           <li>A set of preferred time slots</li>
7185           <li>Min/max days between them</li>
7186           <li>End(s) students day</li>
7187           <li>Same starting time/day/hour</li>
7188           <li>Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
7189             flexible constraint, useful in many situations)</li>
7190           <li>Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for 2 or 3 (sub)activities)</li>
7191           <li>Not overlapping</li>
7192           <li>Max simultaneous in selected time slots</li>
7193           <li>Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities</li>
7194         </ul></li>
7195     </ul></li>
7196
7197   <li>A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
7198     <ul>
7199       <li>Room not available periods</li>
7200       <li>For teacher(s):
7201         <ul>
7202           <li>Home room(s)</li>
7203           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
7204           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
7205         </ul>
7206       </li>
7207
7208       <li>For students (sets):
7209         <ul>
7210           <li>Home room(s)</li>
7211           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
7212           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
7213         </ul>
7214       </li>
7215       <li>Preferred room(s):
7216         <ul>
7217           <li>For a subject</li>
7218           <li>For an activity tag</li>
7219           <li>For a subject and an activity tag</li>
7220           <li>Individually for a (sub)activity</li>
7221         </ul>
7222       </li>
7223
7224       <li>For a set of activities:
7225         <ul>
7226           <li>Occupy a maximum number of different rooms</li>
7227         </ul>
7228       </li>
7229     </ul>
7230   </li>
7231 </ul></p>
7232
7233 <p>I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
7234 planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it.  If you
7235 need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
7236 manually, check it out.
7237
7238 A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
7239 <a href="http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/2012/03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/">a
7240 blog post from MarvelSoft</a>.  If you find FET useful, please provide
7241 a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
7242 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos">Debian Edu HowTo
7243 section</a>.</p>
7244
7245       </div>
7246       <div class="tags">
7247
7248
7249         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>.
7250
7251
7252       </div>
7253     </div>
7254     <div class="padding"></div>
7255
7256     <div class="entry">
7257       <div class="title">
7258         <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>
7259       </div>
7260       <div class="date">
7261          3rd July 2012
7262       </div>
7263       <div class="body">
7264         <p>In the NUUG <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a>
7265 project (Norwegian version of
7266 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> from
7267 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>), we have discovered
7268 a problem with the municipalities using
7269 <a href="http://www.zimbra.com/">Zimbra</a>.  When FiksGataMi send a
7270 problem report to the government, the email From: address is set to
7271 the address of the person reporting the problem, while envelope sender
7272 is set to the FiksGataMi contact address.  The intention is to make
7273 sure the municipality send any replies to the person reporting the
7274 problem, while any email delivery problems are sent to us in NUUG.
7275 This work well in most cases, but not for Karmøy municipality using
7276 Zimbra.  Karmøy is using the vacation message function in Zimbra to
7277 send an automatic reply to report that the message has been received,
7278 and this message is sent to the envelope sender and not the address in
7279 the From: header.</p>
7280
7281 <p>This causes the automatic message from Karmøy to go to NUUGs
7282 request-tracker instance instead of to the person reporting the
7283 problem.  We can not really change the envelope sender address, as
7284 this would make it impossible for us to discover when there are
7285 problems with the MTAs receiving problem reports.  We have been in
7286 contact with the people at Karmøy municipality, and they are willing
7287 to adjust Zimbra if something can be changed there to get a better
7288 behaviour.</p>
7289
7290 <p>The default behaviour of Zimbra is as far as I can tell according
7291 to the specification in RFC 3834, which recommend that vacation
7292 messages are sent to the envelope sender and not to the From: address.
7293 But I wonder if it is possible to adjust or configure Zimbra to behave
7294 differently.  Anyone know?  Please let us know at
7295 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
7296 (at) nuug.no</a>.</p>
7297
7298       </div>
7299       <div class="tags">
7300
7301
7302         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>.
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/Debian_Edu_interview__Jos__Luis_Redrejo_Rodr_guez.html">Debian Edu interview: José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez</a>
7312       </div>
7313       <div class="date">
7314         26th June 2012
7315       </div>
7316       <div class="body">
7317         <p>I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
7318 another interview with the people behind
7319 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
7320 This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
7321 helpers from Spain.  His effort was the reason we added support for
7322 several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
7323 Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
7324 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
7325 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
7326
7327 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
7328
7329 <p>I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
7330 ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
7331 ICT in schools</p>
7332
7333 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
7334 project?</strong></p>
7335
7336 <p>At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
7337 project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
7338 similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
7339 I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.</p>
7340
7341 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
7342 Edu?</strong></p>
7343
7344 <p>A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
7345 really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
7346 concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
7347 been used everyday inside Debian Edu.</p>
7348
7349 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
7350 Edu?</strong></p>
7351
7352 <p>Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
7353 economical and technical resources in the different countries don't
7354 allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
7355 approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
7356 lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
7357 technologies in school.</p>
7358
7359 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
7360
7361 <p>Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
7362 between Iceweasel, <a href="http://www.geany.org/">Geany</a> and
7363 <a href="http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator">Terminator</a>.</p>
7364
7365 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
7366 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
7367
7368 <p>I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
7369 different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
7370 environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
7371 laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.</p>
7372
7373 <p>Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
7374 not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
7375 universities. So different strategies are needed.</p>
7376
7377 <p>But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
7378 we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
7379 our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
7380 multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
7381 more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
7382 using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in
7383 the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
7384 them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
7385 working there.</p>
7386
7387       </div>
7388       <div class="tags">
7389
7390
7391         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>.
7392
7393
7394       </div>
7395     </div>
7396     <div class="padding"></div>
7397
7398     <div class="entry">
7399       <div class="title">
7400         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
7401       </div>
7402       <div class="date">
7403         24th June 2012
7404       </div>
7405       <div class="body">
7406         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
7407 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
7408 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
7409 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
7410 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
7411 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
7412 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
7413 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
7414 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
7415 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
7416 missing in my book.</p>
7417
7418 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
7419 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
7420 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
7421 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
7422 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
7423 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
7424 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
7425
7426       </div>
7427       <div class="tags">
7428
7429
7430         Tags: <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>.
7431
7432
7433       </div>
7434     </div>
7435     <div class="padding"></div>
7436
7437     <div class="entry">
7438       <div class="title">
7439         <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>
7440       </div>
7441       <div class="date">
7442         11th June 2012
7443       </div>
7444       <div class="body">
7445         <p>During my work on
7446 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.nb.html">Debian Edu
7447 based on Squeeze</a>, I came across some issues that should be
7448 addressed in the Wheezy release.  I finally found time to wrap up my
7449 notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
7450 explanation.</p>
7451
7452 <p><ul>
7453
7454 <li>We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
7455 changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
7456 with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
7457 system depend on tasksel tasks in
7458 /usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
7459 installation.</li>
7460
7461 <li>Enable Kerberos login for more services.  Now with the Kerberos
7462 foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
7463 services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions.  We should
7464 at least try to enable it for these services:
7465 <ul>
7466
7467   <li>CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
7468     quotas.</li>
7469   <li>Nagios for admins checking the system status.</li>
7470   <li>GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.</li>
7471   <li>LDAP for admins updating LDAP.</li>
7472   <li>Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.</li>
7473   <li>ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.</li>
7474
7475 </ul></li>
7476
7477 <li>When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
7478 authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
7479 use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
7480 is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind</li>
7481
7482 <li>Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install.  The split made
7483 sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
7484 inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.</li>
7485
7486 <li>Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
7487 touching the disk if the disk is too small.  This is
7488 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/653305">BTS report #653305</a> and the
7489 d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
7490 it and upload.  After this is done we need to adjust
7491 debian-edu-install to use this new hook.</li>
7492
7493 <li>Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
7494 time config).  LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
7495 packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
7496 in Wheezy.
7497
7498 <li>Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
7499 the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
7500 up KDE login on slow networks.</li>
7501
7502 <li>Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
7503 change on first login.  This is useful when handing out password on
7504 paper, to make sure only the user know the password.  This require
7505 fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.</li>
7506
7507 <li>Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
7508 The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
7509 familiar with GUIs.  This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
7510 have it available where the admin will be looking for it..</li>
7511
7512 <li>We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
7513 actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses).  None of the
7514 Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.</li>
7515
7516 <li>We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
7517 using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
7518 packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.</li>
7519
7520 <li>We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
7521 when changing password using the Kerberos protocol.  The hook was
7522 requested in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/588968">BTS report
7523 #588968</a> and is now available in Wheezy.  We might need to write a
7524 MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.</li>
7525
7526 <li>We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
7527 <ul>
7528
7529 <li>reduce the number of chemistry visualisers</li>
7530 <li>consider dropping xpaint</li>
7531 <li>and probably more?</li>
7532 </ul></li>
7533
7534 <li>Some hardware need external firmware to work properly.  This is
7535 mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
7536 examples too.  For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
7537 firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
7538 some GUI to do this.  Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
7539 could consider using their packages.  At the moment we have some
7540 command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
7541 for the LTSP chroot).</li>
7542
7543
7544 <li>In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options.  We
7545 should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
7546 install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
7547 use.</li>
7548
7549 <li>The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
7550 interesting educational packages.  We should work on the package
7551 tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
7552 packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
7553 new applications with a simple mouse click.</li>
7554
7555 <li>The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
7556 with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
7557 be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
7558 filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled.  We should
7559 implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
7560 instead of the "it is documented" method of today.</li>
7561
7562 <li>A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
7563 "take over" the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
7564 There are at least three implementations,
7565 <a href="italc.sourceforge.net/">italc</a>,
7566 <a href="http://www.itais.net/help/en/">controlaula</a> og
7567 <a href="http://www.epoptes.org/">epoptes</a> and we should pick one of
7568 them and make it trivial to set it up in a school.  The challenges is
7569 how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
7570 and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
7571 given room.</li>
7572
7573 <li>Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
7574 should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
7575 the Debian Edu network.  Not quite sure how.  Perhaps we should
7576 provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
7577 them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
7578 configuration and data with the central server.  This should be
7579 investigated.</li>
7580
7581 </ul></p>
7582
7583 <p>I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
7584 version.</p>
7585
7586       </div>
7587       <div class="tags">
7588
7589
7590         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>.
7591
7592
7593       </div>
7594     </div>
7595     <div class="padding"></div>
7596
7597     <div class="entry">
7598       <div class="title">
7599         <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>
7600       </div>
7601       <div class="date">
7602          9th June 2012
7603       </div>
7604       <div class="body">
7605         <p>Slashdot got a story about Intel planning a
7606 <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
7607 with face recognition</a> to recognise the viewer, and it occurred to
7608 me that it would be more interesting to turn it around, and do face
7609 recognition on the TV image itself.  It could let the viewer know who
7610 is present on the screen, and perhaps look up their credibility,
7611 company affiliation, previous appearances etc for the viewer to better
7612 evaluate what is being said and done.  That would be a feature I would
7613 be willing to pay for.</p>
7614
7615 <p>I would not be willing to pay for a TV that point a camera on my
7616 household, like the big brother feature apparently proposed by Intel.
7617 It is the telescreen idea fetched straight out of the book
7618 <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt">1984 by George
7619 Orwell</a>.</p>
7620
7621       </div>
7622       <div class="tags">
7623
7624
7625         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>.
7626
7627
7628       </div>
7629     </div>
7630     <div class="padding"></div>
7631
7632     <div class="entry">
7633       <div class="title">
7634         <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>
7635       </div>
7636       <div class="date">
7637          6th June 2012
7638       </div>
7639       <div class="body">
7640         <p>A few days ago
7641 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">I
7642 reported how to get</a> the support status out of Dell using an
7643 unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was
7644 <a href="http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2012-February/045959.html">discovered
7645 by Daniel De Marco in february</a>.  Combined with my web scraping
7646 code for HP, Dell and IBM
7647 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">from
7648 2009</a>, I got inspired and wrote
7649 <a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/">a
7650 web service</a> based on Scraperwiki to make it easy to look up the
7651 support status and get a machine readable result back.</p>
7652
7653 <p>This is what it look like at the moment when asking for the JSON
7654 output:
7655
7656 <blockquote><pre>
7657 % 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>
7658 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": ""})
7659 %
7660 </pre></blockquote>
7661
7662 <p>It currently support Dell and HP, and I am hoping for help to add
7663 support for other vendors.  The python source is available on
7664 Scraperwiki and I welcome help with adding more features.</p>
7665
7666       </div>
7667       <div class="tags">
7668
7669
7670         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>.
7671
7672
7673       </div>
7674     </div>
7675     <div class="padding"></div>
7676
7677     <div class="entry">
7678       <div class="title">
7679         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel</a>
7680       </div>
7681       <div class="date">
7682          2nd June 2012
7683       </div>
7684       <div class="body">
7685         <p>Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
7686 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
7687 mailing list.  He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
7688 thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
7689 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
7690 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
7691
7692 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
7693
7694 <p>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
7695 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
7696 (Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
7697 by Angela).</p>
7698
7699 <p>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
7700 and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
7701 touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
7702 the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
7703 becoming an osteopath.</p>
7704
7705 <p>Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
7706 have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
7707 introducing free software into schools. The project's name is
7708 "IT-Zukunft Schule" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
7709 skills with communication skills.</p>
7710
7711 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
7712 project?</strong></p>
7713
7714 <p>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
7715 "IT-Zukunft Schule" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
7716 reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
7717 people said.  From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
7718 distributions that target being used for school networks.</p>
7719
7720 <p>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
7721 commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
7722 Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
7723 went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
7724 and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
7725 Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
7726 got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
7727 attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
7728 the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.</p>
7729
7730 <p>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
7731 people.  People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
7732 protection experts, other IT professionals.</p>
7733
7734 <p>We came to two conclusions:</p>
7735
7736 <p>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
7737 bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
7738 by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
7739 whereas most of each school's requirements could mapped by a standard
7740 IT solution.  The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
7741 customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
7742 possible.  In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
7743 standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
7744 degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
7745 locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
7746 point.</p>
7747
7748 <p>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
7749 all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
7750 for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
7751 has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
7752 of people into using IT and teaching with IT. "IT-Zukunft Schule"
7753 tries to provide an approach for this.</p>
7754
7755 <p>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
7756 defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
7757 Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school's IT
7758 equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
7759 teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
7760 spare time.</p>
7761
7762 <p>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
7763 networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
7764 here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
7765 teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
7766 non-existent until 2010/2011.</p>
7767
7768 <p>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
7769 class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
7770 avoidance do exist.</p>
7771
7772 <p>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
7773 social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
7774 for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
7775 several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
7776 they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
7777 at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
7778 and probably a gain for all.</p>
7779
7780 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
7781 Edu?</strong></p>
7782
7783 <p>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
7784 any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
7785 the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
7786 workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
7787 project communication, honest communication within the group of
7788 developers, etc.</p>
7789
7790 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
7791 Edu?</strong></p>
7792
7793 <p>Every coin has two sides:</p>
7794
7795 <p>Technically: <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/311188">BTS issue
7796 #311188</a>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
7797 client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
7798 should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
7799 about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
7800 several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
7801 contribute).</p>
7802
7803 <p>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
7804 find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
7805 Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
7806 promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
7807 there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
7808 these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
7809 all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
7810 meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
7811 there being rather disconnected from the development department of
7812 Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
7813
7814 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
7815
7816 <p>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.</p>
7817
7818 <p>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
7819 serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
7820 more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.</p>
7821
7822 <p>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
7823 development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
7824 PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
7825 is being integrated in Ubuntu's software center.</p>
7826
7827 <p>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
7828 as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
7829 I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
7830 the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
7831 whiteboard.</p>
7832
7833 <p>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.</p>
7834
7835 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
7836 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
7837
7838 <p>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
7839 enrol people.</p>
7840
7841       </div>
7842       <div class="tags">
7843
7844
7845         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>.
7846
7847
7848       </div>
7849     </div>
7850     <div class="padding"></div>
7851
7852     <div class="entry">
7853       <div class="title">
7854         <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>
7855       </div>
7856       <div class="date">
7857          1st June 2012
7858       </div>
7859       <div class="body">
7860         <p>A few years ago I wrote
7861 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">how
7862 to extract support status</a> for your Dell and HP servers.  Recently
7863 I have learned from colleges here at the
7864 <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> that Dell have
7865 made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service.  Given
7866 the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
7867 readable information about the support status.  This perl code
7868 demonstrate how to do it:</p>
7869
7870 <p><pre>
7871 use strict;
7872 use warnings;
7873 use SOAP::Lite;
7874 use Data::Dumper;
7875 my $GUID = '11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111';
7876 my $App = 'test';
7877 my $servicetag = $ARGV[0] or die "Please supply a servicetag. $!\n";
7878 my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
7879 my $s = SOAP::Lite
7880     -> uri('http://support.dell.com/WebServices/')
7881     -> on_action( sub { join '', @_ } )
7882     -> proxy('http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx')
7883     ;
7884 my $a = $s->GetAssetInformation(
7885     SOAP::Data->name('guid')->value($GUID)->type(''),
7886     SOAP::Data->name('applicationName')->value($App)->type(''),
7887     SOAP::Data->name('serviceTags')->value($servicetag)->type(''),
7888 );
7889 print Dumper($a -> result) ;
7890 </pre></p>
7891
7892 <p>The output can look like this:</p>
7893
7894 <p><pre>
7895 $VAR1 = {
7896           'Asset' => {
7897                      'Entitlements' => {
7898                                        'EntitlementData' => [
7899                                                             {
7900                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
7901                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
7902                                                               'Provider' => '',
7903                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
7904                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
7905                                                             },
7906                                                             {
7907                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
7908                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
7909                                                               'Provider' => '',
7910                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
7911                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
7912                                                             },
7913                                                             {
7914                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
7915                                                               'EndDate' => '2007-07-29T00:00:00',
7916                                                               'Provider' => '',
7917                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
7918                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
7919                                                             }
7920                                                           ]
7921                                      },
7922                      'AssetHeaderData' => {
7923                                           'SystemModel' => 'GX620',
7924                                           'ServiceTag' => '8DSGD2J',
7925                                           'SystemShipDate' => '2006-07-29T19:00:00-05:00',
7926                                           'Buid' => '2323',
7927                                           'Region' => 'Europe',
7928                                           'SystemID' => 'PLX_GX620',
7929                                           'SystemType' => 'OptiPlex'
7930                                         }
7931                    }
7932         };
7933 </pre></p>
7934
7935 <p>I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
7936 service outside the
7937 <a href="http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation">inline
7938 documentation</a>, and according to
7939 <a href="http://iboyd.net/index.php/2012/02/14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/">one
7940 comment</a> it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
7941 scraping HTML pages. :)</p>
7942
7943 <p>Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service.  If
7944 you know of one, drop me an email. :)</p>
7945
7946       </div>
7947       <div class="tags">
7948
7949
7950         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>.
7951
7952
7953       </div>
7954     </div>
7955     <div class="padding"></div>
7956
7957     <div class="entry">
7958       <div class="title">
7959         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html">First monitor calibration using ColorHug</a>
7960       </div>
7961       <div class="date">
7962         31st May 2012
7963       </div>
7964       <div class="body">
7965         <p>A few days ago my color calibration gadget
7966 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">ColorHug</a> arrived in the
7967 mail, and I've had a few days to test it.  As all my machines are
7968 running Debian Squeeze, where
7969 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">the
7970 calibration software</a> is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid),
7971 I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD.  This worked
7972 just fine.  So far I have only done the quick calibration.  It was
7973 slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for
7974 another day.</p>
7975
7976 <p>After calibration, I get a
7977 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile">ICC color
7978 profile</a> file that can be passed to programs understanding such
7979 tools.  KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched
7980 for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X.
7981 xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single
7982 monitor setups.  But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen
7983 attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct
7984 monitor.  After searching a bit, I
7985 <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347896">discovered</a>
7986 that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted,
7987 and a simple</p>
7988
7989 <p><pre>
7990 dispwin -d 1 profile.icc
7991 </pre></p>
7992
7993 <p>later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor.  The
7994 result was a bit more pink than I expected.  I guess I picked the
7995 wrong monitor type for the "led" monitor I got, but the result is good
7996 enough for now.</p>
7997
7998       </div>
7999       <div class="tags">
8000
8001
8002         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8003
8004
8005       </div>
8006     </div>
8007     <div class="padding"></div>
8008
8009     <div class="entry">
8010       <div class="title">
8011         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html">Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter</a>
8012       </div>
8013       <div class="date">
8014         27th May 2012
8015       </div>
8016       <div class="body">
8017         <p>In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the
8018 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
8019 mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
8020 up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils.  His name was Ralf
8021 Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
8022 since then, helping to make sure the
8023 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
8024 Squeeze</a> release became as good as it is..</p>
8025
8026 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
8027
8028 <p>I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
8029 Mathematics, and Computer Science ("Informatik"). During the past 12
8030 years (since 2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
8031 also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
8032 O- or A-level ("Abitur").  For quite as long, I've been taking care of
8033 our computer network.</p>
8034
8035 <p>Now, in my early 40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
8036 spare time together with my wife, our son (3 years) and our daughter
8037 (4 months).</p>
8038
8039 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
8040 project?</strong></p>
8041
8042 <p>We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
8043 my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
8044 very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
8045 ("Best Newcomer Distribution", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
8046 to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt, 2005 (IIRC). Few
8047 months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
8048 (Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others.  For more
8049 than 7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
8050 our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
8051 approximately 50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
8052 locally installed Skolelinux image.  As a consequence, I joined quite
8053 a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
8054 (Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
8055 one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.</p>
8056
8057 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
8058 Edu?</strong></p>
8059
8060 <p>Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
8061 project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
8062 the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
8063 computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
8064 free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
8065 up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
8066 labs).  Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
8067 administration costs tend towards zero.</p>
8068
8069 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
8070 Edu?</strong></p>
8071
8072 <p>While Debian's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
8073 might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
8074 budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
8075 supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
8076 office packages or desktop environments.  These schools have the
8077 option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
8078 capacity to do so.  Another issue is that Debian release cycles
8079 include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
8080 power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
8081 within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
8082 the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
8083 i.e. harder to understand for novices.</p>
8084
8085 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
8086
8087 <p>LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
8088 KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
8089 PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)</p>
8090
8091 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
8092 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
8093
8094 <p><ol>
8095
8096 <li>Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
8097 people really "own" their hardware, to make them understand the
8098 difference between proprietary software products, and free software
8099 developing.</li>
8100
8101 <li>Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany's public schools
8102 there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
8103 licenses), so schools won't benefit from any savings here. This
8104 privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
8105 share among German Skolelinux schools.</li>
8106
8107 <li>Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
8108 trained. In many cases, teachers' software customs are respected by
8109 decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.</li>
8110
8111 <li>Don't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
8112 free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
8113 general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
8114 shared world wide (school books e.g.).</li>
8115
8116 <li>Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
8117 office suites is much above 20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don't
8118 need to know the "ribbon menu" in order to get employed.</li>
8119
8120 <li>Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.</li>
8121
8122 <li>Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
8123 for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
8124 Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials.  And
8125 keep sending documents in ODF formats.</li>
8126
8127 </ol></p>
8128
8129       </div>
8130       <div class="tags">
8131
8132
8133         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>.
8134
8135
8136       </div>
8137     </div>
8138     <div class="padding"></div>
8139
8140     <div class="entry">
8141       <div class="title">
8142         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html">The cost of ODF and OOXML</a>
8143       </div>
8144       <div class="date">
8145         26th May 2012
8146       </div>
8147       <div class="body">
8148         <p>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
8149 claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
8150 government.  I just sent him an email to let him know that his
8151 assumption are most likely wrong.  Sharing it here in case some of my
8152 blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.</p>
8153
8154 <p><blockquote> <p>Hi.  I just noted your
8155 <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>
8156 comment:</p>
8157
8158 <p><blockquote>"They're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
8159 with the help of Google Translate I can't find any figures about the
8160 savings of "moving to a flexible two standard" as claimed by the
8161 Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let's take
8162 it, and the £500 million figure for the UK, on trust."
8163 </blockquote></p>
8164
8165 <p>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated.  I believe it is
8166 the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around 2007,
8167 and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
8168 at the content.  In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
8169 will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
8170 existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
8171 formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
8172 ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
8173 10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver.  In
8174 reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
8175 receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
8176 would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not 20 minutes
8177 of wasted effort.</p>
8178
8179 <p>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
8180 transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending 10
8181 minutes converting to ODF. :)</p>
8182
8183 <p>See
8184 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php</a>
8185 and
8186 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php</a>
8187 for background information.  Norwegian only, sorry. :)</p>
8188 </blockquote></p>
8189
8190       </div>
8191       <div class="tags">
8192
8193
8194         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>.
8195
8196
8197       </div>
8198     </div>
8199     <div class="padding"></div>
8200
8201     <div class="entry">
8202       <div class="title">
8203         <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>
8204       </div>
8205       <div class="date">
8206         18th May 2012
8207       </div>
8208       <div class="body">
8209         <p>In january, I
8210 <a href="http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2012/01/17/colorhug-has-arrived/">discovered
8211 the ColorHug</a>, a USB dongle from
8212 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">Hughski</a> to calibrate
8213 the color on a computer screen.  The software required is
8214 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">included
8215 in Debian</a>, and I decided back then to preorder from the next
8216 batch.  Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the
8217 opportunity to order.  Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the
8218 delivery.  I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it
8219 should go in the mail on monday. :)</p>
8220
8221 <p>If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended
8222 colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software
8223 drivers. :)</p>
8224
8225       </div>
8226       <div class="tags">
8227
8228
8229         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8230
8231
8232       </div>
8233     </div>
8234     <div class="padding"></div>
8235
8236     <div class="entry">
8237       <div class="title">
8238         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html">Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner</a>
8239       </div>
8240       <div class="date">
8241         13th May 2012
8242       </div>
8243       <div class="body">
8244         <p>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
8245 publish another interview with the people behind
8246 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
8247 This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
8248 years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
8249 details get right before release.
8250
8251 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
8252
8253 <p>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
8254 Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany.  I worked nearly 20 years as
8255 certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
8256 international company for machinery and equipment.  Since 2011 I'm a
8257 certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
8258 documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer.  From April this year
8259 I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
8260 manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.</p>
8261
8262 <p>My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
8263 it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
8264 home since 2006.</p>
8265
8266 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
8267 project?</strong></p>
8268
8269 <p>Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
8270 daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
8271 middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
8272 him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
8273 asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
8274 computers in use. I answered: "Yes".</p>
8275
8276 <p>Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
8277 running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
8278 gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
8279 network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
8280 and with a lot of fun.  About one year later the school was connected
8281 to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
8282 building.  That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
8283 Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
8284 being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
8285 costs for things like licence and software.  So I searched for a
8286 school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
8287 people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
8288 prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school.  I
8289 managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
8290 the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
8291 Bielefeld in December of 2006.</p>
8292
8293 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
8294 Edu?</strong></p>
8295
8296 <p>When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
8297 for me as today.</p>
8298
8299 <p>In the past there were advantages like:</p>
8300
8301 <p><ul>
8302
8303 <li>I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
8304 they had little money to spent for computers and software.</li>
8305
8306 <li>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
8307 cost.</li>
8308
8309 <li>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
8310 schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
8311 clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
8312 infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
8313 server</li>
8314
8315 <li>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
8316 school.</li>
8317
8318 </ul></p>
8319
8320 <p>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
8321 came up in this way:</p>
8322
8323 <p><ul>
8324
8325 <li>Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
8326 now.</li>
8327
8328 <li>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
8329 have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
8330 because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.</li>
8331
8332 <li>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
8333 management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
8334 interfaces used in the past.</li>
8335
8336 <li>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
8337 different needs.</li>
8338
8339 <li>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.</li>
8340
8341 <li>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
8342 world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
8343 is sharing knowledge and minds.</li>
8344
8345 <li>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
8346 solved today by Debian Edu. </li>
8347
8348 </ul></p>
8349
8350 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
8351 Edu?</strong></p>
8352
8353 <p><ul>
8354
8355 <li>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
8356 their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
8357 whole municipality areas.</li>
8358
8359 <li>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
8360 enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
8361 politicians.</li>
8362
8363 <li>Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.</li>
8364
8365 </ul></p>
8366
8367 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
8368
8369 <p>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
8370 computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
8371 use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
8372 KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
8373 need from the KDE environment.  On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
8374 screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.</p>
8375
8376 <p>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
8377 and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
8378 rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
8379 with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
8380 and the whole family.  I probably forgot something.</p>
8381
8382 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
8383 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
8384
8385 <p>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
8386 Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
8387 countries and areas all over the world.</p>
8388
8389       </div>
8390       <div class="tags">
8391
8392
8393         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>.
8394
8395
8396       </div>
8397     </div>
8398     <div class="padding"></div>
8399
8400     <div class="entry">
8401       <div class="title">
8402         <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>
8403       </div>
8404       <div class="date">
8405         30th April 2012
8406       </div>
8407       <div class="body">
8408         <p><!-- IMG_5869.JPG -->
8409 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-1611.jpeg"></p>
8410
8411 <p>I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a
8412 common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway.
