blog/tags/english/index.html

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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/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html">PGP key transition statement for key EE4E02F9</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28         17th November 2015
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>I've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to
  32 set it up properly.  I wanted to generate it offline and have it
  33 available on <a href="http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/#openpgp">a OpenPGP
  34 smart card</a> for daily use, and learning how to do it and finding
  35 time to sit down with an offline machine almost took forever.  But
  36 finally I've been able to complete the process, and have now moved
  37 from my old GPG key to a new GPG key.  See
  38 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-11-17-new-gpg-key-transition.txt">the
  39 full transition statement, signed with both my old and new key</a> for
  40 the details.  This is my new key:</p>
  41
  42 <pre>
  43 pub   3936R/<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/EE4E02F9.html">EE4E02F9</a> 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-14]
  44       Key fingerprint = 3AC7 B2E3 ACA5 DF87 78F1  D827 111D 6B29 EE4E 02F9
  45 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@hungry.com&gt;
  46 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@debian.org&gt;
  47 sub   4096R/87BAFB0E 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
  48 sub   4096R/F91E6DE9 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
  49 sub   4096R/A0439BAB 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
  50 </pre>
  51
  52 <p>The key can be downloaded from the OpenPGP key servers, signed by
  53 my old key.</p>
  54
  55 <p>If you signed my old key
  56 (<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/2A30D729.html">DB4CCC4B2A30D729</a>),
  57 I'd very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and
  58 instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if
  59 you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.</p>
  60
  61       </div>
  62       <div class="tags">
  63
  64
  65         Tags: <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>.
  66
  67
  68       </div>
  69     </div>
  70     <div class="padding"></div>
  71
  72     <div class="entry">
  73       <div class="title">
  74         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Pentagon_deciding_the_Norwegian_negotiating_position_on_Internet_governance_.html">Is Pentagon deciding the Norwegian negotiating position on Internet governance?</a>
  75       </div>
  76       <div class="date">
  77          3rd November 2015
  78       </div>
  79       <div class="body">
  80         <p>In Norway, all government offices are required by law to keep a
  81 list of every document or letter arriving and leaving their offices.
  82 Internal notes should also be documented.  The document list (called a mail
  83 journal - "postjournal" in Norwegian) is public information and thanks
  84 to the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (Offentleglova) the mail
  85 journal is available for everyone.  Most offices even publish the mail
  86 journal on their web pages, as PDFs or tables in web pages.  The state-level offices even have a shared web based search service (called
  87 <a href="https://www.oep.no/">Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal -
  88 OEP</a>) to make it possible to search the entries in the list.  Not
  89 all journal entries show up on OEP, and the search service is hard to
  90 use, but OEP does make it easier to find at least some interesting
  91 journal entries .</p>
  92
  93 <p>In 2012 I came across a document in the mail journal for the
  94 Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications on OEP that
  95 piqued my interest.  The title of the document was
  96 "<a href="https://www.oep.no/search/resultSingle.html?journalPostId=4192362">Internet
  97 Governance and how it affects national security</a>" (Norwegian:
  98 "Internet Governance og påvirkning på nasjonal sikkerhet").  The
  99 document date was 2012-05-22, and it was said to be sent from the
 100 "Permanent Mission of Norway to the United Nations".  I asked for a
 101 copy, but my request was rejected with a reference to a legal clause said to authorize them to reject it
 102 (<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20,
 103 letter c</a>) and an explanation that the document was exempt because
 104 of foreign policy interests as it contained information related to the
 105 Norwegian negotiating position, negotiating strategies or similar.  I
 106 was told the information in the document related to the ongoing
 107 negotiation in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).  The
 108 explanation made sense to me in early January 2013, as a ITU
 109 conference in Dubay discussing Internet Governance
 110 (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunication_Union#World_Conference_on_International_Telecommunications_2012_.28WCIT-12.29">World
 111 Conference on International Telecommunications - WCIT-12</a>) had just
 112 ended,
 113 <a href="http://www.digi.no/kommentarer/2012/12/18/tvil-om-usas-rolle-pa-teletoppmote">reportedly
 114 in chaos</a> when USA walked out of the negotiations and 25 countries
 115 including Norway refused to sign the new treaty.  It seemed
 116 reasonable to believe talks were still going on a few weeks later.
 117 Norway was represented at the ITU meeting by two authorities, the
 118 <a href="http://www.nkom.no/">Norwegian Communications Authority</a>
 119 and the <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dep/sd/">Ministry of
 120 Transport and Communications</a>.  This might be the reason the letter
 121 was sent to the ministry.  As I was unable to find the document in the
 122 mail journal of any Norwegian UN mission, I asked the ministry who had
 123 sent the document to the ministry, and was told that it was the Deputy
 124 Permanent Representative with the Permanent Mission of Norway in
 125 Geneva.</p>
 126
 127 <p>Three years later, I was still curious about the content of that
 128 document, and again asked for a copy, believing the negotiation was
 129 over now.  This time
 130 <a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/kopi_av_dokumenter_i_sak_2012914">I
 131 asked both the Ministry of Transport and Communications as the
 132 receiver</a> and
 133 <a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/brev_om_internet_governance_og_p">asked
 134 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva as the sender</a> for a
 135 copy, to see if they both agreed that it should be withheld from the
 136 public.  The ministry upheld its rejection quoting the same law
 137 reference as before, while the permanent mission rejected it quoting a
 138 different clause
 139 (<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20
 140 letter b</a>), claiming that they were required to keep the
 141 content of the document from the public because it contained
 142 information given to Norway with the expressed or implied expectation
 143 that the information should not be made public.  I asked the permanent
 144 mission for an explanation, and was told that the document contained
 145 an account from a meeting held in the Pentagon for a limited group of NATO
 146 nations where the organiser of the meeting did not intend the content
 147 of the meeting to be publicly known.  They explained that giving me a
 148 copy might cause Norway to not get access to similar information in
 149 the future and thus hurt the future foreign interests of Norway.  They
 150 also explained that the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was not
 151 the author of the document, they only got a copy of it, and because of
 152 this had not listed it in their mail journal.</p>
 153
 154 <p>Armed with this
 155 knowledge I asked the Ministry to reconsider and asked who was the
 156 author of the document, now realising that it was not same as the
 157 "sender" according to Ministry of Transport and Communications.  The
 158 ministry upheld its rejection but told me the name of the author of
 159 the document.  According to
 160 <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/unga69_rapport1/id2001204/">a
 161 government report</a> the author was with the Permanent Mission of
 162 Norway in New York a bit more than a year later (2014-09-22), so I
 163 guessed that might be the office responsible for writing and sending
 164 the report initially and
 165 <a href="https://www.mimesbronn.no/request/mote_2012_i_pentagon_om_itu">asked
 166 them for a copy</a> but I was obviously wrong as I was told that the
 167 document was unknown to them and that the author did not work there
 168 when the document was written.  Next, I asked the Permanent Mission of
 169 Norway in Geneva and the Foreign Ministry to reconsider and at least
 170 tell me who sent the document to Deputy Permanent Representative with
 171 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva.  The Foreign Ministry also
 172 upheld its rejection, but told me that the person sending the document
 173 to Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was the defence attaché with
 174 the Norwegian Embassy in Washington.  I do not know if this is the
 175 same person as the author of the document.</p>
 176
 177 <p>If I understand the situation correctly, someone capable of
 178 inviting selected NATO nations to a meeting in Pentagon organised a
 179 meeting where someone representing the Norwegian defence attaché in
 180 Washington attended, and the account from this meeting is interpreted
 181 by the Ministry of Transport and Communications to expose Norways
 182 negotiating position, negotiating strategies and similar regarding the
 183 ITU negotiations on Internet Governance.  It is truly amazing what can
 184 be derived from mere meta-data.</p>
 185
 186 <p>I wonder which NATO countries besides Norway attended this meeting?
 187 And what exactly was said and done at the meeting?  Anyone know?</p>
 188
 189       </div>
 190       <div class="tags">
 191
 192
 193         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
 194
 195
 196       </div>
 197     </div>
 198     <div class="padding"></div>
 199
 200     <div class="entry">
 201       <div class="title">
 202         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_book___Fri_kultur__by__lessig__a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of__Free_Culture__from_2004.html">New book, "Fri kultur" by @lessig, a Norwegian Bokmål translation of "Free Culture" from 2004</a>
 203       </div>
 204       <div class="date">
 205         31st October 2015
 206       </div>
 207       <div class="body">
 208         <p>People keep asking me where to get the various forms of the book I
 209 published last week, the Norwegian Bokmål edition of Lawrence Lessigs
 210 book <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>.  It was
 211 published on paper via lulu.com, and is also available in PDF, ePub
 212 and MOBI format.  I currently sell the paper edition for self cost
 213 from lulu.com, but might extend the distribution to book stores like
 214 Amazon and Barnes & Noble later.  This will double the price and force
 215 me to make a profit from selling the book.  Anyway, here are links to
 216 get the book in different formats:</p>
 217
 218 <ul>
 219
 220   <li><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22406445.html">Buy
 221     paper edition from lulu.com</a></li>
 222
 223   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf">Download
 224     PDF, size 7.9 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
 225
 226   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub">Download
 227     ePub, size 11 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
 228
 229   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.mobi">Download
 230     MOBI, size 3.8 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
 231
 232 </ul>
 233
 234 <p>Note that the MOBI version have problems with the table of content,
 235 at least with the viewers I have been able to test.  And the ePub file
 236 have several problems according to
 237 <a href="https://github.com/IDPF/epubcheck">epubcheck</a>, but seem
 238 to display fine in the viewers I have tested.  All the files needed to
 239 create the book in various forms are available from
 240 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">the
 241 github project page</a>.</p>
 242
 243 <p>The project got press coverage from the Norwegian IT news site
 244 digi.no.  Check out the article
 245 "<a href="http://www.digi.no/juss_og_samfunn/2015/10/29/vil-apne-politikernes-oyne-for-creative-commons">Vil
 246 åpne politikernes øyne for Creative Commons</a>".</li>
 247
 248 <p>I've <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">blogged
 249 about the project</a> as it moved along.  The blogs document the translation
 250 progress and insights I had along the way.</p>
 251
 252       </div>
 253       <div class="tags">
 254
 255
 256         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>.
 257
 258
 259       </div>
 260     </div>
 261     <div class="padding"></div>
 262
 263     <div class="entry">
 264       <div class="title">
 265         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Free_Culture__by__lessig___The_background_story_for_Creative_Commons___new_edition_available.html">"Free Culture" by @lessig - The background story for Creative Commons - new edition available</a>
 266       </div>
 267       <div class="date">
 268         23rd October 2015
 269       </div>
 270       <div class="body">
 271         <p><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">Click
 272 here to buy the book</a>.</p>
 273
 274 <p>In 2004, as the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons
 275 movement</a> gained momentum, its creator Lawrence Lessig wrote the
 276 book <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)">Free
 277 Culture</a> to explain the problems with increasing copyright
 278 regulation and suggest some solutions.  I read the book back then and
 279 was very moved by it.  Reading the book inspired me and changed the
 280 way I looked on copyright law, and I would love it if more people
 281 would read it too.</p>
 282
 283 <p>Because of this, I decided in the summer of 2012 to translate it to
 284 Norwegian Bokmål and publish it for those of my friends and family
 285 that prefer to read books in Norwegian.  I translated the book using
 286 docbook and a gettext PO file, and a byproduct of this process is a
 287 new edition of the English original.  I've been in touch with the
 288 author during by work, and he said it was fine with him if I also
 289 published an English version.  So I decided to do so.  Today, I made
 290 this edition
 291 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">available
 292 for sale on Lulu.com</a>, for those interested in a paper book.  This
 293 is the cover:
 294
 295 <p align="center"><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-10-23-free-culture-english-published-cover.png"/></a></p>
 296
 297 <p>The Norwegian Bokmål version will be available for purchase in a
 298 few days.  I also plan to publish a French version in a few weeks or
 299 months, depending on the amount of people with knowledge of French to
 300 join the translation project.  So far there is only one active
 301 person, but the French book is almost completely translated but
 302 need some proof reading.</p>
 303
 304 <p>The book is also available in PDF, ePub and MOBI formats from
 305 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
 306 github project page</a>.  Note the ePub and MOBI versions have some
 307 formatting problems I believe is due to bugs in the docbook tool
 308 dbtoepub (Debian BTS issues
 309 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=795842">#795842</a>
 310 and
 311 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=796871">#796871</a>),
 312 but I have not taken the time to investigate.  I recommend the PDF and
 313 ePub version for now, as they seem to show up fine in the viewers I
 314 have available.</p>
 315
 316 <p>After the translation to Norwegian Bokmål was complete, I was able
 317 to secure some sponsoring from
 318 <a href="http://www.nuugfoundation.no/">the NUUG Foundation</a> to
 319 print the book.  This is the reason their logo is located on the back
 320 cover. I am very grateful for their contribution, and will use it to
 321 give a copy of the Norwegian edition to members of the Norwegian
 322 Parliament and other decision makers here in Norway.</p>
 323
 324       </div>
 325       <div class="tags">
 326
 327
 328         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>.
 329
 330
 331       </div>
 332     </div>
 333     <div class="padding"></div>
 334
 335     <div class="entry">
 336       <div class="title">
 337         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lawrence_Lessig_interviewed_Edward_Snowden_a_year_ago.html">Lawrence Lessig interviewed Edward Snowden a year ago</a>
 338       </div>
 339       <div class="date">
 340         19th October 2015
 341       </div>
 342       <div class="body">
 343         <p>Last year, <a href="https://lessig2016.us/">US president candidate
 344 in the Democratic Party</a> Lawrence interviewed Edward Snowden.  The
 345 one hour interview was
 346 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Sr96TFQQE">published by
 347 Harvard Law School 2014-10-23 on Youtube</a>, and the meeting took
 348 place 2014-10-20.</p>
 349
 350 <p>The questions are very good, and there is lots of useful
 351 information to be learned and very interesting issues to think about
 352 being raised.  Please check it out.</p>
 353
 354 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/o_Sr96TFQQE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
 355
 356 <p>I find it especially interesting to hear again that Snowden did try
 357 to bring up his reservations through the official channels without any
 358 luck.  It is in sharp contrast to the answers made 2013-11-06 by the
 359 Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg to the Norwegian Parliament,
 360 <a href="https://tale.holderdeord.no/speeches/s131106/68">claiming
 361 Snowden is no Whistle-Blower</a> because he should have taken up his
 362 concerns internally and using official channels.  It make me sad
 363 that this is the political leadership we have here in Norway.</p>
 364
 365       </div>
 366       <div class="tags">
 367
 368
 369         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>.
 370
 371
 372       </div>
 373     </div>
 374     <div class="padding"></div>
 375
 376     <div class="entry">
 377       <div class="title">
 378         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Story_of_Aaron_Swartz___Let_us_all_weep_.html">The Story of Aaron Swartz - Let us all weep!</a>
 379       </div>
 380       <div class="date">
 381          8th October 2015
 382       </div>
 383       <div class="body">
 384         <p>The movie "<a href="http://www.takepart.com/internets-own-boy">The
 385 Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz</a>" is both inspiring
 386 and depressing at the same time.  The work of Aaron Swartz has
 387 inspired me in my work, and I am grateful of all the improvements he
 388 was able to initiate or complete.  I wish I am able to do as much good
 389 in my life as he did in his.  Every minute of this 1:45 long movie is
 390 inspiring in documenting how much impact a single person can have on
 391 improving the society and this world.  And it is depressing in
 392 documenting how the law enforcement of USA (and other countries) is
 393 corrupted to a point where they can push a bright kid to his death for
 394 downloading too many scientific articles.  Aaron is dead.  Let us all
 395 weep.</p>
 396
 397 <p>The movie is also available on
 398 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXr-2hwTk58">Youtube</a>.  I
 399 wish there were Norwegian subtitles available, so I could show it to
 400 my parents.</p>
 401
 402       </div>
 403       <div class="tags">
 404
 405
 406         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>.
 407
 408
 409       </div>
 410     </div>
 411     <div class="padding"></div>
 412
 413     <div class="entry">
 414       <div class="title">
 415         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/French_Docbook_PDF_EPUB_MOBI_edition_of_the_Free_Culture_book.html">French Docbook/PDF/EPUB/MOBI edition of the Free Culture book</a>
 416       </div>
 417       <div class="date">
 418          1st October 2015
 419       </div>
 420       <div class="body">
 421         <p>As I wrap up the Norwegian version of
 422 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
 423 Culture</a> book by Lawrence Lessig (still waiting for my final proof
 424 reading copy to arrive in the mail), my great
 425 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a> helper and
 426 developer of the dblatex docbook processor, Benoît Guillon, decided a
 427 to try to create a French version of the book.  He started with the
 428 French translation available from the
 429 <a href="http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre">Wikilivres wiki
 430 pages</a>, and wrote a program to convert it into a PO file, allowing
 431 the translation to be integrated into the po4a based framework I use
 432 to create the Norwegian translation from the English edition.  We meet
 433 on the <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23dblatex">#dblatex IRC
 434 channel</a> to discuss the work.  If you want to help create a French
 435 edition, check out
 436 <a href="https://github.com/marsgui/free-culture-lessig">his git
 437 repository</a> and join us on IRC.  If the French edition look good,
 438 we might publish it as a paper book on lulu.com.  A French version of
 439 the drawings and the cover need to be provided for this to happen.</p>
 440
 441       </div>
 442       <div class="tags">
 443
 444
 445         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>.
 446
 447
 448       </div>
 449     </div>
 450     <div class="padding"></div>
 451
 452     <div class="entry">
 453       <div class="title">
 454         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">The life and death of a laptop battery</a>
 455       </div>
 456       <div class="date">
 457         24th September 2015
 458       </div>
 459       <div class="body">
 460         <p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
 461 But this do not last.  The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
 462 within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
 463 and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
 464 all the time.  Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
 465 about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
 466 more hard facts when the battery started to fail.</p>
 467
 468 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
 469
 470 <p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
 471 battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
 472 by someone else.  I found
 473 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
 474 which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
 475 broken.  I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
 476 write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
 477 from him.  Via
 478 <a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
 479 blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
 480 discovered
 481 <a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
 482 available in Debian.</p>
 483
 484 <p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
 485 battery stats ever since. Now my
 486 /var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around 115,000
 487 measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
 488 when it is unable to charge above 7% of original capacity.  My
 489 collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:</p>
 490
 491 <pre>
 492 #!/bin/sh
 493 # Inspired by
 494 # http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
 495 # See also
 496 # http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2013/01/02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
 497 logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
 498
 499 files="manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
 500     energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status"
 501
 502 if [ ! -e "$logfile" ] ; then
 503     (
 504         printf "timestamp,"
 505         for f in $files; do
 506             printf "%s," $f
 507         done
 508         echo
 509     ) > "$logfile"
 510 fi
 511
 512 log_battery() {
 513     # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
 514     # when several log processes run in parallel.
 515     msg=$(printf "%s," $(date +%s); \
 516         for f in $files; do \
 517             printf "%s," $(cat $f); \
 518         done)
 519     echo "$msg"
 520 }
 521
 522 cd /sys/class/power_supply
 523
 524 for bat in BAT*; do
 525     (cd $bat && log_battery >> "$logfile")
 526 done
 527 </pre>
 528
 529 <p>The script is called when the power management system detect a
 530 change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
 531 and out of hibernation and suspend.  In addition, it collect a value
 532 every 10 minutes.  This make it possible for me know when the battery
 533 is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
 534 The code for the Debian package
 535 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
 536 available on github</a>.</p>
 537
 538 <p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
 539
 540 <pre>
 541 timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
 542 1376591133,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,62800000,62160000,39050000,0,Discharging,
 543 [...]
 544 1443090528,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
 545 1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
 546 </pre>
 547
 548 <p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
 549 over time.  This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
 550 battery.</p>
 551
 552 <p>But why is this happening?  Why are my laptop batteries always
 553 dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
 554 satellites keep working year after year.  If we are to believe
 555 <a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
 556 University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
 557 chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
 558 all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
 559 I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
 560 <a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
 561 the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
 562 100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
 563 like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
 564 story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
 565 Linux too.</p>
 566
 567 <p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
 568 stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
 569 preparation for a longer trip?  I found
 570 <a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
 571 recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
 572 80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
 573 load).</p>
 574
 575 <p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
 576 at the start.  I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
 577 times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
 578 back to design capacity.  And I wonder if the discharge and charge
 579 speed change over time, or if this stay the same.  I did not yet try
 580 to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
 581 level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
 582 those.</p>
 583
 584 <p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
 585 acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
 586 packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
 587 initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
 588 and stop.  I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
 589 and need to be replaced.  The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
 590 specific.</p>
 591
 592       </div>
 593       <div class="tags">
 594
 595
 596         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 597
 598
 599       </div>
 600     </div>
 601     <div class="padding"></div>
 602
 603     <div class="entry">
 604       <div class="title">
 605         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Book_cover_for_the_Free_Culture_book_finally_done.html">Book cover for the Free Culture book finally done</a>
 606       </div>
 607       <div class="date">
 608          3rd September 2015
 609       </div>
 610       <div class="body">
 611         <p>Creating a good looking book cover proved harder than I expected.
 612 I wanted to create a cover looking similar to the original cover of
 613 the
 614 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
 615 Culture</a> book we are translating to Norwegian, and I wanted it in
 616 vector format for high resolution printing.  But my inkscape knowledge
 617 were not nearly good enough to pull that off.
 618
 619 <p>But thanks to the great inkscape community, I was able to wrap up
 620 the cover yesterday evening.  I asked on the
 621 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23inkscape">#inkscape IRC channel</a>
 622 on Freenode for help and clues, and Marc Jeanmougin (Mc-) volunteered
 623 to try to recreate it based on the PDF of the cover from the HTML
 624 version.  Not only did he create a
 625 <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/copy1.svg ">SVG document with
 626 the original and his vector version side by side</a>, he even provided
 627 an <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/out-1.ogv">instruction
 628 video</a> explaining how he did it</a>.  But the instruction video is
 629 not easy to follow for an untrained inkscape user. The video is a
 630 recording on how he did it, and he is obviously very experienced as
 631 the menu selections are very quick and he mentioned on IRC that he did
 632 use some keyboard shortcuts that can't be seen on the video, but it
 633 give a good idea about the inkscape operations to use to create the
 634 stripes with the embossed copyright sign in the center.</p>
 635
 636 <p>I took his SVG file, copied the vector image and re-sized it to fit
 637 on the cover I was drawing.  I am happy with the end result, and the
 638 current english version look like this:</p>
 639
 640 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-03-free-culture-cover.png" width="70%" align="center"/>
 641
 642 <p>I am not quite sure about the text on the back, but guess it will
 643 do.  I picked three quotes from the official site for the book, and
 644 hope it will work to trigger the interest of potential readers.  The
 645 Norwegian cover will look the same, but with the texts and bar code
 646 replaced with the Norwegian version.</p>
 647
 648 <p>The book is very close to being ready for publication, and I expect
 649 to upload the final draft to Lulu in the next few days and order a
 650 final proof reading copy to verify that everything look like it should
 651 before allowing everyone to order their own copy of Free Culture, in
 652 English or Norwegian Bokmål.  I'm waiting to give the the productive
 653 proof readers a chance to complete their work.</p>
 654
 655       </div>
 656       <div class="tags">
 657
 658
 659         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>.
 660
 661
 662       </div>
 663     </div>
 664     <div class="padding"></div>
 665
 666     <div class="entry">
 667       <div class="title">
 668         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/In_my_hand__a_pocket_book_edition_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_.html">In my hand, a pocket book edition of the Norwegian Free Culture book!</a>
 669       </div>
 670       <div class="date">
 671         19th August 2015
 672       </div>
 673       <div class="body">
 674         <p>Today, finally, my first printed draft edition of the Norwegian
 675 translation of Free Culture I have been working on for the last few
 676 years arrived in the mail.  I had to fake a cover to get the interior
 677 printed, and the exterior of the book look awful, but that is
 678 irrelevant at this point.  I asked for a printed pocket book version
 679 to get an idea about the font sizes and paper format as well as how
 680 good the figures and images look in print, but also to test what the
 681 pocket book version would look like.  After receiving the 500 page
 682 pocket book, it became obvious to me that that pocket book size is too
 683 small for this book.  I believe the book is too thick, and several
 684 tables and figures do not look good in the size they get with that
 685 small page sizes.  I believe I will go with the 5.5x8.5 inch size
 686 instead.  A surprise discovery from the paper version was how bad the
 687 URLs look in print.  They are very hard to read in the colophon page.
 688 The URLs are red in the PDF, but light gray on paper.  I need to
 689 change the color of links somehow to look better.  But there is a
 690 printed book in my hand, and it feels great. :)</p>
 691
 692 <p>Now I only need to fix the cover, wrap up the postscript with the
 693 store behind the book, and collect the last corrections from the proof
 694 readers before the book is ready for proper printing.  Cover artists
 695 willing to work for free and create a Creative Commons licensed vector
 696 file looking similar to the original is most welcome, as my skills as
 697 a graphics designer are mostly missing.</p>
 698
 699       </div>
 700       <div class="tags">
 701
 702
 703         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>.
 704
 705
 706       </div>
 707     </div>
 708     <div class="padding"></div>
 709
 710     <div class="entry">
 711       <div class="title">
 712         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_paper_version_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_heading_my_way.html">First paper version of the Norwegian Free Culture book heading my way</a>
 713       </div>
 714       <div class="date">
 715          9th August 2015
 716       </div>
 717       <div class="body">
 718         <p>Typesetting a book is harder than I hoped.  As the translation is
 719 mostly done, and a volunteer proof reader was going to check the text
 720 on paper, it was time this summer to focus on formatting my translated
 721 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> based version of the
 722 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> book by Lawrence
 723 Lessig.  I've been trying to get both docboox-xsl+fop and dblatex to
 724 give me a good looking PDF, but in the end I went with dblatex, because
 725 its Debian maintainer and upstream developer were responsive and very
 726 helpful in solving my formatting challenges.</p>
 727
 728 <p>Last night, I finally managed to create a PDF that no longer made
 729 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/">Lulu.com</a> complain after uploading,
 730 and I ordered a text version of the book on paper.  It is lacking a
 731 proper book cover and is not tagged with the correct ISBN number, but
 732 should give me an idea what the finished book will look like.</p>
 733
 734 <p>Instead of using Lulu, I did consider printing the book using
 735 <a href="http://www.createspace.com/">CreateSpace</a>, but ended up
 736 using Lulu because it had smaller book size options (CreateSpace seem
 737 to lack pocket book with extended distribution).  I looked for a
 738 similar service in Norway, but have not seen anything so far.  Please
 739 let me know if I am missing out on something here.</p>
 740
 741 <p>But I still struggle to decide the book size.  Should I go for
 742 pocket book (4.25x6.875 inches / 10.8x17.5 cm) with 556 pages, Digest
 743 (5.5x8.5 inches / 14x21.6 cm) with 323 pages or US Trade (6x8 inches /
 744 15.3x22.9 cm) with 280 pages?  Fewer pager give a cheaper book, and a
 745 smaller book is easier to carry around.  The test book I ordered was
 746 pocket book sized, to give me an idea how well that fit in my hand,
 747 but I suspect I will end up using a digest sized book in the end to
 748 bring the prize down further.</p>
 749
 750 <p>My biggest challenge at the moment is making nice cover art.  My
 751 inkscape skills are not yet up to the task of replicating the original
 752 cover in SVG format.  I also need to figure out what to write about
 753 the book on the back (will most likely use the same text as the
 754 description on web based book stores).  I would love help with this,
 755 if you are willing to license the art source and final version using
 756 the same CC license as the book.  My artistic skills are not really up
 757 to the task.</p>
 758
 759 <p>I plan to publish the book in both English and Norwegian and on
 760 paper, in PDF form as well as EPUB and MOBI format.  The current
 761 status can as usual be found on
 762 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
 763 in the archive/ directory.  So far I have spent all time on making the
 764 PDF version look good.  Someone should probably do the same with the
 765 dbtoepub generated e-book.  Help is definitely needed here, as I
 766 expect to run out of steem before I find time to improve the epub
 767 formatting.</p>
 768
 769 <p>Please let me know via github if you find typos in the book or
 770 discover translations that should be improved.  The final proof
 771 reading is being done right now, and I expect to publish the finished
 772 result in a few months.</p>
 773
 774       </div>
 775       <div class="tags">
 776
 777
 778         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>.
 779
 780
 781       </div>
 782     </div>
 783     <div class="padding"></div>
 784
 785     <div class="entry">
 786       <div class="title">
 787         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_DocBook_footnotes_as_endnotes_with_dblatex.html">Typesetting DocBook footnotes as endnotes with dblatex</a>
 788       </div>
 789       <div class="date">
 790         16th July 2015
 791       </div>
 792       <div class="body">
 793         <p>I'm still working on the Norwegian version of the
 794 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture book by Lawrence
 795 Lessig</a>, and is now working on the final typesetting and layout.
 796 One of the features I want to get the structure similar to the
 797 original book is to typeset the footnotes as endnotes in the notes
 798 chapter.  Based on the
 799 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/685063">feedback from the Debian
 800 maintainer and the dblatex developer</a>, I came up with this recipe I
 801 would like to share with you.  The proposal was to create a new LaTeX
 802 class file and add the LaTeX code there, but this is not always
 803 practical, when I want to be able to replace the class using a make
 804 file variable.  So my proposal misuses the latex.begindocument XSL
 805 parameter value, to get a small fragment into the correct location in
 806 the generated LaTeX File.</p>
 807
 808 <p>First, decide where in the DocBook document to place the endnotes,
 809 and add this text there:</p>
 810
 811 <pre>
 812 &lt;?latex \theendnotes ?&gt;
 813 </pre>
 814
 815 <p>Next, create a xsl stylesheet file dblatex-endnotes.xsl to add the
 816 code needed to add the endnote instructions in the preamble of the
 817 generated LaTeX document, with content like this:</p>
 818
 819 <pre>
 820 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
 821 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
 822   &lt;xsl:param name="latex.begindocument"&gt;
 823     &lt;xsl:text&gt;
 824 \usepackage{endnotes}
 825 \let\footnote=\endnote
 826 \def\enoteheading{\mbox{}\par\vskip-\baselineskip }
 827 \begin{document}
 828     &lt;/xsl:text&gt;
 829   &lt;/xsl:param&gt;
 830 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
 831 </pre>
 832
 833 <p>Finally, load this xsl file when running dblatex, for example like
 834 this:</p>
 835
 836 <pre>
 837 dblatex --xsl-user=dblatex-endnotes.xsl freeculture.nb.xml
 838 </pre>
 839
 840 <p>The end result can be seen on github, where
 841 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
 842 book project</a> is located.</p>
 843
 844       </div>
 845       <div class="tags">
 846
 847
 848         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>.
 849
 850
 851       </div>
 852     </div>
 853     <div class="padding"></div>
 854
 855     <div class="entry">
 856       <div class="title">
 857         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MPEG_LA_on__Internet_Broadcast_AVC_Video__licensing_and_non_private_use.html">MPEG LA on "Internet Broadcast AVC Video" licensing and non-private use</a>
 858       </div>
 859       <div class="date">
 860          7th July 2015
 861       </div>
 862       <div class="body">
 863         <p>After asking the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK)
 864 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Hva_gj_r_at_NRK_kan_distribuere_H_264_video_uten_patentavtale_med_MPEG_LA_.html">why
 865 they can broadcast and stream H.264 video without an agreement with
 866 the MPEG LA</a>, I was wiser, but still confused.  So I asked MPEG LA
 867 if their understanding matched that of NRK.  As far as I can tell, it
 868 does not.</p>
 869
 870 <p>I started by asking for more information about the various
 871 licensing classes and what exactly is covered by the "Internet
 872 Broadcast AVC Video" class that NRK pointed me at to explain why NRK
 873 did not need a license for streaming H.264 video:
 874
 875 <p><blockquote>
 876
 877 <p>According to
 878 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/226/n-10-02-02.pdf">a
 879 MPEG LA press release dated 2010-02-02</a>, there is no charge when
 880 using MPEG AVC/H.264 according to the terms of "Internet Broadcast AVC
 881 Video".  I am trying to understand exactly what the terms of "Internet
 882 Broadcast AVC Video" is, and wondered if you could help me.  What
 883 exactly is covered by these terms, and what is not?</p>
 884
 885 <p>The only source of more information I have been able to find is a
 886 PDF named
 887 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avcweb.pdf">AVC
 888 Patent Portfolio License Briefing</a>, which states this about the
 889 fees:</p>
 890
 891 <ul>
 892  <li>Where End User pays for AVC Video
 893   <ul>
 894    <li>Subscription (not limited by title) – 100,000 or fewer
 895      subscribers/yr = no royalty; &gt; 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers/yr =
 896      $25,000; &gt;250,000 to 500,000 subscribers/yr = $50,000; &gt;500,000 to
 897      1M subscribers/yr = $75,000; &gt;1M subscribers/yr = $100,000</li>
 898
 899    <li>Title-by-Title - 12 minutes or less = no royalty; &gt;12 minutes in
 900      length = lower of (a) 2% or (b) $0.02 per title</li>
 901   </ul></li>
 902
 903  <li>Where remuneration is from other sources
 904   <ul>
 905    <li>Free Television - (a) one-time $2,500 per transmission encoder or
 906      (b) annual fee starting at $2,500 for &gt; 100,000 HH rising to
 907      maximum $10,000 for &gt;1,000,000 HH</li>
 908
 909    <li>Internet Broadcast AVC Video (not title-by-title, not subscription)
 910      – no royalty for life of the AVC Patent Portfolio License</li>
 911   </ul></li>
 912 </ul>
 913
 914 <p>Am I correct in assuming that the four categories listed is the
 915 categories used when selecting licensing terms, and that "Internet
 916 Broadcast AVC Video" is the category for things that do not fall into
 917 one of the other three categories?  Can you point me to a good source
 918 explaining what is ment by "title-by-title" and "Free Television" in
 919 the license terms for AVC/H.264?</p>
 920
 921 <p>Will a web service providing H.264 encoded video content in a
 922 "video on demand" fashing similar to Youtube and Vimeo, where no
 923 subscription is required and no payment is required from end users to
 924 get access to the videos, fall under the terms of the "Internet
 925 Broadcast AVC Video", ie no royalty for life of the AVC Patent
 926 Portfolio license?  Does it matter if some users are subscribed to get
 927 access to personalized services?</p>
 928
 929 <p>Note, this request and all answers will be published on the
 930 Internet.</p>
 931 </blockquote></p>
 932
 933 <p>The answer came quickly from Benjamin J. Myers, Licensing Associate
 934 with the MPEG LA:</p>
 935
 936 <p><blockquote>
 937 <p>Thank you for your message and for your interest in MPEG LA.  We
 938 appreciate hearing from you and I will be happy to assist you.</p>
 939
 940 <p>As you are aware, MPEG LA offers our AVC Patent Portfolio License
 941 which provides coverage under patents that are essential for use of
 942 the AVC/H.264 Standard (MPEG-4 Part 10).  Specifically, coverage is
 943 provided for end products and video content that make use of AVC/H.264
 944 technology.  Accordingly, the party offering such end products and
 945 video to End Users concludes the AVC License and is responsible for
 946 paying the applicable royalties.</p>
 947
 948 <p>Regarding Internet Broadcast AVC Video, the AVC License generally
 949 defines such content to be video that is distributed to End Users over
 950 the Internet free-of-charge.  Therefore, if a party offers a service
 951 which allows users to upload AVC/H.264 video to its website, and such
 952 AVC Video is delivered to End Users for free, then such video would
 953 receive coverage under the sublicense for Internet Broadcast AVC
 954 Video, which is not subject to any royalties for the life of the AVC
 955 License.  This would also apply in the scenario where a user creates a
 956 free online account in order to receive a customized offering of free
 957 AVC Video content.  In other words, as long as the End User is given
 958 access to or views AVC Video content at no cost to the End User, then
 959 no royalties would be payable under our AVC License.</p>
 960
 961 <p>On the other hand, if End Users pay for access to AVC Video for a
 962 specific period of time (e.g., one month, one year, etc.), then such
 963 video would constitute Subscription AVC Video.  In cases where AVC
 964 Video is delivered to End Users on a pay-per-view basis, then such
 965 content would constitute Title-by-Title AVC Video.  If a party offers
 966 Subscription or Title-by-Title AVC Video to End Users, then they would
 967 be responsible for paying the applicable royalties you noted below.</p>
 968
 969 <p>Finally, in the case where AVC Video is distributed for free
 970 through an "over-the-air, satellite and/or cable transmission", then
 971 such content would constitute Free Television AVC Video and would be
 972 subject to the applicable royalties.</p>
 973
 974 <p>For your reference, I have attached
 975 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-07-07-mpegla.pdf">a
 976 .pdf copy of the AVC License</a>. You will find the relevant
 977 sublicense information regarding AVC Video in Sections 2.2 through
 978 2.5, and the corresponding royalties in Section 3.1.2 through 3.1.4.
 979 You will also find the definitions of Title-by-Title AVC Video,
 980 Subscription AVC Video, Free Television AVC Video, and Internet
 981 Broadcast AVC Video in Section 1 of the License.  Please note that the
 982 electronic copy is provided for informational purposes only and cannot
 983 be used for execution.</p>
 984
 985 <p>I hope the above information is helpful.  If you have additional
 986 questions or need further assistance with the AVC License, please feel
 987 free to contact me directly.</p>
 988 </blockquote></p>
 989
 990 <p>Having a fresh copy of the license text was useful, and knowing
 991 that the definition of Title-by-Title required payment per title made
 992 me aware that my earlier understanding of that phrase had been wrong.
 993 But I still had a few questions:</p>
 994
 995 <p><blockquote>
 996 <p>I have a small followup question.  Would it be possible for me to get
 997 a license with MPEG LA even if there are no royalties to be paid?  The
 998 reason I ask, is that some video related products have a copyright
 999 clause limiting their use without a license with MPEG LA.  The clauses
1000 typically look similar to this:
1001
1002 <p><blockquote>
1003   This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
1004   the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer to (a) encode
1005   video in compliance with the AVC standard ("AVC video") and/or (b)
1006   decode AVC video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a
1007   personal and non-commercial activity and/or AVC video that was
1008   obtained from a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No
1009   license is granted or shall be implied for any other use. additional
1010   information may be obtained from MPEG LA L.L.C.
1011 </blockquote></p>
1012
1013 <p>It is unclear to me if this clause mean that I need to enter into
1014 an agreement with MPEG LA to use the product in question, even if
1015 there are no royalties to be paid to MPEG LA.  I suspect it will
1016 differ depending on the jurisdiction, and mine is Norway.  What is
1017 MPEG LAs view on this?</p>
1018 </blockquote></p>
1019
1020 <p>According to the answer, MPEG LA believe those using such tools for
1021 non-personal or commercial use need a license with them:</p>
1022
1023 <p><blockquote>
1024
1025 <p>With regard to the Notice to Customers, I would like to begin by
1026 clarifying that the Notice from Section 7.1 of the AVC License
1027 reads:</p>
1028
1029 <p>THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR
1030 THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT
1031 RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC
1032 STANDARD ("AVC VIDEO") AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED
1033 BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM
1034 A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED
1035 OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE
1036 OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM</p>
1037
1038 <p>The Notice to Customers is intended to inform End Users of the
1039 personal usage rights (for example, to watch video content) included
1040 with the product they purchased, and to encourage any party using the
1041 product for commercial purposes to contact MPEG LA in order to become
1042 licensed for such use (for example, when they use an AVC Product to
1043 deliver Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free Television or Internet
1044 Broadcast AVC Video to End Users, or to re-Sell a third party's AVC
1045 Product as their own branded AVC Product).</p>
1046
1047 <p>Therefore, if a party is to be licensed for its use of an AVC
1048 Product to Sell AVC Video on a Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free
1049 Television or Internet Broadcast basis, that party would need to
1050 conclude the AVC License, even in the case where no royalties were
1051 payable under the License.  On the other hand, if that party (either a
1052 Consumer or business customer) simply uses an AVC Product for their
1053 own internal purposes and not for the commercial purposes referenced
1054 above, then such use would be included in the royalty paid for the AVC
1055 Products by the licensed supplier.</p>
1056
1057 <p>Finally, I note that our AVC License provides worldwide coverage in
1058 countries that have AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, including
1059 Norway.</p>
1060
1061 <p>I hope this clarification is helpful.  If I may be of any further
1062 assistance, just let me know.</p>
1063 </blockquote></p>
1064
1065 <p>The mentioning of Norwegian patents made me a bit confused, so I
1066 asked for more information:</p>
1067
1068 <p><blockquote>
1069
1070 <p>But one minor question at the end.  If I understand you correctly,
1071 you state in the quote above that there are patents in the AVC Patent
1072 Portfolio that are valid in Norway.  This make me believe I read the
1073 list available from &lt;URL:
1074 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx">http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx</a>
1075 &gt; incorrectly, as I believed the "NO" prefix in front of patents
1076 were Norwegian patents, and the only one I could find under Mitsubishi
1077 Electric Corporation expired in 2012.  Which patents are you referring
1078 to that are relevant for Norway?</p>
1079
1080 </blockquote></p>
1081
1082 <p>Again, the quick answer explained how to read the list of patents
1083 in that list:</p>
1084
1085 <p><blockquote>
1086
1087 <p>Your understanding is correct that the last AVC Patent Portfolio
1088 Patent in Norway expired on 21 October 2012.  Therefore, where AVC
1089 Video is both made and Sold in Norway after that date, then no
1090 royalties would be payable for such AVC Video under the AVC License.
1091 With that said, our AVC License provides historic coverage for AVC
1092 Products and AVC Video that may have been manufactured or Sold before
1093 the last Norwegian AVC patent expired.  I would also like to clarify
1094 that coverage is provided for the country of manufacture and the
1095 country of Sale that has active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents.</p>
1096
1097 <p>Therefore, if a party offers AVC Products or AVC Video for Sale in
1098 a country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents (for example,
1099 Sweden, Denmark, Finland, etc.), then that party would still need
1100 coverage under the AVC License even if such products or video are
1101 initially made in a country without active AVC Patent Portfolio
1102 Patents (for example, Norway).  Similarly, a party would need to
1103 conclude the AVC License if they make AVC Products or AVC Video in a
1104 country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, but eventually Sell
1105 such AVC Products or AVC Video in a country without active AVC Patent
1106 Portfolio Patents.</p>
1107 </blockquote></p>
1108
1109 <p>As far as I understand it, MPEG LA believe anyone using Adobe
1110 Premiere and other video related software with a H.264 distribution
1111 license need a license agreement with MPEG LA to use such tools for
1112 anything non-private or commercial, while it is OK to set up a
1113 Youtube-like service as long as no-one pays to get access to the
1114 content.  I still have no clear idea how this applies to Norway, where
1115 none of the patents MPEG LA is licensing are valid.  Will the
1116 copyright terms take precedence or can those terms be ignored because
1117 the patents are not valid in Norway?</p>
1118
1119       </div>
1120       <div class="tags">
1121
1122
1123         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
1124
1125
1126       </div>
1127     </div>
1128     <div class="padding"></div>
1129
1130     <div class="entry">
1131       <div class="title">
1132         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_laptop___some_more_clues_and_ideas_based_on_feedback.html">New laptop - some more clues and ideas based on feedback</a>
1133       </div>
1134       <div class="date">
1135          5th July 2015
1136       </div>
1137       <div class="body">
1138         <p>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
1139 need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback.  I wish to
1140 thank every one of these.  Several pointed me to the possibility of
1141 fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
1142 do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
1143 machine.  But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
1144 with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
1145 for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement.  If I did
1146 not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
1147 using <a href="http://www.francecrans.com/">FrancEcrans</a>, but it
1148 might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.</p>
1149
1150 <p>One tip I got was to use the
1151 <a href="https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb">Skinflint</a> web service to
1152 compare laptop models.  It seem to have more models available than
1153 prisjakt.no.  Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
1154 keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook 840 keyboard is not
1155 very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
1156 keyboards I tested.  Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
1157
1158 <p>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
1159 newest Thinkpad X model.  The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
1160 (which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
1161 Debian Sid/Unstable according to
1162 <a href="http://www.corsac.net/X250/">Corsac.net</a>.  The reports I
1163 got on the keyboard quality are not consistent.  Some say the keyboard
1164 is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
1165 Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
1166 keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
1167 keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
1168 replace it.  I'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
1169 activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230.  I'm
1170 also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
1171 noisy.  In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
1172 Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.</p>
1173
1174 <p>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
1175 <a href="http://pro-star.com">Pro-Star</a>, another was
1176 <a href="http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/">Libreboot</a>.
1177 The latter look very attractive to me.</p>
1178
1179 <p>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback.  It help a lot
1180 as I keep looking for a replacement.</p>
1181
1182 <p>Update 2015-07-06: I was recommended to check out the
1183 <a href="">lapstore.de</a> web shop for used laptops.  They got several
1184 different
1185 <a href="http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/">old
1186 thinkpad X models</a>, and provide one year warranty.</p>
1187
1188       </div>
1189       <div class="tags">
1190
1191
1192         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1193
1194
1195       </div>
1196     </div>
1197     <div class="padding"></div>
1198
1199     <div class="entry">
1200       <div class="title">
1201         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_find_a_new_laptop__as_the_old_one_is_broken_after_only_two_years.html">Time to find a new laptop, as the old one is broken after only two years</a>
1202       </div>
1203       <div class="date">
1204          3rd July 2015
1205       </div>
1206       <div class="body">
1207         <p>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
1208 replacement soon.  The left 5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
1209 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
1210 cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
1211 flickering.</p>
1212
1213 <p>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
1214 still as
1215 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">I
1216 described them in 2013</a>.  The last time I bought a laptop, I had
1217 good help from
1218 <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=353">prisjakt.no</a>
1219 where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
1220 wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually.  Three button mouse
1221 and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
1222 laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook 820 G1 and
1223 G2) lack three mouse buttons).  It is also unclear to me how good the
1224 keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are.  I hope Lenovo have not messed up
1225 the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
1226 deteriorated since X41.</p>
1227
1228 <p>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
1229 seem sensible to me?  Are there better services around to search the
1230 set of available laptops for features?  Please send me an email if you
1231 have suggestions.</p>
1232
1233 <p>Update 2015-07-23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
1234 <a href="http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom">list
1235 of endorsed hardware</a>, which is useful background information.</p>
1236
1237       </div>
1238       <div class="tags">
1239
1240
1241         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1242
1243
1244       </div>
1245     </div>
1246     <div class="padding"></div>
1247
1248     <div class="entry">
1249       <div class="title">
1250         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MakerCon_Nordic_videos_now_available_on_Frikanalen.html">MakerCon Nordic videos now available on Frikanalen</a>
1251       </div>
1252       <div class="date">
1253          2nd July 2015
1254       </div>
1255       <div class="body">
1256         <p>Last oktober I was involved on behalf of
1257 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> with recording the talks at
1258 <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">MakerCon Nordic</a>, a conference for
1259 the Maker movement.  Since then it has been the plan to publish the
1260 recordings on <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, which
1261 finally happened the last few days.  A few talks are missing because
1262 the speakers asked the organizers to not publish them, but most of the
1263 talks are available.  The talks are being broadcasted on RiksTV
1264 channel 50 and using multicast on Uninett, as well as being available
1265 from the Frikanalen web site.  The unedited recordings are
1266 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">available on
1267 Youtube too</a>.</p>
1268
1269 <p>This is the list of talks available at the moment.  Visit the
1270 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/?q=makercon">Frikanalen video
1271 pages</a> to view them.</p>
1272
1273 <ul>
1274
1275   <li>Evolutionary algorithms as a design tool - from art
1276       to robotics (Kyrre Glette)</li>
1277
1278   <li>Make and break (Hans Gerhard Meier)</li>
1279
1280   <li>Making a one year school course for young makers
1281       (Olav Helland)</li>
1282
1283   <li>Innovation Inspiration - IPR Databases as a Source of
1284       Inspiration (Hege Langlo)</li>
1285
1286   <li>Making a toy for makers (Erik Torstensson)</li>
1287
1288   <li>How to make 3D printer electronics (Elias Bakken)</li>
1289
1290   <li>Hovering Clouds: Looking at online tool offerings for Product
1291       Design and 3D Printing (William Kempton)</li>
1292
1293   <li>Travelling maker stories (Øyvind Nydal Dahl)</li>
1294
1295   <li>Making the first Maker Faire in Sweden (Nils Olander)</li>
1296
1297   <li>Breaking the mold: Printing 1000’s of parts (Espen Sivertsen)</li>
1298
1299   <li>Ultimaker — and open source 3D printing (Erik de Bruijn)</li>
1300
1301   <li>Autodesk’s 3D Printing Platform: Sparking innovation (Hilde
1302       Sevens)</li>
1303
1304   <li>How Making is Changing the World – and How You Can Too!
1305       (Jennifer Turliuk)</li>
1306
1307   <li>Open-Source Adventuring: OpenROV, OpenExplorer and the Future of
1308       Connected Exploration (David Lang)</li>
1309
1310   <li>Making in Norway (Haakon Karlsen Jr., Graham Hayward and Jens
1311       Dyvik)</li>
1312
1313   <li>The Impact of the Maker Movement (Mike Senese)</li>
1314
1315 </ul>
1316
1317 <p>Part of the reason this took so long was that the scripts NUUG had
1318 to prepare a recording for publication were five years old and no
1319 longer worked with the current video processing tools (command line
1320 argument changes).  In addition, we needed better audio normalization,
1321 which sent me on a detour to
1322 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html">package
1323 bs1770gain for Debian</a>.  Now this is in place and it became a lot
1324 easier to publish NUUG videos on Frikanalen.</p>
1325
1326       </div>
1327       <div class="tags">
1328
1329
1330         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>.
1331
1332
1333       </div>
1334     </div>
1335     <div class="padding"></div>
1336
1337     <div class="entry">
1338       <div class="title">
1339         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Graphing_the_Norwegian_company_ownership_structure.html">Graphing the Norwegian company ownership structure</a>
1340       </div>
1341       <div class="date">
1342         15th June 2015
1343       </div>
1344       <div class="body">
1345         <p>It is a bit work to figure out the ownership structure of companies
1346 in Norway.  The information is publicly available, but one need to
1347 recursively look up ownership for all owners to figure out the complete
1348 ownership graph of a given set of companies.  To save me the work in
1349 the future, I wrote a script to do this automatically, outputting the
1350 ownership structure using the Graphviz/dotty format.  The data source
1351 is web scraping from <a href="http://www.proff.no/">Proff</a>, because
1352 I failed to find a useful source directly from the official keepers of
1353 the ownership data, <a href="http://www.brreg.no/">Brønnøysundsregistrene</a>.</p>
1354
1355 <p>To get an ownership graph for a set of companies, fetch
1356 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/brreg-norway-ownership-graph">the code from git</a> and run it using the organisation number.  I'm
1357 using the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet as an example here, as its
1358 ownership structure is very simple:</p>
1359
1360 <pre>
1361 % time ./bin/eierskap-dotty 958033540 > dagbladet.dot
1362
1363 real    0m2.841s
1364 user    0m0.184s
1365 sys     0m0.036s
1366 %
1367 </pre>
1368
1369 <p>The script accept several organisation numbers on the command line,
1370 allowing a cluster of companies to be graphed in the same image.  The
1371 resulting dot file for the example above look like this.  The edges
1372 are labeled with the ownership percentage, and the nodes uses the
1373 organisation number as their name and the name as the label:</p>
1374
1375 <pre>
1376 digraph ownership {
1377 rankdir = LR;
1378 "Aller Holding A/s" -> "910119877" [label="100%"]
1379 "910119877" -> "998689015" [label="100%"]
1380 "998689015" -> "958033540" [label="99%"]
1381 "974530600" -> "958033540" [label="1%"]
1382 "958033540" [label="AS DAGBLADET"]
1383 "998689015" [label="Berner Media Holding AS"]
1384 "974530600" [label="Dagbladets Stiftelse"]
1385 "910119877" [label="Aller Media AS"]
1386 }
1387 </pre>
1388
1389 <p>To view the ownership graph, run "<tt>dotty dagbladet.dot</tt>" or
1390 convert it to a PNG using "<tt>dot -T png dagbladet.dot >
1391 dagbladet.png</tt>".  The result can be seen below:</p>
1392
1393 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-06-15-ownership-graphs-norway-dagbladet.png" width="80%">
1394
1395 <p>Note that I suspect the "Aller Holding A/S" entry to be incorrect
1396 data in the official ownership register, as that name is not
1397 registered in the official company register for Norway.  The ownership
1398 register is sensitive to typos and there seem to be no strict checking
1399 of the ownership links.</p>
1400
1401 <p>Let me know if you improve the script or find better data sources.
1402 The code is licensed according to GPL 2 or newer.</p>
1403
1404 <p>Update 2015-06-15: Since the initial post I've been told that
1405 "<a href="http://www.proff.dk/firma/carl-allers-etablissement-aktieselskab/københavn-v/hovedkontorer/13624518-3/">Aller
1406 Holding A/S</a>" is a Danish company, which explain why it did not
1407 have a Norwegian organisation number.  I've also been told that there
1408 is a <a href="http://www.brreg.no/automatiske/webservices/">web
1409 services API available</a> from Brønnøysundsregistrene, for those
1410 willing to accept the terms or pay the price.</p>
1411
1412       </div>
1413       <div class="tags">
1414
1415
1416         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>.
1417
1418
1419       </div>
1420     </div>
1421     <div class="padding"></div>
1422
1423     <div class="entry">
1424       <div class="title">
1425         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html">Measuring and adjusting the loudness of a TV channel using bs1770gain</a>
1426       </div>
1427       <div class="date">
1428         11th June 2015
1429       </div>
1430       <div class="body">
1431         <p>Television loudness is the source of frustration for viewers
1432 everywhere.  Some channels are very load, others are less loud, and
1433 ads tend to shout very high to get the attention of the viewers, and
1434 the viewers do not like this.  This fact is well known to the TV
1435 channels.  See for example the BBC white paper
1436 "<a href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp-pdf-files/WHP202.pdf">Terminology
1437 for loudness and level dBTP, LU, and all that</a>" from 2011 for a
1438 summary of the problem domain.  To better address the need for even
1439 loadness, the TV channels got together several years ago to agree on a
1440 new way to measure loudness in digital files as one step in
1441 standardizing loudness.  From this came the ITU-R standard BS.1770,
1442 "<a href="http://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-BS.1770/en">Algorithms to
1443 measure audio programme loudness and true-peak audio level</a>".</p>
1444
1445 <p>The ITU-R BS.1770 specification describe an algorithm to measure
1446 loadness in LUFS (Loudness Units, referenced to Full Scale). But
1447 having a way to measure is not enough.  To get the same loudness
1448 across TV channels, one also need to decide which value to standardize
1449 on.  For European TV channels, this was done in the EBU Recommondaton
1450 R128, "<a href="https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf">Loudness
1451 normalisation and permitted maximum level of audio signals</a>", which
1452 specifies a recommended level of -23 LUFS.  In Norway, I have been
1453 told that NRK, TV2, MTG and SBS have decided among themselves to
1454 follow the R128 recommondation for playout from 2016-03-01.</p>
1455
1456 <p>There are free software available to measure and adjust the loudness
1457 level using the LUFS.  In Debian, I am aware of a library named
1458 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libebur128">libebur128</a>
1459 able to measure the loudness and since yesterday morning a new binary
1460 named <a href="http://bs1770gain.sourceforge.net">bs1770gain</a>
1461 capable of both measuring and adjusting was uploaded and is waiting
1462 for NEW processing.  I plan to maintain the latter in Debian under the
1463 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=pkg-multimedia-maintainers%40lists.alioth.debian.org">Debian
1464 multimedia</a> umbrella.</p>
1465
1466 <p>The free software based TV channel I am involved in,
1467 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, plan to follow the
1468 R128 recommondation ourself as soon as we can adjust the software to
1469 do so, and the bs1770gain tool seem like a good fit for that part of
1470 the puzzle to measure loudness on new video uploaded to Frikanalen.
1471 Personally, I plan to use bs1770gain to adjust the loudness of videos
1472 I upload to Frikanalen on behalf of <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
1473 NUUG member organisation</a>.  The program seem to be able to measure
1474 the LUFS value of any media file handled by ffmpeg, but I've only
1475 successfully adjusted the LUFS value of WAV files.  I suspect it
1476 should be able to adjust it for all the formats handled by ffmpeg.</p>
1477
1478       </div>
1479       <div class="tags">
1480
1481
1482         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>.
1483
1484
1485       </div>
1486     </div>
1487     <div class="padding"></div>
1488
1489     <div class="entry">
1490       <div class="title">
1491         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_citizens_now_required_by_law_to_give_their_fingerprint_to_the_police.html">Norwegian citizens now required by law to give their fingerprint to the police</a>
1492       </div>
1493       <div class="date">
1494         10th May 2015
1495       </div>
1496       <div class="body">
1497         <p>5 days ago, the Norwegian Parliament decided, unanimously, that all
1498 citizens of Norway, no matter if they are suspected of something
1499 criminal or not, are
1500 <a href="https://www.holderdeord.no/votes/1430838871e">required to
1501 give fingerprints to the police</a> (vote details from Holder de
1502 ord).  The law make it sound like it will be optional, but in a few
1503 years there will be no option any more.  The ID will be required to
1504 vote, to get a bank account, a bank card, to change address on the
1505 post office, to receive an electronic ID or to get a drivers license
1506 and many other tasks required to function in Norway.  The banks plan
1507 to stop providing their own ID on the bank cards when this new
1508 national ID is introduced, and the national road authorities plan to
1509 change the drivers license to no longer be usable as identity cards.
1510 In effect, to function as a citizen in Norway a national ID card will
1511 be required, and to get it one need to provide the fingerprints to
1512 the police.</p>
1513
1514 <p>In addition to handing the fingerprint to the police (which
1515 promised to not make a copy of the fingerprint image at that point in
1516 time, but say nothing about doing it later), a picture of the
1517 fingerprint will be stored on the RFID chip, along with a picture of
1518 the face and other information about the person.  Some of the
1519 information will be encrypted, but the encryption will be the same
1520 system as currently used in the passports.  The codes to decrypt will
1521 be available to a lot of government offices and their suppliers around
1522 the globe, but for those that do not know anyone in those circles it
1523 is good to know that
1524 <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/nov/17/news.homeaffairs">the
1525 encryption is already broken</a>.  And they
1526 <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/article/2215057/wireless/bad-guys-could-read-rfid-passports-at-217-feet--maybe-a-lot-more.html">can
1527 be read from 70 meters away</a>.  This can be mitigated a bit by
1528 keeping it in a Faraday cage (metal box or metal wire container), but
1529 one will be required to take it out of there often enough to expose
1530 ones private and personal information to a lot of people that have no
1531 business getting access to that information.</p>
1532
1533 <p>The new Norwegian national IDs are a vehicle for identity theft,
1534 and I feel sorry for us all having politicians accepting such invasion
1535 of privacy without any objections.  So are the Norwegian passports,
1536 but it has been possible to function in Norway without those so far.
1537 That option is going away with the passing of the new law.  In this, I
1538 envy the Germans, because for them it is optional how much biometric
1539 information is stored in their national ID.</p>
1540
1541 <p>And if forced collection of fingerprints was not bad enough, the
1542 information collected in the national ID card register can be handed
1543 over to foreign intelligence services and police authorities, "when
1544 extradition is not considered disproportionate".</p>
1545
1546 <p>Update 2015-05-12: For those unable to believe that the Parliament
1547 really could make such decision, I wrote
1548 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Blir_det_virkelig_krav_om_fingeravtrykk_i_nasjonale_ID_kort_.html">a
1549 summary of the sources I have</a> for concluding the way I do
1550 (Norwegian Only, as the sources are all in Norwegian).</p>
1551
1552       </div>
1553       <div class="tags">
1554
1555
1556         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
1557
1558
1559       </div>
1560     </div>
1561     <div class="padding"></div>
1562
1563     <div class="entry">
1564       <div class="title">
1565         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_would_it_cost_to_store_all_phone_calls_in_Norway_.html">What would it cost to store all phone calls in Norway?</a>
1566       </div>
1567       <div class="date">
1568          1st May 2015
1569       </div>
1570       <div class="body">
1571         <p>Many years ago, a friend of mine calculated how much it would cost
1572 to store the sound of all phone calls in Norway, and came up with the
1573 cost of around 20 million NOK (2.4 mill EUR) for all the calls in a
1574 year.  I got curious and wondered what the same calculation would look
1575 like today.  To do so one need an idea of how much data storage is
1576 needed for each minute of sound, how many minutes all the calls in
1577 Norway sums up to, and the cost of data storage.</p>
1578
1579 <p>The 2005 numbers are from
1580 <a href="http://www.digi.no/analyser/2005/10/04/vi-prater-stadig-mindre-i-roret">digi.no</a>,
1581 the 2012 numbers are from
1582 <a href="http://www.nkom.no/aktuelt/nyheter/fortsatt-vekst-i-det-norske-ekommarkedet">a
1583 NKOM report</a>, and I got the 2013 numbers after asking NKOM via
1584 email.  I was told the numbers for 2014 will be presented May 20th,
1585 and decided not to wait for those, as I doubt they will be very
1586 different from the numbers from 2013.</p>
1587
1588 <p>The amount of data storage per minute sound depend on the wanted
1589 quality, and for phone calls it is generally believed that 8 Kbit/s is
1590 enough.  See for example a
1591 <a href="http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/voice/voice-quality/7934-bwidth-consume.html#topic1">summary
1592 on voice quality from Cisco</a> for some alternatives.  8 Kbit/s is 60
1593 Kbytes/min, and this can be multiplied with the number of call minutes
1594 to get the storage requirements.</p>
1595
1596 <p>Storage prices varies a lot, depending on speed, backup strategies,
1597 availability requirements etc.  But a simple way to calculate can be
1598 to use the price of a TiB-disk (around 1000 NOK / 120 EUR) and double
1599 it to take space, power and redundancy into account.  It could be much
1600 higher with high speed and good redundancy requirements.</p>
1601
1602 <p>But back to the question, What would it cost to store all phone
1603 calls in Norway?  Not much.  Here is a small table showing the
1604 estimated cost, which is within the budget constraint of most medium
1605 and large organisations:</p>
1606
1607 <table border="1">
1608 <tr><th>Year</th><th>Call minutes</th><th>Size</th><th>Price in NOK / EUR</th></tr>
1609 <tr><td>2005</td><td align="right">24 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.3 PiB</td><td align="right">3 mill / 358 000</td></tr>
1610 <tr><td>2012</td><td align="right">18 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.0 PiB</td><td align="right">2.2 mill / 262 000</td></tr>
1611 <tr><td>2013</td><td align="right">17 000 000 000</td><td align="right">950 TiB</td><td align="right">2.1 mill / 250 000</td></tr>
1612 </table>
1613
1614 <p>This is the cost of buying the storage.  Maintenance need to be
1615 taken into account too, but calculating that is left as an exercise
1616 for the reader.  But it is obvious to me from those numbers that
1617 recording the sound of all phone calls in Norway is not going to be
1618 stopped because it is too expensive.  I wonder if someone already is
1619 collecting the data?</p>
1620
1621       </div>
1622       <div class="tags">
1623
1624
1625         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
1626
1627
1628       </div>
1629     </div>
1630     <div class="padding"></div>
1631
1632     <div class="entry">
1633       <div class="title">
1634         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_beta_release.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu beta release</a>
1635       </div>
1636       <div class="date">
1637         26th April 2015
1638       </div>
1639       <div class="body">
1640         <p>I am happy to report that the Debian Edu team sent out
1641 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2015/04/msg00000.html">this
1642 announcement today</a>:</p>
1643
1644 <pre>
1645 the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is pleased to announce the first
1646 *beta* release of Debian Edu "Jessie" 8.0+edu0~b1, which for the first
1647 time is composed entirely of packages from the current Debian stable
1648 release, Debian 8 "Jessie".
1649
1650 (As most reading this will know, Debian "Jessie" hasn't actually been
1651 released by now. The release is still in progress but should finish
1652 later today ;)
1653
1654 We expect to make a final release of Debian Edu "Jessie" in the coming
1655 weeks, timed with the first point release of Debian Jessie. Upgrades
1656 from this beta release of Debian Edu Jessie to the final release will
1657 be possible and encouraged!
1658
1659 Please report feedback to debian-edu@lists.debian.org and/or submit
1660 bugs: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
1661
1662 Debian Edu - sometimes also known as "Skolelinux" - is a complete
1663 operating system for schools, universities and other
1664 organisations. Through its pre- prepared installation profiles
1665 administrators can install servers, workstations and laptops which
1666 will work in harmony on the school network.  With Debian Edu, the
1667 teachers themselves or their technical support staff can roll out a
1668 complete multi-user, multi-machine study environment within hours or
1669 days.
1670
1671 Debian Edu is already in use at several hundred schools all over the
1672 world, particularly in Germany, Spain and Norway. Installations come
1673 with hundreds of applications pre-installed, plus the whole Debian
1674 archive of thousands of compatible packages within easy reach.
1675
1676 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
1677 installation instructions are available, including detailed
1678 instructions in the manual explaining the first steps, such as setting
1679 up a network or adding users.  Please note that the password for the
1680 user your prompted for during installation must have a length of at
1681 least 5 characters!
1682
1683 == Where to download ==
1684
1685 A multi-architecture CD / usbstick image (649 MiB) for network booting
1686 can be downloaded at the following locations:
1687
1688     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso
1689     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso .
1690
1691 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 54a524d16246cddd8d2cfd6ea52f2dd78c47ee0a
1692
1693 Alternatively an extended DVD / usbstick image (4.9 GiB) is also
1694 available, with more software included (saving additional download
1695 time):
1696
1697     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
1698     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
1699
1700 The SHA1SUM of this image is: fb1f1504a490c077a48653898f9d6a461cb3c636
1701
1702 Sources are available from the Debian archive, see
1703 http://ftp.debian.org/debian-cd/8.0.0/source/ for some download
1704 options.
1705
1706 == Debian Edu Jessie manual in seven languages ==
1707
1708 Please see https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/ for
1709 the English version of the Debian Edu jessie manual.
1710
1711 This manual has been fully translated to German, French, Italian,
1712 Danish, Dutch and Norwegian Bokmål. A partly translated version exists
1713 for Spanish.  See http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/ for
1714 online version of the translated manual.
1715
1716 More information about Debian 8 "Jessie" itself is provided in the
1717 release notes and the installation manual:
1718 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes
1719 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual
1720
1721
1722 == Errata / known problems ==
1723
1724     It takes up to 15 minutes for a changed hostname to be updated via
1725     DHCP (#780461).
1726
1727     The hostname script fails to update LTSP server hostname (#783087).
1728
1729 Workaround: run update-hostname-from-ip on the client to update the
1730 hostname immediately.
1731
1732 Check https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie for a possibly
1733 more current and complete list.
1734
1735 == Some more details about Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~b1 Codename Jessie released 2015-04-25 ==
1736
1737 === Software updates ===
1738
1739 Everything which is new in Debian 8 Jessie, e.g.:
1740
1741  * Linux kernel 3.16.7-ctk9; for the i386 architecture, support for
1742    i486 processors has been dropped; oldest supported ones: i586 (like
1743    Intel Pentium and AMD K5).
1744
1745  * Desktop environments KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11.13, GNOME 3.14,
1746    Xfce 4.12, LXDE 0.5.6
1747    * new optional desktop environment: MATE 1.8
1748    * KDE Plasma Workspaces is installed by default; to choose one of
1749      the others see the manual.
1750  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 41
1751  * LibreOffice 4.3.3
1752  * GOsa 2.7.4
1753  * LTSP 5.5.4
1754  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
1755  * new boot framework: systemd
1756  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.12
1757  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
1758  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
1759  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.1
1760  * golearn 0.9
1761  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
1762  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
1763  * Debian Jessie includes about 43000 packages available for installation.
1764  * More information about Debian 8 Jessie is provided in its release
1765    notes and the installation manual, see the link above.
1766
1767 === Installation changes ===
1768
1769     Installations done via PXE now also install firmware automatically
1770     for the hardware present.
1771
1772 === Fixed bugs ===
1773
1774 A number of bugs have been fixed in this release; the most noticeable
1775 from a user perspective:
1776
1777  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
1778    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
1779    information is corrected (710362)
1780
1781  * shutdown-at-night now shuts the system down if gdm3 is used (775608).
1782
1783 === Sugar desktop removed ===
1784
1785 As the Sugar desktop was removed from Debian Jessie, it is also not
1786 available in Debian Edu jessie.
1787
1788
1789 == About Debian Edu / Skolelinux ==
1790
1791 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on
1792 Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
1793 configured school network. Directly after installation a school server
1794 running all services needed for a school network is set up just
1795 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
1796 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
1797 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
1798 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
1799 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
1800 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
1801 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
1802 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
1803 can choose between KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
1804 environment.
1805
1806 == About Debian ==
1807
1808 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
1809 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
1810 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
1811 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
1812 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
1813 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
1814 operating system.
1815
1816 == Thanks ==
1817
1818 Thanks to everyone making Debian and Debian Edu / Skolelinux happen!
1819 You rock.
1820 </pre>
1821
1822       </div>
1823       <div class="tags">
1824
1825
1826         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>.
1827
1828
1829       </div>
1830     </div>
1831     <div class="padding"></div>
1832
1833     <div class="entry">
1834       <div class="title">
1835         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Shirish_Agarwal.html">Debian Edu interview: Shirish Agarwal</a>
1836       </div>
1837       <div class="date">
1838         15th April 2015
1839       </div>
1840       <div class="body">
1841         <p>It was a surprise to me to learn that project to create a complete
1842 computer system for schools I've involved in,
1843 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, was
1844 being used in India.  But apparently it is, and I managed to get an
1845 interview with one of the friends of the project there, Shirish
1846 Agarwal.</p>
1847
1848 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
1849
1850 <p>My name is Shirish Agarwal. Based out of the educational and
1851 historical city of Pune, from the western state of Maharashtra, India.
1852 My bread comes from giving training, giving policy tips,
1853 installations on free software to mom and pop shops in different
1854 fields from Desktop publishing to retail shops as well as work with
1855 few software start-ups as well.</p>
1856
1857 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
1858 project?</strong></p>
1859
1860 <p>It started innocently enough. I have been using Debian for a few
1861 years and in one local minidebconf / debutsav I was asked if there was
1862 anything for schools or education. I had worked / played with free
1863 educational softwares such as Gcompris and Stellarium for my many
1864 nieces and nephews so researched and found Debian Edu or Skolelinux as
1865 it was known then.  Since then I have started using the various
1866 education meta-packages provided by the project.</p>
1867
1868 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
1869 Edu?</strong></p>
1870
1871 <p>It's closest I have seen where a package full of educational
1872 software are packed, which are free and open (both literally and
1873 figuratively).  Even if I take the simplest software which is
1874 gcompris, the number of activities therein are amazing. Another one of
1875 the softwares that I have liked for a long time is stellarium. Even
1876 pysycache is cool except for couple of issues I encountered
1877 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781841">#781841</a> and
1878 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781842">#781842</a>.</p>
1879
1880 <p>I prefer software installed on the system over web based solutions,
1881 as a web site can disappear any time but the software on disk has the
1882 possibility of a larger life span.  Of course with both it's more a
1883 question if it has enough users who make it fun or sustainable or both
1884 for the developer per-se.</p>
1885
1886 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
1887 Edu?</strong></p>
1888
1889 <p>I do see that the Debian Edu team seems to be short-handed and I
1890 think more efforts should be made to make it popular and ask and take
1891 help from people and the larger community wherever possible.</p>
1892
1893 <p>I don't see any disadvantage to use Skolelinux apart from the fact
1894 that most apps. are generic which is good or bad how you see it.
1895 However, saying that I do acknowledge the fact that the canvas is
1896 pretty big and there are lot of interesting ideas that could be done
1897 but for reasons not known not done or if done I don't know about them.
1898 Let me share some of the ideas (these are more upstream based but
1899 still) I have had for a long time :</p>
1900
1901 <p>1. Classical maths question of two trains in opposing directions
1902 each running @x kmph/mph at y distance, when they will meet and how
1903 far would each travel and similar questions like these.
1904
1905 <p>The computer is a fantastic system where questions like these can
1906 be drawn, animated and the methodology and answers teased out in
1907 interactive manner. While sites such as the
1908 <a href="http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.two.trains.html">Ask
1909 Dr. Math FAQ on The Two Trains problem</a> (as an example or point of
1910 inspiration) can be used there is lot more that can be done.  I dunno
1911 if there is a free software which does something like this.  The idea
1912 being a blend of objects + animation + interaction which does
1913 this. The whole interaction could be gamified with points or sounds or
1914 colourful celebration whenever the user gets even part of the question
1915 or/and methodology right. That would help reinforce good behaviour.
1916 This understanding could be used to share/showcase everything from how
1917 the first wheel came to be, to evolution to how astronomy started,
1918 psychics and everything in-between.</p>
1919
1920 <p>One specific idea in the train part was having the Linux mascot on
1921 one train and the BSD or GNU mascot on the other train and they
1922 meeting somewhere in-between. Characters from blender movies could
1923 also be used.</p>
1924
1925 <p>2. Loads of crossword-puzzles with reference to subjects: We have
1926 enormous data sets in Wikipedia and Wikitionary.  I don't think it
1927 should be a big job to design crossword puzzles. Using categories and
1928 sub-categories it should be doable to have Q&A single word answers
1929 from the existing data-sets. What would make it easy or hard could be
1930 the length of the word + existence of many or few vowels depending on
1931 the user's input.</p>
1932
1933 <p>3. Jigsaw puzzles - We already have a great software called
1934 palapeli with number of slicers making it pretty interesting. What
1935 needs to be done is to download large number of public domain and
1936 copyleft images, tease and use IPTC tags to categorise them into
1937 nature, history etc.  and let it loose. This could turn to be really
1938 huge collection of images. One source could be taken from
1939 commons.wikimedia.org, others could be huge collection of royalty-free
1940 stock photos. Potential is immense.</p>
1941
1942 <p>Apart from this, free software suffers in two directions, we lag
1943 both in development (of using new features per-se) and maintenance a
1944 lot.  This is more so in educational software as these applications
1945 need to be timely and the opportunity cost of missing deadlines is
1946 immense. If we are able to solve issues of funding for development and
1947 maintenance of such software I don't see any big difficulties. I know
1948 of few start-ups in and around India who would love to develop and
1949 maintain such software if funding issues could be solved.</p>
1950
1951 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
1952
1953 <p>That would be huge list. Some of the softwares are obviously apt,
1954 aptitude, debdelta, leafpad, the shell of course (zsh nowadays),
1955 quassel for IRC. In games I use shisen-sho while card-games are evenly
1956 between kpat and Aiselriot.  In desktops it's a tie between
1957 gnome-flashback and mate.</p>
1958
1959 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
1960 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
1961
1962 <p>I think it should first start with using specific FOSS apps. in
1963 whatever environment they are. If it's MS-Windows or Mac so be it.
1964 Once they are habitual with the apps. and there is buy-in from the
1965 school management then it could be installed anywhere. Most of the
1966 people now understand the concept of a repository because of the
1967 various online stores so it isn't hard to convince on that front.</p>
1968
1969 <p>What is harder is having enough people with technical skills and
1970 passion to service them. If you get buy-in from one or two teachers
1971 then ideas like above could also be asked to be done as a project as
1972 well.</p>
1973
1974 <p>I think where we fall short more than anything is in marketing. For
1975 instance, Debian has this whole range of fonts in its archive but
1976 there isn't even a page where all those different fonts in the La
1977 Ipsum format could be tried out for newcomers.</p>
1978
1979 <p>One of the issues faced constantly in installations is with updates
1980 and upgrades.  People have this myth that each update and upgrade
1981 means the user interface will / has to change. I have seen this
1982 innumerable times.  That perhaps is one of the reasons which browsers
1983 like Iceweasel / Firefox change user interfaces so much, not because
1984 it might be needed or be functional but because people believe that
1985 changed user interfaces are better. This, can easily be pointed with
1986 the user interfaces changed with almost every MS-Windows and Mac OS
1987 releases.</p>
1988
1989 <p>The problems with Debian Edu for deployment are many. The biggest
1990 is the huge gap between what is taught in schools and what Debian Edu
1991 is aimed at.
1992
1993 <p>Me and my friends did teach on week-ends in a government school for
1994 around 2 years, and
1995 <a href="https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/sharings/">gathered
1996 some experience</a> there.  Some of the things we learnt/discovered
1997 there was :</p>
1998
1999 <ol>
2000
2001   <li>Most of the teachers are very territorial about their subjects
2002    and they do not want you to teach anything out of the
2003    portion/syllabus given.</li>
2004
2005   <li>They want any activity on the system in accordance to whatever
2006    is in the syllabus.</li>
2007
2008   <li>There are huge barriers both with the English language and at
2009    times with objects or whatever. An example, let's say in gcompris
2010    you have objects falling down and you have to name them and let's
2011    say the falling object is a hat or a fedora hat, this would not be
2012    as recognizable as say a
2013    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puneri_Pagadi">Puneri
2014    Pagdi</a> so there is need to inject local objects, words wherever
2015    possible. Especially for word-games there are so many hindi words
2016    which have become part of english vocabulary (for instance in
2017    parley), those could be made into a hinglish collection or
2018    something but that is something for upstream to do.</li>
2019
2020 </ol>
2021
2022       </div>
2023       <div class="tags">
2024
2025
2026         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>.
2027
2028
2029       </div>
2030     </div>
2031     <div class="padding"></div>
2032
2033     <div class="entry">
2034       <div class="title">
2035         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_m_going_to_the_Open_Source_Developers__Conference_Nordic_2015_.html">I'm going to the Open Source Developers' Conference Nordic 2015!</a>
2036       </div>
2037       <div class="date">
2038          7th April 2015
2039       </div>
2040       <div class="body">
2041         <p>I am happy to let you all know that I'm going to the <a
2042 href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/">Open Source Developers'
2043 Conference Nordic 2015</a>!</p>
2044
2045 <p>It take place Friday 8th to Sunday 10th of May in Oslo next to
2046 where I work, and I finally got around to submitting
2047 <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talk/6192">a talk proposal for
2048 it</a> (dead link for most people until the talk is accepted).  As
2049 part of my involvement with the
2050 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group member
2051 association</a> I have been slightly involved in the planning of this
2052 conference for a while now, with a focus on organising a Civic Hacking
2053 Hackathon with our friends
2054 over at <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> and
2055 <a href="http://www.holderdeord.no/">Holder de ord</a>.  This part is
2056 named the 'My Society' track in the program.  There is still space for
2057 more talks and participants.  I hope to see you there.</p>
2058
2059 <p>Check out <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talks">the talks
2060 submitted and accepted so far</a>.</p>
2061
2062       </div>
2063       <div class="tags">
2064
2065
2066         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>.
2067
2068
2069       </div>
2070     </div>
2071     <div class="padding"></div>
2072
2073     <div class="entry">
2074       <div class="title">
2075         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Proof_reading_the_Norwegian_translation_of_Free_Culture_by_Lessig.html">Proof reading the Norwegian translation of Free Culture by Lessig</a>
2076       </div>
2077       <div class="date">
2078          4th April 2015
2079       </div>
2080       <div class="body">
2081         <p>During eastern I had some time to continue working on the Norwegian
2082 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
2083 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
2084 At the moment I am proof reading the finished text, looking for typos,
2085 inconsistent wordings and sentences that do not flow as they should.
2086 I'm more than two thirds done with the text, and welcome others to
2087 check the text up to chapter 13.  The current status is available on the
2088 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
2089 project pages.  You can also check out the
2090 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
2091 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
2092 and HTML version available in the
2093 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
2094 directory</a>.</p>
2095
2096 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
2097 you find any.</p>
2098
2099       </div>
2100       <div class="tags">
2101
2102
2103         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>.
2104
2105
2106       </div>
2107     </div>
2108     <div class="padding"></div>
2109
2110     <div class="entry">
2111       <div class="title">
2112         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen__Norwegian_TV_channel_for_technical_topics.html">Frikanalen, Norwegian TV channel for technical topics</a>
2113       </div>
2114       <div class="date">
2115          9th March 2015
2116       </div>
2117       <div class="body">
2118         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a>,
2119 where I am a member, and where people interested in free software,
2120 open standards and UNIX like operating systems like Linux and the BSDs
2121 come together, record our monthly technical presentations on video.
2122 The purpose is to document the talks and spread them to a wider
2123 audience.  For this, the the Norwegian nationwide open channel
2124 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is a useful venue.
2125 Since a few days ago, when I figured out the
2126 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/api/">REST API</a> to program the
2127 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/guide/">channel time schedule</a>,
2128 the channel has been filled with NUUG talks, related recordings and
2129 some Creative Commons licensed TED talks (from archive.org).  I fill
2130 all "leftover bits" on the channel with content from NUUG, which at
2131 the moment is almost 17 of 24 hours every day.</p>
2132
2133 <p>The list of NUUG videos
2134 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/organization/82">uploaded so far</a>
2135 include things like a
2136 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/625090">one hour talk by John
2137 Perry Barlow when he visited Oslo</a>, a presentation of
2138 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624275">Haiku, the BeOS
2139 re-implementation</a>, the
2140 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624493">history of FiksGataMi,
2141 the Norwegian version of FixMyStreet</a>, the good old
2142 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/623566">Warriors of the net
2143 video</A> and many others.</p>
2144
2145 <p>We have a large backlog of NUUG talks not yet uploaded to
2146 Frikanalen, and plan to upload every useful bit to the channel to
2147 spread the word there.  I also hope to find useful recordings from the
2148 Chaos Computer Club and Debian conferences and spread them on the
2149 channel as well.  But this require locating the videos and their meta
2150 information (title, description, license, etc), and preparing the
2151 recordings for broadcast, and I have not yet had the spare time to
2152 focus on this.  Perhaps you want to help.  Please join us on IRC,
2153 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
2154 if you want to help make this happen.</p>
2155
2156 <p>But as I said, already the channel is already almost exclusively
2157 filled with technical topics, and if you want to learn something new
2158 today, check out the <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">Ogg Theora
2159 web stream</a> or use one of the other ways to get access to the
2160 channel.  Unfortunately the Ogg Theora recoding for distribution still
2161 do not properly sync the video and sound.  It is generated by recoding
2162 a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to
2163 Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and we have not been able to find a way that
2164 produces acceptable quality.  Help needed, please get in touch if you
2165 know how to fix it using free software.</p>
2166
2167       </div>
2168       <div class="tags">
2169
2170
2171         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2172
2173
2174       </div>
2175     </div>
2176     <div class="padding"></div>
2177
2178     <div class="entry">
2179       <div class="title">
2180         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Citizenfour_documentary_on_the_Snowden_confirmations_to_Norway.html">The Citizenfour documentary on the Snowden confirmations to Norway</a>
2181       </div>
2182       <div class="date">
2183         28th February 2015
2184       </div>
2185       <div class="body">
2186         <p>Today I was happy to learn that the documentary
2187 <a href="https://citizenfourfilm.com/">Citizenfour</a> by
2188 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Poitras">Laura Poitras</a>
2189 finally will show up in Norway.  According to the magazine
2190 <a href="http://montages.no/">Montages</a>, a deal has finally been
2191 made for
2192 <a href="http://montages.no/nyheter/snowden-dokumentaren-citizenfour-far-norsk-kinodistribusjon/">Cinema
2193 distribution in Norway</a> and the movie will have its premiere soon.
2194 This is great news.  As part of my involvement with
2195 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User Group</a>, me and
2196 a friend have
2197 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_til_Norge_.shtml">tried
2198 to get the movie to Norway</a> ourselves, but obviously
2199 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_endelig_til_Norge_.shtml">we
2200 were too late</a> and Tor Fosse beat us to it.  I am happy he did, as
2201 the movie will make its way to the public and we do not have to make
2202 it happen ourselves.
2203 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwAvd5mvM">The trailer</a>
2204 can be seen on youtube, if you are curious what kind of film this
2205 is.</p>
2206
2207 <p>The whistle blower Edward Snowden really deserve political asylum
2208 here in Norway, but I am afraid he would not be safe.</p>
2209
2210       </div>
2211       <div class="tags">
2212
2213
2214         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
2215
2216
2217       </div>
2218     </div>
2219     <div class="padding"></div>
2220
2221     <div class="entry">
2222       <div class="title">
2223         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Norwegian_open_channel_Frikanalen___24x7_on_the_Internet.html">The Norwegian open channel Frikanalen - 24x7 on the Internet</a>
2224       </div>
2225       <div class="date">
2226         25th February 2015
2227       </div>
2228       <div class="body">
2229         <p>The Norwegian nationwide open channel
2230 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is still going
2231 strong.  It allow everyone to send the video they want on national
2232 television.  It is a TV station administrated completely using a web
2233 browser, running only <ahref="https://github.com/Frikanalen">Free
2234 Software</a>, providing <ahref="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api">a REST
2235 api</a> for administrators and members, and with distribution on the
2236 national DVB-T distribution network RiksTV.  But only between 12:00
2237 and 17:30 Norwegian time.  This has finally changed, after many years
2238 with limited distribution.  A few weeks ago, we set up a Ogg Theora
2239 stream via icecast to allow everyone with Internet access to check out
2240 the channel the rest of the day.  This is presented on
2241 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">the Frikanalen web site now</a>.  And
2242 since a few days ago, the channel is also available
2243 via <a href="https://www.uninett.no/iptv-tilgang">multicast on
2244 UNINETT</a>, available for those using IPTV TVs and set-top boxes in
2245 the Norwegian National Research and Education network.</p>
2246
2247 <p>If you want to see what is on the channel, point your media player
2248 to one of these sources.  The first should work with most players and
2249 browsers, while as far as I know, the multicast UDP stream only work
2250 with VLC.</p>
2251
2252 <ul>
2253   <li><a href="http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv">http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv</a></li>
2254   <li>udp://@224.17.43.129:1234</li>
2255 </ul>
2256
2257 <p>The Ogg Theora / icecast stream is not working well, as the video
2258 and audio is slightly out of sync.  We have not been able to figure
2259 out how to fix it.  It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG
2260 transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to Ogg Theora /
2261 Vorbis, and the result is less then stellar.  If you have ideas how to
2262 fix it, please let us know on frikanalen (at) nuug.no.  We currently
2263 use this with ffmpeg2theora 0.29:</p>
2264
2265 <blockquote><pre>
2266 ./ffmpeg2theora.linux &lt;OBE_gemini_URL.ts&gt; -F 25 -x 720 -y 405 \
2267  --deinterlace --inputfps 25 -c 1 -H 48000 --keyint 8 --buf-delay 100 \
2268  --nosync -V 700 -o - | oggfwd video.nuug.no 8000 &lt;pw&gt; /frikanalen.ogv
2269 </pre></blockquote>
2270
2271 <p>If you get the multicast UDP stream working, please let me know, as
2272 I am curious how far the multicast stream reach.  It do not make it to
2273 my home network, nor any other commercially available network in
2274 Norway that I am aware of.</p>
2275
2276       </div>
2277       <div class="tags">
2278
2279
2280         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2281
2282
2283       </div>
2284     </div>
2285     <div class="padding"></div>
2286
2287     <div class="entry">
2288       <div class="title">
2289         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nude_body_scanner_now_present_on_Norwegian_airport.html">Nude body scanner now present on Norwegian airport</a>
2290       </div>
2291       <div class="date">
2292         10th February 2015
2293       </div>
2294       <div class="body">
2295         <p>Aftenposten, one of the largest newspapers in Norway, today report
2296 that
2297 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/reise/Slik-skannes-kroppen-din-i-fremtidens-sikkerhetskontroll-490666_1.snd">three
2298 of the nude body scanners now is put to use at Gardermoen</a>, the
2299 main airport in Norway.  This way the travelers can have their body
2300 photographed without cloths when visiting Norway.  Of course this
2301 horrible news is presented with a positive spin, stating that "now
2302 travelers can move past the security check point faster and more
2303 efficiently", but fail to mention that the machines in question take
2304 pictures of their nude bodies and store them internally in the
2305 computer, while only presenting sketch figure of the body to the
2306 public.  The article is written in a way that leave the impression
2307 that the new machines do not take these nude pictures and only create
2308 the sketch figures.  In reality the same nude pictures are still
2309 taken, but not presented to everyone.  They are still available for
2310 the owners of the system and the people doing maintenance of the
2311 scanners, as long as they are taken and stored.</p>
2312
2313 <p>Wikipedia have a more on
2314 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_body_scanner">Full body
2315 scanners</a>, including example images and a summary of the
2316 controversy about these scanners.</p>
2317
2318 <p>Personally I will decline to use these machines, as I believe strip
2319 searches of my body is a very intrusive attack on my privacy, and not
2320 something everyone should have to accept to travel.</p>
2321
2322       </div>
2323       <div class="tags">
2324
2325
2326         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>.
2327
2328
2329       </div>
2330     </div>
2331     <div class="padding"></div>
2332
2333     <div class="entry">
2334       <div class="title">
2335         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nagios_module_to_check_if_the_Frikanalen_video_stream_is_working.html">Nagios module to check if the Frikanalen video stream is working</a>
2336       </div>
2337       <div class="date">
2338          8th February 2015
2339       </div>
2340       <div class="body">
2341         <p>When running a TV station with both broadcast and web stream
2342 distribution, it is useful to know that the stream is working.  As I
2343 am involved in the Norwegian open channel
2344 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> as part of my
2345 activity in the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member
2346 organisation</a>, I wrote a script to use mplayer to connect to a
2347 video stream, pick two images 35 seconds apart and compare them.  If
2348 the images are missing or identical, something is probably wrong with
2349 the stream and an alarm should be triggered.  The script is written as
2350 a Nagios plugin, allowing us to use Nagios to run the check regularly
2351 and sound the alarm when something is wrong.  It is able to detect
2352 both a hanging and a broken video stream.</p>
2353
2354 <p>I just uploaded the code for the script into the
2355 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen/frikanalen/blob/master/nagios-plugin/check_video_stream_images">Frikanalen
2356 git repository</a> on github.  If you run a TV station with web
2357 streaming, perhaps you can find it useful too.</p>
2358
2359 <p>Last year, the Frikanalen public TV station transformed into using
2360 only Linux based free software to administrate, schedule and
2361 distribute the TV content.  The
2362 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen">source code for the entire TV
2363 station</a> is available from the Github project page.  Everyone can
2364 use it to send their content on national TV, and we provide both a web
2365 GUI and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api/">a web API</a> to
2366 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/login/?next=/members/video/">add</a>
2367 and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/members/plan/">schedule
2368 content</a>.  And thanks to last weeks developer gathering and
2369 following activity, we now have the schedule
2370 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/xmltv/2015/01/01">available as
2371 XMLTV</a> too.  Still a lot of work left to do, especially with the
2372 process to add videos and with the scheduling, so your contribution is
2373 most welcome.  Perhaps you want to set up your own TV station?</p>
2374
2375 <p>Update 2015-02-25: Got a tip from Uninett about their
2376 <a href="https://scm.uninett.no/maalepaaler/qstream/">qstream
2377 monitoring system</a>, which gather connection time, jitter, packet
2378 loss and burst bandwidth usage.  It look useful to check if UDP
2379 streams are working as they should.</p>
2380
2381       </div>
2382       <div class="tags">
2383
2384
2385         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>.
2386
2387
2388       </div>
2389     </div>
2390     <div class="padding"></div>
2391
2392     <div class="entry">
2393       <div class="title">
2394         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_subtitles_for_the_FSF_video_User_Liberation.html">Norwegian Bokmål subtitles for the FSF video User Liberation</a>
2395       </div>
2396       <div class="date">
2397         12th January 2015
2398       </div>
2399       <div class="body">
2400         <p>A few days ago, the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/">Free Software
2401 Foundation</a> announced a new video
2402 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">explaining
2403 Free software</a> in simple terms.  The video named User Liberation is
2404 3 minutes long, and I recommend showing it to everyone you know as a
2405 way to explain what Free Software is all about.  Unfortunately several
2406 of the people I know do not understand English and Spanish, so it did
2407 not make sense to show it to them.</p>
2408
2409 <p>But today I was told that
2410 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">English
2411 subtitles were available</a> and set out to provide Norwegian Bokmål
2412 subtitles based on these.  The result has been sent to FSF and made
2413 available in
2414 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/fsf-video-user-liberation-subtitles">a
2415 git repository</a> provided by Github.  Please let me know if you find
2416 errors or have improvements to the subtitles.</p>
2417
2418 <p>Update 2015-02-03: Since I publised this post, FSF created a
2419 Libreplanet
2420 <a href="http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:FSF/User_Liberation_Video_Translation">project
2421 to track subtitles</A> for the video.</p>
2422
2423       </div>
2424       <div class="tags">
2425
2426
2427         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
2428
2429
2430       </div>
2431     </div>
2432     <div class="padding"></div>
2433
2434     <div class="entry">
2435       <div class="title">
2436         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Updated_version_of_the_Norwegian_web_service_FiksGataMi.html">Updated version of the Norwegian web service FiksGataMi</a>
2437       </div>
2438       <div class="date">
2439         30th December 2014
2440       </div>
2441       <div class="body">
2442         <p>I am very happy that we in the
2443 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group (NUUG)</a>,
2444 spearheaded by Marius Halden from NUUG and Matthew Somerville from
2445 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>, finally managed to
2446 upgrade the code base for the Norwegian version of
2447 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org/">FixMyStreet</a>.  This
2448 was the first major update since 2011. The refurbished
2449 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is already live, and
2450 seem to hold up the pressure.  The
2451 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__FiksGataMi_i_oppdatert_og_mobilvennlig_klesdrakt.shtml">press
2452 release and announcement</a> went out this morning.</p>
2453
2454 <p>FixMyStreet is a web platform for allowing the citizens to easily
2455 report problems with public infrastructure to the responsible
2456 authorities.  Think of it as a shared mail client with map support,
2457 allowing everyone to see what already was reported and comment on the
2458 reports in public.</p>
2459
2460       </div>
2461       <div class="tags">
2462
2463
2464         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>.
2465
2466
2467       </div>
2468     </div>
2469     <div class="padding"></div>
2470
2471     <div class="entry">
2472       <div class="title">
2473         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Of_course_USA_loses_in_cyber_war___NSA_and_friends_made_sure_it_would_happen.html">Of course USA loses in cyber war - NSA and friends made sure it would happen</a>
2474       </div>
2475       <div class="date">
2476         19th December 2014
2477       </div>
2478       <div class="body">
2479         <p>So, Sony caved in
2480 (<a href="https://twitter.com/RobLowe/status/545338568512917504">according
2481 to Rob Lowe</a>) and demonstrated that America lost its first cyberwar
2482 (<a href="https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/status/545339074975109122">according
2483 to Newt Gingrich</a>).  It should not surprise anyone, after the
2484 whistle blower Edward Snowden documented that the government of USA
2485 and their allies for many years have done their best to make sure the
2486 technology used by its citizens is filled with security holes allowing
2487 the secret services to spy on its own population.  No one in their
2488 right minds could believe that the ability to snoop on the people all
2489 over the globe could only be used by the personnel authorized to do so
2490 by the president of the United States of America.  If the capabilities
2491 are there, they will be used by friend and foe alike, and now they are
2492 being used to bring Sony on its knees.</p>
2493
2494 <p>I doubt it will a lesson learned, and expect USA to lose its next
2495 cyber war too, given how eager the western intelligence communities
2496 (and probably the non-western too, but it is less in the news) seem to
2497 be to continue its current dragnet surveillance practice.</p>
2498
2499 <p>There is a reason why China and others are trying to move away from
2500 Windows to Linux and other alternatives, and it is not to avoid
2501 sending its hard earned dollars to Cayman Islands (or whatever
2502 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven">tax haven</a>
2503 Microsoft is using these days to collect the majority of its
2504 income. :)</p>
2505
2506       </div>
2507       <div class="tags">
2508
2509
2510         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
2511
2512
2513       </div>
2514     </div>
2515     <div class="padding"></div>
2516
2517     <div class="entry">
2518       <div class="title">
2519         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_stay_with_sysvinit_in_Debian_Jessie.html">How to stay with sysvinit in Debian Jessie</a>
2520       </div>
2521       <div class="date">
2522         22nd November 2014
2523       </div>
2524       <div class="body">
2525         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
2526 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
2527 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
2528 courtesy of
2529 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
2530 Schubert</a> and
2531 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
2532 McVittie</a>.
2533
2534 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
2535 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
2536 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
2537 you upgrade:</p>
2538
2539 <p><blockquote><pre>
2540 Package: systemd-sysv
2541 Pin: release o=Debian
2542 Pin-Priority: -1
2543 </pre></blockquote><p>
2544
2545 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
2546 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
2547 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
2548 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
2549 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
2550
2551 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
2552 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
2553 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
2554 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
2555 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
2556 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
2557
2558 <p><blockquote><pre>
2559 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
2560 </pre></blockquote><p>
2561
2562 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
2563
2564 <p><blockquote><pre>
2565 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
2566 </pre></blockquote><p>
2567
2568 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
2569 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
2570
2571 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
2572 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
2573 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
2574 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
2575 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
2576 Jessie is released.</p>
2577
2578 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
2579 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
2580 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
2581 line.</p>
2582
2583       </div>
2584       <div class="tags">
2585
2586
2587         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>.
2588
2589
2590       </div>
2591     </div>
2592     <div class="padding"></div>
2593
2594     <div class="entry">
2595       <div class="title">
2596         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Debian_package_for_SMTP_via_Tor__aka_SMTorP__using_exim4.html">A Debian package for SMTP via Tor (aka SMTorP) using exim4</a>
2597       </div>
2598       <div class="date">
2599         10th November 2014
2600       </div>
2601       <div class="body">
2602         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
2603 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
2604 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
2605
2606 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
2607 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
2608 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
2609 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
2610 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
2611 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
2612 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
2613 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
2614 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
2615 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
2616 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
2617 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
2618 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
2619 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
2620 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
2621
2622 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
2623 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
2624 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
2625 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
2626 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
2627 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
2628 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
2629 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
2630 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
2631 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
2632 were fairly easy, and
2633 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
2634 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
2635 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
2636 useful approach.</p>
2637
2638 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
2639 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
2640 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
2641 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
2642 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
2643 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
2644 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
2645 this:</p>
2646
2647 <p><blockquote><pre>
2648 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
2649   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
2650 </pre></blockquote></p>
2651
2652 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
2653 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
2654
2655 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
2656 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
2657 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
2658 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
2659 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
2660 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
2661 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
2662 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
2663 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
2664 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
2665 system.</p>
2666
2667 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
2668 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
2669 SMTorP. :)</p>
2670
2671       </div>
2672       <div class="tags">
2673
2674
2675         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
2676
2677
2678       </div>
2679     </div>
2680     <div class="padding"></div>
2681
2682     <div class="entry">
2683       <div class="title">
2684         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_released__alpha0_.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu released (alpha0)</a>
2685       </div>
2686       <div class="date">
2687         27th October 2014
2688       </div>
2689       <div class="body">
2690         <p>I am happy to report that I on behalf of the Debian Edu team just
2691 sent out
2692 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2014/10/msg00000.html">this
2693 announcement</a>:</p>
2694
2695 <pre>
2696 The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu
2697 Jessie 8.0+edu0~alpha0
2698
2699 Debian Edu is a complete operating system for schools. Through its
2700 various installation profiles you can install servers, workstations
2701 and laptops which will work together on the school network. With
2702 Debian Edu, the teachers themselves or their technical support can
2703 roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within
2704 hours or a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications
2705 pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.
2706
2707 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
2708 installation instructions are available, including detailed
2709 instructions in the manual[1] explaining the first steps, such as
2710 setting up a network or adding users. Please note that the password
2711 for the user your prompted for during installation must have a length
2712 of at least 5 characters!
2713
2714  [1] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie</a> &gt;
2715
2716 Would you like to give your school's computer a longer life? Are you
2717 tired of sneaker administration, running from computer to computer
2718 reinstalling the operating system? Would you like to administrate all
2719 the computers in your school using only a couple of hours every week?
2720 Check out Debian Edu Jessie!
2721
2722 Skolelinux is used by at least two hundred schools all over the world,
2723 mostly in Germany and Norway.
2724
2725 About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
2726 ===============================
2727
2728 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux[2], is a Linux distribution based
2729 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
2730 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
2731 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
2732 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
2733 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
2734 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
2735 machines can be installed via the network.  The provided school server
2736 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
2737 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
2738 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
2739 packages[3] and more are available from the Debian archive, and
2740 schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
2741 environment.
2742
2743  [2] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">http://www.skolelinux.org/</a> &gt;
2744  [3] &lt;URL: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html</a> &gt;
2745
2746 Full release notes and manual
2747 =============================
2748
2749 Below the download URLs there is a list of some of the new features
2750 and bugfixes of Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie. The full
2751 list is part of the manual. (See the feature list in the manual[4] for
2752 the English version.) For some languages manual translations are
2753 available, see the manual translation overview[5].
2754
2755  [4] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features</a> &gt;
2756  [5] &lt;URL: <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/</a> &gt;
2757
2758 Where to get it
2759 ---------------
2760
2761 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release (624 MiB) you can use
2762
2763  * <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso</a>
2764  * <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso</a>
2765  * rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso .
2766
2767 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 361188818e036ce67280a572f757de82ebfeb095
2768
2769 New features for Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie released 2014-10-27
2770 ===============================================================================
2771
2772
2773 Installation changes
2774 --------------------
2775
2776  * PXE installation now installs firmware automatically for the hardware present.
2777
2778 Software updates
2779 ----------------
2780
2781 Everything which is new in Debian Jessie 8.0, eg:
2782
2783  * Linux kernel 3.16.x
2784  * Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.11.12, GNOME 3.14, Xfce 4.10,
2785    LXDE 0.5.6 and MATE 1.8 (KDE "Plasma" is installed by default; to
2786    choose one of the others see manual.)
2787  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 38
2788  * !LibreOffice 4.3.3
2789  * GOsa 2.7.4
2790  * LTSP 5.5.4
2791  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
2792  * new boot framework: systemd
2793  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.07
2794  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
2795  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
2796  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.0
2797  * golearn 0.9
2798  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
2799  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
2800  * Debian Jessie includes about 42000 packages available for
2801    installation.
2802  * More information about Debian Jessie 8.0 is provided in the release
2803    notes[6] and the installation manual[7].
2804
2805  [6] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes</a> &gt;
2806  [7] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual</a> &gt;
2807
2808 Fixed bugs
2809 ----------
2810
2811  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
2812    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
2813    information is corrected (Debian bug #710362)
2814  * and many others.
2815
2816 Documentation and translation updates
2817 -------------------------------------
2818
2819  * The Debian Edu Jessie Manual is fully translated to German, French,
2820    Italian, Danish and Dutch. Partly translated versions exist for
2821    Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
2822
2823 Other changes
2824 -------------
2825
2826  * Due to new Squid settings, powering off or rebooting the main
2827    server takes more time.
2828  * To manage printers localhost:631 has to be used, currently www:631
2829    doesn't work.
2830
2831 Regressions / known problems
2832 ----------------------------
2833
2834  * Installing LTSP chroot fails with a bug related to eatmydata about
2835    exim4-config failing to run its postinst (see Debian bug #765694
2836    and Debian bug #762103).
2837  * Munin collection is not properly configured on clients (Debian bug
2838    #764594).  The fix is available in a newer version of munin-node.
2839  * PXE setup for Main Server and Thin Client Server setup does not
2840    work when installing on a machine without direct Internet access.
2841    Will be fixed when Debian bug #766960 is fixed in Jessie.
2842
2843 See the status page[8] for the complete list.
2844
2845  [8] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie</a> &gt;
2846
2847 How to report bugs
2848 ------------------
2849
2850 &lt;URL: <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a> &gt;
2851
2852 About Debian
2853 ============
2854
2855 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
2856 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
2857 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
2858 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
2859 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
2860 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
2861 operating system.
2862
2863 Contact Information
2864 For further information, please visit the Debian web pages[9] or send
2865 mail to press@debian.org.
2866
2867  [9] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a> &gt;
2868 </pre>
2869
2870       </div>
2871       <div class="tags">
2872
2873
2874         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>.
2875
2876
2877       </div>
2878     </div>
2879     <div class="padding"></div>
2880
2881     <div class="entry">
2882       <div class="title">
2883         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html">I spent last weekend recording MakerCon Nordic</a>
2884       </div>
2885       <div class="date">
2886         23rd October 2014
2887       </div>
2888       <div class="body">
2889         <p>I spent last weekend at <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">Makercon
2890 Nordic</a>, a great conference and workshop for makers in Norway and
2891 the surrounding countries.  I had volunteered on behalf of the
2892 Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG) to video record the talks, and we
2893 had a great and exhausting time recording the entire day, two days in
2894 a row.  There were only two of us, Hans-Petter and me, and we used the
2895 regular video equipment for NUUG, with a
2896 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">dvswitch</a>, a
2897 camera and a VGA to DV convert box, and mixed video and slides
2898 live.</p>
2899
2900 <p>Hans-Petter did the post-processing, consisting of uploading the
2901 around 180 GiB of raw video to Youtube, and the result is
2902 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">now becoming
2903 public</a> on the MakerConNordic account.  The videos have the license
2904 NUUG always use on our recordings, which is
2905 <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/no/">Creative
2906 Commons Navngivelse-Del på samme vilkår 3.0 Norge</a>.  Many great
2907 talks available.  Check it out! :)</p>
2908
2909       </div>
2910       <div class="tags">
2911
2912
2913         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>.
2914
2915
2916       </div>
2917     </div>
2918     <div class="padding"></div>
2919
2920     <div class="entry">
2921       <div class="title">
2922         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/listadmin__the_quick_way_to_moderate_mailman_lists___nice_free_software.html">listadmin, the quick way to moderate mailman lists - nice free software</a>
2923       </div>
2924       <div class="date">
2925         22nd October 2014
2926       </div>
2927       <div class="body">
2928         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
2929 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
2930 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
2931 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
2932 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
2933 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
2934 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
2935 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
2936 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
2937 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
2938 lists I recently took over:</p>
2939
2940 <p><blockquote><pre>
2941 % time listadmin xiph
2942 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
2943 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
2944
2945 real    0m1.709s
2946 user    0m0.232s
2947 sys     0m0.012s
2948 %
2949 </pre></blockquote></p>
2950
2951 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
2952 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
2953 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
2954 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
2955 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
2956 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
2957 program.</p>
2958
2959 <p>If you install
2960 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
2961 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
2962 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
2963
2964 <p><blockquote><pre>
2965 username username@example.org
2966 spamlevel 23
2967 default discard
2968 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
2969
2970 password secret
2971 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
2972 mailman-list@lists.example.com
2973
2974 password hidden
2975 other-list@otherserver.example.org
2976 </pre></blockquote></p>
2977
2978 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
2979 learn the details.</p>
2980
2981 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
2982 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
2983 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
2984 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
2985
2986 <p><blockquote><pre>
2987 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
2988 </pre></blockquote></p>
2989
2990 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
2991 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
2992 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
2993 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
2994 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
2995 email.</p>
2996
2997 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
2998 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
2999 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
3000 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
3001 software.</p>
3002
3003 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3004 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3005 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3006
3007 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
3008 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
3009 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
3010 sure why.</p>
3011
3012       </div>
3013       <div class="tags">
3014
3015
3016         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3017
3018
3019       </div>
3020     </div>
3021     <div class="padding"></div>
3022
3023     <div class="entry">
3024       <div class="title">
3025         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
3026       </div>
3027       <div class="date">
3028         17th October 2014
3029       </div>
3030       <div class="body">
3031         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
3032 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
3033 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
3034 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
3035 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
3036 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
3037 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
3038
3039 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
3040 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
3041 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
3042 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
3043 of this story.)</p>
3044
3045 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
3046 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
3047 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
3048 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
3049 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
3050 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
3051 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
3052 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
3053 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
3054 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
3055
3056 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
3057 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
3058 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
3059 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
3060
3061 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
3062 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
3063
3064 <p><blockquote><pre>
3065 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
3066 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
3067 </pre></blockquote></p>
3068
3069 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
3070 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
3071 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
3072 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
3073 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
3074 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
3075 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
3076 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
3077
3078 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
3079 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
3080
3081 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
3082 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
3083 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
3084 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
3085 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
3086
3087 <p><blockquote><pre>
3088 Task: isenkram-packages
3089 Section: hardware
3090 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
3091  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
3092  proposed.
3093 Test-new-install: show show
3094 Relevance: 8
3095 Packages: for-current-hardware
3096
3097 Task: isenkram-firmware
3098 Section: hardware
3099 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
3100  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
3101  packages are proposed.
3102 Test-new-install: mark show
3103 Relevance: 8
3104 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
3105 </pre></blockquote></p>
3106
3107 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
3108 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
3109 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
3110 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
3111 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
3112
3113 <p><blockquote><pre>
3114 #!/bin/sh
3115 #
3116 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
3117 export PATH
3118 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
3119 </pre></blockquote></p>
3120
3121 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
3122 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
3123
3124 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
3125 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
3126 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
3127 install.</p>
3128
3129 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
3130 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
3131 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
3132
3133       </div>
3134       <div class="tags">
3135
3136
3137         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
3138
3139
3140       </div>
3141     </div>
3142     <div class="padding"></div>
3143
3144     <div class="entry">
3145       <div class="title">
3146         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ubuntu_used_to_show_the_bread_prizes_at_ICA_Storo.html">Ubuntu used to show the bread prizes at ICA Storo</a>
3147       </div>
3148       <div class="date">
3149          4th October 2014
3150       </div>
3151       <div class="body">
3152         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
3153 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
3154 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
3155 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
3156
3157 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
3158
3159 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
3160 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
3161 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
3162
3163       </div>
3164       <div class="tags">
3165
3166
3167         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3168
3169
3170       </div>
3171     </div>
3172     <div class="padding"></div>
3173
3174     <div class="entry">
3175       <div class="title">
3176         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_lsdvd_release_version_0_17_is_ready.html">New lsdvd release version 0.17 is ready</a>
3177       </div>
3178       <div class="date">
3179          4th October 2014
3180       </div>
3181       <div class="body">
3182         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
3183 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
3184 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
3185 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
3186 Dibb.</p>
3187
3188 <p>I just wrapped up
3189 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
3190 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
3191 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
3192 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
3193 0.17.</p>
3194
3195 <ul>
3196
3197  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
3198  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
3199    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
3200  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
3201  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
3202  <li>Fix include orders</li>
3203  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
3204  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
3205  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
3206    the palette size is the same.</li>
3207  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
3208  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
3209  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
3210  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
3211    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
3212
3213 </ul>
3214
3215 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
3216 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
3217 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
3218
3219       </div>
3220       <div class="tags">
3221
3222
3223         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
3224
3225
3226       </div>
3227     </div>
3228     <div class="padding"></div>
3229
3230     <div class="entry">
3231       <div class="title">
3232         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_Debian_Edu_Jessie_despite_some_fatal_problems_with_the_installer.html">How to test Debian Edu Jessie despite some fatal problems with the installer</a>
3233       </div>
3234       <div class="date">
3235         26th September 2014
3236       </div>
3237       <div class="body">
3238         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
3239 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
3240 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
3241 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
3242 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
3243 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
3244 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
3245 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
3246 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
3247 future.  The
3248 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
3249 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
3250 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
3251 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
3252 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
3253
3254 <p>First, download the test ISO via
3255 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
3256 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
3257 or rsync (use
3258 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
3259 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
3260 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
3261 install with some tweaking.</p>
3262
3263 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
3264 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
3265
3266 <p><blockquote><pre>
3267 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
3268 </pre></blockquote></p>
3269
3270 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
3271 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
3272 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
3273 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
3274
3275 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
3276 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
3277 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
3278 your need.</p>
3279
3280 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
3281 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
3282 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
3283 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
3284 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
3285 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
3286 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
3287 days.</p>
3288
3289 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
3290 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
3291 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
3292 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
3293 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
3294 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
3295 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
3296 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
3297 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
3298
3299 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
3300 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
3301 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
3302
3303       </div>
3304       <div class="tags">
3305
3306
3307         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>.
3308
3309
3310       </div>
3311     </div>
3312     <div class="padding"></div>
3313
3314     <div class="entry">
3315       <div class="title">
3316         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Suddenly_I_am_the_new_upstream_of_the_lsdvd_command_line_tool.html">Suddenly I am the new upstream of the lsdvd command line tool</a>
3317       </div>
3318       <div class="date">
3319         25th September 2014
3320       </div>
3321       <div class="body">
3322         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
3323 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
3324 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
3325 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
3326 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
3327 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
3328 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
3329 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
3330 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
3331 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
3332 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
3333 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
3334 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
3335
3336 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
3337 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
3338 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
3339 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
3340 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
3341 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
3342 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
3343 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
3344 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
3345 list</a>. :)</p>
3346
3347       </div>
3348       <div class="tags">
3349
3350
3351         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
3352
3353
3354       </div>
3355     </div>
3356     <div class="padding"></div>
3357
3358     <div class="entry">
3359       <div class="title">
3360         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">Speeding up the Debian installer using eatmydata and dpkg-divert</a>
3361       </div>
3362       <div class="date">
3363         16th September 2014
3364       </div>
3365       <div class="body">
3366         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
3367 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
3368 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
3369 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
3370 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
3371 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
3372 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
3373 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
3374 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
3375 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
3376 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
3377 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
3378 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
3379 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
3380
3381 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
3382 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
3383 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
3384 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
3385 depend on the small and clever package
3386 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
3387 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
3388 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
3389 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
3390 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
3391 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
3392 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
3393 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
3394 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
3395 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
3396 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
3397
3398 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
3399 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
3400 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
3401 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
3402 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
3403 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
3404 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
3405 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
3406 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
3407 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
3408 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
3409 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
3410 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
3411 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
3412 dialog.</p>
3413
3414 <p><table>
3415
3416 <tr>
3417 <th>Machine/setup</th>
3418 <th>Original tasksel</th>
3419 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
3420 <th>Reduction</th>
3421 </tr>
3422
3423 <tr>
3424 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
3425 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
3426 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
3427 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
3428 </tr>
3429
3430 <tr>
3431 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
3432 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
3433 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
3434 <td>23 min 40%</td>
3435 </tr>
3436
3437 <tr>
3438 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
3439 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
3440 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
3441 <td>11 min 50%</td>
3442 </tr>
3443
3444 <tr>
3445 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
3446 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
3447 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
3448 <td>2 min 33%</td>
3449 </tr>
3450
3451 <tr>
3452 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
3453 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
3454 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
3455 <td>4 min 21%</td>
3456 </tr>
3457
3458 </table></p>
3459
3460 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
3461 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
3462 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
3463 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
3464 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
3465 installed.</p>
3466
3467 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
3468 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
3469 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
3470 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
3471 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
3472 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
3473 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
3474 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
3475 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
3476 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
3477 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
3478 for the entire installation.</p>
3479
3480 <p>I've implemented this in the
3481 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
3482 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
3483 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
3484 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
3485 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
3486
3487 <p><blockquote><pre>
3488 #!/bin/sh
3489 set -e
3490 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
3491 info() {
3492     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
3493 }
3494 error() {
3495     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
3496 }
3497 override_install() {
3498     apt-install eatmydata || true
3499     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
3500         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
3501             file=/usr/bin/$bin
3502             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
3503             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
3504                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
3505                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
3506                     > /target$file.edu
3507                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
3508                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
3509                     --rename --quiet --add $file
3510                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
3511             else
3512                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
3513             fi
3514         done
3515     else
3516         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
3517     fi
3518 }
3519
3520 override_install
3521 </pre></blockquote></p>
3522
3523 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
3524 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
3525
3526 <p><blockquote><pre>
3527 #! /bin/sh -e
3528 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
3529 error() {
3530     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
3531 }
3532 remove_install_override() {
3533     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
3534         file=/usr/bin/$bin
3535         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
3536             rm /target$file
3537             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
3538                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
3539             rm /target$file.edu
3540         else
3541             error "Missing divert for $file."
3542         fi
3543     done
3544     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
3545 }
3546
3547 remove_install_override
3548 </pre></blockquote></p>
3549
3550 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
3551 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
3552 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
3553
3554 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
3555 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
3556 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
3557 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
3558 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
3559 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
3560 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
3561 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
3562 everyone.</p>
3563
3564 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
3565 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
3566 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
3567 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
3568
3569 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
3570 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
3571 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
3572 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
3573 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
3574
3575 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
3576 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
3577 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
3578 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
3579 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
3580
3581       </div>
3582       <div class="tags">
3583
3584
3585         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>.
3586
3587
3588       </div>
3589     </div>
3590     <div class="padding"></div>
3591
3592     <div class="entry">
3593       <div class="title">
3594         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_bye_subkeys_pgp_net__welcome_pool_sks_keyservers_net.html">Good bye subkeys.pgp.net, welcome pool.sks-keyservers.net</a>
3595       </div>
3596       <div class="date">
3597         10th September 2014
3598       </div>
3599       <div class="body">
3600         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
3601 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
3602 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
3603 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
3604 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
3605 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
3606 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
3607 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
3608 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
3609 those problems are gone now.</p>
3610
3611 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
3612 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
3613 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
3614 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
3615 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
3616
3617 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
3618 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
3619 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
3620
3621 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
3622 line:</p>
3623
3624 <p><blockquote><pre>
3625 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
3626 </pre></blockquote></p>
3627
3628 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
3629 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
3630 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
3631 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
3632
3633 <p><blockquote><pre>
3634 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
3635 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
3636 %
3637 </pre></blockquote></p>
3638
3639 <p>Now if only
3640 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
3641 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
3642 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
3643 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
3644 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
3645 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
3646 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
3647 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
3648 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
3649
3650       </div>
3651       <div class="tags">
3652
3653
3654         Tags: <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>.
3655
3656
3657       </div>
3658     </div>
3659     <div class="padding"></div>
3660
3661     <div class="entry">
3662       <div class="title">
3663         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Do_you_need_an_agreement_with_MPEG_LA_to_publish_and_broadcast_H_264_video_in_Norway_.html">Do you need an agreement with MPEG-LA to publish and broadcast H.264 video in Norway?</a>
3664       </div>
3665       <div class="date">
3666         25th August 2014
3667       </div>
3668       <div class="body">
3669         <p>Two years later, I am still not sure if it is legal here in Norway
3670 to use or publish a video in H.264 or MPEG4 format edited by the
3671 commercially licensed video editors, without limiting the use to
3672 create "personal" or "non-commercial" videos or get a license
3673 agreement with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com">MPEG LA</a>.  If one
3674 want to publish and broadcast video in a non-personal or commercial
3675 setting, it might be that those tools can not be used, or that video
3676 format can not be used, without breaking their copyright license.  I
3677 am not sure.
3678 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Trenger_en_avtale_med_MPEG_LA_for___publisere_og_kringkaste_H_264_video_.html">Back
3679 then</a>, I found that the copyright license terms for Adobe Premiere
3680 and Apple Final Cut Pro both specified that one could not use the
3681 program to produce anything else without a patent license from MPEG
3682 LA.  The issue is not limited to those two products, though.  Other
3683 much used products like those from Avid and Sorenson Media have terms
3684 of use are similar to those from Adobe and Apple.  The complicating
3685 factor making me unsure if those terms have effect in Norway or not is
3686 that the patents in question are not valid in Norway, but copyright
3687 licenses are.</p>
3688
3689 <p>These are the terms for Avid Artist Suite, according to their
3690 <a href="http://www.avid.com/US/about-avid/legal-notices/legal-enduserlicense2">published
3691 end user</a>
3692 <a href="http://www.avid.com/static/resources/common/documents/corporate/LICENSE.pdf">license
3693 text</a> (converted to lower case text for easier reading):</p>
3694
3695 <p><blockquote>
3696 <p>18.2. MPEG-4. MPEG-4 technology may be included with the
3697 software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice: </p>
3698
3699 <p>This product is licensed under the MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio
3700 license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer for (i)
3701 encoding video in compliance with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4
3702 video”) and/or (ii) decoding MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a
3703 consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or was
3704 obtained from a video provider licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4
3705 video.  No license is granted or shall be implied for any other
3706 use. Additional information including that relating to promotional,
3707 internal and commercial uses and licensing may be obtained from MPEG
3708 LA, LLC.  See http://www.mpegla.com. This product is licensed under
3709 the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license for encoding in compliance
3710 with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except that an additional license
3711 and payment of royalties are necessary for encoding in connection with
3712 (i) data stored or replicated in physical media which is paid for on a
3713 title by title basis and/or (ii) data which is paid for on a title by
3714 title basis and is transmitted to an end user for permanent storage
3715 and/or use, such additional license may be obtained from MPEG LA,
3716 LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for additional details.</p>
3717
3718 <p>18.3. H.264/AVC. H.264/AVC technology may be included with the
3719 software.  MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:</p>
3720
3721 <p>This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
3722 the personal use of a consumer or other uses in which it does not
3723 receive remuneration to (i) encode video in compliance with the AVC
3724 standard (“AVC video”) and/or (ii) decode AVC video that was encoded
3725 by a consumer engaged in a personal activity and/or was obtained from
3726 a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No license is granted
3727 or shall be implied for any other use. Additional information may be
3728 obtained from MPEG LA, L.L.C. See http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
3729 </blockquote></p>
3730
3731 <p>Note the requirement that the videos created can only be used for
3732 personal or non-commercial purposes.</p>
3733
3734 <p>The Sorenson Media software have
3735 <a href="http://www.sorensonmedia.com/terms/">similar terms</a>:</p>
3736
3737 <p><blockquote>
3738
3739 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4 Video
3740 Decoders and/or Encoders: Any such product is licensed under the
3741 MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio license for the personal and
3742 non-commercial use of a consumer for (i) encoding video in compliance
3743 with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4 video”) and/or (ii) decoding
3744 MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and
3745 non-commercial activity and/or was obtained from a video provider
3746 licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4 video. No license is granted or
3747 shall be implied for any other use. Additional information including
3748 that relating to promotional, internal and commercial uses and
3749 licensing may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See
3750 http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
3751
3752 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4
3753 Consumer Recorded Data Encoder, MPEG-4 Systems Internet Data Encoder,
3754 MPEG-4 Mobile Data Encoder, and/or MPEG-4 Unique Use Encoder: Any such
3755 product is licensed under the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license
3756 for encoding in compliance with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except
3757 that an additional license and payment of royalties are necessary for
3758 encoding in connection with (i) data stored or replicated in physical
3759 media which is paid for on a title by title basis and/or (ii) data
3760 which is paid for on a title by title basis and is transmitted to an
3761 end user for permanent storage and/or use. Such additional license may
3762 be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for
3763 additional details.</p>
3764
3765 </blockquote></p>
3766
3767 <p>Some free software like
3768 <a href="https://handbrake.fr/">Handbrake</A> and
3769 <a href="http://ffmpeg.org/">FFMPEG</a> uses GPL/LGPL licenses and do
3770 not have any such terms included, so for those, there is no
3771 requirement to limit the use to personal and non-commercial.</p>
3772
3773       </div>
3774       <div class="tags">
3775
3776
3777         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
3778
3779
3780       </div>
3781     </div>
3782     <div class="padding"></div>
3783
3784     <div class="entry">
3785       <div class="title">
3786         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html">Debian Edu interview: Bernd Zeitzen</a>
3787       </div>
3788       <div class="date">
3789         31st July 2014
3790       </div>
3791       <div class="body">
3792         <p>The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for
3793 schools, <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
3794 Skolelinux</a>, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
3795 involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
3796 from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
3797 the setup.  I managed to interview him this summer.</p>
3798
3799 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
3800
3801 <p>My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I'm married with Hedda, a self
3802 employed physiotherapist.  My former profession is tool maker, but I
3803 haven't worked for 30 years in this job.  30 years ago I started to
3804 support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
3805 administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
3806 Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
3807 Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
3808 works with Windows . :-(</p>
3809
3810 <p>In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
3811 Windows 98, 2000, XP, …, 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX.  Today we are running a
3812 Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of
3813 children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
3814 psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
3815 work with the documentations of our patients.</p>
3816
3817 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
3818 project?</strong></p>
3819
3820 <p>Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
3821 his school (<a href="http://www.gymnasium-harsewinkel.de/">Gymnasium
3822 Harsewinkel</a>).  They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
3823 were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
3824 software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
3825 computer skills in optional lessons.  I'm spending 4-6 hours a week
3826 with this job.</p>
3827
3828 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
3829 Edu?</strong></p>
3830
3831 <p>The independence.</p>
3832
3833 <p>First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
3834 software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
3835 included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.</p>
3836
3837 <p>Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
3838 possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices.  The
3839 servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
3840 working reliable. </p>
3841
3842 <p>We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45
3843 workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
3844 solution for all classrooms.  These machines are all booting from the
3845 terminal server.  In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile
3846 workstations.  Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
3847 machines in their classrooms.  Internet access is realized by a WLAN
3848 router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
3849 dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.</p>
3850
3851 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
3852 Edu?</strong></p>
3853
3854 <p>Teachers and pupils are Windows users.  &lt;Irony on&gt; And Linux
3855 isn't cool. It's software for freaks using the command line. &lt;Irony
3856 off&gt; They don't realize the stability of the system. </p>
3857
3858 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
3859
3860 <p>Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Samba,
3861 Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, … and Skolelinux / Debian Edu)</p>
3862
3863 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
3864 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
3865
3866 <p>In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
3867 which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
3868 teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
3869 Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
3870 Office. They don't know about the possibility to use Free Software
3871 instead.  Another problem are the publisher of school books.  They
3872 develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.</p>
3873
3874       </div>
3875       <div class="tags">
3876
3877
3878         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>.
3879
3880
3881       </div>
3882     </div>
3883     <div class="padding"></div>
3884
3885     <div class="entry">
3886       <div class="title">
3887         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/98_6_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html">98.6 percent done with the Norwegian draft translation of Free Culture</a>
3888       </div>
3889       <div class="date">
3890         23rd July 2014
3891       </div>
3892       <div class="body">
3893         <p>This summer I finally had time to continue working on the Norwegian
3894 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
3895 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
3896 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with todays copyright
3897 law.  Yesterday, I finally completed translated the book text.  There
3898 are still some foot/end notes left to translate, the colophon page
3899 need to be rewritten, and a few words and phrases still need to be
3900 translated, but the Norwegian text is ready for the first proof
3901 reading. :) More spell checking is needed, and several illustrations
3902 need to be cleaned up.  The work stopped up because I had to give
3903 priority to other projects the last year, and the progress graph of
3904 the translation show this very well:</p>
3905
3906 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
3907
3908 <p>If you want to read the result, check out the
3909 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
3910 project pages and the
3911 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
3912 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
3913 and HTML version available in the
3914 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
3915 directory</a>.</p>
3916
3917 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
3918 you find any.</p>
3919
3920       </div>
3921       <div class="tags">
3922
3923
3924         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>.
3925
3926
3927       </div>
3928     </div>
3929     <div class="padding"></div>
3930
3931     <div class="entry">
3932       <div class="title">
3933         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html">From English wiki to translated PDF and epub via Docbook</a>
3934       </div>
3935       <div class="date">
3936         17th June 2014
3937       </div>
3938       <div class="body">
3939         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
3940 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
3941 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
3942 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
3943 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
3944
3945 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
3946 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
3947 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
3948 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
3949 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
3950 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
3951 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
3952 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
3953 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
3954 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
3955 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
3956 goals.</p>
3957
3958 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
3959 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
3960 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
3961 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
3962 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
3963 chapters together into one large web page (aka
3964 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
3965 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
3966 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
3967 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
3968 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
3969 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
3970 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
3971 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
3972 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
3973 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
3974 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
3975 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
3976 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
3977 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
3978 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
3979 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
3980 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
3981 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
3982
3983 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
3984 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
3985 track the English original.  For this we use the
3986 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
3987 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
3988 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
3989 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
3990 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
3991 files), which the translations update with the native language
3992 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
3993 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
3994 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
3995 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
3996 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
3997 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
3998 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
3999 of the documentation.</p>
4000
4001 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
4002 recommend using
4003 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
4004 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
4005 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
4006 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
4007 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
4008 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
4009 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
4010 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
4011
4012 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
4013 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
4014 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
4015 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
4016 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
4017 translated images by storing translated versions in
4018 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
4019 package maintainers know more.</p>
4020
4021 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
4022 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
4023 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
4024 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
4025 PDF version</a> or the
4026 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
4027 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
4028 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
4029
4030 <p>To learn more, check out
4031 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
4032 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
4033 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
4034 manual on the wiki</a> and
4035 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
4036 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
4037
4038       </div>
4039       <div class="tags">
4040
4041
4042         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4043
4044
4045       </div>
4046     </div>
4047     <div class="padding"></div>
4048
4049     <div class="entry">
4050       <div class="title">
4051         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_car_computer_solution_.html">Free software car computer solution?</a>
4052       </div>
4053       <div class="date">
4054         29th May 2014
4055       </div>
4056       <div class="body">
4057         <p>Dear lazyweb.  I'm planning to set up a small Raspberry Pi computer
4058 in my car, connected to
4059 <a href="http://www.dx.com/p/400a-4-0-tft-lcd-digital-monitor-for-vehicle-parking-reverse-camera-1440x272-12v-dc-57776">a
4060 small screen</a> next to the rear mirror.  I plan to hook it up with a
4061 GPS and a USB wifi card too.  The idea is to get my own
4062 "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carputer">Carputer</a>".  But I
4063 wonder if someone already created a good free software solution for
4064 such car computer.</p>
4065
4066 <p>This is my current wish list for such system:</p>
4067
4068 <ul>
4069
4070  <li>Work on Raspberry Pi.</li>
4071
4072  <li>Show current speed limit based on location, and warn if going too
4073    fast (for example using color codes yellow and red on the screen,
4074    or make a sound).  This could be done either using either data from
4075    <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">Openstreetmap</a> or OCR
4076    info gathered from a dashboard camera.</li>
4077
4078  <li>Track automatic toll road passes and their cost, show total spent
4079    and make it possible to calculate toll costs for planned
4080    route.</li>
4081
4082  <li>Collect GPX tracks for use with OpenStreetMap.</li>
4083
4084  <li>Automatically detect and use any wireless connection to connect
4085    to home server.  Try IP over DNS
4086    (<a href="http://dev.kryo.se/iodine/">iodine</a>) or ICMP
4087    (<a href="http://code.gerade.org/hans/">Hans</a>) if direct
4088    connection do not work.</li>
4089
4090  <li>Set up mesh network to talk to other cars with the same system,
4091    or some standard car mesh protocol.</li>
4092
4093  <li>Warn when approaching speed cameras and speed camera ranges
4094    (speed calculated between two cameras).</li>
4095
4096  <li>Suport dashboard/front facing camera to discover speed limits and
4097    run OCR to track registration number of passing cars.</li>
4098
4099 </ul>
4100
4101 <p>If you know of any free software car computer system supporting
4102 some or all of these features, please let me know.</p>
4103
4104       </div>
4105       <div class="tags">
4106
4107
4108         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4109
4110
4111       </div>
4112     </div>
4113     <div class="padding"></div>
4114
4115     <div class="entry">
4116       <div class="title">
4117         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_the_Coverity_issues_in_Gnash_fixed_in_the_next_release.html">Half the Coverity issues in Gnash fixed in the next release</a>
4118       </div>
4119       <div class="date">
4120         29th April 2014
4121       </div>
4122       <div class="body">
4123         <p>I've been following <a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">the Gnash
4124 project</a> for quite a while now.  It is a free software
4125 implementation of Adobe Flash, both a standalone player and a browser
4126 plugin.  Gnash implement support for the AVM1 format (and not the
4127 newer AVM2 format - see
4128 <a href="http://lightspark.github.io/">Lightspark</a> for that one),
4129 allowing several flash based sites to work.  Thanks to the friendly
4130 developers at Youtube, it also work with Youtube videos, because the
4131 Javascript code at Youtube detect Gnash and serve a AVM1 player to
4132 those users. :) Would be great if someone found time to implement AVM2
4133 support, but it has not happened yet.  If you install both Lightspark
4134 and Gnash, Lightspark will invoke Gnash if it find a AVM1 flash file,
4135 so you can get both handled as free software.  Unfortunately,
4136 Lightspark so far only implement a small subset of AVM2, and many
4137 sites do not work yet.</p>
4138
4139 <p>A few months ago, I started looking at
4140 <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/">Coverity</a>, the static source
4141 checker used to find heaps and heaps of bugs in free software (thanks
4142 to the donation of a scanning service to free software projects by the
4143 company developing this non-free code checker), and Gnash was one of
4144 the projects I decided to check out.  Coverity is able to find lock
4145 errors, memory errors, dead code and more.  A few days ago they even
4146 extended it to also be able to find the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.
4147 There are heaps of checks being done on the instrumented code, and the
4148 amount of bogus warnings is quite low compared to the other static
4149 code checkers I have tested over the years.</p>
4150
4151 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I've been working with the other Gnash
4152 developers squashing bugs discovered by Coverity.  I was quite happy
4153 today when I checked the current status and saw that of the 777 issues
4154 detected so far, 374 are marked as fixed.  This make me confident that
4155 the next Gnash release will be more stable and more dependable than
4156 the previous one.  Most of the reported issues were and are in the
4157 test suite, but it also found a few in the rest of the code.</p>
4158
4159 <p>If you want to help out, you find us on
4160 <a href="https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev">the
4161 gnash-dev mailing list</a> and on
4162 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#gnash">the #gnash channel on
4163 irc.freenode.net IRC server</a>.</p>
4164
4165       </div>
4166       <div class="tags">
4167
4168
4169         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>.
4170
4171
4172       </div>
4173     </div>
4174     <div class="padding"></div>
4175
4176     <div class="entry">
4177       <div class="title">
4178         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Install_hardware_dependent_packages_using_tasksel__Isenkram_0_7_.html">Install hardware dependent packages using tasksel (Isenkram 0.7)</a>
4179       </div>
4180       <div class="date">
4181         23rd April 2014
4182       </div>
4183       <div class="body">
4184         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
4185 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
4186 So I implemented one, using
4187 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
4188 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
4189 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
4190 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
4191 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
4192 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
4193
4194 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
4195 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
4196 packages to install.  The first part is in
4197 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
4198 this:</p>
4199
4200 <p><blockquote><pre>
4201 Task: isenkram
4202 Section: hardware
4203 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
4204  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
4205  proposed.
4206 Test-new-install: mark show
4207 Relevance: 8
4208 Packages: for-current-hardware
4209 </pre></blockquote></p>
4210
4211 <p>The second part is in
4212 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
4213 this:</p>
4214
4215 <p><blockquote><pre>
4216 #!/bin/sh
4217 #
4218 (
4219     isenkram-lookup
4220     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
4221 ) | sort -u
4222 </pre></blockquote></p>
4223
4224 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
4225 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
4226 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
4227 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
4228 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
4229 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
4230
4231 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
4232 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
4233 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
4234 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
4235 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
4236 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
4237 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
4238 the python-apt code (bug
4239 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
4240 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
4241 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
4242 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
4243 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
4244 unstable today.</p>
4245
4246 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
4247 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
4248 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
4249 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
4250 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
4251 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
4252 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
4253 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
4254 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
4255
4256 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
4257 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
4258 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
4259 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
4260 package.  See also
4261 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
4262 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
4263 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
4264 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
4265
4266       </div>
4267       <div class="tags">
4268
4269
4270         Tags: <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>.
4271
4272
4273       </div>
4274     </div>
4275     <div class="padding"></div>
4276
4277     <div class="entry">
4278       <div class="title">
4279         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/FreedomBox_milestone___all_packages_now_in_Debian_Sid.html">FreedomBox milestone - all packages now in Debian Sid</a>
4280       </div>
4281       <div class="date">
4282         15th April 2014
4283       </div>
4284       <div class="body">
4285         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
4286 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
4287 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
4288 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
4289 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
4290 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
4291
4292 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
4293 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
4294 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
4295 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
4296 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
4297 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
4298 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
4299
4300 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
4301 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
4302 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
4303 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
4304 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
4305 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
4306 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
4307 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
4308 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
4309 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
4310 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
4311 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
4312
4313 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
4314 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
4315 become root:</p>
4316
4317 <p><pre>
4318 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
4319   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
4320   u-boot-tools
4321 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
4322   freedom-maker
4323 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
4324 </pre></p>
4325
4326 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
4327 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
4328 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
4329 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
4330 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
4331 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
4332 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
4333 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
4334
4335 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
4336 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
4337 the preseed values:</p>
4338
4339 <p><pre>
4340 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
4341 </pre></p>
4342
4343 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
4344 it still work.</p>
4345
4346 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
4347 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
4348 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
4349 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
4350 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
4351 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
4352 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
4353
4354 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
4355 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
4356 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
4357 irc.debian.org)</a> and
4358 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
4359 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
4360
4361       </div>
4362       <div class="tags">
4363
4364
4365         Tags: <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>.
4366
4367
4368       </div>
4369     </div>
4370     <div class="padding"></div>
4371
4372     <div class="entry">
4373       <div class="title">
4374         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/S3QL__a_locally_mounted_cloud_file_system___nice_free_software.html">S3QL, a locally mounted cloud file system - nice free software</a>
4375       </div>
4376       <div class="date">
4377          9th April 2014
4378       </div>
4379       <div class="body">
4380         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
4381 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
4382 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
4383 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
4384 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
4385 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
4386 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
4387 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
4388 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
4389 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
4390 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
4391 have looked at a system called
4392 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
4393 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
4394
4395 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
4396 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
4397 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
4398 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
4399 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
4400 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
4401 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
4402 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
4403 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
4404 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
4405 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
4406 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
4407 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
4408
4409 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
4410 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
4411 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
4412 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
4413 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
4414 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
4415 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
4416 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
4417 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
4418 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
4419 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
4420 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
4421 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
4422 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
4423 account.</p>
4424
4425 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
4426 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
4427 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
4428 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
4429 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
4430 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
4431 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
4432
4433 <p><blockquote><pre>
4434 [s3c]
4435 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
4436 backend-login: API-login
4437 backend-password: API-password
4438 fs-passphrase: local-password
4439 </pre></blockquote></p>
4440
4441 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
4442 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
4443 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
4444 details and password to create it:</p>
4445
4446 <p><blockquote><pre>
4447 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
4448 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
4449   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
4450 Enter backend login:
4451 Enter backend password:
4452 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
4453 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
4454 Enter encryption password:
4455 Confirm encryption password:
4456 Generating random encryption key...
4457 Creating metadata tables...
4458 Dumping metadata...
4459 ..objects..
4460 ..blocks..
4461 ..inodes..
4462 ..inode_blocks..
4463 ..symlink_targets..
4464 ..names..
4465 ..contents..
4466 ..ext_attributes..
4467 Compressing and uploading metadata...
4468 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
4469 # </pre></blockquote></p>
4470
4471 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
4472
4473 <p><blockquote><pre>
4474 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
4475   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
4476 Using 4 upload threads.
4477 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
4478 Reading metadata...
4479 ..objects..
4480 ..blocks..
4481 ..inodes..
4482 ..inode_blocks..
4483 ..symlink_targets..
4484 ..names..
4485 ..contents..
4486 ..ext_attributes..
4487 Mounting filesystem...
4488 # df -h /s3ql
4489 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
4490 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
4491 #
4492 </pre></blockquote></p>
4493
4494 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
4495 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
4496 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
4497 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
4498 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
4499 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
4500
4501 <p><blockquote><pre>
4502 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
4503 #
4504 </pre></blockquote></p>
4505
4506 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
4507 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
4508 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
4509 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
4510 file system:</p>
4511
4512 <p><blockquote><pre>
4513 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
4514 Using cached metadata.
4515 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
4516 Checking DB integrity...
4517 Creating temporary extra indices...
4518 Checking lost+found...
4519 Checking cached objects...
4520 Checking names (refcounts)...
4521 Checking contents (names)...
4522 Checking contents (inodes)...
4523 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
4524 Checking objects (reference counts)...
4525 Checking objects (backend)...
4526 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
4527 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
4528 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
4529 Checking objects (sizes)...
4530 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
4531 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
4532 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
4533 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
4534 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
4535 Checking inodes (sizes)...
4536 Checking extended attributes (names)...
4537 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
4538 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
4539 Checking directory reachability...
4540 Checking unix conventions...
4541 Checking referential integrity...
4542 Dropping temporary indices...
4543 Backing up old metadata...
4544 Dumping metadata...
4545 ..objects..
4546 ..blocks..
4547 ..inodes..
4548 ..inode_blocks..
4549 ..symlink_targets..
4550 ..names..
4551 ..contents..
4552 ..ext_attributes..
4553 Compressing and uploading metadata...
4554 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
4555 #
4556 </pre></blockquote></p>
4557
4558 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
4559 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
4560 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
4561 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
4562 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
4563 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
4564 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
4565 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
4566 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
4567 working set.</p>
4568
4569 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
4570 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
4571 busy:</p>
4572
4573 <p><blockquote><pre>
4574 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
4575   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
4576 Using 8 upload threads.
4577 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
4578 #
4579 </pre></blockquote></p>
4580
4581 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
4582 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
4583 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
4584 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
4585 s3qlctrl:
4586
4587 <p><blockquote><pre>
4588 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
4589 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
4590 #
4591 </pre></blockquote></p>
4592
4593 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
4594 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
4595 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
4596 a report:</p>
4597
4598 <p><blockquote><pre>
4599 # s3qlstat /s3ql
4600 Directory entries:    9141
4601 Inodes:               9143
4602 Data blocks:          8851
4603 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
4604 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
4605 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
4606 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
4607 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
4608 #
4609 </pre></blockquote></p>
4610
4611 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
4612 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
4613 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
4614 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
4615 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
4616 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
4617 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
4618 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
4619 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
4620 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
4621 best.</p>
4622
4623 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
4624 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
4625 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
4626 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
4627 poster is titled
4628 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
4629 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
4630 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
4631 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
4632 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
4633
4634 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
4635 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
4636 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
4637 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
4638 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
4639 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
4640 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
4641 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
4642
4643 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
4644 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
4645 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
4646 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
4647 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
4648 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
4649 only read from it.</p>
4650
4651 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4652 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4653 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4654
4655       </div>
4656       <div class="tags">
4657
4658
4659         Tags: <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>.
4660
4661
4662       </div>
4663     </div>
4664     <div class="padding"></div>
4665
4666     <div class="entry">
4667       <div class="title">
4668         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ReactOS_Windows_clone___nice_free_software.html">ReactOS Windows clone - nice free software</a>
4669       </div>
4670       <div class="date">
4671          1st April 2014
4672       </div>
4673       <div class="body">
4674         <p>Microsoft have announced that Windows XP reaches its end of life
4675 2014-04-08, in 7 days.  But there are heaps of machines still running
4676 Windows XP, and depending on Windows XP to run their applications, and
4677 upgrading will be expensive, both when it comes to money and when it
4678 comes to the amount of effort needed to migrate from Windows XP to a
4679 new operating system.  Some obvious options (buy new a Windows
4680 machine, buy a MacOSX machine, install Linux on the existing machine)
4681 are already well known and covered elsewhere.  Most of them involve
4682 leaving the user applications installed on Windows XP behind and
4683 trying out replacements or updated versions. In this blog post I want
4684 to mention one strange bird that allow people to keep the hardware and
4685 the existing Windows XP applications and run them on a free software
4686 operating system that is Windows XP compatible.</p>
4687
4688 <p><a href="http://www.reactos.org/">ReactOS</a> is a free software
4689 operating system (GNU GPL licensed) working on providing a operating
4690 system that is binary compatible with Windows, able to run windows
4691 programs directly and to use Windows drivers for hardware directly.
4692 The project goal is for Windows user to keep their existing machines,
4693 drivers and software, and gain the advantages from user a operating
4694 system without usage limitations caused by non-free licensing.  It is
4695 a Windows clone running directly on the hardware, so quite different
4696 from the approach taken by <a href="http://www.winehq.org/">the Wine
4697 project</a>, which make it possible to run Windows binaries on
4698 Linux.</p>
4699
4700 <p>The ReactOS project share code with the Wine project, so most
4701 shared libraries available on Windows are already implemented already.
4702 There is also a software manager like the one we are used to on Linux,
4703 allowing the user to install free software applications with a simple
4704 click directly from the Internet.  Check out the
4705 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/screenshots">screen shots on the
4706 project web site</a> for an idea what it look like (it looks just like
4707 Windows before metro).</p>
4708
4709 <p>I do not use ReactOS myself, preferring Linux and Unix like
4710 operating systems.  I've tested it, and it work fine in a virt-manager
4711 virtual machine.  The browser, minesweeper, notepad etc is working
4712 fine as far as I can tell.  Unfortunately, my main test application
4713 is the software included on a CD with the Lego Mindstorms NXT, which
4714 seem to install just fine from CD but fail to leave any binaries on
4715 the disk after the installation.  So no luck with that test software.
4716 No idea why, but hope someone else figure out and fix the problem.
4717 I've tried the ReactOS Live ISO on a physical machine, and it seemed
4718 to work just fine.  If you like Windows and want to keep running your
4719 old Windows binaries, check it out by
4720 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/download">downloading</a> the
4721 installation CD, the live CD or the preinstalled virtual machine
4722 image.</p>
4723
4724       </div>
4725       <div class="tags">
4726
4727
4728         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos</a>.
4729
4730
4731       </div>
4732     </div>
4733     <div class="padding"></div>
4734
4735     <div class="entry">
4736       <div class="title">
4737         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Roger_Marsal.html">Debian Edu interview: Roger Marsal</a>
4738       </div>
4739       <div class="date">
4740         30th March 2014
4741       </div>
4742       <div class="body">
4743         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
4744 keep gaining new users.  Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC,
4745 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>, with a
4746 wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great
4747 contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background.</p>
4748
4749 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
4750
4751 <p>My name is Roger Marsal, I'm 27 years old (1986 generation) and I
4752 live in Barcelona, Spain. I've got a strong business background and I
4753 work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent.  Additionally,
4754 I've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the
4755 last development phase of a new social networking concept.</p>
4756
4757 <p>I'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years
4758 ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability
4759 and as a necessary step to gain expertise.</p>
4760
4761 <p>In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I
4762 can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux
4763 hunger.</p>
4764
4765 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
4766 project?</strong></p>
4767
4768 <p>I discovered the <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP</a> advantages
4769 with "Ubuntu 12.04 alternate install" and after a year of use I
4770 started looking for an alternative.  Even though I highly value and
4771 respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to
4772 change to a more robust and stable alternative.  As far as I was using
4773 Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install
4774 Debian and configure an LTSP server myself.  Surprised, I discovered
4775 that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent,
4776 and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and
4777 running.  I just loved it.</p>
4778
4779 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
4780 Edu?</strong></p>
4781
4782 <p>I found a main advantage in that, once you know "the tips and
4783 tricks", a new installation just works out of the box. It's the most
4784 complete alternative I've found to create an LTSP network. All the
4785 other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to
4786 be made of steel.</p>
4787
4788 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
4789 Edu?</strong></p>
4790
4791 <p>I found two main disadvantages.</p>
4792
4793 <p>I'm not an expert but I've got notions and I had to spent a considerable
4794 amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I'm quite
4795 stubborn and I just worked until I did but I'm sure many people with few
4796 resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched
4797 or dropped.</p>
4798
4799 <p>It's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved
4800 this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets
4801 more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can
4802 discourage many people too.</p>
4803
4804 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
4805
4806 <p>I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and
4807 Virtualbox.</p>
4808
4809
4810 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
4811 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
4812
4813 <p>I don't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free
4814 attribute in both "freedom" and "no price" meanings is what will
4815 really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of
4816 the <a href="http://www.r-project.org/">"R" statistical language</a>; a
4817 few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people.
4818 Today it's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many
4819 different level of studies.  I believe free and open software will
4820 increasingly gain popularity, but I'm sure schools will be one of the
4821 first scenarios where this will happen.</p>
4822
4823       </div>
4824       <div class="tags">
4825
4826
4827         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>.