8413 But the last ones have not really been up to the task.  My last
8414 cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the
8415 time, and cutting my head took forever.  And the one before that did
8416 not work very well either.  We have looked for something better for a
8417 while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we
8418 discovered that there are indeed better tools available.  But these
8419 are not marketed and sold to "regular consumers".  The hair saloons
8420 can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell
8421 companies.  The models they sell, are very different from the ones
8422 available from Elkjøp and Lefdal.  The main difference is their
8423 efficiency.  It would cut my hair in 5 minutes, instead of the 30-40
8424 minutes required by my impotent Braun.  The hairdresser I visited had
8425 a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the
8426 producer.  But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.</p>
8427
8428 <p>The next step was to find somewhere to buy it.  This was not
8429 straight forward.  The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser
8430 did not want to sell anything to me.  But searching for the model on
8431 the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for
8432 around NOK 4000,-.  This was a bit much.  We kept searching and
8433 finally found a Danish supplier
8434 <a href="http://nicehair.dk/panasonic-er-1611-professionel-hartrimmer.html">selling
8435 it for around NOK 1800,-</a>.  We ordered one, and it arrived a few
8436 days ago.</p>
8437
8438 <p>The instructions said it had to charge for 8 hours when we started
8439 to use it, so we left it charging over night.  Normally it will only
8440 need one hour to charge.  The following evening we successfully tested
8441 it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair
8442 cutter.  The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter
8443 toys.</p>
8444
8445       </div>
8446       <div class="tags">
8447
8448
8449         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8450
8451
8452       </div>
8453     </div>
8454     <div class="padding"></div>
8455
8456     <div class="entry">
8457       <div class="title">
8458         <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>
8459       </div>
8460       <div class="date">
8461         26th April 2012
8462       </div>
8463       <div class="body">
8464         <p>In <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article243690.ece">an
8465 article today</a> published by Computerworld Norway, the photographer
8466 <a href="http://www.urke.com/eirik/">Eirik Helland Urke</a> reports
8467 that the video editor application included with
8468 <a href="http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs">HTC One
8469 X</a> have some quite surprising terms of use.  The article is mostly
8470 based on the twitter message from mister Urke, stating:
8471
8472 <p><blockquote>
8473 "<a href="http://twitter.com/urke/status/194062269724897280">Drøy
8474 brukeravtale: HTC kan bruke MINE redigerte videoer kommersielt. Selv
8475 kan jeg KUN bruke dem privat.</a>"
8476 </blockquote></p>
8477
8478 <p>I quickly translated it to this English message:</p>
8479
8480 <p><blockquote>
8481 "Arrogant user agreement: HTC can use MY edited videos
8482 commercially.  Although I can ONLY use them privately."
8483 </blockquote></p>
8484
8485 <p>I've been unable to find the text of the license term myself, but
8486 suspect it is a variation of the MPEG-LA terms I
8487 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html">discovered
8488 with my Canon IXUS 130</a>.  The HTC One X specification specifies that
8489 the recording format of the phone is .amr for audio and .mp3 for
8490 video.  AMR is
8491 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec#Licensing_and_patent_issues">Adaptive
8492 Multi-Rate audio codec</a> with patents which according to the
8493 Wikipedia article require an license agreement with
8494 <a href="http://www.voiceage.com/">VoiceAge</a>.  MP4 is
8495 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing">MPEG4 with
8496 H.264</a>, which according to Wikipedia require a licence agreement
8497 with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/">MPEG-LA</a>.</p>
8498
8499 <p>I know why I prefer
8500 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and open
8501 standards</a> also for video.</p>
8502
8503       </div>
8504       <div class="tags">
8505
8506
8507         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/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>.
8508
8509
8510       </div>
8511     </div>
8512     <div class="padding"></div>
8513
8514     <div class="entry">
8515       <div class="title">
8516         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html">RAND terms - non-reasonable and discriminatory</a>
8517       </div>
8518       <div class="date">
8519         19th April 2012
8520       </div>
8521       <div class="body">
8522         <p>Here in Norway, the
8523 <a href="http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad.html?id=339"> Ministry of
8524 Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs</a> is behind
8525 a <a href="http://standard.difi.no/forvaltningsstandarder">directory of
8526 standards</a> that are recommended or mandatory for use by the
8527 government.  When the directory was created, the people behind it made
8528 an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the
8529 standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions
8530 to the government.  Free software and non-free software could compete
8531 on the same level.</p>
8532
8533 <p>But recently, some standards with RAND
8534 (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing">Reasonable
8535 And Non-Discriminatory</a>) terms have made their way into the
8536 directory.  And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that
8537 standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from
8538 implementing them.  The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per
8539 user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone
8540 willing to pay will get a license.  Both sound great in theory.  In
8541 practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and
8542 be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user.  By
8543 definition, users of free software do not need to register their use.
8544 So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects.
8545 And given that people will use the software without handing any money
8546 to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free
8547 software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights
8548 to implement a standard when the income available is zero.  The result
8549 in these situations is that free software are locked out from
8550 implementing standards with RAND terms.</p>
8551
8552 <p>Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a
8553 standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is
8554 how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory.  Because free
8555 software developers are working in a global market, it does not really
8556 help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable
8557 in Norway.  The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here.
8558 I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more
8559 attention to these issues in the future.</p>
8560
8561 <p>You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms
8562 from Simon Phipps
8563 (<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/11/rand-not-so-reasonable/">RAND:
8564 Not So Reasonable?</a>).</p>
8565
8566 <p>Update 2012-04-21: Just came across a
8567 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/of-microsoft-netscape-patents-and-open-standards/index.htm">blog
8568 post from Glyn Moody</a> over at Computer World UK warning about the
8569 same issue, and urging people to speak out to the UK government.  I
8570 can only urge Norwegian users to do the same for
8571 <a href="http://www.standard.difi.no/hoyring/hoyring-om-nye-anbefalte-it-standarder">the
8572 hearing taking place at the moment</a> (respond before 2012-04-27).
8573 It proposes to require video conferencing standards including
8574 specifications with RAND terms.</p>
8575
8576       </div>
8577       <div class="tags">
8578
8579
8580         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>.
8581
8582
8583       </div>
8584     </div>
8585     <div class="padding"></div>
8586
8587     <div class="entry">
8588       <div class="title">
8589         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html">Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt</a>
8590       </div>
8591       <div class="date">
8592         15th April 2012
8593       </div>
8594       <div class="body">
8595         <p>Behind <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
8596 Skolelinux</a> there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
8597 setting together all the pieces.  This time I present to you Andreas
8598 Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
8599 years.  He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
8600 up in the recently released
8601 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
8602 Edu Squeeze</a> version.</p>
8603
8604 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
8605
8606 <p>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany.  After
8607 studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
8608 Quantum Optics.  After that I worked some years in an optics company.
8609 Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
8610 teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school.  I teach math, physics,
8611 information technology and science/technology.</p>
8612
8613 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
8614 project?</strong></p>
8615
8616 <p>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
8617 project because of my interest in education and Debian.  Within the
8618 qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
8619 contributing.</p>
8620
8621 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
8622 Edu?</strong></p>
8623
8624 <p>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
8625 out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
8626 Debian Project!</p>
8627
8628 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
8629 Edu?</strong></p>
8630
8631 <p>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
8632 downside, too.  In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
8633 setup, if you need or want that.  Further more, it is not easily
8634 possible to upgrade the system to a new release.  It takes much too
8635 long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
8636 because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
8637 rather small and often busy elsewhere.</p>
8638
8639 <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN">Debian LAN</a>
8640 project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.</p>
8641
8642 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
8643
8644 <p>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
8645 on all my machines.  For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
8646 mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing.  At school I
8647 have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.</p>
8648
8649 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
8650 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
8651
8652 <p>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
8653 Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
8654 politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader".  The school
8655 administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
8656 Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats.  Even
8657 free browsers do not work for the school administration.  Publishers
8658 of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.</p>
8659
8660 <p>To change this, political work is very important.  Parts of the
8661 political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
8662 However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free'
8663 the system.  There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and
8664 "Free/Open Standards".  I am not sure if all the involved parties have
8665 a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
8666 fraction takes them seriously.  However it might slowly make free
8667 software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.</p>
8668
8669       </div>
8670       <div class="tags">
8671
8672
8673         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>.
8674
8675
8676       </div>
8677     </div>
8678     <div class="padding"></div>
8679
8680     <div class="entry">
8681       <div class="title">
8682         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html">Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye</a>
8683       </div>
8684       <div class="date">
8685          8th April 2012
8686       </div>
8687       <div class="body">
8688         <p>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
8689 like <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>,
8690 and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
8691 contributor to the
8692 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
8693 Edu Squeeze release manual</a>.
8694
8695 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
8696
8697 <p>I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
8698 occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.</p>
8699
8700 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
8701 project?</strong></p>
8702
8703 <p>I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user!  The only
8704 reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
8705 around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
8706 they'd like a native English speaker to proofread...  So I did a sweep
8707 through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
8708 "localisation".</p>
8709
8710 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
8711 Edu?</strong></p>
8712
8713 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
8714 Edu?</strong></p>
8715
8716 <p>These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it!  In fact I
8717 had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the
8718 education system.</p>
8719
8720 <p>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
8721 as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
8722 everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
8723 money on the latest hardware.</p>
8724
8725 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
8726
8727 <p>I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
8728 software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
8729 words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).</p>
8730
8731 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
8732 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
8733
8734 <p>Well, I don't know.  I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning
8735 with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
8736 you would hardly need a strategy.</p>
8737
8738       </div>
8739       <div class="tags">
8740
8741
8742         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>.
8743
8744
8745       </div>
8746     </div>
8747     <div class="padding"></div>
8748
8749     <div class="entry">
8750       <div class="title">
8751         <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>
8752       </div>
8753       <div class="date">
8754          6th April 2012
8755       </div>
8756       <div class="body">
8757         <p>Recently I have spent time with
8758 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a> on speeding
8759 up a <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
8760 Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
8761 process I discovered something very surprising.  The reason the KDE
8762 menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
8763 due to the way KDE find application icons.  I discovered that showing
8764 the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
8765 passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server.  Most of these were
8766
8767 NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response.  Because the
8768 ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
8769 ms, the menus would be very slow.  Looking at the strace of kicker in
8770 Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
8771 the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
8772 non-existing files.  KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
8773 one icon file.  In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
8774 around 230 access(2) calls.</p>
8775
8776 <p>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
8777 directories, and the list of possible directories is large.  In
8778 (almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
8779 and .xpm.  The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
8780 mounted.  Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
8781 requests.  I am not the first one to discover this.  I found a
8782 <a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211416">KDE bug report
8783 from 2009</a> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.</p>
8784
8785 <p>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
8786 kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
8787 used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
8788 for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
8789 icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/.  Finally, I add symlinks to
8790 these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
8791 for them.  This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
8792 one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
8793 almost instantaneous.  I'm not quite sure where to make the package
8794 publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.</p>
8795
8796 <p>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
8797 and icon handling, but also the login process.  Not quite sure how to
8798 speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
8799 that is not really an option at the moment.</p>
8800
8801 <p>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
8802 (at) lists.debian.org.</p>
8803
8804       </div>
8805       <div class="tags">
8806
8807
8808         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>.
8809
8810
8811       </div>
8812     </div>
8813     <div class="padding"></div>
8814
8815     <div class="entry">
8816       <div class="title">
8817         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html">Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News</a>
8818       </div>
8819       <div class="date">
8820          5th April 2012
8821       </div>
8822       <div class="body">
8823         <p>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
8824 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a> by
8825 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News.  The result was made public for
8826 non-subscribers today.  I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
8827 for schools.  Check out his article
8828 <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/488805/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
8829 distribution for education</a> if you want to learn more.</p>
8830
8831       </div>
8832       <div class="tags">
8833
8834
8835         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>.
8836
8837
8838       </div>
8839     </div>
8840     <div class="padding"></div>
8841
8842     <div class="entry">
8843       <div class="title">
8844         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html">Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer</a>
8845       </div>
8846       <div class="date">
8847          1st April 2012
8848       </div>
8849       <div class="body">
8850         <p>Germany is a core area for the
8851 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
8852 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
8853 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
8854
8855 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
8856
8857 <p>I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
8858 Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
8859 "<a href="http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/">Westfalen-Kolleg
8860 Dortmund</a>", a second chance school.  Here, young adults is given
8861 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
8862 examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This
8863 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
8864 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.</p>
8865
8866 <p>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
8867 blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other
8868 information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been
8869 teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my
8870 school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at
8871 the end of April this year.</p>
8872
8873 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
8874 project?</strong></p>
8875
8876 <p>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
8877 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
8878 Project).  At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
8879 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
8880 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
8881 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
8882 reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
8883 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
8884 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
8885 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
8886 Skolelinux.</p>
8887
8888 <p>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
8889 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
8890 clients.  The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
8891 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
8892 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
8893 the admin teachers.</p>
8894
8895 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
8896 Edu?</strong></p>
8897
8898 <p>It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
8899 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
8900 So it was a perfect choice.</p>
8901
8902 <p>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's
8903 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
8904 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp.  It's of
8905 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
8906 a school and to choose where to get support for this.</p>
8907
8908 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
8909 Edu?</strong></p>
8910
8911 <p>Nothing yet.</p>
8912
8913 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
8914
8915 <p>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
8916 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
8917 Annotator).  At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
8918 LibreOffice.</p>
8919
8920 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
8921 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
8922
8923 <p>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
8924 that doesn't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
8925 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.</p>
8926
8927       </div>
8928       <div class="tags">
8929
8930
8931         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>.
8932
8933
8934       </div>
8935     </div>
8936     <div class="padding"></div>
8937
8938     <div class="entry">
8939       <div class="title">
8940         <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>
8941       </div>
8942       <div class="date">
8943         25th March 2012
8944       </div>
8945       <div class="body">
8946         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
8947
8948 <p>The same Debian Edu developer that did the last screen cast I
8949 published, Wolfgang Schweer, has created a new screen cast showing how
8950 to set up Kmail in Debian Edu Squeze to authenticate using Kerberos,
8951 allowing users to check their local email account without providing
8952 any password. The video is embedded here in quarter size,
8953 and also available from <a href="https://vimeo.com/38601767">vimeo</a>
8954 and download as a
8955 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg
8956 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
8957
8958 <p><video id="kmail-kerberos-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
8959   <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"' />
8960     <p>Download video as
8961       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
8962 </video></p>
8963
8964       </div>
8965       <div class="tags">
8966
8967
8968         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>.
8969
8970
8971       </div>
8972     </div>
8973     <div class="padding"></div>
8974
8975     <div class="entry">
8976       <div class="title">
8977         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html">Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby</a>
8978       </div>
8979       <div class="date">
8980         19th March 2012
8981       </div>
8982       <div class="body">
8983         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
8984 users are spread all across the globe.  The second inteview after
8985 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
8986 Squeeze release</a> was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
8987 long time Linux user in United Kingdom.</p>
8988
8989 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
8990
8991 <p>I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
8992 Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
8993 author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
8994 contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
8995 encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
8996 years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
8997 weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
8998 installations.</p>
8999
9000 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
9001 project?</strong></p>
9002
9003 <p>Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
9004 London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
9005 just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
9006 along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
9007 mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
9008 well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
9009 have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
9010 LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
9011 these things we decided to try it.</p>
9012
9013 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
9014 Edu?</strong></p>
9015
9016 <p>By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
9017 from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
9018 goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
9019 would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
9020 low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
9021 that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
9022 Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
9023 proprietary software everywhere.</p>
9024
9025 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
9026 Edu?</strong></p>
9027
9028 <p>As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
9029 how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
9030 various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
9031 English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
9032 users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!</p>
9033
9034 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
9035
9036 <p>Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
9037 OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
9038 desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
9039 use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
9040 that counts...)</p>
9041
9042 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
9043 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
9044
9045 <p>That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
9046 and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
9047 the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
9048 applications".  However, schools today are experiencing budget
9049 constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
9050 XP.  At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
9051 iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
9052 longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
9053 realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
9054 putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
9055 first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.</p>
9056
9057 <p>I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
9058 free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
9059 Edu users in this country has to be part of it.</p>
9060
9061       </div>
9062       <div class="tags">
9063
9064
9065         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>.
9066
9067
9068       </div>
9069     </div>
9070     <div class="padding"></div>
9071
9072     <div class="entry">
9073       <div class="title">
9074         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html">Writing and translating documentation in Debian Edu</a>
9075       </div>
9076       <div class="date">
9077         16th March 2012
9078       </div>
9079       <div class="body">
9080         <p>Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
9081 it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
9082 translated versions in sync.  To do this we have come up with what we
9083 believe is a very efficient work flow.</p>
9084
9085 <ol>
9086
9087 <li>The documentation is written in a
9088 <a href="http://moinmo.in">moinmoin wiki</a> (see for example
9089 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">the
9090 Squeeze release manual</a>) with support for exporting the content as
9091 docbook XML.</li>
9092
9093 <li>This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
9094 .pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
9095 with the translated text.</li>
9096
9097 <li>The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
9098 which part of the original wiki document is new or changed.  They can
9099 use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
9100 the translation.  There is even a system in place to handle translated
9101 images.</li>
9102
9103 <li>The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
9104 XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.</li>
9105
9106 <li>The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
9107 create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.</li>
9108
9109 </ol>
9110
9111 <p>This setup work very well, but have a few issues.  The biggest
9112 issue is that <a href="http://moinmo.in/DocBook">the docbook support
9113 we use in moinmoin</a> is not actively maintained.  The docbook
9114 support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
9115 make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.</p>
9116
9117 <p>If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
9118 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc">debian-edu-doc
9119 package</a>.</p>
9120
9121       </div>
9122       <div class="tags">
9123
9124
9125         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>.
9126
9127
9128       </div>
9129     </div>
9130     <div class="padding"></div>
9131
9132     <div class="entry">
9133       <div class="title">
9134         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html">Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze is out!</a>
9135       </div>
9136       <div class="date">
9137         11th March 2012
9138       </div>
9139       <div class="body">
9140         <p>This weekend we finally published the first stable release of
9141 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> based
9142 on Debian/Squeeze.  The full announcement is
9143 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">available</a>
9144 from the project announcement list.  Now is a good time to test if it
9145 you have not done so already.</p>
9146
9147 <p>I plan to present the new version at
9148 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20120313-skolelinux/">a NUUG
9149 meeting</a> on tuesday.  I look forward to seeing you there if you are
9150 in Oslo, Norway.</p>
9151
9152       </div>
9153       <div class="tags">
9154
9155
9156         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>.
9157
9158
9159       </div>
9160     </div>
9161     <div class="padding"></div>
9162
9163     <div class="entry">
9164       <div class="title">
9165         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html">Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker</a>
9166       </div>
9167       <div class="date">
9168          9th March 2012
9169       </div>
9170       <div class="body">
9171         <p>Inspired by <a href="http://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/interview/">the
9172 interview series</a> conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
9173 interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
9174 community.  This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
9175 more international audience.</p>
9176
9177 <p>While <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
9178 Skolelinux</a> originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
9179 Europe, there are users all around the globe.  One of those far away
9180 from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
9181 and contributor.  It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
9182 work out of the box in Japan.  I got him to answer a few questions,
9183 and am happy to share the response with you. :)
9184
9185
9186 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
9187
9188 <p>My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
9189 and we have three lovely children, aged 15, 14 and 4(!) I am the IT
9190 Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
9191 teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
9192 Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
9193 I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
9194 primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
9195 so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
9196 also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
9197 to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
9198 appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.</p>
9199
9200 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
9201 project?</strong></p>
9202
9203 <p>In around 2004 or 5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
9204 server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
9205 samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
9206 Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn't really improve my setup. I
9207 did various desperate searches for things like "school Linux server"
9208 and ended up in a document called "Drift" something or other. Reading
9209 there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
9210 problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
9211 previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
9212 Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
9213 downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
9214 Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
9215 my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.</p>
9216
9217 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
9218 Edu?</strong></p>
9219
9220 <p>For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
9221 workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
9222 ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
9223 designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
9224 doesn't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
9225 school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
9226 Japan.</p>
9227
9228 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
9229 Edu?</strong></p>
9230
9231 <p>The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
9232 have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
9233 make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
9234 who don't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
9235 important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
9236 instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
9237 default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
9238 kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
9239 Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is.  A
9240 second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
9241 customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
9242 multiplies. For example, backup wasn't working properly in Lenny. It
9243 took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
9244 I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
9245 help.</p>
9246
9247 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
9248
9249 <p>Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
9250 studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
9251 (customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
9252 still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
9253 house, that's very useful for the family photos and music.  At school
9254 the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
9255 have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
9256 day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
9257 installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS.  We also
9258 have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
9259 and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.</p>
9260
9261 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
9262 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
9263
9264 <p>Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
9265 and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
9266 popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
9267 to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
9268 file formats and Word than they did 5 years ago.  The Edu aspect is
9269 also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
9270 Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu?  But of course the main attraction is
9271 budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
9272 compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
9273 is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
9274 are not impressed when their USB drive doesn't work, or their browser
9275 doesn't play flash, for example.</p>
9276
9277       </div>
9278       <div class="tags">
9279
9280
9281         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>.
9282
9283
9284       </div>
9285     </div>
9286     <div class="padding"></div>
9287
9288     <div class="entry">
9289       <div class="title">
9290         <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>
9291       </div>
9292       <div class="date">
9293          7th March 2012
9294       </div>
9295       <div class="body">
9296         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
9297
9298 <p>One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a
9299 screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on
9300 Debian Edu Squeeze.  The video is embedded here in quarter size, and
9301 also available from <a href="http://vimeo.com/37675399">vimeo</a> and
9302 download as a
9303 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg
9304 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
9305
9306 <p><video id="gosa-mass-user-create-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
9307   <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"' />
9308     <p>Download video as
9309       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
9310 </video></p>
9311
9312       </div>
9313       <div class="tags">
9314
9315
9316         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>.
9317
9318
9319       </div>
9320     </div>
9321     <div class="padding"></div>
9322
9323     <div class="entry">
9324       <div class="title">
9325         <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>
9326       </div>
9327       <div class="date">
9328          4th March 2012
9329       </div>
9330       <div class="body">
9331         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the third release
9332 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
9333 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
9334 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00000.html">available</a>
9335 from the project announcement list.  Check it out if you
9336 need a software solution for your school.</p>
9337
9338       </div>
9339       <div class="tags">
9340
9341
9342         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>.
9343
9344
9345       </div>
9346     </div>
9347     <div class="padding"></div>
9348
9349     <div class="entry">
9350       <div class="title">
9351         <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>
9352       </div>
9353       <div class="date">
9354          3rd March 2012
9355       </div>
9356       <div class="body">
9357         <p>Many years ago, the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
9358 / Debian Edu project</a> initiated a student project to create a tool
9359 for making stop motion movies.  The proposal came from a teacher
9360 needing such tool on Skolelinux.  The project, called "stopmotion",
9361 was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a
9362 national aware with this great project.  The project was initiated and
9363 mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bjørn Erik Nilsen
9364 and Fredrik Berg Kjølstad.  They got in touch with people at Aardman
9365 Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like
9366 such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by
9367 animators around the globe.  But as is usual after studying, both got
9368 jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the
9369 project, and it has been lingering for a few years now.  Until last
9370 year...</p>
9371
9372 <p>Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the
9373 project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new
9374 name,
9375 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxstopmotion/">linuxstopmotion</a>.
9376 The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using
9377 Internet search engines (try to search for 'stopmotion' to see what I
9378 mean). I've been following
9379 <a href="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxstopmotion-community">the
9380 mailing list</a> and the improvement already in place and planned for
9381 the future is encouraging.  If you want to make stop motion movies.
9382 Check it out. :)</p>
9383
9384       </div>
9385       <div class="tags">
9386
9387
9388         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>.
9389
9390
9391       </div>
9392     </div>
9393     <div class="padding"></div>
9394
9395     <div class="entry">
9396       <div class="title">
9397         <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>
9398       </div>
9399       <div class="date">
9400         27th February 2012
9401       </div>
9402       <div class="body">
9403         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the second release
9404 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
9405 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement did for some
9406 reason not make it the project announcement list, but is
9407 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/02/msg00015.html">available</a>
9408 from the Debian development announcement list.  Check it out if you
9409 need a software solution for your school.</p>
9410
9411       </div>
9412       <div class="tags">
9413
9414
9415         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>.
9416
9417
9418       </div>
9419     </div>
9420     <div class="padding"></div>
9421
9422     <div class="entry">
9423       <div class="title">
9424         <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>
9425       </div>
9426       <div class="date">
9427         19th February 2012
9428       </div>
9429       <div class="body">
9430         <p>One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
9431 wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
9432 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
9433 on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
9434 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00001.html">available</a>
9435 on the project announcement list.  Check it out if you need a software
9436 solution for your school.</p>
9437
9438       </div>
9439       <div class="tags">
9440
9441
9442         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>.
9443
9444
9445       </div>
9446     </div>
9447     <div class="padding"></div>
9448
9449     <div class="entry">
9450       <div class="title">
9451         <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>
9452       </div>
9453       <div class="date">
9454         14th February 2012
9455       </div>
9456       <div class="body">
9457         <p>Once in a while my home server have disk problems.  Thanks to Linux
9458 Software RAID, I have not lost data yet (but
9459 <a href="http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/34532">I was
9460 close</a> this summer :).  But once a disk is starting to behave
9461 funny, a practical problem present itself.  How to get from the Linux
9462 device name (like /dev/sdd) to something that can be used to identify
9463 the disk when the computer is turned off?  In my case I have SATA
9464 disks with a unique ID printed on the label.  All I need is a way to
9465 figure out how to query the disk to get the ID out.</p>
9466
9467 <p>After fumbling a bit, I
9468 <a href="http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-getting-scsi-ide-harddisk-information/">found
9469 that hdparm -I</a> will report the disk serial number, which is
9470 printed on the disk label.  The following (almost) one-liner can be
9471 used to look up the ID of all the failed disks:</p>
9472
9473 <blockquote><pre>
9474 for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep '(F)'|tr ' ' "\n"|grep '(F)'|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u);
9475 do
9476     printf "Failed disk $d: "
9477     hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep 'Serial Num'
9478 done
9479 </blockquote></pre>
9480
9481 <p>Putting it here to make sure I do not have to search for it the
9482 next time, and in case other find it useful.</p>
9483
9484 <p>At the moment I have two failing disk. :(</p>
9485
9486 <blockquote><pre>
9487 Failed disk sdd1:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
9488 Failed disk sdd2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
9489 Failed disk sde2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1840589
9490 </blockquote></pre>
9491
9492 <p>The last time I had failing disks, I added the serial number on
9493 labels I printed and stuck on the short sides of each disk, to be able
9494 to figure out which disk to take out of the box without having to
9495 remove each disk to look at the physical vendor label.  The vendor
9496 label is at the top of the disk, which is hidden when the disks are
9497 mounted inside my box.</p>
9498
9499 <p>I really wish the check_linux_raid Nagios plugin for checking Linux
9500 Software RAID in the
9501 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nagios-plugins.html">nagios-plugins-standard</a>
9502 debian package would look up this value automatically, as it would
9503 make the plugin a lot more useful when my disks fail.  At the moment
9504 it only report a failure when there are no more spares left (it really
9505 should warn as soon as a disk is failing), and it do not tell me which
9506 disk(s) is failing when the RAID is running short on disks.</p>
9507
9508       </div>
9509       <div class="tags">
9510
9511
9512         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>.
9513
9514
9515       </div>
9516     </div>
9517     <div class="padding"></div>
9518
9519     <div class="entry">
9520       <div class="title">
9521         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">Automatic proxy configuration with Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
9522       </div>
9523       <div class="date">
9524         13th February 2012
9525       </div>
9526       <div class="body">
9527         <p>New in the Squeeze version of
9528 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is the
9529 ability for clients to automatically configure their proxy settings
9530 based on their environment.  We want all systems on the client to use
9531 the WPAD based proxy definition fetched from <tt>http://wpad/wpad.dat</tt>, to
9532 allow sites to control the proxy setting from a central place and make
9533 sure clients do not have hard coded proxy settings.  The schools can
9534 change the global proxy setting by editing
9535 <tt>tjener:/etc/debian-edu/www/wpad.dat</tt> and the change propagate
9536 to all Debian Edu clients in the network.</p>
9537
9538 <p>The problem is that some systems do not understand the WPAD system.
9539 In other words, how do one get from a WPAD file like this (this is a
9540 simple one, they can run arbitrary code):</p>
9541
9542 <blockquote><pre>
9543 function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
9544 {
9545    if (!isResolvable(host) ||
9546        isPlainHostName(host) ||
9547        dnsDomainIs(host, ".intern"))
9548       return "DIRECT";
9549    else
9550       return "PROXY webcache:3128; DIRECT";
9551 }
9552 </pre></blockquote>
9553
9554 <p>to a proxy setting in the process environment looking like this:</p>
9555
9556 <blockquote><pre>
9557 http_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
9558 ftp_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
9559 </pre></blockquote>
9560
9561 <p>To do this conversion I developed a perl script that will execute
9562 the javascript fragment in the WPAD file and return the proxy that
9563 would be used for
9564 <tt><a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a></tt>,
9565 and insert this extracted proxy URL in <tt>/etc/environment</tt> and
9566 <tt>/etc/apt/apt.conf</tt>.  The perl script wpad-extract work just
9567 fine in Squeeze, but in Wheezy the library it need to run the
9568 javascript code is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/631045">no longer
9569 able to build</a> because the C library it depended on is now a C++
9570 library.  I hope someone find a solution to that problem before Wheezy
9571 is frozen.  An alternative would be for us to rewrite wpad-extract to
9572 use some other javascript library currently working in Wheezy, but no
9573 known alternative is known at the moment.</p>
9574
9575 <p>This automatic proxy system allow the roaming workstation (aka
9576 laptop) setup in Debian Edu/Squeeze to use the proxy when the laptop
9577 is connected to the backbone network in a Debian Edu setup, and to
9578 automatically use any proxy present and announced using the WPAD
9579 feature when it is connected to other networks.  And if no proxy is
9580 announced, direct connections will be used instead.</p>
9581
9582 <p>Silently using a proxy announced on the network might be a privacy
9583 or security problem.  But those controlling DHCP and DNS on a network
9584 could just as easily set up a transparent proxy, and force all HTTP
9585 and FTP connections to use a proxy anyway, so I consider that
9586 distinction to be academic.  If you are afraid of using the wrong
9587 proxy, you should avoid connecting to the network in question in the
9588 first place.  In Debian Edu, the proxy setup is updated using dhcp and
9589 ifupdown hooks, to make sure the configuration is updated every time
9590 the network setup changes.</p>
9591
9592 <p>The WPAD system is documented in a
9593 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-01">IETF
9594 draft</a> and a
9595 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol">Wikipedia
9596 page</a> for those that want to learn more.</p>
9597
9598       </div>
9599       <div class="tags">
9600
9601
9602         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>.