4828
4829
4830       </div>
4831     </div>
4832     <div class="padding"></div>
4833
4834     <div class="entry">
4835       <div class="title">
4836         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">Public Trusted Timestamping services for everyone</a>
4837       </div>
4838       <div class="date">
4839         25th March 2014
4840       </div>
4841       <div class="body">
4842         <p>Did you ever need to store logs or other files in a way that would
4843 allow it to be used as evidence in court, and needed a way to
4844 demonstrate without reasonable doubt that the file had not been
4845 changed since it was created?  Or, did you ever need to document that
4846 a given document was received at some point in time, like some
4847 archived document or the answer to an exam, and not changed after it
4848 was received?  The problem in these settings is to remove the need to
4849 trust yourself and your computers, while still being able to prove
4850 that a file is the same as it was at some given time in the past.</p>
4851
4852 <p>A solution to these problems is to have a trusted third party
4853 "stamp" the document and verify that at some given time the document
4854 looked a given way.  Such
4855 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notarius">notarius</a> service
4856 have been around for thousands of years, and its digital equivalent is
4857 called a
4858 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
4859 timestamping service</a>.  <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">The Internet
4860 Engineering Task Force</a> standardised how such service could work a
4861 few years ago as <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC
4862 3161</a>.  The mechanism is simple.  Create a hash of the file in
4863 question, send it to a trusted third party which add a time stamp to
4864 the hash and sign the result with its private key, and send back the
4865 signed hash + timestamp.  Both email, FTP and HTTP can be used to
4866 request such signature, depending on what is provided by the service
4867 used. Anyone with the document and the signature can then verify that
4868 the document matches the signature by creating their own hash and
4869 checking the signature using the trusted third party public key.
4870 There are several commercial services around providing such
4871 timestamping.  A quick search for
4872 "<a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rfc+3161+service">rfc 3161
4873 service</a>" pointed me to at least
4874 <a href="https://www.digistamp.com/technical/how-a-digital-time-stamp-works/">DigiStamp</a>,
4875 <a href="http://www.quovadisglobal.co.uk/CertificateServices/SigningServices/TimeStamp.aspx">Quo
4876 Vadis</a>,
4877 <a href="https://www.globalsign.com/timestamp-service/">Global Sign</a>
4878 and <a href="http://www.globaltrustfinder.com/TSADefault.aspx">Global
4879 Trust Finder</a>.  The system work as long as the private key of the
4880 trusted third party is not compromised.</p>
4881
4882 <p>But as far as I can tell, there are very few public trusted
4883 timestamp services available for everyone.  I've been looking for one
4884 for a while now. But yesterday I found one over at
4885 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">Deutches
4886 Forschungsnetz</a> mentioned in
4887 <a href="http://www.d-mueller.de/blog/dealing-with-trusted-timestamps-in-php-rfc-3161/">a
4888 blog by David Müller</a>.  I then found
4889 <a href="http://www.rz.uni-greifswald.de/support/dfn-pki-zertifikate/zeitstempeldienst.html">a
4890 good recipe on how to use the service</a> over at the University of
4891 Greifswald.</p>
4892
4893 <p><a href="http://www.openssl.org/">The OpenSSL library</a> contain
4894 both server and tools to use and set up your own signing service.  See
4895 the ts(1SSL), tsget(1SSL) manual pages for more details.  The
4896 following shell script demonstrate how to extract a signed timestamp
4897 for any file on the disk in a Debian environment:</p>
4898
4899 <p><blockquote><pre>
4900 #!/bin/sh
4901 set -e
4902 url="http://zeitstempel.dfn.de"
4903 caurl="https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt"
4904 reqfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsq)
4905 resfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsr)
4906 cafile=chain.txt
4907 if [ ! -f $cafile ] ; then
4908     wget -O $cafile "$caurl"
4909 fi
4910 openssl ts -query -data "$1" -cert | tee "$reqfile" \
4911     | /usr/lib/ssl/misc/tsget -h "$url" -o "$resfile"
4912 openssl ts -reply -in "$resfile" -text 1>&2
4913 openssl ts -verify -data "$1" -in "$resfile" -CAfile "$cafile" 1>&2
4914 base64 < "$resfile"
4915 rm "$reqfile" "$resfile"
4916 </pre></blockquote></p>
4917
4918 <p>The argument to the script is the file to timestamp, and the output
4919 is a base64 encoded version of the signature to STDOUT and details
4920 about the signature to STDERR.  Note that due to
4921 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=742553">a bug
4922 in the tsget script</a>, you might need to modify the included script
4923 and remove the last line.  Or just write your own HTTP uploader using
4924 curl. :) Now you too can prove and verify that files have not been
4925 changed.</p>
4926
4927 <p>But the Internet need more public trusted timestamp services.
4928 Perhaps something for <a href="http://www.uninett.no/">Uninett</a> or
4929 my work place the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
4930 to set up?</p>
4931
4932       </div>
4933       <div class="tags">
4934
4935
4936         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
4937
4938
4939       </div>
4940     </div>
4941     <div class="padding"></div>
4942
4943     <div class="entry">
4944       <div class="title">
4945         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Video_DVD_reader_library___python_dvdvideo___nice_free_software.html">Video DVD reader library / python-dvdvideo - nice free software</a>
4946       </div>
4947       <div class="date">
4948         21st March 2014
4949       </div>
4950       <div class="body">
4951         <p>Keeping your DVD collection safe from scratches and curious
4952 children fingers while still having it available when you want to see a
4953 movie is not straight forward.  My preferred method at the moment is
4954 to store a full copy of the ISO on a hard drive, and use VLC, Popcorn
4955 Hour or other useful players to view the resulting file.  This way the
4956 subtitles and bonus material are still available and using the ISO is
4957 just like inserting the original DVD record in the DVD player.</p>
4958
4959 <p>Earlier I used dd for taking security copies, but it do not handle
4960 DVDs giving read errors (which are quite a few of them).  I've also
4961 tried using
4962 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">dvdbackup
4963 and genisoimage</a>, but these days I use the marvellous python library
4964 and program
4965 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">python-dvdvideo</a>
4966 written by Bastian Blank.  It is
4967 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/python-dvdvideo.html">in Debian
4968 already</a> and the binary package name is python3-dvdvideo. Instead
4969 of trying to read every block from the DVD, it parses the file
4970 structure and figure out which block on the DVD is actually in used,
4971 and only read those blocks from the DVD.  This work surprisingly well,
4972 and I have been able to almost backup my entire DVD collection using
4973 this method.</p>
4974
4975 <p>So far, python-dvdvideo have failed on between 10 and
4976 20 DVDs, which is a small fraction of my collection.  The most common
4977 problem is
4978 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=720831">DVDs
4979 using UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 characters</a>, which according to
4980 Bastian is against the DVD specification (and seem to cause some
4981 players to fail too).  A rarer problem is what seem to be inconsistent
4982 DVD structures, as the python library
4983 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=723079">claim
4984 there is a overlap between objects</a>.  An equally rare problem claim
4985 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=741878">some
4986 value is out of range</a>.  No idea what is going on there.  I wish I
4987 knew enough about the DVD format to fix these, to ensure my movie
4988 collection will stay with me in the future.</p>
4989
4990 <p>So, if you need to keep your DVDs safe, back them up using
4991 python-dvdvideo. :)</p>
4992
4993       </div>
4994       <div class="tags">
4995
4996
4997         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/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
4998
4999
5000       </div>
5001     </div>
5002     <div class="padding"></div>
5003
5004     <div class="entry">
5005       <div class="title">
5006         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Freedombox_on_Dreamplug__Raspberry_Pi_and_virtual_x86_machine.html">Freedombox on Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and virtual x86 machine</a>
5007       </div>
5008       <div class="date">
5009         14th March 2014
5010       </div>
5011       <div class="body">
5012         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
5013 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
5014 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
5015 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
5016 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
5017 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
5018 release (0.2).</p>
5019
5020 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
5021 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
5022 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
5023 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
5024 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
5025 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
5026 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
5027 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
5028 and build using
5029 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
5030 with a user with sudo access to become root:
5031
5032 <pre>
5033 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
5034   freedom-maker
5035 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
5036   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
5037   u-boot-tools
5038 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
5039 </pre>
5040
5041 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
5042 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
5043 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
5044 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
5045 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
5046 kpartx call.</p>
5047
5048 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
5049 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
5050 the preseed values:</p>
5051
5052 <pre>
5053 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
5054 </pre>
5055
5056 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
5057 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
5058 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
5059 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
5060 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
5061 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
5062
5063 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
5064 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
5065 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
5066 irc.debian.org)</a> and
5067 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
5068 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
5069
5070       </div>
5071       <div class="tags">
5072
5073
5074         Tags: <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>.
5075
5076
5077       </div>
5078     </div>
5079     <div class="padding"></div>
5080
5081     <div class="entry">
5082       <div class="title">
5083         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_add_extra_storage_servers_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">How to add extra storage servers in Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
5084       </div>
5085       <div class="date">
5086         12th March 2014
5087       </div>
5088       <div class="body">
5089         <p>On larger sites, it is useful to use a dedicated storage server for
5090 storing user home directories and data.  The design for handling this
5091 in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, is
5092 to update the automount rules in LDAP and let the automount daemon on
5093 the clients take care of the rest.  I was reminded about the need to
5094 document this better when one of the customers of
5095 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a>, where I am
5096 on the board of directors, asked about how to do this.  The steps to
5097 get this working are the following:</p>
5098
5099 <p><ol>
5100
5101 <li>Add new storage server in DNS.  I use nas-server.intern as the
5102 example host here.</li>
5103
5104 <li>Add automoun LDAP information about this server in LDAP, to allow
5105 all clients to automatically mount it on reqeust.</li>
5106
5107 <li>Add the relevant entries in tjener.intern:/etc/fstab, because
5108 tjener.intern do not use automount to avoid mounting loops.</li>
5109
5110 </ol></p>
5111
5112 <p>DNS entries are added in GOsa², and not described here.  Follow the
5113 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/GettingStarted">instructions
5114 in the manual</a> (Machine Management with GOsa² in section Getting
5115 started).</p>
5116
5117 <p>Ensure that the NFS export points on the server are exported to the
5118 relevant subnets or machines:</p>
5119
5120 <p><blockquote><pre>
5121 root@tjener:~# showmount -e nas-server
5122 Export list for nas-server:
5123 /storage         10.0.0.0/8
5124 root@tjener:~#
5125 </pre></blockquote></p>
5126
5127 <p>Here everything on the backbone network is granted access to the
5128 /storage export.  With NFSv3 it is slightly better to limit it to
5129 netgroup membership or single IP addresses to have some limits on the
5130 NFS access.</p>
5131
5132 <p>The next step is to update LDAP.  This can not be done using GOsa²,
5133 because it lack a module for automount.  Instead, use ldapvi and add
5134 the required LDAP objects using an editor.</p>
5135
5136 <p><blockquote><pre>
5137 ldapvi --ldap-conf -ZD '(cn=admin)' -b ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
5138 </pre></blockquote></p>
5139
5140 <p>When the editor show up, add the following LDAP objects at the
5141 bottom of the document.  The "/&" part in the last LDAP object is a
5142 wild card matching everything the nas-server exports, removing the
5143 need to list individual mount points in LDAP.</p>
5144
5145 <p><blockquote><pre>
5146 add cn=nas-server,ou=auto.skole,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
5147 objectClass: automount
5148 cn: nas-server
5149 automountInformation: -fstype=autofs --timeout=60 ldap:ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
5150
5151 add ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
5152 objectClass: top
5153 objectClass: automountMap
5154 ou: auto.nas-server
5155
5156 add cn=/,ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
5157 objectClass: automount
5158 cn: /
5159 automountInformation: -fstype=nfs,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,rw,intr,hard,nodev,nosuid,noatime nas-server.intern:/&
5160 </pre></blockquote></p>
5161
5162 <p>The last step to remember is to mount the relevant mount points in
5163 tjener.intern by adding them to /etc/fstab, creating the mount
5164 directories using mkdir and running "mount -a" to mount them.</p>
5165
5166 <p>When this is done, your users should be able to access the files on
5167 the storage server directly by just visiting the
5168 /tjener/nas-server/storage/ directory using any application on any
5169 workstation, LTSP client or LTSP server.</p>
5170
5171       </div>
5172       <div class="tags">
5173
5174
5175         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>.
5176
5177
5178       </div>
5179     </div>
5180     <div class="padding"></div>
5181
5182     <div class="entry">
5183       <div class="title">
5184         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_home_and_release_1_0_for_netgroup_and_innetgr__aka_ng_utils_.html">New home and release 1.0 for netgroup and innetgr (aka ng-utils)</a>
5185       </div>
5186       <div class="date">
5187         22nd February 2014
5188       </div>
5189       <div class="body">
5190         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
5191 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
5192 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
5193 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
5194 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
5195 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
5196 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
5197 proper home since then.</p>
5198
5199 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
5200 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
5201 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
5202 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
5203 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
5204
5205 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
5206 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
5207 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
5208 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
5209 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
5210 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
5211 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
5212 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
5213 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
5214
5215       </div>
5216       <div class="tags">
5217
5218
5219         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5220
5221
5222       </div>
5223     </div>
5224     <div class="padding"></div>
5225
5226     <div class="entry">
5227       <div class="title">
5228         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
5229       </div>
5230       <div class="date">
5231          3rd February 2014
5232       </div>
5233       <div class="body">
5234         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
5235 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
5236 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
5237 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
5238 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
5239 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
5240 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
5241 <a href="http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz">http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz</a>,
5242 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
5243
5244 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
5245 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
5246 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
5247 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
5248 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
5249 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
5250
5251 <p><blockquote><pre>
5252 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
5253 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
5254 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
5255 dhclient /dev/eth0
5256 </pre></blockquote></p>
5257
5258 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
5259 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
5260 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
5261
5262 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
5263 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
5264 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
5265 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
5266 side.</p>
5267
5268 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
5269 stuff:</p>
5270
5271 <p><blockquote><pre>
5272 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
5273 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
5274 EOF
5275 apt-get update
5276 apt-get dist-upgrade
5277 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
5278     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
5279 update-alternatives --config runsystem
5280 </pre></blockquote></p>
5281
5282 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
5283 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
5284 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
5285 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
5286 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
5287 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
5288 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
5289 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
5290 ssh instead.
5291
5292 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
5293 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
5294 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
5295 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
5296 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
5297 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
5298
5299 <p><blockquote><pre>
5300 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
5301 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
5302 EOF
5303 </pre></blockquote></p>
5304
5305 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
5306 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
5307 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
5308 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
5309
5310 <p><blockquote><pre>
5311 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
5312 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
5313 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
5314 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
5315 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
5316 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
5317 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
5318 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
5319 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
5320 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
5321 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
5322 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
5323 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
5324 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
5325 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
5326 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
5327 #
5328 </pre></blockquote></p>
5329
5330 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
5331 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
5332 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
5333 command line stuff.<p>
5334
5335       </div>
5336       <div class="tags">
5337
5338
5339         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>.
5340
5341
5342       </div>
5343     </div>
5344     <div class="padding"></div>
5345
5346     <div class="entry">
5347       <div class="title">
5348         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_fist_full_of_non_anonymous_Bitcoins.html">A fist full of non-anonymous Bitcoins</a>
5349       </div>
5350       <div class="date">
5351         29th January 2014
5352       </div>
5353       <div class="body">
5354         <p>Bitcoin is a incredible use of peer to peer communication and
5355 encryption, allowing direct and immediate money transfer without any
5356 central control.  It is sometimes claimed to be ideal for illegal
5357 activity, which I believe is quite a long way from the truth.  At least
5358 I would not conduct illegal money transfers using a system where the
5359 details of every transaction are kept forever.  This point is
5360 investigated in
5361 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">USENIX ;login:</a>
5362 from December 2013, in the article
5363 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/03_meiklejohn-online.pdf">A
5364 Fistful of Bitcoins - Characterizing Payments Among Men with No
5365 Names</a>" by Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole,Grant Jordan, Kirill
5366 Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage.  They
5367 analyse the transaction log in the Bitcoin system, using it to find
5368 addresses belong to individuals and organisations and follow the flow
5369 of money from both Bitcoin theft and trades on Silk Road to where the
5370 money end up.  This is how they wrap up their article:</p>
5371
5372 <p><blockquote>
5373 <p>"To demonstrate the usefulness of this type of analysis, we turned
5374 our attention to criminal activity. In the Bitcoin economy, criminal
5375 activity can appear in a number of forms, such as dealing drugs on
5376 Silk Road or simply stealing someone else’s bitcoins. We followed the
5377 flow of bitcoins out of Silk Road (in particular, from one notorious
5378 address) and from a number of highly publicized thefts to see whether
5379 we could track the bitcoins to known services. Although some of the
5380 thieves attempted to use sophisticated mixing techniques (or possibly
5381 mix services) to obscure the flow of bitcoins, for the most part
5382 tracking the bitcoins was quite straightforward, and we ultimately saw
5383 large quantities of bitcoins flow to a variety of exchanges directly
5384 from the point of theft (or the withdrawal from Silk Road).</p>
5385
5386 <p>As acknowledged above, following stolen bitcoins to the point at
5387 which they are deposited into an exchange does not in itself identify
5388 the thief; however, it does enable further de-anonymization in the
5389 case in which certain agencies can determine (through, for example,
5390 subpoena power) the real-world owner of the account into which the
5391 stolen bitcoins were deposited.  Because such exchanges seem to serve
5392 as chokepoints into and out of the Bitcoin economy (i.e., there are
5393 few alternative ways to cash out), we conclude that using Bitcoin for
5394 money laundering or other illicit purposes does not (at least at
5395 present) seem to be particularly attractive."</p>
5396 </blockquote><p>
5397
5398 <p>These researches are not the first to analyse the Bitcoin
5399 transaction log.  The 2011 paper
5400 "<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524">An Analysis of Anonymity in
5401 the Bitcoin System</A>" by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan is
5402 summarized like this:</p>
5403
5404 <p><blockquote>
5405 "Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a
5406 complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by
5407 public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will
5408 attempt to construct the one-to-many mapping between users and
5409 public-keys and associate information external to the system with the
5410 users. Bitcoin tries to prevent this attack by storing the mapping of
5411 a user to his or her public-keys on that user's node only and by
5412 allowing each user to generate as many public-keys as required. In
5413 this chapter we consider the topological structure of two networks
5414 derived from Bitcoin's public transaction history. We show that the
5415 two networks have a non-trivial topological structure, provide
5416 complementary views of the Bitcoin system and have implications for
5417 anonymity. We combine these structures with external information and
5418 techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate
5419 an alleged theft of Bitcoins, which, at the time of the theft, had a
5420 market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars."
5421 </blockquote></p>
5422
5423 <p>I hope these references can help kill the urban myth that Bitcoin
5424 is anonymous.  It isn't really a good fit for illegal activites.  Use
5425 cash if you need to stay anonymous, at least until regular DNA
5426 sampling of notes and coins become the norm. :)</p>
5427
5428 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5429 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5430 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5431
5432       </div>
5433       <div class="tags">
5434
5435
5436         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix</a>.
5437
5438
5439       </div>
5440     </div>
5441     <div class="padding"></div>
5442
5443     <div class="entry">
5444       <div class="title">
5445         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
5446       </div>
5447       <div class="date">
5448         14th January 2014
5449       </div>
5450       <div class="body">
5451         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
5452 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
5453 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
5454 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
5455 the source.  The company behind it provide
5456 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
5457 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
5458 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
5459 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
5460 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
5461 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
5462 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
5463 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
5464 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
5465 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
5466 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
5467 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
5468 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
5469 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
5470 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
5471 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
5472 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
5473 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
5474 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
5475
5476 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
5477
5478 <ul>
5479
5480   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
5481   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
5482   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
5483
5484 </ul>
5485
5486 <p>You can
5487 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
5488 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
5489 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
5490 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
5491 include a test suite check.</p>
5492
5493       </div>
5494       <div class="tags">
5495
5496
5497         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5498
5499
5500       </div>
5501     </div>
5502     <div class="padding"></div>
5503
5504     <div class="entry">
5505       <div class="title">
5506         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html">Debian Edu interview: Dominik George</a>
5507       </div>
5508       <div class="date">
5509         25th December 2013
5510       </div>
5511       <div class="body">
5512         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
5513 project</a> consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
5514 was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
5515 up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
5516 successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School.  Say hello
5517 to <a href="https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Natureshadow">Dominik
5518 George</a>.</p>
5519
5520 <!-- http://www.dominik-george.de/images/foto.jpg -->
5521
5522 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
5523
5524 <p>I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
5525 life with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a
5526 student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
5527 Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
5528 voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
5529 a bit vacant right now however.</p>
5530
5531 <p>I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
5532 (public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
5533 around 2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
5534 it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
5535 network of that school together with a team of very interested and
5536 talented students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to
5537 learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
5538 to help building another school's informational education concept from
5539 scratch.</p>
5540
5541 <p>That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids
5542 and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
5543 ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.</p>
5544
5545 <p>When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
5546 and cycling.</p>
5547
5548 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
5549 project?</strong></p>
5550
5551 <p>I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
5552 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">FrOSCon</a> and visited the project
5553 booth. I think I wasn't too interested back then because I used to
5554 have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
5555 own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
5556 "out-of-the-box" solution ;).</p>
5557
5558 <p>The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
5559 <a href="http://www.openrheinruhr.de">OpenRheinRuhr</a> 2011 when the
5560 BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
5561 really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
5562 ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
5563 a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
5564 guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
5565 small demonstration, but there wasn't any real feedback and the guys
5566 seemed rather uninterested.</p>
5567
5568 <p>After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
5569 mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
5570 reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
5571 basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!</p>
5572
5573 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
5574 Edu?</strong></p>
5575
5576 <p>The most important advantage seems to be that it "just
5577 works". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
5578 in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
5579 without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
5580 from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't
5581 have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
5582 and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
5583 server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
5584 notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
5585 and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
5586 it. I could use 8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
5587 tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that's enough to say
5588 that it rocks!</p>
5589
5590 <p>Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no
5591 politician will ever permit a setup described as "Debian, an universal
5592 operating system, with some really cool educational tools" while they
5593 will be jsut fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
5594 school network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
5595 this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
5596 too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).</p>
5597
5598 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
5599 Edu?</strong></p>
5600
5601 <p>I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
5602 answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
5603 other words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I
5604 can list a few points about that:</p>
5605
5606 <ul>
5607
5608  <li>always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
5609  <li>be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
5610  <li>be helpful at being helpful ;)
5611
5612 </ul>
5613
5614 <p>I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!</p>
5615
5616 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
5617
5618 <p>First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
5619 all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
5620 year.</p>
5621
5622 <p>I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
5623 run text tools. I use
5624 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm">mksh</a> as shell,
5625 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/jupp.htm">jupp</a> as very advanced
5626 text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
5627 based full-featured student management software with the two),
5628 <a href="http://mcabber.com/">mcabber</a> for XMPP and
5629 <a href="http://www.irssi.org/">irssi</a> for IRC. For that overly
5630 coloured world called the WWW, I use
5631 <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/">Iceweasel
5632 (Firefox)</a>. Oh, and <a href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a> for
5633 e-mail.</p>
5634
5635 <p>However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
5636 are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
5637 least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
5638 kids. One of these things is <a href="http://jappix.org/">Jappix</a>,
5639 which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
5640 Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
5641 Facebook now ;).</p>
5642
5643 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
5644 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
5645
5646 <p>Well, that's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
5647 side is what I have experienced.</p>
5648
5649 <p>I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
5650 that won't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
5651 grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
5652 to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
5653 see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
5654 students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
5655 desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
5656 they jsut refused to use it because "Linux sucks". It is something
5657 that makes the council of our city spend around 600000 € to buy
5658 software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
5659 networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
5660 not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
5661 already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
5662 if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
5663 that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
5664 plain criminal.</p>
5665
5666 <p>That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
5667 method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
5668 founded an association named
5669 <a href="https://www.teckids.org">Teckids</a> here in Germany that does
5670 just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
5671 area of free and open source software, for example the
5672 <a href="http://kids.froscon.org">FrogLabs</a>, which share staff with
5673 Teckids and are the youth programme of
5674 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">the Free and Open Source Software
5675 Conference (FrOSCon)</a>. We do a lot more than most other conferences
5676 - this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
5677 aged 10 to 16. It was a huge success, with approx. 30 kids taking part
5678 and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
5679 of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.</p>
5680
5681 <p>Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
5682 the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
5683 their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
5684 Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
5685 clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
5686 it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
5687 who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
5688 We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
5689 open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
5690 software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
5691 group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
5692 Skolelinux in the future ;)!</p>
5693
5694 <p>So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren't for the world
5695 being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
5696 that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
5697 but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.</p>
5698
5699 <!--
5700
5701 >  * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
5702
5703 That's probably the hardest question of them all, as I do not know the
5704 community. However, I would be willing to do the following:
5705
5706  <li>Run an interview with a German headteacher who is very open to
5707    free software, and also prefers it, but cannot really use it because
5708    of the decision makers above;
5709  <li>Run interviews with some kids, both with and without previous
5710    knowledge about free software
5711
5712 If that is wanted, just let me know ;).
5713
5714 -->
5715
5716       </div>
5717       <div class="tags">
5718
5719
5720         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>.
5721
5722
5723       </div>
5724     </div>
5725     <div class="padding"></div>
5726
5727     <div class="entry">
5728       <div class="title">
5729         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html">Debian Edu interview: Klaus Knopper</a>
5730       </div>
5731       <div class="date">
5732          6th December 2013
5733       </div>
5734       <div class="body">
5735         <p>It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview,
5736 but the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
5737 Skolelinux</a> community is still going strong, and yesterday we even
5738 had a new school administrator show up on
5739 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a> to share
5740 his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school.  This
5741 time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of
5742 Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in
5743 Germany a few years ago.</p>
5744
5745 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
5746
5747 <p>I am Klaus Knopper.  I have a master degree in electrical
5748 engineering, and is currently professor in information management at
5749 the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and
5750 freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.</p>
5751
5752 <p>All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart
5753 from teaching, I'm also conducting some more or less experimental
5754 projects like the <a href="http://www.knoppix.org">Knoppix GNU/Linux live
5755 system</a> (Debian-based like Skolelinux),
5756 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html">ADRIANE</a>
5757 (a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and
5758 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/linbo/index-en.html">LINBO</a>
5759 (Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair
5760 system supporting various operating systems).</p>
5761
5762 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
5763 project?</strong></p>
5764
5765 <p>The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German
5766 coordinator for Skolelinux.  We were looking for an all-in-one open
5767 source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt
5768 introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.</p>
5769
5770 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
5771 Edu?</strong></p>
5772
5773 <ul>
5774   <li>Quick installation,</li>
5775   <li>works (almost) out of the box,</li>
5776   <li>contains many useful software packages for teaching and learning,</li>
5777   <li>is a purely community-based distro and not controlled by a
5778     single company,</li>
5779   <li>has a large number of supporters and teachers who share their
5780     experience and problem solutions.</li>
5781 </ul>
5782
5783 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
5784 Edu?</strong></p>
5785
5786 <ul>
5787   <li>Skolelinux is - as we had to learn - not easily upgradable to
5788   the next version.  Opposed to its genuine Debian base, upgrading to
5789   a new version means a full new installation from scratch to get it
5790   working again reliably.
5791
5792   <li>Skolelinux is based on Debian/stable, and therefore always a
5793   little outdated in terms of program versions compared to Edubuntu or
5794   similar educational Linux distros, which rather use Debian/testing
5795   as their base.
5796
5797   <li>Skolelinux has some very self-opinionated and stubborn default
5798   configuration which in my opinion adds unnecessary complexity and is
5799   not always suitable for a schools needs, the preset network
5800   configuration is actually a core definition feature of Skolelinux
5801   and not easy to change, so schools sometimes have to change their
5802   network configuration to make it "Skolelinux-compatible".
5803
5804   <li>Some proposed extensions, which were made available as
5805   contribution, like secure examination mode and lecture material
5806   distribution and collection, were not accepted into the mainline
5807   Skolelinux development and are now not easy to maintain in the
5808   future because of Skolelinux somewhat undeterministic update
5809   schemes.</li>
5810
5811   <li>Skolelinux has only a very tiny number of base developers
5812   compared to Debian.</li>
5813
5814 </ul>
5815
5816 <p>For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now
5817 rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until
5818 Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes
5819 upgradeable without reinstallation.</p>
5820
5821 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
5822
5823 <p>GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and
5824 programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence,
5825 occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various
5826 programming languages for teaching.</p>
5827
5828 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
5829 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
5830
5831 <p>Strong arguments are</p>
5832
5833 <ul>
5834
5835   <li>Knowledge is free, and so should be methods and tools for
5836     teaching and learning.</li>
5837
5838   <li>Students can learn with and use the same software at school, at
5839     home, and at their working place without running into license or
5840     conversion problems.</li>
5841
5842   <li>Closed source or proprietary software hides knowledge rather
5843     than exposing it, and proprietary software vendors try to bind
5844     customers to certain products.  But teachers need to teach
5845     science, not products.</li>
5846
5847   <li>If you have everything you for daily work as open source, what
5848     would you need proprietary software for?</li>
5849
5850 </ul>
5851
5852       </div>
5853       <div class="tags">
5854
5855
5856         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>.
5857
5858
5859       </div>
5860     </div>
5861     <div class="padding"></div>
5862
5863     <div class="entry">
5864       <div class="title">
5865         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnadsnett_for_alle__a_wireless_community_network_in_Oslo__take_shape.html">Dugnadsnett for alle, a wireless community network in Oslo, take shape</a>
5866       </div>
5867       <div class="date">
5868         30th November 2013
5869       </div>
5870       <div class="body">
5871         <p>If you want the ability to electronically communicate directly with
5872 your neighbors and friends using a network controlled by your peers in
5873 stead of centrally controlled by a few corporations, or would like to
5874 experiment with interesting network technology, the
5875 <a href="http://www.dugnadsnett.no/">Dugnasnett for alle i Oslo</a>
5876 might be project for you.  39 mesh nodes are currently being planned,
5877 in the freshly started initiative from NUUG and Hackeriet to create a
5878 wireless community network.  The work is inspired by
5879 <a href="http://freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a>,
5880 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan
5881 Network</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet">Roofnet</a>
5882 and other successful mesh networks around the globe.  Two days ago we
5883 held a workshop to try to get people started on setting up their own
5884 mesh node, and there we decided to create a new mailing list
5885 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/dugnadsnett">dugnadsnett
5886 (at) nuug.no</a> and IRC channel
5887 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#dugnadsnett.no">#dugnadsnett.no</a> to
5888 coordinate the work.  See also the NUUG blog post
5889 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/E_postliste_og_IRC_kanal_for_Dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">announcing
5890 the mailing list and IRC channel</a>.</p>
5891
5892       </div>
5893       <div class="tags">
5894
5895
5896         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
5897
5898
5899       </div>
5900     </div>
5901     <div class="padding"></div>
5902
5903     <div class="entry">
5904       <div class="title">
5905         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
5906       </div>
5907       <div class="date">
5908         24th November 2013
5909       </div>
5910       <div class="body">
5911         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
5912 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
5913 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
5914 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
5915 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
5916 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
5917 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
5918 is working on.  I checked the
5919 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
5920 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
5921 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
5922 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
5923 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
5924 These are the release notes:</p>
5925
5926 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
5927
5928 <ul>
5929
5930   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
5931    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
5932    up.</li>
5933
5934   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
5935
5936   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
5937    Matthias Klose.</li>
5938
5939   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
5940    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
5941
5942   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
5943    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
5944    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
5945
5946 </ul>
5947
5948 <p>You can
5949 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
5950 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
5951 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
5952 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
5953 include a testsuite check.</p>
5954
5955       </div>
5956       <div class="tags">
5957
5958
5959         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5960
5961
5962       </div>
5963     </div>
5964     <div class="padding"></div>
5965
5966     <div class="entry">
5967       <div class="title">
5968         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/All_drones_should_be_radio_marked_with_what_they_do_and_who_they_belong_to.html">All drones should be radio marked with what they do and who they belong to</a>
5969       </div>
5970       <div class="date">
5971         21st November 2013
5972       </div>
5973       <div class="body">
5974         <p>Drones, flying robots, are getting more and more popular.  The most
5975 know ones are the killer drones used by some government to murder
5976 people they do not like without giving them the chance of a fair
5977 trial, but the technology have many good uses too, from mapping and
5978 forest maintenance to photography and search and rescue.  I am sure it
5979 is just a question of time before "bad drones" are in the hands of
5980 private enterprises and not only state criminals but petty criminals
5981 too.  The drone technology is very useful and very dangerous.  To have
5982 some control over the use of drones, I agree with Daniel Suarez in his
5983 TED talk
5984 "<a href="https://archive.org/details/DanielSuarez_2013G">The kill
5985 decision shouldn't belong to a robot</a>", where he suggested this
5986 little gem to keep the good while limiting the bad use of drones:</p>
5987
5988 <blockquote>
5989
5990 <p>Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed
5991 I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement
5992 through public spaces. We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on
5993 aircraft. This is no different. And every citizen should be able to
5994 download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous
5995 vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and
5996 historically. And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones
5997 to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their
5998 own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their
5999 presence. And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic
6000 drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility.</p>
6001
6002 <p>But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. It
6003 would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles
6004 and drones while still preserving our open, civil society.</p>
6005
6006 </blockquote>
6007
6008 <p>The key is that <em>every citizen</em> should be able to read the
6009 radio beacons sent from the drones in the area, to be able to check
6010 both the government and others use of drones.  For such control to be
6011 effective, everyone must be able to do it.  What should such beacon
6012 contain?  At least formal owner, purpose, contact information and GPS
6013 location.  Probably also the origin and target position of the current
6014 flight.  And perhaps some registration number to be able to look up
6015 the drone in a central database tracking their movement.  Robots
6016 should not have privacy.  It is people who need privacy.</p>
6017
6018       </div>
6019       <div class="tags">
6020
6021
6022         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
6023
6024
6025       </div>
6026     </div>
6027     <div class="padding"></div>
6028
6029     <div class="entry">
6030       <div class="title">
6031         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_wireless_community_network_in_Oslo_.html">Lets make a wireless community network in Oslo!</a>
6032       </div>
6033       <div class="date">
6034         13th November 2013
6035       </div>
6036       <div class="body">
6037         <p>Today NUUG and Hackeriet announced
6038 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Bli_med___bygge_dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">our
6039 plans to join forces and create a wireless community network in
6040 Oslo</a>.  The workshop to help people get started will take place
6041 Thursday 2013-11-28, but we already are collecting the geolocation of
6042 people joining forces to make this happen.  We have
6043 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/oslo-nodes.geojson">9
6044 locations plotted on the map</a>, but we will need more before we have
6045 a connected mesh spread across Oslo.  If this sound interesting to
6046 you, please join us at the workshop.  If you are too impatient to wait
6047 15 days, please join us on the IRC channel
6048 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
6049 right away. :)</p>
6050
6051       </div>
6052       <div class="tags">
6053
6054
6055         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
6056
6057
6058       </div>
6059     </div>
6060     <div class="padding"></div>
6061
6062     <div class="entry">
6063       <div class="title">
6064         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Running_TP_Link_MR3040_as_a_batman_adv_mesh_node_using_openwrt.html">Running TP-Link MR3040 as a batman-adv mesh node using openwrt</a>
6065       </div>
6066       <div class="date">
6067         10th November 2013
6068       </div>
6069       <div class="body">
6070         <p>Continuing my research into mesh networking, I was recommended to
6071 use TP-Link 3040 and 3600 access points as mesh nodes, and the pair I
6072 bought arrived on Friday.  Here are my notes on how to set up the
6073 MR3040 as a mesh node using
6074 <a href="http://www.openwrt.org/">OpenWrt</a>.</p>
6075
6076 <p>I started by following the instructions on the OpenWRT wiki for
6077 <a href="http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3040">TL-MR3040</a>,
6078 and downloaded
6079 <a href="http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin">the
6080 recommended firmware image</a>
6081 (openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin) and
6082 uploaded it into the original web interface.  The flashing went fine,
6083 and the machine was available via telnet on the ethernet port.  After
6084 logging in and setting the root password, ssh was available and I
6085 could start to set it up as a batman-adv mesh node.</p>
6086
6087 <p>I started off by reading the instructions from
6088 <a href="http://wirelessafrica.meraka.org.za/wiki/index.php?title=Antoine's_Research">Wireless
6089 Africa</a>, which had quite a lot of useful information, but
6090 eventually I followed the recipe from the Open Mesh wiki for
6091 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Batman-adv-openwrt-config">using
6092 batman-adv on OpenWrt</a>.  A small snag was the fact that the
6093 <tt>opkg install kmod-batman-adv</tt> command did not work as it
6094 should.  The batman-adv kernel module would fail to load because its
6095 dependency crc16 was not already loaded.  I
6096 <a href="https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/14452">reported the bug</a> to
6097 the openwrt project and hope it will be fixed soon.  But the problem
6098 only seem to affect initial testing of batman-adv, as configuration
6099 seem to work when booting from scratch.</p>
6100
6101 <p>The setup is done using files in /etc/config/.  I did not bridge
6102 the Ethernet and mesh interfaces this time, to be able to hook up the
6103 box on my local network and log into it for configuration updates.
6104 The following files were changed and look like this after modifying
6105 them:</p>
6106
6107 <p><tt>/etc/config/network</tt></p>
6108
6109 <pre>
6110
6111 config interface 'loopback'
6112         option ifname 'lo'
6113         option proto 'static'
6114         option ipaddr '127.0.0.1'
6115         option netmask '255.0.0.0'
6116
6117 config globals 'globals'
6118         option ula_prefix 'fdbf:4c12:3fed::/48'
6119
6120 config interface 'lan'
6121         option ifname 'eth0'
6122         option type 'bridge'
6123         option proto 'dhcp'
6124         option ipaddr '192.168.1.1'
6125         option netmask '255.255.255.0'
6126         option hostname 'tl-mr3040'
6127         option ip6assign '60'
6128
6129 config interface 'mesh'
6130         option ifname 'adhoc0'
6131         option mtu '1528'
6132         option proto 'batadv'
6133         option mesh 'bat0'
6134 </pre>
6135
6136 <p><tt>/etc/config/wireless</tt></p>
6137 <pre>
6138
6139 config wifi-device 'radio0'
6140         option type 'mac80211'
6141         option channel '11'
6142         option hwmode '11ng'
6143         option path 'platform/ar933x_wmac'
6144         option htmode 'HT20'
6145         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-20'
6146         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-40'
6147         list ht_capab 'RX-STBC1'
6148         list ht_capab 'DSSS_CCK-40'
6149         option disabled '0'
6150
6151 config wifi-iface 'wmesh'
6152         option device 'radio0'
6153         option ifname 'adhoc0'
6154         option network 'mesh'
6155         option encryption 'none'
6156         option mode 'adhoc'
6157         option bssid '02:BA:00:00:00:01'
6158         option ssid 'meshfx@hackeriet'
6159 </pre>
6160 <p><tt>/etc/config/batman-adv</tt></p>
6161 <pre>
6162
6163 config 'mesh' 'bat0'
6164         option interfaces 'adhoc0'
6165         option 'aggregated_ogms'
6166         option 'ap_isolation'
6167         option 'bonding'
6168         option 'fragmentation'
6169         option 'gw_bandwidth'
6170         option 'gw_mode'
6171         option 'gw_sel_class'
6172         option 'log_level'
6173         option 'orig_interval'
6174         option 'vis_mode'
6175         option 'bridge_loop_avoidance'
6176         option 'distributed_arp_table'
6177         option 'network_coding'
6178         option 'hop_penalty'
6179
6180 # yet another batX instance
6181 # config 'mesh' 'bat5'
6182 #       option 'interfaces' 'second_mesh'
6183 </pre>
6184
6185 <p>The mesh node is now operational.  I have yet to test its range,
6186 but I hope it is good.  I have not yet tested the TP-Link 3600 box
6187 still wrapped up in plastic.</p>
6188
6189       </div>
6190       <div class="tags">
6191
6192
6193         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
6194
6195
6196       </div>
6197     </div>
6198     <div class="padding"></div>
6199
6200     <div class="entry">
6201       <div class="title">
6202         <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>
6203       </div>
6204       <div class="date">
6205          2nd November 2013
6206       </div>
6207       <div class="body">
6208         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
6209 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
6210 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
6211 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
6212 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
6213
6214 <p><pre>
6215 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
6216 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
6217 # Provides:          rsyslog
6218 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
6219 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
6220 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
6221 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
6222 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
6223 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
6224 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
6225 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
6226 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
6227 ### END INIT INFO
6228 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
6229 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
6230 </pre></p>
6231
6232 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
6233 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
6234 info/comments.</p>
6235
6236 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
6237 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
6238
6239 <p><pre>
6240 #!/bin/sh
6241
6242 # Define LSB log_* functions.
6243 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
6244 # and status_of_proc is working.
6245 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
6246
6247 #
6248 # Function that starts the daemon/service
6249
6250 #
6251 do_start()
6252 {
6253         # Return
6254         #   0 if daemon has been started
6255         #   1 if daemon was already running
6256         #   2 if daemon could not be started
6257         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
6258                 || return 1
6259         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
6260                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
6261                 || return 2
6262         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
6263         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
6264         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
6265 }
6266
6267 #
6268 # Function that stops the daemon/service
6269 #
6270 do_stop()
6271 {
6272         # Return
6273         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
6274         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
6275         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
6276         #   other if a failure occurred
6277         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
6278         RETVAL="$?"
6279         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
6280         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
6281         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
6282         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
6283         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
6284         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
6285         # sleep for some time.
6286         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
6287         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
6288         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
6289         rm -f $PIDFILE
6290         return "$RETVAL"
6291 }
6292
6293 #
6294 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
6295 #
6296 do_reload() {
6297         #
6298         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
6299         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
6300         # then implement that here.
6301         #
6302         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
6303         return 0
6304 }
6305
6306 SCRIPTNAME=$1
6307 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
6308 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
6309 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
6310     script="$1"
6311     shift
6312     . $script
6313 else
6314     exit 0
6315 fi
6316
6317 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
6318 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
6319
6320 # Exit if the package is not installed
6321 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
6322
6323 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
6324 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
6325
6326 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
6327 . /lib/init/vars.sh
6328
6329 case "$1" in
6330   start)
6331         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
6332         do_start
6333         case "$?" in
6334                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
6335                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
6336         esac
6337         ;;
6338   stop)
6339         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
6340         do_stop
6341         case "$?" in
6342                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
6343                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
6344         esac
6345         ;;
6346   status)
6347         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
6348         ;;
6349   #reload|force-reload)
6350         #
6351         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
6352         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
6353         #
6354         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
6355         #do_reload
6356         #log_end_msg $?
6357         #;;
6358   restart|force-reload)
6359         #
6360         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
6361         # 'force-reload' alias
6362         #
6363         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
6364         do_stop
6365         case "$?" in
6366           0|1)
6367                 do_start
6368                 case "$?" in
6369                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
6370                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
6371                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
6372                 esac
6373                 ;;
6374           *)
6375                 # Failed to stop
6376                 log_end_msg 1
6377                 ;;
6378         esac
6379         ;;
6380   *)
6381         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
6382         exit 3
6383         ;;
6384 esac
6385
6386 :
6387 </pre></p>
6388
6389 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
6390 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
6391 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
6392 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
6393
6394 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
6395 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
6396 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
6397 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
6398 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
6399
6400       </div>
6401       <div class="tags">
6402
6403
6404         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>.
6405
6406
6407       </div>
6408     </div>
6409     <div class="padding"></div>
6410
6411     <div class="entry">
6412       <div class="title">
6413         <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>
6414       </div>
6415       <div class="date">
6416          1st November 2013
6417       </div>
6418       <div class="body">
6419         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
6420 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
6421 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
6422 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
6423 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
6424 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
6425 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
6426 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
6427 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
6428 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
6429 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
6430 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
6431
6432 <p>The source is now available from
6433 <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>
6434
6435       </div>
6436       <div class="tags">
6437
6438
6439         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6440
6441
6442       </div>
6443     </div>
6444     <div class="padding"></div>
6445
6446     <div class="entry">
6447       <div class="title">
6448         <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>
6449       </div>
6450       <div class="date">
6451         27th October 2013
6452       </div>
6453       <div class="body">
6454         <p>The
6455 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
6456 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
6457 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
6458 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
6459 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
6460 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
6461 of a plan to simplify the build system for
6462 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
6463 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
6464 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
6465 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
6466 Raspberry Pi.</p>
6467
6468 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
6469 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
6470 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
6471 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
6472 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
6473 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
6474 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
6475 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
6476 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
6477 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
6478 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
6479 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
6480 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
6481 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
6482 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
6483 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
6484 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
6485 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
6486 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
6487 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
6488 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
6489 available from
6490 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
6491 upstream project page</a>.</p>
6492
6493 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
6494 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
6495 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
6496 list:</p>
6497
6498 <p><pre>
6499 #!/bin/sh
6500 set -e # Exit on first error
6501 rootdir="$1"
6502 cd "$rootdir"
6503 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
6504 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
6505 EOF
6506 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
6507 # install a kernel somewhere too.
6508 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
6509     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
6510 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
6511 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
6512 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
6513 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
6514 </pre></p>
6515
6516 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
6517 to build the image:</p>
6518
6519 <pre>
6520 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
6521     --variant minbase \
6522     --arch armel \
6523     --distribution jessie \
6524     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
6525     --image test.img \
6526     --size 600M \
6527     --bootsize 64M \
6528     --boottype vfat \
6529     --log-level debug \
6530     --verbose \
6531     --no-kernel \
6532     --no-extlinux \
6533     --root-password raspberry \
6534     --hostname raspberrypi \
6535     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
6536     --customize `pwd`/customize \
6537     --package netbase \
6538     --package git-core \
6539     --package binutils \
6540     --package ca-certificates \
6541     --package wget \
6542     --package kmod
6543 </pre></p>
6544
6545 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
6546 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
6547 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
6548 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
6549 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
6550 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
6551 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
6552
6553 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
6554 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
6555 build dependency list.</p>
6556
6557 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
6558 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
6559 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
6560 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
6561
6562       </div>
6563       <div class="tags">
6564
6565
6566         Tags: <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>.
6567
6568
6569       </div>
6570     </div>
6571     <div class="padding"></div>
6572
6573     <div class="entry">
6574       <div class="title">
6575         <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>
6576       </div>
6577       <div class="date">
6578         21st October 2013
6579       </div>
6580       <div class="body">
6581         <p>The last few days I have been experimenting with
6582 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki">the
6583 batman-adv mesh technology</a>.  I want to gain some experience to see
6584 if it will fit <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the
6585 Freedombox project</a>, and together with my neighbors try to build a
6586 mesh network around the park where I live.  Batman-adv is a layer 2
6587 mesh system ("ethernet" in other words), where the mesh network appear
6588 as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch.</p>
6589
6590 <p>My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying
6591 around, but I've been unable to get them working with batman-adv.  So
6592 instead, I started playing with a
6593 <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org/">Raspberry Pi</a>, and tried to
6594 get it working as a mesh node.  My idea is to use it to create a mesh
6595 node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to
6596 the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh
6597 network.  This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys
6598 WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow
6599 non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh.  This in turn is useful for
6600 Android phones using <a href="http://servalproject.org/">the Serval
6601 Project</a> voip client, allowing every one around the playground to
6602 phone and message each other for free.  The reason is that Android
6603 phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from
6604 the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted.  But if
6605 they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to
6606 every client on the local network.</p>
6607
6608 <p>To get this working, I've created a debian package
6609 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node">meshfx-node</a>
6610 and a script
6611 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/build-rpi-mesh-node">build-rpi-mesh-node</a>
6612 to create the Raspberry Pi boot image.  I'm using Debian Jessie (and
6613 not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available.
6614 Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot
6615 image to get it booting, but I'll ignore that for now.  Also, as
6616 Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry
6617 Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit.  I hope
6618 the routing performance isn't affected by the lack of hardware FPU
6619 support.</p>
6620
6621 <p>To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user
6622 after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:</p>
6623
6624 <p><pre>
6625 % wget -O build-rpi-mesh-node \
6626     https://raw.github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
6627 % sudo bash -x ./build-rpi-mesh-node > build.log 2>&1
6628 % dd if=/root/rpi/rpi_basic_jessie_$(date +%Y%m%d).img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M
6629 %
6630 </pre></p>
6631
6632 <p>Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB
6633 wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node.  At least it does for
6634 me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the
6635 ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in
6636 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">an
6637 earlier blog post about this mesh testing</a>.</p>
6638
6639 <p>The mesh node was not horribly expensive either.  I bought
6640 everything over the counter in shops nearby.  If I had ordered online
6641 from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:</p>
6642
6643 <p><table>
6644
6645 <tr><th>Supplier</th><th>Model</th><th>NOK</th></tr>
6646 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi model B</td><td>349.90</td></tr>
6647 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi type B case</td><td>99.90</td></tr>
6648 <tr><td>Lefdal</td><td>Jensen Air:Link 25150</td><td>295.-</td></tr>
6649 <tr><td>Clas Ohlson</td><td>Kingston 16 GB SD card</td><td>199.-</td></tr>
6650 <tr><td>Total cost</td><td></td><td>943.80</td></tr>
6651
6652 </table></p>
6653
6654 <p>Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement
6655 connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the 1th
6656 floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one
6657 play-node I use to develop the image building script.  And some times
6658 I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it.  I look forward
6659 to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give,
6660 and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)</p>
6661
6662       </div>
6663       <div class="tags">
6664
6665
6666         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>.
6667
6668
6669       </div>
6670     </div>
6671     <div class="padding"></div>
6672
6673     <div class="entry">
6674       <div class="title">
6675         <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>
6676       </div>
6677       <div class="date">
6678         19th October 2013
6679       </div>
6680       <div class="body">
6681         <p>Back in 2010, I created a Perl library to talk to
6682 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spykee">the Spykee robot</a>
6683 (with two belts, wifi, USB and Linux) and made it available from my
6684 web page.  Today I concluded that it should move to a site that is
6685 easier to use to cooperate with others, and moved it to github.  If
6686 you got a Spykee robot, you might want to check out
6687 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/libspykee-perl">the
6688 libspykee-perl github repository</a>.</p>
6689
6690       </div>
6691       <div class="tags">
6692
6693
6694         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>.
6695
6696
6697       </div>
6698     </div>
6699     <div class="padding"></div>
6700
6701     <div class="entry">
6702       <div class="title">
6703         <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>
6704       </div>
6705       <div class="date">
6706         15th October 2013
6707       </div>
6708       <div class="body">
6709         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
6710 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
6711 these. :)</p>
6712
6713 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
6714 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
6715 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
6716 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
6717 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
6718 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
6719 hope you will to. :)</p>
6720
6721 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
6722 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
6723 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
6724 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
6725 donated.  Are you next?</p>
6726
6727 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
6728 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
6729 statement under the heading
6730 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
6731 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
6732 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
6733 too.</p>
6734
6735       </div>
6736       <div class="tags">
6737
6738
6739         Tags: <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>.
6740
6741
6742       </div>
6743     </div>
6744     <div class="padding"></div>
6745
6746     <div class="entry">
6747       <div class="title">
6748         <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>
6749       </div>
6750       <div class="date">
6751         11th October 2013
6752       </div>
6753       <div class="body">
6754         <p>Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
6755 networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
6756 areas, depending on the radio technology used.  Normal wifi equipment
6757 can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
6758 successful examples like
6759 <a href="http://www.freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a> and
6760 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network</a>
6761 (see
6762 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece">wikipedia
6763 for a large list</a>) around the globe.  To give you an idea how it
6764 work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
6765 can be seen from their
6766 <a href="http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html">dynamically
6767 updated node graph and map</a>, where one can see how the mesh nodes
6768 automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
6769 There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
6770 and that is the main topic of this blog post.</p>
6771
6772 <p>I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
6773 to do it as part of my involvement with the <a
6774 href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member organisation</a> community, and
6775 my recent involvement in
6776 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the Freedombox project</a>
6777 finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
6778 Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
6779 when possible, given that most communication between people are
6780 between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
6781 communication patterns).  It also allow people to communicate without
6782 any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
6783 private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
6784 important over the years.</p>
6785
6786 <p>So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
6787 working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
6788 <a href="http://hackeriet.no/">Hackeriet</a> at Husmania.  They seem to
6789 have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
6790 <a href="http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page">the Oslo
6791 Freifunk project</a>, but that effort is now dead and the people
6792 behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
6793 <a href="http://meshfx.org/trac">meshfx</a>.  Unfortunately the wiki
6794 site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
6795 reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to
6796 the new project.  A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
6797 from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks.  I
6798 came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
6799 speakers about this talk (from
6800 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Kd7CLkhSY">youtube</a>):</p>
6801
6802 <p><iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
6803
6804 <p>I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
6805 There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
6806 figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but
6807 given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
6808 is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
6809 completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
6810 batman-adv for now.  It sure help me to  know that the very cool
6811 <a href="http://www.servalproject.org/">Serval project in Australia</a>
6812 is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
6813 organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
6814 less industrialized communities.  Check out this cool video presenting
6815 that project (from
6816 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30qNfzJCQOA">youtube</a>):</p>
6817
6818 <p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/30qNfzJCQOA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
6819
6820 <p>According to the wikipedia page on
6821 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network">Wireless
6822 mesh network</a> there are around 70 competing schemes for routing
6823 packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
6824 B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
6825 based community mesh networks.</p>
6826
6827 <p>The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer 2
6828 (as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
6829 network.  One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
6830 vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
6831 computer.  The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
6832 least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up.  A
6833 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide">good
6834 introduction</a> is available from the Open Mesh project.  These are
6835 the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:</p>
6836
6837 <p><table>
6838 <tr><th>Setting</th><th>Value</th></tr>
6839 <tr><td>Protocol / kernel module</td><td>batman-adv</td></tr>
6840 <tr><td>ESSID</td><td>meshfx@hackeriet</td></tr>
6841 <td>Channel / Frequency</td><td>11 / 2462</td></tr>
6842 <td>Cell ID</td><td>02:BA:00:00:00:01</td>
6843 </table></p>
6844
6845 <p>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
6846 in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers.  (See a nice post from
6847 VillageTelco about
6848 "<a href="http://tiebing.blogspot.no/2009/12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html">Information
6849 about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!</a>
6850 for details.)  When these settings are activated and you have some
6851 other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
6852 network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
6853 any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)</p>
6854
6855 <p>My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
6856 but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
6857 firmware supporting batman-adv.  If anyone know how to use that old
6858 wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.</p>
6859
6860 <p>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
6861 us on IRC, either channel
6862 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace">#oslohackerspace</a>
6863 or <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug">#nuug</a> on
6864 irc.freenode.net.</p>
6865
6866 <p>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
6867 research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
6868 and Innovation called
6869 <a href="http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-2008.pdf">The
6870 reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks</a> and elsewhere
6871 learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
6872 Grünerløkka in Oslo.  So mesh networks are also interesting for
6873 commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
6874 to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
6875 know have closed down the experiment.  Perhaps Telenor or others would
6876 be interested in a cooperation?</p>
6877
6878 <p><strong>Update 2013-10-12</strong>: I was just
6879 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2013-October/005900.html">told
6880 by the Serval project developers</a> that they no longer use
6881 batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
6882 mesh system.</p>
6883
6884       </div>
6885       <div class="tags">
6886
6887
6888         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>.
6889
6890
6891       </div>
6892     </div>
6893     <div class="padding"></div>
6894
6895     <div class="entry">
6896       <div class="title">
6897         <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>
6898       </div>
6899       <div class="date">
6900          8th October 2013
6901       </div>
6902       <div class="body">
6903         <p>The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
6904 Salvador had published a
6905 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GgpdqgLFc">video on
6906 Youtube</a> showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu /
6907 Skolelinux profile.  This is the profile intended for use at home or
6908 on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network
6909 services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc,
6910 in other word a single user machine).  The result is 11 minutes long,
6911 and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked).
6912 Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium
6913 showing the <a href="http://www.zygotebody.com/">Zygote Body 3D model
6914 of the human body</a>, but I guess he did not know about those or find
6915 other programs more interesting. :) And the video do not show the
6916 advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian
6917 Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of
6918 computers without hard drives by installing one central
6919 <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP server</a>.</p>
6920
6921 <p>Anyway, check out the video, embedded below and linked to above:</p>
6922
6923 <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/w-GgpdqgLFc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
6924
6925 <p>Are there other nice videos demonstrating Skolelinux?  Please let
6926 me know. :)</p>
6927
6928       </div>
6929       <div class="tags">
6930
6931
6932         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>.
6933
6934
6935       </div>
6936     </div>
6937     <div class="padding"></div>
6938
6939     <div class="entry">
6940       <div class="title">
6941         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Finally__Debian_Edu_Wheezy_is_released_today_.html">Finally, Debian Edu Wheezy is released today!</a>
6942       </div>
6943       <div class="date">
6944         29th September 2013
6945       </div>
6946       <div class="body">
6947         <p>A few hours ago, the announcement for the first stable release of
6948 Debian Edu Wheezy went out from the Debian publicity team.  The
6949 complete announcement text can be found at
6950 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130928">the Debian News
6951 section</a>, translated to several languages.  Please check it out.</p>
6952
6953 <p>There is one minor known problem that we will fix very soon.  One
6954 can not install a amd64 Thin Client Server using PXE, as the /var/
6955 partition is too small.  A workaround is to extend the partition (use
6956 lvresize + resize2fs in tty 2 while installing).</p>
6957
6958       </div>
6959       <div class="tags">
6960
6961
6962         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>.
6963
6964
6965       </div>
6966     </div>
6967     <div class="padding"></div>
6968
6969     <div class="entry">
6970       <div class="title">
6971         <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>
6972       </div>
6973       <div class="date">
6974         27th September 2013
6975       </div>
6976       <div class="body">
6977         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
6978 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
6979 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
6980 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
6981
6982 <ul>
6983
6984 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
6985 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
6986
6987 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
6988 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
6989
6990 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
6991 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
6992 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
6993 (Youtube)</li>
6994
6995 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
6996 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
6997
6998 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
6999 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
7000
7001 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
7002 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
7003 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
7004
7005 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
7006 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
7007 (Youtube)</li>
7008
7009 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
7010 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
7011
7012 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
7013 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
7014
7015 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
7016 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
7017 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
7018
7019 </ul>
7020
7021 <p>A larger list is available from
7022 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
7023 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
7024
7025 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
7026 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
7027 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
7028 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
7029 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
7030 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
7031 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
7032 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
7033 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
7034 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
7035 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
7036
7037       </div>
7038       <div class="tags">
7039
7040
7041         Tags: <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>.
7042
7043
7044       </div>
7045     </div>
7046     <div class="padding"></div>
7047
7048     <div class="entry">
7049       <div class="title">
7050         <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>
7051       </div>
7052       <div class="date">
7053         16th September 2013
7054       </div>
7055       <div class="body">
7056         <p>The third wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
7057 today.  This is the release announcement from Holger Levsen:</p>
7058
7059 <blockquote>
7060 <p>Hi,</p>
7061
7062 <p>it is my pleasure to announce the third beta release (beta 2 for
7063 short) of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
7064 Skolelinux</a> based on Debian Wheezy!</p>
7065
7066 <p>Please test these images extensivly, if no new problems are found
7067 we plan to do this final Debian Edu Wheezy release this coming
7068 weekend.  We are not aware of any major problems or blockers in beta2,
7069 if you find something, please notify us immediately!</p>
7070
7071 <p>(More about the remaining steps for the Edu Wheezy release in
7072 another mail to the edu list tonight or tomorrow...)</p>
7073
7074 <p>Noteworthy changes and software updates for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b2
7075 compared to beta1:</p>
7076
7077 <ul>
7078
7079 <li>The KDE proxy setup has been adjusted to use the provided wpad.dat. This
7080 also gets Chromium to use this proxy.</li>
7081 <li>Install kdepim-groupware with KDE desktops to make sure korganizer
7082 understand ical/dav sources.</li>
7083 <li>Increased default maximum size of /var/spool/squid and /skole/backup on the
7084 main server.</li>
7085 <li>A source DVD image containing all source packages is now available as well.</li>
7086 <li>Updates for chromium (29.0.1547.57-1~deb7u1), imagemagick
7087 (6.7.7.10-5+deb7u2), php5 (5.4.4-14+deb7u4), libmodplug
7088 (0.8.8.4-3+deb7u1+git20130828), tiff (4.0.2-6+deb7u2), linux-image
7089 (3.2.0-4-486_3.2.46-1+deb7u1).</li>
7090
7091 </ul>
7092
7093 <p>Where to get it:</p>
7094
7095 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
7096
7097 <ul>
7098 <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>
7099 <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>
7100 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso .</li>
7101 </ul>
7102
7103 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is:  3a1c89f4666df80eebcd46c5bf5fedb866f9472f</p>
7104
7105 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
7106 <ul>
7107 <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>
7108 <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>
7109 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso .</li>
7110 </ul>
7111
7112 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 702d1718548f401c74bfa6df9f032cc3ee16597e</p>
7113
7114 <p>The Source DVD image has the filename
7115 debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-source-DVD.iso and the SHA1SUM
7116 089eed8b3f962db47aae1f6a9685e9bb2fa30ca5 and is available the same way
7117 as the other isos.</p>
7118
7119 <p>How to report bugs</p>
7120
7121 <p>For information how to report bugs please see
7122 <br><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
7123
7124
7125 <p>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</p>
7126
7127 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
7128 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
7129 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
7130 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
7131 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
7132 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
7133 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
7134 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
7135 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
7136 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
7137 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
7138 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
7139 can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
7140
7141 <p>This is the seventh test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
7142 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
7143 Squeeze release.</p>
7144
7145 <p>Notes for upgrades from Alpha Prereleases</p>
7146
7147 <p>Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
7148 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
7149 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
7150 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
7151 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (2)
7152 Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin
7153 password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one
7154 (backup copy!). In both cases all users need to change their password
7155 to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home
7156 directory.</p>
7157
7158
7159 <p>cheers,
7160 <br>        Holger</p>
7161 </blockquote>
7162
7163       </div>
7164       <div class="tags">
7165
7166
7167         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>.
7168
7169
7170       </div>
7171     </div>
7172     <div class="padding"></div>
7173
7174     <div class="entry">
7175       <div class="title">
7176         <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>
7177       </div>
7178       <div class="date">
7179         10th September 2013
7180       </div>
7181       <div class="body">
7182         <p>I was introduced to the
7183 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
7184 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
7185 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
7186 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
7187 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
7188 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
7189 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
7190 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
7191
7192 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
7193 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
7194 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
7195 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
7196 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
7197
7198 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
7199 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
7200 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
7201 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
7202 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
7203 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
7204 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
7205 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
7206 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
7207 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
7208 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
7209 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
7210 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
7211 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
7212 missing in Debian).</p>
7213
7214 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
7215 scripts
7216 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
7217 and a administrative web interface
7218 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
7219 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
7220 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
7221 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
7222 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
7223 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
7224 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
7225 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
7226 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
7227 this is really working yet, see
7228 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
7229 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
7230 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
7231 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
7232 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
7233 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
7234 with lots of half baked features.</p>
7235
7236 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
7237 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
7238 at.</p>
7239
7240 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
7241
7242 <ol>
7243
7244 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
7245 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
7246 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
7247 to the Debian installer:<p>
7248 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
7249
7250 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
7251 install on.</li>
7252
7253 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
7254 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
7255
7256 </ol>
7257
7258 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
7259
7260 <ol>
7261
7262 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
7263 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
7264 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
7265 <pre>
7266 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
7267 </pre></li>
7268 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
7269 <pre>
7270 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
7271    apt-key add -
7272 apt-get update
7273 apt-get install freedombox-setup
7274 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
7275 </pre></li>
7276 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
7277
7278 </ol>
7279
7280 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
7281 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
7282 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
7283 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
7284 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
7285
7286 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
7287 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
7288 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
7289 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
7290
7291 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
7292 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
7293 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
7294 irc.debian.org and the
7295 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
7296 mailing list</a>.</p>
7297
7298 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
7299 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
7300 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
7301 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
7302 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
7303 default password is 'secret'.</p>
7304
7305       </div>
7306       <div class="tags">
7307
7308
7309         Tags: <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>.
7310
7311
7312       </div>
7313     </div>
7314     <div class="padding"></div>
7315
7316     <div class="entry">
7317       <div class="title">
7318         <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>
7319       </div>
7320       <div class="date">
7321         22nd August 2013
7322       </div>
7323       <div class="body">
7324         <p>The second wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
7325 today, slightly delayed because of some bugs in the initial Windows
7326 integration fixes .  This is the release announcement:</p>
7327
7328 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b1 released 2013-08-22</strong></p>
7329
7330 <p>These are the release notes for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7331 7.1+edu0~b1, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
7332
7333 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
7334
7335 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
7336 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
7337 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
7338 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
7339 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
7340 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
7341 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
7342 the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be
7343 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
7344 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
7345 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
7346 desktop contains
7347 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
7348 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
7349 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
7350 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
7351
7352 <p>This is the sixth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically this
7353 is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze
7354 release.</p>
7355
7356 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
7357 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
7358 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
7359 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
7360 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined
7361 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/08/msg00127.html">on
7362 the mailing list</a>. (2) Accept the new version of gosa.conf and
7363 replace both contained admin password placeholders with the password
7364 hashes found in the old one (backup copy!). In both cases every user
7365 need to change their their password to make sure a password is set for
7366 CIFS access to their home directory.</p>
7367
7368 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
7369
7370 <ul>
7371
7372 <li>Added ssh askpass packages to default installation, to ensure ssh
7373     work also without a attached tty.</li>
7374 <li>Add the command-not-found package to the default installation to
7375     make it easier to figure out where to find missing command line
7376     tools. Please note, that the command 'update-command-not-found'
7377     has to be run as root to actually make it useful (internet access
7378     required).</li>
7379
7380 </ul>
7381
7382 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
7383
7384 <ul>
7385
7386 <li>Adjusted the USB stick ISO image build to include every tool
7387 needed for desktop=xfce installations.</li>
7388 <li>Adjust thin-client-server task to work when installing from USB
7389 stick ISO image.</li>
7390 <li>Made new grub artwork (changed png from indexed to RGB format).</li>
7391 <li>Minor cleanup in the CUPS setup.</li>
7392 <li>Make sure that bootstrapping of the Samba domain really happens
7393     during installation of the main server and adjust SID handling to
7394     cope with this.</li>
7395 <li>Make Samba passwords changeable (again) via GOsa².</li>
7396 <li>Fix generation of LM and NT password hashes via GOsa² to avoid
7397     empty password hashes.</li>
7398 <li>Adapted Samba machine domain joining to latest change in the
7399     smbldap-tools Perl package, fixing bugs blocking Windows machines
7400     from joining the Samba domain.</li>
7401
7402 </ul>
7403
7404 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
7405
7406 <ul>
7407
7408 <li>KDE fails to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
7409     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
7410 <li>Chromium also fails to use the proxy when using the KDE desktop
7411     (using the KDE configuration).</li>
7412
7413 </ul>
7414
7415 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
7416
7417 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
7418
7419 <ul>
7420
7421 <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>
7422
7423 <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>
7424
7425 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso .</li>
7426
7427 </ul>
7428
7429 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 1e357f80b55e703523f2254adde6d78b
7430 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 7157f9be5fd27c7694d713c6ecfed61c3edda3b2</p>
7431
7432 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
7433
7434 <ul>
7435
7436 <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>
7437 <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>
7438 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso .</li>
7439
7440 </ul>
7441
7442 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 7a8408ead59cf7e3cef25afb6e91590b
7443 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: f1817c031f02790d5edb3bfa0dcf8451088ad119</p>
7444
7445
7446 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
7447
7448 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
7449
7450       </div>
7451       <div class="tags">
7452
7453
7454         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>.
7455
7456
7457       </div>
7458     </div>
7459     <div class="padding"></div>
7460
7461     <div class="entry">
7462       <div class="title">
7463         <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>
7464       </div>
7465       <div class="date">
7466         18th August 2013
7467       </div>
7468       <div class="body">
7469         <p>Earlier, I reported about
7470 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
7471 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
7472 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
7473 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
7474 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
7475 currently on the disk.</p>
7476
7477 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
7478 <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>
7479 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
7480 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
7481 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
7482 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
7483 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
7484 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
7485 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
7486 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
7487 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
7488 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
7489 the broken disks.</p>
7490
7491       </div>
7492       <div class="tags">
7493
7494
7495         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7496
7497
7498       </div>
7499     </div>
7500     <div class="padding"></div>
7501
7502     <div class="entry">
7503       <div class="title">
7504         <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>
7505       </div>
7506       <div class="date">
7507          2nd August 2013
7508       </div>
7509       <div class="body">
7510         <p>It has been a while since my last update.  Since last summer, I
7511 have worked on a Norwegian
7512 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
7513 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
7514 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright
7515 law.  Yesterday, I finally broken the 90% mark, when counting the
7516 number of strings to translate.  Due to real life constraints, I have
7517 not had time to work on it since March, but when the summer broke out,
7518 I found time to work on it again.  Still lots of work left, but the
7519 first draft is nearing completion.  I created a graph to show the
7520 progress of the translation:</p>
7521
7522 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
7523
7524 <p>When the first draft is done, the translated text need to be
7525 proof read, and the remaining formatting problems with images and SVG
7526 drawings need to be fixed.  There are probably also some index entries
7527 missing that need to be added.  This can be done by comparing the
7528 index entries listed in the SiSU version of the book, or comparing the
7529 English docbook version with the paper version.  Last, the colophon
7530 page with ISBN numbers etc need to be wrapped up before the release is
7531 done.  I should also figure out how to get correct Norwegian sorting
7532 of the index pages.  All docbook tools I have tried so far (xmlto,
7533 docbook-xsl, dblatex) get the order of symbols and the special
7534 Norwegian letters ÆØÅ wrong.</p>
7535
7536 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
7537 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
7538 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
7539 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
7540 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
7541 around?  There are also some legal terms that are unfamiliar to me.
7542 If you want to help, please get in touch with me, and check out the
7543 project files currently available from
7544 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
7545
7546 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
7547 the updated
7548 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
7549 and
7550 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
7551 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
7552 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
7553 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
7554
7555       </div>
7556       <div class="tags">
7557
7558
7559         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>.
7560
7561
7562       </div>
7563     </div>
7564     <div class="padding"></div>
7565
7566     <div class="entry">
7567       <div class="title">
7568         <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>
7569       </div>
7570       <div class="date">
7571         27th July 2013
7572       </div>
7573       <div class="body">
7574         <p>The first wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
7575 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
7576
7577 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b0 released
7578 2013-07-27</strong></p>
7579
7580 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7581 7.1+edu0~b0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
7582
7583 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
7584
7585 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
7586 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
7587 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
7588 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
7589 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
7590 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
7591 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
7592 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
7593 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
7594 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
7595 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
7596 desktop contains
7597 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
7598 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
7599 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
7600 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
7601
7602 <p>This is the fifth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
7603 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
7604 Squeeze release.</p>
7605
7606 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
7607 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
7608 release.</p>
7609
7610 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
7611
7612 <ul>
7613
7614 <li>Switched roaming workstation profiles from wicd to network-manager
7615    for network configuration, as wicd didn't work any more.</li>
7616 <li>Changed version numbers of patched gosa and libpam-mklocaluser
7617    packages to make sure our locally patched versions will be replaced
7618    by the official packages when they are released from Debian. Those
7619    installing alpha version need to reinstall or manually downgrade gosa
7620    and libpam-mklocaluser.</li>
7621 <li>Added bluetooth tools to the default desktop (bluedevil, blueman).</li>
7622 <li>Added tools for sharing the desktop on KDE (krdc, krfb).</li>
7623 <li>Added valgrind to the default installation for easier debugging of
7624    crash bugs.</li>
7625
7626 </ul>
7627
7628 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
7629
7630 <ul>
7631
7632 <li>Fixed artwork package to work with gnome, no longer break
7633    desktop=gnome installations.</li>
7634 <li>Adjusted installer to now work when forced to use a proxy with the
7635    netinst CD.</li>
7636 <li>Fixed code detecting and setting/loading hardware specific
7637    setup/firmware to work more robust out of the box.</li>
7638 <li>Adjusted Kerberos setup to detect realm and server settings at
7639    install time instead of dynamically at run time. This avoid a crash
7640    with krb5-auth-dialog on diskless workstations without a DNS name.</li>
7641 <li>Worked around misfeature in network-manager not calling the dhclient
7642    exit hooks, causing automatic proxy configuration and automatic host
7643    name setting at run time to work again.</li>
7644 <li>Fixed feature setting the default Iceweasel start page from URL
7645    fetched from LDAP, to allow schools to set the global default by
7646    updating the dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no LDAP object.</li>
7647 <li>Changed default host name on all networked machines to be unique
7648    (generated from MAC or reverse DNS) after boot.</li>
7649 <li>Adjusted partition sizes to make sure they are big enough.</li>
7650
7651 </ul>
7652
7653 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
7654
7655 <ul>
7656
7657 <li>Grub is missing the new artwork.</li>
7658 <li>KDE fail to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
7659     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
7660 <li>Chromium also fail to use the proxy.</li>
7661
7662 </ul>
7663
7664 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
7665
7666 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
7667
7668 <ul>
7669
7670 <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>
7671
7672 <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>
7673
7674 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso .</li>
7675
7676 </ul>
7677
7678 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 55d5de9765b6dccd5d9ec33cf1a07109
7679 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 996a1d9517740e4d627d100de2d12b23dd545a3f</p>
7680
7681 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
7682
7683 <ul>
7684
7685 <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>
7686 <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>
7687 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso .</li>
7688
7689 </ul>
7690
7691 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: d8f0818c51a78d357de794066f289f69
7692 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 49185ca354e8d0543240423746924f76a6cee733</p>
7693
7694
7695 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
7696
7697 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
7698
7699       </div>
7700       <div class="tags">
7701
7702
7703         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>.