9603
9604
9605       </div>
9606     </div>
9607     <div class="padding"></div>
9608
9609     <div class="entry">
9610       <div class="title">
9611         <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>
9612       </div>
9613       <div class="date">
9614          5th February 2012
9615       </div>
9616       <div class="body">
9617         <p>Since the Lenny version of
9618 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, a
9619 feature to save power have been included.  It is as simple as it is
9620 practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again
9621 in the morning.  This is done using the
9622 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/shutdown-at-night.html">shutdown-at-night</a> Debian package.</p>
9623
9624 <p>To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to
9625 the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts.  For Debian Edu, this is done in
9626 LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check
9627 every hour from 16:00 until 06:00 to see if the machine is unused, and
9628 shut it down if it is.  If the hardware in question is supported by
9629 the
9630 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvram-wakeup.html">nvram-wakeup</a>
9631 package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around 07:00 +-
9632 10 minutes.  If this isn't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to
9633 try to turn on the client.  The wake-on-lan option is only documented
9634 and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.</p>
9635
9636 <p>It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can
9637 blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like
9638 the common setup for a classroom.  The nvram-wakeup method only work
9639 for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock.  I've seen old
9640 machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were
9641 starting from 0 (or was it 1990?) every boot.  If you have one of
9642 those, you have to turn on the computer manually.</p>
9643
9644 <p>The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can
9645 also be used outside the Debian Edu environment.  For those without a
9646 central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file
9647 <tt>/etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night</tt> to enable it.
9648 Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?</p>
9649
9650       </div>
9651       <div class="tags">
9652
9653
9654         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>.
9655
9656
9657       </div>
9658     </div>
9659     <div class="padding"></div>
9660
9661     <div class="entry">
9662       <div class="title">
9663         <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>
9664       </div>
9665       <div class="date">
9666          4th February 2012
9667       </div>
9668       <div class="body">
9669         <p>I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and
9670 publish the third beta version of
9671 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
9672 on Squeeze.  If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with
9673 out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and
9674 installing new machines, check it out.  If you need a software
9675 solution for your school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
9676 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00000.html">available</a>
9677 on the project announcement list.</p>
9678
9679 <p>I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since
9680 beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):</p>
9681
9682 <ul>
9683
9684 <li>It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from
9685   10.0.0.0/8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after
9686   the installation.</li>
9687
9688 <li>Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main
9689   Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.</li>
9690
9691 <li>The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all
9692   disabled queues are restarted every hour.  This should cut down on
9693   the amount of manual administration needed for printers.</li>
9694
9695 <li>The set of initial users have been changed.  Now a personal user
9696   for the local system administrator is created during installation
9697   instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users,
9698   and this user is granted administrative privileges using group
9699   membership.  This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep
9700   up to date on the system.</li>
9701
9702 </ul>
9703
9704 <p>The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my
9705 private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home.  I will use it look
9706 for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the
9707 final Squeeze release is published.</p>
9708
9709 <p>Next weekend the project organise a
9710 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00001.html">developer
9711 gathering</a> in Oslo.  We will continue the work on the Squeeze
9712 version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version.  Perhaps I
9713 will see you there?</p>
9714
9715       </div>
9716       <div class="tags">
9717
9718
9719         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>.
9720
9721
9722       </div>
9723     </div>
9724     <div class="padding"></div>
9725
9726     <div class="entry">
9727       <div class="title">
9728         <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>
9729       </div>
9730       <div class="date">
9731         27th January 2012
9732       </div>
9733       <div class="body">
9734         <p>With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
9735 This is the sad fact of todays computers.  In the next version of
9736 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
9737 on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
9738 firmware blobs easier to handle.  The common use case I run into is a
9739 laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
9740 work, but there are other use cases as well.</p>
9741
9742 <p>First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
9743 with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
9744 included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
9745 during installation.  This take care firmware for network devices used
9746 by the installer when installing from from local media.  But for
9747 example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
9748 not taken care of by this.</p>
9749
9750 <p>For non-network devices, we provide the script
9751 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware</tt> which
9752 search through the <tt>dmesg</tt> output for drivers requesting extra
9753 firmware.  The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
9754 file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
9755 the requested firmware file(s) is installed.  I have proposed to do
9756 something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
9757 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">#655507</a>), to allow PXE
9758 installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better.  Run the
9759 script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
9760 firmware packages.</p>
9761
9762 <p>Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
9763 because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
9764 working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
9765 included to be able to install at all.  To fill the PXE installation
9766 initrd with extra firmware, the
9767 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware</tt> script is
9768 provided.  Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
9769 PXE initrd with firmware packages.</p>
9770
9771 <p>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
9772 network cards working.  For this,
9773 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware</tt> is
9774 provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs.  It is used
9775 the same way as the other firmware related tools.</p>
9776
9777 <p>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation.  We
9778 do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
9779 non-free software, and it is their choice.</p>
9780
9781 <p>We plan to release beta3 this weekend.  You might want to give it a
9782 try.</p>
9783
9784       </div>
9785       <div class="tags">
9786
9787
9788         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>.
9789
9790
9791       </div>
9792     </div>
9793     <div class="padding"></div>
9794
9795     <div class="entry">
9796       <div class="title">
9797         <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>
9798       </div>
9799       <div class="date">
9800         25th January 2012
9801       </div>
9802       <div class="body">
9803         <p>The next version of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu
9804 / Skolelinux</a> will include a new tool
9805 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp</tt>, which can be used to quickly set up all
9806 the computers in a school without much manual labour.  Here is a short
9807 summary on how to use it to set up a new school.</p>
9808
9809 <p>First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
9810 central server in the network.  Next, PXE boot all the client machines
9811 as thin clients and wait 5 minutes after the last client booted to
9812 allow the clients to report their existence to the central server.  When
9813 this is done, log on to the central server and run
9814 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a</tt> in the <tt>konsole</tt> to use the
9815 collected information to generate system objects in LDAP.  The output
9816 will look similar to this:</p>
9817
9818 <p><blockquote><pre>
9819 % sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
9820 info: Updating machine tjener.intern [10.0.2.2] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:05.
9821 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.
9822
9823 Enter password if you want to activate these changes, and ^c to abort.
9824
9825 Connecting to LDAP as cn=admin,ou=ldap-access,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
9826 enter password: *******
9827 %
9828 </pre></blockquote></p>
9829
9830 <p>After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
9831 root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
9832 populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
9833 automatically generated names.  The final step to set up the school is
9834 then to log into <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa</a>,
9835 the web based user, group and system administration system to change
9836 system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
9837 enable DHCP and DNS for the systems.  All clients that should be used
9838 as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
9839 group.  After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
9840 and get their assigned names and group based configuration
9841 automatically.</p>
9842
9843 <p>We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
9844 enabled this weekend.  You might want to give it a try.</p>
9845
9846 <p>Update 2012-01-28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
9847 hosts, one need to add the option -a.  I forgot to mention this in my
9848 original text, and have added it to the text now.</p>
9849
9850       </div>
9851       <div class="tags">
9852
9853
9854         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>.
9855
9856
9857       </div>
9858     </div>
9859     <div class="padding"></div>
9860
9861     <div class="entry">
9862       <div class="title">
9863         <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>
9864       </div>
9865       <div class="date">
9866         10th January 2012
9867       </div>
9868       <div class="body">
9869         <p>In the Squeeze version of
9870 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> soon
9871 to be released, users of the system will get their default browser
9872 start page set from LDAP, allowing the system administrator to point
9873 all users to the school web page by updating one setting in LDAP.  In
9874 addition to setting the default start page when a machine boots, users
9875 are shown the same page as a welcome page when they log in for the
9876 first time.</p>
9877
9878 <p>The LDAP object dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no have an attribute
9879 labeledURI with "http://www/ LDAP for Debian Edu/Skolelinux" as the
9880 default content.  By changing this value to another URL, all users get
9881 to see the page behind this new URL.</p>
9882
9883 <p>An easy way to update it is by using the ldapvi tool.  It can be
9884 called as "<tt>ldapvi -ZD '(cn=admin)'</tt>' to update LDAP with the
9885 new setting.</p>
9886
9887 <p>We have written the code to adjust the default start page and show
9888 the welcome page, and I wonder if there is an easier way to do this
9889 from within Iceweasel instead.</p>
9890
9891       </div>
9892       <div class="tags">
9893
9894
9895         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>.
9896
9897
9898       </div>
9899     </div>
9900     <div class="padding"></div>
9901
9902     <div class="entry">
9903       <div class="title">
9904         <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>
9905       </div>
9906       <div class="date">
9907          7th January 2012
9908       </div>
9909       <div class="body">
9910         <p>I am happy to announce that today we managed to wrap up and publish
9911 the second beta version of
9912 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>.  If
9913 you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE
9914 configuration for running diskless machines and installing new
9915 machines, check it out.  If you need a software solution for your
9916 school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
9917 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00000.html">available</a>
9918 on the project announcement list.</p>
9919
9920       </div>
9921       <div class="tags">
9922
9923
9924         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>.
9925
9926
9927       </div>
9928     </div>
9929     <div class="padding"></div>
9930
9931     <div class="entry">
9932       <div class="title">
9933         <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>
9934       </div>
9935       <div class="date">
9936          3rd January 2012
9937       </div>
9938       <div class="body">
9939         <p>During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of
9940 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ready
9941 for release.  The initial problem I looked at was particularly
9942 interesting.</p>
9943
9944 <P>The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it
9945 post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find
9946 the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I
9947 integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from
9948 scratch.  I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors,
9949 remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and
9950 wrap up its tasks.</p>
9951
9952 <p>Eventually the cause was found.  The kernel was simply running out
9953 of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more.
9954 Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries
9955 to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but
9956 because I was typing.</P>
9957
9958 <p>The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at
9959 the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking
9960 /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the
9961 installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do 'find /' to
9962 generate some disk IO.  Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is
9963 one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to
9964 generate entropy.</p>
9965
9966 <p>The fix is in
9967 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/Installation">beta1
9968 of the Debian Edu/Squeeze</a> version, and we
9969 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu">welcome more testers and
9970 developers</a>.  We plan to release beta2 this weekend.</p>
9971
9972       </div>
9973       <div class="tags">
9974
9975
9976         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>.
9977
9978
9979       </div>
9980     </div>
9981     <div class="padding"></div>
9982
9983     <div class="entry">
9984       <div class="title">
9985         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
9986       </div>
9987       <div class="date">
9988         21st November 2011
9989       </div>
9990       <div class="body">
9991         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
9992 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
9993 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
9994 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
9995 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
9996 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
9997 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
9998 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
9999 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
10000 the tools to do so.</p>
10001
10002 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
10003 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
10004 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
10005 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
10006
10007 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
10008 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
10009 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
10010 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
10011 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
10012 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
10013 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
10014 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
10015
10016 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
10017 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
10018 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
10019
10020 <p><pre>
10021 #!/usr/bin/perl
10022 use strict;
10023 use warnings;
10024 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
10025 BEGIN {
10026     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
10027     my %rhelmodules = (
10028         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
10029         );
10030     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
10031         eval "use $module;";
10032         if ($@) {
10033             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
10034             system("yum install -y $pkg");
10035             eval "use $module;";
10036         }
10037     }
10038 }
10039 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
10040
10041 upgrade_dell();
10042
10043 exit 0;
10044
10045 sub run_firmware_script {
10046     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
10047     unless ($script) {
10048         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
10049         exit 1
10050     }
10051     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
10052
10053     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
10054         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
10055     } else {
10056         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
10057     }
10058 }
10059
10060 sub run_firmware_scripts {
10061     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
10062     # Run firmware packages
10063     for my $dir (@dirs) {
10064         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
10065         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
10066         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
10067             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
10068             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
10069         }
10070         closedir $dh;
10071     }
10072 }
10073
10074 sub download {
10075     my $url = shift;
10076     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
10077     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
10078 }
10079
10080 sub upgrade_dell {
10081     my @dirs;
10082     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
10083     chomp $product;
10084
10085     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
10086
10087         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
10088         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
10089
10090         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
10091             CLEANUP => 1
10092             );
10093         chdir($tmpdir);
10094         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
10095         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
10096         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
10097         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
10098         my $fwopts = "-q";
10099         if (@paths) {
10100             for my $url (@paths) {
10101                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
10102             }
10103             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
10104         } else {
10105             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
10106             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
10107         }
10108         chdir('/');
10109     } else {
10110         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
10111         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
10112     }
10113 }
10114
10115 sub fetch_dell_fw {
10116     my $path = shift;
10117     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
10118     download($url);
10119 }
10120
10121 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
10122 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
10123 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
10124 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
10125     my $filename = shift;
10126
10127     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
10128     chomp $product;
10129     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
10130
10131     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
10132
10133     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
10134     my @paths;
10135     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
10136         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
10137         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
10138         my $oscode;
10139         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
10140             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
10141         } else {
10142             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
10143         }
10144         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
10145         {
10146             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
10147         }
10148     }
10149     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
10150         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
10151
10152         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
10153         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
10154
10155         my $cpath = $component->{path};
10156         for my $path (@paths) {
10157             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
10158                 push(@paths, $cpath);
10159             }
10160         }
10161     }
10162     return @paths;
10163 }
10164 </pre>
10165
10166 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
10167 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
10168 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
10169 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
10170 outdated.</p>
10171
10172       </div>
10173       <div class="tags">
10174
10175
10176         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10177
10178
10179       </div>
10180     </div>
10181     <div class="padding"></div>
10182
10183     <div class="entry">
10184       <div class="title">
10185         <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>
10186       </div>
10187       <div class="date">
10188          7th October 2011
10189       </div>
10190       <div class="body">
10191         <p>Here in Norway the public libraries are debating with the
10192 publishing houses how to handle electronic books.  Surprisingly, the
10193 libraries seem to be willing to accept digital restriction mechanisms
10194 (DRM) on books and renting e-books with artificial scarcity from the
10195 publishing houses.  Time limited renting (2-3 years) is one proposed
10196 model, and only allowing X borrowers for each book is another.
10197 Personally I find it amazing that libraries are even considering such
10198 models.</p>
10199
10200 <p>Anyway, while reading <a href="http://boklaben.no/?p=220">part of
10201 this debate</a>, it occurred to me that someone should present a more
10202 sensible approach to the libraries, to allow its borrowers to get used
10203 to a better model.  The idea is simple:</p>
10204
10205 <p>Create a computer system for the libraries, either in the form of a
10206 Live DVD or a installable distribution, that provide a simple kiosk
10207 solution to hand out free e-books.  As a start, the books distributed
10208 by <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about
10209 36,000 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a>
10210 (1149 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The
10211 Internet Archive</a> (3,033,748 books) could be included, but any book
10212 where the copyright has expired or with a free licence could be
10213 distributed.</p>
10214
10215 <p>The computer system would make it easy to:</p>
10216
10217 <ul>
10218
10219 <li>Copy e-books into a USB stick, reading tablets, cell phones and
10220   other relevant equipment.</li>
10221
10222 <li>Show the books for reading on the the screen in the library.</li>
10223
10224 </ul>
10225
10226 <p>In addition to such kiosk solution, there should probably be a web
10227 site as well to allow people easy access to these books without
10228 visiting the library.  The site would be the distribution point for
10229 the kiosk systems, which would connect regularly to fetch any new
10230 books available.</p>
10231
10232 <p>Are there anyone working on a system like this?  I guess it would
10233 fit any library in the world, and not just the Norwegian public
10234 libraries. :)</p>
10235
10236       </div>
10237       <div class="tags">
10238
10239
10240         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>.
10241
10242
10243       </div>
10244     </div>
10245     <div class="padding"></div>
10246
10247     <div class="entry">
10248       <div class="title">
10249         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">Ripping problematic DVDs using dvdbackup and genisoimage</a>
10250       </div>
10251       <div class="date">
10252         17th September 2011
10253       </div>
10254       <div class="body">
10255         <p>For convenience, I want to store copies of all my DVDs on my file
10256 server.  It allow me to save shelf space flat while still having my
10257 movie collection easily available.  It also make it possible to let
10258 the kids see their favourite DVDs without wearing the physical copies
10259 down.  I prefer to store the DVDs as ISOs to keep the DVD menu and
10260 subtitle options intact.  It also ensure that the entire film is one
10261 file on the disk.  As this is for personal use, the ripping is
10262 perfectly legal here in Norway.</p>
10263
10264 <p>Normally I rip the DVDs using dd like this:</p>
10265
10266 <blockquote><pre>
10267 #!/bin/sh
10268 # apt-get install lsdvd
10269 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
10270 dd if=/dev/dvd of=/storage/dvds/$title.iso bs=1M
10271 </pre></blockquote>
10272
10273 <p>But some DVDs give a input/output error when I read it, and I have
10274 been looking for a better alternative.  I have no idea why this I/O
10275 error occur, but suspect my DVD drive, the Linux kernel driver or
10276 something fishy with the DVDs in question.  Or perhaps all three.</p>
10277
10278 <p>Anyway, I believe I found a solution today using dvdbackup and
10279 genisoimage.  This script gave me a working ISO for a problematic
10280 movie by first extracting the DVD file system and then re-packing it
10281 back as an ISO.
10282
10283 <blockquote><pre>
10284 #!/bin/sh
10285 # apt-get install lsdvd dvdbackup genisoimage
10286 set -e
10287 tmpdir=/storage/dvds/
10288 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
10289 dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M -o $tmpdir -n$title
10290 genisoimage -dvd-video -o $tmpdir/$title.iso $tmpdir/$title
10291 rm -rf $tmpdir/$title
10292 </pre></blockquote>
10293
10294 <p>Anyone know of a better way available in Debian/Squeeze?</p>
10295
10296 <p>Update 2011-09-18: I got a tip from Konstantin Khomoutov about the
10297 readom program from the wodim package.  It is specially written to
10298 read optical media, and is called like this: <tt>readom dev=/dev/dvd
10299 f=image.iso</tt>.  It got 6 GB along with the problematic Cars DVD
10300 before it failed, and failed right away with a Timmy Time DVD.</p>
10301
10302 <p>Next, I got a tip from Bastian Blank about
10303 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">his
10304 program python-dvdvideo</a>, which seem to be just what I am looking
10305 for.  Tested it with my problematic Timmy Time DVD, and it succeeded
10306 creating a ISO image.  The git source built and installed just fine in
10307 Squeeze, so I guess this will be my tool of choice in the future.</p>
10308
10309       </div>
10310       <div class="tags">
10311
10312
10313         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>.
10314
10315
10316       </div>
10317     </div>
10318     <div class="padding"></div>
10319
10320     <div class="entry">
10321       <div class="title">
10322         <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>
10323       </div>
10324       <div class="date">
10325          4th August 2011
10326       </div>
10327       <div class="body">
10328         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
10329 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
10330 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
10331 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
10332 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
10333 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
10334 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
10335 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
10336 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
10337
10338 <p><blockquote>
10339 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
10340 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
10341 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
10342 </blockquote></p>
10343
10344 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
10345 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
10346 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
10347 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
10348 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
10349 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
10350 hard to explain.</p>
10351
10352 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
10353 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
10354 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
10355 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
10356 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
10357 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
10358 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
10359 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
10360 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
10361 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
10362 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
10363 mode).</p>
10364
10365 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
10366 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
10367 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
10368 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
10369 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
10370 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
10371 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
10372 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
10373 after visiting single user mode.</p>
10374
10375 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
10376 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
10377 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
10378 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
10379 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
10380 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
10381 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
10382 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
10383
10384 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
10385 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
10386 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
10387
10388       </div>
10389       <div class="tags">
10390
10391
10392         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>.
10393
10394
10395       </div>
10396     </div>
10397     <div class="padding"></div>
10398
10399     <div class="entry">
10400       <div class="title">
10401         <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>
10402       </div>
10403       <div class="date">
10404         30th July 2011
10405       </div>
10406       <div class="body">
10407         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
10408 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
10409 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
10410 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
10411 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
10412 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
10413 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
10414 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
10415 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
10416 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
10417 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
10418 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
10419 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
10420
10421 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
10422 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
10423 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
10424 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
10425 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
10426 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
10427 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
10428 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
10429 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
10430
10431 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
10432 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
10433 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
10434 is presented.</p>
10435
10436 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
10437 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
10438 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
10439 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
10440 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
10441 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
10442 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
10443 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
10444 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
10445 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
10446 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
10447 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
10448 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
10449 find time to push this forward.</p>
10450
10451       </div>
10452       <div class="tags">
10453
10454
10455         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>.
10456
10457
10458       </div>
10459     </div>
10460     <div class="padding"></div>
10461
10462     <div class="entry">
10463       <div class="title">
10464         <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>
10465       </div>
10466       <div class="date">
10467         29th July 2011
10468       </div>
10469       <div class="body">
10470         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
10471 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
10472 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
10473 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
10474 issues.</p>
10475
10476 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
10477 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
10478 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
10479
10480 <ol>
10481
10482 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
10483 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
10484 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
10485 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
10486 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
10487 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
10488 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
10489 Debian.</li>
10490
10491 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
10492 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
10493 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
10494 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
10495 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
10496 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
10497 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
10498 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
10499 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
10500 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
10501 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
10502 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
10503 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
10504
10505 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
10506 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
10507 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
10508 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
10509 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
10510 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
10511 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
10512 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
10513 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
10514 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
10515
10516 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
10517 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
10518 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
10519 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
10520 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
10521 latter behaviour.</li>
10522
10523 </ol>
10524
10525 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
10526 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
10527 it do not matter much.</p>
10528
10529 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
10530 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
10531 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
10532
10533       </div>
10534       <div class="tags">
10535
10536
10537         Tags: <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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
10538
10539
10540       </div>
10541     </div>
10542     <div class="padding"></div>
10543
10544     <div class="entry">
10545       <div class="title">
10546         <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>
10547       </div>
10548       <div class="date">
10549         26th July 2011
10550       </div>
10551       <div class="body">
10552         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
10553 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
10554 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
10555 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
10556 security support for a few years.</p>
10557
10558 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
10559 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
10560 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
10561 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
10562 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
10563 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
10564 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
10565 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
10566 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
10567 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
10568 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
10569 easier in the future.</p>
10570
10571 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
10572 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
10573 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
10574 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
10575 do not have time for.</p>
10576
10577       </div>
10578       <div class="tags">
10579
10580
10581         Tags: <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>.
10582
10583
10584       </div>
10585     </div>
10586     <div class="padding"></div>
10587
10588     <div class="entry">
10589       <div class="title">
10590         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html">Free Software vs. proprietary softare...</a>
10591       </div>
10592       <div class="date">
10593         20th June 2011
10594       </div>
10595       <div class="body">
10596         <p>Reading
10597 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/06/20/open-source-vs-closed-source-eulas/">the
10598 thingiverse blog</a>, I came across two highlights of interesting
10599 parts of the
10600 <a href="http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Autodesk_EULA">Autodesk</a>
10601 and
10602 <a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/06/things-you-cant-do-with-the-microsoft-kinect-sdk.html">Microsoft
10603 Kinect</a> End User License Agreements (EULAs), which illustrates
10604 quite well why I stay away from software with EULAs.  Whenever I take
10605 the time to read their content, the terms are simply unacceptable.</p>
10606
10607       </div>
10608       <div class="tags">
10609
10610
10611         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>.
10612
10613
10614       </div>
10615     </div>
10616     <div class="padding"></div>
10617
10618     <div class="entry">
10619       <div class="title">
10620         <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>
10621       </div>
10622       <div class="date">
10623         30th April 2011
10624       </div>
10625       <div class="body">
10626         <p>Today, the first draft implementation of an
10627 <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> for the Norwegian
10628 service <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> started to
10629 work.  It is only available on the developer server for now, and I
10630 have not tested it using any existing Open311 client (I lack the
10631 platforms needed to run the clients I have found so far), but it is
10632 able to query the database and extract a list of open and closed
10633 requests within a given category and reported to a given municipality.
10634 I believe that is a good start to create a useful service for those
10635 that want to do data mining on the requests submitted so far.</p>
10636
10637 <p>Where is it?  Visit
10638 <a href="http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/">http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/</a>
10639 to have a look.  Please send feedback to the
10640 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
10641 (at) nuug.no</a> mailing list.</p>
10642
10643       </div>
10644       <div class="tags">
10645
10646
10647         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>.
10648
10649
10650       </div>
10651     </div>
10652     <div class="padding"></div>
10653
10654     <div class="entry">
10655       <div class="title">
10656         <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>
10657       </div>
10658       <div class="date">
10659         29th April 2011
10660       </div>
10661       <div class="body">
10662         <p>The last few days I have spent some time trying to add support for
10663 the <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> in the
10664 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">Norwegian FixMyStreet service</a>.
10665 Earlier I believed Open311 would be a useful API to use to submit
10666 reports to the municipalities, but when I noticed that the
10667 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org.nz/">New Zealand version</a> of
10668 FixMyStreet had implemented Open311 on the server side, it occurred to
10669 me that this was a nice way to allow the public, press and
10670 municipalities to do data mining directly in the FixMyStreet service.
10671 Thus I went to work implementing the Open311 specification for
10672 FixMyStreet.  The implementation is not yet ready, but I am starting
10673 to get a draft limping along.  In the process, I have discovered a few
10674 issues with the Open311 specification.</p>
10675
10676 <p>One obvious missing feature is the lack of natural language
10677 handling in the specification.  The specification seem to assume all
10678 reports will be written in English, and do not provide a way for the
10679 receiving end to specify which languages are understood there.  To be
10680 able to use the same client and submit to several Open311 receivers,
10681 it would be useful to know which language to use when writing reports.
10682 I believe the specification should be extended to allow the receivers
10683 of problem reports to specify which language they accept, and the
10684 submitter to specify which language the report is written in.
10685 Language of a text can also be automatically guessed using statistical
10686 methods, but for multi-lingual persons like myself, it is useful to
10687 know which language to use when writing a problem report.  I suspect
10688 some lang=nb,nn kind of attribute would solve it.</p>
10689
10690 <p>A key part of the Open311 API is the list of services provided,
10691 which is similar to the categories used by FixMyStreet.  One issue I
10692 run into is the need to specify both name and unique identifier for
10693 each category.  The specification do not state that the identifier
10694 should be numeric, but all example implementations have used numbers
10695 here.  In FixMyStreet, there is no number associated with each
10696 category.  As the specification do not forbid it, I will use the name
10697 as the unique identifier for now and see how open311 clients handle
10698 it.</p>
10699
10700 <p>The report format in open311 and the report format in FixMyStreet
10701 differ in a key part.  FixMyStreet have a title and a description,
10702 while Open311 only have a description and lack the title.  I'm not
10703 quite sure how to best handle this yet.  When asking for a FixMyStreet
10704 report in Open311 format, I just merge title an description into the
10705 open311 description, but this is not going to work if the open311 API
10706 should be used for submitting new reports to FixMyStreet.</p>
10707
10708 <p>The search feature in Open311 is missing a way to ask for problems
10709 near a geographic location.  I believe this is important if one is to
10710 use Open311 as the query language for mobile units.  The specification
10711 should be extended to handle this, probably using some new lat=, lon=
10712 and range= options.</p>
10713
10714 <p>The final challenge I see is that the FixMyStreet code handle
10715 several administrations in one interface, while the Open311 API seem
10716 to assume only one administration.  For FixMyStreet, this mean a
10717 report can be sent to several administrations, and the categories
10718 available depend on the location of the problem.  Not quite sure how
10719 to best handle this.  I've noticed
10720 <a href="http://seeclickfix.com/open311/">SeeClickFix</a> added
10721 latitude and longitude options to the services request, but it do not
10722 solve the problem of what to return when no location is specified.
10723 Will have to investigate this a bit more.</p>
10724
10725 <p>My distaste for web forums have kept me from bringing these issues
10726 up with the open311 developer group.  I really wish they had a email
10727 list available via <a href="http://www.gmane.org/">Gmane</a> to use for
10728 discussions instead of only
10729 <a href="http://lists.open311.org/groups/discuss">a forum<a/>.  Oh,
10730 well.  That will probably resolve itself, one way or another.  I've
10731 also tried visiting the IRC channel #open311 on FreeNode, but no-one
10732 seem to reply to my questions there.  This make me wonder if I just
10733 fail to understand how the open311 community work.  It sure do not
10734 work like the free software project communities I am used to.</p>
10735
10736       </div>
10737       <div class="tags">
10738
10739
10740         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>.
10741
10742
10743       </div>
10744     </div>
10745     <div class="padding"></div>
10746
10747     <div class="entry">
10748       <div class="title">
10749         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html">Gnash enteres Google Summer of Code 2011</a>
10750       </div>
10751       <div class="date">
10752          6th April 2011
10753       </div>
10754       <div class="body">
10755         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is still
10756 the most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation.
10757 A few days ago the project
10758 <a href="http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/2011-04/msg00011.html">announced</a>
10759 that it will participate in Google Summer of Code.  I hope many
10760 students apply, and that some of them succeed in getting AVM2 support
10761 into Gnash.</p>
10762
10763       </div>
10764       <div class="tags">
10765
10766
10767         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>.
10768
10769
10770       </div>
10771     </div>
10772     <div class="padding"></div>
10773
10774     <div class="entry">
10775       <div class="title">
10776         <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>
10777       </div>
10778       <div class="date">
10779          3rd April 2011
10780       </div>
10781       <div class="body">
10782         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
10783 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
10784 update in English.</p>
10785
10786 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
10787 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
10788 of the British service
10789 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
10790 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
10791 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
10792 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
10793 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
10794 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
10795 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
10796 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
10797 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
10798 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
10799 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
10800 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
10801 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
10802
10803 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
10804 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
10805 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
10806 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
10807 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
10808 public infrastructure.</p>
10809
10810 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
10811 such service?</p>
10812
10813       </div>
10814       <div class="tags">
10815
10816
10817         Tags: <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>.
10818
10819
10820       </div>
10821     </div>
10822     <div class="padding"></div>
10823
10824     <div class="entry">
10825       <div class="title">
10826         <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>
10827       </div>
10828       <div class="date">
10829         28th January 2011
10830       </div>
10831       <div class="body">
10832         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
10833 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
10834 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
10835 available on the Internet, and check our locally
10836 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
10837 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
10838 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
10839 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
10840 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
10841 out which security holes were present in our free software
10842 collection.</p>
10843
10844 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
10845 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
10846 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
10847 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
10848 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
10849 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
10850 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
10851 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
10852 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
10853 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
10854 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
10855 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
10856 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
10857 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
10858 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
10859 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
10860
10861 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
10862 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
10863 check out, one could look up
10864 <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
10865 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
10866 The most recent one is
10867 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
10868 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
10869 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
10870
10871 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
10872 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
10873 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
10874 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
10875 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
10876 security issues out.</p>
10877
10878 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
10879 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
10880 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
10881 RHEL is providing
10882 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
10883 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
10884 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
10885
10886 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
10887 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
10888 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
10889 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
10890 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
10891 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
10892 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
10893 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
10894 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
10895 established soon.</p>
10896
10897 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
10898 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
10899 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
10900 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
10901 for their packages.</p>
10902
10903       </div>
10904       <div class="tags">
10905
10906
10907         Tags: <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>.
10908
10909
10910       </div>
10911     </div>
10912     <div class="padding"></div>
10913
10914     <div class="entry">
10915       <div class="title">
10916         <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>
10917       </div>
10918       <div class="date">
10919         23rd January 2011
10920       </div>
10921       <div class="body">
10922         <p>In the
10923 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
10924 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
10925 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
10926 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
10927 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
10928 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
10929 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
10930 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
10931 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
10932 one of my machines like this:</p>
10933
10934 <pre>
10935 loaded modules:
10936 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
10937 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
10938 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
10939 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
10940 10de:03ec pata_amd
10941 10de:03f6 sata_nv
10942 1022:1103 k8temp
10943 109e:036e bttv
10944 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
10945 11ab:4364 sky2
10946 </pre>
10947
10948 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
10949 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
10950
10951 <pre>
10952 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
10953     echo loaded pci modules:
10954     (
10955         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
10956         for address in * ; do
10957             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
10958                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
10959                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
10960                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
10961                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
10962                     echo "$id $module"
10963                 fi
10964             fi
10965         done
10966     )
10967     echo
10968 fi
10969 </pre>
10970
10971 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
10972 mappings:</p>
10973
10974 <pre>
10975 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
10976     echo loaded usb modules:
10977     (
10978         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
10979         for address in * ; do
10980             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
10981                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
10982                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
10983                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
10984                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
10985                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
10986                         echo "$id $module"
10987                     fi
10988                 fi
10989             fi
10990         done
10991     )
10992     echo
10993 fi
10994 </pre>
10995
10996 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
10997 well.</p>
10998
10999       </div>
11000       <div class="tags">
11001
11002
11003         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11004
11005
11006       </div>
11007     </div>
11008     <div class="padding"></div>
11009
11010     <div class="entry">
11011       <div class="title">
11012         <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>
11013       </div>
11014       <div class="date">
11015         16th January 2011
11016       </div>
11017       <div class="body">
11018         <p>The video format struggle on the web continues, and the three
11019 contenders seem to be Ogg Theora, H.264 and WebM.  Most video sites
11020 seem to use H.264, while others use Ogg Theora.  Interestingly enough,
11021 the comments I see give me the feeling that a lot of people believe
11022 H.264 is the most supported video format in browsers, but according to
11023 the Wikipedia article on
11024 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">HTML5 video</a>,
11025 this is not true.  Check out the nice table of supprted formats in
11026 different browsers there.  The format supported by most browsers is
11027 Ogg Theora, supported by released versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google
11028 Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Origyn Web Browser and
11029 BOLT browser, while not supported by Internet Explorer nor Safari.
11030 The runner up is WebM supported by released versions of Google Chrome
11031 Chromium Opera and Origyn Web Browser, and test versions of Mozilla
11032 Firefox.  H.264 is supported by released versions of Safari, Origyn
11033 Web Browser and BOLT browser, and the test version of Internet
11034 Explorer.  Those wanting Ogg Theora support in Internet Explorer and
11035 Safari can install plugins to get it.</p>
11036
11037 <p>To me, the simple conclusion from this is that to reach most users
11038 without any extra software installed, one uses Ogg Theora with the
11039 HTML5 video tag.   Of course to reach all those without a browser
11040 handling HTML5, one need fallback mechanisms.  In
11041 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a>, we provide first fallback to a
11042 plugin capable of playing MPEG1 video, and those without such support
11043 we have a second fallback to the Cortado java applet playing Ogg
11044 Theora.  This seem to work quite well, as can be seen in an <a
11045 href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20110111-semantic-web/">example
11046 from last week</a>.</p>
11047
11048 <p>The reason Ogg Theora is the most supported format, and H.264 is
11049 the least supported is simple.  Implementing and using H.264
11050 require royalty payment to MPEG-LA, and the terms of use from MPEG-LA
11051 are incompatible with free software licensing.  If you believed H.264
11052 was without royalties and license terms, check out
11053 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
11054 Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps.</p>
11055
11056 <p>A incomplete list of sites providing video in Ogg Theora is
11057 available from
11058 <a href="http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_Theora_videos">the
11059 Xiph.org wiki</a>, if you want to have a look.  I'm not aware of a
11060 similar list for WebM nor H.264.</p>
11061
11062 <p>Update 2011-01-16 09:40: A question from Tollef on IRC made me
11063 realise that I failed to make it clear enough this text is about the
11064 &lt;video&gt; tag support in browsers and not the video support
11065 provided by external plugins like the Flash plugins.</p>
11066
11067       </div>
11068       <div class="tags">
11069
11070
11071         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/video">video</a>.
11072
11073
11074       </div>
11075     </div>
11076     <div class="padding"></div>
11077
11078     <div class="entry">
11079       <div class="title">
11080         <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>
11081       </div>
11082       <div class="date">
11083         12th January 2011
11084       </div>
11085       <div class="body">
11086         <p>Today I discovered
11087 <a href="http://www.digi.no/860070/google-dropper-h264-stotten-i-chrome">via
11088 digi.no</a> that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
11089 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html">yesterday
11090 announced</a> plans to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt; in
11091 the browser.  The argument used is that H.264 is not a "completely
11092 open" codec technology.  If you believe H.264 was free for everyone
11093 to use, I recommend having a look at the essay
11094 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
11095 Free That Matters</a>".  It is not free of cost for creators of video
11096 tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the
11097 terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from
11098 licensing the patents needed for H.264.  Some background information
11099 on the Google announcement is available from
11100 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24243/Google_To_Drop_H264_Support_from_Chrome">OSnews</a>.
11101 A good read. :)</p>
11102
11103 <p>Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to
11104 promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on
11105 the Internet.  This can only be done by publishing using free and open
11106 standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support
11107 for these free and open standards.  At the moment there seem to be two
11108 camps in the web browser world when it come to video support.  Some
11109 browsers support H.264, and others support
11110 <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg Theora</a> and
11111 <a href="http://www.webmproject.org/">WebM</a>
11112 (<a href="http://www.diracvideo.org/">Dirac</a> is not really an option
11113 yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet
11114 and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for
11115 H.264 to not reach all potential viewers.
11116 Wikipedia keep <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">an
11117 updated summary</a> of the current browser support.</p>
11118
11119 <p>Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
11120 promoting H.264, and John Gruber
11121 <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/simple_questions">presents
11122 the mind set</a> of these people quite well.  His rhetorical questions
11123 provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
11124 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24245/10_Questions_for_John_Gruber_Regarding_H_264_WebM">presenting
11125 the issues with H.264</a>. Both are worth a read.</p>
11126
11127 <p>Some argue that if Google is dropping H.264 because it isn't free,
11128 they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin.  This
11129 argument was covered by Simon Phipps in
11130 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/01/google-and-h264---far-from-hypocritical/index.htm">todays
11131 blog post</a>, which I find to put the issue in context.  To me it
11132 make perfect sense to drop native H.264 support for HTML5 in the
11133 browser while still allowing plugins.</p>
11134
11135 <p>I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest,
11136 is that all the users and promoters of H.264 suddenly get an uneasy
11137 feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse.  A lot of TV
11138 broadcasters have been moving to H.264 the last few years, and a lot
11139 of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they
11140 could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web
11141 publishing.  Suddenly this belief is shaken.</p>
11142
11143 <p>An interesting question is why Google is doing this.  While the
11144 presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only
11145 present the argument if the change make sense from a business
11146 perspective.  One reason might be that they are currently negotiating
11147 with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the
11148 feeling that dropping H.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and
11149 Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google.
11150 Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having
11151 to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a
11152 video format not requiring royalties at all.  A third reason might be
11153 that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the
11154 Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome.
11155 I guess time will tell.</p>
11156
11157 <p>Update 2011-01-15: The Google Chrome team provided
11158 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html">more
11159 background and information on the move</a> it a blog post yesterday.</p>
11160
11161       </div>
11162       <div class="tags">
11163
11164
11165         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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
11166
11167
11168       </div>
11169     </div>
11170     <div class="padding"></div>
11171
11172     <div class="entry">
11173       <div class="title">
11174         <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>
11175       </div>
11176       <div class="date">
11177         30th December 2010
11178       </div>
11179       <div class="body">
11180         <p>After trying to
11181 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html">compare
11182 Ogg Theora</a> to
11183 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the Digistan
11184 definition</a> of a free and open standard, I concluded that this need
11185 to be done for more standards and started on a framework for doing
11186 this.  As a start, I want to get the status for all the standards in
11187 the Norwegian reference directory, which include UTF-8, HTML, PDF, ODF,
11188 JPEG, PNG, SVG and others.  But to be able to complete this in a
11189 reasonable time frame, I will need help.</p>
11190
11191 <p>If you want to help out with this work, please visit
11192 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/standard/digistan-analyse">the
11193 wiki pages I have set up for this</a>, and let me know that you want
11194 to help out.  The IRC channel #nuug on irc.freenode.net is a good
11195 place to coordinate this for now, as it is the IRC channel for the
11196 NUUG association where I have created the framework (I am the leader
11197 of the Norwegian Unix User Group).</p>
11198
11199 <p>The framework is still forming, and a lot is left to do.  Do not be
11200 scared by the sketchy form of the current pages. :)</p>
11201
11202       </div>
11203       <div class="tags">
11204
11205
11206         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>.
11207
11208
11209       </div>
11210     </div>
11211     <div class="padding"></div>
11212
11213     <div class="entry">
11214       <div class="title">
11215         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html">The many definitions of a open standard</a>
11216       </div>
11217       <div class="date">
11218         27th December 2010
11219       </div>
11220       <div class="body">
11221         <p>One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of
11222 "<a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">Free and
11223 Open Standard</a>" is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of
11224 the term has been decided by Digistan.  The term "Open Standard" has
11225 become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking
11226 about standards.  One end up discussing which definition is the best
11227 one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of
11228 de-facto standards and proprietary solutions.</p>
11229
11230 <p>But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open
11231 standards, here are a few that I know about.  This list is not
11232 complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a
11233 complete survey.  More definitions are available on the
11234 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard">wikipedia
11235 page</a>.</p>
11236
11237 <p>First off is my favourite, the definition from the European
11238 Interoperability Framework version 1.0.  Really sad to notice that BSA
11239 and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version 2.0 of the
11240 framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with
11241 their own people.  Anyway, the definition is still available and it
11242 include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a
11243 specification on equal terms.</p>
11244
11245 <blockquote>
11246
11247 <p>The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification
11248 and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an
11249 open standard:</p>
11250
11251 <ul>
11252
11253 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
11254 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
11255 open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties
11256 (consensus or majority decision etc.).</li>
11257
11258 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
11259 document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be
11260 permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a
11261 nominal fee.</li>
11262
11263 <li>The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of
11264 (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-
11265 free basis.</li>
11266
11267 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
11268
11269 </ul>
11270 </blockquote>
11271
11272 <p>Another one originates from my friends over at
11273 <a href="http://www.dkuug.dk/">DKUUG</a>, who coined and gathered
11274 support for <a href="http://www.aaben-standard.dk/">this
11275 definition</a> in 2004.  It even made it into the Danish parlament as
11276 <a href="http://www.ft.dk/dokumenter/tingdok.aspx?/samling/20051/beslutningsforslag/B103/som_fremsat.htm">their
11277 definition of a open standard</a>.  Another from a different part of
11278 the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.</p>
11279
11280 <blockquote>
11281
11282 <p>En åben standard opfylder følgende krav:</p>
11283
11284 <ol>
11285
11286 <li>Veldokumenteret med den fuldstændige specifikation offentligt
11287 tilgængelig.</li>
11288
11289 <li>Frit implementerbar uden økonomiske, politiske eller juridiske
11290 begrænsninger på implementation og anvendelse.</li>
11291
11292 <li>Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et åbent forum (en såkaldt
11293 "standardiseringsorganisation") via en åben proces.</li>
11294
11295 </ol>
11296
11297 </blockquote>
11298
11299 <p>Then there is <a href="http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/def.html">the
11300 definition</a> from Free Software Foundation Europe.</p>
11301
11302 <blockquote>
11303
11304 <p>An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is</p>
11305
11306 <ol>
11307
11308 <li>subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a
11309 manner equally available to all parties;</li>
11310
11311 <li>without any components or extensions that have dependencies on
11312 formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open
11313 Standard themselves;</li>
11314
11315 <li>free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by
11316 any party or in any business model;</li>
11317
11318 <li>managed and further developed independently of any single vendor
11319 in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third
11320 parties;</li>
11321
11322 <li>available in multiple complete implementations by competing
11323 vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all
11324 parties.</li>
11325
11326 </ol>
11327
11328 </blockquote>
11329
11330 <p>A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created
11331 its
11332 <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/dennisding/resource/Open%20Standard%20Definition.pdf">Open
11333 Standards Checklist</a> with a fairly detailed description.</p>
11334
11335 <blockquote>
11336 <p>Creation and Management of an Open Standard
11337
11338 <ul>
11339
11340 <li>Its development and management process must be collaborative and
11341   democratic:
11342
11343          <ul>
11344
11345          <li>Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to
11346             participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria
11347             imposed by the organization under which it is developed
11348             and managed.</li>
11349
11350          <li>The processes must be documented and, through a known
11351             method, can be changed through input from all
11352             participants.</li>
11353
11354          <li>The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for
11355             the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.</li>
11356
11357          <li>Development and management should strive for consensus,
11358             and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.</li>
11359
11360          <li>The standard specification must be open to extensive
11361             public review at least once in its life-cycle, with
11362             comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.</li>
11363
11364          </ul>
11365
11366 </li>
11367
11368 </ul>
11369
11370 <p>Use and Licensing of an Open Standard</p>
11371 <ul>
11372
11373 <li>The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation,
11374   and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing
11375   implementations to the interface described in the standard without
11376   undue or restrictive constraints.  Interfaces include APIs,
11377   protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.</li>
11378
11379 <li> The standard must not contain any proprietary "hooks" that create
11380   a technical or economic barriers</li>
11381
11382 <li>Faithful implementations of the standard must
11383   interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer
11384   program to communicate and exchange information with other computer
11385   programs and mutually to use the information which has been
11386   exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange
11387   file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or
11388   conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other
11389   computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are
11390   intended to function.</li>
11391
11392 <li>It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the
11393   standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it
11394   must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.</li>
11395
11396 <li>It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or
11397   fees; also known as "royalty free"), worldwide, non-exclusive and
11398   perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and
11399   sell products based on the standard.  The only exceptions are
11400   terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms
11401   outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished
11402   patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is
11403   only for the exact scope of the standard in question.
11404
11405       <ul>
11406
11407       <li> May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of
11408         licensees' patent claims essential to practice that standard
11409         (also known as a reciprocity clause)</li>
11410
11411       <li> May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor
11412         or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims
11413         essential to practice that standard (also known as a
11414         "defensive suspension" clause)</li>
11415
11416       <li> The same licensing terms are available to every potential
11417         licensor</li>
11418
11419       </ul>
11420 </li>
11421
11422 <li>The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude
11423   implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms
11424   or restricted licensing terms</li>
11425
11426 </ul>
11427
11428 </blockquote>
11429
11430 <p>It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that
11431 there are so many of them.  As you can see, the same holds true for
11432 open standard definitions.  Most of the definitions have a lot in
11433 common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open
11434 standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it
11435 possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real
11436 competition to downplay the significance of open standards.  I hope we
11437 can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open
11438 Standards.</p>
11439
11440       </div>
11441       <div class="tags">
11442
11443
11444         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>.
11445
11446
11447       </div>
11448     </div>
11449     <div class="padding"></div>
11450
11451     <div class="entry">
11452       <div class="title">
11453         <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>
11454       </div>
11455       <div class="date">
11456         25th December 2010
11457       </div>
11458       <div class="body">
11459         <p><a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">The
11460 Digistan definition</a> of a free and open standard reads like this:</p>
11461
11462 <blockquote>
11463
11464 <p>The Digital Standards Organization defines free and open standard
11465 as follows:</p>
11466
11467 <ol>
11468
11469 <li>A free and open standard is immune to vendor capture at all stages
11470 in its life-cycle. Immunity from vendor capture makes it possible to
11471 freely use, improve upon, trust, and extend a standard over time.</li>
11472
11473 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
11474 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
11475 open decision-making procedure available to all interested
11476 parties.</li>
11477
11478 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
11479 document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy,
11480 distribute, and use it freely.</li>
11481
11482 <li>The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made
11483 irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.</li>
11484
11485 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
11486
11487 </ol>
11488
11489 <p>The economic outcome of a free and open standard, which can be
11490 measured, is that it enables perfect competition between suppliers of
11491 products based on the standard.</p>
11492 </blockquote>
11493
11494 <p>For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free
11495 and open standard according to this definition.  Here is a short
11496 writeup of what I have been able to gather so far.  I brought up the
11497 topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list
11498 <a href="http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/advocacy/2009-July/001632.html">in
11499 July 2009</a>, for those that want to see some background information.
11500 According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list
11501 the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.</p>
11502
11503 <p><strong>Free from vendor capture?</strong></p>
11504
11505 <p>As far as I can see, there is no single vendor that can control the
11506 Ogg Theora specification.  It can be argued that the
11507 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/">Xiph foundation</A> is such vendor, but
11508 given that it is a non-profit foundation with the expressed goal
11509 making free and open protocols and standards available, it is not
11510 obvious that this is a real risk.  One issue with the Xiph
11511 foundation is that its inner working (as in board member list, or who
11512 control the foundation) are not easily available on the web.  I've
11513 been unable to find out who is in the foundation board, and have not
11514 seen any accounting information documenting how money is handled nor
11515 where is is spent in the foundation.  It is thus not obvious for an
11516 external observer who control The Xiph foundation, and for all I know
11517 it is possible for a single vendor to take control over the
11518 specification.  But it seem unlikely.</p>
11519
11520 <p><strong>Maintained by open not-for-profit organisation?</strong></p>
11521
11522 <p>Assuming that the Xiph foundation is the organisation its web pages
11523 claim it to be, this point is fulfilled.  If Xiph foundation is
11524 controlled by a single vendor, it isn't, but I have not found any
11525 documentation indicating this.</p>
11526
11527 <p>According to
11528 <a href="http://media.hiof.no/diverse/fad/rapport_4.pdf">a report</a>
11529 prepared by Audun Vaaler og Børre Ludvigsen for the Norwegian
11530 government, the Xiph foundation is a non-commercial organisation and
11531 the development process is open, transparent and non-Discrimatory.
11532 Until proven otherwise, I believe it make most sense to believe the
11533 report is correct.</p>
11534
11535 <p><strong>Specification freely available?</strong></p>
11536
11537 <p>The specification for the <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/">Ogg
11538 container format</a> and both the
11539 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/">Vorbis</a> and
11540 <a href="http://theora.org/doc/">Theora</a> codeces are available on
11541 the web.  This are the terms in the Vorbis and Theora specification:
11542
11543 <blockquote>
11544
11545 Anyone may freely use and distribute the Ogg and [Vorbis/Theora]
11546 specifications, whether in private, public, or corporate
11547 capacity. However, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the Ogg project reserve
11548 the right to set the Ogg [Vorbis/Theora] specification and certify
11549 specification compliance.
11550
11551 </blockquote>
11552
11553 <p>The Ogg container format is specified in IETF
11554 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/rfc3533.txt">RFC 3533</a>, and
11555 this is the term:<p>
11556
11557 <blockquote>
11558
11559 <p>This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
11560 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
11561 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
11562 distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
11563 provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
11564 included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
11565 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
11566 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
11567 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
11568 Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
11569 in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to
11570 translate it into languages other than English.</p>
11571
11572 <p>The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
11573 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.</p>
11574 </blockquote>
11575
11576 <p>All these terms seem to allow unlimited distribution and use, an
11577 this term seem to be fulfilled.  There might be a problem with the
11578 missing permission to distribute modified versions of the text, and
11579 thus reuse it in other specifications.  Not quite sure if that is a
11580 requirement for the Digistan definition.</p>
11581
11582 <p><strong>Royalty-free?</strong></p>
11583
11584 <p>There are no known patent claims requiring royalties for the Ogg
11585 Theora format.
11586 <a href="http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=65782">MPEG-LA</a>
11587 and
11588 <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/237238/Steve-Jobs-Hints-At-Theora-Lawsuit">Steve
11589 Jobs</a> in Apple claim to know about some patent claims (submarine
11590 patents) against the Theora format, but no-one else seem to believe
11591 them.  Both Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation have looked into
11592 this and decided to implement Ogg Theora support in their browsers
11593 without paying any royalties.  For now the claims from MPEG-LA and
11594 Steve Jobs seem more like FUD to scare people to use the H.264 codec
11595 than any real problem with Ogg Theora.</p>
11596
11597 <p><strong>No constraints on re-use?</strong></p>
11598
11599 <p>I am not aware of any constraints on re-use.</p>
11600
11601 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
11602
11603 <p>3 of 5 requirements seem obviously fulfilled, and the remaining 2
11604 depend on the governing structure of the Xiph foundation.  Given the
11605 background report used by the Norwegian government, I believe it is
11606 safe to assume the last two requirements are fulfilled too, but it
11607 would be nice if the Xiph foundation web site made it easier to verify
11608 this.</p>
11609
11610 <p>It would be nice to see other analysis of other specifications to
11611 see if they are free and open standards.</p>
11612
11613       </div>
11614       <div class="tags">
11615
11616
11617         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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
11618
11619
11620       </div>
11621     </div>
11622     <div class="padding"></div>
11623
11624     <div class="entry">
11625       <div class="title">
11626         <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>
11627       </div>
11628       <div class="date">
11629         25th December 2010
11630       </div>
11631       <div class="body">
11632         <p>A few days ago
11633 <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article189879.ece">an
11634 article</a> in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version
11635 2.0 of
11636 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Framework">European
11637 Interoperability Framework</a> has been successfully lobbied by the
11638 proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software.
11639 Nothing very surprising there, given
11640 <a href="http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/29/2115235/Open-Source-Open-Standards-Under-Attack-In-Europe">earlier
11641 reports</a> on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in
11642 this work.  But I find this very sad.   The definition of
11643 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dokumenter/standard-presse-def-200506.txt">an
11644 open standard from version 1</a> was very good, and something I
11645 believe should be used also in the future, alongside
11646 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the
11647 definition from Digistan</A>.  Version 2 have removed the open
11648 standard definition from its content.</p>
11649
11650 <p>Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar
11651 Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply
11652 to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software
11653 in the public sector in Peru.  As the text was not available from a
11654 few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from
11655 <a href="http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/articles/en/reponseperou/villanueva_to_ms.html">my
11656 source</a> to ensure it is available also in the future.  Some
11657 background information about that story is available in
11658 <a href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6099">an article</a> from
11659 Linux Journal in 2002.</p>
11660
11661 <blockquote>
11662 <p>Lima, 8th of April, 2002<br>
11663 To: Señor JUAN ALBERTO GONZÁLEZ<br>
11664 General Manager of Microsoft Perú</p>
11665
11666 <p>Dear Sir:</p>
11667
11668 <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>
11669
11670 <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>
11671
11672 <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>
11673
11674 <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>
11675
11676 <p>
11677 <ul>
11678 <li>Free access to public information by the citizen. </li>
11679 <li>Permanence of public data. </li>
11680 <li>Security of the State and citizens.</li>
11681 </ul>
11682 </p>
11683
11684 <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>
11685
11686 <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>
11687
11688 <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>
11689
11690 <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>
11691
11692 <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>
11693
11694
11695 <p>From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:<br>
11696 <li>the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software</li>
11697 <li>the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software</li>
11698 <li>the law does not specify which concrete software to use</li>
11699 <li>the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought</li>
11700 <li>the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.</li>
11701
11702 </p>
11703
11704 <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>
11705
11706 <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>
11707
11708 <p>As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail:</p>
11709
11710 <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>
11711
11712 <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>
11713
11714 <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>
11715
11716 <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>
11717
11718 <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>
11719
11720 <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>
11721
11722 <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>
11723
11724 <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>
11725
11726 <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>
11727
11728 <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>
11729
11730 <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>
11731
11732 <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>
11733
11734 <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>
11735
11736 <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>
11737
11738 <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>
11739
11740 <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>
11741
11742 <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>
11743
11744 <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>
11745
11746 <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>
11747
11748 <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>
11749
11750 <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>
11751
11752 <p>On security:</p>
11753
11754 <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>
11755
11756 <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>
11757
11758 <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>
11759
11760 <p>In respect of the guarantee:</p>
11761
11762 <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>
11763
11764 <p>On Intellectual Property:</p>
11765
11766 <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>
11767
11768 <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>
11769
11770 <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>
11771
11772 <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>
11773
11774 <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>
11775
11776 <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>
11777
11778 <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>
11779
11780 <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>
11781
11782 <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>
11783
11784 <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>
11785
11786 <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>
11787
11788 <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>
11789
11790 <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>
11791
11792 <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>
11793
11794 <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>
11795
11796 <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>
11797
11798 <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>
11799
11800 <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>
11801
11802 <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>
11803
11804 <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>
11805
11806 <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>
11807
11808 <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>
11809
11810 <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>
11811
11812 <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>
11813
11814 <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>
11815
11816 <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>
11817
11818 <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>
11819
11820 <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>
11821
11822 <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>
11823
11824 <p>Cordially,<br>
11825 DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NUÑEZ<br>
11826 Congressman of the Republic of Perú.</p>
11827 </blockquote>
11828
11829       </div>
11830       <div class="tags">
11831
11832
11833         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>.
11834
11835
11836       </div>
11837     </div>
11838     <div class="padding"></div>
11839
11840     <div class="entry">
11841       <div class="title">
11842         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html">Officeshots still going strong</a>
11843       </div>
11844       <div class="date">
11845         25th December 2010
11846       </div>
11847       <div class="body">
11848         <p>Half a year ago I
11849 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">wrote
11850 a bit</a> about <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>,
11851 a web service to allow anyone to test how ODF documents are handled by
11852 the different programs reading and writing the ODF format.</p>
11853
11854 <p>I just had a look at the service, and it seem to be going strong.
11855 Very interesting to see the results reported in the gallery, how
11856 different Office implementations handle different ODF features.  Sad
11857 to see that KOffice was not doing it very well, and happy to see that
11858 LibreOffice has been tested already (but sadly not listed as a option
11859 for OfficeShots users yet).  I am glad to see that the ODF community
11860 got such a great test tool available.</p>
11861
11862       </div>
11863       <div class="tags">
11864
11865
11866         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>.
11867
11868
11869       </div>
11870     </div>
11871     <div class="padding"></div>
11872
11873     <div class="entry">
11874       <div class="title">
11875         <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>
11876       </div>
11877       <div class="date">
11878         22nd December 2010
11879       </div>
11880       <div class="body">
11881         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
11882 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
11883 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
11884 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
11885 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
11886 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
11887 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
11888 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
11889 university.</p>
11890
11891 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
11892 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
11893 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
11894 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
11895 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
11896 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
11897 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
11898 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
11899
11900 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
11901 I perform on a new model.</p>
11902
11903 <ul>
11904
11905 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
11906 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
11907 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
11908
11909 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
11910 installation, X.org is working.</li>
11911
11912 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
11913 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
11914 reported by the program.</li>
11915
11916 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
11917 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
11918 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
11919 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
11920 normally test this by playing
11921 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
11922 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
11923
11924 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
11925 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
11926
11927 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
11928 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
11929
11930 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
11931 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
11932
11933 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
11934 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
11935 few.</li>
11936
11937 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
11938 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
11939 notice this.</li>
11940
11941 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
11942 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
11943 resume.</li>
11944
11945 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
11946 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
11947 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
11948 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
11949 not.</li>
11950
11951 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
11952 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
11953 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
11954 existence.</li>
11955
11956 </ul>
11957
11958 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
11959 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
11960 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
11961 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
11962 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
11963 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
11964 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
11965 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
11966
11967       </div>
11968       <div class="tags">
11969
11970
11971         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>.