7704
7705
7706       </div>
7707     </div>
7708     <div class="padding"></div>
7709
7710     <div class="entry">
7711       <div class="title">
7712         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
7713       </div>
7714       <div class="date">
7715         17th July 2013
7716       </div>
7717       <div class="body">
7718         <p>Today I switched to
7719 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
7720 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
7721 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
7722 <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
7723 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
7724 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
7725 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
7726 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
7727 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
7728 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
7729 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
7730 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
7731 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
7732 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
7733 station from now on.</p>
7734
7735 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
7736 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
7737 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
7738 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
7739 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
7740 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
7741 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
7742 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
7743 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
7744 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
7745 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
7746 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
7747
7748 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
7749 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
7750 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
7751 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
7752 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
7753 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
7754 parameters are tuned:</p>
7755
7756 <ul>
7757
7758 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
7759     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
7760
7761 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
7762     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
7763     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
7764
7765 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
7766     systems.</li>
7767
7768 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
7769     /etc/fstab.</li>
7770
7771 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
7772
7773 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
7774     cron.daily).</li>
7775
7776 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
7777     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
7778
7779 </ul>
7780
7781 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
7782 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
7783 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
7784 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
7785 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
7786 from getting the data on the disk (see
7787 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
7788 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
7789 right thing to do.</p>
7790
7791 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
7792 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
7793 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
7794
7795 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
7796 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
7797 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
7798 instead of during my work.</p>
7799
7800 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
7801 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
7802
7803 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
7804 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
7805 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
7806
7807 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
7808 there.</p>
7809
7810 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
7811 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
7812 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
7813 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
7814 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
7815 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
7816 back.</p>
7817
7818       </div>
7819       <div class="tags">
7820
7821
7822         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7823
7824
7825       </div>
7826     </div>
7827     <div class="padding"></div>
7828
7829     <div class="entry">
7830       <div class="title">
7831         <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>
7832       </div>
7833       <div class="date">
7834         10th July 2013
7835       </div>
7836       <div class="body">
7837         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
7838 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
7839 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
7840 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
7841 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
7842 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
7843 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
7844 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
7845
7846 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
7847 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
7848 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
7849 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
7850 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
7851 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
7852 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
7853 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
7854 lock up when I download a new
7855 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
7856 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
7857 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
7858
7859 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
7860 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
7861 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
7862 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
7863 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
7864 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
7865
7866 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
7867 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
7868 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
7869 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
7870 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
7871 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
7872
7873 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
7874 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
7875 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
7876 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
7877 exist).</p>
7878
7879       </div>
7880       <div class="tags">
7881
7882
7883         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7884
7885
7886       </div>
7887     </div>
7888     <div class="padding"></div>
7889
7890     <div class="entry">
7891       <div class="title">
7892         <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>
7893       </div>
7894       <div class="date">
7895          9th July 2013
7896       </div>
7897       <div class="body">
7898         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
7899 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
7900 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
7901 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
7902 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7903 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
7904 Bitraf</a>.</p>
7905
7906 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
7907 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
7908 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
7909 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
7910 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
7911
7912       </div>
7913       <div class="tags">
7914
7915
7916         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>.
7917
7918
7919       </div>
7920     </div>
7921     <div class="padding"></div>
7922
7923     <div class="entry">
7924       <div class="title">
7925         <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>
7926       </div>
7927       <div class="date">
7928          5th July 2013
7929       </div>
7930       <div class="body">
7931         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
7932 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
7933 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
7934 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
7935 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
7936 ended up picking a
7937 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
7938 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
7939 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
7940 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
7941 on that below.</p>
7942
7943 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
7944 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
7945 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
7946 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
7947 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
7948 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
7949 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
7950 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
7951 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
7952
7953 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
7954 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
7955 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
7956 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
7957 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
7958 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
7959 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
7960
7961 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
7962 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
7963
7964 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
7965 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
7966 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
7967 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
7968 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
7969 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
7970 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
7971 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
7972 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
7973 kernel developers as
7974 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
7975 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
7976 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
7977 Lenovo forums, both for
7978 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
7979 2012-11-10</a> and for
7980 <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
7981 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
7982 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
7983 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
7984 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
7985 There is even a
7986 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
7987 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
7988 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
7989
7990 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
7991 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
7992 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
7993 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
7994 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
7995 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
7996 fixed. :)</p>
7997
7998       </div>
7999       <div class="tags">
8000
8001
8002         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <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/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230.html">The Thinkpad is dead, long live the Thinkpad X230</a>
8012       </div>
8013       <div class="date">
8014          4th July 2013
8015       </div>
8016       <div class="body">
8017         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
8018 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
8019 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
8020 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
8021 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
8022 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
8023 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
8024 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
8025 with an expencive door stop.</p>
8026
8027 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
8028 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
8029 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
8030 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
8031 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
8032 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
8033 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
8034
8035 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
8036 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
8037 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
8038 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
8039 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
8040 new laptop now. :)</p>
8041
8042 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
8043
8044       </div>
8045       <div class="tags">
8046
8047
8048         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8049
8050
8051       </div>
8052     </div>
8053     <div class="padding"></div>
8054
8055     <div class="entry">
8056       <div class="title">
8057         <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>
8058       </div>
8059       <div class="date">
8060          3rd July 2013
8061       </div>
8062       <div class="body">
8063         <p>The fourth wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
8064 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
8065
8066 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~alpha3 released
8067 2013-07-03</strong></p>
8068
8069 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
8070 7.1+edu0~alpha3, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
8071
8072 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
8073
8074 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
8075 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
8076 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
8077 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
8078 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
8079 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
8080 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
8081 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
8082 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
8083 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
8084 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
8085 desktop contains
8086 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
8087 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
8088 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
8089 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
8090
8091 <p>This is the fourth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
8092 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
8093 Squeeze release.</p>
8094
8095 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
8096 <ul>
8097   <li>Dropped ispell dictionaries from our default installation.</li>
8098   <li>Dropped menu-xdg from the KDE desktop option, to drop the Debian
8099     submenu.  It was not included with Gnome, LXDE or Xfce, so this
8100     brings KDE in line with the others.</li>
8101   <li>Dropped xdrawchem, xjig and xsok from our default installation as
8102     they don't have a desktop menu entry and thus won't show up in the
8103     menu now that menu-xdg was removed.</li>
8104   <li>Removed the killer system to kill left behind processes on
8105     multi-user machines, as it was no longer able to understand when a
8106     X display was in use and killed the processes of the active users
8107     too.</li>
8108   <li>Dropped the golearn (from goplay) package as the debtags in wheezy
8109     are too few to make the package useful.</li>
8110 </ul>
8111 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
8112 <ul>
8113   <li>Updated artwork matching http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Joy
8114   <li>Multi-arch i386/amd64 USB stick ISO available.</li>
8115   <li>Got rid of ispell/wordlist related debconf questions that showed
8116     up for some language options.</li>
8117   <li>Switched to using http.debian.net as APT source by default.</li>
8118   <li>Fixed proxy configuration on Main Server installations.</li>
8119   <li>Changed LTSP setup to ask dpkg to use force-unsafe-io the same way
8120     d-i is doing it.</li>
8121   <li>Made sure root and user passwords were not left behind in the
8122     debconf database after installation on Main Server installations.</li>
8123   <li>Made Roaming Workstation dynamic setup more robust and added draft
8124     script setup-ad-client to hook a Roaming Workstation up to a
8125     Active Directory server instead of a Debian Edu Main Server.</li>
8126   <li>Update system to install needed firmware packages during
8127     installation, to work properly in Wheezy.</li>
8128   <li>Update system to handle hardware quirks (debian-edu-hwsetup).</li>
8129   <li>Corrected PXE installation setup to properly pass selected desktop
8130     and keymap settings to PXE installation clients.</li>
8131   <li>LTSP diskless workstations use sshfs by default, allowing them to
8132     work without adding them to DNS and NIS netgroups for NFS access.</li>
8133 </ul>
8134 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
8135 <ul>
8136   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
8137     available yet (698840).</li>
8138   <li>Artwork not enabled for all desktops.</li>
8139 </ul>
8140 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
8141
8142 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
8143 <ul>
8144   <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>
8145   <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>
8146   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso .</li>
8147 </ul>
8148
8149 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 2b161a99d2a848c376d8d04e3854e30c
8150 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 498922e9c508c0a7ee9dbe1dfe5bf830d779c3c8</p>
8151
8152 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
8153 <ul>
8154   <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>
8155   <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>
8156   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso .</li>
8157 </ul>
8158
8159 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 25e808e403a4c15dbef1d13c37d572ac
8160 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 15ecfc93eb6b4f453b7eb0bc04b6a279262d9721</p>
8161
8162 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
8163
8164 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
8165
8166       </div>
8167       <div class="tags">
8168
8169
8170         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>.
8171
8172
8173       </div>
8174     </div>
8175     <div class="padding"></div>
8176
8177     <div class="entry">
8178       <div class="title">
8179         <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>
8180       </div>
8181       <div class="date">
8182         25th June 2013
8183       </div>
8184       <div class="body">
8185         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
8186 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
8187 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
8188 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
8189 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
8190 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
8191 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
8192 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
8193 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
8194 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
8195 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
8196
8197 <p><pre>
8198 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
8199 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
8200 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
8201 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
8202 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
8203 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
8204 firmware-ipw2x00
8205 firmware-ipw2x00
8206 Preconfiguring packages ...
8207 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
8208 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
8209 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
8210 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
8211 #
8212 </pre></p>
8213
8214 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
8215 printed instead:</p>
8216
8217 <p><pre>
8218 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
8219 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
8220 #
8221 </pre></p>
8222
8223 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
8224 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
8225
8226 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
8227 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
8228 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
8229 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
8230 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
8231 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
8232 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
8233 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
8234 machine.</p>
8235
8236 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
8237 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
8238 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
8239 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
8240 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
8241 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
8242
8243       </div>
8244       <div class="tags">
8245
8246
8247         Tags: <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>.
8248
8249
8250       </div>
8251     </div>
8252     <div class="padding"></div>
8253
8254     <div class="entry">
8255       <div class="title">
8256         <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>
8257       </div>
8258       <div class="date">
8259         22nd June 2013
8260       </div>
8261       <div class="body">
8262         <p>In the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
8263 Skolelinux</a> project, we include a post-installation test suite,
8264 which check that services are running, working, and return the
8265 expected results.  It runs automatically just after the first boot on
8266 test installations (using test ISOs), but not on production
8267 installations (using non-test ISOs).  It test that the LDAP service is
8268 operating, Kerberos is responding, DNS is replying, file systems are
8269 online resizable, etc, etc.  And it check that the PXE service is
8270 configured, which is the topic of this post.</p>
8271
8272 <p>The last week I've fixed the DVD and USB stick ISOs for our Debian
8273 Edu Wheezy release.  These ISOs are supposed to be able to install a
8274 complete system without any Internet connection, but for that to
8275 happen all the needed packages need to be on them.  Thanks to our test
8276 suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
8277 cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
8278 When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
8279 using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
8280 working packages to get it working.  And the packages changed name
8281 from debian-installer-6.0-netboot-$arch to
8282 debian-installer-7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
8283 packages during installation.  Without our test suite, I suspect we
8284 would never have discovered this before release.  Now it is fixed
8285 right after we got the ISOs operational.</p>
8286
8287 <p>Another by-product of the test suite is that we can ask system
8288 administrators with problems getting Debian Edu to work, to run the
8289 test suite using <tt>/usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install</tt> and see if
8290 any errors are detected.  This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
8291 the problem.</p>
8292
8293 <p>If you want to help us help kids learn how to share and create,
8294 please join us on
8295 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
8296 irc.debian.org</a> and the
8297 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@</a> mailing
8298 list.</p>
8299
8300       </div>
8301       <div class="tags">
8302
8303
8304         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>.
8305
8306
8307       </div>
8308     </div>
8309     <div class="padding"></div>
8310
8311     <div class="entry">
8312       <div class="title">
8313         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html">Debian Edu interview: Victor Nițu</a>
8314       </div>
8315       <div class="date">
8316         17th June 2013
8317       </div>
8318       <div class="body">
8319         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
8320 Skolelinux</a> distribution have users and contributors all around the
8321 globe.  And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
8322 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">our IRC channel
8323 #debian-edu</a> and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
8324 worked.  We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
8325 help us with translations.  And today I managed to get an interview
8326 with him, to learn more about him.</p>
8327
8328 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
8329
8330 <p>I'm a 25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
8331 which is also my country of origin. Back in 2009, at a New Year's Eve
8332 party, I had a very nice <strike>beer</strike> discussion with a
8333 friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
8334 country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
8335 community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
8336 began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
8337 constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
8338 field.</p>
8339
8340 <p>A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
8341 provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
8342 activities. For the last 13 months, I have been the Technical Director
8343 of <a href="http://ceata.org/">Fundația Ceata</a>, which is a free
8344 software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
8345 the only one we have in our country.</p>
8346
8347 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
8348 project?</strong></p>
8349
8350 <p>The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
8351 even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
8352 it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
8353 educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
8354 love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
8355 technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
8356 ways to contribute.</p>
8357
8358 <p>My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
8359 configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
8360 haven't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
8361 areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
8362 software in my country is pretty low, I'll be happy to be the first
8363 one around here advocating for the project's adoption in educational
8364 environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
8365 for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
8366 from now on, time will tell what I'll be doing next, but I think I
8367 have a pretty consistent starting point.</p>
8368
8369 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
8370 Edu?</strong></p>
8371
8372 <p>Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
8373 maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
8374 took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
8375 Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
8376 time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
8377 with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
8378 out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
8379 it comes to managing a school's network, for example.</p>
8380
8381 <p>Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
8382 availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
8383 scenarios is something I can't wait to experiment "into the wild" (I
8384 only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
8385 lot more I haven't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
8386 project.</p>
8387
8388 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
8389 Edu?</strong></p>
8390
8391 <p>As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
8392 disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
8393 project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
8394 a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story.  I'd like to see
8395 Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
8396 ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
8397 lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
8398 opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project's dynamics. Not
8399 to mention it's a very fun blend to work on!</p>
8400
8401 <p>Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
8402 with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
8403 to all blends and derivatives, but it's an issue we can all work
8404 on.</p>
8405
8406 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
8407
8408 <p>I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
8409 daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
8410 am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
8411 Enlightenment project a lot!),
8412 <a href="http://www.claws-mail.org/‎">Claws Mail</a> due to its ease of
8413 use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
8414 <a href="https://launchpad.net/redshift">Redshift</a>, which helps me
8415 get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
8416 stuff in this bag, but I'll need a blog on my own for doing this!</p>
8417
8418 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
8419 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
8420
8421 <p>Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
8422 now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
8423 that:</p>
8424
8425 <ul>
8426
8427 <li>schools would like to get rid of proprietary software</li>
8428
8429 <li>students will love the openness of the system, and will want to
8430     experiment with it - maybe we need to harvest the native curiosity
8431     of teenagers more?</li>
8432
8433 <li>there is no "right one" when it comes to strategies, but it would
8434     be useful to have some success stories published somewhere, so
8435     other can get some inspiration from them (I know I'd promote
8436     them!)</li>
8437
8438 <li>more active promotion - talks, conferences, even small school
8439     lectures can do magical things if they encounter at least one
8440     person interested. Who knows who that person might be? ;-)</li>
8441
8442 </ul>
8443
8444 <p>I also see some problems in getting Skolelinux into schools; for
8445 example, in our country we have a great deal of corruption issues, so
8446 it might be hard(er) to fight against proprietary solutions. Also,
8447 people who relied on commercial software for all their lives, would be
8448 very hard to convert against their will.</p>
8449
8450       </div>
8451       <div class="tags">
8452
8453
8454         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>.
8455
8456
8457       </div>
8458     </div>
8459     <div class="padding"></div>
8460
8461     <div class="entry">
8462       <div class="title">
8463         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jonathan_Carter.html">Debian Edu interview: Jonathan Carter</a>
8464       </div>
8465       <div class="date">
8466         12th June 2013
8467       </div>
8468       <div class="body">
8469         <p>There is a certain cross-over between the
8470 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
8471 project</a> and <a href="http://www.edubuntu.org/">the Edubuntu
8472 project</a>, and for example the LTSP packages in Debian are a joint
8473 effort between the projects.  One person with a foot in both camps is
8474 Jonathan Carter, which I am now happy to present to you.</p>
8475
8476 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
8477
8478 <p>I'm a South-African free software geek who lives in Cape Town. My
8479 days vary quite a bit since I'm involved in too many things. As I'm
8480 getting older I'm learning how to focus a bit more :)</p>
8481
8482 <p>I'm also an Edubuntu contributor and I love when there are
8483 opportunities for the Edubuntu and Debian Edu projects to benefit from
8484 each other.</p>
8485
8486 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
8487 project?</strong></p>
8488
8489 <p>I've been somewhat familiar with the project before, but I think my
8490 first direct exposure to the project was when I met Petter
8491 [Reinholdtsen] and Knut [Yrvin] at the Edubuntu summit in 2005 in
8492 London. They provided great feedback that helped the bootstrapping of
8493 Edubuntu. Back then Edubuntu (and even Ubuntu) was still very new and
8494 it was great getting input from people who have been around longer. I
8495 was also still very excitable and said yes to everything and to this
8496 day I have a big todo list backlog that I'm catching up with. I think
8497 over the years the relationship between Edubuntu and Debian-Edu has
8498 been gradually improving, although I think there's a lot that we could
8499 still improve on in terms of working together on packages. I'm sure
8500 we'll get there one day.</p>
8501
8502 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
8503 Edu?</strong></p>
8504
8505 <p>Debian itself already has so many advantages. I could go on about
8506 it for pages, but in essence I love that it's a very honest project
8507 that puts its users first with no hidden agendas and also produces
8508 very high quality work.</p>
8509
8510 <p>I think the advantage of Debian Edu is that it makes many common
8511 set-up tasks simpler so that administrators can get up and running
8512 with a lot less effort and frustration. At the same time I think it
8513 helps to standardise installations in schools so that it's easier for
8514 community members and commercial suppliers to support.</p>
8515
8516 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
8517 Edu?</strong></p>
8518
8519 <p>I had to re-type this one a few times because I'm trying to
8520 separate "disadvantages" from "areas that need improvement" (which is
8521 what I originally rambled on about)</p>
8522
8523 <p>The biggest disadvantage I can think of is lack of manpower. The
8524 project could do so much more if there were more good contributors. I
8525 think some of the problems are external too. Free software and free
8526 content in education is a no-brainer but it takes some time to catch
8527 on. When you've been working with the same proprietary eco-system for
8528 years and have gotten used to it, it can be hard to adjust to some
8529 concepts in the free software world. It would be nice if there were
8530 more Debian Edu consultants across the world. I'd love to be one
8531 myself but I'm already so over-committed that it's just not possible
8532 currently.</p>
8533
8534 <p>I think the best short-term solution to that large-scale problem is
8535 for schools to be pro-active and share their experiences and grow
8536 their skills in-house. I'm often saddened to see how much money
8537 educational institutions spend on 3rd party solutions that they don't
8538 have access to after the service has ended and they could've gotten so
8539 much more value otherwise by being more self-sustainable and
8540 autonomous.</p>
8541
8542 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
8543
8544 <p>My main laptop dual-boots between Debian and Windows 7. I was
8545 Windows free for years but started dual-booting again last year for
8546 some games which help me focus and relax (Starcraft II in
8547 particular). Gaming support on Linux is improving in leaps and bounds
8548 so I suppose I'll soon be able to regain that disk space :)</p>
8549
8550 <p>Besides that I rely on Icedove, Chromium, Terminator, Byobu, irssi,
8551 git, Tomboy, KVM, VLC and LibreOffice. Recently I've been torn on
8552 which desktop environment I like and I'm taking some refuge in Xfce
8553 while I figure that out. I like tools that keep things simple. I enjoy
8554 Python and shell scripting. I went to an Arduino workshop recently and
8555 it was awesome seeing how easy and simple the IDE software was to get
8556 up and running in Debian compared to the users running Windows and OS
8557 X.</p>
8558
8559 <p>I also use mc which some people frown upon slightly. I got used to
8560 using Norton Commander in the early 90's and it stuck (I think the
8561 people who sneer at it is just jealous that they don't know how to use
8562 it :p)
8563
8564 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
8565 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
8566
8567 <p>I think trying to force it is unproductive. I also think that in
8568 many cases it's appropriate for schools to use non-free systems and I
8569 don't think that there's any particular moral or ethical problem with
8570 that.</p>
8571
8572 <p>I do think though that free software can already solve so so many
8573 problems in educational institutions and it's just a shame not taking
8574 advantage of that.</p>
8575
8576 <p>I also think that some curricula need serious review. For example,
8577 some areas of the world rely heavily on very specific versions of MS
8578 Office, teaching students to parrot menu items instead of learning the
8579 general concepts. I think that's very unproductive because firstly, MS
8580 Office's interface changes drastically every few years and on top of
8581 that it also locks in a generation to a product that might not be the
8582 best solution for them.</p>
8583
8584 <p>To answer your question, I believe that the right strategy is to
8585 educate and inform, giving someone the information they require to
8586 make a decision that would work for them.</p>
8587
8588       </div>
8589       <div class="tags">
8590
8591
8592         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>.
8593
8594
8595       </div>
8596     </div>
8597     <div class="padding"></div>
8598
8599     <div class="entry">
8600       <div class="title">
8601         <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>
8602       </div>
8603       <div class="date">
8604         11th June 2013
8605       </div>
8606       <div class="body">
8607         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
8608 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
8609 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
8610 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
8611 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
8612 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
8613 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
8614 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
8615 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
8616 i915 driver used by the
8617 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
8618 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
8619
8620 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
8621 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
8622 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
8623 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
8624 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
8625
8626 <pre>
8627 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
8628 update-initramfs -u -k all
8629 </pre>
8630
8631 <p>Since March 2012 there is
8632 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
8633 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
8634 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
8635 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
8636 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
8637 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
8638 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
8639 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
8640 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
8641 number.</p>
8642
8643 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
8644 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
8645
8646 <p><pre>
8647 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
8648     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
8649     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
8650  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
8651  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
8652     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
8653  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
8654     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
8655  Latency: 0
8656  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
8657  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
8658  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
8659  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
8660  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
8661  Capabilities: <access denied>
8662  Kernel driver in use: i915
8663 </pre></p>
8664
8665 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
8666
8667 <p><pre>
8668 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
8669        ...
8670         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
8671         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
8672        ...
8673 }
8674 </pre></p>
8675
8676 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
8677 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
8678 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
8679 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
8680 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
8681 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
8682 yet shown up in
8683 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
8684 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
8685 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
8686 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
8687 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
8688 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
8689
8690 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
8691 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
8692 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
8693 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
8694 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
8695 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
8696 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
8697 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
8698 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
8699 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
8700 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
8701 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
8702
8703 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
8704 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
8705 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
8706 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
8707 backlight.</p>
8708
8709       </div>
8710       <div class="tags">
8711
8712
8713         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8714
8715
8716       </div>
8717     </div>
8718     <div class="padding"></div>
8719
8720     <div class="entry">
8721       <div class="title">
8722         <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>
8723       </div>
8724       <div class="date">
8725         10th June 2013
8726       </div>
8727       <div class="body">
8728         <p>The third wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
8729 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
8730
8731 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha2 released
8732 2013-06-10</strong></p>
8733
8734 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
8735 alpha2, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
8736
8737 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
8738
8739 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
8740 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
8741 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
8742 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
8743 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
8744 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
8745 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
8746 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
8747 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
8748 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
8749 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
8750 desktop contains
8751 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
8752 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
8753 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
8754 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
8755
8756 <p>This is the third test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
8757 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
8758 Squeeze release.</p>
8759
8760 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
8761
8762 <ul>
8763
8764 <li>Iceweasel was updated from 10 to 17. (DSA 2699-1)
8765 <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).
8766 <li>Switched xrdp on thin client servers to use tightvncserver instead of xvnc4.
8767 <li>Now install software oscilloscope xoscope by default.
8768 <li>Now install music tools gtick, lingot and pianobooster by default.
8769
8770 </ul>
8771
8772 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
8773
8774 <ul>
8775
8776 <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.
8777 <li>Updated translation of the installation.
8778 <li>New Romanian translation.
8779 <li>Fix security problem causing root and first user password to no longer show up in /var/cache/debconf/templates.dat.
8780 <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).
8781 <li>Made roaming workstation setup more robust in non-Debian Edu environments.
8782 <li>New script debian-edu-bless to transform a Debian installation to a Debian Edu profile.
8783 <li>Adjust Iceweasel setup to improve performance when $HOME is on NFS.
8784 <li>More testsuite tests.
8785 <li>Make automatic proxy configuration more robust.
8786 <li>Adjust GOsa² GUI configuration.
8787
8788 <li>Update thin client and diskless workstation setup to work with
8789 LTSP in Wheezy.</li>
8790
8791 <li>Diskless workstations now run out of the box -- no need to set
8792 them up with GOsa².</li>
8793
8794 <li>Update IMAP server setup. </li>
8795
8796 <li>Fix login into Skolelinux Backup Tool (Closed in
8797 slbackup-php/0.4.4-1: #700257: slbackup-php: Fails to submit correctly
8798 entered password). </li>
8799
8800 </ul>
8801
8802 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
8803
8804 <ul>
8805
8806 <li>DVD binary and source images are not yet ready.</li>
8807
8808 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
8809 available yet (Open in gosa/2.7.4-4: #698840: gosa-plugin-ldapmanager:
8810 missing import feature).</li>
8811
8812 <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others). </li>
8813
8814 <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons (Closed: #502192: menu-xdg: invents
8815 own icon names instead of using existing). This will remain
8816 unfixed.</li>
8817
8818 </ul>
8819
8820 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
8821
8822 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
8823
8824 <ul>
8825
8826 <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>
8827
8828 <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>
8829
8830 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso .</li>
8831
8832 </ul>
8833
8834 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 27bbcace407743382f3c42c08dbe8178
8835 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: e35f7d7908566cd3075375b3721fa10ee420d419</p>
8836
8837 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
8838
8839 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
8840
8841       </div>
8842       <div class="tags">
8843
8844
8845         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>.
8846
8847
8848       </div>
8849     </div>
8850     <div class="padding"></div>
8851
8852     <div class="entry">
8853       <div class="title">
8854         <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>
8855       </div>
8856       <div class="date">
8857          5th June 2013
8858       </div>
8859       <div class="body">
8860         <p>Here is a call for help from the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project.
8861 We have two problems blocking the release of the Wheezy version we
8862 hope to get released soon.  The two problems require some with PHP
8863 skills, and we seem to lack anyone with both time and PHP skills in
8864 the project:
8865
8866 <ol>
8867
8868 <li>It is impossible to log into the slbackup web interface
8869   (slbackup-php) using the root user and password.  This is
8870   <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">BTS report #700257</a>.
8871   This used to work, but stopped working some time since Squeeze.
8872   Perhaps some obsolete PHP feature was used?</li>
8873
8874 <li>It is not possible to "mass import" user lists in Gosa, neither
8875   using ldif nor using CSV files.  The feature was disabled after a
8876   major rewrite of Gosa, and need to be ported to the new system.
8877   This is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">BTS report
8878   #698840</a>.</li>
8879
8880 </ol>
8881
8882 <p>If you can help us, please join us on IRC
8883 (<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
8884 irc.debian.org</a>) and provide patches via the BTS.</p>
8885
8886       </div>
8887       <div class="tags">
8888
8889
8890         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>.
8891
8892
8893       </div>
8894     </div>
8895     <div class="padding"></div>
8896
8897     <div class="entry">
8898       <div class="title">
8899         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html">Debian Edu interview: Cédric Boutillier</a>
8900       </div>
8901       <div class="date">
8902          4th June 2013
8903       </div>
8904       <div class="body">
8905         <p>It has been a while since my last English
8906 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
8907 interview last November.  But the developers and translators are still
8908 pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this
8909 time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators
8910 in the project, Cédric Boutillier.</p>
8911
8912 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
8913
8914 <p>I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
8915 professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
8916 mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
8917 probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.</p>
8918
8919 <p>I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
8920 and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
8921 packaging, publicity and translation.</p>
8922
8923 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
8924 project?</strong></p>
8925
8926 <p>I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
8927 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Manuals">the
8928 Debian Edu manual</a> for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
8929 then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
8930 manual.
8931
8932 <p>I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
8933 virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
8934 shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
8935 how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.</p>
8936
8937 <p>What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
8938 ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
8939 by <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa²</a>.  What pleased
8940 me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
8941 there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages,
8942 to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
8943 artistic skills with music (<a href="http://ardour.org/">Ardour</a>,
8944 <a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a>) and
8945 movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
8946 <a href="http://linuxstopmotion.sourceforge.net/">Stopmotion</a>).</p>
8947
8948 <p>I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
8949 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>.
8950 Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this
8951 beautiful project.</p>
8952
8953 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
8954 Edu?</strong></p>
8955
8956 <p>For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
8957 community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
8958 fact that it provides a solution ready to use.</p>
8959
8960 <p>I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
8961 distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
8962 of educational free software.</p>
8963
8964 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
8965 Edu?</strong></p>
8966
8967 <p>Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
8968 project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
8969 not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
8970 solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
8971 is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.</p>
8972
8973 <p>One can find support from a company by looking at
8974 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Help/ProfessionalHelp">the
8975 wiki dokumentation</a>, where some countries already have a number of
8976 companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
8977 Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
8978 for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
8979 consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
8980 support for Debian Edu as well.</p>
8981
8982 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
8983
8984 <p>I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
8985 most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
8986 scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice.  I am
8987 also using the mathematical software
8988 <a href="http://www.scilab.org/en/scilab/about‎">Scilab</a> and
8989 <a href="http://www.sagemath.org/index.html‎">Sage</a> (built from
8990 source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).
8991
8992 <p><strong>Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
8993 using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
8994 statistics?</strong></p>
8995
8996 <p>I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our
8997 university, we use both <a href="http://www.r-project.org/‎">R</a> and
8998 Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
8999 geometry, there are nice programs:</p>
9000
9001 <ul>
9002
9003 <li><a href="http://www.drgeo.eu/">drgeo</a> and
9004 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/kig‎">kig</a> to do
9005 constructions in planar geometry
9006
9007 <li><a href="http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/software/download/kali.html">kali</a>
9008 to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze
9009 groups), although the interface looks a bit old.</li>
9010
9011 </ul>
9012
9013 <p>I like also
9014 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/cantor">cantor</a>, which
9015 provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage,
9016 <a href="http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Octave‎">Octave</a>, etc...</p>
9017
9018 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
9019 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
9020
9021 <p>My suggestions would be to</p>
9022
9023 <ul>
9024
9025 <li>advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.</li>
9026
9027 <li>communicate about the quality of free software projects, using
9028     well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and
9029     OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.</li>
9030
9031 <li>advertise the living and strong community around the project.</li>
9032
9033 <li>show that it is not more difficult to use than any other
9034     system.</li>
9035
9036 </ul>
9037
9038       </div>
9039       <div class="tags">
9040
9041
9042         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>.
9043
9044
9045       </div>
9046     </div>
9047     <div class="padding"></div>
9048
9049     <div class="entry">
9050       <div class="title">
9051         <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>
9052       </div>
9053       <div class="date">
9054          1st June 2013
9055       </div>
9056       <div class="body">
9057         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
9058 Skolelinux</a>, there are quite a lot of educational software.
9059 Created to help teachers teach, and pupils learn.  We have tried to
9060 tag them all using debtags use::learning and role::program, and using
9061 the debtags I was happy to be able to create a collage of the
9062 educational software packages installed by default, sorted by the
9063 debtag field.  Here it is.  Click on a image to learn more about the
9064 program.</p>
9065
9066 <!-- 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 -->
9067
9068 <p><strong>field::arts</strong></p>
9069 <p>
9070 <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>
9071 <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>
9072 <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>
9073 <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>
9074 <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>
9075 <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>
9076 <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>
9077 <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>
9078 <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>
9079 <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>
9080 <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>
9081 <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>
9082 <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>
9083 <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>
9084 </p>
9085
9086 <p><strong>field::astronomy</strong></p>
9087 <p>
9088 <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>
9089 <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>
9090 <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>
9091 <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>
9092 <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>
9093 <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>
9094 </p>
9095
9096 <p><strong>field::biology:structural</strong></p>
9097 <p>
9098 <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>
9099 </p>
9100
9101 <p><strong>field::chemistry</strong></p>
9102 <p>
9103 <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>
9104 <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>
9105 <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>
9106 <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>
9107 <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>
9108 <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>
9109 <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>
9110 <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>
9111 <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>
9112 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=viewmol'>[viewmol]</a>
9113 <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>
9114 </p>
9115
9116 <p><strong>field::electronics</strong></p>
9117 <p>
9118 <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>
9119 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gpsim'>[gpsim]</a>
9120 </p>
9121
9122 <p><strong>field::geography</strong></p>
9123 <p>
9124 <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>
9125 <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>
9126 <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>
9127 </p>
9128
9129 <p><strong>field::linguistics</strong></p>
9130 <p>
9131 <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>
9132 <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>
9133 <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>
9134 <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>
9135 <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>
9136 </p>
9137
9138 <p><strong>field::mathematics</strong></p>
9139 <p>
9140 <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>
9141 <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>
9142 <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>
9143 <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>
9144 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=geomview'>[geomview]</a>
9145 <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>
9146 <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>
9147 <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>
9148 <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>
9149 <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>
9150 <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>
9151 <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>
9152 <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>
9153 <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>
9154 <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>
9155 <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>
9156 <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>
9157 </p>
9158
9159 <p><strong>field::physics</strong></p>
9160 <p>
9161 <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>
9162 <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>
9163 </p>
9164
9165 <p><strong>field::TODO</strong></p>
9166 <p>
9167 <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>
9168 <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>
9169 <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>
9170 <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>
9171 <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>
9172 <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>
9173 <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>
9174 <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>
9175 <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>
9176 <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>
9177 </p>
9178
9179 <p>In total, 61 applications.  3 of them lacked screen shots on
9180 <a href="http://screenshot.debian.net">screenshot.debian.net</a>.  If
9181 you know of some packages we should install by default, please let us
9182 know on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu
9183 on irc.debian.org</a>, or our
9184 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">mailing list
9185 debian-edu@</a>.</p>
9186
9187       </div>
9188       <div class="tags">
9189
9190
9191         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>.
9192
9193
9194       </div>
9195     </div>
9196     <div class="padding"></div>
9197
9198     <div class="entry">
9199       <div class="title">
9200         <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>
9201       </div>
9202       <div class="date">
9203         27th May 2013
9204       </div>
9205       <div class="body">
9206         <p>Two days ago, I asked
9207 <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
9208 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
9209 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
9210 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
9211 and Windows 8.</p>
9212
9213 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
9214 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
9215 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
9216 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
9217 enough to tell.</p>
9218
9219 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
9220 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
9221 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
9222 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
9223 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
9224 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
9225 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
9226 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
9227 to follow.</p>
9228
9229 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
9230 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
9231 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
9232 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
9233 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
9234 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
9235 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
9236 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
9237
9238 <p>I've updated the
9239 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
9240 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
9241 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
9242 machine.</p>
9243
9244 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
9245 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
9246
9247       </div>
9248       <div class="tags">
9249
9250
9251         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9252
9253
9254       </div>
9255     </div>
9256     <div class="padding"></div>
9257
9258     <div class="entry">
9259       <div class="title">
9260         <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>
9261       </div>
9262       <div class="date">
9263         25th May 2013
9264       </div>
9265       <div class="body">
9266         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
9267 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
9268 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
9269 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
9270 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
9271 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
9272
9273 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
9274 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
9275 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
9276 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
9277 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
9278 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
9279 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
9280 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
9281 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
9282 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
9283
9284 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
9285 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
9286 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
9287 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
9288 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
9289 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
9290
9291 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
9292 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
9293 on new Laptops?</p>
9294
9295       </div>
9296       <div class="tags">
9297
9298
9299         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9300
9301
9302       </div>
9303     </div>
9304     <div class="padding"></div>
9305
9306     <div class="entry">
9307       <div class="title">
9308         <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>
9309       </div>
9310       <div class="date">
9311         17th May 2013
9312       </div>
9313       <div class="body">
9314         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
9315 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
9316 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
9317 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
9318 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
9319 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
9320 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
9321 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
9322 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
9323 donate some money</a>.
9324
9325 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
9326 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
9327 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
9328 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
9329 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
9330
9331 <p>The script,
9332 <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/>
9333 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
9334 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
9335 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
9336
9337 <ol>
9338
9339 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
9340 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
9341 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
9342     our configuration.</li>
9343 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
9344     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
9345     according to the profile specified in the config above,
9346     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
9347 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
9348     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
9349 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
9350
9351 </ol>
9352
9353 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
9354 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
9355 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
9356 the needed packages.</p>
9357
9358 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
9359 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
9360 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
9361 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
9362 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
9363 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
9364
9365 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
9366 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
9367 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
9368
9369 <p><pre>
9370 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
9371 DESKTOP="lxde"
9372 </pre></p>
9373
9374 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
9375 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
9376 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
9377 boot.</p>
9378
9379       </div>
9380       <div class="tags">
9381
9382
9383         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>.
9384
9385
9386       </div>
9387     </div>
9388     <div class="padding"></div>
9389
9390     <div class="entry">
9391       <div class="title">
9392         <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>
9393       </div>
9394       <div class="date">
9395         14th May 2013
9396       </div>
9397       <div class="body">
9398         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
9399 project</a> is making great progress and made its second Wheezy based
9400 release today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
9401
9402 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha1 released
9403 2013-05-14</strong></p>
9404
9405 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
9406 alpha1, based on <a href="http://www.debian.org">Debian</a> with
9407 codename "Wheezy".</p>
9408
9409 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
9410
9411 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
9412 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
9413 configured school network. Immediatly after installation a school
9414 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
9415 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
9416 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
9417 initial installation of the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all
9418 other machines can be installed via the network.</p>
9419
9420 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
9421 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
9422 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
9423
9424 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
9425 <ul>
9426   <li>Install freemind (0.9.0) by default, and stop installing vym by
9427     default.</li>
9428   <li>Install chromium (26.0.1410.43) by default.</li>
9429   <li>Install goplay (0.5-1.1) to make golearn available by default.</li>
9430   <li>Updated support for Japanese input methods, now based on
9431     ibus-anthy.</li>
9432 </ul>
9433
9434 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
9435 <ul>
9436
9437   <li>Switched default file system from ext3 to ext4 for speed and
9438     reliability improvements.</li>
9439   <li>Got rid of unwanted winbind daemon and PAM setup activated because
9440     of <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706434">706434</a>.</li>
9441   <li>Extended and improved the testsuite tests to detect more possible
9442     problems.</li>
9443   <li>Corrected proxy handling to not set http_proxy to a bogus
9444     direct:// URL.</li>
9445   <li>Corrected proxy setup for diskless workstations.</li>
9446   <li>Corrected PXE setup to use our updated udebs during installation.</li>
9447   <li>Made installation handling of low entropy level more robust.</li>
9448   <li>Create larger partitions for Roaming workstations and Thin client
9449     servers, to make room for all the software installed.</li>
9450   <li>Fix bug in Roaming workstation PAM setup, making it impossible to
9451     log in (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706753">706753</a>).</li>
9452 </ul>
9453
9454 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
9455 <ul>
9456
9457   <li>IP resolution for the local hostname give useless IPv6 address
9458     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/705900">705900</a>).  Only install
9459     libnss-myhostname on roaming workstations until it is fixed.</li>
9460   <li>DVD images are not yet ready.</li>
9461   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
9462     available yet (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">698840</a>).</li>
9463   <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others).</li>
9464   <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons.</li>
9465   <li>LXDE menu lacks entry for changing GOsa password
9466     (website). Installing gosa-desktop will be an option.</li>
9467   <li>Backup configuration via web interface is impossible due to
9468     password submission problem
9469     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">700257</a>).</li>
9470
9471 </ul>
9472
9473 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
9474
9475 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
9476 <ul>
9477
9478   <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>
9479   <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>
9480   <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>
9481
9482 </ul>
9483
9484 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 685ed76c1aa8e44b12d3fde21faf450b</p>
9485
9486 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 6c874de157024da13e115bab29c068080a11ec4c</p>
9487
9488 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
9489
9490 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
9491
9492       </div>
9493       <div class="tags">
9494
9495
9496         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>.
9497
9498
9499       </div>
9500     </div>
9501     <div class="padding"></div>
9502
9503     <div class="entry">
9504       <div class="title">
9505         <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>
9506       </div>
9507       <div class="date">
9508         11th May 2013
9509       </div>
9510       <div class="body">
9511         <P>In January,
9512 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
9513 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
9514 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
9515 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
9516 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
9517 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
9518 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
9519 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
9520 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
9521 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
9522 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
9523 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
9524
9525 <p><table>
9526 <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>
9527 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
9528 <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>
9529 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
9530 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
9531 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
9532 <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>
9533 <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>
9534 <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>
9535 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
9536 </table></p>
9537
9538 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
9539 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
9540 available in experimental.</p>
9541
9542 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
9543 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
9544 for LEGO designers.</p>
9545
9546       </div>
9547       <div class="tags">
9548
9549
9550         Tags: <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>.
9551
9552
9553       </div>
9554     </div>
9555     <div class="padding"></div>
9556
9557     <div class="entry">
9558       <div class="title">
9559         <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>
9560       </div>
9561       <div class="date">
9562          5th May 2013
9563       </div>
9564       <div class="body">
9565         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
9566 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
9567 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
9568 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
9569 soon.</p>
9570
9571 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
9572 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
9573 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
9574 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
9575 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
9576 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
9577 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
9578 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
9579 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
9580 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
9581 Edu.</a>
9582
9583 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
9584 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
9585 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
9586 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
9587 follow.<p>
9588
9589       </div>
9590       <div class="tags">
9591
9592
9593         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>.
9594
9595
9596       </div>
9597     </div>
9598     <div class="padding"></div>
9599
9600     <div class="entry">
9601       <div class="title">
9602         <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>
9603       </div>
9604       <div class="date">
9605         26th April 2013
9606       </div>
9607       <div class="body">
9608         <p>The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is still going strong and made
9609 its first Wheezy based release today.  This is the release
9610 announcement:</p>
9611
9612 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu ~7.0.0 alpha0 released
9613 2013-04-26</strong></p>
9614
9615 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux ~7.0.0
9616 edu alpha0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
9617
9618 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
9619
9620 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
9621 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
9622 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
9623 network. Immediatly after installation a school server running all
9624 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
9625 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
9626 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
9627 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
9628 installed via the network.</p>
9629
9630 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
9631 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
9632 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
9633
9634 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
9635
9636 <ul>
9637 <li>Everything which is new in Debian Wheezy, eg:
9638   <ul>
9639      <li>Linux kernel 3.2.x</li>
9640      <li>Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.8.4, GNOME 3.4, and LXDE 4
9641          (KDE is installed by default; to choose GNOME or LXDE: see
9642          manual.)</li>
9643      <li>Web browser Iceweasel 10 ESR</li>
9644      <li>LibreOffice 3.5.4</li>
9645      <li>LTSP 5.4.2</li>
9646      <li>GOsa 2.7.4</li>
9647      <li>CUPS print system 1.5.3</li>
9648      <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 12.01</li>
9649      <li>Music creator Rosegarden 12.04</li>
9650      <li>Image editor Gimp 2.8.2</li>
9651      <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.1</li>
9652      <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.11.3</li>
9653      <li>Scratch visual programming environment 1.4.0.6</li>
9654      <li>New version of debian-installer from Debian Wheezy, see
9655          <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual">installation
9656          manual</a> for more details.</li>
9657      <li>Debian Wheezy includes about 37000 packages available for
9658          installation.</li>
9659      <li>More information about Debian Wheezy 7.0 is provided in the
9660          <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>
9661   </ul></li>
9662 </ul>
9663
9664 <p><strong>Documentation</strong></p>
9665 <ul>
9666 <li>The (<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy">English</a>) Debian Edu Wheezy Manual is fully translated to
9667     German, French, Italian and Danish. Partly translated versions exist
9668     for Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.</li>
9669 </ul>
9670
9671 <p><Strong>LDAP related changes</strong></p>
9672 <ul>
9673 <li>Slight changes to some objects and acls to have more types to
9674     choose from when adding systems in GOsa. Now systems can be of type
9675     server, workstation, printer, terminal or netdevice.</li>
9676 </ul>
9677
9678 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
9679 <ul>
9680 <li>LTSP clients start as diskless workstation / thin client can be
9681     configured via command line argument -- or individually adding an
9682     entry in lts.conf or LDAP.<li>
9683 <li>GOsa gui: Now some options that seemed to be available, but are non
9684     functional, are greyed out (or are not clickable). Some tabs are
9685     completely hidden to the end user, others even to the GOsa admin.</li>
9686 </ul>
9687
9688 <p><strong>Regressions</strong></p>
9689 <ul>
9690 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv) available
9691     yet.</li>
9692 </ul>
9693
9694 <p><strong>No updated artwork</strong></p>
9695
9696 <ul>
9697 <li>Updated artwork which is visible during installation, in the login
9698     screen and as desktop wallpaper is still missing or the same as we
9699     had for our Squeeze based release.</li>
9700 </ul>
9701
9702 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
9703
9704 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
9705 <ul>
9706 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
9707 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
9708 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</li>
9709 </ul>
9710
9711 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: c5e773ddafdaa4f48c409c682f598b6c</p>
9712
9713 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 25934fabb9b7d20235499a0a51f08ce6c54215f2</p>
9714
9715 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
9716
9717 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
9718
9719       </div>
9720       <div class="tags">
9721
9722
9723         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>.
9724
9725
9726       </div>
9727     </div>
9728     <div class="padding"></div>
9729
9730     <div class="entry">
9731       <div class="title">
9732         <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>
9733       </div>
9734       <div class="date">
9735         16th April 2013
9736       </div>
9737       <div class="body">
9738         <p>This years first <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux /
9739 Debian Edu</a> developer gathering take place the coming weekend in Trondheim.
9740 Details about the gathering can be found
9741 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2013-04-19-21-Trondheim">on
9742 the FRiSK wiki</a>.  The dates are 19-21th of April 2013, and online
9743 participation for those unable to make it in person is very welcome,
9744 and I plan to participate online myself as I could not leave Oslo this
9745 weekend.</p>
9746
9747 <p>The focus of the gathering is to work on the web pages and project
9748 infrastructure, and to continue the work on the Wheezy based Debian
9749 Edu release.</p>
9750
9751 <p>See you on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu on irc.debian.org,</a> then?</p>
9752
9753       </div>
9754       <div class="tags">
9755
9756
9757         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>.
9758
9759
9760       </div>
9761     </div>
9762     <div class="padding"></div>
9763
9764     <div class="entry">
9765       <div class="title">
9766         <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>
9767       </div>
9768       <div class="date">
9769          3rd April 2013
9770       </div>
9771       <div class="body">
9772         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
9773 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
9774 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
9775 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
9776
9777 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
9778 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
9779 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
9780 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
9781 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
9782 BTS. :)</p>
9783
9784       </div>
9785       <div class="tags">
9786
9787
9788         Tags: <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>.
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/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>
9798       </div>
9799       <div class="date">
9800         26th March 2013
9801       </div>
9802       <div class="body">
9803         <p>Would you like to help the environment and save money at the same
9804 time, without much sacrifice?  A small step could be to change the
9805 font you use when printing.</p>
9806
9807 <p>Three years ago,
9808 <a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/04/last-year-printer-comparison-website/">Ars
9809 Technica</a> reported how the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
9810 changed their default front from
9811 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial">Arial</a> to
9812 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Gothic">Century
9813 Gothic</a> to save money.  The Century Gothic font uses 30% less toner
9814 than Arial to print the same text.  In other word, you could cut your
9815 toner costs by 30% (or actually, increase your toner supply life time
9816 by more than 30%), by simply changing the default font used in your
9817 prints.</p>
9818
9819 <p>But it is not quite obvious how much one will save by switching.
9820 The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay said it used $100,000 per year
9821 on ink and toner cartridges, according to
9822 <a href="http://www.twincities.com/ci_14833097">a report from
9823 TwinCities.com</a>, and expected to save between $5,000 and $10,000
9824 per year by asking staff and students to use a different font.  Not
9825 all PDFs and documents are created internally, and those from external
9826 sources will most likely still use a different font.  Also, the
9827 Century Gothic font is slightly wider than Arial, and thus might use
9828 more sheets of paper to print the same text, so the total saving
9829 depend on the documents printed.</p>
9830
9831 <p>But it is definitely something to consider, if you want to reduce
9832 the amount of trash, decrease the amount of toner used in the world,
9833 and save some money in the process.</p>
9834
9835 <p>Update 2013-04-10: If you want to know how much ink/toner could be
9836 saved when switching between fonts, Inkfarm got a
9837 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/What-the-Font">service to calculate the
9838 difference between font pairs</a>.  They also
9839 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/Recommended-Ink-Saving-Fonts---">recommend
9840 which fonts to use</a> to save ink.  Check it out. :) While updating
9841 this blog post, I also came across a blog post from InkCloners,
9842 <a href="http://inkcloners.com/blog/ink-cartridges/change-fonts-to-save-ink-costs/">listing
9843 the fonts they recommend</a>, with Centory Gothic at the top.</p>
9844
9845       </div>
9846       <div class="tags">
9847
9848
9849         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9850
9851
9852       </div>
9853     </div>
9854     <div class="padding"></div>
9855
9856     <div class="entry">
9857       <div class="title">
9858         <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>
9859       </div>
9860       <div class="date">
9861         24th March 2013
9862       </div>
9863       <div class="body">
9864         <p>A few days ago, during a discussion in
9865 <a href="http://www.efn.no/">EFN</a> about interesting books to read
9866 about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
9867 the 1968 short story Kodémus by
9868 <a href="http://web2.gyldendal.no/toraage/">Tore Åge Bringsværd</a>
9869 came up.  The text was only available in old paper books, and thus not
9870 easily available for current and future generations.  Some of the
9871 people participating in the discussion contacted the author, and
9872 reported back 2013-03-19 that the author was OK with releasing the
9873 short story using a <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org/">Creative
9874 Commons</a> license.  The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
9875 were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.</p>
9876
9877 <p>As I already had some experience formatting text in my project to
9878 provide a Norwegian version of the Free Culture book by Lawrence
9879 Lessig, I chipped in and set up a
9880 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">DocBook</a> processing framework to
9881 generate PDF, HTML and EPUB version of the short story.  The tools to
9882 transform DocBook to different formats are already in my Linux
9883 distribution of choice, <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>, so
9884 all I had to do was to use the
9885 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a>,
9886 <a href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/epub/README">dbtoepub</a>
9887 and <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/xmlto/">xmlto</a> tools to do the
9888 conversion.  After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
9889 xsltproc/fop (aka
9890 <a href="http://wiki.docbook.org/DocBookXslStylesheets">docbook-xsl</a>),
9891 to get the copyright information to show up in the PDF and to get a
9892 nicer &lt;variablelist&gt; typesetting, but that is just a minor
9893 technical detail.</p>
9894
9895 <p>There were a few challenges, of course.  We want to typeset the
9896 short story to look like the original, and that require fairly good
9897 control over the layout.  The original short story have three
9898 parts/scenes separated by a single horizontally centred star (*), and
9899 the paragraphs do not contain only flowing text, but dialogs and text
9900 that started on a new line in the middle of the paragraph.</p>
9901
9902 <p>I initially solved the first challenge by using a paragraph with a
9903 single star in it, ie &lt;para&gt;*&lt;/para&gt;, but it made sure a
9904 placeholder indicated where the scene shifted.  This did not look too
9905 good without the centring.  The next approach was to create a new
9906 preprocessor directive &lt;?newscene?&gt;, mapping to "&lt;hr/&gt;"
9907 for HTML and "&lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;&lt;fo:leader
9908 leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;&lt;/fo:block&gt;"
9909 for FO/PDF output (did not try to implement this in dblatex, as we had
9910 switched at this time).  The HTML XSL file looked like this:</p>
9911
9912 <p><blockquote><pre>
9913 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
9914 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
9915   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
9916     &lt;hr/&gt;
9917   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
9918 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
9919 </pre></blockquote></p>
9920
9921 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
9922
9923 <p><blockquote><pre>
9924 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
9925 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
9926   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
9927     &lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;
9928       &lt;fo:leader leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;
9929     &lt;/fo:block&gt;
9930   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
9931 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
9932 </pre></blockquote></p>
9933
9934 <p>Finally, I came across the &lt;bridgehead&gt; tag, which seem to be
9935 a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced &lt;?newscene?&gt;
9936 with &lt;bridgehead&gt;*&lt;/bridgehead&gt;.  It isn't centred, but we
9937 can fix it with some XSL rule if the current visual layout isn't
9938 enough.</p>
9939
9940 <p>I did not find a good DocBook compliant way to solve the
9941 linebreak/paragraph challenge, so I ended up creating a new processor
9942 directive &lt;?linebreak?&gt;, mapping to &lt;br/&gt; in HTML, and
9943 &lt;fo:block/&gt; in FO/PDF.  I suspect there are better ways to do
9944 this, and welcome ideas and patches on github.  The HTML XSL file now
9945 look like this:</p>
9946
9947 <p><blockquote><pre>
9948 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
9949 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
9950   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
9951     &lt;br/&gt;
9952   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
9953 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
9954 </pre></blockquote></p>
9955
9956 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
9957
9958 <p><blockquote><pre>
9959 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
9960 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'
9961   xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"&gt;
9962   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
9963     &lt;fo:block/&gt;
9964   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
9965 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
9966 </pre></blockquote></p>
9967
9968 <p>One unsolved challenge is our wish to expose different ISBN numbers
9969 per publication format, while keeping all of them in some conditional
9970 structure in the DocBook source.  No idea how to do this, so we ended
9971 up listing all the ISBN numbers next to their format in the colophon
9972 page.</p>
9973
9974 <p>If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
9975 <a href="https://github.com/sickel/kodemus">source repository at
9976 github</a>
9977 (<a href="https://github.com/EFN/kodemus">future/new/official
9978 repository</a>).  We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
9979 days.</p>
9980
9981       </div>
9982       <div class="tags">
9983
9984
9985         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>.
9986
9987
9988       </div>
9989     </div>
9990     <div class="padding"></div>
9991
9992     <div class="entry">
9993       <div class="title">
9994         <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>
9995       </div>
9996       <div class="date">
9997         17th March 2013
9998       </div>
9999       <div class="body">
10000         <p>Via
10001 <a href="https://twitter.com/pcwizz/status/313044373262716930">twitter</a>
10002 I just discovered that <a href="http://pcwizz.net/">Pcwizz</a> have
10003 done a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPzTZ61Pcuc">video
10004 review</a> on Youtube of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
10005 / Debian Edu</a> version 6.  He installed the standalone profile and
10006 the video show a walk-through of of the menu content, demonstration of
10007 a few programs and his view of our distribution.</p>
10008
10009 <p>There is also some really nice quotes (transcribed by me, might
10010 have heard wrong).  While looking thought the Graphics menu:</p>
10011
10012 <blockquote>
10013 "Basically everything you ever need in a school environment."
10014 </blockquote>
10015
10016 <p>And as a general evaluation of the entire distribution:</p>
10017
10018 <blockquote>
10019 "So, yeah, a bit bloated.  It kept all the Debian stuff in there, just
10020 to keep it nice and GNU.  So, I do not want to go on about it, but
10021 lets give it 7 out of 10.  I am not going to use it.  That is because
10022 I am not deploying a school network.  There may be some mythical
10023 feature to help you deploy Skolelinux on a school network."
10024 </blockquote>
10025
10026 <p>To bad he did not test the server profile, and discovered the PXE
10027 installation option.  It make it possible to install only the main
10028 server from CD, and the rest of the machines via the net, and might be
10029 considered the mythical feature he talk about. :)</p>
10030
10031 <p>While looking through the menus, there is also this funny comment
10032 about the part of the K menu generated from the Debian menu subsystem:
10033
10034 <blockquote>
10035 "[The K menu] have a special Debian section for software that no-one
10036 is going to look at, because it contain lots of junky stuff that you
10037 actually don't need in the education distribution, but have just been
10038 included because it isn't stripped out for some reason."
10039 </blockquote>
10040
10041 <p>I guess it is yet another argument for merging the Debian menu and
10042 Gnome/KDE desktop menu entries into
10043 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/DebianMenuUsingDesktopEntries">one
10044 consistent menu system</a> instead of two incomplete and partly
10045 inconsistent menu systems.</p>
10046
10047 <p>The entire video is available below for those accepting iframe
10048 embedding:</p>
10049
10050 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wPzTZ61Pcuc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
10051
10052       </div>
10053       <div class="tags">
10054
10055
10056         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>.
10057
10058
10059       </div>
10060     </div>
10061     <div class="padding"></div>
10062
10063     <div class="entry">
10064       <div class="title">
10065         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_update_released.html">First Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze update released</a>
10066       </div>
10067       <div class="date">
10068          8th March 2013
10069       </div>
10070       <div class="body">
10071         <p>Last Sunday, 2013-03-03,, Holger Levsen announced the first update
10072 of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
10073 based on Debian Squeeze.  This is the first update since
10074 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
10075 initial release 2012-03-11</a>.  This is the
10076 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2013/03/msg00000.html">release
10077 announcement email from Holger</a>:</p>
10078
10079 <blockquote><p>Hi,</p>
10080
10081 <p>it's my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of Debian
10082 Edu 6.0.7+r1 ("Debian Edu Squeeze").</p>
10083
10084 <p>Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 is an incremental update to Debian Edu
10085 6.0.4+r0, containing all the changes between Debian 6.0.4 and 6.0.7 as
10086 well Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements. See below (in this
10087 mail) for the full list of (edu) changes.  Please see
10088 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311">http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311</a>
10089 for more information on "Debian Edu Squeeze".</p>
10090
10091 <p>Images are available for download at
10092 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/</a></p>
10093
10094 <p>md5sums:
10095 <br>1fe79eb4f0f9ae1c58fc318e26cc1e2e  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
10096 <br>a6ddd924a8bd9a1b5ca122e8fe1c34ec  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
10097 <br>ac6c72cd7925ccec51bfbf58e2a7c69c  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
10098
10099 <p>sha1sums:
10100 <br>a4b58233b672a99c7df8dc24fb6de3327654a5c3  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
10101 <br>9b524915e0ff2aa793f13d93123e5bd2bab2dbaa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
10102 <br>43997614893fc5e9e59ad6ce066b05d07fd836fa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
10103
10104 <p>These images are suitable for amd64+i386.</p>
10105
10106 <p>Changes for Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 Codename "Squeeze", released
10107 2013-03-03:</p>
10108
10109 <ul>
10110   <li>sitesummary was updated from 0.1.3 to 0.1.8
10111   <ul>
10112         <li>Make Nagios configuration more robust and efficient</li>
10113         <li>Comply with 3.X kernel</li>
10114   </ul></li>
10115   <li>debian-edu-doc from 1.4~20120310~6.0.4+r0 to 1.4~20130228~6.0.7+r1
10116   <ul>
10117         <li>Minor updates from the wiki</li>
10118         <li>Danish translation now complete</li>
10119   </ul></li>
10120   <li>debian-edu-config from 1.453 to 1.455
10121      <ul>
10122         <li>Fix /etc/hosts for LTSP diskless workstations. Closes: #699880</li>
10123         <li>Make ltsp_local_mount script work for multiple devices.</li>
10124         <li>Correct Kerberos user policy: don't expire password after 2 days.
10125                 Closes: #664596</li>
10126         <li>Handle '#' characters in the root or first users password.
10127                 Closes: #664976</li>
10128         <li>Fixes for gosa-sync:
10129            <ul>
10130                 <li>Don't fail if password contains "</li>
10131                 <li>Don't disclose new password string in syslog</li>
10132            </ul></li>
10133         <li>Fixes for gosa-create:
10134            <ul>
10135                 <li>Invalidate libnss cache before applying changes</li>
10136                 <li>Multiple failures during mass user import into GOsa²</li>
10137                 <li>gosa-netgroups plugin: don't erase entries of attribute type
10138                          "memberNisNetgroup". Closes: #687256</li>
10139                 <li>First user now uses the same Kerberos policy as all other users</li>
10140            </ul></li>
10141         <li>Add Danish web page</li>
10142     </ul>
10143   <li>debian-edu-install from 1.528 to 1.530
10144     <ul>
10145         <li>Improve preseeding support and documentation</li>
10146     </ul></li>
10147 </ul>
10148
10149 <p>End-user documentation in English is available at
10150 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/</a>
10151 - translations to French, Italian, Danish and German are available in
10152 the debian-edu-doc package. (Other languages could use your help!)</p>
10153
10154 <p>If you want to contribute to Debian Edu, please join our
10155 mailinglist
10156 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@lists.debian.org</a>!
10157 </p></blockquote>
10158
10159 <p>I am very happy to see the fruits of a year of hard work. :)</p>
10160
10161       </div>
10162       <div class="tags">
10163
10164
10165         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>.
10166
10167
10168       </div>
10169     </div>
10170     <div class="padding"></div>
10171
10172     <div class="entry">
10173       <div class="title">
10174         <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>
10175       </div>
10176       <div class="date">
10177          3rd March 2013
10178       </div>
10179       <div class="body">
10180         <p>Do you want to set up your own TV station, schedule videos and
10181 broadcast them on the air?  Using free software?  With video on demand
10182 support using
10183 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
10184 open standards</a>?  Included a web based video stream as well?  And
10185 administrate it all in your web browser from anywhere in the world?  A
10186 few years now the Norwegian public access TV-channel
10187 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> have been building a
10188 system to do just this.  The source code for the solution is licensed
10189 using the GNU LGPL, and
10190 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from github</a>.</p>
10191
10192 <p>The idea is simple.  You upload a video file over the web, and
10193 attach meta information to the file.  You select a time slot in the
10194 program schedule, and when the time come it is played on the air and
10195 in the web stream.  It is also made available in a video on demand
10196 solution for anyone to see it also outside its scheduled time.  All
10197 you need to run a TV station - using your web browser.</p>
10198
10199 <p>There are several parts to this web based solution.  I'll mention
10200 the three most important ones.  The first part is the database of
10201 videos and the schedule.  This is written in Django and include a REST
10202 API.  The current database is SQLite, but the plan is to migrate it to
10203 PostgreSQL.  At the moment this system can be tested on
10204 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/">beta.frikanalen.tv</a>.  The
10205 second part is the video playout, taking the schedule information from
10206 the database and providing a video stream to broadcast.  This is done
10207 using <a href="http://www.casparcg.com/">CasparCG from SVT</a> and
10208 <a href="http://www.mltframework.org/">Media Lovin' Toolkit</a>.  Video
10209 signal distribution is handled using
10210 <a href="http://www.ob-encoder.com/">Open Broadcast Encoder</a>.  The
10211 third part is the converter, handling the transformation of uploaded
10212 video files to a format useful for broadcasting, streaming and video
10213 on demand.  It is still very much work in progress, so it is not yet
10214 decided what it will end up using.  Note that the source of the latter
10215 two parts are not yet pushed to github.  The lead author want to clean
10216 them up a bit more first.</p>
10217
10218 <p>The development is coordinated on the
10219 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23frikanalen">#frikanalen IRC
10220 channel</a> (irc.freenode.net), and discussed on
10221 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/frikanalen">the
10222 frikanalen mailing list</a>. The lead developer is Benjamin Bruheim
10223 (phed on IRC).  Anyone is welcome to participate in the
10224 development.</p>
10225
10226       </div>
10227       <div class="tags">
10228
10229
10230         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>.
10231
10232
10233       </div>
10234     </div>
10235     <div class="padding"></div>
10236
10237     <div class="entry">
10238       <div class="title">
10239         <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>
10240       </div>
10241       <div class="date">
10242         27th February 2013
10243       </div>
10244       <div class="body">
10245         <p>Dr. <a href="http://www.stallman.org/">Richard Stallman</a>,
10246 founder of <a href="http://www.fsf.org/">Free Software Foundation</a>,
10247 is giving <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">a
10248 talk in Oslo March 1st 2013 17:00 to 19:00</a>.  The event is public
10249 and organised by <a href="">Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG)</a>
10250 (where I am the chair of the board) and
10251 <a href="http://www.friprog.no/">The Norwegian Open Source Competence
10252 Center</a>.  The title of the talk is «The Free Software Movement and
10253 GNU», with this description:
10254
10255 <p><blockquote>
10256 The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users' freedom to
10257 cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software Movement
10258 developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the
10259 kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms possible.
10260 </blockquote></p>
10261
10262 <p>The meeting is open for everyone.  Due to space limitations, the
10263 doors opens for NUUG members at 16:15, and everyone else at 16:45.  I
10264 am really curious how many will show up.  See
10265 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">the event
10266 page</a> for the location details.</p>
10267
10268       </div>
10269       <div class="tags">
10270
10271
10272         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>.
10273
10274
10275       </div>
10276     </div>
10277     <div class="padding"></div>
10278
10279     <div class="entry">
10280       <div class="title">
10281         <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>
10282       </div>
10283       <div class="date">
10284         15th February 2013
10285       </div>
10286       <div class="body">
10287         <p>If you, like me, want an updated a map for your Garmin GPS, there is
10288 now a great source of free maps available from
10289 <a href="http://www.frikart.no/garmin/index.html">Frikart</a>.  To
10290 download a map, just click on the country you are interested in, and
10291 download the map type you want.  There are 8 different maps available,
10292 using different colours and data selection.  Pick one of Roadmap, Topo
10293 Summer, Topo Winter, Roadmap II, Topo Summer II, Topo Winter II,
10294 "Trails - overlay map" and "Cross country - overlay map" (see the web
10295 page for descriptions).</p>
10296
10297 <p>The maps are updated weekly, so if you find something wrong in the
10298 map you can just edit the
10299 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> map source
10300 (anyone can contribute) and fetch a fixed map a week later. :)</p>
10301
10302       </div>
10303       <div class="tags">
10304
10305
10306         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>.
10307
10308
10309       </div>
10310     </div>
10311     <div class="padding"></div>
10312
10313     <div class="entry">
10314       <div class="title">
10315         <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>
10316       </div>
10317       <div class="date">
10318         12th February 2013
10319       </div>
10320       <div class="body">
10321         <p>Here in Norway, electronic invoices are spreading, and the
10322 <a href="http://www.anskaffelser.no/e-handel/faktura">solution promoted
10323 by the Norwegian government</a> require that invoices are sent through
10324 one of the approved facilitators, and it is not possible to send
10325 electronic invoices without an agreement with one of these
10326 facilitators.  This seem like a needless limitation to be able to
10327 transfer invoice information between buyers and sellers.  My preferred
10328 solution would be to just transfer the invoice information directly
10329 between seller and buyer, for example using SMTP, or some HTTP based
10330 protocol like REST or SOAP.  But this might also be overkill, as the
10331 "electronic" information can be transferred using paper invoices too,
10332 using a simple bar code.  My bar code encoding of choice would be QR
10333 codes, as this encoding can be read by any smart phone out there.  The
10334 content of the code could be anything, but I would go with
10335 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard">the vCard format</a>, as
10336 it too is supported by a lot of computer equipment these days.</p>
10337
10338 <p>The vCard format support extentions, and the invoice specific
10339 information can be included using such extentions.  For example an
10340 invoice from SLX Debian Labs (picked because we
10341 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">ask
10342 for donations to the Debian Edu project</a> and thus have bank account
10343 information publicly available) for NOK 1000.00 could have these extra
10344 fields:</p>
10345
10346 <p><pre>
10347 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
10348 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
10349 X-INVOICE-KID:123412341234
10350 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
10351 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
10352 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
10353 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
10354 </pre></p>
10355
10356 <p>The X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER field was proposed in a stackoverflow
10357 answer regarding
10358 <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10045664/storing-bank-account-in-vcard-file">how
10359 to put bank account information into a vCard</a>.  For payments in
10360 Norway, either X-INVOICE-KID (payment ID) or X-INVOICE-MSG could be
10361 used to pass on information to the seller when paying the invoice.</p>
10362
10363 <p>The complete vCard could look like this:</p>
10364
10365 <p><pre>
10366 BEGIN:VCARD
10367 VERSION:2.1
10368 ORG:SLX Debian Labs Foundation
10369 ADR;WORK:;;Gunnar Schjelderups vei 29D;OSLO;;0485;Norway
10370 URL;WORK:http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/
10371 EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:sdl-styret@rt.nuug.no
10372 REV:20130212T095000Z
10373 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
10374 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
10375 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
10376 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
10377 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
10378 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
10379 END:VCARD
10380 </pre></p>
10381
10382 <p>The resulting QR code created using
10383 <a href="http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/">qrencode</a> would look
10384 like this, and should be readable (and thus checkable) by any smart
10385 phone, or for example the <a href="http://zbar.sourceforge.net/">zbar
10386 bar code reader</a> and feed right into the approval and accounting
10387 system.</p>
10388
10389 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-12-qr-invoice.png"></p>
10390
10391 <p>The extension fields will most likely not show up in any normal
10392 vCard reader, so those parts would have to go directly into a system
10393 handling invoices.  I am a bit unsure how vCards without name parts
10394 are handled, but a simple test indicate that this work just fine.</p>
10395
10396 <p><strong>Update 2013-02-12 11:30</strong>: Added KID to the proposal
10397 based on feedback from Sturle Sunde.</p>
10398
10399       </div>
10400       <div class="tags">
10401
10402
10403         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>.
10404
10405
10406       </div>
10407     </div>
10408     <div class="padding"></div>
10409
10410     <div class="entry">
10411       <div class="title">
10412         <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>
10413       </div>
10414       <div class="date">
10415         10th February 2013
10416       </div>
10417       <div class="body">
10418         <p><img align="left" style="margin-right:25px;" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-10-morning-light.jpeg"></p>
10419
10420 <p>With kids in the house, one challenge is getting them to sleep
10421 during the night and wake up when it is morning.  I mean, when I
10422 believe it is morning, and not two hours earlier.  In our household we
10423 have decided that 07:00 is the turning point, but getting the kids to
10424 sleep until 07:00 is a small challenge every day.  They have adapted
10425 quite well, and rarely wake up at 05:00 any more, but some times wake
10426 up at times like 05:50, 06:15, 06:30 or 06:45, and it is hard to put
10427 the awake one to bed again without disturbing and waking the rest.
10428 And I understand perfectly well that they fail to sleep until 07:00
10429 some times, as there is no way for them to know if it is before or
10430 after the magic moment without coming and asking us parents.</p>
10431
10432 <p>But yesterday I came up with a method to solve this problem.  It
10433 involve home automation.  A few years ago I bought a
10434 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick">Tellstick</a> and RF
10435 switches at the local <a href="http://www.clasohlson.com/">Clas
10436 Ohlson</a> shop, allowing me to control lights and other electrical
10437 gadgets using my Linux server.  When I moved from the old flat to a
10438 small house, I put away all this equipment as most of the lighting in
10439 the house was not using wall sockets and thus not easy to connect to
10440 the gadgets I had.  But recently I bought a
10441 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick_net">Tellstick
10442 Net</a> to be able to read sensor input as well as control power
10443 sockets.  I want to control ovens in the basement to avoid the pipes
10444 to freeze, and monitor the humidity to detect flooding.  The default
10445 setup for Tellstick Net is to be controlled by the vendor web service,
10446 which to me is a security problem, but it is also possible to build
10447 ones own
10448 <a href="http://developer.telldus.com/blog/2012/03/02/help-us-develop-local-access-using-tellstick-net-build-your-own-firmware">firmware
10449 with local access</A> instead of being controlled by a Swedish
10450 company, thanks to the release of the GPL licensed firmware source
10451 code.  I plan to get that running before I let it control anything
10452 important.  But while working on this, one idea to make it easier for
10453 the kids came to me yesterday.  We can set up a night light controlled
10454 by the computer, and turn it automatically on at 07:00.  The kids can
10455 then check the light in the morning to know if they are supposed to
10456 get up or not.  They joined me in setting everything up, and I
10457 repeated the concept several times before bed times to make sure they
10458 remembered to check the light before getting up in the morning.</p>
10459
10460 <p>We tested it this morning, and all the kids stayed in bed until
10461 after 07:00, and every one of them commented on the fact that the
10462 "morning light" was turned on and signalled that the morning had
10463 arrived.  So this look like a success, and I am excited to see how
10464 this develops the next few days. :) I really hope this can allow us
10465 all to sleep a bit longer in the morning.</p>
10466
10467 <p>A nice advantage of this setup is that we can remote control when
10468 to tell the kids to get up.  We do not have to wait until 07:00, and
10469 can also delay it if we want to.</p>
10470
10471       </div>
10472       <div class="tags">
10473
10474
10475         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10476
10477
10478       </div>
10479     </div>
10480     <div class="padding"></div>
10481
10482     <div class="entry">
10483       <div class="title">
10484         <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>
10485       </div>
10486       <div class="date">
10487          2nd February 2013
10488       </div>
10489       <div class="body">
10490         <p>My
10491 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
10492 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
10493 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
10494 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
10495 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
10496 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
10497 version too.</p>
10498
10499 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
10500 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
10501 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
10502 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
10503 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
10504 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
10505 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
10506 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
10507
10508 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
10509 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
10510 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
10511 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
10512 it. :)</p>
10513
10514 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
10515 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
10516 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
10517
10518       </div>
10519       <div class="tags">
10520
10521
10522         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>.
10523
10524
10525       </div>
10526     </div>
10527     <div class="padding"></div>
10528
10529     <div class="entry">
10530       <div class="title">
10531         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
10532       </div>
10533       <div class="date">
10534         22nd January 2013
10535       </div>
10536       <div class="body">
10537         <p>Yesterday, I
10538 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
10539 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
10540 pluggable hardware devices, which I
10541 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
10542 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
10543 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
10544 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
10545 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
10546 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
10547 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
10548 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
10549 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
10550 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
10551
10552 <pre>
10553 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
10554 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
10555 </pre>
10556
10557 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
10558 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
10559 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
10560 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
10561
10562 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
10563 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
10564 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
10565 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
10566 word.</p>
10567
10568 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
10569 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
10570 process.</p>
10571
10572 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
10573 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
10574
10575       </div>
10576       <div class="tags">
10577
10578
10579         Tags: <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>.
10580
10581
10582       </div>
10583     </div>
10584     <div class="padding"></div>
10585
10586     <div class="entry">
10587       <div class="title">
10588         <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>
10589       </div>
10590       <div class="date">
10591         21st January 2013
10592       </div>
10593       <div class="body">
10594         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
10595 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
10596 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
10597 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
10598 it, fetch the
10599 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
10600 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
10601 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
10602 autostart script.</p>
10603
10604 <p>The design is simple:</p>
10605
10606 <ul>
10607
10608 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
10609 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
10610
10611 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
10612 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
10613 initially did.</li>
10614
10615 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
10616 the APT database, a database
10617 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
10618 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
10619
10620 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
10621 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
10622 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
10623 package or packages.</li>
10624
10625 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
10626 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
10627
10628 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
10629 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
10630
10631 </ul>
10632
10633 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
10634 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
10635 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
10636 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
10637
10638 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
10639 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
10640 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
10641 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
10642 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
10643
10644 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
10645 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
10646 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
10647 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
10648 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
10649 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
10650 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
10651 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
10652
10653 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
10654 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
10655 '<tt>svn checkout
10656 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
10657 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
10658 devscripts package.</p>
10659
10660 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
10661 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
10662 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
10663 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
10664 instructions</a> for details.</p>
10665
10666       </div>
10667       <div class="tags">
10668
10669
10670         Tags: <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>.
10671
10672
10673       </div>
10674     </div>
10675     <div class="padding"></div>
10676
10677     <div class="entry">
10678       <div class="title">
10679         <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>
10680       </div>
10681       <div class="date">
10682         19th January 2013
10683       </div>
10684       <div class="body">
10685         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
10686 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
10687 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
10688 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
10689 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
10690 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
10691 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
10692 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
10693 not a durable solution.