11972
11973
11974       </div>
11975     </div>
11976     <div class="padding"></div>
11977
11978     <div class="entry">
11979       <div class="title">
11980         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
11981       </div>
11982       <div class="date">
11983         11th December 2010
11984       </div>
11985       <div class="body">
11986         <p>As I continue to explore
11987 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
11988 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
11989 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
11990
11991 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
11992 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
11993 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
11994 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
11995 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
11996 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
11997 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
11998 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
11999 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
12000 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
12001 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
12002 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
12003 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
12004 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
12005 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
12006 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
12007 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
12008 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
12009 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
12010 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
12011
12012 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
12013 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
12014 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
12015 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
12016 If the Skolelinux foundation
12017 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
12018 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
12019 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
12020 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
12021 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
12022 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
12023 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
12024 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
12025
12026 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
12027 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
12028 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
12029 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
12030 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
12031 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
12032 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
12033 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
12034 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
12035 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
12036 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
12037 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
12038 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
12039 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
12040 currencies.</p>
12041
12042 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
12043 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
12044 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
12045 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
12046 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
12047 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
12048 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
12049 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
12050 BitCoins.  Check out
12051 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
12052 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
12053 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
12054 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
12055 yet.</p>
12056
12057 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
12058 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
12059 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
12060 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
12061 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
12062
12063       </div>
12064       <div class="tags">
12065
12066
12067         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>.
12068
12069
12070       </div>
12071     </div>
12072     <div class="padding"></div>
12073
12074     <div class="entry">
12075       <div class="title">
12076         <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>
12077       </div>
12078       <div class="date">
12079         10th December 2010
12080       </div>
12081       <div class="body">
12082         <p>With this weeks lawless
12083 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
12084 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
12085 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
12086 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
12087 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
12088 A blog post from
12089 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
12090 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
12091 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
12092 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
12093 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
12094 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
12095 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
12096
12097 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
12098 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
12099 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
12100 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
12101 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
12102 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
12103 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
12104 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
12105 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
12106 Debian</a> soon.</p>
12107
12108 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
12109 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
12110 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
12111 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
12112 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
12113 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
12114 you can even get
12115 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
12116 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
12117 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
12118 on the current exchange rates.</p>
12119
12120 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
12121 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
12122 donations to the address
12123 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
12124
12125       </div>
12126       <div class="tags">
12127
12128
12129         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>.
12130
12131
12132       </div>
12133     </div>
12134     <div class="padding"></div>
12135
12136     <div class="entry">
12137       <div class="title">
12138         <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>
12139       </div>
12140       <div class="date">
12141          9th December 2010
12142       </div>
12143       <div class="body">
12144         <p>A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot
12145 student assosiation <a href="http://www.robotica.no/">Robotica
12146 Osloensis</a> at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to
12147 get their own 3D printer.  They wanted to learn from me based on my
12148 work in the area.  After having a short lunch meeting with them, I
12149 offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete
12150 the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon.  I look
12151 forward to see how this goes.  This monday their volunteer driver
12152 picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the
12153 last exam is over so they can start work on getting the 3D printer
12154 operational.</p>
12155
12156 <p>The robotic group have already build several robots on their own,
12157 and seem capable of getting the reprap operational.  I really look
12158 forward to being able to print all the cool 3D designs published on
12159 <a href="http://www.thingiverse.com/">Thingiverse</a>.  I even got
12160 some 3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at
12161 the computer science department at the university demonstrated their
12162 very cool 3D scanner.</p>
12163
12164       </div>
12165       <div class="tags">
12166
12167
12168         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>.
12169
12170
12171       </div>
12172     </div>
12173     <div class="padding"></div>
12174
12175     <div class="entry">
12176       <div class="title">
12177         <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>
12178       </div>
12179       <div class="date">
12180         29th November 2010
12181       </div>
12182       <div class="body">
12183         <p>On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
12184 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2010-12-03-05-Oslo">development
12185 gathering</a> in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway.  I
12186 really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
12187 Squeeze release.  The gathering is open for everyone interested in
12188 learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
12189
12190 <p>On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
12191 organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
12192 will hold its
12193 <a href="http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Genfors/2010">General Assembly
12194 for 2010</a>.  Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388
12195 people registered as members.  Last year 32 members cast their vote in
12196 the memberdb based election system.  I hope more people find time to
12197 vote this year.</p>
12198
12199       </div>
12200       <div class="tags">
12201
12202
12203         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>.
12204
12205
12206       </div>
12207     </div>
12208     <div class="padding"></div>
12209
12210     <div class="entry">
12211       <div class="title">
12212         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
12213       </div>
12214       <div class="date">
12215         27th November 2010
12216       </div>
12217       <div class="body">
12218         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
12219 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
12220 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
12221 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
12222 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
12223 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
12224 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
12225 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
12226
12227 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
12228 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
12229 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
12230 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
12231 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
12232 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
12233 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
12234 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
12235 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
12236 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
12237 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
12238
12239 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
12240 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
12241 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
12242 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
12243 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
12244 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
12245 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
12246 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
12247 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
12248 what is going on.</p>
12249
12250       </div>
12251       <div class="tags">
12252
12253
12254         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>.
12255
12256
12257       </div>
12258     </div>
12259     <div class="padding"></div>
12260
12261     <div class="entry">
12262       <div class="title">
12263         <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>
12264       </div>
12265       <div class="date">
12266         22nd November 2010
12267       </div>
12268       <div class="body">
12269         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
12270 upgrade testing of the
12271 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
12272 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
12273 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
12274 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
12275
12276 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
12277
12278 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
12279
12280 <blockquote><p>
12281   apache2.2-bin
12282   aptdaemon
12283   baobab
12284   binfmt-support
12285   browser-plugin-gnash
12286   cheese-common
12287   cli-common
12288   cups-pk-helper
12289   dmz-cursor-theme
12290   empathy
12291   empathy-common
12292   freedesktop-sound-theme
12293   freeglut3
12294   gconf-defaults-service
12295   gdm-themes
12296   gedit-plugins
12297   geoclue
12298   geoclue-hostip
12299   geoclue-localnet
12300   geoclue-manual
12301   geoclue-yahoo
12302   gnash
12303   gnash-common
12304   gnome
12305   gnome-backgrounds
12306   gnome-cards-data
12307   gnome-codec-install
12308   gnome-core
12309   gnome-desktop-environment
12310   gnome-disk-utility
12311   gnome-screenshot
12312   gnome-search-tool
12313   gnome-session-canberra
12314   gnome-system-log
12315   gnome-themes-extras
12316   gnome-themes-more
12317   gnome-user-share
12318   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
12319   gstreamer0.10-tools
12320   gtk2-engines
12321   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
12322   gtk2-engines-smooth
12323   hamster-applet
12324   libapache2-mod-dnssd
12325   libapr1
12326   libaprutil1
12327   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
12328   libaprutil1-ldap
12329   libart2.0-cil
12330   libboost-date-time1.42.0
12331   libboost-python1.42.0
12332   libboost-thread1.42.0
12333   libchamplain-0.4-0
12334   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
12335   libcheese-gtk18
12336   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
12337   libcryptui0
12338   libdiscid0
12339   libelf1
12340   libepc-1.0-2
12341   libepc-common
12342   libepc-ui-1.0-2
12343   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
12344   libfreerdp0
12345   libgconf2.0-cil
12346   libgdata-common
12347   libgdata7
12348   libgdu-gtk0
12349   libgee2
12350   libgeoclue0
12351   libgexiv2-0
12352   libgif4
12353   libglade2.0-cil
12354   libglib2.0-cil
12355   libgmime2.4-cil
12356   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
12357   libgnome2.24-cil
12358   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
12359   libgpod-common
12360   libgpod4
12361   libgtk2.0-cil
12362   libgtkglext1
12363   libgtksourceview2.0-common
12364   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
12365   libmono-addins0.2-cil
12366   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
12367   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
12368   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
12369   libmono-posix2.0-cil
12370   libmono-security2.0-cil
12371   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
12372   libmono-system2.0-cil
12373   libmtp8
12374   libmusicbrainz3-6
12375   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
12376   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
12377   libopal3.6.8
12378   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
12379   libpt2.6.7
12380   libpython2.6
12381   librpm1
12382   librpmio1
12383   libsdl1.2debian
12384   libsrtp0
12385   libssh-4
12386   libtelepathy-farsight0
12387   libtelepathy-glib0
12388   libtidy-0.99-0
12389   media-player-info
12390   mesa-utils
12391   mono-2.0-gac
12392   mono-gac
12393   mono-runtime
12394   nautilus-sendto
12395   nautilus-sendto-empathy
12396   p7zip-full
12397   pkg-config
12398   python-aptdaemon
12399   python-aptdaemon-gtk
12400   python-axiom
12401   python-beautifulsoup
12402   python-bugbuddy
12403   python-clientform
12404   python-coherence
12405   python-configobj
12406   python-crypto
12407   python-cupshelpers
12408   python-elementtree
12409   python-epsilon
12410   python-evolution
12411   python-feedparser
12412   python-gdata
12413   python-gdbm
12414   python-gst0.10
12415   python-gtkglext1
12416   python-gtksourceview2
12417   python-httplib2
12418   python-louie
12419   python-mako
12420   python-markupsafe
12421   python-mechanize
12422   python-nevow
12423   python-notify
12424   python-opengl
12425   python-openssl
12426   python-pam
12427   python-pkg-resources
12428   python-pyasn1
12429   python-pysqlite2
12430   python-rdflib
12431   python-serial
12432   python-tagpy
12433   python-twisted-bin
12434   python-twisted-conch
12435   python-twisted-core
12436   python-twisted-web
12437   python-utidylib
12438   python-webkit
12439   python-xdg
12440   python-zope.interface
12441   remmina
12442   remmina-plugin-data
12443   remmina-plugin-rdp
12444   remmina-plugin-vnc
12445   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
12446   rhythmbox-plugins
12447   rpm-common
12448   rpm2cpio
12449   seahorse-plugins
12450   shotwell
12451   software-center
12452   system-config-printer-udev
12453   telepathy-gabble
12454   telepathy-mission-control-5
12455   telepathy-salut
12456   tomboy
12457   totem
12458   totem-coherence
12459   totem-mozilla
12460   totem-plugins
12461   transmission-common
12462   xdg-user-dirs
12463   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
12464   xserver-xephyr
12465 </p></blockquote>
12466
12467 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
12468
12469 <blockquote><p>
12470   cheese
12471   ekiga
12472   eog
12473   epiphany-extensions
12474   evolution-exchange
12475   fast-user-switch-applet
12476   file-roller
12477   gcalctool
12478   gconf-editor
12479   gdm
12480   gedit
12481   gedit-common
12482   gnome-games
12483   gnome-games-data
12484   gnome-nettool
12485   gnome-system-tools
12486   gnome-themes
12487   gnuchess
12488   gucharmap
12489   guile-1.8-libs
12490   libavahi-ui0
12491   libdmx1
12492   libgalago3
12493   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
12494   libgtksourceview2.0-0
12495   liblircclient0
12496   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
12497   libspeexdsp1
12498   libsvga1
12499   rhythmbox
12500   seahorse
12501   sound-juicer
12502   system-config-printer
12503   totem-common
12504   transmission-gtk
12505   vinagre
12506   vino
12507 </p></blockquote>
12508
12509 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
12510
12511 <blockquote><p>
12512   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
12513 </p></blockquote>
12514
12515 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
12516
12517 <blockquote><p>
12518 [nothing]
12519 </p></blockquote>
12520
12521 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
12522
12523 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
12524
12525 <blockquote><p>
12526   ksmserver
12527 </p></blockquote>
12528
12529 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
12530
12531 <blockquote><p>
12532   kwin
12533   network-manager-kde
12534 </p></blockquote>
12535
12536 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
12537
12538 <blockquote><p>
12539   arts
12540   dolphin
12541   freespacenotifier
12542   google-gadgets-gst
12543   google-gadgets-xul
12544   kappfinder
12545   kcalc
12546   kcharselect
12547   kde-core
12548   kde-plasma-desktop
12549   kde-standard
12550   kde-window-manager
12551   kdeartwork
12552   kdeartwork-emoticons
12553   kdeartwork-style
12554   kdeartwork-theme-icon
12555   kdebase
12556   kdebase-apps
12557   kdebase-workspace
12558   kdebase-workspace-bin
12559   kdebase-workspace-data
12560   kdeeject
12561   kdelibs
12562   kdeplasma-addons
12563   kdeutils
12564   kdewallpapers
12565   kdf
12566   kfloppy
12567   kgpg
12568   khelpcenter4
12569   kinfocenter
12570   konq-plugins-l10n
12571   konqueror-nsplugins
12572   kscreensaver
12573   kscreensaver-xsavers
12574   ktimer
12575   kwrite
12576   libgle3
12577   libkde4-ruby1.8
12578   libkonq5
12579   libkonq5-templates
12580   libnetpbm10
12581   libplasma-ruby
12582   libplasma-ruby1.8
12583   libqt4-ruby1.8
12584   marble-data
12585   marble-plugins
12586   netpbm
12587   nuvola-icon-theme
12588   plasma-dataengines-workspace
12589   plasma-desktop
12590   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
12591   plasma-runners-addons
12592   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
12593   plasma-scriptengine-python
12594   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
12595   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
12596   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
12597   plasma-scriptengines
12598   plasma-wallpapers-addons
12599   plasma-widget-folderview
12600   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
12601   ruby
12602   sweeper
12603   update-notifier-kde
12604   xscreensaver-data-extra
12605   xscreensaver-gl
12606   xscreensaver-gl-extra
12607   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
12608 </p></blockquote>
12609
12610 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
12611
12612 <blockquote><p>
12613   ark
12614   google-gadgets-common
12615   google-gadgets-qt
12616   htdig
12617   kate
12618   kdebase-bin
12619   kdebase-data
12620   kdepasswd
12621   kfind
12622   klipper
12623   konq-plugins
12624   konqueror
12625   ksysguard
12626   ksysguardd
12627   libarchive1
12628   libcln6
12629   libeet1
12630   libeina-svn-06
12631   libggadget-1.0-0b
12632   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
12633   libgps19
12634   libkdecorations4
12635   libkephal4
12636   libkonq4
12637   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
12638   libkscreensaver5
12639   libksgrd4
12640   libksignalplotter4
12641   libkunitconversion4
12642   libkwineffects1a
12643   libmarblewidget4
12644   libntrack-qt4-1
12645   libntrack0
12646   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
12647   libplasmaclock4a
12648   libplasmagenericshell4
12649   libprocesscore4a
12650   libprocessui4a
12651   libqalculate5
12652   libqedje0a
12653   libqtruby4shared2
12654   libqzion0a
12655   libruby1.8
12656   libscim8c2a
12657   libsmokekdecore4-3
12658   libsmokekdeui4-3
12659   libsmokekfile3
12660   libsmokekhtml3
12661   libsmokekio3
12662   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
12663   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
12664   libsmokekparts3
12665   libsmokektexteditor3
12666   libsmokekutils3
12667   libsmokenepomuk3
12668   libsmokephonon3
12669   libsmokeplasma3
12670   libsmokeqtcore4-3
12671   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
12672   libsmokeqtgui4-3
12673   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
12674   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
12675   libsmokeqtscript4-3
12676   libsmokeqtsql4-3
12677   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
12678   libsmokeqttest4-3
12679   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
12680   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
12681   libsmokeqtxml4-3
12682   libsmokesolid3
12683   libsmokesoprano3
12684   libtaskmanager4a
12685   libtidy-0.99-0
12686   libweather-ion4a
12687   libxklavier16
12688   libxxf86misc1
12689   okteta
12690   oxygencursors
12691   plasma-dataengines-addons
12692   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
12693   plasma-widget-lancelot
12694   plasma-widgets-addons
12695   plasma-widgets-workspace
12696   polkit-kde-1
12697   ruby1.8
12698   systemsettings
12699   update-notifier-common
12700 </p></blockquote>
12701
12702 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
12703 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
12704 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
12705 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
12706
12707       </div>
12708       <div class="tags">
12709
12710
12711         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>.
12712
12713
12714       </div>
12715     </div>
12716     <div class="padding"></div>
12717
12718     <div class="entry">
12719       <div class="title">
12720         <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>
12721       </div>
12722       <div class="date">
12723         22nd November 2010
12724       </div>
12725       <div class="body">
12726         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
12727 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
12728 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
12729 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
12730 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
12731 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
12732 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
12733 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
12734 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
12735
12736 <p>I found
12737 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
12738 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
12739 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
12740 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
12741 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
12742 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
12743
12744 <pre>
12745 #!/bin/sh
12746
12747 # Based on
12748 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
12749
12750 set -e
12751 set -x
12752
12753 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
12754     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
12755     exit 1
12756 else
12757     host="$1"
12758 fi
12759
12760 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
12761     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
12762     exit 1
12763 fi
12764
12765 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
12766 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
12767 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
12768 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
12769
12770 img=$host.img
12771 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
12772 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
12773
12774 parted $img mklabel msdos
12775 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
12776 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
12777 parted $img set 1 boot on
12778
12779 modprobe dm-mod
12780 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
12781 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
12782
12783 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
12784 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
12785 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
12786
12787 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
12788 losetup -d /dev/loop0
12789 </pre>
12790
12791 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
12792 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
12793
12794 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
12795 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
12796 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
12797 seem to work just fine.</p>
12798
12799       </div>
12800       <div class="tags">
12801
12802
12803         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>.
12804
12805
12806       </div>
12807     </div>
12808     <div class="padding"></div>
12809
12810     <div class="entry">
12811       <div class="title">
12812         <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>
12813       </div>
12814       <div class="date">
12815         20th November 2010
12816       </div>
12817       <div class="body">
12818         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
12819 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
12820 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
12821 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
12822
12823 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
12824 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
12825 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
12826
12827 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
12828
12829 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
12830
12831 <blockquote><p>
12832   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
12833   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
12834   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
12835   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
12836   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
12837   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
12838   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
12839   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
12840   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
12841   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
12842   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
12843   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
12844   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
12845   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
12846   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
12847   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
12848   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
12849   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
12850   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
12851   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
12852   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
12853   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
12854   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
12855   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
12856   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
12857   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
12858   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
12859   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
12860   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
12861   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
12862   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
12863   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
12864   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
12865   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
12866   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
12867   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
12868   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
12869   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
12870   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
12871   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
12872   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
12873   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
12874   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
12875   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
12876   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
12877   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
12878   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
12879   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
12880   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
12881   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
12882   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
12883   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
12884   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
12885   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
12886   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
12887   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
12888   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
12889   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
12890   zip
12891 </p></blockquote>
12892
12893 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
12894
12895 <blockquote><p>
12896   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
12897   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
12898   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
12899   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
12900   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
12901   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
12902   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
12903   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
12904   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
12905   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
12906   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
12907   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
12908   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
12909   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
12910   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
12911   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
12912   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
12913   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
12914   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
12915   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
12916   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
12917   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
12918   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
12919   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
12920   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
12921   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
12922   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
12923   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
12924   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
12925 </p></blockquote>
12926
12927 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
12928
12929 <blockquote><p>
12930   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
12931 </p></blockquote>
12932
12933 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
12934
12935 <blockquote><p>
12936 [nothing]
12937 </p></blockquote>
12938
12939 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
12940
12941 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
12942
12943 <blockquote><p>
12944   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
12945   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
12946   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
12947   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
12948   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
12949   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
12950   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
12951   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
12952   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
12953   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
12954   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
12955   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
12956   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
12957   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
12958   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
12959   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
12960   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
12961   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
12962   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
12963   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
12964   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
12965   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
12966   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
12967   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
12968   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
12969   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
12970   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
12971   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
12972   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
12973   ttf-sazanami-gothic
12974 </p></blockquote>
12975
12976 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
12977
12978 <blockquote><p>
12979   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
12980   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
12981   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
12982   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
12983   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
12984   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
12985   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
12986   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
12987   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
12988   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
12989   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
12990   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
12991   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
12992   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
12993   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
12994   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
12995   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
12996   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
12997   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
12998   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
12999   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
13000   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
13001   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
13002   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
13003   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
13004   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
13005   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
13006   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
13007   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
13008   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
13009   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
13010   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
13011   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
13012 </p></blockquote>
13013
13014 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
13015
13016 <blockquote><p>
13017   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
13018   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
13019   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
13020   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
13021   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
13022   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
13023   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
13024 </p></blockquote>
13025
13026 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
13027
13028 <blockquote><p>
13029   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
13030 </p></blockquote>
13031
13032       </div>
13033       <div class="tags">
13034
13035
13036         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>.
13037
13038
13039       </div>
13040     </div>
13041     <div class="padding"></div>
13042
13043     <div class="entry">
13044       <div class="title">
13045         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
13046       </div>
13047       <div class="date">
13048         20th November 2010
13049       </div>
13050       <div class="body">
13051         <p>Answering
13052 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
13053 call from the Gnash project</a> for
13054 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
13055 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
13056 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
13057 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
13058 releases out more often.</p>
13059
13060 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
13061 I have considered setting up a <a
13062 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
13063 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
13064 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
13065 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
13066 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
13067 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
13068 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
13069 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
13070 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
13071 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
13072 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
13073 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
13074
13075       </div>
13076       <div class="tags">
13077
13078
13079         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>.
13080
13081
13082       </div>
13083     </div>
13084     <div class="padding"></div>
13085
13086     <div class="entry">
13087       <div class="title">
13088         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
13089       </div>
13090       <div class="date">
13091          9th November 2010
13092       </div>
13093       <div class="body">
13094         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
13095
13096 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
13097 3D linked in from
13098 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
13099 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
13100
13101       </div>
13102       <div class="tags">
13103
13104
13105         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>.
13106
13107
13108       </div>
13109     </div>
13110     <div class="padding"></div>
13111
13112     <div class="entry">
13113       <div class="title">
13114         <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>
13115       </div>
13116       <div class="date">
13117          7th November 2010
13118       </div>
13119       <div class="body">
13120         <p>Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
13121 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> DVD, which is
13122 supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
13123 needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard.  Even
13124 schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
13125 working using this DVD.</p>
13126
13127 <p>The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
13128 installing recommended packages by default.  We want the same set of
13129 packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
13130 that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD.  I created
13131 a patch for debian-cd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/601203">BTS
13132 report #601203</a> to do this, and since this change was applied to
13133 the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.</p>
13134
13135 <p>A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
13136 the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
13137 those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
13138 Debian archive.</p>
13139
13140 <p>Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
13141 were using most space.  A few large packages are well know;
13142 openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont.  But I also
13143 discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB.
13144 The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
13145 when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were
13146 the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
13147 I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
13148 our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
13149 documentation.  Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
13150 which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
13151 free X driver should work.</p>
13152
13153 <p>With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
13154 desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
13155 DVD more useful again.</p>
13156
13157       </div>
13158       <div class="tags">
13159
13160
13161         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>.
13162
13163
13164       </div>
13165     </div>
13166     <div class="padding"></div>
13167
13168     <div class="entry">
13169       <div class="title">
13170         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
13171       </div>
13172       <div class="date">
13173         24th October 2010
13174       </div>
13175       <div class="body">
13176         <p>Some updates.</p>
13177
13178 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
13179 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
13180 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
13181 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
13182 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
13183 :)</p>
13184
13185 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
13186 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
13187 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
13188 It is called
13189 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
13190 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
13191 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
13192 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
13193 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
13194 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
13195
13196 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
13197 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
13198 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
13199 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
13200 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
13201 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
13202 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
13203 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
13204 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
13205 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
13206
13207       </div>
13208       <div class="tags">
13209
13210
13211         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>.
13212
13213
13214       </div>
13215     </div>
13216     <div class="padding"></div>
13217
13218     <div class="entry">
13219       <div class="title">
13220         <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>
13221       </div>
13222       <div class="date">
13223         19th October 2010
13224       </div>
13225       <div class="body">
13226         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is the
13227 most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation. It
13228 has done great so far, but there is still far to go, and recently its
13229 funding has dried up.  I believe AVM2 support in Gnash is vital to the
13230 continued progress of the project, as more and more sites show up with
13231 AVM2 flash files.</p>
13232
13233 <p>To try to get funding for developing such support, I have started
13234 <a href="http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">a pledge</a> with the
13235 following text:</P>
13236
13237 <p><blockquote>
13238
13239   <p>"I will pay 100$ to the Gnash project to develop AVM2 support but
13240   only if 10 other people will do the same."</p>
13241
13242   <p>- Petter Reinholdtsen, free software developer</p>
13243
13244   <p>Deadline to sign up by: 24th December 2010</p>
13245
13246   <p>The Gnash project need to get support for the new Flash file
13247   format AVM2 to work with a lot of sites using Flash on the
13248   web. Gnash already work with a lot of Flash sites using the old AVM1
13249   format, but more and more sites are using the AVM2 format these
13250   days. The project web page is available from
13251   http://www.getgnash.org/ . Gnash is a free software implementation
13252   of Adobe Flash, allowing those of us that do not accept the terms of
13253   the Adobe Flash license to get access to Flash sites.</p>
13254
13255   <p>The project need funding to get developers to put aside enough
13256   time to develop the AVM2 support, and this pledge is my way to try
13257   to get this to happen.</p>
13258
13259   <p>The project accept donations via the OpenMediaNow foundation,
13260   <a href="http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32">http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32</a> .</p>
13261
13262 </blockquote></p>
13263
13264 <p>I hope you will support this effort too.  I hope more than 10
13265 people will participate to make this happen.  The more money the
13266 project gets, the more features it can develop using these funds.
13267 :)</p>
13268
13269       </div>
13270       <div class="tags">
13271
13272
13273         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>.
13274
13275
13276       </div>
13277     </div>
13278     <div class="padding"></div>
13279
13280     <div class="entry">
13281       <div class="title">
13282         <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>
13283       </div>
13284       <div class="date">
13285          9th October 2010
13286       </div>
13287       <div class="body">
13288         <p>This summer I got the chance to buy cheap Spykee robots, and since
13289 then I have worked on getting Linux software in place to control them.
13290 The firmware for the robot is available from the producer, and using
13291 that source it was trivial to figure out the protocol specification.
13292 I've started on a perl library to control it, and made some demo
13293 programs using this perl library to allow one to control the
13294 robots.</p>
13295
13296 <p>The library is quite functional already, and capable of controlling
13297 the driving, fetching video, uploading MP3s and play them.  There are
13298 a few less important features too.</p>
13299
13300 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I ran out of time to spend on this project,
13301 but I never got around to releasing the current source.  I decided
13302 today that it was time to do something about it, and uploaded the
13303 source to my Debian package store at people.skolelinux.org.</p>
13304
13305 <p>Because it was simpler for me, I made a Debian package and
13306 published the source and deb.  If you got a spykee robot, grab the
13307 source or binary package:</p>
13308
13309 <p><ul>
13310 <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>
13311 <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>
13312 <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>
13313 </ul></p>
13314
13315 <p>If you are interested in helping out with developing this library,
13316 please let me know.</p>
13317
13318       </div>
13319       <div class="tags">
13320
13321
13322         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>.
13323
13324
13325       </div>
13326     </div>
13327     <div class="padding"></div>
13328
13329     <div class="entry">
13330       <div class="title">
13331         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html">Links for 2010-10-03</a>
13332       </div>
13333       <div class="date">
13334          3rd October 2010
13335       </div>
13336       <div class="body">
13337         <p><ul>
13338
13339 <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
13340 is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly</a></li>
13341
13342 <li>Scanner looking under clothes
13343 <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/10/03/nyheter/utenriks/reise/overvakingskamera/flyplasser/13667192/">has
13344 already been misused at Heathrow</a>.</li>
13345
13346 <li><a href="http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Landell">Landell
13347 Webcasting</a> - interesting alternative for
13348 <ahref="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">DVSwitch</a> with
13349 simple setup.
13350
13351 </ul></p>
13352
13353       </div>
13354       <div class="tags">
13355
13356
13357         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>.
13358
13359
13360       </div>
13361     </div>
13362     <div class="padding"></div>
13363
13364     <div class="entry">
13365       <div class="title">
13366         <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>
13367       </div>
13368       <div class="date">
13369          9th September 2010
13370       </div>
13371       <div class="body">
13372         <p>A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital
13373 camera, a Canon IXUS 130.  It was instructive and very disturbing to
13374 be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to
13375 specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera.
13376 Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras
13377 are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway.  What is the
13378 problem, you might ask?  It is software patents, MPEG-4, H.264 and the
13379 MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences
13380 without asking for permissions that is at risk.
13381
13382 <p>On page 27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is
13383 written:</p>
13384
13385 <blockquote>
13386 <p>This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard
13387 and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding
13388 MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and
13389 non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the
13390 AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video.</p>
13391
13392 <p>No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4
13393 standard.</p>
13394 </blockquote>
13395
13396 <p>In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology
13397 (MPEG-4/H.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and
13398 non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations
13399 holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.</p>
13400
13401 <p>This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to
13402 read
13403 "<a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA">Why
13404 Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the
13405 MPEG-LA</a>" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and
13406 "<a href="http://webmink.com/2010/09/03/h-264-and-foss/">H.264 Is Not
13407 The Sort Of Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps to learn more about
13408 the issue.  The solution is to support the
13409 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
13410 open standards</a> for video, like <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg
13411 Theora</a>, and avoid MPEG-4 and H.264 if you can.</p>
13412
13413       </div>
13414       <div class="tags">
13415
13416
13417         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/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>.
13418
13419
13420       </div>
13421     </div>
13422     <div class="padding"></div>
13423
13424     <div class="entry">
13425       <div class="title">
13426         <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>
13427       </div>
13428       <div class="date">
13429          4th September 2010
13430       </div>
13431       <div class="body">
13432         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
13433 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
13434 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
13435 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
13436 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
13437 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
13438 installed.</p>
13439
13440 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
13441 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
13442 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
13443 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
13444 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
13445 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
13446 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
13447 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
13448 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
13449
13450 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
13451 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
13452 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
13453 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
13454 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
13455 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
13456 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
13457 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
13458 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
13459 pages they want to visit.</p>
13460
13461 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
13462 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
13463 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
13464 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
13465 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
13466 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
13467 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
13468 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
13469 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
13470 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
13471 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
13472
13473       </div>
13474       <div class="tags">
13475
13476
13477         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>.