10694
10695 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
10696 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
10697
10698 <ul>
10699
10700 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
10701   than A4).</li>
10702 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
10703 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
10704 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
10705 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
10706 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
10707 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
10708 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
10709 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
10710 size).</li>
10711 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
10712   X.org packages.</li>
10713 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
10714   the time).
10715
10716 </ul>
10717
10718 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
10719 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
10720 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
10721 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
10722 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
10723 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
10724 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
10725 still be useful.</p>
10726
10727 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
10728 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
10729 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
10730 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
10731 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
10732 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
10733
10734       </div>
10735       <div class="tags">
10736
10737
10738         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10739
10740
10741       </div>
10742     </div>
10743     <div class="padding"></div>
10744
10745     <div class="entry">
10746       <div class="title">
10747         <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>
10748       </div>
10749       <div class="date">
10750         18th January 2013
10751       </div>
10752       <div class="body">
10753         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
10754 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
10755 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
10756 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
10757 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
10758 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
10759 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
10760
10761 <pre>
10762 #!/usr/bin/python
10763 import sys
10764 import apt
10765 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
10766     cache = apt.Cache()
10767     cache.open(None)
10768     thepkgs = []
10769     for pkg in cache:
10770         version = pkg.candidate
10771         if version is None:
10772             version = pkg.installed
10773         if version is None:
10774             continue
10775         record = version.record
10776         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
10777             continue
10778         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
10779         for t in mime_types:
10780             t = t.rstrip().strip()
10781             if t == mimetype:
10782                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
10783     return thepkgs
10784 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
10785 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
10786     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
10787 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
10788 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
10789     print "  %s" %pkg
10790 </pre>
10791
10792 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
10793
10794 <pre>
10795 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
10796 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
10797   gecko-mediaplayer
10798 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
10799 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
10800   browser-plugin-gnash
10801 %
10802 </pre>
10803
10804 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
10805 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
10806 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
10807 anyone working on adding it?</p>
10808
10809 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
10810 request for icweasel support for this feature is
10811 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
10812 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
10813 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
10814 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
10815
10816       </div>
10817       <div class="tags">
10818
10819
10820         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10821
10822
10823       </div>
10824     </div>
10825     <div class="padding"></div>
10826
10827     <div class="entry">
10828       <div class="title">
10829         <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>
10830       </div>
10831       <div class="date">
10832         16th January 2013
10833       </div>
10834       <div class="body">
10835         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
10836 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
10837 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
10838 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
10839 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
10840 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
10841 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
10842 downloaded by the browser.</p>
10843
10844 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
10845 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
10846 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
10847 can be found on the
10848 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
10849 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
10850 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
10851 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
10852 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
10853
10854 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
10855
10856 <pre>
10857   count MIME type
10858   ----- -----------------------
10859      32 text/plain
10860      30 audio/mpeg
10861      29 image/png
10862      28 image/jpeg
10863      27 application/ogg
10864      26 audio/x-mp3
10865      25 image/tiff
10866      25 image/gif
10867      22 image/bmp
10868      22 audio/x-wav
10869      20 audio/x-flac
10870      19 audio/x-mpegurl
10871      18 video/x-ms-asf
10872      18 audio/x-musepack
10873      18 audio/x-mpeg
10874      18 application/x-ogg
10875      17 video/mpeg
10876      17 audio/x-scpls
10877      17 audio/ogg
10878      16 video/x-ms-wmv
10879 </pre>
10880
10881 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
10882
10883 <pre>
10884   count MIME type
10885   ----- -----------------------
10886      33 text/plain
10887      32 image/png
10888      32 image/jpeg
10889      29 audio/mpeg
10890      27 image/gif
10891      26 image/tiff
10892      26 application/ogg
10893      25 audio/x-mp3
10894      22 image/bmp
10895      21 audio/x-wav
10896      19 audio/x-mpegurl
10897      19 audio/x-mpeg
10898      18 video/mpeg
10899      18 audio/x-scpls
10900      18 audio/x-flac
10901      18 application/x-ogg
10902      17 video/x-ms-asf
10903      17 text/html
10904      17 audio/x-musepack
10905      16 image/x-xbitmap
10906 </pre>
10907
10908 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
10909
10910 <pre>
10911   count MIME type
10912   ----- -----------------------
10913      31 text/plain
10914      31 image/png
10915      31 image/jpeg
10916      29 audio/mpeg
10917      28 application/ogg
10918      27 image/gif
10919      26 image/tiff
10920      26 audio/x-mp3
10921      23 audio/x-wav
10922      22 image/bmp
10923      21 audio/x-flac
10924      20 audio/x-mpegurl
10925      19 audio/x-mpeg
10926      18 video/x-ms-asf
10927      18 video/mpeg
10928      18 audio/x-scpls
10929      18 application/x-ogg
10930      17 audio/x-musepack
10931      16 video/x-ms-wmv
10932      16 video/x-msvideo
10933 </pre>
10934
10935 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
10936 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
10937 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
10938 issues.</p>
10939
10940 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
10941 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
10942
10943       </div>
10944       <div class="tags">
10945
10946
10947         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10948
10949
10950       </div>
10951     </div>
10952     <div class="padding"></div>
10953
10954     <div class="entry">
10955       <div class="title">
10956         <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>
10957       </div>
10958       <div class="date">
10959         15th January 2013
10960       </div>
10961       <div class="body">
10962         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
10963 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
10964 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
10965 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
10966 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
10967 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
10968 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
10969 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
10970 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
10971 packages.</p>
10972
10973 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
10974 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
10975 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
10976 modalias.</p>
10977
10978 <p><blockquote>
10979 Package: package-name
10980 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
10981 </blockquote></p>
10982
10983 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
10984 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
10985
10986 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
10987 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
10988
10989 <p><blockquote>
10990 Package: cheese
10991 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
10992 </blockquote></p>
10993
10994 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
10995 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
10996
10997 <p><blockquote>
10998 Package: pcmciautils
10999 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
11000 </blockquote></p>
11001
11002 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
11003 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
11004
11005 <p><blockquote>
11006 Package: colorhug-client
11007 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
11008 </blockquote></p>
11009
11010 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
11011 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
11012 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
11013
11014 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
11015 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
11016 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
11017 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
11018 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
11019 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
11020 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
11021 Raring.</p>
11022
11023 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
11024 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
11025 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
11026 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
11027 try the
11028 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
11029 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
11030 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
11031 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
11032
11033 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
11034 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
11035
11036 <p><blockquote>
11037 % ./hw-support-lookup
11038 <br>yubikey-personalization
11039 <br>%
11040 </blockquote></p>
11041
11042 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
11043 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
11044
11045 <p><blockquote>
11046 % ./hw-support-lookup
11047 <br>pcmciautils
11048 <br>%
11049 </blockquote></p>
11050
11051 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
11052 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
11053 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
11054
11055 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
11056 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
11057 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
11058 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
11059 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
11060 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
11061 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
11062 see if it work.</p>
11063
11064 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
11065 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
11066 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
11067 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
11068
11069       </div>
11070       <div class="tags">
11071
11072
11073         Tags: <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>.
11074
11075
11076       </div>
11077     </div>
11078     <div class="padding"></div>
11079
11080     <div class="entry">
11081       <div class="title">
11082         <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>
11083       </div>
11084       <div class="date">
11085         14th January 2013
11086       </div>
11087       <div class="body">
11088         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
11089 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
11090 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
11091 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
11092 in
11093 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
11094 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
11095
11096 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
11097
11098 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
11099 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
11100 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
11101 &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;,
11102 &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
11103 &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;.
11104
11105 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
11106 this shell script:</p>
11107
11108 <pre>
11109 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
11110 </pre>
11111
11112 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
11113 using modinfo:</p>
11114
11115 <pre>
11116 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
11117 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
11118 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
11119 %
11120 </pre>
11121
11122 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
11123
11124 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
11125 Bridge memory controller:</p>
11126
11127 <p><blockquote>
11128 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
11129 </blockquote></p>
11130
11131 <p>This represent these values:</p>
11132
11133 <pre>
11134  v   00008086  (vendor)
11135  d   00002770  (device)
11136  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
11137  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
11138  bc  06        (bus class)
11139  sc  00        (bus subclass)
11140  i   00        (interface)
11141 </pre>
11142
11143 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
11144 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
11145 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
11146 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
11147
11148 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
11149 means.</p>
11150
11151 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
11152
11153 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
11154 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
11155
11156 <p><blockquote>
11157 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
11158 </blockquote></p>
11159
11160 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
11161
11162 <pre>
11163  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
11164  p    0001  (device product)
11165  d    0206  (bcddevice)
11166  dc     09  (device class)
11167  dsc    00  (device subclass)
11168  dp     00  (device protocol)
11169  ic     09  (interface class)
11170  isc    00  (interface subclass)
11171  ip     00  (interface protocol)
11172 </pre>
11173
11174 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
11175 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
11176 these alias entries show up:</p>
11177
11178 <p><blockquote>
11179 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
11180 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
11181 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
11182 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
11183 </blockquote></p>
11184
11185 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
11186 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
11187 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
11188
11189 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
11190
11191 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
11192 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
11193
11194 <p><blockquote>
11195 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
11196 </blockquote></p>
11197
11198 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
11199
11200 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
11201
11202 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
11203 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
11204 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
11205
11206 <p><blockquote>
11207 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
11208 </blockquote></p>
11209
11210 <p>The values present are</p>
11211
11212 <pre>
11213  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
11214  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
11215  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
11216  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
11217  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
11218  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
11219  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
11220  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
11221  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
11222  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
11223  ct   10             (chassis type)
11224  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
11225 </pre>
11226
11227 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
11228 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
11229
11230 <pre>
11231   3 Desktop
11232   4 Low Profile Desktop
11233   5 Pizza Box
11234   6 Mini Tower
11235   7 Tower
11236   8 Portable
11237   9 Laptop
11238  10 Notebook
11239  11 Hand Held
11240  12 Docking Station
11241  13 All In One
11242  14 Sub Notebook
11243  15 Space-saving
11244  16 Lunch Box
11245  17 Main Server Chassis
11246  18 Expansion Chassis
11247  19 Sub Chassis
11248  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
11249  21 Peripheral Chassis
11250  22 RAID Chassis
11251  23 Rack Mount Chassis
11252  24 Sealed-case PC
11253  25 Multi-system
11254  26 CompactPCI
11255  27 AdvancedTCA
11256  28 Blade
11257  29 Blade Enclosing
11258 </pre>
11259
11260 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
11261 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
11262 claim it is a desktop.</p>
11263
11264 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
11265
11266 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
11267 test machine:</p>
11268
11269 <p><blockquote>
11270 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
11271 </blockquote></p>
11272
11273 <p>The values present are</p>
11274
11275 <pre>
11276   ty  01  (type)
11277   pr  00  (prototype)
11278   id  00  (id)
11279   ex  00  (extra)
11280 </pre>
11281
11282 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
11283 the valid values are.</p>
11284
11285 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
11286
11287 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
11288 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
11289 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
11290 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
11291 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
11292 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
11293 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
11294
11295 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
11296
11297 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
11298 one can use the following shell script:</p>
11299
11300 <pre>
11301   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
11302     echo "$id" ; \
11303     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
11304   done
11305 </pre>
11306
11307 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
11308 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
11309
11310 <pre>
11311   acpi:ACPI0003:
11312     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
11313   acpi:device:
11314   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
11315   acpi:IBM0068:
11316     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
11317     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
11318     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
11319     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
11320   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
11321     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
11322     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
11323     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
11324   [...]
11325 </pre>
11326
11327 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
11328 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
11329 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
11330 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
11331
11332 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
11333 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
11334 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
11335
11336       </div>
11337       <div class="tags">
11338
11339
11340         Tags: <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>.
11341
11342
11343       </div>
11344     </div>
11345     <div class="padding"></div>
11346
11347     <div class="entry">
11348       <div class="title">
11349         <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>
11350       </div>
11351       <div class="date">
11352         10th January 2013
11353       </div>
11354       <div class="body">
11355         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
11356 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
11357 Launcher and updated the Debian package
11358 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
11359 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
11360 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
11361 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
11362 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
11363 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
11364 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
11365 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
11366 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
11367 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
11368 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
11369 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
11370 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
11371 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
11372 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
11373
11374       </div>
11375       <div class="tags">
11376
11377
11378         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
11379
11380
11381       </div>
11382     </div>
11383     <div class="padding"></div>
11384
11385     <div class="entry">
11386       <div class="title">
11387         <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>
11388       </div>
11389       <div class="date">
11390          9th January 2013
11391       </div>
11392       <div class="body">
11393         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
11394 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
11395 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
11396 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
11397 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
11398 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
11399 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
11400 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
11401 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
11402 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
11403 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
11404
11405 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
11406 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
11407 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
11408 simple:
11409
11410 <ul>
11411
11412 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
11413   starting when a user log in.</li>
11414
11415 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
11416   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
11417
11418 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
11419   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
11420   packages.</li>
11421
11422 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
11423   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
11424
11425 </ul>
11426
11427 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
11428 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
11429 discover database to find packages and
11430 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
11431 packages.</p>
11432
11433 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
11434 draft package is now checked into
11435 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
11436 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
11437 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
11438 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
11439 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
11440 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
11441 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
11442 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
11443 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
11444 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
11445 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
11446 because of the freeze).</p>
11447
11448 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
11449 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
11450 inserted):</p>
11451
11452 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
11453
11454 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
11455 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
11456 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
11457
11458 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
11459 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
11460 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
11461 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
11462 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
11463 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
11464 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
11465
11466 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
11467 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
11468 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
11469 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
11470 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
11471 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
11472 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
11473 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
11474 not be installed?</p>
11475
11476 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
11477 please send me an email. :)</p>
11478
11479       </div>
11480       <div class="tags">
11481
11482
11483         Tags: <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>.
11484
11485
11486       </div>
11487     </div>
11488     <div class="padding"></div>
11489
11490     <div class="entry">
11491       <div class="title">
11492         <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>
11493       </div>
11494       <div class="date">
11495          2nd January 2013
11496       </div>
11497       <div class="body">
11498         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
11499 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
11500 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
11501 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
11502 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
11503 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
11504 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
11505 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
11506 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
11507 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
11508
11509 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
11510 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
11511 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
11512
11513       </div>
11514       <div class="tags">
11515
11516
11517         Tags: <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>.
11518
11519
11520       </div>
11521     </div>
11522     <div class="padding"></div>
11523
11524     <div class="entry">
11525       <div class="title">
11526         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html">A Christmas present for Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
11527       </div>
11528       <div class="date">
11529         28th December 2012
11530       </div>
11531       <div class="body">
11532         <p>I was happy to discover a few days ago that the
11533 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
11534 project also this year received a Christmas present from Another
11535 Agency in Trondheim.  NOK 1000,- showed up on our donation account
11536 December 24th.  I want to express our thanks for this very welcome
11537 present.  As the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is very short on
11538 funding these days, and thus lack the money to do regular developer
11539 gatherings, this donation was most welcome.  One developer gathering
11540 cost around NOK 15&nbsp;000,-, so we need quite a lot more to keep the
11541 development pace we want.  Thus, I hope their example this year is
11542 followed by many others. :)</p>
11543
11544 <p>The public list of donors can be found on
11545 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">the
11546 donation page</a> for the project, which also contain instructions if
11547 you want to donate to the project.</p>
11548
11549       </div>
11550       <div class="tags">
11551
11552
11553         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>.
11554
11555
11556       </div>
11557     </div>
11558     <div class="padding"></div>
11559
11560     <div class="entry">
11561       <div class="title">
11562         <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>
11563       </div>
11564       <div class="date">
11565         25th December 2012
11566       </div>
11567       <div class="body">
11568         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
11569 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
11570
11571 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
11572 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
11573 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
11574 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
11575 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
11576 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
11577 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
11578 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
11579 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
11580 name.</p>
11581
11582 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
11583 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
11584 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
11585
11586 <blockquote><pre>
11587 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
11588 cd bitcoin
11589 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
11590 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
11591 </pre></blockquote>
11592
11593 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
11594 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
11595 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
11596 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
11597 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
11598 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
11599 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
11600 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
11601 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
11602
11603 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
11604 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
11605 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
11606
11607       </div>
11608       <div class="tags">
11609
11610
11611         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>.
11612
11613
11614       </div>
11615     </div>
11616     <div class="padding"></div>
11617
11618     <div class="entry">
11619       <div class="title">
11620         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
11621       </div>
11622       <div class="date">
11623         21st December 2012
11624       </div>
11625       <div class="body">
11626         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
11627 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
11628 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
11629 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
11630 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
11631 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
11632 is now maintained by a
11633 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
11634 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
11635 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
11636 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
11637 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
11638 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
11639 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
11640 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
11641 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
11642 Corallo in a
11643 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
11644 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
11645 Debian package.</p>
11646
11647 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
11648 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
11649 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
11650 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
11651 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
11652 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
11653 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
11654 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
11655 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
11656 new version to unstable.
11657
11658 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
11659 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
11660 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
11661 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
11662 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
11663 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
11664 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
11665 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
11666 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
11667 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
11668 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
11669 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
11670 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
11671 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
11672 have not tested them.</p>
11673
11674 <p>My
11675 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
11676 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
11677 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
11678 years ago, as can be
11679 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
11680 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
11681 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
11682 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
11683 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
11684 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
11685 the same address as last time,
11686 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
11687
11688       </div>
11689       <div class="tags">
11690
11691
11692         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>.
11693
11694
11695       </div>
11696     </div>
11697     <div class="padding"></div>
11698
11699     <div class="entry">
11700       <div class="title">
11701         <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>
11702       </div>
11703       <div class="date">
11704         18th December 2012
11705       </div>
11706       <div class="body">
11707         <p>A few days ago I came across
11708 <a href="http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/hledger/">a blog post from Joey
11709 Hess</a> describing <a href="http://ledger-cli.org/">ledger</a> and
11710 hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting.  I found it
11711 interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
11712 accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
11713 the different web based systems we use.  I find it hard to find what I
11714 look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
11715 the systems.  Ledger seem different.  The accounting data is kept in
11716 text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
11717
11718 are at least <a href="https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Ports">five
11719 different implementations</a> able to read the format.  An example
11720 entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
11721 generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:</p>
11722
11723 <blockquote><pre>
11724 2004-05-27 Book Store
11725       Expenses:Books                 $20.00
11726       Liabilities:Visa
11727 </pre></blockquote>
11728
11729 <p>The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
11730 look for others using it.  I found blog posts from
11731 <a href="http://blog.spang.cc/posts/hledger_rocks_my_world/">Christine
11732 Spang</a>,
11733 <a href="http://bugsplat.info/2010-05-23-keeping-finances-with-ledger.html">Pete
11734 Keen</a>,
11735 <a href="http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2010/11/06/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/">Andrew
11736 Cantino</a> and
11737 <a href="http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/2012/11/29/command-line-double-entry-accounting/">Ronald
11738 Ip</a> describing how they use it, as well as a post from
11739 <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ledger-cli/r0oWjwbQ9Bo">Bradley
11740 M. Kuhn</a> at the Software Freedom Conservancy.  All seemed like good
11741 recommendations fitting my need.</p>
11742
11743 <p>The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/ledger.html">ledger</a>
11744 package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
11745 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/haskell-hledger.html">hledger</a>
11746 package only is available in Debian Sid.  As I use Squeeze, ledger
11747 seemed the best choice to get started.</p>
11748
11749 <p>To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
11750 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/tools/lodo2ledger">web scraper</a> for
11751 <a href="http://www.lodo.no/">LODO</a>, the accounting system used by
11752 the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> association, and started to
11753 play with the data set.  I'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
11754 am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
11755 using the "<tt>ledger balance</tt>" command.  But I will have to
11756 gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
11757 for the organisations I am involved in.</p>
11758
11759       </div>
11760       <div class="tags">
11761
11762
11763         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>.
11764
11765
11766       </div>
11767     </div>
11768     <div class="padding"></div>
11769
11770     <div class="entry">
11771       <div class="title">
11772         <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>
11773       </div>
11774       <div class="date">
11775          6th December 2012
11776       </div>
11777       <div class="body">
11778         <p>Where I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of
11779 Oslo</a>, we use the
11780 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/cerebrum/">Cerebrum user
11781 administration system</a> to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
11782 I've known since the system was written that the server is providing
11783 an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC">XML-RPC</a> API, but
11784 I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we
11785 always use the bofh command line client at work.  Until today.  I want
11786 to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up
11787 virtual machines.  Here are a few notes on how to use it with
11788 Python.</p>
11789
11790 <p>I started by looking at the source of the Java
11791 <a href="http://cerebrum.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cerebrum/trunk/cerebrum/clients/jbofh/">bofh
11792 client</a>, to figure out how it connected to the API server.  I also
11793 googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
11794 <a href="http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XML-RPC-HOWTO/xmlrpc-howto-python.html">a
11795 simple example in</a> the XML-RPC howto.</p>
11796
11797 <p>This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
11798 commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
11799 user currently logged in:</p>
11800
11801 <blockquote><pre>
11802 #!/usr/bin/env python
11803 import getpass
11804 import xmlrpclib
11805 server_url = 'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:8000';
11806 username = getpass.getuser()
11807 password = getpass.getpass()
11808 server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
11809 #print server.get_commands(sessionid)
11810 sessionid = server.login(username, password)
11811 print server.run_command(sessionid, "user_info", username)
11812 result = server.logout(sessionid)
11813 print result
11814 </pre></blockquote>
11815
11816 <p>Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
11817 and DHCP updates I wanted to do.</p>
11818
11819       </div>
11820       <div class="tags">
11821
11822
11823         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>.
11824
11825
11826       </div>
11827     </div>
11828     <div class="padding"></div>
11829
11830     <div class="entry">
11831       <div class="title">
11832         <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>
11833       </div>
11834       <div class="date">
11835         17th November 2012
11836       </div>
11837       <div class="body">
11838         <p>While working on a
11839 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Norwegian
11840 translation of the Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig</a> (76% done),
11841 which cover the problems with todays copyright law and how it stifles
11842 creativity, one idea occurred to me.  The idea is to get the tax
11843 office to help make more works enter the public domain and also help
11844 make it easier to clear rights for using copyrighted works.</p>
11845
11846 <p>I mentioned this idea briefly during Yesterdays
11847 <a href="http://www.farmann.no/2012/11/14/john-perry-barlow-in-oslo-friday-nov-16
11848 -15-30-19-00/">presentation
11849 by John Perry Barlow</a>, and concluded that it was best to put it
11850 in writing for a wider audience.  The idea is not really based on the
11851 argument that copyrighted works are "intellectual property", as the
11852 core requirement is that copyrighted work have value for the copyright
11853 holder and the tax office like to collect their share from any value
11854 controlled by the citizens in a country.  I'm sharing the idea here to
11855 let others consider it and perhaps shoot it down with a fresh set of
11856 arguments.</p>
11857
11858 <p>Most valuables are taxed by the government.  At least here in
11859 Norway, the amount of money you have, the value of our land property,
11860 the value of your house, the value of your car, the value of our
11861 stocks and other valuables are all added together.  If the tax value
11862 of these values exceed your debt, you have to pay the tax office some
11863 taxes for these values.  And copyrighted work have value.  It have
11864 value for the rights holder, who can earn money selling access to the
11865 work.  But it is not included in the tax calculations?  Why not?</p>
11866
11867 <p>If the government want to tax copyrighted works, it would want to
11868 maintain a database of all the copyrighted works and who are the
11869 rights holders for a given works, to be able to associate the works
11870 value to the right citizen or company for tax purposes.  If such
11871 database exist, it will become a lot easier to find out who to talk to
11872 for clearing permissions to use a copyrighted work, which is a very
11873 hard operation with todays copyright law.  To ensure that copyright
11874 holders keep the database up-to-date, it would have to become a
11875 requirement to be able to collect money for granting access to
11876 copyrighted works that the work is listed in the database with the
11877 correct right holder.</p>
11878
11879 <p>If copyright causes copyright holders to have to pay more taxes,
11880 they will have a small incentive to "disown" their copyright, and let
11881 the work enter the public domain. For works with several right holders
11882 one of the right holders could state (and get it registered in the
11883 database) that she do not need to be consulted when clearing rights to
11884 use the work in question and thus will not get any income from that
11885 work.  Stating this would have to be impossible to revert and stop the
11886 tax office from adding the value of that work to the given citizens
11887 tax calculation.  I assume the copyright law would stay the same,
11888 allowing creators to pick a license of their choosing, and also
11889 allowing them to put their work directly in the public domain.  The
11890 existence of such database will make it even easier to clear rights,
11891 and if the right holders listed in the database is taxed, this system
11892 would increase the amount of works that enter the public domain.</p>
11893
11894 <p>The effect would be that the tax office help to make it easier to
11895 get rights to use the works that have not yet entered the public
11896 domain and help to get more work into the public domain and .</p>
11897
11898 <p>Why have such taxing not happened yet?  I am sure the tax office
11899 would like to tax copyrighted work values if they could.</p>
11900
11901       </div>
11902       <div class="tags">
11903
11904
11905         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>.
11906
11907
11908       </div>
11909     </div>
11910     <div class="padding"></div>
11911
11912     <div class="entry">
11913       <div class="title">
11914         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html">Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß</a>
11915       </div>
11916       <div class="date">
11917         14th November 2012
11918       </div>
11919       <div class="body">
11920         <p>Here is another interview with one of the people in the <a
11921 href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
11922 community.  I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
11923 if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
11924 After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
11925 the people behind the German
11926 "<a href="http://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/">IT-Zukunft Schule</a>"
11927 project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview.  Give a warm
11928 welcome to Angela Fuß. :)</p>
11929
11930 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
11931
11932 <p>I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
11933 Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my
11934 two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.
11935
11936 <p>At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
11937 the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
11938 Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
11939 growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
11940 system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-).  We are also
11941 in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.</p>
11942
11943 <p>In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
11944 nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there.  Besides
11945 that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
11946 working in our own school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" in North
11947 Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
11948 relationship management and the communication processes in the
11949 project.</p>
11950
11951 <p>Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
11952 and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
11953 and a yoga teacher.</p>
11954
11955 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
11956 project?</strong></p>
11957
11958 <p>I fell in love with Mike ;-).</p>
11959
11960 <p>Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
11961 Free Software.  At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
11962 founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
11963 their IT environment.  Often when Mike came home from working at the
11964 newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
11965 several points where the communication with the schools head or the
11966 teachers did not work.  So we were clear that he would not work for
11967 one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
11968 between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
11969 parents.</p>
11970
11971 <p>Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
11972 started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
11973 schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
11974 Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
11975 networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
11976 Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
11977 Germany.</p>
11978
11979 <p>For information about our school project you can read
11980 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">the
11981 interview with Mike Gabriel</a>.</p>
11982
11983 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
11984 Edu?</strong></p>
11985
11986 <p>First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
11987 answer comes rather from a social point of view.</p>
11988
11989 <p>The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
11990 and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
11991 background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
11992 and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
11993 something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
11994 ;-). This is of course a user experience.  What I also get as a big
11995 advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
11996 works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
11997 teachers, parents...</p>
11998
11999 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
12000 Edu?</strong></p>
12001
12002 <p>I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
12003 Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
12004
12005 <p>What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
12006 the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
12007 marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
12008 schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
12009 I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
12010
12011 <p>Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
12012 do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
12013 democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
12014 and helpful.  I am also missing some kind of contact between the
12015 Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
12016 level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
12017 different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
12018
12019 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
12020
12021 <p>On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
12022 on.  As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
12023 LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
12024 my N900 running with Maemo.</p>
12025
12026 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12027 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
12028
12029 <p>I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft
12030 Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
12031 schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
12032 that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
12033 strategy has three crucial pillars:</p>
12034
12035 <ul>
12036
12037 <li>We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
12038 concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
12039 kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.</li>
12040
12041 <li>Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
12042 are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
12043 beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
12044 they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
12045 they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
12046 needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
12047 we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.</li>
12048
12049 <li>Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
12050 co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
12051 contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
12052 offer to become more and more independent from us.</li>
12053
12054 </ul>
12055
12056       </div>
12057       <div class="tags">
12058
12059
12060         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>.
12061
12062
12063       </div>
12064     </div>
12065     <div class="padding"></div>
12066
12067     <div class="entry">
12068       <div class="title">
12069         <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>
12070       </div>
12071       <div class="date">
12072          4th November 2012
12073       </div>
12074       <div class="body">
12075         <p>Slashdot just ran a story about the European Central Bank (ECB)
12076 <a href="http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemes201210en.pdf">releasing
12077 a report (PDF)</a> about virtual currencies and
12078 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>.  It is interesting to
12079 see how a member of the bitcoin community
12080 <a href="http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/10/30/the-ecb-report-on-bitcoin-and-virtual-currencies.html">receive
12081 the report</a>.  As for the future, I suspect the central banks and
12082 the governments will outlaw bitcoin if it gain any popularity, to avoid
12083 competition.  My thoughts go to the
12084 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wörgl">Wörgl experiment</a> with
12085 negative inflation on cash which was such a success that it was
12086 terminated by the Austrian National Bank in 1933.  A successful
12087 alternative would be a threat to the current money system and gain
12088 powerful forces to work against it.</p>
12089
12090 <p>While checking out the current status of bitcoin, I also discovered
12091 that the community already seem to have
12092 <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/27/3271637/bitcoin-savings-trust-pyramid-scheme-shuts-down">experienced
12093 its first pyramid game / Ponzi scheme</a>.  Not very surprising, given
12094 how members of "small" communities tend to trust each other.  I guess
12095 enterprising crocks will try again and again, as they do anywhere
12096 wealth is available.</p>
12097
12098       </div>
12099       <div class="tags">
12100
12101
12102         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>.
12103
12104
12105       </div>
12106     </div>
12107     <div class="padding"></div>
12108
12109     <div class="entry">
12110       <div class="title">
12111         <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>
12112       </div>
12113       <div class="date">
12114         26th October 2012
12115       </div>
12116       <div class="body">
12117         <p>I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
12118 looking after the computers, mostly on the unix side, but in general
12119 all over the place.  I am also a member (and currently leader) of
12120 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG association</a>, which in turn
12121 make me a member of <a href="http://www.usenix.org/">USENIX</a>.  NUUG
12122 is an member organisation for us in Norway interested in free
12123 software, open standards and unix like operating systems, and USENIX
12124 is a US based member organisation with similar targets.  And thanks to
12125 these memberships, I get all issues of the great USENIX magazine
12126 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">;login:</a> in the
12127 mail several times a year.  The magazine is great, and I read most of
12128 it every time.</p>
12129
12130 <p>In the last issue of the USENIX magazine ;login:, there is an
12131 article by <a href="http://www.skendric.com/">Stuart Kendrick</a> from
12132 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center titled
12133 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/october-2012-volume-37-number-5/what-takes-us-down">What
12134 Takes Us Down</a>" (longer version also
12135 <a href="http://www.skendric.com/problem/incident-analysis/2012-06-30/What-Takes-Us-Down.pdf">available
12136 from his own site</a>), where he report what he found when he
12137 processed the outage reports (both planned and unplanned) from the
12138 last twelve years and classified them according to cause, time of day,
12139 etc etc.  The article is a good read to get some empirical data on
12140 what kind of problems affect a data centre, but what really inspired
12141 me was the kind of reporting they had put in place since 2000.<p>
12142
12143 <p>The centre set up a mailing list, and started to send fairly
12144 standardised messages to this list when a outage was planned or when
12145 it already occurred, to announce the plan and get feedback on the
12146 assumtions on scope and user impact.  Here is the two example from the
12147 article: First the unplanned outage:
12148
12149 <blockquote><pre>
12150 Subject:     Exchange 2003 Cluster Issues
12151 Severity:    Critical (Unplanned)
12152 Start:       Monday, May 7, 2012, 11:58
12153 End:         Monday, May 7, 2012, 12:38
12154 Duration:    40 minutes
12155 Scope:       Exchange 2003
12156 Description: The HTTPS service on the Exchange cluster crashed, triggering
12157              a cluster failover.
12158
12159 User Impact: During this period, all Exchange users were unable to
12160              access e-mail. Zimbra users were unaffected.
12161 Technician:  [xxx]
12162 </pre></blockquote>
12163
12164 Next the planned outage:
12165
12166 <blockquote><pre>
12167 Subject:     H Building Switch Upgrades
12168 Severity:    Major (Planned)
12169 Start:       Saturday, June 16, 2012, 06:00
12170 End:         Saturday, June 16, 2012, 16:00
12171 Duration:    10 hours
12172 Scope:       H2 Transport
12173 Description: Currently, Catalyst 4006s provide 10/100 Ethernet to end-
12174              stations. We will replace these with newer Catalyst
12175              4510s.
12176 User Impact: All users on H2 will be isolated from the network during
12177              this work. Afterward, they will have gigabit
12178              connectivity.
12179 Technician:  [xxx]
12180 </pre></blockquote>
12181
12182 <p>He notes in his article that the date formats and other fields have
12183 been a bit too free form to make it easy to automatically process them
12184 into a database for further analysis, and I would have used ISO 8601
12185 dates myself to make it easier to process (in other words I would ask
12186 people to write '2012-06-16 06:00 +0000' instead of the start time
12187 format listed above).  There are also other issues with the format
12188 that could be improved, read the article for the details.</p>
12189
12190 <p>I find the idea of standardising outage messages seem to be such a
12191 good idea that I would like to get it implemented here at the
12192 university too.  We do register
12193 <a href="http://www.uio.no/tjenester/it/aktuelt/planlagte-tjenesteavbrudd/">planned
12194 changes and outages in a calendar</a>, and report the to a mailing
12195 list, but we do not do so in a structured format and there is not a
12196 report to the same location for unplanned outages.  Perhaps something
12197 for other sites to consider too?</p>
12198
12199       </div>
12200       <div class="tags">
12201
12202
12203         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix</a>.
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/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>
12213       </div>
12214       <div class="date">
12215         22nd October 2012
12216       </div>
12217       <div class="body">
12218         <p>A blog post from Martin Bekkelund today tell the story of
12219 <a href="http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/">how
12220 Amazon erased the books from a customer's kindle, locked the account
12221 and refuse to tell the customer why</a>.  If a real book store did
12222 this to a customer, it would be called breaking into private property
12223 and theft.  The story has spread around the net today.  A bit more
12224 background information is available in Norwegian from
12225 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904658/hun-ble-kastet-ut-av-amazon">digi.no</a>.
12226 It is no surprise that digital restriction mechanisms (DRM) are used
12227 this way, as it has been warned about such abuse since DRM was
12228 introduced many years back.  And Amazon proved in 2009 that it was
12229 willing to
12230 <a href="http://boingboing.net/2009/07/20/amazons-orwellian-de.html">
12231 break into customers equipment and remove the books</a> people had
12232 bought, when it removed the book 1984 by George Orwell from all the
12233 customers who had bought it.  From the official comments, it even
12234 sounded like
12235 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html">Amazon
12236 would never do that again</a>.  And here we are, three years
12237 later.</p>
12238
12239 <p>And thought this action is
12240 <a href="http://www.itavisen.no/904648/forbrukerraadet-helt-haarreisende">against
12241 Norwegian regulations and law</a>, it is according to the terms of use
12242 as written by Amazon, and it is hard to hold Amazon accountable to
12243 Norwegian laws.  It is just yet another example of unacceptable terms
12244 of use on the web, and how they are used to remove customer
12245 rights.</p>
12246
12247 <p>Luckily for electronic books, there are alternatives without
12248 unacceptable terms.  For example
12249 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about 40,000
12250 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a> (1,652
12251 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The Internet
12252 Archive</a> (3,641,797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which
12253 can read by anyone and shared with anyone.</p>
12254
12255 <p>Update 2012-10-23: This story broke in the morning on Monday. In
12256 the evening after the story had spread all across the Internet, Amazon
12257 restored the account of the user, as reported by
12258 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904675/helomvending-fra-amazon">digi.no</a>
12259 and <a href="http://nrk.no/kultur-og-underholdning/1.8368487">NRK</a>.
12260 Apparently public pressure work.  The story from Martin have seen
12261 several twitter messages per minute the last 24 hours, which is quite
12262 a lot, and is still drawing a lot of attention.  But even when the
12263 account is restored, the fundamental problem still exist.  I recommend
12264 reading two opinions from
12265 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm">Simon
12266 Phipps</a> and
12267 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/10/is-amazon-playing-fair/index.htm">Glen
12268 Moody</a> if you want to learn more about the fundamentals and more
12269 details about the original story.</p>
12270
12271       </div>
12272       <div class="tags">
12273
12274
12275         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>.
12276
12277
12278       </div>
12279     </div>
12280     <div class="padding"></div>
12281
12282     <div class="entry">
12283       <div class="title">
12284         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_fight_for_freedom_and_privacy.html">The fight for freedom and privacy</a>
12285       </div>
12286       <div class="date">
12287         18th October 2012
12288       </div>
12289       <div class="body">
12290         <p>Civil liberties and privacy in the western world are going down the
12291 drain, and it is hard to fight against it.  I try to do my best, but
12292 time is limited.  I hope you do your best too.  A few years ago I came
12293 across a marvellous drawing by
12294 <a href="http://www.claybennett.com/about.html">Clay Bennett</a>
12295 visualising some of what is going on.
12296
12297 <p><a href="http://www.claybennett.com/pages/security_fence.html">
12298 <img src="http://www.claybennett.com/images/archivetoons/security_fence.jpg"></a></p>
12299
12300 <blockquote>
12301 «They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
12302 safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.» - Benjamin Franklin
12303 </blockquote>
12304
12305 <p>Do you feel safe at the airport?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when
12306 you see a surveillance camera?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when you
12307 leave electronic traces of your behaviour and opinions?  I do not.  I
12308 just remember <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon">the
12309 Panopticon</a>, and can not help to think that we are slowly
12310 transforming our society to a huge Panopticon on our own.</p>
12311
12312       </div>
12313       <div class="tags">
12314
12315
12316         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>.
12317
12318
12319       </div>
12320     </div>
12321     <div class="padding"></div>
12322
12323     <div class="entry">
12324       <div class="title">
12325         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColonHelp_produser_sue_WordPress_to_silence_critic.html">ColonHelp produser sue WordPress to silence critic</a>
12326       </div>
12327       <div class="date">
12328         12th October 2012
12329       </div>
12330       <div class="body">
12331         <p>Thanks to a blog post by
12332 <a href="http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.no/2012/10/a-shitstorm-is-comming.html">Eddy
12333 Petrișor</a>, I became aware of yet another "alternative medicine"
12334 company using legal intimidation tactics to scare off critics.
12335 According to the originating blog post about the detox "cure"
12336 <a href="http://insulaindoielii.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/colon-help-sues-wordpress/">ColonHelp
12337 and its producers Zenyth Pharmaceuticals actions</a>, the producer
12338 sues Wordpress to get rid of the critical information.  To check if
12339 the story was for real, I contacted Automattic, the company behind
12340 wordpress.com, and they reply was "We can confirm that Zenyth is
12341 seeking a court order against WordPress / Automattic.  However, we
12342 don't believe the Terms of Service have been violated in this
12343 matter".</p>
12344
12345 <p>The story seem to be simply that a blogger checked the scientific
12346 foundation for a popular health product in Rumania, ColonHelp, and
12347 reported that there was no reason at all to believe it improved the
12348 health of its users.  This caused the company behind the product,
12349 Zenyth Pharmaceuticals, to use legal intimidation to try to silence
12350 the critic, instead of presenting its views and scientific foundation
12351 to argue its side.</p>
12352
12353 <p>This is the usual story, and the Zenyth Pharmaceuticals company
12354 deserve everyone to know how it failed to act properly.  Lets hope the
12355 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect">Streisand
12356 effect</a> can make it rethink its strategy.</p>
12357
12358 <p>What is the harm, you might think.  I suggest you take a look at
12359 <a href="http://www.whatstheharm.net/detoxification.html">a list of
12360 victims of detoxification</a>.</p>
12361
12362       </div>
12363       <div class="tags">
12364
12365
12366         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>.
12367
12368
12369       </div>
12370     </div>
12371     <div class="padding"></div>
12372
12373     <div class="entry">
12374       <div class="title">
12375         <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>
12376       </div>
12377       <div class="date">
12378          3rd October 2012
12379       </div>
12380       <div class="body">
12381         <p>I just read the blog post from Tim Retout
12382 <a href="http://retout.co.uk/blog/2012/10/02/the-library-challenge">about
12383 the computer science book collection available in his local
12384 library</a>, and just wanted to share my comment on his theory about
12385 computer books becoming obsolete so soon.  That is part of the reason
12386 why the selection is so sad in almost any local library (it is in mine
12387 too), but I believe the major contributing factor is that the people
12388 buying books to the library have no way to know a good and future
12389 computer classic from trash.  And they need to know which one will
12390 become a classic in the future, as they would normally buy one of the
12391 recently published books.</p>
12392
12393 <p>During my university years, I worked for a while at the university
12394 library, and even there the person in charge of buying computer
12395 related books (and in fact any natural science related book), did not
12396 know enough about computers to make a good educated guess.  Once, just
12397 before Christmas, they had some leftover money on the book budget and
12398 I was asked if I could pick out a lot of computer books in the
12399 university book store, for the library to buy for their collection.  I
12400 had a great time picking all the books I dreamt of buying and reading,
12401 and the books I knew were classics (like most of the
12402 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens">Stevens
12403 collection</a>).  I picked several of the generic O'Reilly books (ie
12404 documenting protocols, formats and systems, not specific versions of
12405 products) and stayed away from the 'teach yourself X in N days' class.
12406 I had a great time, and probably picked out more than a hundred books
12407 for the library that evening.</p>
12408
12409 <p>The sad fact is that there is no way a overworked librarian is
12410 going to know that for example
12411 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming">The
12412 Practice of Programming</a> is a must-have in any computer library,
12413 and they will most of the time end up picking the wrong books to buy.
12414 Perhaps you can help your local library make better choices by giving
12415 the suggestions for books to get?  I know they would love to hear from
12416 you, even if their budget might block them from getting your favourite
12417 book right away.</p>
12418
12419       </div>
12420       <div class="tags">
12421
12422
12423         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12424
12425
12426       </div>
12427     </div>
12428     <div class="padding"></div>
12429
12430     <div class="entry">
12431       <div class="title">
12432         <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>
12433       </div>
12434       <div class="date">
12435         23rd September 2012
12436       </div>
12437       <div class="body">
12438         <p>Since this summer, I have worked in my spare time on a Norwegian <a
12439 href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book <a
12440 href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
12441 The reason is that this book is a great primer on what problems exist
12442 in the current copyright laws, and I want it to be available also for
12443 those that are reluctant do read an English book.
12444
12445 When I started, I
12446 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
12447 for volunteers</a> to help me, but too few have volunteered so far,
12448 and progress is a bit slow.  Anyway, today I broken the 70 percent
12449 mark for the first rough translation.  At the moment, less than 700
12450 strings (paragraphs, index terms, titles) are left to translate.  With
12451 my current progress of 10-20 strings per day, it will take a while to
12452 complete the translation.  This graph show the updated progress:</p>
12453
12454 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
12455
12456 <p>Progress have slowed down lately due to family and work
12457 commitments.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out
12458 the project files currently available from
12459 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
12460
12461 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
12462 the updated
12463 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
12464 and
12465 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
12466 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
12467 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
12468 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
12469
12470       </div>
12471       <div class="tags">
12472
12473
12474         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>.
12475
12476
12477       </div>
12478     </div>
12479     <div class="padding"></div>
12480
12481     <div class="entry">
12482       <div class="title">
12483         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html">Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda</a>
12484       </div>
12485       <div class="date">
12486         17th September 2012
12487       </div>
12488       <div class="body">
12489         <p>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
12490 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
12491 community, I finally found time to wrap up another.  This time it is
12492 Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
12493 this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
12494 administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
12495 conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.</p>
12496
12497 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12498
12499 <p>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
12500 in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
12501 university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
12502 Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
12503 IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
12504 got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
12505 labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
12506 the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
12507 training is anyway very important</p>
12508
12509 <p>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
12510 <a href="http://www.spse.ch/">SPSE school</a> (secondary) is a very
12511 special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
12512 all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
12513 recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
12514
12515 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
12516 project?</strong></p>
12517
12518 <p>Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
12519 already several years ago. But since the system was still not
12520 Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
12521 use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
12522 next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
12523 hole.</p>
12524
12525 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12526 Edu?</strong></p>
12527
12528 <p>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
12529 very generous for help and hints.  Chat help is crucial, together with
12530 the mailing list.  Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
12531 engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
12532 and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
12533 can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
12534 platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
12535 head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
12536 hassle.</p>
12537
12538 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12539 Edu?</strong></p>
12540
12541 <p>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
12542 flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
12543 there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
12544 need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
12545 devices that have specific software packages for another specific
12546 distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
12547 Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
12548 and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)</p>
12549
12550 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
12551
12552 <p>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
12553 mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
12554 combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
12555 <a href="http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html">Perceus</a>
12556 has the same...</p>
12557
12558 <p>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
12559 only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
12560 something breaks.  Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
12561 statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.</p>
12562
12563 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12564 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
12565
12566 <P>I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
12567 cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
12568 just because they are normally not open to change.</p>
12569
12570 <p>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
12571 to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
12572 don't.</p>
12573
12574 <p>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
12575 laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
12576 we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
12577 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
12578 reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
12579 repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
12580 Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.</p>
12581
12582       </div>
12583       <div class="tags">
12584
12585
12586         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>.
12587
12588
12589       </div>
12590     </div>
12591     <div class="padding"></div>
12592
12593     <div class="entry">
12594       <div class="title">
12595         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html">IETF activity to standardise video codec</a>
12596       </div>
12597       <div class="date">
12598         15th September 2012
12599       </div>
12600       <div class="body">
12601         <p>After the
12602 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">Opus
12603 codec made</a> it into <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> as
12604 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716</a>, I had a look
12605 to see if there is any activity in IETF to standardise a video codec
12606 too, and I was happy to discover that there is some activity in this
12607 area.  A non-"working group" mailing list
12608 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/video-codec">video-codec</a>
12609 was
12610 <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
12611 formal working group should be formed.</p>
12612
12613 <p>I look forward to see how this plays out.  There is already
12614 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/video-codec/current/msg00003.html">an
12615 email from someone</a> in the MPEG group at ISO asking people to
12616 participate in the ISO group.  Given how ISO failed with OOXML and given
12617 that it so far (as far as I can remember) only have produced
12618 multimedia formats requiring royalty payments, I suspect
12619 joining the ISO group would be a complete waste of time, but I am not
12620 involved in any codec work and my opinion will not matter much.</p>
12621
12622 <p>If one of my readers is involved with codec work, I hope she will
12623 join this work to standardise a royalty free video codec within
12624 IETF.</p>
12625
12626       </div>
12627       <div class="tags">
12628
12629
12630         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>.
12631
12632
12633       </div>
12634     </div>
12635     <div class="padding"></div>
12636
12637     <div class="entry">
12638       <div class="title">
12639         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">IETF standardize its first multimedia codec: Opus</a>
12640       </div>
12641       <div class="date">
12642         12th September 2012
12643       </div>
12644       <div class="body">
12645         <p>Yesterday, <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> announced the
12646 publication of of
12647 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716, the Definition
12648 of the Opus Audio Codec</a>, a low latency, variable bandwidth, codec
12649 intended for both VoIP, film and music.  This is the first time, as
12650 far as I know, that IETF have standardized a multimedia codec.  In
12651 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3533">RFC 3533</a>, IETF
12652 standardized the OGG container format, and it has proven to be a great
12653 royalty free container for audio, video and movies.  I hope IETF will
12654 continue to standardize more royalty free codeces, after ISO and MPEG
12655 have proven incapable of securing everyone equal rights to publish
12656 multimedia content on the Internet.</p>
12657
12658 <p>IETF require two interoperating independent implementations to
12659 ratify a standard, and have so far ensured to only standardize royalty
12660 free specifications.  Both are key factors to allow everyone (rich and
12661 poor), to compete on equal terms on the Internet.</p>
12662
12663 <p>Visit the <a href="http://opus-codec.org/">Opus project page</a> if
12664 you want to learn more about the solution.</p>
12665
12666       </div>
12667       <div class="tags">
12668
12669
12670         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>.
12671
12672
12673       </div>
12674     </div>
12675     <div class="padding"></div>
12676
12677     <div class="entry">
12678       <div class="title">
12679         <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>
12680       </div>
12681       <div class="date">
12682          7th September 2012
12683       </div>
12684       <div class="body">
12685         <p>As I
12686 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
12687 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
12688 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
12689 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
12690 repository for the project</a>.</p>
12691
12692 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
12693 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
12694 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
12695 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
12696
12697 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
12698 PostScript formats at
12699 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
12700 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
12701
12702       </div>
12703       <div class="tags">
12704
12705
12706         Tags: <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>.
12707
12708
12709       </div>
12710     </div>
12711     <div class="padding"></div>
12712
12713     <div class="entry">
12714       <div class="title">
12715         <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>
12716       </div>
12717       <div class="date">
12718         23rd August 2012
12719       </div>
12720       <div class="body">
12721         <p>I came across a great comment from Simon Phipps today, about how
12722 <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/how-microsoft-was-forced-open-office-200233">Microsoft
12723 have been forced to open Office</a>, and it made me remember and
12724 revisit the great site
12725 <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">officeshots</a> which allow you
12726 to check out how different programs present the ODF file format.  I
12727 recommend both to those of my readers interested in ODF. :)</p>
12728
12729       </div>
12730       <div class="tags">
12731
12732
12733         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>.
12734
12735
12736       </div>
12737     </div>
12738     <div class="padding"></div>
12739
12740     <div class="entry">
12741       <div class="title">
12742         <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>
12743       </div>
12744       <div class="date">
12745         17th August 2012
12746       </div>
12747       <div class="body">
12748         <p>In my spare time, I currently work on a Norwegian
12749 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
12750 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
12751 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law
12752 I can give to my parents and others that are reluctant to read an
12753 English book.  It is a marvellous set of examples on how the ever
12754 expanding copyright regulations hurt culture and society.  When the
12755 translation is done, I hope to find funding to print and ship a copy
12756 to all the members of the Norwegian parliament, before they sit down
12757 to debate the latest revisions to the Norwegian copyright law.  This
12758 summer I
12759 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
12760 for volunteers</a> to help me, and I have been able to secure the
12761 valuable contribution from at least one other Norwegian.</p>
12762
12763 <p>Two days ago, we finally broke the 50% mark.  Then more than 50% of
12764 the number of strings to translate (normally paragraphs, but also
12765 titles and index entries are also counted).  All parts from the
12766 beginning up to and including chapter four is translated.  So is
12767 chapters six, seven and the conclusion.  I created a graph to show the
12768 progress:</p>
12769
12770 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
12771
12772 <p>The number of strings to translate increase as I insert the index
12773 entries into the docbook.  They were missing with the docbook version
12774 I initially started with.  There are still quite a few index entries
12775 missing, but everyone starting with A, B, O, Z and Y are done.  I
12776 currently focus on completing the index entries, to get a complete
12777 english version of the docbook source.</p>
12778
12779 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
12780 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
12781 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
12782 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
12783 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
12784 around?  I am sure there are some legal terms that are unfamiliar to
12785 me.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out the
12786 project files currently available from <a
12787 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
12788
12789 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
12790 the updated
12791 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
12792 and
12793 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
12794 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
12795 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
12796 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
12797
12798       </div>
12799       <div class="tags">
12800
12801
12802         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>.
12803
12804
12805       </div>
12806     </div>
12807     <div class="padding"></div>
12808
12809     <div class="entry">
12810       <div class="title">
12811         <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>
12812       </div>
12813       <div class="date">
12814         10th August 2012
12815       </div>
12816       <div class="body">
12817         <p>In <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> one can specify
12818 the language used at the top, and the processing pipeline will use
12819 this information to pick the correct translations for 'chapter', 'see
12820 also', 'index' etc.  And for most languages used with docbook, I guess
12821 this work just fine.  For example a German user can start the document
12822 with &lt;book lang="de"&gt;, and the document will show up with the
12823 correct content with any of the docbook processors.  This is not the
12824 case for the language
12825 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html">I
12826 am working with at the moment</a>, Norwegian Bokmål.</p>
12827
12828 <p>For a while, I was confused about which language code to use,
12829 because I was unable to find any language code that would work across
12830 all tools.  I am currently testing dblatex, xmlto, docbook-xsl, and
12831 dbtoepub, and they do not handle Norwegian Bokmål the same way.  Some
12832 of them do not handle it at all.</p>
12833
12834 <p>A bit of background information is probably needed to understand
12835 this mess.  Norwegian is not one, but two written variants.  The
12836 variants are Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål.  There are three
12837 two letter language codes associated with these languages, Norwegian
12838 is 'no', Norwegian Nynorsk is 'nn' and Norwegian Bokmål is 'nb'.
12839 Historically the 'no' language code was used for Norwegian Bokmål, but
12840 many years ago this was found to be å bad idea, and the recommendation
12841 is to use the most specific language code instead, to avoid confusion.
12842 In the transition period it is a good idea to make sure 'no' was an
12843 alias for 'nb'.</p>
12844
12845 <p>Back to docbook processing tools in Debian.  The dblatex tool only
12846 understand 'nn'.  There are translations for 'no', but not 'nb' (BTS
12847 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/684391">#684391</a>), but due to a bug
12848 (BTS <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">#682936</a>) the 'no'
12849 language code is not recognised.  The docbook-xsl tool chain only
12850 recognise 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The xmlto tool only recognise
12851 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The end result that there is no language
12852 code I can use to get the docbook file working with all of these tools
12853 at the same time. :(</p>
12854
12855 <p>The correct solution is to use &lt;book lang="nb"&gt;, but it will
12856 take time before that will work with all the free software docbook
12857 processors. :(</p>
12858
12859 <p>Oh, the joy of well integrated tools. :/</p>
12860
12861       </div>
12862       <div class="tags">
12863
12864
12865         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>.
12866
12867
12868       </div>
12869     </div>
12870     <div class="padding"></div>
12871
12872     <div class="entry">
12873       <div class="title">
12874         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html">Best way to create a docbook book?</a>
12875       </div>
12876       <div class="date">
12877         31st July 2012
12878       </div>
12879       <div class="body">
12880         <p>I tried to send this text to the
12881 <a href="https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/">docbook-apps
12882 mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org</a>, but it only accept messages
12883 from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
12884 bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
12885 try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
12886 out.</p>
12887
12888 <p>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
12889 learning curve at the moment.</p>
12890
12891 <p>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
12892 translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
12893 docbook to handle the process.  The files to build the book are
12894 available from
12895 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.
12896 The book got around 400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
12897 index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
12898 software docbook processors.  My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
12899 Squeeze.</p>
12900
12901 <p>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
12902 tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
12903 formats.  I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
12904 problems.</p>
12905
12906 <ul>
12907
12908 <li>Using dblatex, the &lt;part&gt; handling is not the way I want to,
12909    as &lt;/part&gt; do not really end the &lt;part&gt;. (See
12910    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683166">BTS report #683166</a>), the
12911    xetex backend (needed to process UTF-8) give incorrect hyphens in
12912    index references spanning several pages (See
12913    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682901">BTS report #682901</a>), and
12914    I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
12915    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">BTS report #682936</a>).</li>
12916
12917 <li>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
12918    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683163">BTS report
12919    #683163</a>).</li>
12920
12921 <li>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
12922    show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
12923    footnote and text body, see
12924    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683197">BTS report #683197</a>), and
12925    fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
12926    refs listed are not right).</li>
12927
12928 <li>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.</li>
12929
12930 <li>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
12931    index problems the xmlto + fop processing.</li>
12932
12933 </ul>
12934
12935 <p>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
12936 of this book?  Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
12937 experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?</p>
12938
12939 <p>What about HTML and EPUB versions?</p>
12940
12941       </div>
12942       <div class="tags">
12943
12944
12945         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>.
12946
12947
12948       </div>
12949     </div>
12950     <div class="padding"></div>
12951
12952     <div class="entry">
12953       <div class="title">
12954         <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>
12955       </div>
12956       <div class="date">
12957         21st July 2012
12958       </div>
12959       <div class="body">
12960         <p>I reported earlier that I am working on
12961 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">a
12962 norwegian version</a> of the book
12963 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
12964 Progress is good, and yesterday I got a major contribution from Anders
12965 Hagen Jarmund completing chapter six.  The source files as well as a
12966 PDF and EPUB version of this book are available from
12967 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
12968
12969 <p>I am happy to report that the draft for the first two chapters
12970 (preface, introduction) is complete, and three other chapters are also
12971 completely translated.  This completes 26 percent of the number of
12972 strings (equivalent to paragraphs) in the book, and there is thus 74
12973 percent left to translate.  A graph of the progress is present at the
12974 bottom of the github project page.  There is still room for more
12975 contributors.  Get in touch or send github pull requests with fixes if
12976 you got time and are willing to help make this book make it to
12977 print. :)</p>
12978
12979 <p>The book translation framework could also be a good basis for other
12980 translations, if you want the book to be available in your
12981 language.</p>
12982
12983       </div>
12984       <div class="tags">
12985
12986
12987         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>.
12988
12989
12990       </div>
12991     </div>
12992     <div class="padding"></div>
12993
12994     <div class="entry">
12995       <div class="title">
12996         <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>
12997       </div>
12998       <div class="date">
12999         16th July 2012
13000       </div>
13001       <div class="body">
13002         <p>I am currently working on a
13003 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">project
13004 to translate</a> the book
13005 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig
13006 to Norwegian.  And the source we base our translation on is the
13007 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook">docbook</a> version, to
13008 allow us to use po4a and .po files to handle the translation, and for
13009 this to work well the docbook source document need to be properly
13010 tagged.  The source files of this project is available from
13011 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
13012
13013 <p>The problem is that the docbook source have flaws, and we have
13014 no-one involved in the project that is a docbook expert.  Is there a
13015 docbook expert somewhere that is interested in helping us create a
13016 well tagged docbook version of the book, and adjust our build process
13017 for the PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book?  This will provide a
13018 well tagged English version (our source document), and make it a lot
13019 easier for us to create a good Norwegian version.  If you can and want
13020 to help, please get in touch with me or fork the github project and
13021 send pull requests with fixes. :)</p>
13022
13023       </div>
13024       <div class="tags">
13025
13026
13027         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>.
13028
13029
13030       </div>
13031     </div>
13032     <div class="padding"></div>
13033
13034     <div class="entry">
13035       <div class="title">
13036         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html">Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg</a>
13037       </div>
13038       <div class="date">
13039          9th July 2012
13040       </div>
13041       <div class="body">
13042         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
13043 Skolelinux</a> project have users all over the globe, but until
13044 recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
13045 country Sweden.  This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
13046 this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
13047 to adjust and scale the just released
13048 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
13049 Wheezy</a> setup to his liking.  He granted me an interview, and I am
13050 happy to share his answers with you here.</p>
13051
13052 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13053
13054 <p>I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
13055 the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
13056 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
13057 "folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups.  In
13058 Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
13059 in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
13060 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
13061 perspective when working with IT.</p>
13062
13063 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
13064 project?</strong></p>
13065
13066 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
13067 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
13068 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
13069 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
13070 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
13071 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
13072
13073 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13074 Edu?</strong></p>
13075
13076 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
13077 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
13078 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
13079 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
13080 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
13081 well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
13082 when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
13083 showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
13084 mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
13085 same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
13086 setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
13087 workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
13088 thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
13089 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
13090 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
13091 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
13092 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
13093 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time.  Our
13094 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
13095 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
13096 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
13097 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
13098 quicker to update.
13099
13100 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13101 Edu?</strong></p>
13102
13103 <p>Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
13104 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
13105 year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
13106 sound from working with them.  It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
13107 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
13108 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.</p>
13109
13110 <p>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
13111 install time.  In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
13112 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
13113 That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
13114 Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
13115 to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
13116 support for single-sign on.  That will make the transition to free
13117 software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
13118 need.  No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
13119 some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
13120 run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes.  We run a journalist
13121 education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
13122 by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association).  Our
13123 education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
13124 are done.  This is important if you want to get a job.</p>
13125
13126 <p>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
13127 magazines.  We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
13128 market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
13129 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
13130 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
13131 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
13132 edit and compile a newspaper.  But politically at our school we are not
13133 there yet.  And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.</p>
13134
13135 <p>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
13136 the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
13137 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
13138 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
13139 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
13140 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
13141 studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
13142 want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise.  Those
13143 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
13144 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
13145 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
13146 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
13147 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
13148 sound file.</p>
13149
13150 <p>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
13151 will try.  The problem is the students have certain expectations when
13152 they start an education towards a profession.  So the programs has to
13153 look and feel professional.  Good thing with radio, there are many
13154 programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
13155 as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
13156 program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
13157 learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
13158 the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.</p>
13159
13160 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13161
13162 <p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days.  I use almost
13163 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
13164 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
13165 )</p>
13166
13167 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13168 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13169
13170 <p>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
13171 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
13172 it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
13173 flawlessly.  The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
13174 will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
13175 students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
13176 clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
13177 idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
13178 the administration.  It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
13179 open source, if the principal has to run Windows.  It also creates a
13180 problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
13181 will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
13182 support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
13183 desktop is essential.  At least at our school, where we have mixed
13184 level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
13185
13186 <p>Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
13187 useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
13188 article <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/481607/">Radio station
13189 management with Airtime</a>,
13190 <a href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/">Airtime</a> which
13191 claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
13192 <a href="http://www.rivendellaudio.org/">Rivendell</a> which claim to
13193 be complete radio broadcast automation solution.  All of them seem
13194 useful to the aspiring radio producer.</p>
13195
13196       </div>
13197       <div class="tags">
13198
13199
13200         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>.
13201
13202
13203       </div>
13204     </div>
13205     <div class="padding"></div>
13206
13207     <div class="entry">
13208       <div class="title">
13209         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html">Why do schools waste money on IT?</a>
13210       </div>
13211       <div class="date">
13212          8th July 2012
13213       </div>
13214       <div class="body">
13215         <p>In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
13216 of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
13217 in schools and municipalities.  We provide what the happy users of
13218 Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
13219 alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution.  I
13220 was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
13221 Steinberg in his blog post
13222 "<a href="http://www.mysociety.org/2012/06/19/can-you-recognize-the-million-pound-chair/">Can
13223 you recognize the million pound chair?</a>".  Read it and weep for the
13224 spending of your tax money.</p>
13225
13226 <p>Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
13227 projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
13228 causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
13229 to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
13230 public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
13231 purchases.</p>
13232
13233       </div>
13234       <div class="tags">
13235
13236
13237         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>.
13238
13239
13240       </div>
13241     </div>
13242     <div class="padding"></div>
13243
13244     <div class="entry">
13245       <div class="title">
13246         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html">Free Timetabling Software - nice free software</a>
13247       </div>
13248       <div class="date">
13249          7th July 2012
13250       </div>
13251       <div class="body">
13252         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
13253 Skolelinux</a> is a large collection of end user and school specific
13254 software.  It is one of the packages not installed by default but
13255 provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
13256 is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
13257 information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
13258 the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
13259 receive.  The software is
13260
13261 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/">named FET</a>, and it provide a
13262 graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
13263 result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
13264 both teachers and students.  It is available both for
13265 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download.html">Linux, MacOSX and
13266 Windows</a>.</p>
13267
13268 <p>This is <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/features.html">the
13269 feature list</a>, liftet from the project web site:</p>
13270
13271 <p><ul>
13272
13273   <li>FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
13274     You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it </li>
13275
13276   <li>Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
13277     (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
13278     (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
13279     (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
13280     (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
13281     (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
13282     sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
13283     (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
13284     </li>
13285
13286   <li>Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
13287     semi-automatic or manual allocation</li>
13288
13289   <li>Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
13290     GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports </li>
13291
13292   <li>Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
13293     with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)</li>
13294
13295   <li>Import/export from CSV format</li>
13296
13297   <li>The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
13298     formats </li>
13299
13300   <li>Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
13301     and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
13302     non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
13303     (as separate sets)</li>
13304
13305   <li>Each constraint has a weight percentage, from 0.0% to 100.0%
13306     (but some special constraints are allowed to have only 100% weight
13307     percentage)</li>
13308
13309   <li>Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
13310     demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
13311     memory):
13312     <ul>
13313       <li>Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day: 60</li>
13314       <li>Maximum number of working days per week: 35</li>
13315       <li>Maximum total number of teachers: 6000</li>
13316       <li>Maximum total number of sets of students: 30000</li>
13317       <li>Maximum total number of subjects: 6000</li>
13318       <li>Virtually unlimited number of activity tags</li>
13319       <li>Maximum number of activities: 30000</li>
13320       <li>Maximum number of rooms: 6000</li>
13321       <li>Maximum number of buildings: 6000</li>
13322       <li>Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
13323           students sets for each activity.  (it is possible
13324           also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
13325           activity)</li>
13326       <li>Virtually unlimited number of time constraints</li>
13327       <li>Virtually unlimited number of space constraints</li>
13328     </ul></li>
13329
13330   <li>A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
13331     <ul>
13332       <li>Break periods</li>
13333       <li>For teacher(s):
13334         <ul>
13335           <li>Not available periods</li>
13336           <li>Max/min days per week</li>
13337           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
13338           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
13339           <li>Min hours daily</li>
13340           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
13341
13342           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
13343             days per week</li>
13344         </ul></li>
13345       <li>For students (sets):
13346         <ul>
13347           <li>Not available periods</li>
13348           <li>Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)</li>
13349           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
13350           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
13351           <li>Min hours daily</li>
13352           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
13353
13354           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
13355             days per week</li>
13356         </ul></li>
13357       <li>For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
13358         <ul>
13359           <li>A single preferred starting time</li>
13360           <li>A set of preferred starting times</li>
13361           <li>A set of preferred time slots</li>
13362           <li>Min/max days between them</li>
13363           <li>End(s) students day</li>
13364           <li>Same starting time/day/hour</li>
13365           <li>Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
13366             flexible constraint, useful in many situations)</li>
13367           <li>Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for 2 or 3 (sub)activities)</li>
13368           <li>Not overlapping</li>
13369           <li>Max simultaneous in selected time slots</li>
13370           <li>Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities</li>
13371         </ul></li>
13372     </ul></li>
13373
13374   <li>A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
13375     <ul>
13376       <li>Room not available periods</li>
13377       <li>For teacher(s):
13378         <ul>
13379           <li>Home room(s)</li>
13380           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
13381           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
13382         </ul>
13383       </li>
13384
13385       <li>For students (sets):
13386         <ul>
13387           <li>Home room(s)</li>
13388           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
13389           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
13390         </ul>
13391       </li>
13392       <li>Preferred room(s):
13393         <ul>
13394           <li>For a subject</li>
13395           <li>For an activity tag</li>
13396           <li>For a subject and an activity tag</li>
13397           <li>Individually for a (sub)activity</li>
13398         </ul>
13399       </li>
13400
13401       <li>For a set of activities:
13402         <ul>
13403           <li>Occupy a maximum number of different rooms</li>
13404         </ul>
13405       </li>
13406     </ul>
13407   </li>
13408 </ul></p>
13409
13410 <p>I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
13411 planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it.  If you
13412 need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
13413 manually, check it out.
13414
13415 A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
13416 <a href="http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/2012/03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/">a
13417 blog post from MarvelSoft</a>.  If you find FET useful, please provide
13418 a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
13419 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos">Debian Edu HowTo
13420 section</a>.</p>
13421
13422       </div>
13423       <div class="tags">
13424
13425
13426         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>.
13427
13428
13429       </div>
13430     </div>
13431     <div class="padding"></div>
13432
13433     <div class="entry">
13434       <div class="title">
13435         <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>
13436       </div>
13437       <div class="date">
13438          3rd July 2012
13439       </div>
13440       <div class="body">
13441         <p>In the NUUG <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a>
13442 project (Norwegian version of
13443 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> from
13444 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>), we have discovered
13445 a problem with the municipalities using
13446 <a href="http://www.zimbra.com/">Zimbra</a>.  When FiksGataMi send a
13447 problem report to the government, the email From: address is set to
13448 the address of the person reporting the problem, while envelope sender
13449 is set to the FiksGataMi contact address.  The intention is to make
13450 sure the municipality send any replies to the person reporting the
13451 problem, while any email delivery problems are sent to us in NUUG.
13452 This work well in most cases, but not for Karmøy municipality using
13453 Zimbra.  Karmøy is using the vacation message function in Zimbra to
13454 send an automatic reply to report that the message has been received,
13455 and this message is sent to the envelope sender and not the address in
13456 the From: header.</p>
13457
13458 <p>This causes the automatic message from Karmøy to go to NUUGs
13459 request-tracker instance instead of to the person reporting the
13460 problem.  We can not really change the envelope sender address, as
13461 this would make it impossible for us to discover when there are
13462 problems with the MTAs receiving problem reports.  We have been in
13463 contact with the people at Karmøy municipality, and they are willing
13464 to adjust Zimbra if something can be changed there to get a better
13465 behaviour.</p>
13466
13467 <p>The default behaviour of Zimbra is as far as I can tell according
13468 to the specification in RFC 3834, which recommend that vacation
13469 messages are sent to the envelope sender and not to the From: address.
13470 But I wonder if it is possible to adjust or configure Zimbra to behave
13471 differently.  Anyone know?  Please let us know at
13472 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
13473 (at) nuug.no</a>.</p>
13474
13475       </div>
13476       <div class="tags">
13477
13478
13479         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>.
13480
13481
13482       </div>
13483     </div>
13484     <div class="padding"></div>
13485
13486     <div class="entry">
13487       <div class="title">
13488         <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>
13489       </div>
13490       <div class="date">
13491         26th June 2012
13492       </div>
13493       <div class="body">
13494         <p>I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
13495 another interview with the people behind
13496 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
13497 This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
13498 helpers from Spain.  His effort was the reason we added support for
13499 several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
13500 Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
13501 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
13502 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
13503
13504 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13505
13506 <p>I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
13507 ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
13508 ICT in schools</p>
13509
13510 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
13511 project?</strong></p>
13512
13513 <p>At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
13514 project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
13515 similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
13516 I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.</p>
13517
13518 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13519 Edu?</strong></p>
13520
13521 <p>A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
13522 really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
13523 concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
13524 been used everyday inside Debian Edu.</p>
13525
13526 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13527 Edu?</strong></p>
13528
13529 <p>Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
13530 economical and technical resources in the different countries don't
13531 allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
13532 approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
13533 lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
13534 technologies in school.</p>
13535
13536 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13537
13538 <p>Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
13539 between Iceweasel, <a href="http://www.geany.org/">Geany</a> and
13540 <a href="http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator">Terminator</a>.</p>
13541
13542 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13543 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13544
13545 <p>I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
13546 different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
13547 environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
13548 laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.</p>
13549
13550 <p>Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
13551 not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
13552 universities. So different strategies are needed.</p>
13553
13554 <p>But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
13555 we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
13556 our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
13557 multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
13558 more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
13559 using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in
13560 the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
13561 them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
13562 working there.</p>
13563
13564       </div>
13565       <div class="tags">
13566
13567
13568         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>.
13569
13570
13571       </div>
13572     </div>
13573     <div class="padding"></div>
13574
13575     <div class="entry">
13576       <div class="title">
13577         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
13578       </div>
13579       <div class="date">
13580         24th June 2012
13581       </div>
13582       <div class="body">
13583         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
13584 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
13585 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
13586 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
13587 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
13588 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
13589 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
13590 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
13591 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
13592 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
13593 missing in my book.</p>
13594
13595 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
13596 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
13597 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
13598 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
13599 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
13600 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
13601 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
13602
13603       </div>
13604       <div class="tags">
13605
13606
13607         Tags: <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>.
13608
13609
13610       </div>
13611     </div>
13612     <div class="padding"></div>
13613
13614     <div class="entry">
13615       <div class="title">
13616         <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>
13617       </div>
13618       <div class="date">
13619         11th June 2012
13620       </div>
13621       <div class="body">
13622         <p>During my work on
13623 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.nb.html">Debian Edu
13624 based on Squeeze</a>, I came across some issues that should be
13625 addressed in the Wheezy release.  I finally found time to wrap up my
13626 notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
13627 explanation.</p>
13628
13629 <p><ul>
13630
13631 <li>We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
13632 changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
13633 with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
13634 system depend on tasksel tasks in
13635 /usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
13636 installation.</li>
13637
13638 <li>Enable Kerberos login for more services.  Now with the Kerberos
13639 foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
13640 services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions.  We should
13641 at least try to enable it for these services:
13642 <ul>
13643
13644   <li>CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
13645     quotas.</li>
13646   <li>Nagios for admins checking the system status.</li>
13647   <li>GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.</li>
13648   <li>LDAP for admins updating LDAP.</li>
13649   <li>Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.</li>
13650   <li>ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.</li>
13651
13652 </ul></li>
13653
13654 <li>When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
13655 authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
13656 use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
13657 is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind</li>
13658
13659 <li>Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install.  The split made
13660 sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
13661 inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.</li>
13662
13663 <li>Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
13664 touching the disk if the disk is too small.  This is
13665 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/653305">BTS report #653305</a> and the
13666 d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
13667 it and upload.  After this is done we need to adjust
13668 debian-edu-install to use this new hook.</li>
13669
13670 <li>Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
13671 time config).  LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
13672 packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
13673 in Wheezy.