13478
13479
13480       </div>
13481     </div>
13482     <div class="padding"></div>
13483
13484     <div class="entry">
13485       <div class="title">
13486         <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>
13487       </div>
13488       <div class="date">
13489          1st September 2010
13490       </div>
13491       <div class="body">
13492         <p>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application.  The last few
13493 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
13494 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
13495 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
13496 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
13497 allow me to drive the robot around.  I picked PerlQt as I have had
13498 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
13499 browsing the web for examples.  Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
13500 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
13501 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
13502 libqt-perl.  Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
13503 drive around.</p>
13504
13505 <p>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
13506 controlling the robot.  Here is an small example on how to use it:</p>
13507
13508 <p><pre>
13509 use Spykee;
13510 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
13511 my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
13512 my $spykee = Spykee->new();
13513 $spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
13514 $spykee->left();
13515 sleep 2;
13516 $spykee->right();
13517 sleep 2;
13518 $spykee->forward();
13519 sleep 2;
13520 $spykee->back();
13521 sleep 2;
13522 $spykee->stop();
13523 </pre></p>
13524
13525 <p>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
13526 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
13527 implement the protocol used by the robot.  I've implemented several of
13528 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
13529 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote.  First I
13530 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
13531 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
13532 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
13533 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
13534 going. :).</p>
13535
13536 <p>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
13537 where to make it available first.  I will add a link to
13538 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/">the NUUG wiki</a> for
13539 those that want to check back later to find it.</p>
13540
13541       </div>
13542       <div class="tags">
13543
13544
13545         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>.
13546
13547
13548       </div>
13549     </div>
13550     <div class="padding"></div>
13551
13552     <div class="entry">
13553       <div class="title">
13554         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken hard link handling with sshfs</a>
13555       </div>
13556       <div class="date">
13557         30th August 2010
13558       </div>
13559       <div class="body">
13560         <p>Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
13561 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">previous
13562 post about sshfs</a>.  He reported another problem with sshfs.  It
13563 fail to handle hard links properly.  A simple way to spot this is to
13564 look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree.  These should have
13565 a link count >1, but on sshfs the count is 1.  I just tested to see
13566 what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:</p>
13567
13568 <pre>
13569 % ln foo bar
13570 ln: creating hard link `bar' => `foo': Function not implemented
13571 %
13572 </pre>
13573
13574 <p>I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
13575 system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
13576 avoid surprised unix programs.  Not as useful as working file locking
13577 and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
13578 nevertheless. :)</p>
13579
13580 <p>The latest version of the file system test code is available via
13581 git from
13582 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a></p>
13583
13584       </div>
13585       <div class="tags">
13586
13587
13588         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>.
13589
13590
13591       </div>
13592     </div>
13593     <div class="padding"></div>
13594
13595     <div class="entry">
13596       <div class="title">
13597         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken umask handling with sshfs</a>
13598       </div>
13599       <div class="date">
13600         26th August 2010
13601       </div>
13602       <div class="body">
13603         <p>My file system sematics program
13604 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">presented
13605 a few days ago</a> is very useful to verify that a file system can
13606 work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit.  I'm
13607 looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
13608 University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs.  My friend
13609 Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
13610 Edu, but stopped because of problems.  I asked today what the problems
13611 where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
13612 Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
13613 script:</p>
13614
13615 <pre>
13616 mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
13617   mode_t retval = 0;
13618   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
13619   if (-1 != fd) {
13620     unlink(name);
13621     struct stat statbuf;
13622     if (-1 != fstat(fd, &statbuf)) {
13623       retval = statbuf.st_mode & 0x1ff;
13624     }
13625     close(fd);
13626   }
13627   return retval;
13628 }
13629
13630 /* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
13631 int test_umask(void) {
13632   printf("info: testing umask effect on file creation\n");
13633
13634   mode_t orig_umask = umask(000);
13635   mode_t newmode;
13636   if (0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
13637     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 000\n",
13638            newmode);
13639   }
13640   umask(007);
13641   if (0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
13642     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 007\n",
13643            newmode);
13644   }
13645
13646   umask (orig_umask);
13647   return 0;
13648 }
13649
13650 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
13651   [...]
13652   test_umask();
13653   return 0;
13654 }
13655 </pre>
13656
13657 <p>Sure enough.  On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:</p>
13658
13659 <pre>
13660 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
13661 info: testing symlink creation
13662 info: testing subdirectory creation
13663 info: testing fcntl locking
13664   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
13665   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
13666   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
13667   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
13668   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
13669   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
13670 info: testing umask effect on file creation
13671 </pre>
13672
13673 <p>When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this
13674 result:</p>
13675
13676 <pre>
13677 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
13678 info: testing symlink creation
13679 info: testing subdirectory creation
13680 info: testing fcntl locking
13681   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
13682   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
13683   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
13684   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
13685   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
13686   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
13687 info: testing umask effect on file creation
13688   error: Wrong file mode 644 when creating using mode 666 and umask 000
13689   error: Wrong file mode 640 when creating using mode 666 and umask 007
13690 </pre>
13691
13692 <p>So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a
13693 Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home
13694 directory.</p>
13695
13696 <p>Update 2010-08-26: Reported the issue in
13697 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/594498">BTS report #594498</a></p>
13698
13699 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
13700 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
13701 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
13702
13703       </div>
13704       <div class="tags">
13705
13706
13707         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>.
13708
13709
13710       </div>
13711     </div>
13712     <div class="padding"></div>
13713
13714     <div class="entry">
13715       <div class="title">
13716         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html">Rob Weir: How to Crush Dissent</a>
13717       </div>
13718       <div class="date">
13719         15th August 2010
13720       </div>
13721       <div class="body">
13722         <p>I found the notes from Rob Weir on
13723 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/VGb23-kta8c/how-to-crush-dissent.html">how
13724 to crush dissent</a> matching my own thoughts on the matter quite
13725 well.  Highly recommended for those wondering which road our society
13726 should go down.  In my view we have been heading the wrong way for a
13727 long time.</p>
13728
13729       </div>
13730       <div class="tags">
13731
13732
13733         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>.
13734
13735
13736       </div>
13737     </div>
13738     <div class="padding"></div>
13739
13740     <div class="entry">
13741       <div class="title">
13742         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html">No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients</a>
13743       </div>
13744       <div class="date">
13745          9th August 2010
13746       </div>
13747       <div class="body">
13748         <p>As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
13749 Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
13750 configuration settings on the clients.  I believe the work to be
13751 mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
13752 generated configuration.</p>
13753
13754 <p>What is the point, you might ask?  The point is to allow a Debian
13755 Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
13756 without any manual configuration.</p>
13757
13758 <p>This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
13759 the University of Oslo using PXE.  With the PXE installation, I am
13760 asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
13761 layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
13762 accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
13763 popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret).  After answering
13764 these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
13765 after around 50 minutes it is done.  I press enter to finish the
13766 installation, and the machine reboots into KDE.  When the machine is
13767 ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
13768 username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
13769 been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
13770 same username and password to the KDE 4.4 desktop.  At no point during
13771 this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
13772 required configuration was dynamically detected using information
13773 fetched via DHCP and DNS.  The roaming workstation is now ready for
13774 use.</p>
13775
13776 <p>How was this done, you might wonder?  First of all, here is the
13777 list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
13778 working properly out of the box:</p>
13779
13780 <ul>
13781 <li>IP address/netmask and DNS server.</li>
13782 <li>Web proxy URL.</li>
13783 <li>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).</li>
13784 <li>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.</li>
13785 <li>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)</li>
13786 <li>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)</li>
13787 <li>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)</li>
13788 </ul>
13789
13790 <p>(Hm, did I forget anything?  Let me knew if I did.)</p>
13791
13792 <p>The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
13793 machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
13794 administrators to track their machines.  Since yesterday, everything
13795 but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
13796 and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.</p>
13797
13798 <p>The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
13799 When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
13800 http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
13801 configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
13802 /etc/apt/apt.conf.  I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
13803 hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
13804 it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
13805 proxy present on the new network when it moves around.</p>
13806
13807 <p>The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
13808 configuration are generated using DNS information at boot.  First the
13809 installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain.  If
13810 not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead.  If an
13811 LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
13812 attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
13813 determine which LDAP base to use for NSS.  If there are several
13814 namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
13815 LDAP subtree is used as the base.  If defaultNamingContext is missing,
13816 the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
13817 object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
13818 such an object is used as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
13819 search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
13820 for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record.  I've been unable to find a way to
13821 look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
13822 current DNS domain is used.</p>
13823
13824 <p>For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
13825 for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
13826 found.  This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
13827 Oslo.  A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
13828 server, but have not been implemented yet.  I decided to fetch and
13829 save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
13830 different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
13831 log in nor the passwords required to log in.  Usernames and passwords
13832 will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
13833 network, and will not change as the laptop move around.  For a
13834 non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
13835 supposed to stay in place it should not matter much.  Perhaps we
13836 should switch those to use sssd too?</p>
13837
13838 <p>The user's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
13839 located when the user logs in for the first time.  The LDAP server is
13840 consulted to look for the user's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
13841 attribute is used if found.  If it isn't found, the home directory
13842 path fetched from NSS is used instead.  Assuming the path is of the
13843 form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
13844 DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
13845 smb://server.domain/username.  This algorithm works for both Debian
13846 edu and the University of Oslo.  Perhaps there are better attributes
13847 to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
13848 do for now. :)</p>
13849
13850 <p>This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
13851 into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
13852 more flexible than before.  I suspect it will also work for thin
13853 client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
13854 existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
13855 yet.</p>
13856
13857 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
13858 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
13859
13860 <p>Update 2010-08-09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
13861 detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
13862 before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name.  Will have to
13863 implement it for Debian Edu. :)</p>
13864
13865       </div>
13866       <div class="tags">
13867
13868
13869         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>.
13870
13871
13872       </div>
13873     </div>
13874     <div class="padding"></div>
13875
13876     <div class="entry">
13877       <div class="title">
13878         <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>
13879       </div>
13880       <div class="date">
13881          8th August 2010
13882       </div>
13883       <div class="body">
13884         <p>A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
13885 Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
13886 Edu/Skolelinux machines.  This was thought to be no problem, as the
13887 access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
13888 knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
13889 mount home directories without any problems.  But, after months of
13890 struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.</p>
13891
13892 <p>The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
13893 directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
13894 work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
13895 underlying file system is a unix file system.  When using a Windows
13896 file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
13897 and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
13898 want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.</p>
13899
13900 <p>As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
13901 with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
13902 OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
13903 it should.  If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
13904 help you find your way out again.  This is the fs-test.c source:</p>
13905
13906 <pre>
13907 /*
13908  * Some tests to check the file system sematics.  Used to verify that
13909  * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
13910  * directory.
13911  * License: GPL v2 or later
13912  *
13913  * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
13914  * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
13915 */
13916
13917 #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
13918 #define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE 1
13919 #define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE 1
13920
13921 #define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
13922
13923 #include &lt;errno.h>
13924 #include &lt;fcntl.h>
13925 #include &lt;stdio.h>
13926 #include &lt;string.h>
13927 #include &lt;stdlib.h>
13928 #include &lt;sys/file.h>
13929 #include &lt;sys/stat.h>
13930 #include &lt;sys/types.h>
13931 #include &lt;unistd.h>
13932
13933 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
13934 /*
13935  * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
13936  * package and linking with -lsqlite3.  A more low level test is
13937  * below.
13938  * See also &lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 >.
13939  */
13940 #include &lt;sqlite3.h>
13941 #define CREATE_TABLE_USERS                                              \
13942   "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); "
13943 int test_sqlite_open(void) {
13944   char *zErrMsg;
13945   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
13946   sqlite3 *db=NULL;
13947   unlink(name);
13948   int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &db);
13949   if( rc ){
13950     printf("error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
13951     sqlite3_close(db);
13952     return -1;
13953   }
13954
13955   /* create tables */
13956   rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,  0, &zErrMsg);
13957   if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
13958     printf("error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n", zErrMsg);
13959     sqlite3_close(db);
13960     return -1;
13961   }
13962   printf("info: sqlite worked\n");
13963   sqlite3_close(db);
13964   return 0;
13965 }
13966 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
13967
13968 /*
13969  * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3.  This
13970  * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows 2003.  This is
13971  * done in the sqlite3 library.
13972  * See also
13973  * &lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html> and the
13974  * POSIX specification
13975  * &lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html>.
13976  */
13977 int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
13978   struct flock fl;
13979   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
13980   unlink(name);
13981   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
13982   printf("info: testing fcntl locking\n");
13983
13984   fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
13985   fl.l_pid    = getpid();
13986   printf("  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
13987   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
13988   fl.l_len    = 1;
13989   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
13990   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
13991
13992   printf("  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
13993   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
13994   fl.l_len    = 510;
13995   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
13996   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
13997
13998   printf("  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824");
13999   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
14000   fl.l_len    = 1;
14001   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
14002   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
14003
14004   printf("  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
14005   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
14006   fl.l_len    = 1;
14007   fl.l_type   = F_WRLCK;
14008   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
14009
14010   printf("  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
14011   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
14012   fl.l_len    = 510;
14013   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
14014
14015   printf("  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824");
14016   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
14017   fl.l_len    = 2;
14018   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
14019   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
14020
14021   close(fd);
14022   return 0;
14023 }
14024
14025 /*
14026  * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
14027  * below them.  This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
14028  * Mounting with option 'sync' seem to solve this problem while
14029  * slowing down file operations.
14030  */
14031 int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
14032 #define LEVELS 5
14033   char *path = strdup("test");
14034   char *dirs[LEVELS];
14035   int level;
14036   printf("info: testing subdirectory creation\n");
14037   for (level = 0; level &lt; LEVELS; level++) {
14038     char *newpath = NULL;
14039     if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777)) {
14040       printf("  error: Unable to create directory '%s': %s\n",
14041              path, strerror(errno));
14042       break;
14043     }
14044     asprintf(&newpath, "%s/%s", path, "test");
14045     free(path);
14046     path = newpath;
14047   }
14048   return 0;
14049 }
14050
14051 /*
14052  * Test if symlinks can be created.  This was a problem detected with
14053  * KDE.
14054  */
14055 int test_symlinks(void) {
14056   printf("info: testing symlink creation\n");
14057   unlink("symlink");
14058   if (-1 == symlink("file", "symlink"))
14059     printf("  error: Unable to create symlink\n");
14060   return 0;
14061 }
14062
14063 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
14064   printf("Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n");
14065   test_symlinks();
14066   test_subdirectory_creation();
14067 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
14068   test_sqlite_open();
14069 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
14070   test_gcompris_locking();
14071   return 0;
14072 }
14073 </pre>
14074
14075 <p>When everything is working, it should print something like
14076 this:</p>
14077
14078 <pre>
14079 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
14080 info: testing symlink creation
14081 info: testing subdirectory creation
14082 info: sqlite worked
14083 info: testing fcntl locking
14084   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
14085   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
14086   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
14087   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
14088   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
14089   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
14090 </pre>
14091
14092 <p>I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
14093 of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
14094 read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
14095 the read-only lock (while Windows do not).  Another was a bug in the
14096 CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
14097 meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
14098 OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
14099 not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.</p>
14100
14101 <p>Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
14102 it. :)</p>
14103
14104 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
14105 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
14106 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
14107
14108       </div>
14109       <div class="tags">
14110
14111
14112         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>.
14113
14114
14115       </div>
14116     </div>
14117     <div class="padding"></div>
14118
14119     <div class="entry">
14120       <div class="title">
14121         <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>
14122       </div>
14123       <div class="date">
14124          7th August 2010
14125       </div>
14126       <div class="body">
14127         <p>A few days ago, I
14128 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">tried
14129 to install</a> a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
14130 while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
14131 noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
14132 university infrastructure.  It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
14133 that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
14134 connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
14135 itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
14136 around it.  Now I am a huge step further along that road.</p>
14137
14138 <p>With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
14139 workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
14140 university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
14141 servers for Kerberos authentication.  All this without any
14142 configuration at all during installation.  My users home directory got
14143 a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
14144 In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured.  In addition to
14145 this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
14146 proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
14147 /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf.  Iceweasel and KDE is
14148 configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
14149 a proxy when at the university network.  If the machine is moved to a
14150 network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
14151 gave it a IP address.</p>
14152
14153 <p>The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
14154 entry ldap.$domain.  If this do not exist, it look for the
14155 _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
14156 server.  Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
14157 namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
14158 pick the first one as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
14159 algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
14160 uppercase version of $domain.</p>
14161
14162 <p>So, what is not working, you might ask.  SMB mounting my home
14163 directory do not work.  No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
14164 Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
14165 the cause.  These are not properly configured during installation, and
14166 had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
14167 but SMB mounting still do not work. :(</p>
14168
14169 <p>With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
14170 roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
14171 connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
14172 authentication.  It should also work out of the box in a Active
14173 Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
14174 with UID and GID values.</p>
14175
14176 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
14177 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
14178
14179       </div>
14180       <div class="tags">
14181
14182
14183         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>.
14184
14185
14186       </div>
14187     </div>
14188     <div class="padding"></div>
14189
14190     <div class="entry">
14191       <div class="title">
14192         <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>
14193       </div>
14194       <div class="date">
14195          3rd August 2010
14196       </div>
14197       <div class="body">
14198         <p>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
14199 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
14200 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
14201 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
14202 infrastructure.  In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
14203 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
14204 servers.</p>
14205
14206 <p>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
14207 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
14208 /etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
14209 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
14210 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
14211 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
14212 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
14213 .uio.no.</p>
14214
14215 <p>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
14216 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
14217 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
14218 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
14219 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
14220 university servers.</p>
14221
14222 <p>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
14223 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
14224 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
14225 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
14226 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
14227 uses.</p>
14228
14229       </div>
14230       <div class="tags">
14231
14232
14233         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>.
14234
14235
14236       </div>
14237     </div>
14238     <div class="padding"></div>
14239
14240     <div class="entry">
14241       <div class="title">
14242         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
14243       </div>
14244       <div class="date">
14245         27th July 2010
14246       </div>
14247       <div class="body">
14248         <p>I discovered this while doing
14249 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
14250 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
14251 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
14252 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
14253 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
14254
14255 <p>An example is from todays
14256 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
14257 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
14258 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
14259 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
14260 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
14261 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
14262 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
14263
14264 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
14265
14266 <blockquote><pre>
14267 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
14268  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
14269   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
14270 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
14271  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
14272 </pre></blockquote>
14273
14274 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
14275 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
14276 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
14277 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
14278 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
14279 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
14280 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
14281 of dependency loops.</p>
14282
14283 <p>Thanks to
14284 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
14285 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
14286 dependencies
14287 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
14288 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
14289
14290 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
14291 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
14292 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
14293 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
14294 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
14295 it.</p>
14296
14297       </div>
14298       <div class="tags">
14299
14300
14301         Tags: <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>.
14302
14303
14304       </div>
14305     </div>
14306     <div class="padding"></div>
14307
14308     <div class="entry">
14309       <div class="title">
14310         <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>
14311       </div>
14312       <div class="date">
14313         27th July 2010
14314       </div>
14315       <div class="body">
14316         <p>I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
14317 with the next Debian Edu release.  Not nearly done, but one major step
14318 completed.</p>
14319
14320 <blockquote>
14321 <p>This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
14322 release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
14323 install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
14324 of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
14325 user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
14326 longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
14327 Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
14328 language of choice, please let us know too.</p>
14329
14330 <p>In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
14331 artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
14332 and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.</p>
14333
14334 <p>The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
14335 work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
14336 much.</p>
14337
14338 <p>Changes compared to the lenny based version</p>
14339
14340 <ul>
14341 <li>Everything from Debian Squeeze
14342 <ul>
14343   <li>Desktop environment KDE 4.4 => the new KDE desktop in
14344          combination with some new artwork
14345   <li>Web browser Iceweasel 3.5
14346   <li>OpenOffice.org 3.2
14347   <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3
14348   <li>Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2
14349   <li>Image editor Gimp 2.6.10
14350   <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0
14351   <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4
14352   <li>3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)
14353   <li>Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)
14354 </ul></li>
14355 <li>Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
14356     Enabled for:
14357 <ul>
14358   <li>PAM
14359   <li>LDAP
14360   <li>IMAP
14361   <li>SMTP (sender verification)
14362 </ul>
14363 </li>
14364 <li>New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.</li>
14365 <li>Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
14366     fetched from LDAP.</li>
14367 <li>New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.</li>
14368 <li>General cleanup (not finished)</li>
14369 </ul>
14370 <p>The following features are not working as they should</p>
14371
14372 <ul>
14373 <li>No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
14374     scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
14375     for testing.</li>
14376 <li>DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
14377     and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
14378     clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.</li>
14379 <li>The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.</li>
14380 <li>The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.</li>
14381 <li>The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.</li>
14382 <li>Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
14383     netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.</li>
14384 <li>The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
14385     some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
14386     jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.</li>
14387 <li>Some packages lack translations. See
14388     http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
14389     and help out with translations.</li>
14390 </ul>
14391
14392 <p>To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use</p>
14393
14394 <ul>
14395 <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>
14396 <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>
14397 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
14398 </ul>
14399 <p>To download this multiarch dvd release you can use</p>
14400
14401 <ul>
14402 <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>
14403 <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>
14404 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
14405 </ul>
14406
14407 <p>There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
14408 get closer to the final release.</p>
14409
14410 <p>The MD5SUM of these images are</p>
14411
14412 <ul>
14413 <li>3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
14414 <li>22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
14415 </ul>
14416
14417 <p>The SHA1SUM of these images are</p>
14418 <ul>
14419 <li>c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
14420 <li>2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
14421 </ul>
14422 <p>How to report bugs:
14423 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla</p>
14424
14425 <p>Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org</p>
14426 </blockquote>
14427
14428       </div>
14429       <div class="tags">
14430
14431
14432         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>.
14433
14434
14435       </div>
14436     </div>
14437     <div class="padding"></div>
14438
14439     <div class="entry">
14440       <div class="title">
14441         <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>
14442       </div>
14443       <div class="date">
14444         25th July 2010
14445       </div>
14446       <div class="body">
14447         <p>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
14448 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
14449 Edu/Skolelinux into shape.  This future version will use Kerberos for
14450 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
14451 getting rid of password questions one at the time.</p>
14452
14453 <p>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
14454 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
14455 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
14456 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server.  This
14457 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
14458 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
14459 package.  I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.</p>
14460
14461 <p>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
14462 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
14463 password when mounting the SMB volume.  A simple click on the shortcut
14464 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
14465 up. :)</p>
14466
14467 <p>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
14468 Debian Edu.  We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
14469 also Samba.  Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.</p>
14470
14471 <p>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
14472 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
14473 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
14474 the release.  It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
14475 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
14476 time for a alpha0 release today.  As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
14477 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
14478 release another day.</p>
14479
14480 <p>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
14481 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
14482
14483       </div>
14484       <div class="tags">
14485
14486
14487         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>.
14488
14489
14490       </div>
14491     </div>
14492     <div class="padding"></div>
14493
14494     <div class="entry">
14495       <div class="title">
14496         <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>
14497       </div>
14498       <div class="date">
14499         18th July 2010
14500       </div>
14501       <div class="body">
14502         <p>Thanks to
14503 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home">todays
14504 opengeodata blog entry</a>, I just discovered that the
14505 OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
14506 <a href="http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT">support
14507 for calculating routes</a>.  The support is still experimental and
14508 only available from the development server, until more experience is
14509 gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.</p>
14510
14511 <p>Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
14512 was provided by <a href="http://maps.cloudmade.com/">Cloudmade</a>,
14513 but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
14514 the issue.  I've had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
14515 alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
14516 and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
14517 www.openstreetmap.org front page.</p>
14518
14519       </div>
14520       <div class="tags">
14521
14522
14523         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>.
14524
14525
14526       </div>
14527     </div>
14528     <div class="padding"></div>
14529
14530     <div class="entry">
14531       <div class="title">
14532         <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>
14533       </div>
14534       <div class="date">
14535         17th July 2010
14536       </div>
14537       <div class="body">
14538         <p>This is a
14539 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
14540 on my
14541 <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
14542 work</a> on
14543 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
14544 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
14545
14546 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
14547 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
14548 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
14549 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
14550
14551 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
14552 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
14553 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
14554
14555 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
14556
14557 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
14558 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
14559 the web.
14560
14561 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
14562 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
14563 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
14564 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
14565 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
14566 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
14567
14568 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
14569 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
14570 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
14571 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
14572 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
14573 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
14574 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
14575 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
14576 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
14577 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
14578 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
14579 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
14580 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
14581 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
14582 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
14583 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
14584
14585 <blockquote><pre>
14586 ldapsearch -h ldap \
14587   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
14588   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
14589   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
14590   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
14591   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
14592   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
14593
14594 ldapsearch -h ldap \
14595   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
14596   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
14597   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
14598   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
14599   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
14600 </pre></blockquote>
14601
14602 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
14603 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
14604 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
14605 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
14606 also exist.</p>
14607
14608 <blockquote><pre>
14609 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
14610 objectclass: top
14611 objectclass: dnsdomain
14612 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
14613 dc: tjener
14614 arecord: 10.0.2.2
14615 associateddomain: tjener.intern
14616
14617 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
14618 objectclass: top
14619 objectclass: dnsdomain2
14620 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
14621 dc: 2
14622 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
14623 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
14624 </pre></blockquote>
14625
14626 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
14627 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
14628 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
14629 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
14630 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
14631 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
14632 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
14633 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
14634 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
14635 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
14636 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
14637 instead.</p>
14638
14639 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
14640 like this:</p>
14641
14642 <blockquote><pre>
14643 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
14644   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
14645   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
14646   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
14647   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
14648   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
14649
14650 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
14651   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
14652 </pre></blockquote>
14653
14654 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
14655 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
14656 reverse lookups.</p>
14657
14658 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
14659 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
14660 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
14661 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
14662
14663 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
14664 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
14665 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
14666
14667 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
14668 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
14669 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
14670 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
14671 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
14672
14673 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
14674 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
14675 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
14676 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
14677 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
14678
14679 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
14680 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
14681 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
14682 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
14683 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
14684 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
14685
14686 <blockquote><pre>
14687 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
14688     SUP top
14689     AUXILIARY
14690     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
14691           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
14692           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
14693           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
14694           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
14695     ))
14696 </pre></blockquote>
14697
14698 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
14699 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
14700 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
14701 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
14702 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
14703 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
14704
14705 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
14706
14707 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
14708 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
14709 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
14710 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
14711 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
14712
14713 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
14714 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
14715 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
14716 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
14717
14718 <blockquote><pre>
14719 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
14720 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
14721 </pre></blockquote>
14722
14723 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
14724 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
14725 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
14726 search result is this entry:</p>
14727
14728 <blockquote><pre>
14729 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
14730 cn: dhcp
14731 objectClass: top
14732 objectClass: dhcpServer
14733 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
14734 </pre></blockquote>
14735
14736 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
14737 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
14738 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
14739 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
14740 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
14741 The search result is this entry:</p>
14742
14743 <blockquote><pre>
14744 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
14745 cn: DHCP Config
14746 objectClass: top
14747 objectClass: dhcpService
14748 objectClass: dhcpOptions
14749 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
14750 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
14751 dhcpStatements: authoritative
14752 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
14753 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
14754 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
14755 </pre></blockquote>
14756
14757 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
14758 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
14759 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
14760 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
14761 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
14762 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
14763 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
14764 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
14765 related computer objects.</p>
14766
14767 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
14768 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
14769 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
14770 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
14771 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
14772 like:</p>
14773
14774 <blockquote><pre>
14775 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
14776 cn: hostname
14777 objectClass: top
14778 objectClass: dhcpHost
14779 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
14780 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
14781 </pre></blockquote>
14782
14783 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
14784 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
14785 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
14786 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
14787 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
14788 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
14789 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
14790 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
14791 structural object class.
14792
14793 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
14794
14795 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
14796 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
14797 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
14798 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
14799 in the configuration.</p>
14800
14801 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
14802 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
14803 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
14804 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
14805 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
14806 structure.</p>
14807
14808 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
14809 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
14810
14811 <blockquote><pre>
14812 ou=services
14813   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
14814     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
14815     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
14816       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
14817         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
14818     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
14819       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
14820         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
14821     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
14822       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
14823 </pre></blockquote>
14824
14825 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
14826 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
14827 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
14828 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
14829
14830 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
14831 like this:</p>
14832
14833 <blockquote><pre>
14834 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
14835 dc: hostname
14836 objectClass: top
14837 objectClass: dhcpHost
14838 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
14839 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
14840 associateddomain: hostname.intern
14841 arecord: 10.11.12.13
14842 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
14843 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
14844 </pre></blockquote>
14845
14846 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
14847 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
14848 auxiliary object class.</p>
14849
14850       </div>
14851       <div class="tags">
14852
14853
14854         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>.
14855
14856
14857       </div>
14858     </div>
14859     <div class="padding"></div>
14860
14861     <div class="entry">
14862       <div class="title">
14863         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
14864       </div>
14865       <div class="date">
14866         14th July 2010
14867       </div>
14868       <div class="body">
14869         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
14870 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
14871 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
14872 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
14873 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
14874
14875 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
14876 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
14877
14878 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
14879 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
14880 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
14881 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
14882 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
14883 to a slave DNS server.</p>
14884
14885 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
14886 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
14887 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
14888 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
14889 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
14890 seem to work.</p>
14891
14892 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
14893 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
14894 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
14895 this:</p>
14896
14897 <blockquote><pre>
14898   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
14899   cn: hostname
14900   objectClass: dhcphost
14901   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
14902   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
14903   associateddomain: hostname.intern
14904   arecord: 10.11.12.13
14905   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
14906   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
14907   ldapconfigsound: Y
14908 </pre></blockquote>
14909
14910 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
14911 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
14912 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
14913 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
14914
14915 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
14916 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
14917 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
14918 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
14919 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
14920 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
14921 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
14922 might be a good place to put it.</p>
14923
14924 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
14925 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
14926
14927       </div>
14928       <div class="tags">
14929
14930
14931         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>.