13674
13675 <li>Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
13676 the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
13677 up KDE login on slow networks.</li>
13678
13679 <li>Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
13680 change on first login.  This is useful when handing out password on
13681 paper, to make sure only the user know the password.  This require
13682 fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.</li>
13683
13684 <li>Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
13685 The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
13686 familiar with GUIs.  This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
13687 have it available where the admin will be looking for it..</li>
13688
13689 <li>We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
13690 actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses).  None of the
13691 Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.</li>
13692
13693 <li>We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
13694 using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
13695 packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.</li>
13696
13697 <li>We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
13698 when changing password using the Kerberos protocol.  The hook was
13699 requested in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/588968">BTS report
13700 #588968</a> and is now available in Wheezy.  We might need to write a
13701 MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.</li>
13702
13703 <li>We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
13704 <ul>
13705
13706 <li>reduce the number of chemistry visualisers</li>
13707 <li>consider dropping xpaint</li>
13708 <li>and probably more?</li>
13709 </ul></li>
13710
13711 <li>Some hardware need external firmware to work properly.  This is
13712 mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
13713 examples too.  For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
13714 firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
13715 some GUI to do this.  Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
13716 could consider using their packages.  At the moment we have some
13717 command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
13718 for the LTSP chroot).</li>
13719
13720
13721 <li>In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options.  We
13722 should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
13723 install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
13724 use.</li>
13725
13726 <li>The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
13727 interesting educational packages.  We should work on the package
13728 tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
13729 packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
13730 new applications with a simple mouse click.</li>
13731
13732 <li>The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
13733 with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
13734 be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
13735 filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled.  We should
13736 implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
13737 instead of the "it is documented" method of today.</li>
13738
13739 <li>A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
13740 "take over" the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
13741 There are at least three implementations,
13742 <a href="italc.sourceforge.net/">italc</a>,
13743 <a href="http://www.itais.net/help/en/">controlaula</a> og
13744 <a href="http://www.epoptes.org/">epoptes</a> and we should pick one of
13745 them and make it trivial to set it up in a school.  The challenges is
13746 how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
13747 and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
13748 given room.</li>
13749
13750 <li>Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
13751 should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
13752 the Debian Edu network.  Not quite sure how.  Perhaps we should
13753 provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
13754 them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
13755 configuration and data with the central server.  This should be
13756 investigated.</li>
13757
13758 </ul></p>
13759
13760 <p>I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
13761 version.</p>
13762
13763       </div>
13764       <div class="tags">
13765
13766
13767         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>.
13768
13769
13770       </div>
13771     </div>
13772     <div class="padding"></div>
13773
13774     <div class="entry">
13775       <div class="title">
13776         <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>
13777       </div>
13778       <div class="date">
13779          9th June 2012
13780       </div>
13781       <div class="body">
13782         <p>Slashdot got a story about Intel planning a
13783 <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
13784 with face recognition</a> to recognise the viewer, and it occurred to
13785 me that it would be more interesting to turn it around, and do face
13786 recognition on the TV image itself.  It could let the viewer know who
13787 is present on the screen, and perhaps look up their credibility,
13788 company affiliation, previous appearances etc for the viewer to better
13789 evaluate what is being said and done.  That would be a feature I would
13790 be willing to pay for.</p>
13791
13792 <p>I would not be willing to pay for a TV that point a camera on my
13793 household, like the big brother feature apparently proposed by Intel.
13794 It is the telescreen idea fetched straight out of the book
13795 <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt">1984 by George
13796 Orwell</a>.</p>
13797
13798       </div>
13799       <div class="tags">
13800
13801
13802         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>.
13803
13804
13805       </div>
13806     </div>
13807     <div class="padding"></div>
13808
13809     <div class="entry">
13810       <div class="title">
13811         <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>
13812       </div>
13813       <div class="date">
13814          6th June 2012
13815       </div>
13816       <div class="body">
13817         <p>A few days ago
13818 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">I
13819 reported how to get</a> the support status out of Dell using an
13820 unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was
13821 <a href="http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2012-February/045959.html">discovered
13822 by Daniel De Marco in february</a>.  Combined with my web scraping
13823 code for HP, Dell and IBM
13824 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">from
13825 2009</a>, I got inspired and wrote
13826 <a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/">a
13827 web service</a> based on Scraperwiki to make it easy to look up the
13828 support status and get a machine readable result back.</p>
13829
13830 <p>This is what it look like at the moment when asking for the JSON
13831 output:
13832
13833 <blockquote><pre>
13834 % 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>
13835 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": ""})
13836 %
13837 </pre></blockquote>
13838
13839 <p>It currently support Dell and HP, and I am hoping for help to add
13840 support for other vendors.  The python source is available on
13841 Scraperwiki and I welcome help with adding more features.</p>
13842
13843       </div>
13844       <div class="tags">
13845
13846
13847         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>.
13848
13849
13850       </div>
13851     </div>
13852     <div class="padding"></div>
13853
13854     <div class="entry">
13855       <div class="title">
13856         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel</a>
13857       </div>
13858       <div class="date">
13859          2nd June 2012
13860       </div>
13861       <div class="body">
13862         <p>Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
13863 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
13864 mailing list.  He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
13865 thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
13866 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
13867 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
13868
13869 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13870
13871 <p>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
13872 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
13873 (Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
13874 by Angela).</p>
13875
13876 <p>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
13877 and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
13878 touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
13879 the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
13880 becoming an osteopath.</p>
13881
13882 <p>Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
13883 have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
13884 introducing free software into schools. The project's name is
13885 "IT-Zukunft Schule" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
13886 skills with communication skills.</p>
13887
13888 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
13889 project?</strong></p>
13890
13891 <p>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
13892 "IT-Zukunft Schule" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
13893 reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
13894 people said.  From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
13895 distributions that target being used for school networks.</p>
13896
13897 <p>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
13898 commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
13899 Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
13900 went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
13901 and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
13902 Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
13903 got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
13904 attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
13905 the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.</p>
13906
13907 <p>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
13908 people.  People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
13909 protection experts, other IT professionals.</p>
13910
13911 <p>We came to two conclusions:</p>
13912
13913 <p>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
13914 bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
13915 by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
13916 whereas most of each school's requirements could mapped by a standard
13917 IT solution.  The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
13918 customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
13919 possible.  In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
13920 standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
13921 degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
13922 locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
13923 point.</p>
13924
13925 <p>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
13926 all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
13927 for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
13928 has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
13929 of people into using IT and teaching with IT. "IT-Zukunft Schule"
13930 tries to provide an approach for this.</p>
13931
13932 <p>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
13933 defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
13934 Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school's IT
13935 equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
13936 teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
13937 spare time.</p>
13938
13939 <p>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
13940 networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
13941 here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
13942 teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
13943 non-existent until 2010/2011.</p>
13944
13945 <p>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
13946 class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
13947 avoidance do exist.</p>
13948
13949 <p>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
13950 social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
13951 for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
13952 several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
13953 they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
13954 at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
13955 and probably a gain for all.</p>
13956
13957 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13958 Edu?</strong></p>
13959
13960 <p>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
13961 any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
13962 the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
13963 workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
13964 project communication, honest communication within the group of
13965 developers, etc.</p>
13966
13967 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13968 Edu?</strong></p>
13969
13970 <p>Every coin has two sides:</p>
13971
13972 <p>Technically: <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/311188">BTS issue
13973 #311188</a>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
13974 client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
13975 should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
13976 about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
13977 several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
13978 contribute).</p>
13979
13980 <p>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
13981 find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
13982 Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
13983 promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
13984 there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
13985 these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
13986 all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
13987 meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
13988 there being rather disconnected from the development department of
13989 Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
13990
13991 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13992
13993 <p>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.</p>
13994
13995 <p>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
13996 serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
13997 more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.</p>
13998
13999 <p>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
14000 development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
14001 PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
14002 is being integrated in Ubuntu's software center.</p>
14003
14004 <p>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
14005 as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
14006 I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
14007 the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
14008 whiteboard.</p>
14009
14010 <p>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.</p>
14011
14012 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
14013 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
14014
14015 <p>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
14016 enrol people.</p>
14017
14018       </div>
14019       <div class="tags">
14020
14021
14022         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>.
14023
14024
14025       </div>
14026     </div>
14027     <div class="padding"></div>
14028
14029     <div class="entry">
14030       <div class="title">
14031         <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>
14032       </div>
14033       <div class="date">
14034          1st June 2012
14035       </div>
14036       <div class="body">
14037         <p>A few years ago I wrote
14038 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">how
14039 to extract support status</a> for your Dell and HP servers.  Recently
14040 I have learned from colleges here at the
14041 <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> that Dell have
14042 made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service.  Given
14043 the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
14044 readable information about the support status.  This perl code
14045 demonstrate how to do it:</p>
14046
14047 <p><pre>
14048 use strict;
14049 use warnings;
14050 use SOAP::Lite;
14051 use Data::Dumper;
14052 my $GUID = '11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111';
14053 my $App = 'test';
14054 my $servicetag = $ARGV[0] or die "Please supply a servicetag. $!\n";
14055 my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
14056 my $s = SOAP::Lite
14057     -> uri('http://support.dell.com/WebServices/')
14058     -> on_action( sub { join '', @_ } )
14059     -> proxy('http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx')
14060     ;
14061 my $a = $s->GetAssetInformation(
14062     SOAP::Data->name('guid')->value($GUID)->type(''),
14063     SOAP::Data->name('applicationName')->value($App)->type(''),
14064     SOAP::Data->name('serviceTags')->value($servicetag)->type(''),
14065 );
14066 print Dumper($a -> result) ;
14067 </pre></p>
14068
14069 <p>The output can look like this:</p>
14070
14071 <p><pre>
14072 $VAR1 = {
14073           'Asset' => {
14074                      'Entitlements' => {
14075                                        'EntitlementData' => [
14076                                                             {
14077                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
14078                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
14079                                                               'Provider' => '',
14080                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
14081                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
14082                                                             },
14083                                                             {
14084                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
14085                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
14086                                                               'Provider' => '',
14087                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
14088                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
14089                                                             },
14090                                                             {
14091                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
14092                                                               'EndDate' => '2007-07-29T00:00:00',
14093                                                               'Provider' => '',
14094                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
14095                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
14096                                                             }
14097                                                           ]
14098                                      },
14099                      'AssetHeaderData' => {
14100                                           'SystemModel' => 'GX620',
14101                                           'ServiceTag' => '8DSGD2J',
14102                                           'SystemShipDate' => '2006-07-29T19:00:00-05:00',
14103                                           'Buid' => '2323',
14104                                           'Region' => 'Europe',
14105                                           'SystemID' => 'PLX_GX620',
14106                                           'SystemType' => 'OptiPlex'
14107                                         }
14108                    }
14109         };
14110 </pre></p>
14111
14112 <p>I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
14113 service outside the
14114 <a href="http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation">inline
14115 documentation</a>, and according to
14116 <a href="http://iboyd.net/index.php/2012/02/14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/">one
14117 comment</a> it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
14118 scraping HTML pages. :)</p>
14119
14120 <p>Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service.  If
14121 you know of one, drop me an email. :)</p>
14122
14123       </div>
14124       <div class="tags">
14125
14126
14127         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>.
14128
14129
14130       </div>
14131     </div>
14132     <div class="padding"></div>
14133
14134     <div class="entry">
14135       <div class="title">
14136         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html">First monitor calibration using ColorHug</a>
14137       </div>
14138       <div class="date">
14139         31st May 2012
14140       </div>
14141       <div class="body">
14142         <p>A few days ago my color calibration gadget
14143 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">ColorHug</a> arrived in the
14144 mail, and I've had a few days to test it.  As all my machines are
14145 running Debian Squeeze, where
14146 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">the
14147 calibration software</a> is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid),
14148 I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD.  This worked
14149 just fine.  So far I have only done the quick calibration.  It was
14150 slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for
14151 another day.</p>
14152
14153 <p>After calibration, I get a
14154 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile">ICC color
14155 profile</a> file that can be passed to programs understanding such
14156 tools.  KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched
14157 for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X.
14158 xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single
14159 monitor setups.  But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen
14160 attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct
14161 monitor.  After searching a bit, I
14162 <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347896">discovered</a>
14163 that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted,
14164 and a simple</p>
14165
14166 <p><pre>
14167 dispwin -d 1 profile.icc
14168 </pre></p>
14169
14170 <p>later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor.  The
14171 result was a bit more pink than I expected.  I guess I picked the
14172 wrong monitor type for the "led" monitor I got, but the result is good
14173 enough for now.</p>
14174
14175       </div>
14176       <div class="tags">
14177
14178
14179         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14180
14181
14182       </div>
14183     </div>
14184     <div class="padding"></div>
14185
14186     <div class="entry">
14187       <div class="title">
14188         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html">Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter</a>
14189       </div>
14190       <div class="date">
14191         27th May 2012
14192       </div>
14193       <div class="body">
14194         <p>In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the
14195 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
14196 mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
14197 up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils.  His name was Ralf
14198 Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
14199 since then, helping to make sure the
14200 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
14201 Squeeze</a> release became as good as it is..</p>
14202
14203 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
14204
14205 <p>I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
14206 Mathematics, and Computer Science ("Informatik"). During the past 12
14207 years (since 2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
14208 also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
14209 O- or A-level ("Abitur").  For quite as long, I've been taking care of
14210 our computer network.</p>
14211
14212 <p>Now, in my early 40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
14213 spare time together with my wife, our son (3 years) and our daughter
14214 (4 months).</p>
14215
14216 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
14217 project?</strong></p>
14218
14219 <p>We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
14220 my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
14221 very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
14222 ("Best Newcomer Distribution", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
14223 to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt, 2005 (IIRC). Few
14224 months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
14225 (Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others.  For more
14226 than 7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
14227 our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
14228 approximately 50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
14229 locally installed Skolelinux image.  As a consequence, I joined quite
14230 a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
14231 (Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
14232 one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.</p>
14233
14234 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
14235 Edu?</strong></p>
14236
14237 <p>Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
14238 project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
14239 the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
14240 computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
14241 free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
14242 up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
14243 labs).  Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
14244 administration costs tend towards zero.</p>
14245
14246 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
14247 Edu?</strong></p>
14248
14249 <p>While Debian's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
14250 might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
14251 budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
14252 supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
14253 office packages or desktop environments.  These schools have the
14254 option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
14255 capacity to do so.  Another issue is that Debian release cycles
14256 include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
14257 power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
14258 within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
14259 the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
14260 i.e. harder to understand for novices.</p>
14261
14262 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
14263
14264 <p>LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
14265 KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
14266 PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)</p>
14267
14268 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
14269 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
14270
14271 <p><ol>
14272
14273 <li>Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
14274 people really "own" their hardware, to make them understand the
14275 difference between proprietary software products, and free software
14276 developing.</li>
14277
14278 <li>Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany's public schools
14279 there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
14280 licenses), so schools won't benefit from any savings here. This
14281 privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
14282 share among German Skolelinux schools.</li>
14283
14284 <li>Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
14285 trained. In many cases, teachers' software customs are respected by
14286 decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.</li>
14287
14288 <li>Don't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
14289 free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
14290 general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
14291 shared world wide (school books e.g.).</li>
14292
14293 <li>Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
14294 office suites is much above 20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don't
14295 need to know the "ribbon menu" in order to get employed.</li>
14296
14297 <li>Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.</li>
14298
14299 <li>Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
14300 for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
14301 Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials.  And
14302 keep sending documents in ODF formats.</li>
14303
14304 </ol></p>
14305
14306       </div>
14307       <div class="tags">
14308
14309
14310         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>.
14311
14312
14313       </div>
14314     </div>
14315     <div class="padding"></div>
14316
14317     <div class="entry">
14318       <div class="title">
14319         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html">The cost of ODF and OOXML</a>
14320       </div>
14321       <div class="date">
14322         26th May 2012
14323       </div>
14324       <div class="body">
14325         <p>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
14326 claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
14327 government.  I just sent him an email to let him know that his
14328 assumption are most likely wrong.  Sharing it here in case some of my
14329 blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.</p>
14330
14331 <p><blockquote> <p>Hi.  I just noted your
14332 <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>
14333 comment:</p>
14334
14335 <p><blockquote>"They're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
14336 with the help of Google Translate I can't find any figures about the
14337 savings of "moving to a flexible two standard" as claimed by the
14338 Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let's take
14339 it, and the £500 million figure for the UK, on trust."
14340 </blockquote></p>
14341
14342 <p>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated.  I believe it is
14343 the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around 2007,
14344 and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
14345 at the content.  In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
14346 will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
14347 existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
14348 formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
14349 ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
14350 10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver.  In
14351 reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
14352 receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
14353 would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not 20 minutes
14354 of wasted effort.</p>
14355
14356 <p>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
14357 transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending 10
14358 minutes converting to ODF. :)</p>
14359
14360 <p>See
14361 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php</a>
14362 and
14363 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php</a>
14364 for background information.  Norwegian only, sorry. :)</p>
14365 </blockquote></p>
14366
14367       </div>
14368       <div class="tags">
14369
14370
14371         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>.
14372
14373
14374       </div>
14375     </div>
14376     <div class="padding"></div>
14377
14378     <div class="entry">
14379       <div class="title">
14380         <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>
14381       </div>
14382       <div class="date">
14383         18th May 2012
14384       </div>
14385       <div class="body">
14386         <p>In january, I
14387 <a href="http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2012/01/17/colorhug-has-arrived/">discovered
14388 the ColorHug</a>, a USB dongle from
14389 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">Hughski</a> to calibrate
14390 the color on a computer screen.  The software required is
14391 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">included
14392 in Debian</a>, and I decided back then to preorder from the next
14393 batch.  Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the
14394 opportunity to order.  Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the
14395 delivery.  I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it
14396 should go in the mail on monday. :)</p>
14397
14398 <p>If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended
14399 colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software
14400 drivers. :)</p>
14401
14402       </div>
14403       <div class="tags">
14404
14405
14406         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14407
14408
14409       </div>
14410     </div>
14411     <div class="padding"></div>
14412
14413     <div class="entry">
14414       <div class="title">
14415         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html">Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner</a>
14416       </div>
14417       <div class="date">
14418         13th May 2012
14419       </div>
14420       <div class="body">
14421         <p>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
14422 publish another interview with the people behind
14423 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
14424 This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
14425 years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
14426 details get right before release.
14427
14428 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
14429
14430 <p>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
14431 Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany.  I worked nearly 20 years as
14432 certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
14433 international company for machinery and equipment.  Since 2011 I'm a
14434 certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
14435 documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer.  From April this year
14436 I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
14437 manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.</p>
14438
14439 <p>My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
14440 it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
14441 home since 2006.</p>
14442
14443 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
14444 project?</strong></p>
14445
14446 <p>Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
14447 daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
14448 middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
14449 him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
14450 asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
14451 computers in use. I answered: "Yes".</p>
14452
14453 <p>Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
14454 running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
14455 gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
14456 network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
14457 and with a lot of fun.  About one year later the school was connected
14458 to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
14459 building.  That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
14460 Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
14461 being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
14462 costs for things like licence and software.  So I searched for a
14463 school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
14464 people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
14465 prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school.  I
14466 managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
14467 the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
14468 Bielefeld in December of 2006.</p>
14469
14470 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
14471 Edu?</strong></p>
14472
14473 <p>When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
14474 for me as today.</p>
14475
14476 <p>In the past there were advantages like:</p>
14477
14478 <p><ul>
14479
14480 <li>I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
14481 they had little money to spent for computers and software.</li>
14482
14483 <li>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
14484 cost.</li>
14485
14486 <li>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
14487 schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
14488 clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
14489 infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
14490 server</li>
14491
14492 <li>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
14493 school.</li>
14494
14495 </ul></p>
14496
14497 <p>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
14498 came up in this way:</p>
14499
14500 <p><ul>
14501
14502 <li>Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
14503 now.</li>
14504
14505 <li>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
14506 have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
14507 because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.</li>
14508
14509 <li>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
14510 management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
14511 interfaces used in the past.</li>
14512
14513 <li>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
14514 different needs.</li>
14515
14516 <li>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.</li>
14517
14518 <li>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
14519 world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
14520 is sharing knowledge and minds.</li>
14521
14522 <li>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
14523 solved today by Debian Edu. </li>
14524
14525 </ul></p>
14526
14527 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
14528 Edu?</strong></p>
14529
14530 <p><ul>
14531
14532 <li>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
14533 their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
14534 whole municipality areas.</li>
14535
14536 <li>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
14537 enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
14538 politicians.</li>
14539
14540 <li>Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.</li>
14541
14542 </ul></p>
14543
14544 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
14545
14546 <p>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
14547 computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
14548 use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
14549 KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
14550 need from the KDE environment.  On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
14551 screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.</p>
14552
14553 <p>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
14554 and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
14555 rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
14556 with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
14557 and the whole family.  I probably forgot something.</p>
14558
14559 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
14560 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
14561
14562 <p>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
14563 Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
14564 countries and areas all over the world.</p>
14565
14566       </div>
14567       <div class="tags">
14568
14569
14570         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>.
14571
14572
14573       </div>
14574     </div>
14575     <div class="padding"></div>
14576
14577     <div class="entry">
14578       <div class="title">
14579         <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>
14580       </div>
14581       <div class="date">
14582         30th April 2012
14583       </div>
14584       <div class="body">
14585         <p><!-- IMG_5869.JPG -->
14586 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-1611.jpeg"></p>
14587
14588 <p>I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a
14589 common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway.
14590 But the last ones have not really been up to the task.  My last
14591 cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the
14592 time, and cutting my head took forever.  And the one before that did
14593 not work very well either.  We have looked for something better for a
14594 while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we
14595 discovered that there are indeed better tools available.  But these
14596 are not marketed and sold to "regular consumers".  The hair saloons
14597 can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell
14598 companies.  The models they sell, are very different from the ones
14599 available from Elkjøp and Lefdal.  The main difference is their
14600 efficiency.  It would cut my hair in 5 minutes, instead of the 30-40
14601 minutes required by my impotent Braun.  The hairdresser I visited had
14602 a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the
14603 producer.  But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.</p>
14604
14605 <p>The next step was to find somewhere to buy it.  This was not
14606 straight forward.  The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser
14607 did not want to sell anything to me.  But searching for the model on
14608 the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for
14609 around NOK 4000,-.  This was a bit much.  We kept searching and
14610 finally found a Danish supplier
14611 <a href="http://nicehair.dk/panasonic-er-1611-professionel-hartrimmer.html">selling
14612 it for around NOK 1800,-</a>.  We ordered one, and it arrived a few
14613 days ago.</p>
14614
14615 <p>The instructions said it had to charge for 8 hours when we started
14616 to use it, so we left it charging over night.  Normally it will only
14617 need one hour to charge.  The following evening we successfully tested
14618 it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair
14619 cutter.  The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter
14620 toys.</p>
14621
14622       </div>
14623       <div class="tags">
14624
14625
14626         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14627
14628
14629       </div>
14630     </div>
14631     <div class="padding"></div>
14632
14633     <div class="entry">
14634       <div class="title">
14635         <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>
14636       </div>
14637       <div class="date">
14638         26th April 2012
14639       </div>
14640       <div class="body">
14641         <p>In <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article243690.ece">an
14642 article today</a> published by Computerworld Norway, the photographer
14643 <a href="http://www.urke.com/eirik/">Eirik Helland Urke</a> reports
14644 that the video editor application included with
14645 <a href="http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs">HTC One
14646 X</a> have some quite surprising terms of use.  The article is mostly
14647 based on the twitter message from mister Urke, stating:
14648
14649 <p><blockquote>
14650 "<a href="http://twitter.com/urke/status/194062269724897280">Drøy
14651 brukeravtale: HTC kan bruke MINE redigerte videoer kommersielt. Selv
14652 kan jeg KUN bruke dem privat.</a>"
14653 </blockquote></p>
14654
14655 <p>I quickly translated it to this English message:</p>
14656
14657 <p><blockquote>
14658 "Arrogant user agreement: HTC can use MY edited videos
14659 commercially.  Although I can ONLY use them privately."
14660 </blockquote></p>
14661
14662 <p>I've been unable to find the text of the license term myself, but
14663 suspect it is a variation of the MPEG-LA terms I
14664 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html">discovered
14665 with my Canon IXUS 130</a>.  The HTC One X specification specifies that
14666 the recording format of the phone is .amr for audio and .mp3 for
14667 video.  AMR is
14668 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec#Licensing_and_patent_issues">Adaptive
14669 Multi-Rate audio codec</a> with patents which according to the
14670 Wikipedia article require an license agreement with
14671 <a href="http://www.voiceage.com/">VoiceAge</a>.  MP4 is
14672 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing">MPEG4 with
14673 H.264</a>, which according to Wikipedia require a licence agreement
14674 with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/">MPEG-LA</a>.</p>
14675
14676 <p>I know why I prefer
14677 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and open
14678 standards</a> also for video.</p>
14679
14680       </div>
14681       <div class="tags">
14682
14683
14684         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
14685
14686
14687       </div>
14688     </div>
14689     <div class="padding"></div>
14690
14691     <div class="entry">
14692       <div class="title">
14693         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html">RAND terms - non-reasonable and discriminatory</a>
14694       </div>
14695       <div class="date">
14696         19th April 2012
14697       </div>
14698       <div class="body">
14699         <p>Here in Norway, the
14700 <a href="http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad.html?id=339"> Ministry of
14701 Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs</a> is behind
14702 a <a href="http://standard.difi.no/forvaltningsstandarder">directory of
14703 standards</a> that are recommended or mandatory for use by the
14704 government.  When the directory was created, the people behind it made
14705 an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the
14706 standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions
14707 to the government.  Free software and non-free software could compete
14708 on the same level.</p>
14709
14710 <p>But recently, some standards with RAND
14711 (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing">Reasonable
14712 And Non-Discriminatory</a>) terms have made their way into the
14713 directory.  And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that
14714 standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from
14715 implementing them.  The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per
14716 user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone
14717 willing to pay will get a license.  Both sound great in theory.  In
14718 practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and
14719 be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user.  By
14720 definition, users of free software do not need to register their use.
14721 So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects.
14722 And given that people will use the software without handing any money
14723 to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free
14724 software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights
14725 to implement a standard when the income available is zero.  The result
14726 in these situations is that free software are locked out from
14727 implementing standards with RAND terms.</p>
14728
14729 <p>Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a
14730 standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is
14731 how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory.  Because free
14732 software developers are working in a global market, it does not really
14733 help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable
14734 in Norway.  The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here.
14735 I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more
14736 attention to these issues in the future.</p>
14737
14738 <p>You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms
14739 from Simon Phipps
14740 (<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/11/rand-not-so-reasonable/">RAND:
14741 Not So Reasonable?</a>).</p>
14742
14743 <p>Update 2012-04-21: Just came across a
14744 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/of-microsoft-netscape-patents-and-open-standards/index.htm">blog
14745 post from Glyn Moody</a> over at Computer World UK warning about the
14746 same issue, and urging people to speak out to the UK government.  I
14747 can only urge Norwegian users to do the same for
14748 <a href="http://www.standard.difi.no/hoyring/hoyring-om-nye-anbefalte-it-standarder">the
14749 hearing taking place at the moment</a> (respond before 2012-04-27).
14750 It proposes to require video conferencing standards including
14751 specifications with RAND terms.</p>
14752
14753       </div>
14754       <div class="tags">
14755
14756
14757         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>.
14758
14759
14760       </div>
14761     </div>
14762     <div class="padding"></div>
14763
14764     <div class="entry">
14765       <div class="title">
14766         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html">Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt</a>
14767       </div>
14768       <div class="date">
14769         15th April 2012
14770       </div>
14771       <div class="body">
14772         <p>Behind <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
14773 Skolelinux</a> there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
14774 setting together all the pieces.  This time I present to you Andreas
14775 Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
14776 years.  He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
14777 up in the recently released
14778 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
14779 Edu Squeeze</a> version.</p>
14780
14781 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
14782
14783 <p>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany.  After
14784 studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
14785 Quantum Optics.  After that I worked some years in an optics company.
14786 Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
14787 teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school.  I teach math, physics,
14788 information technology and science/technology.</p>
14789
14790 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
14791 project?</strong></p>
14792
14793 <p>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
14794 project because of my interest in education and Debian.  Within the
14795 qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
14796 contributing.</p>
14797
14798 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
14799 Edu?</strong></p>
14800
14801 <p>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
14802 out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
14803 Debian Project!</p>
14804
14805 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
14806 Edu?</strong></p>
14807
14808 <p>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
14809 downside, too.  In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
14810 setup, if you need or want that.  Further more, it is not easily
14811 possible to upgrade the system to a new release.  It takes much too
14812 long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
14813 because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
14814 rather small and often busy elsewhere.</p>
14815
14816 <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN">Debian LAN</a>
14817 project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.</p>
14818
14819 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
14820
14821 <p>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
14822 on all my machines.  For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
14823 mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing.  At school I
14824 have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.</p>
14825
14826 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
14827 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
14828
14829 <p>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
14830 Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
14831 politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader".  The school
14832 administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
14833 Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats.  Even
14834 free browsers do not work for the school administration.  Publishers
14835 of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.</p>
14836
14837 <p>To change this, political work is very important.  Parts of the
14838 political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
14839 However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free'
14840 the system.  There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and
14841 "Free/Open Standards".  I am not sure if all the involved parties have
14842 a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
14843 fraction takes them seriously.  However it might slowly make free
14844 software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.</p>
14845
14846       </div>
14847       <div class="tags">
14848
14849
14850         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>.
14851
14852
14853       </div>
14854     </div>
14855     <div class="padding"></div>
14856
14857     <div class="entry">
14858       <div class="title">
14859         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html">Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye</a>
14860       </div>
14861       <div class="date">
14862          8th April 2012
14863       </div>
14864       <div class="body">
14865         <p>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
14866 like <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>,
14867 and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
14868 contributor to the
14869 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
14870 Edu Squeeze release manual</a>.
14871
14872 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
14873
14874 <p>I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
14875 occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.</p>
14876
14877 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
14878 project?</strong></p>
14879
14880 <p>I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user!  The only
14881 reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
14882 around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
14883 they'd like a native English speaker to proofread...  So I did a sweep
14884 through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
14885 "localisation".</p>
14886
14887 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
14888 Edu?</strong></p>
14889
14890 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
14891 Edu?</strong></p>
14892
14893 <p>These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it!  In fact I
14894 had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the
14895 education system.</p>
14896
14897 <p>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
14898 as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
14899 everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
14900 money on the latest hardware.</p>
14901
14902 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
14903
14904 <p>I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
14905 software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
14906 words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).</p>
14907
14908 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
14909 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
14910
14911 <p>Well, I don't know.  I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning
14912 with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
14913 you would hardly need a strategy.</p>
14914
14915       </div>
14916       <div class="tags">
14917
14918
14919         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>.
14920
14921
14922       </div>
14923     </div>
14924     <div class="padding"></div>
14925
14926     <div class="entry">
14927       <div class="title">
14928         <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>
14929       </div>
14930       <div class="date">
14931          6th April 2012
14932       </div>
14933       <div class="body">
14934         <p>Recently I have spent time with
14935 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a> on speeding
14936 up a <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
14937 Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
14938 process I discovered something very surprising.  The reason the KDE
14939 menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
14940 due to the way KDE find application icons.  I discovered that showing
14941 the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
14942 passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server.  Most of these were
14943
14944 NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response.  Because the
14945 ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
14946 ms, the menus would be very slow.  Looking at the strace of kicker in
14947 Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
14948 the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
14949 non-existing files.  KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
14950 one icon file.  In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
14951 around 230 access(2) calls.</p>
14952
14953 <p>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
14954 directories, and the list of possible directories is large.  In
14955 (almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
14956 and .xpm.  The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
14957 mounted.  Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
14958 requests.  I am not the first one to discover this.  I found a
14959 <a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211416">KDE bug report
14960 from 2009</a> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.</p>
14961
14962 <p>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
14963 kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
14964 used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
14965 for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
14966 icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/.  Finally, I add symlinks to
14967 these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
14968 for them.  This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
14969 one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
14970 almost instantaneous.  I'm not quite sure where to make the package
14971 publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.</p>
14972
14973 <p>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
14974 and icon handling, but also the login process.  Not quite sure how to
14975 speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
14976 that is not really an option at the moment.</p>
14977
14978 <p>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
14979 (at) lists.debian.org.</p>
14980
14981 <p>Update 2015-08-04: The
14982 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-edu/upstream/kde-icon-cache.git/">source
14983 of the scripts and associated Debian package</a> is available from the
14984 Debian Edu github repository.</p>
14985
14986       </div>
14987       <div class="tags">
14988
14989
14990         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>.
14991
14992
14993       </div>
14994     </div>
14995     <div class="padding"></div>
14996
14997     <div class="entry">
14998       <div class="title">
14999         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html">Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News</a>
15000       </div>
15001       <div class="date">
15002          5th April 2012
15003       </div>
15004       <div class="body">
15005         <p>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
15006 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a> by
15007 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News.  The result was made public for
15008 non-subscribers today.  I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
15009 for schools.  Check out his article
15010 <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/488805/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
15011 distribution for education</a> if you want to learn more.</p>
15012
15013       </div>
15014       <div class="tags">
15015
15016
15017         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>.
15018
15019
15020       </div>
15021     </div>
15022     <div class="padding"></div>
15023
15024     <div class="entry">
15025       <div class="title">
15026         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html">Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer</a>
15027       </div>
15028       <div class="date">
15029          1st April 2012
15030       </div>
15031       <div class="body">
15032         <p>Germany is a core area for the
15033 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
15034 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
15035 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
15036
15037 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
15038
15039 <p>I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
15040 Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
15041 "<a href="http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/">Westfalen-Kolleg
15042 Dortmund</a>", a second chance school.  Here, young adults is given
15043 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
15044 examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This
15045 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
15046 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.</p>
15047
15048 <p>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
15049 blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other
15050 information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been
15051 teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my
15052 school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at
15053 the end of April this year.</p>
15054
15055 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
15056 project?</strong></p>
15057
15058 <p>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
15059 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
15060 Project).  At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
15061 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
15062 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
15063 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
15064 reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
15065 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
15066 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
15067 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
15068 Skolelinux.</p>
15069
15070 <p>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
15071 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
15072 clients.  The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
15073 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
15074 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
15075 the admin teachers.</p>
15076
15077 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
15078 Edu?</strong></p>
15079
15080 <p>It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
15081 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
15082 So it was a perfect choice.</p>
15083
15084 <p>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's
15085 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
15086 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp.  It's of
15087 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
15088 a school and to choose where to get support for this.</p>
15089
15090 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
15091 Edu?</strong></p>
15092
15093 <p>Nothing yet.</p>
15094
15095 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
15096
15097 <p>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
15098 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
15099 Annotator).  At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
15100 LibreOffice.</p>
15101
15102 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
15103 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
15104
15105 <p>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
15106 that doesn't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
15107 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.</p>
15108
15109       </div>
15110       <div class="tags">
15111
15112
15113         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>.
15114
15115
15116       </div>
15117     </div>
15118     <div class="padding"></div>
15119
15120     <div class="entry">
15121       <div class="title">
15122         <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>
15123       </div>
15124       <div class="date">
15125         25th March 2012
15126       </div>
15127       <div class="body">
15128         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
15129
15130 <p>The same Debian Edu developer that did the last screen cast I
15131 published, Wolfgang Schweer, has created a new screen cast showing how
15132 to set up Kmail in Debian Edu Squeze to authenticate using Kerberos,
15133 allowing users to check their local email account without providing
15134 any password. The video is embedded here in quarter size,
15135 and also available from <a href="https://vimeo.com/38601767">vimeo</a>
15136 and download as a
15137 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg
15138 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
15139
15140 <p><video id="kmail-kerberos-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
15141   <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"' />
15142     <p>Download video as
15143       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
15144 </video></p>
15145
15146       </div>
15147       <div class="tags">
15148
15149
15150         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>.
15151
15152
15153       </div>
15154     </div>
15155     <div class="padding"></div>
15156
15157     <div class="entry">
15158       <div class="title">
15159         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html">Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby</a>
15160       </div>
15161       <div class="date">
15162         19th March 2012
15163       </div>
15164       <div class="body">
15165         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
15166 users are spread all across the globe.  The second inteview after
15167 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
15168 Squeeze release</a> was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
15169 long time Linux user in United Kingdom.</p>
15170
15171 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
15172
15173 <p>I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
15174 Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
15175 author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
15176 contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
15177 encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
15178 years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
15179 weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
15180 installations.</p>
15181
15182 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
15183 project?</strong></p>
15184
15185 <p>Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
15186 London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
15187 just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
15188 along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
15189 mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
15190 well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
15191 have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
15192 LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
15193 these things we decided to try it.</p>
15194
15195 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
15196 Edu?</strong></p>
15197
15198 <p>By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
15199 from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
15200 goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
15201 would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
15202 low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
15203 that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
15204 Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
15205 proprietary software everywhere.</p>
15206
15207 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
15208 Edu?</strong></p>
15209
15210 <p>As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
15211 how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
15212 various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
15213 English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
15214 users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!</p>
15215
15216 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
15217
15218 <p>Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
15219 OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
15220 desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
15221 use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
15222 that counts...)</p>
15223
15224 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
15225 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
15226
15227 <p>That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
15228 and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
15229 the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
15230 applications".  However, schools today are experiencing budget
15231 constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
15232 XP.  At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
15233 iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
15234 longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
15235 realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
15236 putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
15237 first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.</p>
15238
15239 <p>I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
15240 free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
15241 Edu users in this country has to be part of it.</p>
15242
15243       </div>
15244       <div class="tags">
15245
15246
15247         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>.
15248
15249
15250       </div>
15251     </div>
15252     <div class="padding"></div>
15253
15254     <div class="entry">
15255       <div class="title">
15256         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html">Writing and translating documentation in Debian Edu</a>
15257       </div>
15258       <div class="date">
15259         16th March 2012
15260       </div>
15261       <div class="body">
15262         <p>Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
15263 it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
15264 translated versions in sync.  To do this we have come up with what we
15265 believe is a very efficient work flow.</p>
15266
15267 <ol>
15268
15269 <li>The documentation is written in a
15270 <a href="http://moinmo.in">moinmoin wiki</a> (see for example
15271 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">the
15272 Squeeze release manual</a>) with support for exporting the content as
15273 docbook XML.</li>
15274
15275 <li>This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
15276 .pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
15277 with the translated text.</li>
15278
15279 <li>The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
15280 which part of the original wiki document is new or changed.  They can
15281 use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
15282 the translation.  There is even a system in place to handle translated
15283 images.</li>
15284
15285 <li>The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
15286 XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.</li>
15287
15288 <li>The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
15289 create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.</li>
15290
15291 </ol>
15292
15293 <p>This setup work very well, but have a few issues.  The biggest
15294 issue is that <a href="http://moinmo.in/DocBook">the docbook support
15295 we use in moinmoin</a> is not actively maintained.  The docbook
15296 support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
15297 make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.</p>
15298
15299 <p>If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
15300 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc">debian-edu-doc
15301 package</a>.</p>
15302
15303       </div>
15304       <div class="tags">
15305
15306
15307         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>.
15308
15309
15310       </div>
15311     </div>
15312     <div class="padding"></div>
15313
15314     <div class="entry">
15315       <div class="title">
15316         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html">Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze is out!</a>
15317       </div>
15318       <div class="date">
15319         11th March 2012
15320       </div>
15321       <div class="body">
15322         <p>This weekend we finally published the first stable release of
15323 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> based
15324 on Debian/Squeeze.  The full announcement is
15325 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">available</a>
15326 from the project announcement list.  Now is a good time to test if it
15327 you have not done so already.</p>
15328
15329 <p>I plan to present the new version at
15330 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20120313-skolelinux/">a NUUG
15331 meeting</a> on tuesday.  I look forward to seeing you there if you are
15332 in Oslo, Norway.</p>
15333
15334       </div>
15335       <div class="tags">
15336
15337
15338         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>.
15339
15340
15341       </div>
15342     </div>
15343     <div class="padding"></div>
15344
15345     <div class="entry">
15346       <div class="title">
15347         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html">Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker</a>
15348       </div>
15349       <div class="date">
15350          9th March 2012
15351       </div>
15352       <div class="body">
15353         <p>Inspired by <a href="http://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/interview/">the
15354 interview series</a> conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
15355 interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
15356 community.  This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
15357 more international audience.</p>
15358
15359 <p>While <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
15360 Skolelinux</a> originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
15361 Europe, there are users all around the globe.  One of those far away
15362 from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
15363 and contributor.  It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
15364 work out of the box in Japan.  I got him to answer a few questions,
15365 and am happy to share the response with you. :)
15366
15367
15368 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
15369
15370 <p>My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
15371 and we have three lovely children, aged 15, 14 and 4(!) I am the IT
15372 Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
15373 teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
15374 Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
15375 I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
15376 primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
15377 so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
15378 also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
15379 to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
15380 appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.</p>
15381
15382 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
15383 project?</strong></p>
15384
15385 <p>In around 2004 or 5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
15386 server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
15387 samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
15388 Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn't really improve my setup. I
15389 did various desperate searches for things like "school Linux server"
15390 and ended up in a document called "Drift" something or other. Reading
15391 there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
15392 problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
15393 previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
15394 Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
15395 downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
15396 Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
15397 my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.</p>
15398
15399 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
15400 Edu?</strong></p>
15401
15402 <p>For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
15403 workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
15404 ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
15405 designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
15406 doesn't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
15407 school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
15408 Japan.</p>
15409
15410 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
15411 Edu?</strong></p>
15412
15413 <p>The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
15414 have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
15415 make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
15416 who don't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
15417 important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
15418 instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
15419 default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
15420 kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
15421 Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is.  A
15422 second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
15423 customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
15424 multiplies. For example, backup wasn't working properly in Lenny. It
15425 took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
15426 I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
15427 help.</p>
15428
15429 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
15430
15431 <p>Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
15432 studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
15433 (customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
15434 still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
15435 house, that's very useful for the family photos and music.  At school
15436 the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
15437 have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
15438 day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
15439 installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS.  We also
15440 have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
15441 and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.</p>
15442
15443 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
15444 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
15445
15446 <p>Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
15447 and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
15448 popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
15449 to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
15450 file formats and Word than they did 5 years ago.  The Edu aspect is
15451 also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
15452 Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu?  But of course the main attraction is
15453 budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
15454 compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
15455 is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
15456 are not impressed when their USB drive doesn't work, or their browser
15457 doesn't play flash, for example.</p>
15458
15459       </div>
15460       <div class="tags">
15461
15462
15463         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>.
15464
15465
15466       </div>
15467     </div>
15468     <div class="padding"></div>
15469
15470     <div class="entry">
15471       <div class="title">
15472         <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>
15473       </div>
15474       <div class="date">
15475          7th March 2012
15476       </div>
15477       <div class="body">
15478         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
15479
15480 <p>One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a
15481 screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on
15482 Debian Edu Squeeze.  The video is embedded here in quarter size, and
15483 also available from <a href="http://vimeo.com/37675399">vimeo</a> and
15484 download as a
15485 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg
15486 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
15487
15488 <p><video id="gosa-mass-user-create-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
15489   <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"' />
15490     <p>Download video as
15491       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
15492 </video></p>
15493
15494       </div>
15495       <div class="tags">
15496
15497
15498         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>.
15499
15500
15501       </div>
15502     </div>
15503     <div class="padding"></div>
15504
15505     <div class="entry">
15506       <div class="title">
15507         <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>
15508       </div>
15509       <div class="date">
15510          4th March 2012
15511       </div>
15512       <div class="body">
15513         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the third release
15514 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
15515 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
15516 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00000.html">available</a>
15517 from the project announcement list.  Check it out if you
15518 need a software solution for your school.</p>
15519
15520       </div>
15521       <div class="tags">
15522
15523
15524         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>.
15525
15526
15527       </div>
15528     </div>
15529     <div class="padding"></div>
15530
15531     <div class="entry">
15532       <div class="title">
15533         <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>
15534       </div>
15535       <div class="date">
15536          3rd March 2012
15537       </div>
15538       <div class="body">
15539         <p>Many years ago, the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
15540 / Debian Edu project</a> initiated a student project to create a tool
15541 for making stop motion movies.  The proposal came from a teacher
15542 needing such tool on Skolelinux.  The project, called "stopmotion",
15543 was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a
15544 national aware with this great project.  The project was initiated and
15545 mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bjørn Erik Nilsen
15546 and Fredrik Berg Kjølstad.  They got in touch with people at Aardman
15547 Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like
15548 such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by
15549 animators around the globe.  But as is usual after studying, both got
15550 jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the
15551 project, and it has been lingering for a few years now.  Until last
15552 year...</p>
15553
15554 <p>Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the
15555 project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new
15556 name,
15557 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxstopmotion/">linuxstopmotion</a>.
15558 The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using
15559 Internet search engines (try to search for 'stopmotion' to see what I
15560 mean). I've been following
15561 <a href="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxstopmotion-community">the
15562 mailing list</a> and the improvement already in place and planned for
15563 the future is encouraging.  If you want to make stop motion movies.
15564 Check it out. :)</p>
15565
15566       </div>
15567       <div class="tags">
15568
15569
15570         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>.
15571
15572
15573       </div>
15574     </div>
15575     <div class="padding"></div>
15576
15577     <div class="entry">
15578       <div class="title">
15579         <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>
15580       </div>
15581       <div class="date">
15582         27th February 2012
15583       </div>
15584       <div class="body">
15585         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the second release
15586 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
15587 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement did for some
15588 reason not make it the project announcement list, but is
15589 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/02/msg00015.html">available</a>
15590 from the Debian development announcement list.  Check it out if you
15591 need a software solution for your school.</p>
15592
15593       </div>
15594       <div class="tags">
15595
15596
15597         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>.
15598
15599
15600       </div>
15601     </div>
15602     <div class="padding"></div>
15603
15604     <div class="entry">
15605       <div class="title">
15606         <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>
15607       </div>
15608       <div class="date">
15609         19th February 2012
15610       </div>
15611       <div class="body">
15612         <p>One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
15613 wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
15614 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
15615 on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
15616 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00001.html">available</a>
15617 on the project announcement list.  Check it out if you need a software
15618 solution for your school.</p>
15619
15620       </div>
15621       <div class="tags">
15622
15623
15624         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>.
15625
15626
15627       </div>
15628     </div>
15629     <div class="padding"></div>
15630
15631     <div class="entry">
15632       <div class="title">
15633         <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>
15634       </div>
15635       <div class="date">
15636         14th February 2012
15637       </div>
15638       <div class="body">
15639         <p>Once in a while my home server have disk problems.  Thanks to Linux
15640 Software RAID, I have not lost data yet (but
15641 <a href="http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/34532">I was
15642 close</a> this summer :).  But once a disk is starting to behave
15643 funny, a practical problem present itself.  How to get from the Linux
15644 device name (like /dev/sdd) to something that can be used to identify
15645 the disk when the computer is turned off?  In my case I have SATA
15646 disks with a unique ID printed on the label.  All I need is a way to
15647 figure out how to query the disk to get the ID out.</p>
15648
15649 <p>After fumbling a bit, I
15650 <a href="http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-getting-scsi-ide-harddisk-information/">found
15651 that hdparm -I</a> will report the disk serial number, which is
15652 printed on the disk label.  The following (almost) one-liner can be
15653 used to look up the ID of all the failed disks:</p>
15654
15655 <blockquote><pre>
15656 for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep '(F)'|tr ' ' "\n"|grep '(F)'|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u);
15657 do
15658     printf "Failed disk $d: "
15659     hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep 'Serial Num'
15660 done
15661 </blockquote></pre>
15662
15663 <p>Putting it here to make sure I do not have to search for it the
15664 next time, and in case other find it useful.</p>
15665
15666 <p>At the moment I have two failing disk. :(</p>
15667
15668 <blockquote><pre>
15669 Failed disk sdd1:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
15670 Failed disk sdd2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
15671 Failed disk sde2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1840589
15672 </blockquote></pre>
15673
15674 <p>The last time I had failing disks, I added the serial number on
15675 labels I printed and stuck on the short sides of each disk, to be able
15676 to figure out which disk to take out of the box without having to
15677 remove each disk to look at the physical vendor label.  The vendor
15678 label is at the top of the disk, which is hidden when the disks are
15679 mounted inside my box.</p>
15680
15681 <p>I really wish the check_linux_raid Nagios plugin for checking Linux
15682 Software RAID in the
15683 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nagios-plugins.html">nagios-plugins-standard</a>
15684 debian package would look up this value automatically, as it would
15685 make the plugin a lot more useful when my disks fail.  At the moment
15686 it only report a failure when there are no more spares left (it really
15687 should warn as soon as a disk is failing), and it do not tell me which
15688 disk(s) is failing when the RAID is running short on disks.</p>
15689
15690       </div>
15691       <div class="tags">
15692
15693
15694         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>.
15695
15696
15697       </div>
15698     </div>
15699     <div class="padding"></div>
15700
15701     <div class="entry">
15702       <div class="title">
15703         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">Automatic proxy configuration with Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
15704       </div>
15705       <div class="date">
15706         13th February 2012
15707       </div>
15708       <div class="body">
15709         <p>New in the Squeeze version of
15710 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is the
15711 ability for clients to automatically configure their proxy settings
15712 based on their environment.  We want all systems on the client to use
15713 the WPAD based proxy definition fetched from <tt>http://wpad/wpad.dat</tt>, to
15714 allow sites to control the proxy setting from a central place and make
15715 sure clients do not have hard coded proxy settings.  The schools can
15716 change the global proxy setting by editing
15717 <tt>tjener:/etc/debian-edu/www/wpad.dat</tt> and the change propagate
15718 to all Debian Edu clients in the network.</p>
15719
15720 <p>The problem is that some systems do not understand the WPAD system.
15721 In other words, how do one get from a WPAD file like this (this is a
15722 simple one, they can run arbitrary code):</p>
15723
15724 <blockquote><pre>
15725 function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
15726 {
15727    if (!isResolvable(host) ||
15728        isPlainHostName(host) ||
15729        dnsDomainIs(host, ".intern"))
15730       return "DIRECT";
15731    else
15732       return "PROXY webcache:3128; DIRECT";
15733 }
15734 </pre></blockquote>
15735
15736 <p>to a proxy setting in the process environment looking like this:</p>
15737
15738 <blockquote><pre>
15739 http_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
15740 ftp_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
15741 </pre></blockquote>
15742
15743 <p>To do this conversion I developed a perl script that will execute
15744 the javascript fragment in the WPAD file and return the proxy that
15745 would be used for
15746 <tt><a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a></tt>,
15747 and insert this extracted proxy URL in <tt>/etc/environment</tt> and
15748 <tt>/etc/apt/apt.conf</tt>.  The perl script wpad-extract work just
15749 fine in Squeeze, but in Wheezy the library it need to run the
15750 javascript code is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/631045">no longer
15751 able to build</a> because the C library it depended on is now a C++
15752 library.  I hope someone find a solution to that problem before Wheezy
15753 is frozen.  An alternative would be for us to rewrite wpad-extract to
15754 use some other javascript library currently working in Wheezy, but no
15755 known alternative is known at the moment.</p>
15756
15757 <p>This automatic proxy system allow the roaming workstation (aka
15758 laptop) setup in Debian Edu/Squeeze to use the proxy when the laptop
15759 is connected to the backbone network in a Debian Edu setup, and to
15760 automatically use any proxy present and announced using the WPAD
15761 feature when it is connected to other networks.  And if no proxy is
15762 announced, direct connections will be used instead.</p>
15763
15764 <p>Silently using a proxy announced on the network might be a privacy
15765 or security problem.  But those controlling DHCP and DNS on a network
15766 could just as easily set up a transparent proxy, and force all HTTP
15767 and FTP connections to use a proxy anyway, so I consider that
15768 distinction to be academic.  If you are afraid of using the wrong
15769 proxy, you should avoid connecting to the network in question in the
15770 first place.  In Debian Edu, the proxy setup is updated using dhcp and
15771 ifupdown hooks, to make sure the configuration is updated every time
15772 the network setup changes.</p>
15773
15774 <p>The WPAD system is documented in a
15775 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-01">IETF
15776 draft</a> and a
15777 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol">Wikipedia
15778 page</a> for those that want to learn more.</p>
15779
15780       </div>
15781       <div class="tags">
15782
15783
15784         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>.
15785
15786
15787       </div>
15788     </div>
15789     <div class="padding"></div>
15790
15791     <div class="entry">
15792       <div class="title">
15793         <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>
15794       </div>
15795       <div class="date">
15796          5th February 2012
15797       </div>
15798       <div class="body">
15799         <p>Since the Lenny version of
15800 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, a
15801 feature to save power have been included.  It is as simple as it is
15802 practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again
15803 in the morning.  This is done using the
15804 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/shutdown-at-night.html">shutdown-at-night</a> Debian package.</p>
15805
15806 <p>To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to
15807 the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts.  For Debian Edu, this is done in
15808 LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check
15809 every hour from 16:00 until 06:00 to see if the machine is unused, and
15810 shut it down if it is.  If the hardware in question is supported by
15811 the
15812 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvram-wakeup.html">nvram-wakeup</a>
15813 package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around 07:00 +-
15814 10 minutes.  If this isn't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to
15815 try to turn on the client.  The wake-on-lan option is only documented
15816 and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.</p>
15817
15818 <p>It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can
15819 blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like
15820 the common setup for a classroom.  The nvram-wakeup method only work
15821 for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock.  I've seen old
15822 machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were
15823 starting from 0 (or was it 1990?) every boot.  If you have one of
15824 those, you have to turn on the computer manually.</p>
15825
15826 <p>The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can
15827 also be used outside the Debian Edu environment.  For those without a
15828 central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file
15829 <tt>/etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night</tt> to enable it.
15830 Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?</p>
15831
15832       </div>
15833       <div class="tags">
15834
15835
15836         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>.
15837
15838
15839       </div>
15840     </div>
15841     <div class="padding"></div>
15842
15843     <div class="entry">
15844       <div class="title">
15845         <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>
15846       </div>
15847       <div class="date">
15848          4th February 2012
15849       </div>
15850       <div class="body">
15851         <p>I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and
15852 publish the third beta version of
15853 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
15854 on Squeeze.  If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with
15855 out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and
15856 installing new machines, check it out.  If you need a software
15857 solution for your school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
15858 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00000.html">available</a>
15859 on the project announcement list.</p>
15860
15861 <p>I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since
15862 beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):</p>
15863
15864 <ul>
15865
15866 <li>It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from
15867   10.0.0.0/8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after
15868   the installation.</li>
15869
15870 <li>Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main
15871   Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.</li>
15872
15873 <li>The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all
15874   disabled queues are restarted every hour.  This should cut down on
15875   the amount of manual administration needed for printers.</li>
15876
15877 <li>The set of initial users have been changed.  Now a personal user
15878   for the local system administrator is created during installation
15879   instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users,
15880   and this user is granted administrative privileges using group
15881   membership.  This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep
15882   up to date on the system.</li>
15883
15884 </ul>
15885
15886 <p>The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my
15887 private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home.  I will use it look
15888 for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the
15889 final Squeeze release is published.</p>
15890
15891 <p>Next weekend the project organise a
15892 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00001.html">developer
15893 gathering</a> in Oslo.  We will continue the work on the Squeeze
15894 version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version.  Perhaps I
15895 will see you there?</p>
15896
15897       </div>
15898       <div class="tags">
15899
15900
15901         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>.
15902
15903
15904       </div>
15905     </div>
15906     <div class="padding"></div>
15907
15908     <div class="entry">
15909       <div class="title">
15910         <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>
15911       </div>
15912       <div class="date">
15913         27th January 2012
15914       </div>
15915       <div class="body">
15916         <p>With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
15917 This is the sad fact of todays computers.  In the next version of
15918 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
15919 on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
15920 firmware blobs easier to handle.  The common use case I run into is a
15921 laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
15922 work, but there are other use cases as well.</p>
15923
15924 <p>First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
15925 with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
15926 included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
15927 during installation.  This take care firmware for network devices used
15928 by the installer when installing from from local media.  But for
15929 example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
15930 not taken care of by this.</p>
15931
15932 <p>For non-network devices, we provide the script
15933 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware</tt> which
15934 search through the <tt>dmesg</tt> output for drivers requesting extra
15935 firmware.  The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
15936 file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
15937 the requested firmware file(s) is installed.  I have proposed to do
15938 something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
15939 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">#655507</a>), to allow PXE
15940 installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better.  Run the
15941 script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
15942 firmware packages.</p>
15943
15944 <p>Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
15945 because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
15946 working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
15947 included to be able to install at all.  To fill the PXE installation
15948 initrd with extra firmware, the
15949 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware</tt> script is
15950 provided.  Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
15951 PXE initrd with firmware packages.</p>
15952
15953 <p>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
15954 network cards working.  For this,
15955 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware</tt> is
15956 provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs.  It is used
15957 the same way as the other firmware related tools.</p>
15958
15959 <p>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation.  We
15960 do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
15961 non-free software, and it is their choice.</p>
15962
15963 <p>We plan to release beta3 this weekend.  You might want to give it a
15964 try.</p>
15965
15966       </div>
15967       <div class="tags">
15968
15969
15970         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>.
15971
15972
15973       </div>
15974     </div>
15975     <div class="padding"></div>
15976
15977     <div class="entry">
15978       <div class="title">
15979         <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>
15980       </div>
15981       <div class="date">
15982         25th January 2012
15983       </div>
15984       <div class="body">
15985         <p>The next version of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu
15986 / Skolelinux</a> will include a new tool
15987 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp</tt>, which can be used to quickly set up all
15988 the computers in a school without much manual labour.  Here is a short
15989 summary on how to use it to set up a new school.</p>
15990
15991 <p>First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
15992 central server in the network.  Next, PXE boot all the client machines
15993 as thin clients and wait 5 minutes after the last client booted to
15994 allow the clients to report their existence to the central server.  When
15995 this is done, log on to the central server and run
15996 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a</tt> in the <tt>konsole</tt> to use the
15997 collected information to generate system objects in LDAP.  The output
15998 will look similar to this:</p>
15999
16000 <p><blockquote><pre>
16001 % sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
16002 info: Updating machine tjener.intern [10.0.2.2] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:05.
16003 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.
16004
16005 Enter password if you want to activate these changes, and ^c to abort.
16006
16007 Connecting to LDAP as cn=admin,ou=ldap-access,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
16008 enter password: *******
16009 %
16010 </pre></blockquote></p>
16011
16012 <p>After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
16013 root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
16014 populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
16015 automatically generated names.  The final step to set up the school is
16016 then to log into <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa</a>,
16017 the web based user, group and system administration system to change
16018 system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
16019 enable DHCP and DNS for the systems.  All clients that should be used
16020 as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
16021 group.  After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
16022 and get their assigned names and group based configuration
16023 automatically.</p>
16024
16025 <p>We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
16026 enabled this weekend.  You might want to give it a try.</p>
16027
16028 <p>Update 2012-01-28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
16029 hosts, one need to add the option -a.  I forgot to mention this in my
16030 original text, and have added it to the text now.</p>
16031
16032       </div>
16033       <div class="tags">
16034
16035
16036         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>.
16037
16038
16039       </div>
16040     </div>
16041     <div class="padding"></div>
16042
16043     <div class="entry">
16044       <div class="title">
16045         <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>
16046       </div>
16047       <div class="date">
16048         10th January 2012
16049       </div>
16050       <div class="body">
16051         <p>In the Squeeze version of
16052 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> soon
16053 to be released, users of the system will get their default browser
16054 start page set from LDAP, allowing the system administrator to point
16055 all users to the school web page by updating one setting in LDAP.  In
16056 addition to setting the default start page when a machine boots, users
16057 are shown the same page as a welcome page when they log in for the
16058 first time.</p>
16059
16060 <p>The LDAP object dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no have an attribute
16061 labeledURI with "http://www/ LDAP for Debian Edu/Skolelinux" as the
16062 default content.  By changing this value to another URL, all users get
16063 to see the page behind this new URL.</p>
16064
16065 <p>An easy way to update it is by using the ldapvi tool.  It can be
16066 called as "<tt>ldapvi -ZD '(cn=admin)'</tt>' to update LDAP with the
16067 new setting.</p>
16068
16069 <p>We have written the code to adjust the default start page and show
16070 the welcome page, and I wonder if there is an easier way to do this
16071 from within Iceweasel instead.</p>
16072
16073       </div>
16074       <div class="tags">
16075
16076
16077         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>.
16078
16079
16080       </div>
16081     </div>
16082     <div class="padding"></div>
16083
16084     <div class="entry">
16085       <div class="title">
16086         <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>
16087       </div>
16088       <div class="date">
16089          7th January 2012
16090       </div>
16091       <div class="body">
16092         <p>I am happy to announce that today we managed to wrap up and publish
16093 the second beta version of
16094 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>.  If
16095 you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE
16096 configuration for running diskless machines and installing new
16097 machines, check it out.  If you need a software solution for your
16098 school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
16099 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00000.html">available</a>
16100 on the project announcement list.</p>
16101
16102       </div>
16103       <div class="tags">
16104
16105
16106         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>.
16107
16108
16109       </div>
16110     </div>
16111     <div class="padding"></div>
16112
16113     <div class="entry">
16114       <div class="title">
16115         <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>
16116       </div>
16117       <div class="date">
16118          3rd January 2012
16119       </div>
16120       <div class="body">
16121         <p>During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of
16122 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ready
16123 for release.  The initial problem I looked at was particularly
16124 interesting.</p>
16125
16126 <P>The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it
16127 post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find
16128 the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I
16129 integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from
16130 scratch.  I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors,
16131 remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and
16132 wrap up its tasks.</p>
16133
16134 <p>Eventually the cause was found.  The kernel was simply running out
16135 of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more.
16136 Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries
16137 to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but
16138 because I was typing.</P>
16139
16140 <p>The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at
16141 the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking
16142 /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the
16143 installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do 'find /' to
16144 generate some disk IO.  Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is
16145 one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to
16146 generate entropy.</p>
16147
16148 <p>The fix is in
16149 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/Installation">beta1
16150 of the Debian Edu/Squeeze</a> version, and we
16151 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu">welcome more testers and
16152 developers</a>.  We plan to release beta2 this weekend.</p>
16153
16154       </div>
16155       <div class="tags">
16156
16157
16158         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>.
16159
16160
16161       </div>
16162     </div>
16163     <div class="padding"></div>
16164
16165     <div class="entry">
16166       <div class="title">
16167         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
16168       </div>
16169       <div class="date">
16170         21st November 2011
16171       </div>
16172       <div class="body">
16173         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
16174 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
16175 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
16176 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
16177 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
16178 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
16179 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
16180 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
16181 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
16182 the tools to do so.</p>
16183
16184 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
16185 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
16186 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
16187 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
16188
16189 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
16190 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
16191 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
16192 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
16193 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
16194 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
16195 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
16196 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
16197
16198 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
16199 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
16200 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
16201
16202 <p><pre>
16203 #!/usr/bin/perl
16204 use strict;
16205 use warnings;
16206 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
16207 BEGIN {
16208     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
16209     my %rhelmodules = (
16210         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
16211         );
16212     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
16213         eval "use $module;";
16214         if ($@) {
16215             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
16216             system("yum install -y $pkg");
16217             eval "use $module;";
16218         }
16219     }
16220 }
16221 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
16222
16223 upgrade_dell();
16224
16225 exit 0;
16226
16227 sub run_firmware_script {
16228     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
16229     unless ($script) {
16230         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
16231         exit 1
16232     }
16233     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
16234
16235     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
16236         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
16237     } else {
16238         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
16239     }
16240 }
16241
16242 sub run_firmware_scripts {
16243     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
16244     # Run firmware packages
16245     for my $dir (@dirs) {
16246         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
16247         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
16248         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
16249             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
16250             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
16251         }
16252         closedir $dh;
16253     }
16254 }
16255
16256 sub download {
16257     my $url = shift;
16258     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
16259     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
16260 }
16261
16262 sub upgrade_dell {
16263     my @dirs;
16264     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
16265     chomp $product;
16266
16267     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
16268
16269         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
16270         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
16271
16272         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
16273             CLEANUP => 1
16274             );
16275         chdir($tmpdir);
16276         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
16277         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
16278         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
16279         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
16280         my $fwopts = "-q";
16281         if (@paths) {
16282             for my $url (@paths) {
16283                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
16284             }
16285             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
16286         } else {
16287             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
16288             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
16289         }
16290         chdir('/');
16291     } else {
16292         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
16293         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
16294     }
16295 }
16296
16297 sub fetch_dell_fw {
16298     my $path = shift;
16299     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
16300     download($url);
16301 }
16302
16303 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
16304 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
16305 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
16306 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
16307     my $filename = shift;
16308
16309     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
16310     chomp $product;
16311     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
16312
16313     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
16314
16315     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
16316     my @paths;
16317     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
16318         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
16319         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
16320         my $oscode;
16321         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
16322             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
16323         } else {
16324             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
16325         }
16326         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
16327         {
16328             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
16329         }
16330     }
16331     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
16332         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
16333
16334         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
16335         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
16336
16337         my $cpath = $component->{path};
16338         for my $path (@paths) {
16339             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
16340                 push(@paths, $cpath);
16341             }
16342         }
16343     }
16344     return @paths;
16345 }
16346 </pre>
16347
16348 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
16349 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
16350 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
16351 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
16352 outdated.</p>
16353
16354       </div>
16355       <div class="tags">
16356
16357
16358         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16359
16360
16361       </div>
16362     </div>
16363     <div class="padding"></div>
16364
16365     <div class="entry">
16366       <div class="title">
16367         <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>
16368       </div>
16369       <div class="date">
16370          7th October 2011
16371       </div>
16372       <div class="body">
16373         <p>Here in Norway the public libraries are debating with the
16374 publishing houses how to handle electronic books.  Surprisingly, the
16375 libraries seem to be willing to accept digital restriction mechanisms
16376 (DRM) on books and renting e-books with artificial scarcity from the
16377 publishing houses.  Time limited renting (2-3 years) is one proposed
16378 model, and only allowing X borrowers for each book is another.
16379 Personally I find it amazing that libraries are even considering such
16380 models.</p>
16381
16382 <p>Anyway, while reading <a href="http://boklaben.no/?p=220">part of
16383 this debate</a>, it occurred to me that someone should present a more
16384 sensible approach to the libraries, to allow its borrowers to get used
16385 to a better model.  The idea is simple:</p>
16386
16387 <p>Create a computer system for the libraries, either in the form of a
16388 Live DVD or a installable distribution, that provide a simple kiosk
16389 solution to hand out free e-books.  As a start, the books distributed
16390 by <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about
16391 36,000 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a>
16392 (1149 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The
16393 Internet Archive</a> (3,033,748 books) could be included, but any book
16394 where the copyright has expired or with a free licence could be
16395 distributed.</p>
16396
16397 <p>The computer system would make it easy to:</p>
16398
16399 <ul>
16400
16401 <li>Copy e-books into a USB stick, reading tablets, cell phones and
16402   other relevant equipment.</li>
16403
16404 <li>Show the books for reading on the the screen in the library.</li>
16405
16406 </ul>
16407
16408 <p>In addition to such kiosk solution, there should probably be a web
16409 site as well to allow people easy access to these books without
16410 visiting the library.  The site would be the distribution point for
16411 the kiosk systems, which would connect regularly to fetch any new
16412 books available.</p>
16413
16414 <p>Are there anyone working on a system like this?  I guess it would
16415 fit any library in the world, and not just the Norwegian public
16416 libraries. :)</p>
16417
16418       </div>
16419       <div class="tags">
16420
16421
16422         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>.
16423
16424
16425       </div>
16426     </div>
16427     <div class="padding"></div>
16428
16429     <div class="entry">
16430       <div class="title">
16431         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">Ripping problematic DVDs using dvdbackup and genisoimage</a>
16432       </div>
16433       <div class="date">
16434         17th September 2011
16435       </div>
16436       <div class="body">
16437         <p>For convenience, I want to store copies of all my DVDs on my file
16438 server.  It allow me to save shelf space flat while still having my
16439 movie collection easily available.  It also make it possible to let
16440 the kids see their favourite DVDs without wearing the physical copies
16441 down.  I prefer to store the DVDs as ISOs to keep the DVD menu and
16442 subtitle options intact.  It also ensure that the entire film is one
16443 file on the disk.  As this is for personal use, the ripping is
16444 perfectly legal here in Norway.</p>
16445
16446 <p>Normally I rip the DVDs using dd like this:</p>
16447
16448 <blockquote><pre>
16449 #!/bin/sh
16450 # apt-get install lsdvd
16451 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
16452 dd if=/dev/dvd of=/storage/dvds/$title.iso bs=1M
16453 </pre></blockquote>
16454
16455 <p>But some DVDs give a input/output error when I read it, and I have
16456 been looking for a better alternative.  I have no idea why this I/O
16457 error occur, but suspect my DVD drive, the Linux kernel driver or
16458 something fishy with the DVDs in question.  Or perhaps all three.</p>
16459
16460 <p>Anyway, I believe I found a solution today using dvdbackup and
16461 genisoimage.  This script gave me a working ISO for a problematic
16462 movie by first extracting the DVD file system and then re-packing it
16463 back as an ISO.
16464
16465 <blockquote><pre>
16466 #!/bin/sh
16467 # apt-get install lsdvd dvdbackup genisoimage
16468 set -e
16469 tmpdir=/storage/dvds/
16470 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
16471 dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M -o $tmpdir -n$title
16472 genisoimage -dvd-video -o $tmpdir/$title.iso $tmpdir/$title
16473 rm -rf $tmpdir/$title
16474 </pre></blockquote>
16475
16476 <p>Anyone know of a better way available in Debian/Squeeze?</p>
16477
16478 <p>Update 2011-09-18: I got a tip from Konstantin Khomoutov about the
16479 readom program from the wodim package.  It is specially written to
16480 read optical media, and is called like this: <tt>readom dev=/dev/dvd
16481 f=image.iso</tt>.  It got 6 GB along with the problematic Cars DVD
16482 before it failed, and failed right away with a Timmy Time DVD.</p>
16483
16484 <p>Next, I got a tip from Bastian Blank about
16485 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">his
16486 program python-dvdvideo</a>, which seem to be just what I am looking
16487 for.  Tested it with my problematic Timmy Time DVD, and it succeeded
16488 creating a ISO image.  The git source built and installed just fine in
16489 Squeeze, so I guess this will be my tool of choice in the future.</p>
16490
16491       </div>
16492       <div class="tags">
16493
16494
16495         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>.
16496
16497
16498       </div>
16499     </div>
16500     <div class="padding"></div>
16501
16502     <div class="entry">
16503       <div class="title">
16504         <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>
16505       </div>
16506       <div class="date">
16507          4th August 2011
16508       </div>
16509       <div class="body">
16510         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
16511 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
16512 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
16513 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
16514 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
16515 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
16516 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
16517 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
16518 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
16519
16520 <p><blockquote>
16521 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
16522 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
16523 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
16524 </blockquote></p>
16525
16526 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
16527 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
16528 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
16529 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
16530 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
16531 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
16532 hard to explain.</p>
16533
16534 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
16535 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
16536 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
16537 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
16538 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
16539 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
16540 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
16541 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
16542 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
16543 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
16544 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
16545 mode).</p>
16546
16547 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
16548 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
16549 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
16550 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
16551 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
16552 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
16553 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
16554 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
16555 after visiting single user mode.</p>
16556
16557 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
16558 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
16559 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
16560 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
16561 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
16562 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
16563 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
16564 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
16565
16566 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
16567 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
16568 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
16569
16570       </div>
16571       <div class="tags">
16572
16573
16574         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>.
16575
16576
16577       </div>
16578     </div>
16579     <div class="padding"></div>
16580
16581     <div class="entry">
16582       <div class="title">
16583         <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>
16584       </div>
16585       <div class="date">
16586         30th July 2011
16587       </div>
16588       <div class="body">
16589         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
16590 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
16591 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
16592 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
16593 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
16594 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
16595 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
16596 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
16597 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
16598 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
16599 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
16600 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
16601 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
16602
16603 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
16604 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
16605 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
16606 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
16607 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
16608 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
16609 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
16610 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
16611 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
16612
16613 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
16614 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
16615 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
16616 is presented.</p>
16617
16618 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
16619 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
16620 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
16621 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
16622 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
16623 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
16624 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
16625 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
16626 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
16627 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
16628 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
16629 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
16630 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
16631 find time to push this forward.</p>
16632
16633       </div>
16634       <div class="tags">
16635
16636
16637         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>.
16638
16639
16640       </div>
16641     </div>
16642     <div class="padding"></div>
16643
16644     <div class="entry">
16645       <div class="title">
16646         <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>
16647       </div>
16648       <div class="date">
16649         29th July 2011
16650       </div>
16651       <div class="body">
16652         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
16653 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
16654 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
16655 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
16656 issues.</p>
16657
16658 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
16659 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
16660 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
16661
16662 <ol>
16663
16664 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
16665 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
16666 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
16667 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
16668 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
16669 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
16670 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
16671 Debian.</li>
16672
16673 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
16674 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
16675 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
16676 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
16677 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
16678 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
16679 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
16680 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
16681 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
16682 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
16683 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
16684 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
16685 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
16686
16687 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
16688 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
16689 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
16690 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
16691 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
16692 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
16693 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
16694 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
16695 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
16696 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
16697
16698 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
16699 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
16700 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
16701 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
16702 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
16703 latter behaviour.</li>
16704
16705 </ol>
16706
16707 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
16708 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
16709 it do not matter much.</p>
16710
16711 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
16712 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
16713 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
16714
16715       </div>
16716       <div class="tags">
16717
16718
16719         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
16720
16721
16722       </div>
16723     </div>
16724     <div class="padding"></div>
16725
16726     <div class="entry">
16727       <div class="title">
16728         <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>
16729       </div>
16730       <div class="date">
16731         26th July 2011
16732       </div>
16733       <div class="body">
16734         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
16735 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
16736 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
16737 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
16738 security support for a few years.</p>
16739
16740 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
16741 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
16742 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
16743 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
16744 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
16745 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
16746 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
16747 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
16748 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
16749 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
16750 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
16751 easier in the future.</p>
16752
16753 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
16754 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
16755 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
16756 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
16757 do not have time for.</p>
16758
16759       </div>
16760       <div class="tags">
16761
16762
16763         Tags: <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>.
16764
16765
16766       </div>
16767     </div>
16768     <div class="padding"></div>
16769
16770     <div class="entry">
16771       <div class="title">
16772         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html">Free Software vs. proprietary softare...</a>
16773       </div>
16774       <div class="date">
16775         20th June 2011
16776       </div>
16777       <div class="body">
16778         <p>Reading
16779 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/06/20/open-source-vs-closed-source-eulas/">the
16780 thingiverse blog</a>, I came across two highlights of interesting
16781 parts of the
16782 <a href="http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Autodesk_EULA">Autodesk</a>
16783 and
16784 <a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/06/things-you-cant-do-with-the-microsoft-kinect-sdk.html">Microsoft
16785 Kinect</a> End User License Agreements (EULAs), which illustrates
16786 quite well why I stay away from software with EULAs.  Whenever I take
16787 the time to read their content, the terms are simply unacceptable.</p>
16788
16789       </div>
16790       <div class="tags">
16791
16792
16793         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>.
16794
16795
16796       </div>
16797     </div>
16798     <div class="padding"></div>
16799
16800     <div class="entry">
16801       <div class="title">
16802         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experimental_Open311_API_for_the_mySociety_fixmystreet_system.html">Experimental Open311 API for the mySociety fixmystreet system</a>
16803       </div>
16804       <div class="date">
16805         30th April 2011
16806       </div>
16807       <div class="body">
16808         <p>Today, the first draft implementation of an
16809 <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> for the Norwegian
16810 service <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> started to
16811 work.  It is only available on the developer server for now, and I
16812 have not tested it using any existing Open311 client (I lack the
16813 platforms needed to run the clients I have found so far), but it is
16814 able to query the database and extract a list of open and closed
16815 requests within a given category and reported to a given municipality.
16816 I believe that is a good start to create a useful service for those
16817 that want to do data mining on the requests submitted so far.</p>
16818
16819 <p>Where is it?  Visit
16820 <a href="http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/">http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/</a>
16821 to have a look.  Please send feedback to the
16822 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
16823 (at) nuug.no</a> mailing list.</p>
16824
16825       </div>
16826       <div class="tags">
16827
16828
16829         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>.
16830
16831
16832       </div>
16833     </div>
16834     <div class="padding"></div>
16835
16836     <div class="entry">
16837       <div class="title">
16838         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Initial_notes_on_adding_Open311_server_API_on_FixMyStreet.html">Initial notes on adding Open311 server API on FixMyStreet</a>
16839       </div>
16840       <div class="date">
16841         29th April 2011
16842       </div>
16843       <div class="body">
16844         <p>The last few days I have spent some time trying to add support for
16845 the <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> in the
16846 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">Norwegian FixMyStreet service</a>.
16847 Earlier I believed Open311 would be a useful API to use to submit
16848 reports to the municipalities, but when I noticed that the
16849 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org.nz/">New Zealand version</a> of
16850 FixMyStreet had implemented Open311 on the server side, it occurred to
16851 me that this was a nice way to allow the public, press and
16852 municipalities to do data mining directly in the FixMyStreet service.
16853 Thus I went to work implementing the Open311 specification for
16854 FixMyStreet.  The implementation is not yet ready, but I am starting
16855 to get a draft limping along.  In the process, I have discovered a few
16856 issues with the Open311 specification.</p>
16857
16858 <p>One obvious missing feature is the lack of natural language
16859 handling in the specification.  The specification seem to assume all
16860 reports will be written in English, and do not provide a way for the
16861 receiving end to specify which languages are understood there.  To be
16862 able to use the same client and submit to several Open311 receivers,
16863 it would be useful to know which language to use when writing reports.
16864 I believe the specification should be extended to allow the receivers
16865 of problem reports to specify which language they accept, and the
16866 submitter to specify which language the report is written in.
16867 Language of a text can also be automatically guessed using statistical
16868 methods, but for multi-lingual persons like myself, it is useful to
16869 know which language to use when writing a problem report.  I suspect
16870 some lang=nb,nn kind of attribute would solve it.</p>
16871
16872 <p>A key part of the Open311 API is the list of services provided,
16873 which is similar to the categories used by FixMyStreet.  One issue I
16874 run into is the need to specify both name and unique identifier for
16875 each category.  The specification do not state that the identifier
16876 should be numeric, but all example implementations have used numbers
16877 here.  In FixMyStreet, there is no number associated with each
16878 category.  As the specification do not forbid it, I will use the name
16879 as the unique identifier for now and see how open311 clients handle
16880 it.</p>
16881
16882 <p>The report format in open311 and the report format in FixMyStreet
16883 differ in a key part.  FixMyStreet have a title and a description,
16884 while Open311 only have a description and lack the title.  I'm not
16885 quite sure how to best handle this yet.  When asking for a FixMyStreet
16886 report in Open311 format, I just merge title an description into the
16887 open311 description, but this is not going to work if the open311 API
16888 should be used for submitting new reports to FixMyStreet.</p>
16889
16890 <p>The search feature in Open311 is missing a way to ask for problems
16891 near a geographic location.  I believe this is important if one is to
16892 use Open311 as the query language for mobile units.  The specification
16893 should be extended to handle this, probably using some new lat=, lon=
16894 and range= options.</p>
16895
16896 <p>The final challenge I see is that the FixMyStreet code handle
16897 several administrations in one interface, while the Open311 API seem
16898 to assume only one administration.  For FixMyStreet, this mean a
16899 report can be sent to several administrations, and the categories
16900 available depend on the location of the problem.  Not quite sure how
16901 to best handle this.  I've noticed
16902 <a href="http://seeclickfix.com/open311/">SeeClickFix</a> added
16903 latitude and longitude options to the services request, but it do not
16904 solve the problem of what to return when no location is specified.
16905 Will have to investigate this a bit more.</p>
16906
16907 <p>My distaste for web forums have kept me from bringing these issues
16908 up with the open311 developer group.  I really wish they had a email
16909 list available via <a href="http://www.gmane.org/">Gmane</a> to use for
16910 discussions instead of only
16911 <a href="http://lists.open311.org/groups/discuss">a forum<a/>.  Oh,
16912 well.  That will probably resolve itself, one way or another.  I've
16913 also tried visiting the IRC channel #open311 on FreeNode, but no-one
16914 seem to reply to my questions there.  This make me wonder if I just
16915 fail to understand how the open311 community work.  It sure do not
16916 work like the free software project communities I am used to.</p>
16917
16918       </div>
16919       <div class="tags">
16920
16921
16922         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>.
16923
16924
16925       </div>
16926     </div>
16927     <div class="padding"></div>
16928
16929     <div class="entry">
16930       <div class="title">
16931         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html">Gnash enteres Google Summer of Code 2011</a>
16932       </div>
16933       <div class="date">
16934          6th April 2011
16935       </div>
16936       <div class="body">
16937         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is still
16938 the most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation.
16939 A few days ago the project
16940 <a href="http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/2011-04/msg00011.html">announced</a>
16941 that it will participate in Google Summer of Code.  I hope many
16942 students apply, and that some of them succeed in getting AVM2 support
16943 into Gnash.</p>
16944
16945       </div>
16946       <div class="tags">
16947
16948
16949         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>.
16950
16951
16952       </div>
16953     </div>
16954     <div class="padding"></div>
16955
16956     <div class="entry">
16957       <div class="title">
16958         <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>
16959       </div>
16960       <div class="date">
16961          3rd April 2011
16962       </div>
16963       <div class="body">
16964         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
16965 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
16966 update in English.</p>
16967
16968 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
16969 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
16970 of the British service
16971 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
16972 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
16973 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
16974 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
16975 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
16976 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
16977 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
16978 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
16979 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
16980 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
16981 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
16982 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
16983 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
16984
16985 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
16986 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
16987 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
16988 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
16989 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
16990 public infrastructure.</p>
16991
16992 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
16993 such service?</p>
16994
16995       </div>
16996       <div class="tags">
16997
16998
16999         Tags: <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>.
17000
17001
17002       </div>
17003     </div>
17004     <div class="padding"></div>
17005
17006     <div class="entry">
17007       <div class="title">
17008         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html">Using NVD and CPE to track CVEs in locally maintained software</a>
17009       </div>
17010       <div class="date">
17011         28th January 2011
17012       </div>
17013       <div class="body">
17014         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
17015 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
17016 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
17017 available on the Internet, and check our locally
17018 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
17019 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
17020 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
17021 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
17022 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
17023 out which security holes were present in our free software
17024 collection.</p>
17025
17026 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
17027 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
17028 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
17029 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
17030 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
17031 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
17032 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
17033 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
17034 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
17035 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
17036 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
17037 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
17038 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
17039 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
17040 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
17041 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
17042
17043 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
17044 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
17045 check out, one could look up
17046 <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
17047 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
17048 The most recent one is
17049 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
17050 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
17051 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
17052
17053 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
17054 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
17055 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
17056 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
17057 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
17058 security issues out.</p>
17059
17060 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
17061 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
17062 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
17063 RHEL is providing
17064 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
17065 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
17066 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
17067
17068 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
17069 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
17070 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
17071 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
17072 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
17073 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
17074 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
17075 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
17076 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
17077 established soon.</p>
17078
17079 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
17080 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
17081 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
17082 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
17083 for their packages.</p>
17084
17085       </div>
17086       <div class="tags">
17087
17088
17089         Tags: <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>.
17090
17091
17092       </div>
17093     </div>
17094     <div class="padding"></div>
17095
17096     <div class="entry">
17097       <div class="title">
17098         <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>
17099       </div>
17100       <div class="date">
17101         23rd January 2011
17102       </div>
17103       <div class="body">
17104         <p>In the
17105 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
17106 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
17107 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
17108 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
17109 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
17110 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
17111 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
17112 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
17113 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
17114 one of my machines like this:</p>
17115
17116 <pre>
17117 loaded modules:
17118 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
17119 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
17120 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
17121 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
17122 10de:03ec pata_amd
17123 10de:03f6 sata_nv
17124 1022:1103 k8temp
17125 109e:036e bttv
17126 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
17127 11ab:4364 sky2
17128 </pre>
17129
17130 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
17131 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
17132
17133 <pre>
17134 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
17135     echo loaded pci modules:
17136     (
17137         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
17138         for address in * ; do
17139             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
17140                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
17141                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
17142                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
17143                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
17144                     echo "$id $module"
17145                 fi
17146             fi
17147         done
17148     )
17149     echo
17150 fi
17151 </pre>
17152
17153 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
17154 mappings:</p>
17155
17156 <pre>
17157 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
17158     echo loaded usb modules:
17159     (
17160         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
17161         for address in * ; do
17162             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
17163                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
17164                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
17165                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
17166                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
17167                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
17168                         echo "$id $module"
17169                     fi
17170                 fi
17171             fi
17172         done
17173     )
17174     echo
17175 fi
17176 </pre>
17177
17178 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
17179 well.</p>
17180
17181       </div>
17182       <div class="tags">
17183
17184
17185         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17186
17187
17188       </div>
17189     </div>
17190     <div class="padding"></div>
17191
17192     <div class="entry">
17193       <div class="title">
17194         <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>
17195       </div>
17196       <div class="date">
17197         16th January 2011
17198       </div>
17199       <div class="body">
17200         <p>The video format struggle on the web continues, and the three
17201 contenders seem to be Ogg Theora, H.264 and WebM.  Most video sites
17202 seem to use H.264, while others use Ogg Theora.  Interestingly enough,
17203 the comments I see give me the feeling that a lot of people believe
17204 H.264 is the most supported video format in browsers, but according to
17205 the Wikipedia article on
17206 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">HTML5 video</a>,
17207 this is not true.  Check out the nice table of supprted formats in
17208 different browsers there.  The format supported by most browsers is
17209 Ogg Theora, supported by released versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google
17210 Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Origyn Web Browser and
17211 BOLT browser, while not supported by Internet Explorer nor Safari.
17212 The runner up is WebM supported by released versions of Google Chrome
17213 Chromium Opera and Origyn Web Browser, and test versions of Mozilla
17214 Firefox.  H.264 is supported by released versions of Safari, Origyn
17215 Web Browser and BOLT browser, and the test version of Internet
17216 Explorer.  Those wanting Ogg Theora support in Internet Explorer and
17217 Safari can install plugins to get it.</p>
17218
17219 <p>To me, the simple conclusion from this is that to reach most users
17220 without any extra software installed, one uses Ogg Theora with the
17221 HTML5 video tag.   Of course to reach all those without a browser
17222 handling HTML5, one need fallback mechanisms.  In
17223 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a>, we provide first fallback to a
17224 plugin capable of playing MPEG1 video, and those without such support
17225 we have a second fallback to the Cortado java applet playing Ogg
17226 Theora.  This seem to work quite well, as can be seen in an <a
17227 href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20110111-semantic-web/">example
17228 from last week</a>.</p>
17229
17230 <p>The reason Ogg Theora is the most supported format, and H.264 is
17231 the least supported is simple.  Implementing and using H.264
17232 require royalty payment to MPEG-LA, and the terms of use from MPEG-LA
17233 are incompatible with free software licensing.  If you believed H.264
17234 was without royalties and license terms, check out
17235 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
17236 Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps.</p>
17237
17238 <p>A incomplete list of sites providing video in Ogg Theora is
17239 available from
17240 <a href="http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_Theora_videos">the
17241 Xiph.org wiki</a>, if you want to have a look.  I'm not aware of a
17242 similar list for WebM nor H.264.</p>
17243
17244 <p>Update 2011-01-16 09:40: A question from Tollef on IRC made me
17245 realise that I failed to make it clear enough this text is about the
17246 &lt;video&gt; tag support in browsers and not the video support
17247 provided by external plugins like the Flash plugins.</p>
17248
17249       </div>
17250       <div class="tags">
17251
17252
17253         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
17254
17255
17256       </div>
17257     </div>
17258     <div class="padding"></div>
17259
17260     <div class="entry">
17261       <div class="title">
17262         <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>
17263       </div>
17264       <div class="date">
17265         12th January 2011
17266       </div>
17267       <div class="body">
17268         <p>Today I discovered
17269 <a href="http://www.digi.no/860070/google-dropper-h264-stotten-i-chrome">via
17270 digi.no</a> that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
17271 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html">yesterday
17272 announced</a> plans to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt; in
17273 the browser.  The argument used is that H.264 is not a "completely
17274 open" codec technology.  If you believe H.264 was free for everyone
17275 to use, I recommend having a look at the essay
17276 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
17277 Free That Matters</a>".  It is not free of cost for creators of video
17278 tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the
17279 terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from
17280 licensing the patents needed for H.264.  Some background information
17281 on the Google announcement is available from
17282 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24243/Google_To_Drop_H264_Support_from_Chrome">OSnews</a>.
17283 A good read. :)</p>
17284
17285 <p>Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to
17286 promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on
17287 the Internet.  This can only be done by publishing using free and open
17288 standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support
17289 for these free and open standards.  At the moment there seem to be two
17290 camps in the web browser world when it come to video support.  Some
17291 browsers support H.264, and others support
17292 <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg Theora</a> and
17293 <a href="http://www.webmproject.org/">WebM</a>
17294 (<a href="http://www.diracvideo.org/">Dirac</a> is not really an option
17295 yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet
17296 and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for
17297 H.264 to not reach all potential viewers.
17298 Wikipedia keep <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">an
17299 updated summary</a> of the current browser support.</p>
17300
17301 <p>Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
17302 promoting H.264, and John Gruber
17303 <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/simple_questions">presents
17304 the mind set</a> of these people quite well.  His rhetorical questions
17305 provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
17306 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24245/10_Questions_for_John_Gruber_Regarding_H_264_WebM">presenting
17307 the issues with H.264</a>. Both are worth a read.</p>
17308
17309 <p>Some argue that if Google is dropping H.264 because it isn't free,
17310 they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin.  This
17311 argument was covered by Simon Phipps in
17312 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/01/google-and-h264---far-from-hypocritical/index.htm">todays
17313 blog post</a>, which I find to put the issue in context.  To me it
17314 make perfect sense to drop native H.264 support for HTML5 in the
17315 browser while still allowing plugins.</p>
17316
17317 <p>I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest,
17318 is that all the users and promoters of H.264 suddenly get an uneasy
17319 feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse.  A lot of TV
17320 broadcasters have been moving to H.264 the last few years, and a lot
17321 of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they
17322 could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web
17323 publishing.  Suddenly this belief is shaken.</p>
17324
17325 <p>An interesting question is why Google is doing this.  While the
17326 presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only
17327 present the argument if the change make sense from a business
17328 perspective.  One reason might be that they are currently negotiating
17329 with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the
17330 feeling that dropping H.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and
17331 Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google.
17332 Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having
17333 to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a
17334 video format not requiring royalties at all.  A third reason might be
17335 that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the
17336 Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome.
17337 I guess time will tell.</p>
17338
17339 <p>Update 2011-01-15: The Google Chrome team provided
17340 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html">more
17341 background and information on the move</a> it a blog post yesterday.</p>
17342
17343       </div>
17344       <div class="tags">
17345
17346
17347         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
17348
17349
17350       </div>
17351     </div>
17352     <div class="padding"></div>
17353
17354     <div class="entry">
17355       <div class="title">
17356         <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>
17357       </div>
17358       <div class="date">
17359         30th December 2010
17360       </div>
17361       <div class="body">
17362         <p>After trying to
17363 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html">compare
17364 Ogg Theora</a> to
17365 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the Digistan
17366 definition</a> of a free and open standard, I concluded that this need
17367 to be done for more standards and started on a framework for doing
17368 this.  As a start, I want to get the status for all the standards in
17369 the Norwegian reference directory, which include UTF-8, HTML, PDF, ODF,
17370 JPEG, PNG, SVG and others.  But to be able to complete this in a
17371 reasonable time frame, I will need help.</p>
17372
17373 <p>If you want to help out with this work, please visit
17374 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/standard/digistan-analyse">the
17375 wiki pages I have set up for this</a>, and let me know that you want
17376 to help out.  The IRC channel #nuug on irc.freenode.net is a good
17377 place to coordinate this for now, as it is the IRC channel for the
17378 NUUG association where I have created the framework (I am the leader
17379 of the Norwegian Unix User Group).</p>
17380
17381 <p>The framework is still forming, and a lot is left to do.  Do not be
17382 scared by the sketchy form of the current pages. :)</p>
17383
17384       </div>
17385       <div class="tags">
17386
17387
17388         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>.
17389
17390
17391       </div>
17392     </div>
17393     <div class="padding"></div>
17394
17395     <div class="entry">
17396       <div class="title">
17397         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html">The many definitions of a open standard</a>
17398       </div>
17399       <div class="date">
17400         27th December 2010
17401       </div>
17402       <div class="body">
17403         <p>One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of
17404 "<a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">Free and
17405 Open Standard</a>" is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of
17406 the term has been decided by Digistan.  The term "Open Standard" has
17407 become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking
17408 about standards.  One end up discussing which definition is the best
17409 one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of
17410 de-facto standards and proprietary solutions.</p>
17411
17412 <p>But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open
17413 standards, here are a few that I know about.  This list is not
17414 complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a
17415 complete survey.  More definitions are available on the
17416 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard">wikipedia
17417 page</a>.</p>
17418
17419 <p>First off is my favourite, the definition from the European
17420 Interoperability Framework version 1.0.  Really sad to notice that BSA
17421 and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version 2.0 of the
17422 framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with
17423 their own people.  Anyway, the definition is still available and it
17424 include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a
17425 specification on equal terms.</p>
17426
17427 <blockquote>
17428
17429 <p>The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification
17430 and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an
17431 open standard:</p>
17432
17433 <ul>
17434
17435 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
17436 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
17437 open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties
17438 (consensus or majority decision etc.).</li>
17439
17440 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
17441 document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be
17442 permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a
17443 nominal fee.</li>
17444
17445 <li>The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of
17446 (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-
17447 free basis.</li>
17448
17449 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
17450
17451 </ul>
17452 </blockquote>
17453
17454 <p>Another one originates from my friends over at
17455 <a href="http://www.dkuug.dk/">DKUUG</a>, who coined and gathered
17456 support for <a href="http://www.aaben-standard.dk/">this
17457 definition</a> in 2004.  It even made it into the Danish parlament as
17458 <a href="http://www.ft.dk/dokumenter/tingdok.aspx?/samling/20051/beslutningsforslag/B103/som_fremsat.htm">their
17459 definition of a open standard</a>.  Another from a different part of
17460 the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.</p>
17461
17462 <blockquote>
17463
17464 <p>En åben standard opfylder følgende krav:</p>
17465
17466 <ol>
17467
17468 <li>Veldokumenteret med den fuldstændige specifikation offentligt
17469 tilgængelig.</li>
17470
17471 <li>Frit implementerbar uden økonomiske, politiske eller juridiske
17472 begrænsninger på implementation og anvendelse.</li>
17473
17474 <li>Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et åbent forum (en såkaldt
17475 "standardiseringsorganisation") via en åben proces.</li>
17476
17477 </ol>
17478
17479 </blockquote>
17480
17481 <p>Then there is <a href="http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/def.html">the
17482 definition</a> from Free Software Foundation Europe.</p>
17483
17484 <blockquote>
17485
17486 <p>An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is</p>
17487
17488 <ol>
17489
17490 <li>subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a
17491 manner equally available to all parties;</li>
17492
17493 <li>without any components or extensions that have dependencies on
17494 formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open
17495 Standard themselves;</li>
17496
17497 <li>free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by
17498 any party or in any business model;</li>
17499
17500 <li>managed and further developed independently of any single vendor
17501 in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third
17502 parties;</li>
17503
17504 <li>available in multiple complete implementations by competing
17505 vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all
17506 parties.</li>
17507
17508 </ol>
17509
17510 </blockquote>
17511
17512 <p>A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created
17513 its
17514 <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/dennisding/resource/Open%20Standard%20Definition.pdf">Open
17515 Standards Checklist</a> with a fairly detailed description.</p>
17516
17517 <blockquote>
17518 <p>Creation and Management of an Open Standard
17519
17520 <ul>
17521
17522 <li>Its development and management process must be collaborative and
17523   democratic:
17524
17525          <ul>
17526
17527          <li>Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to
17528             participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria
17529             imposed by the organization under which it is developed
17530             and managed.</li>
17531
17532          <li>The processes must be documented and, through a known
17533             method, can be changed through input from all
17534             participants.</li>
17535
17536          <li>The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for
17537             the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.</li>
17538
17539          <li>Development and management should strive for consensus,
17540             and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.</li>
17541
17542          <li>The standard specification must be open to extensive
17543             public review at least once in its life-cycle, with
17544             comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.</li>
17545
17546          </ul>
17547
17548 </li>
17549
17550 </ul>
17551
17552 <p>Use and Licensing of an Open Standard</p>
17553 <ul>
17554
17555 <li>The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation,
17556   and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing
17557   implementations to the interface described in the standard without
17558   undue or restrictive constraints.  Interfaces include APIs,
17559   protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.</li>
17560
17561 <li> The standard must not contain any proprietary "hooks" that create
17562   a technical or economic barriers</li>
17563
17564 <li>Faithful implementations of the standard must
17565   interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer
17566   program to communicate and exchange information with other computer
17567   programs and mutually to use the information which has been
17568   exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange
17569   file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or
17570   conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other
17571   computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are
17572   intended to function.</li>
17573
17574 <li>It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the
17575   standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it
17576   must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.</li>
17577
17578 <li>It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or
17579   fees; also known as "royalty free"), worldwide, non-exclusive and
17580   perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and
17581   sell products based on the standard.  The only exceptions are
17582   terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms
17583   outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished
17584   patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is
17585   only for the exact scope of the standard in question.
17586
17587       <ul>
17588
17589       <li> May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of
17590         licensees' patent claims essential to practice that standard
17591         (also known as a reciprocity clause)</li>
17592
17593       <li> May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor
17594         or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims
17595         essential to practice that standard (also known as a
17596         "defensive suspension" clause)</li>
17597
17598       <li> The same licensing terms are available to every potential
17599         licensor</li>
17600
17601       </ul>
17602 </li>
17603
17604 <li>The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude
17605   implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms
17606   or restricted licensing terms</li>
17607
17608 </ul>
17609
17610 </blockquote>
17611
17612 <p>It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that
17613 there are so many of them.  As you can see, the same holds true for
17614 open standard definitions.  Most of the definitions have a lot in
17615 common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open
17616 standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it
17617 possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real
17618 competition to downplay the significance of open standards.  I hope we
17619 can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open
17620 Standards.</p>
17621
17622       </div>
17623       <div class="tags">
17624
17625
17626         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>.
17627
17628
17629       </div>
17630     </div>
17631     <div class="padding"></div>
17632
17633     <div class="entry">
17634       <div class="title">
17635         <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>
17636       </div>
17637       <div class="date">
17638         25th December 2010
17639       </div>
17640       <div class="body">
17641         <p><a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">The
17642 Digistan definition</a> of a free and open standard reads like this:</p>
17643
17644 <blockquote>
17645
17646 <p>The Digital Standards Organization defines free and open standard
17647 as follows:</p>
17648
17649 <ol>
17650
17651 <li>A free and open standard is immune to vendor capture at all stages
17652 in its life-cycle. Immunity from vendor capture makes it possible to
17653 freely use, improve upon, trust, and extend a standard over time.</li>
17654
17655 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
17656 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
17657 open decision-making procedure available to all interested
17658 parties.</li>
17659
17660 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
17661 document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy,
17662 distribute, and use it freely.</li>
17663
17664 <li>The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made
17665 irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.</li>
17666
17667 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
17668
17669 </ol>
17670
17671 <p>The economic outcome of a free and open standard, which can be
17672 measured, is that it enables perfect competition between suppliers of
17673 products based on the standard.</p>
17674 </blockquote>
17675
17676 <p>For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free
17677 and open standard according to this definition.  Here is a short
17678 writeup of what I have been able to gather so far.  I brought up the
17679 topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list
17680 <a href="http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/advocacy/2009-July/001632.html">in
17681 July 2009</a>, for those that want to see some background information.
17682 According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list
17683 the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.</p>
17684
17685 <p><strong>Free from vendor capture?</strong></p>
17686
17687 <p>As far as I can see, there is no single vendor that can control the
17688 Ogg Theora specification.  It can be argued that the
17689 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/">Xiph foundation</A> is such vendor, but
17690 given that it is a non-profit foundation with the expressed goal
17691 making free and open protocols and standards available, it is not
17692 obvious that this is a real risk.  One issue with the Xiph
17693 foundation is that its inner working (as in board member list, or who
17694 control the foundation) are not easily available on the web.  I've
17695 been unable to find out who is in the foundation board, and have not
17696 seen any accounting information documenting how money is handled nor
17697 where is is spent in the foundation.  It is thus not obvious for an
17698 external observer who control The Xiph foundation, and for all I know
17699 it is possible for a single vendor to take control over the
17700 specification.  But it seem unlikely.</p>
17701
17702 <p><strong>Maintained by open not-for-profit organisation?</strong></p>
17703
17704 <p>Assuming that the Xiph foundation is the organisation its web pages
17705 claim it to be, this point is fulfilled.  If Xiph foundation is
17706 controlled by a single vendor, it isn't, but I have not found any
17707 documentation indicating this.</p>
17708
17709 <p>According to
17710 <a href="http://media.hiof.no/diverse/fad/rapport_4.pdf">a report</a>
17711 prepared by Audun Vaaler og Børre Ludvigsen for the Norwegian
17712 government, the Xiph foundation is a non-commercial organisation and
17713 the development process is open, transparent and non-Discrimatory.
17714 Until proven otherwise, I believe it make most sense to believe the
17715 report is correct.</p>
17716
17717 <p><strong>Specification freely available?</strong></p>
17718
17719 <p>The specification for the <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/">Ogg
17720 container format</a> and both the
17721 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/">Vorbis</a> and
17722 <a href="http://theora.org/doc/">Theora</a> codeces are available on
17723 the web.  This are the terms in the Vorbis and Theora specification:
17724
17725 <blockquote>
17726
17727 Anyone may freely use and distribute the Ogg and [Vorbis/Theora]
17728 specifications, whether in private, public, or corporate
17729 capacity. However, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the Ogg project reserve
17730 the right to set the Ogg [Vorbis/Theora] specification and certify
17731 specification compliance.
17732
17733 </blockquote>
17734
17735 <p>The Ogg container format is specified in IETF
17736 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/rfc3533.txt">RFC 3533</a>, and
17737 this is the term:<p>
17738
17739 <blockquote>
17740
17741 <p>This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
17742 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
17743 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
17744 distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
17745 provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
17746 included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
17747 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
17748 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
17749 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
17750 Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
17751 in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to
17752 translate it into languages other than English.</p>
17753
17754 <p>The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
17755 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.</p>
17756 </blockquote>
17757
17758 <p>All these terms seem to allow unlimited distribution and use, an
17759 this term seem to be fulfilled.  There might be a problem with the
17760 missing permission to distribute modified versions of the text, and
17761 thus reuse it in other specifications.  Not quite sure if that is a
17762 requirement for the Digistan definition.</p>
17763
17764 <p><strong>Royalty-free?</strong></p>
17765
17766 <p>There are no known patent claims requiring royalties for the Ogg
17767 Theora format.
17768 <a href="http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=65782">MPEG-LA</a>
17769 and
17770 <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/237238/Steve-Jobs-Hints-At-Theora-Lawsuit">Steve
17771 Jobs</a> in Apple claim to know about some patent claims (submarine
17772 patents) against the Theora format, but no-one else seem to believe
17773 them.  Both Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation have looked into
17774 this and decided to implement Ogg Theora support in their browsers
17775 without paying any royalties.  For now the claims from MPEG-LA and
17776 Steve Jobs seem more like FUD to scare people to use the H.264 codec
17777 than any real problem with Ogg Theora.</p>
17778
17779 <p><strong>No constraints on re-use?</strong></p>
17780
17781 <p>I am not aware of any constraints on re-use.</p>
17782
17783 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
17784
17785 <p>3 of 5 requirements seem obviously fulfilled, and the remaining 2
17786 depend on the governing structure of the Xiph foundation.  Given the
17787 background report used by the Norwegian government, I believe it is
17788 safe to assume the last two requirements are fulfilled too, but it
17789 would be nice if the Xiph foundation web site made it easier to verify
17790 this.</p>
17791
17792 <p>It would be nice to see other analysis of other specifications to
17793 see if they are free and open standards.</p>
17794
17795       </div>
17796       <div class="tags">
17797
17798
17799         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
17800
17801
17802       </div>
17803     </div>
17804     <div class="padding"></div>
17805
17806     <div class="entry">
17807       <div class="title">
17808         <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>
17809       </div>
17810       <div class="date">
17811         25th December 2010
17812       </div>
17813       <div class="body">
17814         <p>A few days ago
17815 <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article189879.ece">an
17816 article</a> in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version
17817 2.0 of
17818 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Framework">European
17819 Interoperability Framework</a> has been successfully lobbied by the
17820 proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software.
17821 Nothing very surprising there, given
17822 <a href="http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/29/2115235/Open-Source-Open-Standards-Under-Attack-In-Europe">earlier
17823 reports</a> on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in
17824 this work.  But I find this very sad.   The definition of
17825 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dokumenter/standard-presse-def-200506.txt">an
17826 open standard from version 1</a> was very good, and something I
17827 believe should be used also in the future, alongside
17828 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the
17829 definition from Digistan</A>.  Version 2 have removed the open
17830 standard definition from its content.</p>
17831
17832 <p>Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar
17833 Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply
17834 to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software
17835 in the public sector in Peru.  As the text was not available from a
17836 few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from
17837 <a href="http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/articles/en/reponseperou/villanueva_to_ms.html">my
17838 source</a> to ensure it is available also in the future.  Some
17839 background information about that story is available in
17840 <a href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6099">an article</a> from
17841 Linux Journal in 2002.</p>
17842
17843 <blockquote>
17844 <p>Lima, 8th of April, 2002<br>
17845 To: Señor JUAN ALBERTO GONZÁLEZ<br>
17846 General Manager of Microsoft Perú</p>
17847
17848 <p>Dear Sir:</p>
17849
17850 <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>
17851
17852 <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>
17853
17854 <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>
17855
17856 <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>
17857
17858 <p>
17859 <ul>
17860 <li>Free access to public information by the citizen. </li>
17861 <li>Permanence of public data. </li>
17862 <li>Security of the State and citizens.</li>
17863 </ul>
17864 </p>
17865
17866 <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>
17867
17868 <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>
17869
17870 <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>
17871
17872 <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>
17873
17874 <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>
17875
17876
17877 <p>From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:<br>
17878 <li>the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software</li>
17879 <li>the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software</li>
17880 <li>the law does not specify which concrete software to use</li>
17881 <li>the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought</li>
17882 <li>the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.</li>
17883
17884 </p>
17885
17886 <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>
17887
17888 <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>
17889
17890 <p>As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail:</p>
17891
17892 <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>
17893
17894 <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>
17895
17896 <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>
17897
17898 <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>
17899
17900 <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>
17901
17902 <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>
17903
17904 <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>
17905
17906 <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>
17907
17908 <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>
17909
17910 <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>
17911
17912 <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>
17913
17914 <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>
17915
17916 <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>
17917
17918 <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>
17919
17920 <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>
17921
17922 <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>
17923
17924 <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>
17925
17926 <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>
17927
17928 <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>
17929
17930 <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>
17931
17932 <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>
17933
17934 <p>On security:</p>
17935
17936 <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>
17937
17938 <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>
17939
17940 <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>
17941
17942 <p>In respect of the guarantee:</p>
17943
17944 <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>
17945
17946 <p>On Intellectual Property:</p>
17947
17948 <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>
17949
17950 <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>
17951
17952 <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>
17953
17954 <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>
17955
17956 <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>
17957
17958 <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>
17959
17960 <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>
17961
17962 <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>
17963
17964 <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>
17965
17966 <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>
17967
17968 <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>
17969
17970 <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>
17971
17972 <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>
17973
17974 <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>
17975
17976 <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>
17977
17978 <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>
17979
17980 <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>
17981
17982 <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>
17983
17984 <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>
17985
17986 <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>
17987
17988 <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>
17989
17990 <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>
17991
17992 <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>
17993
17994 <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>
17995
17996 <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>
17997
17998 <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>
17999
18000 <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>
18001
18002 <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>
18003
18004 <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>
18005
18006 <p>Cordially,<br>
18007 DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NUÑEZ<br>
18008 Congressman of the Republic of Perú.</p>
18009 </blockquote>
18010
18011       </div>
18012       <div class="tags">
18013
18014
18015         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>.
18016
18017
18018       </div>
18019     </div>
18020     <div class="padding"></div>
18021
18022     <div class="entry">
18023       <div class="title">
18024         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html">Officeshots still going strong</a>
18025       </div>
18026       <div class="date">
18027         25th December 2010
18028       </div>
18029       <div class="body">
18030         <p>Half a year ago I
18031 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">wrote
18032 a bit</a> about <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>,
18033 a web service to allow anyone to test how ODF documents are handled by
18034 the different programs reading and writing the ODF format.</p>
18035
18036 <p>I just had a look at the service, and it seem to be going strong.
18037 Very interesting to see the results reported in the gallery, how
18038 different Office implementations handle different ODF features.  Sad
18039 to see that KOffice was not doing it very well, and happy to see that
18040 LibreOffice has been tested already (but sadly not listed as a option
18041 for OfficeShots users yet).  I am glad to see that the ODF community
18042 got such a great test tool available.</p>
18043
18044       </div>
18045       <div class="tags">
18046
18047
18048         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>.
18049
18050
18051       </div>
18052     </div>
18053     <div class="padding"></div>
18054
18055     <div class="entry">
18056       <div class="title">
18057         <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>
18058       </div>
18059       <div class="date">
18060         22nd December 2010
18061       </div>
18062       <div class="body">
18063         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
18064 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
18065 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
18066 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
18067 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
18068 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
18069 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
18070 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
18071 university.</p>
18072
18073 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
18074 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
18075 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
18076 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
18077 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
18078 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
18079 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
18080 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
18081
18082 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
18083 I perform on a new model.</p>
18084
18085 <ul>
18086
18087 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
18088 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
18089 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
18090
18091 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
18092 installation, X.org is working.</li>
18093
18094 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
18095 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
18096 reported by the program.</li>
18097
18098 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
18099 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
18100 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
18101 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
18102 normally test this by playing
18103 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
18104 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
18105
18106 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
18107 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
18108
18109 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
18110 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
18111
18112 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
18113 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
18114
18115 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
18116 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
18117 few.</li>
18118
18119 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
18120 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
18121 notice this.</li>
18122
18123 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
18124 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
18125 resume.</li>
18126
18127 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
18128 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
18129 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
18130 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
18131 not.</li>
18132
18133 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
18134 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
18135 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
18136 existence.</li>
18137
18138 </ul>
18139
18140 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
18141 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
18142 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
18143 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
18144 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
18145 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
18146 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
18147 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
18148
18149       </div>
18150       <div class="tags">
18151
18152
18153         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>.
18154
18155
18156       </div>
18157     </div>
18158     <div class="padding"></div>
18159
18160     <div class="entry">
18161       <div class="title">
18162         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
18163       </div>
18164       <div class="date">
18165         11th December 2010
18166       </div>
18167       <div class="body">
18168         <p>As I continue to explore
18169 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
18170 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
18171 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
18172
18173 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
18174 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
18175 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
18176 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
18177 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
18178 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
18179 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
18180 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
18181 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
18182 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
18183 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
18184 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
18185 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
18186 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
18187 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
18188 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
18189 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
18190 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
18191 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
18192 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
18193
18194 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
18195 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
18196 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
18197 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
18198 If the Skolelinux foundation
18199 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
18200 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
18201 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
18202 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
18203 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
18204 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
18205 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
18206 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
18207
18208 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
18209 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
18210 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
18211 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
18212 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
18213 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
18214 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
18215 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
18216 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
18217 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
18218 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
18219 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
18220 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
18221 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
18222 currencies.</p>
18223
18224 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
18225 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
18226 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
18227 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
18228 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
18229 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
18230 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
18231 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
18232 BitCoins.  Check out
18233 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
18234 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
18235 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
18236 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
18237 yet.</p>
18238
18239 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
18240 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
18241 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
18242 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
18243 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
18244
18245       </div>
18246       <div class="tags">
18247
18248
18249         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>.
18250
18251
18252       </div>
18253     </div>
18254     <div class="padding"></div>
18255
18256     <div class="entry">
18257       <div class="title">
18258         <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>
18259       </div>
18260       <div class="date">
18261         10th December 2010
18262       </div>
18263       <div class="body">
18264         <p>With this weeks lawless
18265 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
18266 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
18267 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
18268 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
18269 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
18270 A blog post from
18271 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
18272 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
18273 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
18274 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
18275 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
18276 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
18277 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
18278
18279 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
18280 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
18281 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
18282 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
18283 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
18284 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
18285 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
18286 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
18287 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
18288 Debian</a> soon.</p>
18289
18290 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
18291 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
18292 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
18293 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
18294 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
18295 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
18296 you can even get
18297 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
18298 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
18299 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
18300 on the current exchange rates.</p>
18301
18302 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
18303 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
18304 donations to the address
18305 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
18306
18307       </div>
18308       <div class="tags">
18309
18310
18311         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>.
18312
18313
18314       </div>
18315     </div>
18316     <div class="padding"></div>
18317
18318     <div class="entry">
18319       <div class="title">
18320         <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>
18321       </div>
18322       <div class="date">
18323          9th December 2010
18324       </div>
18325       <div class="body">
18326         <p>A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot
18327 student assosiation <a href="http://www.robotica.no/">Robotica
18328 Osloensis</a> at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to
18329 get their own 3D printer.  They wanted to learn from me based on my
18330 work in the area.  After having a short lunch meeting with them, I
18331 offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete
18332 the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon.  I look
18333 forward to see how this goes.  This monday their volunteer driver
18334 picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the
18335 last exam is over so they can start work on getting the 3D printer
18336 operational.</p>
18337
18338 <p>The robotic group have already build several robots on their own,
18339 and seem capable of getting the reprap operational.  I really look
18340 forward to being able to print all the cool 3D designs published on
18341 <a href="http://www.thingiverse.com/">Thingiverse</a>.  I even got
18342 some 3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at
18343 the computer science department at the university demonstrated their
18344 very cool 3D scanner.</p>
18345
18346       </div>
18347       <div class="tags">
18348
18349
18350         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>.
18351
18352
18353       </div>
18354     </div>
18355     <div class="padding"></div>
18356
18357     <div class="entry">
18358       <div class="title">
18359         <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>
18360       </div>
18361       <div class="date">
18362         29th November 2010
18363       </div>
18364       <div class="body">
18365         <p>On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
18366 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2010-12-03-05-Oslo">development
18367 gathering</a> in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway.  I
18368 really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
18369 Squeeze release.  The gathering is open for everyone interested in
18370 learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
18371
18372 <p>On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
18373 organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
18374 will hold its
18375 <a href="http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Genfors/2010">General Assembly
18376 for 2010</a>.  Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388
18377 people registered as members.  Last year 32 members cast their vote in
18378 the memberdb based election system.  I hope more people find time to
18379 vote this year.</p>
18380
18381       </div>
18382       <div class="tags">
18383
18384
18385         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>.
18386
18387
18388       </div>
18389     </div>
18390     <div class="padding"></div>
18391
18392     <div class="entry">
18393       <div class="title">
18394         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
18395       </div>
18396       <div class="date">
18397         27th November 2010
18398       </div>
18399       <div class="body">
18400         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
18401 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
18402 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
18403 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
18404 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
18405 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
18406 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
18407 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
18408
18409 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
18410 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
18411 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
18412 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
18413 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
18414 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
18415 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
18416 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
18417 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
18418 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
18419 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
18420
18421 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
18422 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
18423 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
18424 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
18425 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
18426 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
18427 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
18428 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
18429 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
18430 what is going on.</p>
18431
18432       </div>
18433       <div class="tags">
18434
18435
18436         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>.
18437
18438
18439       </div>
18440     </div>
18441     <div class="padding"></div>
18442
18443     <div class="entry">
18444       <div class="title">
18445         <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>
18446       </div>
18447       <div class="date">
18448         22nd November 2010
18449       </div>
18450       <div class="body">
18451         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
18452 upgrade testing of the
18453 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
18454 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
18455 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
18456 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
18457
18458 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
18459
18460 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
18461
18462 <blockquote><p>
18463   apache2.2-bin
18464   aptdaemon
18465   baobab
18466   binfmt-support
18467   browser-plugin-gnash
18468   cheese-common
18469   cli-common
18470   cups-pk-helper
18471   dmz-cursor-theme
18472   empathy
18473   empathy-common
18474   freedesktop-sound-theme
18475   freeglut3
18476   gconf-defaults-service
18477   gdm-themes
18478   gedit-plugins
18479   geoclue
18480   geoclue-hostip
18481   geoclue-localnet
18482   geoclue-manual
18483   geoclue-yahoo
18484   gnash
18485   gnash-common
18486   gnome
18487   gnome-backgrounds
18488   gnome-cards-data
18489   gnome-codec-install
18490   gnome-core
18491   gnome-desktop-environment
18492   gnome-disk-utility
18493   gnome-screenshot
18494   gnome-search-tool
18495   gnome-session-canberra
18496   gnome-system-log
18497   gnome-themes-extras
18498   gnome-themes-more
18499   gnome-user-share
18500   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
18501   gstreamer0.10-tools
18502   gtk2-engines
18503   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
18504   gtk2-engines-smooth
18505   hamster-applet
18506   libapache2-mod-dnssd
18507   libapr1
18508   libaprutil1
18509   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
18510   libaprutil1-ldap
18511   libart2.0-cil
18512   libboost-date-time1.42.0
18513   libboost-python1.42.0
18514   libboost-thread1.42.0
18515   libchamplain-0.4-0
18516   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
18517   libcheese-gtk18
18518   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
18519   libcryptui0
18520   libdiscid0
18521   libelf1
18522   libepc-1.0-2
18523   libepc-common
18524   libepc-ui-1.0-2
18525   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
18526   libfreerdp0
18527   libgconf2.0-cil
18528   libgdata-common
18529   libgdata7
18530   libgdu-gtk0
18531   libgee2
18532   libgeoclue0
18533   libgexiv2-0
18534   libgif4
18535   libglade2.0-cil
18536   libglib2.0-cil
18537   libgmime2.4-cil
18538   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
18539   libgnome2.24-cil
18540   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
18541   libgpod-common
18542   libgpod4
18543   libgtk2.0-cil
18544   libgtkglext1
18545   libgtksourceview2.0-common
18546   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
18547   libmono-addins0.2-cil
18548   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
18549   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
18550   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
18551   libmono-posix2.0-cil
18552   libmono-security2.0-cil
18553   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
18554   libmono-system2.0-cil
18555   libmtp8
18556   libmusicbrainz3-6
18557   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
18558   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
18559   libopal3.6.8
18560   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
18561   libpt2.6.7
18562   libpython2.6
18563   librpm1
18564   librpmio1
18565   libsdl1.2debian
18566   libsrtp0
18567   libssh-4
18568   libtelepathy-farsight0
18569   libtelepathy-glib0
18570   libtidy-0.99-0
18571   media-player-info
18572   mesa-utils
18573   mono-2.0-gac
18574   mono-gac
18575   mono-runtime
18576   nautilus-sendto
18577   nautilus-sendto-empathy
18578   p7zip-full
18579   pkg-config
18580   python-aptdaemon
18581   python-aptdaemon-gtk
18582   python-axiom
18583   python-beautifulsoup
18584   python-bugbuddy
18585   python-clientform
18586   python-coherence
18587   python-configobj
18588   python-crypto
18589   python-cupshelpers
18590   python-elementtree
18591   python-epsilon
18592   python-evolution
18593   python-feedparser
18594   python-gdata
18595   python-gdbm
18596   python-gst0.10
18597   python-gtkglext1
18598   python-gtksourceview2
18599   python-httplib2
18600   python-louie
18601   python-mako
18602   python-markupsafe
18603   python-mechanize
18604   python-nevow
18605   python-notify
18606   python-opengl
18607   python-openssl
18608   python-pam
18609   python-pkg-resources
18610   python-pyasn1
18611   python-pysqlite2
18612   python-rdflib
18613   python-serial
18614   python-tagpy
18615   python-twisted-bin
18616   python-twisted-conch
18617   python-twisted-core
18618   python-twisted-web
18619   python-utidylib
18620   python-webkit
18621   python-xdg
18622   python-zope.interface
18623   remmina
18624   remmina-plugin-data
18625   remmina-plugin-rdp
18626   remmina-plugin-vnc
18627   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
18628   rhythmbox-plugins
18629   rpm-common
18630   rpm2cpio
18631   seahorse-plugins
18632   shotwell
18633   software-center
18634   system-config-printer-udev
18635   telepathy-gabble
18636   telepathy-mission-control-5
18637   telepathy-salut
18638   tomboy
18639   totem
18640   totem-coherence
18641   totem-mozilla
18642   totem-plugins
18643   transmission-common
18644   xdg-user-dirs
18645   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
18646   xserver-xephyr
18647 </p></blockquote>
18648
18649 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
18650
18651 <blockquote><p>
18652   cheese
18653   ekiga
18654   eog
18655   epiphany-extensions
18656   evolution-exchange
18657   fast-user-switch-applet
18658   file-roller
18659   gcalctool
18660   gconf-editor
18661   gdm
18662   gedit
18663   gedit-common
18664   gnome-games
18665   gnome-games-data
18666   gnome-nettool
18667   gnome-system-tools
18668   gnome-themes
18669   gnuchess
18670   gucharmap
18671   guile-1.8-libs
18672   libavahi-ui0
18673   libdmx1
18674   libgalago3
18675   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
18676   libgtksourceview2.0-0
18677   liblircclient0
18678   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
18679   libspeexdsp1
18680   libsvga1
18681   rhythmbox
18682   seahorse
18683   sound-juicer
18684   system-config-printer
18685   totem-common
18686   transmission-gtk
18687   vinagre
18688   vino
18689 </p></blockquote>
18690
18691 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
18692
18693 <blockquote><p>
18694   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
18695 </p></blockquote>
18696
18697 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
18698
18699 <blockquote><p>
18700 [nothing]
18701 </p></blockquote>
18702
18703 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
18704
18705 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
18706
18707 <blockquote><p>
18708   ksmserver
18709 </p></blockquote>
18710
18711 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
18712
18713 <blockquote><p>
18714   kwin
18715   network-manager-kde
18716 </p></blockquote>
18717
18718 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
18719
18720 <blockquote><p>
18721   arts
18722   dolphin
18723   freespacenotifier
18724   google-gadgets-gst
18725   google-gadgets-xul
18726   kappfinder
18727   kcalc
18728   kcharselect
18729   kde-core
18730   kde-plasma-desktop
18731   kde-standard
18732   kde-window-manager
18733   kdeartwork
18734   kdeartwork-emoticons
18735   kdeartwork-style
18736   kdeartwork-theme-icon
18737   kdebase
18738   kdebase-apps
18739   kdebase-workspace
18740   kdebase-workspace-bin
18741   kdebase-workspace-data
18742   kdeeject
18743   kdelibs
18744   kdeplasma-addons
18745   kdeutils
18746   kdewallpapers
18747   kdf
18748   kfloppy
18749   kgpg
18750   khelpcenter4
18751   kinfocenter
18752   konq-plugins-l10n
18753   konqueror-nsplugins
18754   kscreensaver
18755   kscreensaver-xsavers
18756   ktimer
18757   kwrite
18758   libgle3
18759   libkde4-ruby1.8
18760   libkonq5
18761   libkonq5-templates
18762   libnetpbm10
18763   libplasma-ruby
18764   libplasma-ruby1.8
18765   libqt4-ruby1.8
18766   marble-data
18767   marble-plugins
18768   netpbm
18769   nuvola-icon-theme
18770   plasma-dataengines-workspace
18771   plasma-desktop
18772   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
18773   plasma-runners-addons
18774   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
18775   plasma-scriptengine-python
18776   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
18777   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
18778   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
18779   plasma-scriptengines
18780   plasma-wallpapers-addons
18781   plasma-widget-folderview
18782   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
18783   ruby
18784   sweeper
18785   update-notifier-kde
18786   xscreensaver-data-extra
18787   xscreensaver-gl
18788   xscreensaver-gl-extra
18789   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
18790 </p></blockquote>
18791
18792 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
18793
18794 <blockquote><p>
18795   ark
18796   google-gadgets-common
18797   google-gadgets-qt
18798   htdig
18799   kate
18800   kdebase-bin
18801   kdebase-data
18802   kdepasswd
18803   kfind
18804   klipper
18805   konq-plugins
18806   konqueror
18807   ksysguard
18808   ksysguardd
18809   libarchive1
18810   libcln6
18811   libeet1
18812   libeina-svn-06
18813   libggadget-1.0-0b
18814   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
18815   libgps19
18816   libkdecorations4
18817   libkephal4
18818   libkonq4
18819   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
18820   libkscreensaver5
18821   libksgrd4
18822   libksignalplotter4
18823   libkunitconversion4
18824   libkwineffects1a
18825   libmarblewidget4
18826   libntrack-qt4-1
18827   libntrack0
18828   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
18829   libplasmaclock4a
18830   libplasmagenericshell4
18831   libprocesscore4a
18832   libprocessui4a
18833   libqalculate5
18834   libqedje0a
18835   libqtruby4shared2
18836   libqzion0a
18837   libruby1.8
18838   libscim8c2a
18839   libsmokekdecore4-3
18840   libsmokekdeui4-3
18841   libsmokekfile3
18842   libsmokekhtml3
18843   libsmokekio3
18844   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
18845   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
18846   libsmokekparts3
18847   libsmokektexteditor3
18848   libsmokekutils3
18849   libsmokenepomuk3
18850   libsmokephonon3
18851   libsmokeplasma3
18852   libsmokeqtcore4-3
18853   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
18854   libsmokeqtgui4-3
18855   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
18856   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
18857   libsmokeqtscript4-3
18858   libsmokeqtsql4-3
18859   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
18860   libsmokeqttest4-3
18861   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
18862   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
18863   libsmokeqtxml4-3
18864   libsmokesolid3
18865   libsmokesoprano3
18866   libtaskmanager4a
18867   libtidy-0.99-0
18868   libweather-ion4a
18869   libxklavier16
18870   libxxf86misc1
18871   okteta
18872   oxygencursors
18873   plasma-dataengines-addons
18874   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
18875   plasma-widget-lancelot
18876   plasma-widgets-addons
18877   plasma-widgets-workspace
18878   polkit-kde-1
18879   ruby1.8
18880   systemsettings
18881   update-notifier-common
18882 </p></blockquote>
18883
18884 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
18885 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
18886 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
18887 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
18888
18889       </div>
18890       <div class="tags">
18891
18892
18893         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>.
18894
18895
18896       </div>
18897     </div>
18898     <div class="padding"></div>
18899
18900     <div class="entry">
18901       <div class="title">
18902         <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>
18903       </div>
18904       <div class="date">
18905         22nd November 2010
18906       </div>
18907       <div class="body">
18908         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
18909 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
18910 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
18911 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
18912 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
18913 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
18914 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
18915 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
18916 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
18917
18918 <p>I found
18919 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
18920 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
18921 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
18922 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
18923 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
18924 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
18925
18926 <pre>
18927 #!/bin/sh
18928
18929 # Based on
18930 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
18931
18932 set -e
18933 set -x
18934
18935 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
18936     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
18937     exit 1
18938 else
18939     host="$1"
18940 fi
18941
18942 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
18943     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
18944     exit 1
18945 fi
18946
18947 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
18948 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
18949 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
18950 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
18951
18952 img=$host.img
18953 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
18954 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
18955
18956 parted $img mklabel msdos
18957 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
18958 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
18959 parted $img set 1 boot on
18960
18961 modprobe dm-mod
18962 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
18963 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
18964
18965 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
18966 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
18967 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
18968
18969 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
18970 losetup -d /dev/loop0
18971 </pre>
18972
18973 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
18974 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
18975
18976 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
18977 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
18978 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
18979 seem to work just fine.</p>
18980
18981       </div>
18982       <div class="tags">
18983
18984
18985         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>.
18986
18987
18988       </div>
18989     </div>
18990     <div class="padding"></div>
18991
18992     <div class="entry">
18993       <div class="title">
18994         <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>
18995       </div>
18996       <div class="date">
18997         20th November 2010
18998       </div>
18999       <div class="body">
19000         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
19001 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
19002 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
19003 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
19004
19005 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
19006 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
19007 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
19008
19009 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
19010
19011 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
19012
19013 <blockquote><p>
19014   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
19015   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
19016   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
19017   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
19018   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
19019   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
19020   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
19021   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
19022   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
19023   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
19024   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
19025   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
19026   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
19027   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
19028   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
19029   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
19030   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
19031   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
19032   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
19033   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
19034   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
19035   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
19036   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
19037   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
19038   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
19039   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
19040   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
19041   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
19042   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
19043   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
19044   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
19045   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
19046   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
19047   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
19048   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
19049   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
19050   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
19051   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
19052   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
19053   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
19054   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
19055   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
19056   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
19057   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
19058   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
19059   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
19060   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
19061   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
19062   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
19063   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
19064   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
19065   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
19066   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
19067   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
19068   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
19069   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
19070   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
19071   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
19072   zip
19073 </p></blockquote>
19074
19075 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
19076
19077 <blockquote><p>
19078   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
19079   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
19080   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
19081   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
19082   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
19083   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
19084   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
19085   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
19086   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
19087   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
19088   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
19089   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
19090   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
19091   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
19092   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
19093   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
19094   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
19095   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
19096   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
19097   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
19098   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
19099   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
19100   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
19101   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
19102   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
19103   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
19104   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
19105   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
19106   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
19107 </p></blockquote>
19108
19109 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
19110
19111 <blockquote><p>
19112   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
19113 </p></blockquote>
19114
19115 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
19116
19117 <blockquote><p>
19118 [nothing]
19119 </p></blockquote>
19120
19121 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
19122
19123 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
19124
19125 <blockquote><p>
19126   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
19127   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
19128   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
19129   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
19130   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
19131   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
19132   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
19133   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
19134   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
19135   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
19136   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
19137   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
19138   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
19139   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
19140   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
19141   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
19142   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
19143   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
19144   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
19145   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
19146   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
19147   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
19148   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
19149   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
19150   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
19151   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
19152   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
19153   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
19154   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
19155   ttf-sazanami-gothic
19156 </p></blockquote>
19157
19158 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
19159
19160 <blockquote><p>
19161   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
19162   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
19163   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
19164   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
19165   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
19166   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
19167   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
19168   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
19169   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
19170   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
19171   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
19172   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
19173   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
19174   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
19175   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
19176   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
19177   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
19178   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
19179   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
19180   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
19181   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
19182   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
19183   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
19184   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
19185   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
19186   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
19187   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
19188   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
19189   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
19190   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
19191   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
19192   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
19193   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
19194 </p></blockquote>
19195
19196 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
19197
19198 <blockquote><p>
19199   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
19200   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
19201   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
19202   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
19203   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
19204   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
19205   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
19206 </p></blockquote>
19207
19208 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
19209
19210 <blockquote><p>
19211   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
19212 </p></blockquote>
19213
19214       </div>
19215       <div class="tags">
19216
19217
19218         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>.
19219
19220
19221       </div>
19222     </div>
19223     <div class="padding"></div>
19224
19225     <div class="entry">
19226       <div class="title">
19227         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
19228       </div>
19229       <div class="date">
19230         20th November 2010
19231       </div>
19232       <div class="body">
19233         <p>Answering
19234 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
19235 call from the Gnash project</a> for
19236 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
19237 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
19238 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
19239 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
19240 releases out more often.</p>
19241
19242 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
19243 I have considered setting up a <a
19244 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
19245 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
19246 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
19247 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
19248 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
19249 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
19250 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
19251 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
19252 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
19253 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
19254 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
19255 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
19256
19257       </div>
19258       <div class="tags">
19259
19260
19261         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>.
19262
19263
19264       </div>
19265     </div>
19266     <div class="padding"></div>
19267
19268     <div class="entry">
19269       <div class="title">
19270         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
19271       </div>
19272       <div class="date">
19273          9th November 2010
19274       </div>
19275       <div class="body">
19276         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
19277
19278 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
19279 3D linked in from
19280 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
19281 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
19282
19283       </div>
19284       <div class="tags">
19285
19286
19287         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>.
19288
19289
19290       </div>
19291     </div>
19292     <div class="padding"></div>
19293
19294     <div class="entry">
19295       <div class="title">
19296         <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>
19297       </div>
19298       <div class="date">
19299          7th November 2010
19300       </div>
19301       <div class="body">
19302         <p>Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
19303 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> DVD, which is
19304 supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
19305 needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard.  Even
19306 schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
19307 working using this DVD.</p>
19308
19309 <p>The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
19310 installing recommended packages by default.  We want the same set of
19311 packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
19312 that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD.  I created
19313 a patch for debian-cd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/601203">BTS
19314 report #601203</a> to do this, and since this change was applied to
19315 the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.</p>
19316
19317 <p>A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
19318 the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
19319 those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
19320 Debian archive.</p>
19321
19322 <p>Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
19323 were using most space.  A few large packages are well know;
19324 openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont.  But I also
19325 discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB.
19326 The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
19327 when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were
19328 the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
19329 I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
19330 our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
19331 documentation.  Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
19332 which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
19333 free X driver should work.</p>
19334
19335 <p>With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
19336 desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
19337 DVD more useful again.</p>
19338
19339       </div>
19340       <div class="tags">
19341
19342
19343         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>.
19344
19345
19346       </div>
19347     </div>
19348     <div class="padding"></div>
19349
19350     <div class="entry">
19351       <div class="title">
19352         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
19353       </div>
19354       <div class="date">
19355         24th October 2010
19356       </div>
19357       <div class="body">
19358         <p>Some updates.</p>
19359
19360 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
19361 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
19362 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
19363 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
19364 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
19365 :)</p>
19366
19367 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
19368 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
19369 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
19370 It is called
19371 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
19372 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
19373 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
19374 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
19375 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
19376 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
19377
19378 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
19379 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
19380 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
19381 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
19382 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
19383 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
19384 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
19385 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
19386 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
19387 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
19388
19389       </div>
19390       <div class="tags">
19391
19392
19393         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>.
19394
19395
19396       </div>
19397     </div>
19398     <div class="padding"></div>
19399
19400     <div class="entry">
19401       <div class="title">
19402         <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>
19403       </div>
19404       <div class="date">
19405         19th October 2010
19406       </div>
19407       <div class="body">
19408         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is the
19409 most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation. It
19410 has done great so far, but there is still far to go, and recently its
19411 funding has dried up.  I believe AVM2 support in Gnash is vital to the
19412 continued progress of the project, as more and more sites show up with
19413 AVM2 flash files.</p>
19414
19415 <p>To try to get funding for developing such support, I have started
19416 <a href="http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">a pledge</a> with the
19417 following text:</P>
19418
19419 <p><blockquote>
19420
19421   <p>"I will pay 100$ to the Gnash project to develop AVM2 support but
19422   only if 10 other people will do the same."</p>
19423
19424   <p>- Petter Reinholdtsen, free software developer</p>
19425
19426   <p>Deadline to sign up by: 24th December 2010</p>
19427
19428   <p>The Gnash project need to get support for the new Flash file
19429   format AVM2 to work with a lot of sites using Flash on the
19430   web. Gnash already work with a lot of Flash sites using the old AVM1
19431   format, but more and more sites are using the AVM2 format these
19432   days. The project web page is available from
19433   http://www.getgnash.org/ . Gnash is a free software implementation
19434   of Adobe Flash, allowing those of us that do not accept the terms of
19435   the Adobe Flash license to get access to Flash sites.</p>
19436
19437   <p>The project need funding to get developers to put aside enough
19438   time to develop the AVM2 support, and this pledge is my way to try
19439   to get this to happen.</p>
19440
19441   <p>The project accept donations via the OpenMediaNow foundation,
19442   <a href="http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32">http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32</a> .</p>
19443
19444 </blockquote></p>
19445
19446 <p>I hope you will support this effort too.  I hope more than 10
19447 people will participate to make this happen.  The more money the
19448 project gets, the more features it can develop using these funds.
19449 :)</p>
19450
19451       </div>
19452       <div class="tags">
19453
19454
19455         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>.
19456
19457
19458       </div>
19459     </div>
19460     <div class="padding"></div>
19461
19462     <div class="entry">
19463       <div class="title">
19464         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_version_of_a_Perl_library_to_control_the_Spykee_robot.html">First version of a Perl library to control the Spykee robot</a>
19465       </div>
19466       <div class="date">
19467          9th October 2010
19468       </div>
19469       <div class="body">
19470         <p>This summer I got the chance to buy cheap Spykee robots, and since
19471 then I have worked on getting Linux software in place to control them.
19472 The firmware for the robot is available from the producer, and using
19473 that source it was trivial to figure out the protocol specification.
19474 I've started on a perl library to control it, and made some demo
19475 programs using this perl library to allow one to control the
19476 robots.</p>
19477
19478 <p>The library is quite functional already, and capable of controlling
19479 the driving, fetching video, uploading MP3s and play them.  There are
19480 a few less important features too.</p>
19481
19482 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I ran out of time to spend on this project,
19483 but I never got around to releasing the current source.  I decided
19484 today that it was time to do something about it, and uploaded the
19485 source to my Debian package store at people.skolelinux.org.</p>
19486
19487 <p>Because it was simpler for me, I made a Debian package and
19488 published the source and deb.  If you got a spykee robot, grab the
19489 source or binary package:</p>
19490
19491 <p><ul>
19492 <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>
19493 <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>
19494 <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>
19495 </ul></p>
19496
19497 <p>If you are interested in helping out with developing this library,
19498 please let me know.</p>
19499
19500       </div>
19501       <div class="tags">
19502
19503
19504         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>.
19505
19506
19507       </div>
19508     </div>
19509     <div class="padding"></div>
19510
19511     <div class="entry">
19512       <div class="title">
19513         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html">Links for 2010-10-03</a>
19514       </div>
19515       <div class="date">
19516          3rd October 2010
19517       </div>
19518       <div class="body">
19519         <p><ul>
19520
19521 <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
19522 is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly</a></li>
19523
19524 <li>Scanner looking under clothes
19525 <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/10/03/nyheter/utenriks/reise/overvakingskamera/flyplasser/13667192/">has
19526 already been misused at Heathrow</a>.</li>
19527
19528 <li><a href="http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Landell">Landell
19529 Webcasting</a> - interesting alternative for
19530 <ahref="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">DVSwitch</a> with
19531 simple setup.
19532
19533 </ul></p>
19534
19535       </div>
19536       <div class="tags">
19537
19538
19539         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>.
19540
19541
19542       </div>
19543     </div>
19544     <div class="padding"></div>
19545
19546     <div class="entry">
19547       <div class="title">
19548         <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>
19549       </div>
19550       <div class="date">
19551          9th September 2010
19552       </div>
19553       <div class="body">
19554         <p>A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital
19555 camera, a Canon IXUS 130.  It was instructive and very disturbing to
19556 be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to
19557 specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera.
19558 Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras
19559 are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway.  What is the
19560 problem, you might ask?  It is software patents, MPEG-4, H.264 and the
19561 MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences
19562 without asking for permissions that is at risk.
19563
19564 <p>On page 27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is
19565 written:</p>
19566
19567 <blockquote>
19568 <p>This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard
19569 and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding
19570 MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and
19571 non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the
19572 AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video.</p>
19573
19574 <p>No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4
19575 standard.</p>
19576 </blockquote>
19577
19578 <p>In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology
19579 (MPEG-4/H.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and
19580 non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations
19581 holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.</p>
19582
19583 <p>This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to
19584 read
19585 "<a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA">Why
19586 Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the
19587 MPEG-LA</a>" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and
19588 "<a href="http://webmink.com/2010/09/03/h-264-and-foss/">H.264 Is Not
19589 The Sort Of Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps to learn more about
19590 the issue.  The solution is to support the
19591 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
19592 open standards</a> for video, like <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg
19593 Theora</a>, and avoid MPEG-4 and H.264 if you can.</p>
19594
19595       </div>
19596       <div class="tags">
19597
19598
19599         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
19600
19601
19602       </div>
19603     </div>
19604     <div class="padding"></div>
19605
19606     <div class="entry">
19607       <div class="title">
19608         <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>
19609       </div>
19610       <div class="date">
19611          4th September 2010
19612       </div>
19613       <div class="body">
19614         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
19615 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
19616 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
19617 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
19618 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
19619 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
19620 installed.</p>
19621
19622 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
19623 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
19624 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
19625 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
19626 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
19627 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
19628 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
19629 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
19630 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
19631
19632 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
19633 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
19634 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
19635 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
19636 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
19637 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
19638 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
19639 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
19640 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
19641 pages they want to visit.</p>
19642
19643 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
19644 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
19645 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
19646 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
19647 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
19648 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
19649 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
19650 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
19651 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
19652 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
19653 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
19654
19655       </div>
19656       <div class="tags">
19657
19658
19659         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>.
19660
19661
19662       </div>
19663     </div>
19664     <div class="padding"></div>
19665
19666     <div class="entry">
19667       <div class="title">
19668         <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>
19669       </div>
19670       <div class="date">
19671          1st September 2010
19672       </div>
19673       <div class="body">
19674         <p>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application.  The last few
19675 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
19676 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
19677 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
19678 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
19679 allow me to drive the robot around.  I picked PerlQt as I have had
19680 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
19681 browsing the web for examples.  Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
19682 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
19683 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
19684 libqt-perl.  Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
19685 drive around.</p>
19686
19687 <p>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
19688 controlling the robot.  Here is an small example on how to use it:</p>
19689
19690 <p><pre>
19691 use Spykee;
19692 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
19693 my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
19694 my $spykee = Spykee->new();
19695 $spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
19696 $spykee->left();
19697 sleep 2;
19698 $spykee->right();
19699 sleep 2;
19700 $spykee->forward();
19701 sleep 2;
19702 $spykee->back();
19703 sleep 2;
19704 $spykee->stop();
19705 </pre></p>
19706
19707 <p>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
19708 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
19709 implement the protocol used by the robot.  I've implemented several of
19710 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
19711 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote.  First I
19712 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
19713 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
19714 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
19715 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
19716 going. :).</p>
19717
19718 <p>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
19719 where to make it available first.  I will add a link to
19720 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/">the NUUG wiki</a> for
19721 those that want to check back later to find it.</p>
19722
19723       </div>
19724       <div class="tags">
19725
19726
19727         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>.
19728
19729
19730       </div>
19731     </div>
19732     <div class="padding"></div>
19733
19734     <div class="entry">
19735       <div class="title">
19736         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken hard link handling with sshfs</a>
19737       </div>
19738       <div class="date">
19739         30th August 2010
19740       </div>
19741       <div class="body">
19742         <p>Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
19743 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">previous
19744 post about sshfs</a>.  He reported another problem with sshfs.  It
19745 fail to handle hard links properly.  A simple way to spot this is to
19746 look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree.  These should have
19747 a link count >1, but on sshfs the count is 1.  I just tested to see
19748 what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:</p>
19749
19750 <pre>
19751 % ln foo bar
19752 ln: creating hard link `bar' => `foo': Function not implemented
19753 %
19754 </pre>
19755
19756 <p>I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
19757 system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
19758 avoid surprised unix programs.  Not as useful as working file locking
19759 and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
19760 nevertheless. :)</p>
19761
19762 <p>The latest version of the file system test code is available via
19763 git from
19764 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a></p>
19765
19766       </div>
19767       <div class="tags">
19768
19769
19770         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>.
19771
19772
19773       </div>
19774     </div>
19775     <div class="padding"></div>
19776
19777     <div class="entry">
19778       <div class="title">
19779         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken umask handling with sshfs</a>
19780       </div>
19781       <div class="date">
19782         26th August 2010
19783       </div>
19784       <div class="body">
19785         <p>My file system sematics program
19786 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">presented
19787 a few days ago</a> is very useful to verify that a file system can
19788 work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit.  I'm
19789 looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
19790 University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs.  My friend
19791 Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
19792 Edu, but stopped because of problems.  I asked today what the problems
19793 where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
19794 Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
19795 script:</p>
19796
19797 <pre>
19798 mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
19799   mode_t retval = 0;
19800   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
19801   if (-1 != fd) {
19802     unlink(name);
19803     struct stat statbuf;
19804     if (-1 != fstat(fd, &statbuf)) {
19805       retval = statbuf.st_mode & 0x1ff;
19806     }
19807     close(fd);
19808   }
19809   return retval;
19810 }
19811
19812 /* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
19813 int test_umask(void) {
19814   printf("info: testing umask effect on file creation\n");
19815
19816   mode_t orig_umask = umask(000);
19817   mode_t newmode;
19818   if (0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
19819     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 000\n",
19820            newmode);
19821   }
19822   umask(007);
19823   if (0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
19824     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 007\n",
19825            newmode);
19826   }
19827
19828   umask (orig_umask);
19829   return 0;
19830 }
19831
19832 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
19833   [...]
19834   test_umask();
19835   return 0;
19836 }
19837 </pre>
19838
19839 <p>Sure enough.  On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:</p>
19840
19841 <pre>
19842 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
19843 info: testing symlink creation
19844 info: testing subdirectory creation
19845 info: testing fcntl locking
19846   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
19847   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
19848   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
19849   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
19850   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
19851   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
19852 info: testing umask effect on file creation
19853 </pre>
19854
19855 <p>When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this
19856 result:</p>
19857
19858 <pre>
19859 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
19860 info: testing symlink creation
19861 info: testing subdirectory creation
19862 info: testing fcntl locking
19863   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
19864   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
19865   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
19866   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
19867   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
19868   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
19869 info: testing umask effect on file creation
19870   error: Wrong file mode 644 when creating using mode 666 and umask 000
19871   error: Wrong file mode 640 when creating using mode 666 and umask 007
19872 </pre>
19873
19874 <p>So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a
19875 Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home
19876 directory.</p>
19877
19878 <p>Update 2010-08-26: Reported the issue in
19879 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/594498">BTS report #594498</a></p>
19880
19881 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
19882 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
19883 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
19884
19885       </div>
19886       <div class="tags">
19887
19888
19889         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>.
19890
19891
19892       </div>
19893     </div>
19894     <div class="padding"></div>
19895
19896     <div class="entry">
19897       <div class="title">
19898         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html">Rob Weir: How to Crush Dissent</a>
19899       </div>
19900       <div class="date">
19901         15th August 2010
19902       </div>
19903       <div class="body">
19904         <p>I found the notes from Rob Weir on
19905 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/VGb23-kta8c/how-to-crush-dissent.html">how
19906 to crush dissent</a> matching my own thoughts on the matter quite
19907 well.  Highly recommended for those wondering which road our society
19908 should go down.  In my view we have been heading the wrong way for a
19909 long time.</p>
19910
19911       </div>
19912       <div class="tags">
19913
19914
19915         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>.
19916
19917
19918       </div>
19919     </div>
19920     <div class="padding"></div>
19921
19922     <div class="entry">
19923       <div class="title">
19924         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html">No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients</a>
19925       </div>
19926       <div class="date">
19927          9th August 2010
19928       </div>
19929       <div class="body">
19930         <p>As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
19931 Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
19932 configuration settings on the clients.  I believe the work to be
19933 mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
19934 generated configuration.</p>
19935
19936 <p>What is the point, you might ask?  The point is to allow a Debian
19937 Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
19938 without any manual configuration.</p>
19939
19940 <p>This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
19941 the University of Oslo using PXE.  With the PXE installation, I am
19942 asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
19943 layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
19944 accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
19945 popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret).  After answering
19946 these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
19947 after around 50 minutes it is done.  I press enter to finish the
19948 installation, and the machine reboots into KDE.  When the machine is
19949 ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
19950 username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
19951 been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
19952 same username and password to the KDE 4.4 desktop.  At no point during
19953 this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
19954 required configuration was dynamically detected using information
19955 fetched via DHCP and DNS.  The roaming workstation is now ready for
19956 use.</p>
19957
19958 <p>How was this done, you might wonder?  First of all, here is the
19959 list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
19960 working properly out of the box:</p>
19961
19962 <ul>
19963 <li>IP address/netmask and DNS server.</li>
19964 <li>Web proxy URL.</li>
19965 <li>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).</li>
19966 <li>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.</li>
19967 <li>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)</li>
19968 <li>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)</li>
19969 <li>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)</li>
19970 </ul>
19971
19972 <p>(Hm, did I forget anything?  Let me knew if I did.)</p>
19973
19974 <p>The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
19975 machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
19976 administrators to track their machines.  Since yesterday, everything
19977 but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
19978 and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.</p>
19979
19980 <p>The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
19981 When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
19982 http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
19983 configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
19984 /etc/apt/apt.conf.  I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
19985 hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
19986 it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
19987 proxy present on the new network when it moves around.</p>
19988
19989 <p>The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
19990 configuration are generated using DNS information at boot.  First the
19991 installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain.  If
19992 not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead.  If an
19993 LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
19994 attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
19995 determine which LDAP base to use for NSS.  If there are several
19996 namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
19997 LDAP subtree is used as the base.  If defaultNamingContext is missing,
19998 the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
19999 object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
20000 such an object is used as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
20001 search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
20002 for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record.  I've been unable to find a way to
20003 look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
20004 current DNS domain is used.</p>
20005
20006 <p>For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
20007 for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
20008 found.  This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
20009 Oslo.  A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
20010 server, but have not been implemented yet.  I decided to fetch and
20011 save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
20012 different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
20013 log in nor the passwords required to log in.  Usernames and passwords
20014 will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
20015 network, and will not change as the laptop move around.  For a
20016 non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
20017 supposed to stay in place it should not matter much.  Perhaps we
20018 should switch those to use sssd too?</p>
20019
20020 <p>The user's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
20021 located when the user logs in for the first time.  The LDAP server is
20022 consulted to look for the user's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
20023 attribute is used if found.  If it isn't found, the home directory
20024 path fetched from NSS is used instead.  Assuming the path is of the
20025 form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
20026 DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
20027 smb://server.domain/username.  This algorithm works for both Debian
20028 edu and the University of Oslo.  Perhaps there are better attributes
20029 to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
20030 do for now. :)</p>
20031
20032 <p>This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
20033 into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
20034 more flexible than before.  I suspect it will also work for thin
20035 client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
20036 existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
20037 yet.</p>
20038
20039 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
20040 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
20041
20042 <p>Update 2010-08-09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
20043 detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
20044 before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name.  Will have to
20045 implement it for Debian Edu. :)</p>
20046
20047       </div>
20048       <div class="tags">
20049
20050
20051         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>.