14932
14933
14934       </div>
14935     </div>
14936     <div class="padding"></div>
14937
14938     <div class="entry">
14939       <div class="title">
14940         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
14941       </div>
14942       <div class="date">
14943         11th July 2010
14944       </div>
14945       <div class="body">
14946         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
14947 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
14948 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
14949 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
14950
14951 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
14952 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
14953 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
14954 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
14955 LTSP clients.</p>
14956
14957 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
14958 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
14959 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
14960
14961 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
14962 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
14963 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
14964
14965 <blockquote><pre>
14966 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
14967 #
14968 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
14969 #
14970 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
14971 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
14972 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
14973 #
14974 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
14975 # existence of attribute names.
14976 #
14977 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
14978 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
14979 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
14980 #
14981 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
14982 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
14983 #
14984 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
14985 #     SUP top
14986 #     AUXILIARY
14987 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
14988
14989 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
14990 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
14991     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
14992     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
14993         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
14994         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
14995             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
14996             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
14997             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
14998             # bass value on to clients
14999             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
15000         done
15001     done
15002 fi
15003 </pre></blockquote>
15004
15005 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
15006 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
15007 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
15008 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
15009 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
15010
15011 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
15012 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
15013
15014 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
15015 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
15016 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
15017 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
15018 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
15019 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
15020
15021       </div>
15022       <div class="tags">
15023
15024
15025         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>.
15026
15027
15028       </div>
15029     </div>
15030     <div class="padding"></div>
15031
15032     <div class="entry">
15033       <div class="title">
15034         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
15035       </div>
15036       <div class="date">
15037          9th July 2010
15038       </div>
15039       <div class="body">
15040         <p>Since
15041 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
15042 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
15043 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
15044 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
15045 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
15046 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
15047 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
15048 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
15049 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
15050 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
15051 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
15052 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
15053 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
15054
15055       </div>
15056       <div class="tags">
15057
15058
15059         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>.
15060
15061
15062       </div>
15063     </div>
15064     <div class="padding"></div>
15065
15066     <div class="entry">
15067       <div class="title">
15068         <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>
15069       </div>
15070       <div class="date">
15071          3rd July 2010
15072       </div>
15073       <div class="body">
15074         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
15075 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
15076 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
15077 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
15078 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
15079 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
15080 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
15081 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
15082
15083 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
15084 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
15085 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
15086 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
15087 publish the difference.</p>
15088
15089 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
15090
15091 <blockquote><p>
15092   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
15093   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
15094   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
15095   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
15096   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
15097   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
15098   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
15099   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
15100 </p></blockquote>
15101
15102 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
15103
15104 <blockquote><p>
15105   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
15106   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
15107   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
15108   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
15109   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
15110   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
15111   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
15112   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
15113   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
15114   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
15115   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
15116   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
15117   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
15118   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
15119   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
15120   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
15121   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
15122   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
15123   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
15124   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
15125 </p></blockquote>
15126
15127 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
15128
15129 <blockquote><p>
15130   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
15131   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
15132   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
15133   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
15134   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
15135   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
15136   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
15137   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
15138   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
15139   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
15140   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
15141   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
15142   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
15143   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
15144   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
15145   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
15146   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
15147   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
15148   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
15149   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
15150   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
15151 </p></blockquote>
15152
15153 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
15154
15155 <blockquote><p>
15156   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
15157   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
15158   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
15159 </p></blockquote>
15160
15161 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
15162 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
15163 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
15164 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
15165 the difference somewhat.
15166
15167       </div>
15168       <div class="tags">
15169
15170
15171         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>.
15172
15173
15174       </div>
15175     </div>
15176     <div class="padding"></div>
15177
15178     <div class="entry">
15179       <div class="title">
15180         <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>
15181       </div>
15182       <div class="date">
15183          1st July 2010
15184       </div>
15185       <div class="body">
15186         <p>For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
15187 a bit troubling.  Laptops are typically used also when not connected
15188 to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
15189 unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
15190 This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
15191 and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
15192 in Debian.  Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
15193 It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
15194 setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.</p>
15195
15196 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
15197
15198 This is the traditional method with a twist.  The password caching is
15199 provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on
15200 Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd.  The directory
15201 lookup and password checking is done using LDAP.  If one want to use
15202 Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
15203 replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal.  If one is happy having a
15204 local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
15205 pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
15206 using libpam-mklocaluser.  A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
15207 pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
15208 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/568577">bug #568577</a> is in the
15209 archive.  Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
15210 directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
15211 prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/.  This
15212 is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.</p>
15213
15214 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured</p>
15215
15216 <blockquote><pre>
15217 libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
15218 </pre></blockquote>
15219
15220 <p>The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
15221 one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site.  Make sure the
15222 PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
15223 sent in clear text to the LDAP server.  I've been unable to get TLS
15224 certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
15225 LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
15226 is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
15227 on how to get this working.</p>
15228
15229 <p>Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
15230 caching until <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">bug #485282</a>
15231 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
15232 currently in /etc/nscd.conf.  The changes are in the fields
15233 reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
15234 instructions I found in the
15235 <a href="http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/">LDAP for Mobile Laptops</a>
15236 instructions by Flyn Computing.</p>
15237
15238 <blockquote><pre>
15239         debug-level             0
15240         reload-count            unlimited
15241         paranoia                no
15242
15243         enable-cache            passwd          yes
15244         positive-time-to-live   passwd          2592000
15245         negative-time-to-live   passwd          20
15246         suggested-size          passwd          211
15247         check-files             passwd          yes
15248         persistent              passwd          yes
15249         shared                  passwd          yes
15250         max-db-size             passwd          33554432
15251         auto-propagate          passwd          yes
15252
15253         enable-cache            group           yes
15254         positive-time-to-live   group           2592000
15255         negative-time-to-live   group           20
15256         suggested-size          group           211
15257         check-files             group           yes
15258         persistent              group           yes
15259         shared                  group           yes
15260         max-db-size             group           33554432
15261         auto-propagate          group           yes
15262
15263         enable-cache            hosts           no
15264         positive-time-to-live   hosts           2592000
15265         negative-time-to-live   hosts           20
15266         suggested-size          hosts           211
15267         check-files             hosts           yes
15268         persistent              hosts           yes
15269         shared                  hosts           yes
15270         max-db-size             hosts           33554432
15271
15272         enable-cache            services        yes
15273         positive-time-to-live   services        2592000
15274         negative-time-to-live   services        20
15275         suggested-size          services        211
15276         check-files             services        yes
15277         persistent              services        yes
15278         shared                  services        yes
15279         max-db-size             services        33554432
15280 </pre></blockquote>
15281
15282 <p>While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
15283 automatically like the one provided in
15284 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/496915">bug #496915</a>, the file
15285 content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
15286 directory service on the machine.  /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
15287 look like this:</p>
15288
15289 <blockquote><pre>
15290 passwd:         files ldap
15291 group:          files ldap
15292 shadow:         files ldap
15293 hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
15294 networks:       files
15295 protocols:      files
15296 services:       files
15297 ethers:         files
15298 rpc:            files
15299 netgroup:       files ldap
15300 </pre></blockquote>
15301
15302 <p>The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
15303 shadow and netgroup.</p>
15304
15305 <p>With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
15306 in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
15307 directory created and have the password as well as user and group
15308 attributes cached.
15309
15310 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
15311   libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
15312
15313 <p>Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
15314 problems doing proper caching, I've seen suggestions and recipes to
15315 use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
15316 LDAP database is available.  I have not tested such setup, because I
15317 discovered sssd.</p>
15318
15319 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser</h2>
15320
15321 <p>A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
15322 mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
15323 <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/">sssd</a> package from Redhat.
15324 It is part of the <a href="http://www.freeipa.org/">FreeIPA</A> project
15325 to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
15326 machines.  The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
15327 information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
15328 libpam-ccreds.  It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS.  Version
15329 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
15330 in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010.  Because the
15331 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd package</a>
15332 was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
15333 version 1.2 is now in testing.
15334
15335 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
15336 roaming setup I want</p>
15337
15338 <blockquote><pre>
15339 libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
15340 </pre></blockquote>
15341
15342 The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
15343 <tt>/etc/sssd/sssd.conf</tt>.
15344
15345 <blockquote><pre>
15346 [sssd]
15347 config_file_version = 2
15348 reconnection_retries = 3
15349 sbus_timeout = 30
15350 services = nss, pam
15351 domains = INTERN
15352
15353 [nss]
15354 filter_groups = root
15355 filter_users = root
15356 reconnection_retries = 3
15357
15358 [pam]
15359 reconnection_retries = 3
15360
15361 [domain/INTERN]
15362 enumerate = false
15363 cache_credentials = true
15364
15365 id_provider = ldap
15366 auth_provider = ldap
15367 chpass_provider = ldap
15368
15369 ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
15370 ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
15371 ldap_tls_reqcert = never
15372 ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
15373 </pre></blockquote>
15374
15375 <p>I got the same problem here with certificate checking.  Had to set
15376 "ldap_tls_reqcert = never" to get it working.</p>
15377
15378 <p>With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
15379 nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
15380 modify it manually.</p>
15381
15382 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
15383 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
15384
15385       </div>
15386       <div class="tags">
15387
15388
15389         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>.
15390
15391
15392       </div>
15393     </div>
15394     <div class="padding"></div>
15395
15396     <div class="entry">
15397       <div class="title">
15398         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
15399       </div>
15400       <div class="date">
15401         28th June 2010
15402       </div>
15403       <div class="body">
15404         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
15405 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
15406 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
15407 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
15408 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
15409 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
15410 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
15411 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
15412 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
15413 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
15414
15415 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
15416 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
15417 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
15418 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
15419 released.</p>
15420
15421 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
15422 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
15423 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
15424 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
15425
15426 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
15427 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
15428
15429 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
15430 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
15431 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
15432 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
15433 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
15434
15435       </div>
15436       <div class="tags">
15437
15438
15439         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>.
15440
15441
15442       </div>
15443     </div>
15444     <div class="padding"></div>
15445
15446     <div class="entry">
15447       <div class="title">
15448         <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>
15449       </div>
15450       <div class="date">
15451         24th June 2010
15452       </div>
15453       <div class="body">
15454         <p>A while back, I
15455 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
15456 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
15457 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
15458 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
15459
15460 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
15461 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
15462 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
15463 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
15464
15465 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
15466 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
15467 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
15468 Debian Edu.</p>
15469
15470 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
15471 the
15472 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
15473 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
15474 available today from IETF.</p>
15475
15476 <pre>
15477 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
15478 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
15479 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
15480  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
15481         NAME 'dhcpHost'
15482         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
15483 -       SUP top
15484 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
15485         MUST cn
15486         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
15487         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
15488 </pre>
15489
15490 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
15491 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
15492 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
15493
15494 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
15495 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
15496
15497       </div>
15498       <div class="tags">
15499
15500
15501         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>.
15502
15503
15504       </div>
15505     </div>
15506     <div class="padding"></div>
15507
15508     <div class="entry">
15509       <div class="title">
15510         <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>
15511       </div>
15512       <div class="date">
15513         16th June 2010
15514       </div>
15515       <div class="body">
15516         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
15517 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
15518 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
15519 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
15520 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
15521 this:
15522
15523 <blockquote><pre>
15524 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
15525 tasksel --new-install
15526 </pre></blockquote>
15527
15528 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
15529 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
15530 any output what so ever.
15531
15532 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
15533 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
15534 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
15535 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
15536 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
15537 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
15538 code like this:
15539
15540 <blockquote><pre>
15541 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
15542 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
15543 $cmd
15544 </pre></blockquote>
15545
15546 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
15547 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
15548 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
15549 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
15550 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
15551 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
15552 installation.</p>
15553
15554 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
15555 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
15556 like this.</p>
15557
15558       </div>
15559       <div class="tags">
15560
15561
15562         Tags: <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>.
15563
15564
15565       </div>
15566     </div>
15567     <div class="padding"></div>
15568
15569     <div class="entry">
15570       <div class="title">
15571         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">Officeshots taking shape</a>
15572       </div>
15573       <div class="date">
15574         13th June 2010
15575       </div>
15576       <div class="body">
15577         <p>For those of us caring about document exchange and
15578 interoperability, <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>
15579 is a great service.  It is to ODF documents what
15580 <a href="http://browsershots.org/">BrowserShots</a> is for web
15581 pages.</p>
15582
15583 <p>A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
15584 that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
15585 and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
15586 interested in supporting the project.  I helped him to navigate his
15587 request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
15588 a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
15589 arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot.  The machine is
15590 administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
15591 contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
15592 see how the project is doing.</p>
15593
15594 <p>Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
15595 machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
15596 OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
15597 in 17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
15598 Windows.  This is great.</p>
15599
15600       </div>
15601       <div class="tags">
15602
15603
15604         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>.
15605
15606
15607       </div>
15608     </div>
15609     <div class="padding"></div>
15610
15611     <div class="entry">
15612       <div class="title">
15613         <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>
15614       </div>
15615       <div class="date">
15616         13th June 2010
15617       </div>
15618       <div class="body">
15619         <p>My
15620 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
15621 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
15622 finally made the upgrade logs available from
15623 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
15624 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
15625 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
15626 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
15627
15628 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
15629 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
15630 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
15631 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
15632 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
15633 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
15634 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
15635 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
15636
15637 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
15638 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
15639 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
15640 too surprising.</p>
15641
15642 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
15643 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
15644 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
15645 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
15646 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
15647 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
15648 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
15649 continue.</p>
15650
15651 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
15652 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
15653   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
15654   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
15655   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
15656   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
15657   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
15658   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
15659   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
15660   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
15661   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
15662   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
15663   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
15664   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
15665   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
15666   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
15667   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
15668   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
15669   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
15670   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
15671   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
15672   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
15673   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
15674   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
15675   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
15676   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
15677   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
15678   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
15679   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
15680   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
15681
15682 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
15683
15684 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
15685   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
15686   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
15687   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
15688   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
15689   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
15690   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
15691   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
15692   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
15693   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
15694   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
15695   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
15696   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
15697   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
15698   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
15699   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
15700   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
15701   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
15702   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
15703   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
15704   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
15705   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
15706   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
15707   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
15708   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
15709   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
15710   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
15711   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
15712   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
15713   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
15714   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
15715   zip</p>
15716
15717 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
15718
15719 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
15720   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
15721   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
15722   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
15723   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
15724   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
15725   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
15726   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
15727   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
15728   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
15729   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
15730   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
15731   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
15732   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
15733   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
15734   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
15735   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
15736   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
15737   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
15738   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
15739   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
15740   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
15741   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
15742   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
15743   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
15744   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
15745   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
15746   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
15747
15748 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
15749 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
15750   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
15751   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
15752   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
15753   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
15754   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
15755   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
15756   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
15757   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
15758   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
15759   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
15760   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
15761   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
15762   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
15763   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
15764   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
15765   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
15766   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
15767   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
15768   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
15769   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
15770   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
15771   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
15772   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
15773   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
15774   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
15775   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
15776   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
15777   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
15778   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
15779   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
15780   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
15781   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
15782   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
15783   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
15784   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
15785   xulrunner-1.9</p>
15786
15787
15788       </div>
15789       <div class="tags">
15790
15791
15792         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>.
15793
15794
15795       </div>
15796     </div>
15797     <div class="padding"></div>
15798
15799     <div class="entry">
15800       <div class="title">
15801         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
15802       </div>
15803       <div class="date">
15804         11th June 2010
15805       </div>
15806       <div class="body">
15807         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
15808 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
15809 have been discovered and reported in the process
15810 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
15811 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
15812 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
15813 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
15814 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
15815
15816 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
15817 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
15818 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
15819 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
15820 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
15821 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
15822
15823 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
15824 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
15825 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
15826 is created.  The bug report
15827 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
15828 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
15829 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
15830 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
15831 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
15832 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
15833 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
15834 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
15835 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
15836 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
15837 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
15838 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
15839 Debian Squeeze.</p>
15840
15841 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
15842 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
15843 trick:</p>
15844
15845 <blockquote><pre>
15846 #!/bin/sh
15847 set -ex
15848
15849 if [ "$1" ] ; then
15850     desktop=$1
15851 else
15852     desktop=gnome
15853 fi
15854
15855 from=lenny
15856 to=squeeze
15857
15858 exec &lt; /dev/null
15859 unset LANG
15860 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
15861 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
15862 fuser -mv .
15863 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
15864 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
15865 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
15866 #!/bin/sh
15867 exit 101
15868 EOF
15869 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
15870 exit_cleanup() {
15871     umount $tmpdir/proc
15872 }
15873 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
15874 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
15875 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
15876
15877 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
15878
15879 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
15880 # to return the correct answers.
15881 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
15882     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
15883
15884 # Include the desktop and laptop task
15885 for test in desktop laptop ; do
15886     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
15887 #!/bin/sh
15888 exit 2
15889 EOF
15890     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
15891 done
15892
15893 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
15894 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
15895 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
15896 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
15897
15898 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
15899 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
15900 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
15901 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
15902 fuser -mv
15903 </pre></blockquote>
15904
15905 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
15906 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
15907 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
15908 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
15909 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
15910 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
15911
15912 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
15913 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
15914 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
15915 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
15916 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
15917 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
15918 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
15919
15920 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
15921 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
15922 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
15923 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
15924 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
15925 packages.</p>
15926
15927       </div>
15928       <div class="tags">
15929
15930
15931         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>.
15932
15933
15934       </div>
15935     </div>
15936     <div class="padding"></div>
15937
15938     <div class="entry">
15939       <div class="title">
15940         <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>
15941       </div>
15942       <div class="date">
15943          6th June 2010
15944       </div>
15945       <div class="body">
15946         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
15947 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
15948 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
15949 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
15950 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
15951 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
15952 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
15953
15954 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
15955 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
15956 COLUMNS):</p>
15957
15958 <blockquote><pre>
15959 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
15960 previous=N
15961 PREVLEVEL=
15962 RUNLEVEL=
15963 runlevel=S
15964 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
15965 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
15966 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
15967 </pre></blockquote>
15968
15969 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
15970 script.</p>
15971
15972 <blockquote><pre>
15973 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
15974 previous=N
15975 PREVLEVEL=N
15976 RUNLEVEL=S
15977 runlevel=S
15978 </pre></blockquote>
15979
15980 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
15981 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
15982 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
15983
15984 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
15985 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
15986 choice.</p>
15987
15988       </div>
15989       <div class="tags">
15990
15991
15992         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>.
15993
15994
15995       </div>
15996     </div>
15997     <div class="padding"></div>
15998
15999     <div class="entry">
16000       <div class="title">
16001         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
16002       </div>
16003       <div class="date">
16004          6th June 2010
16005       </div>
16006       <div class="body">
16007         <p>Via the
16008 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
16009 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
16010 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
16011 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
16012 following the standards wars of today.</p>
16013
16014       </div>
16015       <div class="tags">
16016
16017
16018         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>.
16019
16020
16021       </div>
16022     </div>
16023     <div class="padding"></div>
16024
16025     <div class="entry">
16026       <div class="title">
16027         <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>
16028       </div>
16029       <div class="date">
16030          3rd June 2010
16031       </div>
16032       <div class="body">
16033         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
16034 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
16035 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
16036 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
16037 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
16038
16039 <blockquote><pre>
16040 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
16041   vendor                    count
16042   Dell Computer Corporation     1
16043     PowerEdge 1750              1
16044   IBM                           1
16045     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
16046   Intel                         2
16047   [no-dmi-info]                 3
16048 maintainer:~#
16049 </pre></blockquote>
16050
16051 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
16052 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
16053 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
16054 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
16055 option to list the individual machines.</p>
16056
16057 <p>A larger list is
16058 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
16059 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
16060 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
16061 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
16062 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
16063 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
16064 collector.</p>
16065
16066       </div>
16067       <div class="tags">
16068
16069
16070         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>.
16071
16072
16073       </div>
16074     </div>
16075     <div class="padding"></div>
16076
16077     <div class="entry">
16078       <div class="title">
16079         <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>
16080       </div>
16081       <div class="date">
16082          1st June 2010
16083       </div>
16084       <div class="body">
16085         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
16086 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
16087 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
16088 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
16089 wait.</p>
16090
16091 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
16092 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
16093 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
16094 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
16095 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
16096 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
16097
16098 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
16099 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
16100 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
16101 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
16102 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
16103 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
16104 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
16105 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
16106
16107 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
16108
16109       </div>
16110       <div class="tags">
16111
16112
16113         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>.
16114
16115
16116       </div>
16117     </div>
16118     <div class="padding"></div>
16119
16120     <div class="entry">
16121       <div class="title">
16122         <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>
16123       </div>
16124       <div class="date">
16125         27th May 2010
16126       </div>
16127       <div class="body">
16128         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
16129 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
16130 issues are known and should be solved:
16131
16132 <p><ul>
16133
16134 <li>The wicd package seen to
16135 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
16136 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
16137 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
16138 seem to be on the case.</li>
16139
16140 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
16141 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
16142 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
16143 maintainer is on the case.</li>
16144
16145 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
16146 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
16147 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
16148 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
16149 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
16150 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
16151 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
16152 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
16153
16154 </ul></p>
16155
16156 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
16157 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
16158 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
16159 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
16160
16161 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
16162 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
16163 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
16164 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
16165
16166 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
16167
16168       </div>
16169       <div class="tags">
16170
16171
16172         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>.
16173
16174
16175       </div>
16176     </div>
16177     <div class="padding"></div>
16178
16179     <div class="entry">
16180       <div class="title">
16181         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
16182       </div>
16183       <div class="date">
16184         22nd May 2010
16185       </div>
16186       <div class="body">
16187         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
16188 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
16189 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
16190 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
16191
16192 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
16193 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
16194 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
16195 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
16196 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
16197 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
16198 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
16199 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
16200 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
16201 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
16202 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
16203 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
16204 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
16205 going to work.</p>
16206
16207 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
16208 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
16209 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
16210 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
16211 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
16212 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
16213 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
16214 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
16215 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
16216 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
16217 Edu.</p>
16218
16219 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
16220 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
16221 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
16222 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
16223 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
16224 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
16225
16226 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
16227 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
16228
16229       </div>
16230       <div class="tags">
16231
16232
16233         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>.
16234
16235
16236       </div>
16237     </div>
16238     <div class="padding"></div>
16239
16240     <div class="entry">
16241       <div class="title">
16242         <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>
16243       </div>
16244       <div class="date">
16245         19th May 2010
16246       </div>
16247       <div class="body">
16248         <p>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
16249 Edu finally entered the Debian archive.  Today, the new
16250 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html">libpam-mklocaluser</a>
16251 package was accepted.  Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
16252 into unstable.  The
16253 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html">pam-python</a>
16254 package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
16255 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd</a> package
16256 passed NEW on Monday.  In addition, the
16257 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
16258 package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
16259 hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.</p>
16260
16261 <p>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
16262 roaming laptops.  The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
16263 nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
16264 which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
16265 for nscd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">BTS report
16266 #485282</a> is implemented.  The alternative setup is to use sssd with
16267 libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
16268 care of the caching of passwords and group information.</p>
16269
16270 <p>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
16271 at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
16272 problem with the server certificate.  I plan to update the Debian
16273 package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
16274 find time to make sure the next release will include both the
16275 Debian/Ubuntu specific patches.  Upstream is friendly and responsive,
16276 and I am sure we will find a good solution.</p>
16277
16278 <p>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
16279 LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
16280 when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
16281 cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
16282 memberhips and other relevant LDAP information.  The
16283 libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
16284 directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
16285 be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used.  To avoid confusion
16286 with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
16287 to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
16288 on the home directory servers.</p>
16289
16290 <p>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
16291 message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
16292 is created.  Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
16293 message.  The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
16294 a bug in gdm.  Have not investigated if there is some other message
16295 type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.</p>
16296
16297 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
16298 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
16299
16300       </div>
16301       <div class="tags">
16302
16303
16304         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>.
16305
16306
16307       </div>
16308     </div>
16309     <div class="padding"></div>
16310
16311     <div class="entry">
16312       <div class="title">
16313         <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>
16314       </div>
16315       <div class="date">
16316         14th May 2010
16317       </div>
16318       <div class="body">
16319         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
16320 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
16321 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
16322 expected, if I am to believe the
16323 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
16324 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
16325 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
16326 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
16327 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
16328 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
16329 version.</p>
16330
16331 More information about
16332 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
16333 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
16334 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
16335 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
16336
16337 <blockquote><pre>
16338 CONCURRENCY=none
16339 </pre></blockquote>
16340
16341 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
16342 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
16343 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
16344 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
16345
16346       </div>
16347       <div class="tags">
16348
16349
16350         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>.
16351
16352
16353       </div>
16354     </div>
16355     <div class="padding"></div>
16356
16357     <div class="entry">
16358       <div class="title">
16359         <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>
16360       </div>
16361       <div class="date">
16362         14th May 2010
16363       </div>
16364       <div class="body">
16365         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
16366 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
16367 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
16368 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
16369 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
16370 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
16371 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
16372 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
16373
16374 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
16375 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
16376 this on the collector host:</p>
16377
16378 <blockquote><pre>
16379 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
16380 </pre></blockquote>
16381
16382 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
16383 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
16384
16385 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
16386 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
16387 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
16388 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
16389 written yet.</p>
16390
16391       </div>
16392       <div class="tags">
16393
16394
16395         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>.
16396
16397
16398       </div>
16399     </div>
16400     <div class="padding"></div>
16401
16402     <div class="entry">
16403       <div class="title">
16404         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
16405       </div>
16406       <div class="date">
16407         13th May 2010
16408       </div>
16409       <div class="body">
16410         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
16411 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
16412 has been
16413 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
16414
16415 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
16416 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
16417 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
16418 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
16419 based boot system.  Tollef is
16420 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
16421 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
16422 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
16423 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
16424 at the moment do not.</p>
16425
16426 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
16427 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
16428 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
16429 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
16430 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
16431 way forward.</p>
16432
16433 <p>In the mean time, based on the
16434 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
16435 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
16436 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
16437 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
16438 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
16439 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
16440 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
16441 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
16442
16443       </div>
16444       <div class="tags">
16445
16446
16447         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>.
16448
16449
16450       </div>
16451     </div>
16452     <div class="padding"></div>
16453
16454     <div class="entry">
16455       <div class="title">
16456         <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>
16457       </div>
16458       <div class="date">
16459          6th May 2010
16460       </div>
16461       <div class="body">
16462         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
16463 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
16464 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
16465 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
16466 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
16467 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
16468 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
16469
16470 <blockquote><pre>
16471 CONCURRENCY=makefile
16472 </pre></blockquote>
16473
16474 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
16475 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
16476 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
16477 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
16478 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
16479 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
16480 make this happen.</p>
16481
16482 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
16483 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
16484 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
16485 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
16486 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
16487
16488 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
16489 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
16490 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
16491 fix the remaining issues.</p>
16492
16493 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
16494 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
16495 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
16496 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
16497
16498       </div>
16499       <div class="tags">
16500
16501
16502         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>.
16503
16504
16505       </div>
16506     </div>
16507     <div class="padding"></div>
16508
16509     <div class="entry">
16510       <div class="title">
16511         <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>
16512       </div>
16513       <div class="date">
16514          2nd May 2010
16515       </div>
16516       <div class="body">
16517         <p>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
16518 create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
16519 change the password on the first login attempt.</p>
16520
16521 <p>I'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
16522 Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account.  The account
16523 and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
16524 unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
16525 passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.</p>
16526
16527 <p>A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
16528 settings in /etc/shadow:</p>
16529
16530 <blockquote><pre>
16531 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
16532 Last password change                                    : May 02, 2010
16533 Password expires                                        : never
16534 Password inactive                                       : never
16535 Account expires                                         : never
16536 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
16537 Maximum number of days between password change          : 99999
16538 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
16539 root@tjener:~#
16540 </pre></blockquote>
16541
16542 <p>The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
16543 account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
16544 lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
16545 to the difference in days between that date and today.  To make it
16546 simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
16547 avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).</p>
16548
16549 <p>After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
16550 intended:</p>
16551
16552 <blockquote><pre>
16553 root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test
16554 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
16555 Last password change                                    : Jan 02, 1970
16556 Password expires                                        : never
16557 Password inactive                                       : never
16558 Account expires                                         : never
16559 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
16560 Maximum number of days between password change          : 10950
16561 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
16562 root@tjener:~#
16563 </pre></blockquote>
16564
16565 <p>So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
16566 Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
16567 user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).</p>
16568
16569 <p>Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
16570 sure only the user itself have the account password?</p>
16571
16572 <p>If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
16573 Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
16574
16575 <p>Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
16576 shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
16577 last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
16578 on the first login.  This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
16579 I did not notice this in my initial testing.  I have tested it on
16580 Squeeze, and '<tt>chage -d 0 username</tt>' do work there.  I have not
16581 tested it on Lenny yet.</p>
16582
16583 <p>Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
16584 equivalent command to expire a password is '<tt>passwd -e
16585 username</tt>', which insert zero into the date of the last password
16586 change.</p>
16587
16588       </div>
16589       <div class="tags">
16590
16591
16592         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>.
16593
16594
16595       </div>
16596     </div>
16597     <div class="padding"></div>
16598
16599     <div class="entry">
16600       <div class="title">
16601         <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>
16602       </div>
16603       <div class="date">
16604         28th April 2010
16605       </div>
16606       <div class="body">
16607         <p>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
16608 Debian Edu.  The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
16609 handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
16610 and go.</p>
16611
16612 <p>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
16613 Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
16614 example called Roaming Workstations.  Here are my thought on this.
16615 The setup would consist of the following:</p>
16616
16617 <ul>
16618
16619  <li>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
16620    the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
16621    the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
16622    server.  This allow the user to work also when offline.  The
16623    central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
16624    request, for example mounted via CIFS.  It could be mounted
16625    automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
16626    and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
16627    hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
16628    request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
16629    can be used to access it when needed.  Perhaps it is enough to use
16630    the fish protocol in KDE?</li>
16631
16632  <li>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
16633    authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
16634    to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
16635    to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server.  This can be done using
16636    <a href="http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
16637    or the Fedora developed
16638    <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD">System
16639    Security Services Daemon</a> packages.</li>
16640
16641  <li>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
16642    using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
16643    directory, using unison.</li>
16644
16645  <li>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
16646    their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
16647    the box with CUPS.  For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
16648    system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
16649    implemented.</li>
16650
16651  <li>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
16652    sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.</li>
16653
16654  <li>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
16655    cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
16656    local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.</li>
16657
16658 </ul>
16659
16660 <p>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
16661 the moment.  If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
16662 in time for the Squeeze release to freeze.  Some of the pieces need
16663 tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
16664 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566718">#566718</a>) and nslcd (or
16665 perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
16666 its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
16667 when disconnected from the net.  If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
16668 to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.</p>
16669
16670 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
16671 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
16672
16673       </div>
16674       <div class="tags">
16675
16676
16677         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>.
16678
16679
16680       </div>
16681     </div>
16682     <div class="padding"></div>
16683
16684     <div class="entry">
16685       <div class="title">
16686         <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>
16687       </div>
16688       <div class="date">
16689         19th April 2010
16690       </div>
16691       <div class="body">
16692         <p>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
16693 thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
16694 touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
16695 conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
16696 book titled "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
16697 Copyright, and the Future of the Future" is available with few
16698 restrictions on the web, for example from
16699 <a href="http://craphound.com/content/">his own site</a>. I read the
16700 epub-version from
16701 <a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2883">feedbooks</a> using
16702 <a href="http://www.fbreader.org/">fbreader</a> and my N810. I
16703 strongly recommend this book.</p>
16704
16705       </div>
16706       <div class="tags">
16707
16708
16709         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>.
16710
16711
16712       </div>
16713     </div>
16714     <div class="padding"></div>
16715
16716     <div class="entry">
16717       <div class="title">
16718         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html">Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?</a>
16719       </div>
16720       <div class="date">
16721         14th April 2010
16722       </div>
16723       <div class="body">
16724         <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/">Yesterdays
16725 NUUG presentation</a> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
16726 about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux.  Setting up a
16727 Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
16728 place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
16729 have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
16730 directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
16731 not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
16732 users and cryptographic keys instead.</p>
16733
16734 <p>A challenge will be integration and administration.  Is there a
16735 Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
16736 administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups?  With it, the
16737 school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
16738 files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.</p>
16739
16740 <p>A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
16741 pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together.  Anyone know?</p>
16742
16743 <p>Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
16744 Nagios.  I have no idea how much work that will be to implement.  We
16745 would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
16746 shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
16747 to work properly.</p>
16748
16749 <p>I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
16750 skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
16751 configuration and integration.  A natural starting point would be
16752 setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
16753 rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
16754 time.</p>
16755
16756 <p>If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
16757 I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
16758 presentation, and start using Kerberos at home.  The video show show
16759 up in a few days.</p>
16760
16761       </div>
16762       <div class="tags">
16763
16764
16765         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>.
16766
16767
16768       </div>
16769     </div>
16770     <div class="padding"></div>
16771
16772     <div class="entry">
16773       <div class="title">
16774         <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>
16775       </div>
16776       <div class="date">
16777          6th March 2010
16778       </div>
16779       <div class="body">
16780         <p>6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
16781 in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
16782 when the user log out.  A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
16783 package in 2004 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/230422">#230422</a>),
16784 and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
16785 Today, this finally paid off.</p>
16786
16787 <p>The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
16788 repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
16789 been updated to use this framework.  Next on my agenda is to make sure
16790 kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.</p>
16791
16792 <p>In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
16793 user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
16794 after a user.  With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
16795 a generic way that work with all display managers using this
16796 framework.  My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
16797 similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.<p>
16798
16799       </div>
16800       <div class="tags">
16801
16802
16803         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>.
16804
16805
16806       </div>
16807     </div>
16808     <div class="padding"></div>
16809
16810     <div class="entry">
16811       <div class="title">
16812         <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>
16813       </div>
16814       <div class="date">
16815         11th February 2010
16816       </div>
16817       <div class="body">
16818         <p>On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
16819 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> was finally
16820 shipped.  This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
16821 pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up.  Work on the first
16822 point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
16823 month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
16824 and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.</p>
16825
16826 <p>Perhaps it even is time for some partying?</p>
16827
16828 <p>After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
16829 next major release, based on Squeeze.  We will try to get as many of
16830 the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
16831 and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.</p>
16832
16833       </div>
16834       <div class="tags">
16835
16836
16837         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>.
16838
16839
16840       </div>
16841     </div>
16842     <div class="padding"></div>
16843
16844     <div class="entry">
16845       <div class="title">
16846         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html">Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration</a>
16847       </div>
16848       <div class="date">
16849         27th January 2010
16850       </div>
16851       <div class="body">
16852         <p>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
16853 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
16854 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
16855 Nagios.  The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
16856 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
16857 further.</p>
16858
16859 <p>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
16860 configured as a Munin and Nagios server.  In addition, it is
16861 configured to be a server for the
16862 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">SiteSummary
16863 system</a> I have written for use in Debian Edu.  The SiteSummary
16864 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
16865 work.  In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
16866 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
16867 computer submitting information to this collector.  This allow for
16868 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
16869 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
16870 packages got etc.  This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
16871 and Nagios configuration.</p>
16872
16873 <p>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
16874 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
16875 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
16876 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.</p>
16877
16878 <p>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
16879 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
16880 services detected).  In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
16881 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
16882 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
16883 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
16884 the machine.</p>
16885
16886 <p>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
16887 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
16888 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
16889 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.</p>
16890
16891 <p>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
16892 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP.  The system
16893 administrator need to run "<tt>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
16894 nagiosadmin</tt>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
16895 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages.  After that,
16896 everything is taken care of.</p>
16897
16898       </div>
16899       <div class="tags">
16900
16901
16902         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>.
16903
16904
16905       </div>
16906     </div>
16907     <div class="padding"></div>
16908
16909     <div class="entry">
16910       <div class="title">
16911         <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>
16912       </div>
16913       <div class="date">
16914         12th August 2009
16915       </div>
16916       <div class="body">
16917         <p>Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
16918 and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
16919 OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage.  I searched using
16920 'filetype:odt' and equvalent terms, and got these results:</P>
16921
16922 <table>
16923 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
16924 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:282000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
16925 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:75600</td> <td>pptx:183000</td></tr>
16926 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:145000</td></tr>
16927 </table>
16928
16929 <p>Next, I added a 'site:no' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
16930 got these numbers:</p>
16931
16932 <table>
16933 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
16934 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480 </td> <td>docx:4460</td></tr>
16935 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:299   </td> <td>pptx:741</td></tr>
16936 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:187       </td> <td>xlsx:372</td></tr>
16937 </table>
16938
16939 <p>I wonder how these numbers change over time.</p>
16940
16941 <p>I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
16942 on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
16943 they are conduced in another country.  Because of this, I did the same
16944 search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
16945 search done from a machine here in Norway.</p>
16946
16947
16948 <table>
16949 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
16950 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:129000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
16951 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:44200</td> <td>pptx:93900</td></tr>
16952 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:82400</td></tr>
16953 </table>
16954
16955 <p>And with 'site:no':
16956
16957 <table>
16958 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
16959 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480</td> <td>docx:3410</td></tr>
16960 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:175</td> <td>pptx:604</td></tr>
16961 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:186       </td> <td>xlsx:296</td></tr>
16962 </table>
16963
16964 <p>Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
16965 numbers.</p>
16966
16967       </div>
16968       <div class="tags">
16969
16970
16971         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>.
16972
16973
16974       </div>
16975     </div>
16976     <div class="padding"></div>
16977
16978     <div class="entry">
16979       <div class="title">
16980         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html">ISO still hope to fix OOXML</a>
16981       </div>
16982       <div class="date">
16983          8th August 2009
16984       </div>
16985       <div class="body">
16986         <p>According to <a
16987 href="http://twerner.blogspot.com/2009/08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html">a
16988 blog post from Torsten Werner</a>, the current defect report for ISO
16989 29500 (ISO OOXML) is 809 pages.  His interesting point is that the
16990 defect report is 71 pages more than the full ODF 1.1 specification.
16991 Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
16992 can be fixed in ISO.  Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
16993 and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
16994 close to solving the problems.  I was part of the Norwegian committee
16995 involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
16996 Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.</p>
16997
16998 <p>These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
16999 with the future ahead of it.  We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
17000 seminar this autumn.</p>
17001
17002       </div>
17003       <div class="tags">
17004
17005
17006         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>.
17007
17008
17009       </div>
17010     </div>
17011     <div class="padding"></div>
17012
17013     <div class="entry">
17014       <div class="title">
17015         <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>
17016       </div>
17017       <div class="date">
17018         27th July 2009
17019       </div>
17020       <div class="body">
17021         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
17022 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
17023 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
17024 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
17025 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
17026 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
17027 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
17028
17029 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
17030 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
17031 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
17032
17033       </div>
17034       <div class="tags">
17035
17036
17037         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>.
17038
17039
17040       </div>
17041     </div>
17042     <div class="padding"></div>
17043
17044     <div class="entry">
17045       <div class="title">
17046         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
17047       </div>
17048       <div class="date">
17049         22nd July 2009
17050       </div>
17051       <div class="body">
17052         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
17053 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
17054 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
17055 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
17056 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
17057 the package up to date.</p>
17058
17059 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
17060 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
17061 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
17062 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
17063 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
17064 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
17065 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
17066 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
17067 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
17068 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
17069 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
17070 working on the future release.</p>
17071
17072 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
17073 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
17074
17075       </div>
17076       <div class="tags">
17077
17078
17079         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>.
17080
17081
17082       </div>
17083     </div>
17084     <div class="padding"></div>
17085
17086     <div class="entry">
17087       <div class="title">
17088         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
17089       </div>
17090       <div class="date">
17091         24th June 2009
17092       </div>
17093       <div class="body">
17094         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
17095 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
17096 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
17097 funded
17098 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
17099 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
17100 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
17101 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
17102 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
17103 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
17104
17105 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
17106 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
17107 boot:</p>
17108
17109 <ul>
17110
17111 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
17112
17113 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
17114    clock is in UTC.</li>
17115
17116 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
17117    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
17118    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
17119
17120 </ul>
17121
17122 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
17123 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
17124 Villegas</a>.
17125
17126 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
17127 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
17128 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
17129 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
17130 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
17131 using this.</p>
17132
17133 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
17134 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
17135 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
17136 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
17137 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
17138 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
17139 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
17140
17141       </div>
17142       <div class="tags">
17143
17144
17145         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>.
17146
17147
17148       </div>
17149     </div>
17150     <div class="padding"></div>
17151
17152     <div class="entry">
17153       <div class="title">
17154         <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>
17155       </div>
17156       <div class="date">
17157          2nd May 2009
17158       </div>
17159       <div class="body">
17160         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
17161 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
17162 do not yet know them.</p>
17163
17164 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
17165 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
17166 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
17167 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
17168 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
17169 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
17170 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
17171 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
17172 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
17173 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
17174 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
17175
17176 <p>The second one is
17177 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
17178 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
17179 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
17180 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
17181 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
17182 and the company behind it is running
17183 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
17184 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
17185 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
17186 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
17187 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
17188 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
17189 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
17190 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
17191
17192 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
17193 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
17194 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
17195 surrounded by today.</p>
17196
17197       </div>
17198       <div class="tags">
17199
17200
17201         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17202
17203
17204       </div>
17205     </div>
17206     <div class="padding"></div>
17207
17208     <div class="entry">
17209       <div class="title">
17210         <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>
17211       </div>
17212       <div class="date">
17213         28th April 2009
17214       </div>
17215       <div class="body">
17216         <p>Julien Blache
17217 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
17218 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
17219 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
17220 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
17221 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
17222 properties.</p>
17223
17224       </div>
17225       <div class="tags">
17226
17227
17228         Tags: <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>.
17229
17230
17231       </div>
17232     </div>
17233     <div class="padding"></div>
17234
17235     <div class="entry">
17236       <div class="title">
17237         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html">Recording video from cron using VLC</a>
17238       </div>
17239       <div class="date">
17240          5th April 2009
17241       </div>
17242       <div class="body">
17243         <p>One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
17244 run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net.  The
17245 task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
17246 of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
17247 vlc.  I finally found a way to do it today.  I spent an hour or so
17248 searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation.  The
17249 hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
17250 dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:</p>
17251
17252 <blockquote><pre>URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
17253 SAVEFILE=rms.ogg
17254 DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
17255   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
17256   --intf=dummy</pre></blockquote>
17257
17258 <p>The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
17259 duplicating the output stream to "nodisplay" and the file, using the
17260 dummy interface.  The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
17261 sure no X interface is needed.</p>
17262
17263 <p>The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
17264 and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
17265 the vlc process with SIGTERM.  Here is a complete script
17266 <tt>vlc-record</tt> to use from <tt>at</tt> or <tt>cron</tt>:</p>
17267
17268 <blockquote><pre>#!/bin/sh
17269 set -e
17270 URL="$1"
17271 SAVEFILE="$2"
17272 DURATION="$3"
17273 DISPLAY= vlc -q "$URL" \
17274   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
17275   --intf=dummy < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 &
17276 pid=$!
17277 sleep $DURATION
17278 kill $pid
17279 wait $pid</pre></blockquote>
17280
17281       </div>
17282       <div class="tags">
17283
17284
17285         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>.
17286
17287
17288       </div>
17289     </div>
17290     <div class="padding"></div>
17291
17292     <div class="entry">
17293       <div class="title">
17294         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html">Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications</a>
17295       </div>
17296       <div class="date">
17297         30th March 2009
17298       </div>
17299       <div class="body">
17300         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
17301 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
17302 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
17303 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
17304 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
17305 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
17306 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
17307 application.</p>
17308
17309 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
17310 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
17311 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
17312 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
17313 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
17314 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
17315 blocked from doing so.</p>
17316
17317 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
17318 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
17319 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
17320 requirements change.</p>
17321
17322 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
17323 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
17324 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
17325
17326       </div>
17327       <div class="tags">
17328
17329
17330         Tags: <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>.
17331
17332
17333       </div>
17334     </div>
17335     <div class="padding"></div>
17336
17337     <div class="entry">
17338       <div class="title">
17339         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
17340       </div>
17341       <div class="date">
17342         29th March 2009
17343       </div>
17344       <div class="body">
17345         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
17346 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
17347 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
17348 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
17349 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
17350 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
17351 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
17352 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
17353 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
17354 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
17355 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
17356 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
17357 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
17358 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
17359 now. :)</p>
17360
17361       </div>
17362       <div class="tags">
17363
17364
17365         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>.
17366
17367
17368       </div>
17369     </div>
17370     <div class="padding"></div>
17371
17372     <div class="entry">
17373       <div class="title">
17374         <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>
17375       </div>
17376       <div class="date">
17377         29th March 2009
17378       </div>
17379       <div class="body">
17380         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
17381 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
17382 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
17383 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
17384 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
17385 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
17386
17387 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
17388 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
17389 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
17390 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
17391 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
17392 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
17393 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
17394 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
17395 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
17396 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
17397 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
17398 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
17399 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
17400
17401 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
17402 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
17403 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
17404 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
17405
17406 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
17407 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
17408
17409 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
17410 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
17411 new IETF work group?</p>
17412
17413       </div>
17414       <div class="tags">
17415
17416
17417         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>.
17418
17419
17420       </div>
17421     </div>
17422     <div class="padding"></div>
17423
17424     <div class="entry">
17425       <div class="title">
17426         <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>
17427       </div>
17428       <div class="date">
17429         28th February 2009
17430       </div>
17431       <div class="body">
17432         <p>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
17433 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
17434 contract expire for each server.  We have a machine (and service)
17435 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
17436 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
17437 each machine.  To make it easier for us to track support contract
17438 status, I've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
17439 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
17440 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
17441 machines.  I extended a perl script already being used to import
17442 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
17443 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
17444 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
17445 for the relevant machines.  This make the support status information
17446 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
17447 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
17448 The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
17449 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
17450 them.  27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
17451 using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
17452 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
17453 services.  After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
17454 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
17455 them break down.  When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
17456 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
17457 machine.</p>
17458
17459 <p>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
17460 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
17461 Werner Forsbring.  The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
17462 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
17463 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code.  I know the HTML
17464 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
17465 introduce more dependencies.  This is the current incarnation:</p>
17466
17467 <pre>
17468 use LWP::Simple;
17469 use POSIX;
17470 use WWW::Mechanize;
17471 use Date::Parse;
17472 [...]
17473 sub get_support_info {
17474     my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
17475     my $str;
17476
17477     if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
17478         # fetch website from Dell support
17479         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";
17480         my $webpage = get($url);
17481         return undef unless ($webpage);
17482
17483         my $daysleft = -1;
17484         my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
17485         foreach my $line (@lines) {
17486             next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
17487             $line =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
17488             $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;
17489
17490             my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
17491             @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
17492             my $lastend = "";
17493             while ($f[3] eq "DELL") {
17494                 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];
17495
17496                 my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
17497                                             localtime(str2time($startstr)));
17498                 my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
17499                                           localtime(str2time($endstr)));
17500                 $str .= "$type $start -> $end ";
17501                 @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
17502                 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
17503             }
17504             my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
17505             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
17506                 if ($lastend lt $today);
17507         }
17508     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
17509         my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
17510         my $url =
17511             'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do';
17512         $mech->get($url);
17513         my $fields = {
17514             'BODServiceID' => 'NA',
17515             'RegisteredPurchaseDate' => '',
17516             'country' => 'NO',
17517             'productNumber' => $productnumber,
17518             'serialNumber1' => $serial,
17519         };
17520         $mech->submit_form( form_number => 2,
17521                             fields      => $fields );
17522         # Next step is screen scraping
17523         my $content = $mech->content();
17524
17525         $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
17526         $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
17527         $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
17528         $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
17529
17530         my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
17531
17532         while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
17533             my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
17534                 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
17535             $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
17536             my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
17537                                         localtime(str2time($startstr)));
17538             my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
17539                                       localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
17540
17541             $str .= "$type ($status) $start -> $end ";
17542
17543             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
17544                 if ($end lt $today);
17545         }
17546     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
17547         # This code ignore extended support contracts.
17548         my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
17549         if ($producttype &amp;&amp; $serial) {
17550             my $content =
17551                 get("http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;brandind=5000008&amp;Submit=Submit&amp;type=$producttype&amp;serial=$serial");
17552             if ($content) {
17553                 $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
17554                 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
17555                 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
17556                 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
17557
17558                 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
17559                 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
17560
17561                 $str .= "($status) -> $end ";
17562
17563                 my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
17564                 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
17565                     if ($end lt $today);
17566             }
17567         }
17568     }
17569     return $str;
17570 }
17571 </pre>
17572
17573 <p>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
17574 serial numbers.  The information passed in as arguments are fetched
17575 from dmidecode.</p>
17576
17577 <pre>
17578 print get_support_info("hp.host", "HP ProLiant BL460c G1", "1234567890"
17579                        "447707-B21");
17580 print get_support_info("dell.host", "Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950", "1234567");
17581 print get_support_info("ibm.host", "IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-",
17582                        "1234567");
17583 </pre>
17584
17585 <p>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
17586 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)</p>
17587
17588 <p>Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
17589 contracts, so it is useless in that case.  The original Dell code do
17590 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
17591 do so.</p>
17592
17593       </div>
17594       <div class="tags">
17595
17596
17597         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>.
17598
17599
17600       </div>
17601     </div>
17602     <div class="padding"></div>
17603
17604     <div class="entry">
17605       <div class="title">
17606         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html">Using bar codes at a computing center</a>
17607       </div>
17608       <div class="date">
17609         20th February 2009
17610       </div>
17611       <div class="body">
17612         <p>At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
17613 in our computing center.  This give us a challenge in tracking the
17614 location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
17615 removed.  Some times the location register is not updated when a
17616 computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
17617 the "missing" computer.</p>
17618
17619 <p>In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
17620 <a href="http://www.libdmtx.org/">libdmtx</a> to write and read bar
17621 code blocks as defined in the
17622 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix">The Data Matrix
17623 Standard</a>.  This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
17624 digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
17625 codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture.  The bar code standard
17626 allow up to 2 KiB to be written in the tag.  There is another project
17627 with <a href="http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/">a bar code
17628 writer written in postscript</a> capable of creating such bar codes,
17629 but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
17630 codes.</p>
17631
17632 <p>It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
17633 machines in our computing center.  If both racks and computers are
17634 tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
17635 computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
17636 If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
17637 locations, and can detect movements and removals.</p>
17638
17639 <p>I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
17640 random rack and tagged all the machines with their names.  Next, I
17641 took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
17642 these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read.  This worked
17643 fairly well.  If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
17644 side, all tags in the image could be read.  Because of limited space
17645 between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
17646 rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
17647 about half the rack.  I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
17648 to 60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.</p>
17649
17650 <p>My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
17651 at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
17652 easier automatic tracking of computers.</p>
17653
17654       </div>
17655       <div class="tags">
17656
17657
17658         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>.
17659
17660
17661       </div>
17662     </div>
17663     <div class="padding"></div>
17664
17665     <div class="entry">
17666       <div class="title">
17667         <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>
17668       </div>
17669       <div class="date">
17670         17th January 2009
17671       </div>
17672       <div class="body">
17673         <p>As part of the work we do in <a href="http://www.nuug.no">NUUG</a>
17674 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
17675 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording.  Putting a
17676 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
17677 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy.  I hope this
17678 will become easier when the &lt;video&gt; tag is implemented in all
17679 browsers, but I am not sure.  We provide the recordings in several
17680 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
17681 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
17682 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
17683 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
17684 &lt;video&gt; tag, the &lt;object&gt; tag, the &lt;embed&gt; tag and
17685 the &lt;applet&gt; tag.  All of these take a lot of options, and
17686 finding the best options is a major challenge.</p>
17687
17688 <p>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from <a
17689 href="http://labs.opera.com">labs.opera.com</a>, to see how it handled
17690 a &lt;video&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
17691 I was not very impressed.  The browser start by fetching a picture
17692 from the video stream.  Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
17693 definitely very early in the recording.  So far, so good. Next,
17694 instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
17695 of it, but do not start to play the video.  This mean I have to wait
17696 for several minutes for the downloading to finish.  When the download
17697 is done, the playing of the video do not start!  Waiting for the
17698 download, but I do not get to see the video?  Some testing later, I
17699 discover that I have to add the controls="true" attribute to be able
17700 to get a play button to pres to start the video.  Adding
17701 autoplay="true" did not help.  I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
17702 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
17703 &lt;video&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
17704 playing when the download is done.</p>
17705
17706 <p>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
17707 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/">available
17708 from the nuug site</a>.  Will have to test it with the new Firefox
17709 too.</p>
17710
17711 <p>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature.  I was unable
17712 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
17713 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video.  I
17714 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)</p>
17715
17716       </div>
17717       <div class="tags">
17718
17719
17720         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>.
17721
17722
17723       </div>
17724     </div>
17725     <div class="padding"></div>
17726
17727     <div class="entry">
17728       <div class="title">
17729         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html">Software video mixer on a USB stick</a>
17730       </div>
17731       <div class="date">
17732         28th December 2008
17733       </div>
17734       <div class="body">
17735         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> is
17736 recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
17737 worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
17738 directly with the video stream.  For this, we use the
17739 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/">dvswitch</a> package from
17740 the Debian video team.  As this require quite one computer per video
17741 source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
17742 borrow laptops.  And to avoid having to install extra software on
17743 these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
17744 bootable USB stick.  The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
17745 source, sink and mixer applications and
17746 <a href="http://www.kinodv.org/">dvgrab</a>.  To allow this setup to
17747 work without any configuration, I've patched dvswitch to use
17748 <a href="http://www.avahi.org/">avahi</a> to connect the various parts
17749 together.  And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
17750 upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
17751 with USB sources.  We have not yet tested this setup in a production
17752 setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
17753 video mixer in a very short time frame.  We will need it for
17754 <a href="http://www.goopen.no/">Go Open 2009</a>.</p>
17755
17756 <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz">The
17757 USB image</a> is for a 1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
17758 larger stick as well.</p>
17759
17760       </div>
17761       <div class="tags">
17762
17763
17764         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>.
17765
17766
17767       </div>
17768     </div>
17769     <div class="padding"></div>
17770
17771     <div class="entry">
17772       <div class="title">
17773         <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>
17774       </div>
17775       <div class="date">
17776          7th December 2008
17777       </div>
17778       <div class="body">
17779         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
17780 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
17781 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
17782 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
17783 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
17784 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
17785 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
17786 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
17787
17788 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
17789 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
17790 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
17791 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
17792 of these cards.</p>
17793
17794       </div>
17795       <div class="tags">
17796
17797
17798         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>.
17799
17800
17801       </div>
17802     </div>
17803     <div class="padding"></div>
17804
17805     <div class="entry">
17806       <div class="title">
17807         <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>
17808       </div>
17809       <div class="date">
17810         25th November 2008
17811       </div>
17812       <div class="body">
17813         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
17814 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
17815 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
17816 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
17817 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
17818 notes are available on
17819 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
17820 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
17821 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
17822 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
17823 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
17824 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
17825 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
17826 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
17827 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
17828
17829 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
17830 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
17831
17832       </div>
17833       <div class="tags">
17834
17835
17836         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>.
17837
17838
17839       </div>
17840     </div>
17841     <div class="padding"></div>
17842
17843     <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>
17844     <div id="sidebar">
17845
17846
17847
17848 <h2>Archive</h2>
17849 <ul>
17850
17851 <li>2013
17852 <ul>
17853
17854 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
17855
17856 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
17857
17858 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
17859
17860 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
17861
17862 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
17863
17864 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
17865
17866 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
17867
17868 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
17869
17870 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
17871
17872 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
17873
17874 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (2)</a></li>
17875
17876 </ul></li>
17877
17878 <li>2012
17879 <ul>
17880
17881 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
17882
17883 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
17884
17885 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
17886
17887 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
17888
17889 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
17890
17891 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
17892
17893 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
17894
17895 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
17896
17897 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
17898
17899 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
17900
17901 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
17902
17903 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
17904
17905 </ul></li>
17906
17907 <li>2011
17908 <ul>
17909
17910 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
17911
17912 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
17913
17914 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
17915
17916 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
17917
17918 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
17919
17920 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
17921
17922 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
17923
17924 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
17925
17926 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
17927
17928 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
17929
17930 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
17931
17932 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
17933
17934 </ul></li>
17935
17936 <li>2010
17937 <ul>
17938
17939 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
17940
17941 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
17942
17943 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
17944
17945 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
17946
17947 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
17948
17949 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
17950
17951 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
17952
17953 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
17954
17955 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
17956
17957 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
17958
17959 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
17960
17961 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
17962
17963 </ul></li>
17964
17965 <li>2009
17966 <ul>
17967
17968 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
17969
17970 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
17971
17972 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
17973
17974 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
17975
17976 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
17977
17978 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
17979
17980 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
17981
17982 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
17983
17984 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
17985
17986 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
17987
17988 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
17989
17990 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
17991
17992 </ul></li>
17993
17994 <li>2008
17995 <ul>
17996
17997 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
17998
17999 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
18000
18001 </ul></li>
18002
18003 </ul>
18004
18005
18006
18007 <h2>Tags</h2>
18008 <ul>
18009
18010  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (13)</a></li>
18011
18012  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
18013
18014  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
18015
18016  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
18017
18018  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (7)</a></li>
18019
18020  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (13)</a></li>
18021
18022  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
18023
18024  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (90)</a></li>
18025
18026  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (142)</a></li>
18027
18028  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (10)</a></li>
18029
18030  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (10)</a></li>
18031
18032  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
18033
18034  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (225)</a></li>
18035
18036  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (21)</a></li>
18037
18038  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (12)</a></li>
18039
18040  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (12)</a></li>
18041
18042  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (5)</a></li>
18043
18044  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (11)</a></li>
18045
18046  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (37)</a></li>
18047
18048  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (7)</a></li>
18049
18050  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (18)</a></li>
18051
18052  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (8)</a></li>
18053
18054  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (6)</a></li>
18055
18056  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
18057
18058  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (3)</a></li>
18059
18060  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (25)</a></li>
18061
18062  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (236)</a></li>
18063
18064  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (156)</a></li>
18065
18066  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (8)</a></li>
18067
18068  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
18069
18070  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (45)</a></li>
18071
18072  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (67)</a></li>
18073
18074  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (1)</a></li>
18075
18076  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
18077
18078  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (2)</a></li>
18079
18080  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (8)</a></li>
18081
18082  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
18083
18084  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (4)</a></li>
18085
18086  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
18087
18088  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (32)</a></li>
18089
18090  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
18091
18092  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (4)</a></li>
18093
18094  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (43)</a></li>
18095
18096  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (3)</a></li>
18097
18098  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (9)</a></li>
18099
18100  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (20)</a></li>
18101
18102  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (1)</a></li>
18103
18104  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (8)</a></li>
18105
18106  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (39)</a></li>
18107
18108  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
18109
18110  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (28)</a></li>
18111
18112 </ul>
18113
18114
18115     </div>
18116     <p style="text-align: right">
18117  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
18118 </p>
18119
18120   </body>
18121 </html>