20052
20053
20054       </div>
20055     </div>
20056     <div class="padding"></div>
20057
20058     <div class="entry">
20059       <div class="title">
20060         <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>
20061       </div>
20062       <div class="date">
20063          8th August 2010
20064       </div>
20065       <div class="body">
20066         <p>A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
20067 Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
20068 Edu/Skolelinux machines.  This was thought to be no problem, as the
20069 access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
20070 knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
20071 mount home directories without any problems.  But, after months of
20072 struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.</p>
20073
20074 <p>The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
20075 directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
20076 work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
20077 underlying file system is a unix file system.  When using a Windows
20078 file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
20079 and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
20080 want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.</p>
20081
20082 <p>As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
20083 with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
20084 OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
20085 it should.  If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
20086 help you find your way out again.  This is the fs-test.c source:</p>
20087
20088 <pre>
20089 /*
20090  * Some tests to check the file system sematics.  Used to verify that
20091  * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
20092  * directory.
20093  * License: GPL v2 or later
20094  *
20095  * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
20096  * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
20097 */
20098
20099 #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
20100 #define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE 1
20101 #define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE 1
20102
20103 #define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
20104
20105 #include &lt;errno.h>
20106 #include &lt;fcntl.h>
20107 #include &lt;stdio.h>
20108 #include &lt;string.h>
20109 #include &lt;stdlib.h>
20110 #include &lt;sys/file.h>
20111 #include &lt;sys/stat.h>
20112 #include &lt;sys/types.h>
20113 #include &lt;unistd.h>
20114
20115 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
20116 /*
20117  * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
20118  * package and linking with -lsqlite3.  A more low level test is
20119  * below.
20120  * See also &lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 >.
20121  */
20122 #include &lt;sqlite3.h>
20123 #define CREATE_TABLE_USERS                                              \
20124   "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); "
20125 int test_sqlite_open(void) {
20126   char *zErrMsg;
20127   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
20128   sqlite3 *db=NULL;
20129   unlink(name);
20130   int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &db);
20131   if( rc ){
20132     printf("error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
20133     sqlite3_close(db);
20134     return -1;
20135   }
20136
20137   /* create tables */
20138   rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,  0, &zErrMsg);
20139   if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
20140     printf("error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n", zErrMsg);
20141     sqlite3_close(db);
20142     return -1;
20143   }
20144   printf("info: sqlite worked\n");
20145   sqlite3_close(db);
20146   return 0;
20147 }
20148 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
20149
20150 /*
20151  * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3.  This
20152  * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows 2003.  This is
20153  * done in the sqlite3 library.
20154  * See also
20155  * &lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html> and the
20156  * POSIX specification
20157  * &lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html>.
20158  */
20159 int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
20160   struct flock fl;
20161   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
20162   unlink(name);
20163   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
20164   printf("info: testing fcntl locking\n");
20165
20166   fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
20167   fl.l_pid    = getpid();
20168   printf("  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
20169   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
20170   fl.l_len    = 1;
20171   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
20172   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
20173
20174   printf("  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
20175   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
20176   fl.l_len    = 510;
20177   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
20178   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
20179
20180   printf("  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824");
20181   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
20182   fl.l_len    = 1;
20183   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
20184   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
20185
20186   printf("  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
20187   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
20188   fl.l_len    = 1;
20189   fl.l_type   = F_WRLCK;
20190   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
20191
20192   printf("  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
20193   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
20194   fl.l_len    = 510;
20195   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
20196
20197   printf("  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824");
20198   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
20199   fl.l_len    = 2;
20200   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
20201   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
20202
20203   close(fd);
20204   return 0;
20205 }
20206
20207 /*
20208  * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
20209  * below them.  This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
20210  * Mounting with option 'sync' seem to solve this problem while
20211  * slowing down file operations.
20212  */
20213 int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
20214 #define LEVELS 5
20215   char *path = strdup("test");
20216   char *dirs[LEVELS];
20217   int level;
20218   printf("info: testing subdirectory creation\n");
20219   for (level = 0; level &lt; LEVELS; level++) {
20220     char *newpath = NULL;
20221     if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777)) {
20222       printf("  error: Unable to create directory '%s': %s\n",
20223              path, strerror(errno));
20224       break;
20225     }
20226     asprintf(&newpath, "%s/%s", path, "test");
20227     free(path);
20228     path = newpath;
20229   }
20230   return 0;
20231 }
20232
20233 /*
20234  * Test if symlinks can be created.  This was a problem detected with
20235  * KDE.
20236  */
20237 int test_symlinks(void) {
20238   printf("info: testing symlink creation\n");
20239   unlink("symlink");
20240   if (-1 == symlink("file", "symlink"))
20241     printf("  error: Unable to create symlink\n");
20242   return 0;
20243 }
20244
20245 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
20246   printf("Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n");
20247   test_symlinks();
20248   test_subdirectory_creation();
20249 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
20250   test_sqlite_open();
20251 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
20252   test_gcompris_locking();
20253   return 0;
20254 }
20255 </pre>
20256
20257 <p>When everything is working, it should print something like
20258 this:</p>
20259
20260 <pre>
20261 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
20262 info: testing symlink creation
20263 info: testing subdirectory creation
20264 info: sqlite worked
20265 info: testing fcntl locking
20266   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
20267   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
20268   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
20269   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
20270   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
20271   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
20272 </pre>
20273
20274 <p>I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
20275 of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
20276 read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
20277 the read-only lock (while Windows do not).  Another was a bug in the
20278 CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
20279 meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
20280 OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
20281 not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.</p>
20282
20283 <p>Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
20284 it. :)</p>
20285
20286 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
20287 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
20288 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
20289
20290       </div>
20291       <div class="tags">
20292
20293
20294         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>.
20295
20296
20297       </div>
20298     </div>
20299     <div class="padding"></div>
20300
20301     <div class="entry">
20302       <div class="title">
20303         <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>
20304       </div>
20305       <div class="date">
20306          7th August 2010
20307       </div>
20308       <div class="body">
20309         <p>A few days ago, I
20310 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">tried
20311 to install</a> a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
20312 while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
20313 noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
20314 university infrastructure.  It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
20315 that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
20316 connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
20317 itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
20318 around it.  Now I am a huge step further along that road.</p>
20319
20320 <p>With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
20321 workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
20322 university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
20323 servers for Kerberos authentication.  All this without any
20324 configuration at all during installation.  My users home directory got
20325 a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
20326 In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured.  In addition to
20327 this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
20328 proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
20329 /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf.  Iceweasel and KDE is
20330 configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
20331 a proxy when at the university network.  If the machine is moved to a
20332 network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
20333 gave it a IP address.</p>
20334
20335 <p>The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
20336 entry ldap.$domain.  If this do not exist, it look for the
20337 _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
20338 server.  Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
20339 namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
20340 pick the first one as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
20341 algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
20342 uppercase version of $domain.</p>
20343
20344 <p>So, what is not working, you might ask.  SMB mounting my home
20345 directory do not work.  No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
20346 Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
20347 the cause.  These are not properly configured during installation, and
20348 had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
20349 but SMB mounting still do not work. :(</p>
20350
20351 <p>With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
20352 roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
20353 connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
20354 authentication.  It should also work out of the box in a Active
20355 Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
20356 with UID and GID values.</p>
20357
20358 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
20359 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
20360
20361       </div>
20362       <div class="tags">
20363
20364
20365         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>.
20366
20367
20368       </div>
20369     </div>
20370     <div class="padding"></div>
20371
20372     <div class="entry">
20373       <div class="title">
20374         <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>
20375       </div>
20376       <div class="date">
20377          3rd August 2010
20378       </div>
20379       <div class="body">
20380         <p>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
20381 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
20382 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
20383 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
20384 infrastructure.  In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
20385 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
20386 servers.</p>
20387
20388 <p>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
20389 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
20390 /etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
20391 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
20392 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
20393 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
20394 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
20395 .uio.no.</p>
20396
20397 <p>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
20398 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
20399 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
20400 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
20401 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
20402 university servers.</p>
20403
20404 <p>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
20405 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
20406 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
20407 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
20408 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
20409 uses.</p>
20410
20411       </div>
20412       <div class="tags">
20413
20414
20415         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>.
20416
20417
20418       </div>
20419     </div>
20420     <div class="padding"></div>
20421
20422     <div class="entry">
20423       <div class="title">
20424         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
20425       </div>
20426       <div class="date">
20427         27th July 2010
20428       </div>
20429       <div class="body">
20430         <p>I discovered this while doing
20431 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
20432 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
20433 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
20434 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
20435 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
20436
20437 <p>An example is from todays
20438 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
20439 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
20440 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
20441 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
20442 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
20443 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
20444 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
20445
20446 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
20447
20448 <blockquote><pre>
20449 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
20450  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
20451   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
20452 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
20453  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
20454 </pre></blockquote>
20455
20456 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
20457 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
20458 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
20459 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
20460 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
20461 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
20462 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
20463 of dependency loops.</p>
20464
20465 <p>Thanks to
20466 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
20467 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
20468 dependencies
20469 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
20470 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
20471
20472 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
20473 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
20474 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
20475 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
20476 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
20477 it.</p>
20478
20479       </div>
20480       <div class="tags">
20481
20482
20483         Tags: <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>.
20484
20485
20486       </div>
20487     </div>
20488     <div class="padding"></div>
20489
20490     <div class="entry">
20491       <div class="title">
20492         <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>
20493       </div>
20494       <div class="date">
20495         27th July 2010
20496       </div>
20497       <div class="body">
20498         <p>I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
20499 with the next Debian Edu release.  Not nearly done, but one major step
20500 completed.</p>
20501
20502 <blockquote>
20503 <p>This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
20504 release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
20505 install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
20506 of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
20507 user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
20508 longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
20509 Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
20510 language of choice, please let us know too.</p>
20511
20512 <p>In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
20513 artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
20514 and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.</p>
20515
20516 <p>The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
20517 work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
20518 much.</p>
20519
20520 <p>Changes compared to the lenny based version</p>
20521
20522 <ul>
20523 <li>Everything from Debian Squeeze
20524 <ul>
20525   <li>Desktop environment KDE 4.4 => the new KDE desktop in
20526          combination with some new artwork
20527   <li>Web browser Iceweasel 3.5
20528   <li>OpenOffice.org 3.2
20529   <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3
20530   <li>Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2
20531   <li>Image editor Gimp 2.6.10
20532   <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0
20533   <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4
20534   <li>3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)
20535   <li>Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)
20536 </ul></li>
20537 <li>Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
20538     Enabled for:
20539 <ul>
20540   <li>PAM
20541   <li>LDAP
20542   <li>IMAP
20543   <li>SMTP (sender verification)
20544 </ul>
20545 </li>
20546 <li>New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.</li>
20547 <li>Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
20548     fetched from LDAP.</li>
20549 <li>New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.</li>
20550 <li>General cleanup (not finished)</li>
20551 </ul>
20552 <p>The following features are not working as they should</p>
20553
20554 <ul>
20555 <li>No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
20556     scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
20557     for testing.</li>
20558 <li>DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
20559     and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
20560     clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.</li>
20561 <li>The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.</li>
20562 <li>The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.</li>
20563 <li>The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.</li>
20564 <li>Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
20565     netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.</li>
20566 <li>The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
20567     some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
20568     jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.</li>
20569 <li>Some packages lack translations. See
20570     http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
20571     and help out with translations.</li>
20572 </ul>
20573
20574 <p>To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use</p>
20575
20576 <ul>
20577 <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>
20578 <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>
20579 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
20580 </ul>
20581 <p>To download this multiarch dvd release you can use</p>
20582
20583 <ul>
20584 <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>
20585 <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>
20586 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
20587 </ul>
20588
20589 <p>There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
20590 get closer to the final release.</p>
20591
20592 <p>The MD5SUM of these images are</p>
20593
20594 <ul>
20595 <li>3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
20596 <li>22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
20597 </ul>
20598
20599 <p>The SHA1SUM of these images are</p>
20600 <ul>
20601 <li>c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
20602 <li>2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
20603 </ul>
20604 <p>How to report bugs:
20605 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla</p>
20606
20607 <p>Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org</p>
20608 </blockquote>
20609
20610       </div>
20611       <div class="tags">
20612
20613
20614         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
20615
20616
20617       </div>
20618     </div>
20619     <div class="padding"></div>
20620
20621     <div class="entry">
20622       <div class="title">
20623         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_step_closer_to_single_signon_in_Debian_Edu.html">One step closer to single signon in Debian Edu</a>
20624       </div>
20625       <div class="date">
20626         25th July 2010
20627       </div>
20628       <div class="body">
20629         <p>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
20630 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
20631 Edu/Skolelinux into shape.  This future version will use Kerberos for
20632 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
20633 getting rid of password questions one at the time.</p>
20634
20635 <p>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
20636 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
20637 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
20638 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server.  This
20639 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
20640 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
20641 package.  I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.</p>
20642
20643 <p>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
20644 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
20645 password when mounting the SMB volume.  A simple click on the shortcut
20646 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
20647 up. :)</p>
20648
20649 <p>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
20650 Debian Edu.  We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
20651 also Samba.  Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.</p>
20652
20653 <p>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
20654 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
20655 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
20656 the release.  It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
20657 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
20658 time for a alpha0 release today.  As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
20659 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
20660 release another day.</p>
20661
20662 <p>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
20663 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
20664
20665       </div>
20666       <div class="tags">
20667
20668
20669         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>.
20670
20671
20672       </div>
20673     </div>
20674     <div class="padding"></div>
20675
20676     <div class="entry">
20677       <div class="title">
20678         <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>
20679       </div>
20680       <div class="date">
20681         18th July 2010
20682       </div>
20683       <div class="body">
20684         <p>Thanks to
20685 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home">todays
20686 opengeodata blog entry</a>, I just discovered that the
20687 OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
20688 <a href="http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT">support
20689 for calculating routes</a>.  The support is still experimental and
20690 only available from the development server, until more experience is
20691 gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.</p>
20692
20693 <p>Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
20694 was provided by <a href="http://maps.cloudmade.com/">Cloudmade</a>,
20695 but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
20696 the issue.  I've had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
20697 alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
20698 and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
20699 www.openstreetmap.org front page.</p>
20700
20701       </div>
20702       <div class="tags">
20703
20704
20705         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>.
20706
20707
20708       </div>
20709     </div>
20710     <div class="padding"></div>
20711
20712     <div class="entry">
20713       <div class="title">
20714         <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>
20715       </div>
20716       <div class="date">
20717         17th July 2010
20718       </div>
20719       <div class="body">
20720         <p>This is a
20721 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
20722 on my
20723 <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
20724 work</a> on
20725 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
20726 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
20727
20728 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
20729 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
20730 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
20731 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
20732
20733 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
20734 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
20735 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
20736
20737 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
20738
20739 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
20740 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
20741 the web.
20742
20743 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
20744 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
20745 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
20746 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
20747 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
20748 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
20749
20750 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
20751 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
20752 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
20753 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
20754 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
20755 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
20756 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
20757 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
20758 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
20759 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
20760 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
20761 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
20762 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
20763 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
20764 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
20765 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
20766
20767 <blockquote><pre>
20768 ldapsearch -h ldap \
20769   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
20770   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
20771   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
20772   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
20773   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
20774   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
20775
20776 ldapsearch -h ldap \
20777   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
20778   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
20779   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
20780   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
20781   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
20782 </pre></blockquote>
20783
20784 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
20785 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
20786 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
20787 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
20788 also exist.</p>
20789
20790 <blockquote><pre>
20791 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
20792 objectclass: top
20793 objectclass: dnsdomain
20794 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
20795 dc: tjener
20796 arecord: 10.0.2.2
20797 associateddomain: tjener.intern
20798
20799 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
20800 objectclass: top
20801 objectclass: dnsdomain2
20802 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
20803 dc: 2
20804 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
20805 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
20806 </pre></blockquote>
20807
20808 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
20809 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
20810 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
20811 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
20812 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
20813 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
20814 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
20815 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
20816 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
20817 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
20818 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
20819 instead.</p>
20820
20821 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
20822 like this:</p>
20823
20824 <blockquote><pre>
20825 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
20826   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
20827   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
20828   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
20829   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
20830   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
20831
20832 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
20833   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
20834 </pre></blockquote>
20835
20836 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
20837 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
20838 reverse lookups.</p>
20839
20840 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
20841 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
20842 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
20843 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
20844
20845 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
20846 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
20847 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
20848
20849 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
20850 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
20851 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
20852 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
20853 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
20854
20855 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
20856 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
20857 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
20858 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
20859 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
20860
20861 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
20862 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
20863 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
20864 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
20865 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
20866 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
20867
20868 <blockquote><pre>
20869 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
20870     SUP top
20871     AUXILIARY
20872     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
20873           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
20874           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
20875           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
20876           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
20877     ))
20878 </pre></blockquote>
20879
20880 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
20881 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
20882 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
20883 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
20884 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
20885 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
20886
20887 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
20888
20889 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
20890 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
20891 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
20892 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
20893 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
20894
20895 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
20896 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
20897 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
20898 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
20899
20900 <blockquote><pre>
20901 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
20902 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
20903 </pre></blockquote>
20904
20905 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
20906 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
20907 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
20908 search result is this entry:</p>
20909
20910 <blockquote><pre>
20911 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
20912 cn: dhcp
20913 objectClass: top
20914 objectClass: dhcpServer
20915 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
20916 </pre></blockquote>
20917
20918 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
20919 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
20920 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
20921 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
20922 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
20923 The search result is this entry:</p>
20924
20925 <blockquote><pre>
20926 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
20927 cn: DHCP Config
20928 objectClass: top
20929 objectClass: dhcpService
20930 objectClass: dhcpOptions
20931 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
20932 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
20933 dhcpStatements: authoritative
20934 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
20935 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
20936 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
20937 </pre></blockquote>
20938
20939 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
20940 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
20941 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
20942 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
20943 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
20944 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
20945 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
20946 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
20947 related computer objects.</p>
20948
20949 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
20950 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
20951 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
20952 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
20953 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
20954 like:</p>
20955
20956 <blockquote><pre>
20957 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
20958 cn: hostname
20959 objectClass: top
20960 objectClass: dhcpHost
20961 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
20962 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
20963 </pre></blockquote>
20964
20965 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
20966 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
20967 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
20968 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
20969 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
20970 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
20971 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
20972 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
20973 structural object class.
20974
20975 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
20976
20977 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
20978 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
20979 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
20980 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
20981 in the configuration.</p>
20982
20983 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
20984 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
20985 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
20986 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
20987 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
20988 structure.</p>
20989
20990 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
20991 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
20992
20993 <blockquote><pre>
20994 ou=services
20995   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
20996     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
20997     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
20998       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
20999         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
21000     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
21001       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
21002         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
21003     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
21004       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
21005 </pre></blockquote>
21006
21007 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
21008 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
21009 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
21010 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
21011
21012 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
21013 like this:</p>
21014
21015 <blockquote><pre>
21016 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
21017 dc: hostname
21018 objectClass: top
21019 objectClass: dhcpHost
21020 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
21021 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
21022 associateddomain: hostname.intern
21023 arecord: 10.11.12.13
21024 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
21025 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
21026 </pre></blockquote>
21027
21028 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
21029 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
21030 auxiliary object class.</p>
21031
21032       </div>
21033       <div class="tags">
21034
21035
21036         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>.
21037
21038
21039       </div>
21040     </div>
21041     <div class="padding"></div>
21042
21043     <div class="entry">
21044       <div class="title">
21045         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
21046       </div>
21047       <div class="date">
21048         14th July 2010
21049       </div>
21050       <div class="body">
21051         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
21052 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
21053 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
21054 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
21055 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
21056
21057 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
21058 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
21059
21060 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
21061 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
21062 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
21063 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
21064 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
21065 to a slave DNS server.</p>
21066
21067 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
21068 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
21069 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
21070 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
21071 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
21072 seem to work.</p>
21073
21074 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
21075 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
21076 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
21077 this:</p>
21078
21079 <blockquote><pre>
21080   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
21081   cn: hostname
21082   objectClass: dhcphost
21083   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
21084   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
21085   associateddomain: hostname.intern
21086   arecord: 10.11.12.13
21087   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
21088   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
21089   ldapconfigsound: Y
21090 </pre></blockquote>
21091
21092 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
21093 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
21094 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
21095 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
21096
21097 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
21098 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
21099 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
21100 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
21101 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
21102 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
21103 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
21104 might be a good place to put it.</p>
21105
21106 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
21107 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
21108
21109       </div>
21110       <div class="tags">
21111
21112
21113         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>.
21114
21115
21116       </div>
21117     </div>
21118     <div class="padding"></div>
21119
21120     <div class="entry">
21121       <div class="title">
21122         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
21123       </div>
21124       <div class="date">
21125         11th July 2010
21126       </div>
21127       <div class="body">
21128         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
21129 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
21130 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
21131 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
21132
21133 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
21134 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
21135 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
21136 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
21137 LTSP clients.</p>
21138
21139 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
21140 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
21141 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
21142
21143 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
21144 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
21145 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
21146
21147 <blockquote><pre>
21148 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
21149 #
21150 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
21151 #
21152 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
21153 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
21154 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
21155 #
21156 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
21157 # existence of attribute names.
21158 #
21159 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
21160 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
21161 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
21162 #
21163 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
21164 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
21165 #
21166 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
21167 #     SUP top
21168 #     AUXILIARY
21169 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
21170
21171 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
21172 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
21173     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
21174     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
21175         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
21176         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
21177             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
21178             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
21179             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
21180             # bass value on to clients
21181             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
21182         done
21183     done
21184 fi
21185 </pre></blockquote>
21186
21187 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
21188 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
21189 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
21190 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
21191 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
21192
21193 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
21194 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
21195
21196 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
21197 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
21198 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
21199 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
21200 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
21201 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
21202
21203       </div>
21204       <div class="tags">
21205
21206
21207         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>.
21208
21209
21210       </div>
21211     </div>
21212     <div class="padding"></div>
21213
21214     <div class="entry">
21215       <div class="title">
21216         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
21217       </div>
21218       <div class="date">
21219          9th July 2010
21220       </div>
21221       <div class="body">
21222         <p>Since
21223 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
21224 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
21225 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
21226 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
21227 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
21228 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
21229 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
21230 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
21231 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
21232 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
21233 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
21234 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
21235 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
21236
21237       </div>
21238       <div class="tags">
21239
21240
21241         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>.
21242
21243
21244       </div>
21245     </div>
21246     <div class="padding"></div>
21247
21248     <div class="entry">
21249       <div class="title">
21250         <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>
21251       </div>
21252       <div class="date">
21253          3rd July 2010
21254       </div>
21255       <div class="body">
21256         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
21257 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
21258 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
21259 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
21260 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
21261 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
21262 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
21263 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
21264
21265 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
21266 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
21267 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
21268 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
21269 publish the difference.</p>
21270
21271 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
21272
21273 <blockquote><p>
21274   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
21275   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
21276   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
21277   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
21278   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
21279   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
21280   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
21281   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
21282 </p></blockquote>
21283
21284 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
21285
21286 <blockquote><p>
21287   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
21288   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
21289   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
21290   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
21291   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
21292   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
21293   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
21294   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
21295   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
21296   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
21297   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
21298   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
21299   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
21300   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
21301   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
21302   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
21303   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
21304   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
21305   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
21306   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
21307 </p></blockquote>
21308
21309 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
21310
21311 <blockquote><p>
21312   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
21313   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
21314   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
21315   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
21316   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
21317   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
21318   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
21319   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
21320   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
21321   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
21322   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
21323   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
21324   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
21325   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
21326   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
21327   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
21328   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
21329   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
21330   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
21331   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
21332   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
21333 </p></blockquote>
21334
21335 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
21336
21337 <blockquote><p>
21338   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
21339   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
21340   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
21341 </p></blockquote>
21342
21343 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
21344 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
21345 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
21346 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
21347 the difference somewhat.
21348
21349       </div>
21350       <div class="tags">
21351
21352
21353         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>.
21354
21355
21356       </div>
21357     </div>
21358     <div class="padding"></div>
21359
21360     <div class="entry">
21361       <div class="title">
21362         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Caching_password__user_and_group_on_a_roaming_Debian_laptop.html">Caching password, user and group on a roaming Debian laptop</a>
21363       </div>
21364       <div class="date">
21365          1st July 2010
21366       </div>
21367       <div class="body">
21368         <p>For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
21369 a bit troubling.  Laptops are typically used also when not connected
21370 to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
21371 unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
21372 This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
21373 and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
21374 in Debian.  Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
21375 It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
21376 setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.</p>
21377
21378 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
21379
21380 This is the traditional method with a twist.  The password caching is
21381 provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on
21382 Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd.  The directory
21383 lookup and password checking is done using LDAP.  If one want to use
21384 Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
21385 replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal.  If one is happy having a
21386 local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
21387 pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
21388 using libpam-mklocaluser.  A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
21389 pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
21390 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/568577">bug #568577</a> is in the
21391 archive.  Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
21392 directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
21393 prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/.  This
21394 is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.</p>
21395
21396 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured</p>
21397
21398 <blockquote><pre>
21399 libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
21400 </pre></blockquote>
21401
21402 <p>The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
21403 one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site.  Make sure the
21404 PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
21405 sent in clear text to the LDAP server.  I've been unable to get TLS
21406 certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
21407 LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
21408 is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
21409 on how to get this working.</p>
21410
21411 <p>Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
21412 caching until <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">bug #485282</a>
21413 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
21414 currently in /etc/nscd.conf.  The changes are in the fields
21415 reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
21416 instructions I found in the
21417 <a href="http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/">LDAP for Mobile Laptops</a>
21418 instructions by Flyn Computing.</p>
21419
21420 <blockquote><pre>
21421         debug-level             0
21422         reload-count            unlimited
21423         paranoia                no
21424
21425         enable-cache            passwd          yes
21426         positive-time-to-live   passwd          2592000
21427         negative-time-to-live   passwd          20
21428         suggested-size          passwd          211
21429         check-files             passwd          yes
21430         persistent              passwd          yes
21431         shared                  passwd          yes
21432         max-db-size             passwd          33554432
21433         auto-propagate          passwd          yes
21434
21435         enable-cache            group           yes
21436         positive-time-to-live   group           2592000
21437         negative-time-to-live   group           20
21438         suggested-size          group           211
21439         check-files             group           yes
21440         persistent              group           yes
21441         shared                  group           yes
21442         max-db-size             group           33554432
21443         auto-propagate          group           yes
21444
21445         enable-cache            hosts           no
21446         positive-time-to-live   hosts           2592000
21447         negative-time-to-live   hosts           20
21448         suggested-size          hosts           211
21449         check-files             hosts           yes
21450         persistent              hosts           yes
21451         shared                  hosts           yes
21452         max-db-size             hosts           33554432
21453
21454         enable-cache            services        yes
21455         positive-time-to-live   services        2592000
21456         negative-time-to-live   services        20
21457         suggested-size          services        211
21458         check-files             services        yes
21459         persistent              services        yes
21460         shared                  services        yes
21461         max-db-size             services        33554432
21462 </pre></blockquote>
21463
21464 <p>While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
21465 automatically like the one provided in
21466 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/496915">bug #496915</a>, the file
21467 content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
21468 directory service on the machine.  /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
21469 look like this:</p>
21470
21471 <blockquote><pre>
21472 passwd:         files ldap
21473 group:          files ldap
21474 shadow:         files ldap
21475 hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
21476 networks:       files
21477 protocols:      files
21478 services:       files
21479 ethers:         files
21480 rpc:            files
21481 netgroup:       files ldap
21482 </pre></blockquote>
21483
21484 <p>The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
21485 shadow and netgroup.</p>
21486
21487 <p>With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
21488 in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
21489 directory created and have the password as well as user and group
21490 attributes cached.
21491
21492 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
21493   libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
21494
21495 <p>Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
21496 problems doing proper caching, I've seen suggestions and recipes to
21497 use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
21498 LDAP database is available.  I have not tested such setup, because I
21499 discovered sssd.</p>
21500
21501 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser</h2>
21502
21503 <p>A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
21504 mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
21505 <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/">sssd</a> package from Redhat.
21506 It is part of the <a href="http://www.freeipa.org/">FreeIPA</A> project
21507 to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
21508 machines.  The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
21509 information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
21510 libpam-ccreds.  It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS.  Version
21511 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
21512 in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010.  Because the
21513 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd package</a>
21514 was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
21515 version 1.2 is now in testing.
21516
21517 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
21518 roaming setup I want</p>
21519
21520 <blockquote><pre>
21521 libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
21522 </pre></blockquote>
21523
21524 The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
21525 <tt>/etc/sssd/sssd.conf</tt>.
21526
21527 <blockquote><pre>
21528 [sssd]
21529 config_file_version = 2
21530 reconnection_retries = 3
21531 sbus_timeout = 30
21532 services = nss, pam
21533 domains = INTERN
21534
21535 [nss]
21536 filter_groups = root
21537 filter_users = root
21538 reconnection_retries = 3
21539
21540 [pam]
21541 reconnection_retries = 3
21542
21543 [domain/INTERN]
21544 enumerate = false
21545 cache_credentials = true
21546
21547 id_provider = ldap
21548 auth_provider = ldap
21549 chpass_provider = ldap
21550
21551 ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
21552 ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
21553 ldap_tls_reqcert = never
21554 ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
21555 </pre></blockquote>
21556
21557 <p>I got the same problem here with certificate checking.  Had to set
21558 "ldap_tls_reqcert = never" to get it working.</p>
21559
21560 <p>With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
21561 nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
21562 modify it manually.</p>
21563
21564 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
21565 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
21566
21567       </div>
21568       <div class="tags">
21569
21570
21571         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>.
21572
21573
21574       </div>
21575     </div>
21576     <div class="padding"></div>
21577
21578     <div class="entry">
21579       <div class="title">
21580         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
21581       </div>
21582       <div class="date">
21583         28th June 2010
21584       </div>
21585       <div class="body">
21586         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
21587 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
21588 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
21589 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
21590 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
21591 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
21592 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
21593 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
21594 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
21595 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
21596
21597 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
21598 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
21599 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
21600 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
21601 released.</p>
21602
21603 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
21604 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
21605 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
21606 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
21607
21608 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
21609 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
21610
21611 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
21612 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
21613 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
21614 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
21615 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
21616
21617       </div>
21618       <div class="tags">
21619
21620
21621         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>.
21622
21623
21624       </div>
21625     </div>
21626     <div class="padding"></div>
21627
21628     <div class="entry">
21629       <div class="title">
21630         <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>
21631       </div>
21632       <div class="date">
21633         24th June 2010
21634       </div>
21635       <div class="body">
21636         <p>A while back, I
21637 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
21638 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
21639 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
21640 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
21641
21642 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
21643 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
21644 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
21645 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
21646
21647 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
21648 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
21649 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
21650 Debian Edu.</p>
21651
21652 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
21653 the
21654 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
21655 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
21656 available today from IETF.</p>
21657
21658 <pre>
21659 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
21660 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
21661 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
21662  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
21663         NAME 'dhcpHost'
21664         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
21665 -       SUP top
21666 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
21667         MUST cn
21668         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
21669         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
21670 </pre>
21671
21672 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
21673 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
21674 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
21675
21676 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
21677 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
21678
21679       </div>
21680       <div class="tags">
21681
21682
21683         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>.
21684
21685
21686       </div>
21687     </div>
21688     <div class="padding"></div>
21689
21690     <div class="entry">
21691       <div class="title">
21692         <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>
21693       </div>
21694       <div class="date">
21695         16th June 2010
21696       </div>
21697       <div class="body">
21698         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
21699 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
21700 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
21701 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
21702 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
21703 this:
21704
21705 <blockquote><pre>
21706 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
21707 tasksel --new-install
21708 </pre></blockquote>
21709
21710 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
21711 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
21712 any output what so ever.
21713
21714 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
21715 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
21716 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
21717 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
21718 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
21719 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
21720 code like this:
21721
21722 <blockquote><pre>
21723 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
21724 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
21725 $cmd
21726 </pre></blockquote>
21727
21728 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
21729 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
21730 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
21731 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
21732 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
21733 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
21734 installation.</p>
21735
21736 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
21737 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
21738 like this.</p>
21739
21740       </div>
21741       <div class="tags">
21742
21743
21744         Tags: <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>.
21745
21746
21747       </div>
21748     </div>
21749     <div class="padding"></div>
21750
21751     <div class="entry">
21752       <div class="title">
21753         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">Officeshots taking shape</a>
21754       </div>
21755       <div class="date">
21756         13th June 2010
21757       </div>
21758       <div class="body">
21759         <p>For those of us caring about document exchange and
21760 interoperability, <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>
21761 is a great service.  It is to ODF documents what
21762 <a href="http://browsershots.org/">BrowserShots</a> is for web
21763 pages.</p>
21764
21765 <p>A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
21766 that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
21767 and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
21768 interested in supporting the project.  I helped him to navigate his
21769 request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
21770 a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
21771 arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot.  The machine is
21772 administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
21773 contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
21774 see how the project is doing.</p>
21775
21776 <p>Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
21777 machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
21778 OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
21779 in 17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
21780 Windows.  This is great.</p>
21781
21782       </div>
21783       <div class="tags">
21784
21785
21786         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>.
21787
21788
21789       </div>
21790     </div>
21791     <div class="padding"></div>
21792
21793     <div class="entry">
21794       <div class="title">
21795         <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>
21796       </div>
21797       <div class="date">
21798         13th June 2010
21799       </div>
21800       <div class="body">
21801         <p>My
21802 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
21803 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
21804 finally made the upgrade logs available from
21805 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
21806 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
21807 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
21808 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
21809
21810 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
21811 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
21812 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
21813 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
21814 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
21815 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
21816 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
21817 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
21818
21819 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
21820 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
21821 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
21822 too surprising.</p>
21823
21824 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
21825 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
21826 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
21827 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
21828 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
21829 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
21830 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
21831 continue.</p>
21832
21833 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
21834 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
21835   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
21836   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
21837   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
21838   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
21839   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
21840   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
21841   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
21842   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
21843   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
21844   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
21845   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
21846   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
21847   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
21848   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
21849   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
21850   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
21851   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
21852   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
21853   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
21854   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
21855   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
21856   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
21857   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
21858   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
21859   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
21860   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
21861   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
21862   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
21863
21864 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
21865
21866 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
21867   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
21868   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
21869   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
21870   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
21871   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
21872   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
21873   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
21874   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
21875   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
21876   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
21877   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
21878   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
21879   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
21880   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
21881   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
21882   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
21883   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
21884   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
21885   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
21886   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
21887   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
21888   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
21889   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
21890   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
21891   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
21892   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
21893   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
21894   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
21895   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
21896   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
21897   zip</p>
21898
21899 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
21900
21901 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
21902   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
21903   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
21904   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
21905   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
21906   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
21907   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
21908   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
21909   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
21910   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
21911   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
21912   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
21913   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
21914   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
21915   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
21916   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
21917   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
21918   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
21919   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
21920   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
21921   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
21922   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
21923   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
21924   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
21925   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
21926   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
21927   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
21928   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
21929
21930 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
21931 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
21932   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
21933   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
21934   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
21935   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
21936   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
21937   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
21938   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
21939   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
21940   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
21941   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
21942   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
21943   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
21944   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
21945   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
21946   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
21947   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
21948   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
21949   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
21950   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
21951   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
21952   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
21953   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
21954   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
21955   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
21956   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
21957   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
21958   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
21959   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
21960   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
21961   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
21962   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
21963   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
21964   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
21965   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
21966   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
21967   xulrunner-1.9</p>
21968
21969
21970       </div>
21971       <div class="tags">
21972
21973
21974         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>.
21975
21976
21977       </div>
21978     </div>
21979     <div class="padding"></div>
21980
21981     <div class="entry">
21982       <div class="title">
21983         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
21984       </div>
21985       <div class="date">
21986         11th June 2010
21987       </div>
21988       <div class="body">
21989         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
21990 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
21991 have been discovered and reported in the process
21992 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
21993 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
21994 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
21995 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
21996 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
21997
21998 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
21999 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
22000 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
22001 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
22002 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
22003 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
22004
22005 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
22006 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
22007 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
22008 is created.  The bug report
22009 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
22010 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
22011 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
22012 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
22013 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
22014 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
22015 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
22016 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
22017 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
22018 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
22019 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
22020 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
22021 Debian Squeeze.</p>
22022
22023 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
22024 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
22025 trick:</p>
22026
22027 <blockquote><pre>
22028 #!/bin/sh
22029 set -ex
22030
22031 if [ "$1" ] ; then
22032     desktop=$1
22033 else
22034     desktop=gnome
22035 fi
22036
22037 from=lenny
22038 to=squeeze
22039
22040 exec &lt; /dev/null
22041 unset LANG
22042 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
22043 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
22044 fuser -mv .
22045 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
22046 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
22047 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
22048 #!/bin/sh
22049 exit 101
22050 EOF
22051 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
22052 exit_cleanup() {
22053     umount $tmpdir/proc
22054 }
22055 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
22056 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
22057 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
22058
22059 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
22060
22061 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
22062 # to return the correct answers.
22063 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
22064     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
22065
22066 # Include the desktop and laptop task
22067 for test in desktop laptop ; do
22068     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
22069 #!/bin/sh
22070 exit 2
22071 EOF
22072     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
22073 done
22074
22075 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
22076 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
22077 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
22078 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
22079
22080 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
22081 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
22082 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
22083 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
22084 fuser -mv
22085 </pre></blockquote>
22086
22087 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
22088 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
22089 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
22090 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
22091 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
22092 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
22093
22094 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
22095 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
22096 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
22097 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
22098 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
22099 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
22100 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
22101
22102 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
22103 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
22104 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
22105 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
22106 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
22107 packages.</p>
22108
22109       </div>
22110       <div class="tags">
22111
22112
22113         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>.
22114
22115
22116       </div>
22117     </div>
22118     <div class="padding"></div>
22119
22120     <div class="entry">
22121       <div class="title">
22122         <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>
22123       </div>
22124       <div class="date">
22125          6th June 2010
22126       </div>
22127       <div class="body">
22128         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
22129 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
22130 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
22131 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
22132 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
22133 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
22134 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
22135
22136 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
22137 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
22138 COLUMNS):</p>
22139
22140 <blockquote><pre>
22141 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
22142 previous=N
22143 PREVLEVEL=
22144 RUNLEVEL=
22145 runlevel=S
22146 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
22147 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
22148 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
22149 </pre></blockquote>
22150
22151 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
22152 script.</p>
22153
22154 <blockquote><pre>
22155 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
22156 previous=N
22157 PREVLEVEL=N
22158 RUNLEVEL=S
22159 runlevel=S
22160 </pre></blockquote>
22161
22162 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
22163 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
22164 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
22165
22166 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
22167 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
22168 choice.</p>
22169
22170       </div>
22171       <div class="tags">
22172
22173
22174         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>.
22175
22176
22177       </div>
22178     </div>
22179     <div class="padding"></div>
22180
22181     <div class="entry">
22182       <div class="title">
22183         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
22184       </div>
22185       <div class="date">
22186          6th June 2010
22187       </div>
22188       <div class="body">
22189         <p>Via the
22190 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
22191 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
22192 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
22193 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
22194 following the standards wars of today.</p>
22195
22196       </div>
22197       <div class="tags">
22198
22199
22200         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>.
22201
22202
22203       </div>
22204     </div>
22205     <div class="padding"></div>
22206
22207     <div class="entry">
22208       <div class="title">
22209         <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>
22210       </div>
22211       <div class="date">
22212          3rd June 2010
22213       </div>
22214       <div class="body">
22215         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
22216 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
22217 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
22218 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
22219 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
22220
22221 <blockquote><pre>
22222 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
22223   vendor                    count
22224   Dell Computer Corporation     1
22225     PowerEdge 1750              1
22226   IBM                           1
22227     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
22228   Intel                         2
22229   [no-dmi-info]                 3
22230 maintainer:~#
22231 </pre></blockquote>
22232
22233 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
22234 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
22235 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
22236 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
22237 option to list the individual machines.</p>
22238
22239 <p>A larger list is
22240 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
22241 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
22242 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
22243 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
22244 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
22245 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
22246 collector.</p>
22247
22248       </div>
22249       <div class="tags">
22250
22251
22252         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>.
22253
22254
22255       </div>
22256     </div>
22257     <div class="padding"></div>
22258
22259     <div class="entry">
22260       <div class="title">
22261         <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>
22262       </div>
22263       <div class="date">
22264          1st June 2010
22265       </div>
22266       <div class="body">
22267         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
22268 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
22269 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
22270 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
22271 wait.</p>
22272
22273 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
22274 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
22275 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
22276 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
22277 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
22278 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
22279
22280 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
22281 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
22282 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
22283 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
22284 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
22285 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
22286 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
22287 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
22288
22289 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
22290
22291       </div>
22292       <div class="tags">
22293
22294
22295         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>.
22296
22297
22298       </div>
22299     </div>
22300     <div class="padding"></div>
22301
22302     <div class="entry">
22303       <div class="title">
22304         <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>
22305       </div>
22306       <div class="date">
22307         27th May 2010
22308       </div>
22309       <div class="body">
22310         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
22311 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
22312 issues are known and should be solved:
22313
22314 <p><ul>
22315
22316 <li>The wicd package seen to
22317 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
22318 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
22319 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
22320 seem to be on the case.</li>
22321
22322 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
22323 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
22324 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
22325 maintainer is on the case.</li>
22326
22327 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
22328 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
22329 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
22330 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
22331 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
22332 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
22333 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
22334 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
22335
22336 </ul></p>
22337
22338 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
22339 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
22340 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
22341 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
22342
22343 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
22344 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
22345 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
22346 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
22347
22348 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
22349
22350       </div>
22351       <div class="tags">
22352
22353
22354         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>.
22355
22356
22357       </div>
22358     </div>
22359     <div class="padding"></div>
22360
22361     <div class="entry">
22362       <div class="title">
22363         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
22364       </div>
22365       <div class="date">
22366         22nd May 2010
22367       </div>
22368       <div class="body">
22369         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
22370 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
22371 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
22372 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
22373
22374 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
22375 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
22376 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
22377 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
22378 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
22379 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
22380 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
22381 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
22382 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
22383 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
22384 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
22385 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
22386 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
22387 going to work.</p>
22388
22389 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
22390 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
22391 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
22392 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
22393 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
22394 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
22395 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
22396 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
22397 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
22398 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
22399 Edu.</p>
22400
22401 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
22402 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
22403 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
22404 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
22405 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
22406 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
22407
22408 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
22409 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
22410
22411       </div>
22412       <div class="tags">
22413
22414
22415         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>.
22416
22417
22418       </div>
22419     </div>
22420     <div class="padding"></div>
22421
22422     <div class="entry">
22423       <div class="title">
22424         <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>
22425       </div>
22426       <div class="date">
22427         19th May 2010
22428       </div>
22429       <div class="body">
22430         <p>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
22431 Edu finally entered the Debian archive.  Today, the new
22432 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html">libpam-mklocaluser</a>
22433 package was accepted.  Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
22434 into unstable.  The
22435 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html">pam-python</a>
22436 package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
22437 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd</a> package
22438 passed NEW on Monday.  In addition, the
22439 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
22440 package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
22441 hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.</p>
22442
22443 <p>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
22444 roaming laptops.  The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
22445 nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
22446 which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
22447 for nscd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">BTS report
22448 #485282</a> is implemented.  The alternative setup is to use sssd with
22449 libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
22450 care of the caching of passwords and group information.</p>
22451
22452 <p>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
22453 at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
22454 problem with the server certificate.  I plan to update the Debian
22455 package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
22456 find time to make sure the next release will include both the
22457 Debian/Ubuntu specific patches.  Upstream is friendly and responsive,
22458 and I am sure we will find a good solution.</p>
22459
22460 <p>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
22461 LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
22462 when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
22463 cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
22464 memberhips and other relevant LDAP information.  The
22465 libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
22466 directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
22467 be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used.  To avoid confusion
22468 with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
22469 to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
22470 on the home directory servers.</p>
22471
22472 <p>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
22473 message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
22474 is created.  Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
22475 message.  The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
22476 a bug in gdm.  Have not investigated if there is some other message
22477 type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.</p>
22478
22479 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
22480 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
22481
22482       </div>
22483       <div class="tags">
22484
22485
22486         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>.
22487
22488
22489       </div>
22490     </div>
22491     <div class="padding"></div>
22492
22493     <div class="entry">
22494       <div class="title">
22495         <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>
22496       </div>
22497       <div class="date">
22498         14th May 2010
22499       </div>
22500       <div class="body">
22501         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
22502 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
22503 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
22504 expected, if I am to believe the
22505 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
22506 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
22507 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
22508 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
22509 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
22510 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
22511 version.</p>
22512
22513 More information about
22514 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
22515 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
22516 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
22517 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
22518
22519 <blockquote><pre>
22520 CONCURRENCY=none
22521 </pre></blockquote>
22522
22523 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
22524 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
22525 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
22526 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
22527
22528       </div>
22529       <div class="tags">
22530
22531
22532         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>.
22533
22534
22535       </div>
22536     </div>
22537     <div class="padding"></div>
22538
22539     <div class="entry">
22540       <div class="title">
22541         <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>
22542       </div>
22543       <div class="date">
22544         14th May 2010
22545       </div>
22546       <div class="body">
22547         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
22548 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
22549 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
22550 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
22551 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
22552 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
22553 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
22554 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
22555
22556 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
22557 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
22558 this on the collector host:</p>
22559
22560 <blockquote><pre>
22561 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
22562 </pre></blockquote>
22563
22564 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
22565 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
22566
22567 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
22568 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
22569 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
22570 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
22571 written yet.</p>
22572
22573       </div>
22574       <div class="tags">
22575
22576
22577         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>.
22578
22579
22580       </div>
22581     </div>
22582     <div class="padding"></div>
22583
22584     <div class="entry">
22585       <div class="title">
22586         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
22587       </div>
22588       <div class="date">
22589         13th May 2010
22590       </div>
22591       <div class="body">
22592         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
22593 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
22594 has been
22595 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
22596
22597 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
22598 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
22599 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
22600 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
22601 based boot system.  Tollef is
22602 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
22603 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
22604 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
22605 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
22606 at the moment do not.</p>
22607
22608 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
22609 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
22610 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
22611 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
22612 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
22613 way forward.</p>
22614
22615 <p>In the mean time, based on the
22616 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
22617 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
22618 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
22619 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
22620 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
22621 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
22622 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
22623 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
22624
22625       </div>
22626       <div class="tags">
22627
22628
22629         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>.
22630
22631
22632       </div>
22633     </div>
22634     <div class="padding"></div>
22635
22636     <div class="entry">
22637       <div class="title">
22638         <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>
22639       </div>
22640       <div class="date">
22641          6th May 2010
22642       </div>
22643       <div class="body">
22644         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
22645 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
22646 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
22647 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
22648 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
22649 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
22650 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
22651
22652 <blockquote><pre>
22653 CONCURRENCY=makefile
22654 </pre></blockquote>
22655
22656 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
22657 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
22658 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
22659 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
22660 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
22661 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
22662 make this happen.</p>
22663
22664 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
22665 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
22666 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
22667 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
22668 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
22669
22670 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
22671 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
22672 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
22673 fix the remaining issues.</p>
22674
22675 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
22676 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
22677 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
22678 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
22679
22680       </div>
22681       <div class="tags">
22682
22683
22684         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>.
22685
22686
22687       </div>
22688     </div>
22689     <div class="padding"></div>
22690
22691     <div class="entry">
22692       <div class="title">
22693         <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>
22694       </div>
22695       <div class="date">
22696          2nd May 2010
22697       </div>
22698       <div class="body">
22699         <p>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
22700 create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
22701 change the password on the first login attempt.</p>
22702
22703 <p>I'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
22704 Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account.  The account
22705 and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
22706 unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
22707 passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.</p>
22708
22709 <p>A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
22710 settings in /etc/shadow:</p>
22711
22712 <blockquote><pre>
22713 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
22714 Last password change                                    : May 02, 2010
22715 Password expires                                        : never
22716 Password inactive                                       : never
22717 Account expires                                         : never
22718 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
22719 Maximum number of days between password change          : 99999
22720 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
22721 root@tjener:~#
22722 </pre></blockquote>
22723
22724 <p>The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
22725 account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
22726 lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
22727 to the difference in days between that date and today.  To make it
22728 simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
22729 avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).</p>
22730
22731 <p>After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
22732 intended:</p>
22733
22734 <blockquote><pre>
22735 root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test
22736 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
22737 Last password change                                    : Jan 02, 1970
22738 Password expires                                        : never
22739 Password inactive                                       : never
22740 Account expires                                         : never
22741 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
22742 Maximum number of days between password change          : 10950
22743 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
22744 root@tjener:~#
22745 </pre></blockquote>
22746
22747 <p>So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
22748 Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
22749 user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).</p>
22750
22751 <p>Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
22752 sure only the user itself have the account password?</p>
22753
22754 <p>If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
22755 Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
22756
22757 <p>Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
22758 shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
22759 last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
22760 on the first login.  This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
22761 I did not notice this in my initial testing.  I have tested it on
22762 Squeeze, and '<tt>chage -d 0 username</tt>' do work there.  I have not
22763 tested it on Lenny yet.</p>
22764
22765 <p>Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
22766 equivalent command to expire a password is '<tt>passwd -e
22767 username</tt>', which insert zero into the date of the last password
22768 change.</p>
22769
22770       </div>
22771       <div class="tags">
22772
22773
22774         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>.
22775
22776
22777       </div>
22778     </div>
22779     <div class="padding"></div>
22780
22781     <div class="entry">
22782       <div class="title">
22783         <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>
22784       </div>
22785       <div class="date">
22786         28th April 2010
22787       </div>
22788       <div class="body">
22789         <p>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
22790 Debian Edu.  The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
22791 handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
22792 and go.</p>
22793
22794 <p>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
22795 Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
22796 example called Roaming Workstations.  Here are my thought on this.
22797 The setup would consist of the following:</p>
22798
22799 <ul>
22800
22801  <li>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
22802    the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
22803    the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
22804    server.  This allow the user to work also when offline.  The
22805    central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
22806    request, for example mounted via CIFS.  It could be mounted
22807    automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
22808    and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
22809    hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
22810    request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
22811    can be used to access it when needed.  Perhaps it is enough to use
22812    the fish protocol in KDE?</li>
22813
22814  <li>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
22815    authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
22816    to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
22817    to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server.  This can be done using
22818    <a href="http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
22819    or the Fedora developed
22820    <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD">System
22821    Security Services Daemon</a> packages.</li>
22822
22823  <li>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
22824    using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
22825    directory, using unison.</li>
22826
22827  <li>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
22828    their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
22829    the box with CUPS.  For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
22830    system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
22831    implemented.</li>
22832
22833  <li>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
22834    sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.</li>
22835
22836  <li>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
22837    cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
22838    local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.</li>
22839
22840 </ul>
22841
22842 <p>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
22843 the moment.  If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
22844 in time for the Squeeze release to freeze.  Some of the pieces need
22845 tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
22846 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566718">#566718</a>) and nslcd (or
22847 perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
22848 its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
22849 when disconnected from the net.  If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
22850 to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.</p>
22851
22852 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
22853 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
22854
22855       </div>
22856       <div class="tags">
22857
22858
22859         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>.
22860
22861
22862       </div>
22863     </div>
22864     <div class="padding"></div>
22865
22866     <div class="entry">
22867       <div class="title">
22868         <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>
22869       </div>
22870       <div class="date">
22871         19th April 2010
22872       </div>
22873       <div class="body">
22874         <p>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
22875 thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
22876 touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
22877 conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
22878 book titled "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
22879 Copyright, and the Future of the Future" is available with few
22880 restrictions on the web, for example from
22881 <a href="http://craphound.com/content/">his own site</a>. I read the
22882 epub-version from
22883 <a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2883">feedbooks</a> using
22884 <a href="http://www.fbreader.org/">fbreader</a> and my N810. I
22885 strongly recommend this book.</p>
22886
22887       </div>
22888       <div class="tags">
22889
22890
22891         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>.
22892
22893
22894       </div>
22895     </div>
22896     <div class="padding"></div>
22897
22898     <div class="entry">
22899       <div class="title">
22900         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html">Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?</a>
22901       </div>
22902       <div class="date">
22903         14th April 2010
22904       </div>
22905       <div class="body">
22906         <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/">Yesterdays
22907 NUUG presentation</a> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
22908 about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux.  Setting up a
22909 Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
22910 place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
22911 have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
22912 directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
22913 not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
22914 users and cryptographic keys instead.</p>
22915
22916 <p>A challenge will be integration and administration.  Is there a
22917 Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
22918 administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups?  With it, the
22919 school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
22920 files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.</p>
22921
22922 <p>A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
22923 pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together.  Anyone know?</p>
22924
22925 <p>Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
22926 Nagios.  I have no idea how much work that will be to implement.  We
22927 would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
22928 shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
22929 to work properly.</p>
22930
22931 <p>I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
22932 skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
22933 configuration and integration.  A natural starting point would be
22934 setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
22935 rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
22936 time.</p>
22937
22938 <p>If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
22939 I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
22940 presentation, and start using Kerberos at home.  The video show show
22941 up in a few days.</p>
22942
22943       </div>
22944       <div class="tags">
22945
22946
22947         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>.
22948
22949
22950       </div>
22951     </div>
22952     <div class="padding"></div>
22953
22954     <div class="entry">
22955       <div class="title">
22956         <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>
22957       </div>
22958       <div class="date">
22959          6th March 2010
22960       </div>
22961       <div class="body">
22962         <p>6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
22963 in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
22964 when the user log out.  A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
22965 package in 2004 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/230422">#230422</a>),
22966 and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
22967 Today, this finally paid off.</p>
22968
22969 <p>The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
22970 repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
22971 been updated to use this framework.  Next on my agenda is to make sure
22972 kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.</p>
22973
22974 <p>In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
22975 user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
22976 after a user.  With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
22977 a generic way that work with all display managers using this
22978 framework.  My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
22979 similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.<p>
22980
22981       </div>
22982       <div class="tags">
22983
22984
22985         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>.
22986
22987
22988       </div>
22989     </div>
22990     <div class="padding"></div>
22991
22992     <div class="entry">
22993       <div class="title">
22994         <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>
22995       </div>
22996       <div class="date">
22997         11th February 2010
22998       </div>
22999       <div class="body">
23000         <p>On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
23001 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> was finally
23002 shipped.  This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
23003 pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up.  Work on the first
23004 point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
23005 month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
23006 and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.</p>
23007
23008 <p>Perhaps it even is time for some partying?</p>
23009
23010 <p>After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
23011 next major release, based on Squeeze.  We will try to get as many of
23012 the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
23013 and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.</p>
23014
23015       </div>
23016       <div class="tags">
23017
23018
23019         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>.
23020
23021
23022       </div>
23023     </div>
23024     <div class="padding"></div>
23025
23026     <div class="entry">
23027       <div class="title">
23028         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html">Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration</a>
23029       </div>
23030       <div class="date">
23031         27th January 2010
23032       </div>
23033       <div class="body">
23034         <p>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
23035 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
23036 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
23037 Nagios.  The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
23038 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
23039 further.</p>
23040
23041 <p>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
23042 configured as a Munin and Nagios server.  In addition, it is
23043 configured to be a server for the
23044 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">SiteSummary
23045 system</a> I have written for use in Debian Edu.  The SiteSummary
23046 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
23047 work.  In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
23048 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
23049 computer submitting information to this collector.  This allow for
23050 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
23051 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
23052 packages got etc.  This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
23053 and Nagios configuration.</p>
23054
23055 <p>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
23056 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
23057 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
23058 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.</p>
23059
23060 <p>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
23061 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
23062 services detected).  In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
23063 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
23064 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
23065 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
23066 the machine.</p>
23067
23068 <p>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
23069 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
23070 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
23071 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.</p>
23072
23073 <p>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
23074 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP.  The system
23075 administrator need to run "<tt>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
23076 nagiosadmin</tt>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
23077 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages.  After that,
23078 everything is taken care of.</p>
23079
23080       </div>
23081       <div class="tags">
23082
23083
23084         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>.
23085
23086
23087       </div>
23088     </div>
23089     <div class="padding"></div>
23090
23091     <div class="entry">
23092       <div class="title">
23093         <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>
23094       </div>
23095       <div class="date">
23096         12th August 2009
23097       </div>
23098       <div class="body">
23099         <p>Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
23100 and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
23101 OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage.  I searched using
23102 'filetype:odt' and equvalent terms, and got these results:</P>
23103
23104 <table>
23105 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
23106 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:282000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
23107 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:75600</td> <td>pptx:183000</td></tr>
23108 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:145000</td></tr>
23109 </table>
23110
23111 <p>Next, I added a 'site:no' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
23112 got these numbers:</p>
23113
23114 <table>
23115 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
23116 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480 </td> <td>docx:4460</td></tr>
23117 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:299   </td> <td>pptx:741</td></tr>
23118 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:187       </td> <td>xlsx:372</td></tr>
23119 </table>
23120
23121 <p>I wonder how these numbers change over time.</p>
23122
23123 <p>I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
23124 on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
23125 they are conduced in another country.  Because of this, I did the same
23126 search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
23127 search done from a machine here in Norway.</p>
23128
23129
23130 <table>
23131 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
23132 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:129000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
23133 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:44200</td> <td>pptx:93900</td></tr>
23134 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:82400</td></tr>
23135 </table>
23136
23137 <p>And with 'site:no':
23138
23139 <table>
23140 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
23141 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480</td> <td>docx:3410</td></tr>
23142 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:175</td> <td>pptx:604</td></tr>
23143 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:186       </td> <td>xlsx:296</td></tr>
23144 </table>
23145
23146 <p>Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
23147 numbers.</p>
23148
23149       </div>
23150       <div class="tags">
23151
23152
23153         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>.
23154
23155
23156       </div>
23157     </div>
23158     <div class="padding"></div>
23159
23160     <div class="entry">
23161       <div class="title">
23162         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html">ISO still hope to fix OOXML</a>
23163       </div>
23164       <div class="date">
23165          8th August 2009
23166       </div>
23167       <div class="body">
23168         <p>According to <a
23169 href="http://twerner.blogspot.com/2009/08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html">a
23170 blog post from Torsten Werner</a>, the current defect report for ISO
23171 29500 (ISO OOXML) is 809 pages.  His interesting point is that the
23172 defect report is 71 pages more than the full ODF 1.1 specification.
23173 Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
23174 can be fixed in ISO.  Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
23175 and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
23176 close to solving the problems.  I was part of the Norwegian committee
23177 involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
23178 Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.</p>
23179
23180 <p>These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
23181 with the future ahead of it.  We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
23182 seminar this autumn.</p>
23183
23184       </div>
23185       <div class="tags">
23186
23187
23188         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>.
23189
23190
23191       </div>
23192     </div>
23193     <div class="padding"></div>
23194
23195     <div class="entry">
23196       <div class="title">
23197         <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>
23198       </div>
23199       <div class="date">
23200         27th July 2009
23201       </div>
23202       <div class="body">
23203         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
23204 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
23205 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
23206 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
23207 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
23208 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
23209 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
23210
23211 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
23212 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
23213 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
23214
23215       </div>
23216       <div class="tags">
23217
23218
23219         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>.
23220
23221
23222       </div>
23223     </div>
23224     <div class="padding"></div>
23225
23226     <div class="entry">
23227       <div class="title">
23228         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
23229       </div>
23230       <div class="date">
23231         22nd July 2009
23232       </div>
23233       <div class="body">
23234         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
23235 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
23236 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
23237 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
23238 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
23239 the package up to date.</p>
23240
23241 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
23242 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
23243 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
23244 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
23245 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
23246 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
23247 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
23248 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
23249 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
23250 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
23251 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
23252 working on the future release.</p>
23253
23254 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
23255 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
23256
23257       </div>
23258       <div class="tags">
23259
23260
23261         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>.
23262
23263
23264       </div>
23265     </div>
23266     <div class="padding"></div>
23267
23268     <div class="entry">
23269       <div class="title">
23270         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
23271       </div>
23272       <div class="date">
23273         24th June 2009
23274       </div>
23275       <div class="body">
23276         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
23277 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
23278 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
23279 funded
23280 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
23281 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
23282 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
23283 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
23284 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
23285 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
23286
23287 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
23288 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
23289 boot:</p>
23290
23291 <ul>
23292
23293 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
23294
23295 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
23296    clock is in UTC.</li>
23297
23298 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
23299    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
23300    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
23301
23302 </ul>
23303
23304 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
23305 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
23306 Villegas</a>.
23307
23308 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
23309 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
23310 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
23311 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
23312 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
23313 using this.</p>
23314
23315 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
23316 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
23317 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
23318 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
23319 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
23320 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
23321 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
23322
23323       </div>
23324       <div class="tags">
23325
23326
23327         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>.
23328
23329
23330       </div>
23331     </div>
23332     <div class="padding"></div>
23333
23334     <div class="entry">
23335       <div class="title">
23336         <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>
23337       </div>
23338       <div class="date">
23339          2nd May 2009
23340       </div>
23341       <div class="body">
23342         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
23343 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
23344 do not yet know them.</p>
23345
23346 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
23347 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
23348 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
23349 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
23350 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
23351 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
23352 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
23353 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
23354 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
23355 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
23356 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
23357
23358 <p>The second one is
23359 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
23360 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
23361 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
23362 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
23363 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
23364 and the company behind it is running
23365 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
23366 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
23367 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
23368 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
23369 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
23370 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
23371 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
23372 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
23373
23374 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
23375 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
23376 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
23377 surrounded by today.</p>
23378
23379       </div>
23380       <div class="tags">
23381
23382
23383         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
23384
23385
23386       </div>
23387     </div>
23388     <div class="padding"></div>
23389
23390     <div class="entry">
23391       <div class="title">
23392         <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>
23393       </div>
23394       <div class="date">
23395         28th April 2009
23396       </div>
23397       <div class="body">
23398         <p>Julien Blache
23399 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
23400 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
23401 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
23402 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
23403 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
23404 properties.</p>
23405
23406       </div>
23407       <div class="tags">
23408
23409
23410         Tags: <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>.
23411
23412
23413       </div>
23414     </div>
23415     <div class="padding"></div>
23416
23417     <div class="entry">
23418       <div class="title">
23419         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html">Recording video from cron using VLC</a>
23420       </div>
23421       <div class="date">
23422          5th April 2009
23423       </div>
23424       <div class="body">
23425         <p>One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
23426 run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net.  The
23427 task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
23428 of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
23429 vlc.  I finally found a way to do it today.  I spent an hour or so
23430 searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation.  The
23431 hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
23432 dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:</p>
23433
23434 <blockquote><pre>URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
23435 SAVEFILE=rms.ogg
23436 DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
23437   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
23438   --intf=dummy</pre></blockquote>
23439
23440 <p>The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
23441 duplicating the output stream to "nodisplay" and the file, using the
23442 dummy interface.  The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
23443 sure no X interface is needed.</p>
23444
23445 <p>The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
23446 and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
23447 the vlc process with SIGTERM.  Here is a complete script
23448 <tt>vlc-record</tt> to use from <tt>at</tt> or <tt>cron</tt>:</p>
23449
23450 <blockquote><pre>#!/bin/sh
23451 set -e
23452 URL="$1"
23453 SAVEFILE="$2"
23454 DURATION="$3"
23455 DISPLAY= vlc -q "$URL" \
23456   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
23457   --intf=dummy < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 &
23458 pid=$!
23459 sleep $DURATION
23460 kill $pid
23461 wait $pid</pre></blockquote>
23462
23463       </div>
23464       <div class="tags">
23465
23466
23467         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>.
23468
23469
23470       </div>
23471     </div>
23472     <div class="padding"></div>
23473
23474     <div class="entry">
23475       <div class="title">
23476         <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>
23477       </div>
23478       <div class="date">
23479         30th March 2009
23480       </div>
23481       <div class="body">
23482         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
23483 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
23484 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
23485 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
23486 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
23487 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
23488 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
23489 application.</p>
23490
23491 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
23492 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
23493 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
23494 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
23495 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
23496 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
23497 blocked from doing so.</p>
23498
23499 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
23500 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
23501 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
23502 requirements change.</p>
23503
23504 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
23505 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
23506 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
23507
23508       </div>
23509       <div class="tags">
23510
23511
23512         Tags: <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>.
23513
23514
23515       </div>
23516     </div>
23517     <div class="padding"></div>
23518
23519     <div class="entry">
23520       <div class="title">
23521         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
23522       </div>
23523       <div class="date">
23524         29th March 2009
23525       </div>
23526       <div class="body">
23527         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
23528 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
23529 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
23530 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
23531 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
23532 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
23533 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
23534 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
23535 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
23536 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
23537 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
23538 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
23539 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
23540 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
23541 now. :)</p>
23542
23543       </div>
23544       <div class="tags">
23545
23546
23547         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>.
23548
23549
23550       </div>
23551     </div>
23552     <div class="padding"></div>
23553
23554     <div class="entry">
23555       <div class="title">
23556         <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>
23557       </div>
23558       <div class="date">
23559         29th March 2009
23560       </div>
23561       <div class="body">
23562         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
23563 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
23564 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
23565 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
23566 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
23567 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
23568
23569 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
23570 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
23571 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
23572 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
23573 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
23574 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
23575 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
23576 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
23577 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
23578 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
23579 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
23580 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
23581 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
23582
23583 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
23584 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
23585 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
23586 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
23587
23588 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
23589 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
23590
23591 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
23592 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
23593 new IETF work group?</p>
23594
23595       </div>
23596       <div class="tags">
23597
23598
23599         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>.
23600
23601
23602       </div>
23603     </div>
23604     <div class="padding"></div>
23605
23606     <div class="entry">
23607       <div class="title">
23608         <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>
23609       </div>
23610       <div class="date">
23611         28th February 2009
23612       </div>
23613       <div class="body">
23614         <p>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
23615 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
23616 contract expire for each server.  We have a machine (and service)
23617 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
23618 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
23619 each machine.  To make it easier for us to track support contract
23620 status, I've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
23621 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
23622 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
23623 machines.  I extended a perl script already being used to import
23624 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
23625 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
23626 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
23627 for the relevant machines.  This make the support status information
23628 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
23629 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
23630 The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
23631 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
23632 them.  27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
23633 using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
23634 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
23635 services.  After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
23636 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
23637 them break down.  When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
23638 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
23639 machine.</p>
23640
23641 <p>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
23642 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
23643 Werner Forsbring.  The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
23644 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
23645 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code.  I know the HTML
23646 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
23647 introduce more dependencies.  This is the current incarnation:</p>
23648
23649 <pre>
23650 use LWP::Simple;
23651 use POSIX;
23652 use WWW::Mechanize;
23653 use Date::Parse;
23654 [...]
23655 sub get_support_info {
23656     my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
23657     my $str;
23658
23659     if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
23660         # fetch website from Dell support
23661         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";
23662         my $webpage = get($url);
23663         return undef unless ($webpage);
23664
23665         my $daysleft = -1;
23666         my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
23667         foreach my $line (@lines) {
23668             next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
23669             $line =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
23670             $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;
23671
23672             my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
23673             @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
23674             my $lastend = "";
23675             while ($f[3] eq "DELL") {
23676                 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];
23677
23678                 my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
23679                                             localtime(str2time($startstr)));
23680                 my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
23681                                           localtime(str2time($endstr)));
23682                 $str .= "$type $start -> $end ";
23683                 @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
23684                 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
23685             }
23686             my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
23687             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
23688                 if ($lastend lt $today);
23689         }
23690     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
23691         my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
23692         my $url =
23693             'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do';
23694         $mech->get($url);
23695         my $fields = {
23696             'BODServiceID' => 'NA',
23697             'RegisteredPurchaseDate' => '',
23698             'country' => 'NO',
23699             'productNumber' => $productnumber,
23700             'serialNumber1' => $serial,
23701         };
23702         $mech->submit_form( form_number => 2,
23703                             fields      => $fields );
23704         # Next step is screen scraping
23705         my $content = $mech->content();
23706
23707         $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
23708         $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
23709         $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
23710         $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
23711
23712         my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
23713
23714         while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
23715             my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
23716                 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
23717             $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
23718             my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
23719                                         localtime(str2time($startstr)));
23720             my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
23721                                       localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
23722
23723             $str .= "$type ($status) $start -> $end ";
23724
23725             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
23726                 if ($end lt $today);
23727         }
23728     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
23729         # This code ignore extended support contracts.
23730         my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
23731         if ($producttype &amp;&amp; $serial) {
23732             my $content =
23733                 get("http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;brandind=5000008&amp;Submit=Submit&amp;type=$producttype&amp;serial=$serial");
23734             if ($content) {
23735                 $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
23736                 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
23737                 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
23738                 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
23739
23740                 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
23741                 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
23742
23743                 $str .= "($status) -> $end ";
23744
23745                 my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
23746                 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
23747                     if ($end lt $today);
23748             }
23749         }
23750     }
23751     return $str;
23752 }
23753 </pre>
23754
23755 <p>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
23756 serial numbers.  The information passed in as arguments are fetched
23757 from dmidecode.</p>
23758
23759 <pre>
23760 print get_support_info("hp.host", "HP ProLiant BL460c G1", "1234567890"
23761                        "447707-B21");
23762 print get_support_info("dell.host", "Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950", "1234567");
23763 print get_support_info("ibm.host", "IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-",
23764                        "1234567");
23765 </pre>
23766
23767 <p>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
23768 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)</p>
23769
23770 <p>Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
23771 contracts, so it is useless in that case.  The original Dell code do
23772 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
23773 do so.</p>
23774
23775       </div>
23776       <div class="tags">
23777
23778
23779         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>.
23780
23781
23782       </div>
23783     </div>
23784     <div class="padding"></div>
23785
23786     <div class="entry">
23787       <div class="title">
23788         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html">Using bar codes at a computing center</a>
23789       </div>
23790       <div class="date">
23791         20th February 2009
23792       </div>
23793       <div class="body">
23794         <p>At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
23795 in our computing center.  This give us a challenge in tracking the
23796 location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
23797 removed.  Some times the location register is not updated when a
23798 computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
23799 the "missing" computer.</p>
23800
23801 <p>In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
23802 <a href="http://www.libdmtx.org/">libdmtx</a> to write and read bar
23803 code blocks as defined in the
23804 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix">The Data Matrix
23805 Standard</a>.  This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
23806 digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
23807 codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture.  The bar code standard
23808 allow up to 2 KiB to be written in the tag.  There is another project
23809 with <a href="http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/">a bar code
23810 writer written in postscript</a> capable of creating such bar codes,
23811 but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
23812 codes.</p>
23813
23814 <p>It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
23815 machines in our computing center.  If both racks and computers are
23816 tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
23817 computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
23818 If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
23819 locations, and can detect movements and removals.</p>
23820
23821 <p>I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
23822 random rack and tagged all the machines with their names.  Next, I
23823 took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
23824 these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read.  This worked
23825 fairly well.  If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
23826 side, all tags in the image could be read.  Because of limited space
23827 between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
23828 rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
23829 about half the rack.  I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
23830 to 60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.</p>
23831
23832 <p>My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
23833 at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
23834 easier automatic tracking of computers.</p>
23835
23836       </div>
23837       <div class="tags">
23838
23839
23840         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>.
23841
23842
23843       </div>
23844     </div>
23845     <div class="padding"></div>
23846
23847     <div class="entry">
23848       <div class="title">
23849         <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>
23850       </div>
23851       <div class="date">
23852         17th January 2009
23853       </div>
23854       <div class="body">
23855         <p>As part of the work we do in <a href="http://www.nuug.no">NUUG</a>
23856 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
23857 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording.  Putting a
23858 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
23859 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy.  I hope this
23860 will become easier when the &lt;video&gt; tag is implemented in all
23861 browsers, but I am not sure.  We provide the recordings in several
23862 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
23863 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
23864 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
23865 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
23866 &lt;video&gt; tag, the &lt;object&gt; tag, the &lt;embed&gt; tag and
23867 the &lt;applet&gt; tag.  All of these take a lot of options, and
23868 finding the best options is a major challenge.</p>
23869
23870 <p>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from <a
23871 href="http://labs.opera.com">labs.opera.com</a>, to see how it handled
23872 a &lt;video&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
23873 I was not very impressed.  The browser start by fetching a picture
23874 from the video stream.  Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
23875 definitely very early in the recording.  So far, so good. Next,
23876 instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
23877 of it, but do not start to play the video.  This mean I have to wait
23878 for several minutes for the downloading to finish.  When the download
23879 is done, the playing of the video do not start!  Waiting for the
23880 download, but I do not get to see the video?  Some testing later, I
23881 discover that I have to add the controls="true" attribute to be able
23882 to get a play button to pres to start the video.  Adding
23883 autoplay="true" did not help.  I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
23884 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
23885 &lt;video&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
23886 playing when the download is done.</p>
23887
23888 <p>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
23889 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/">available
23890 from the nuug site</a>.  Will have to test it with the new Firefox
23891 too.</p>
23892
23893 <p>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature.  I was unable
23894 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
23895 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video.  I
23896 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)</p>
23897
23898       </div>
23899       <div class="tags">
23900
23901
23902         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
23903
23904
23905       </div>
23906     </div>
23907     <div class="padding"></div>
23908
23909     <div class="entry">
23910       <div class="title">
23911         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html">Software video mixer on a USB stick</a>
23912       </div>
23913       <div class="date">
23914         28th December 2008
23915       </div>
23916       <div class="body">
23917         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> is
23918 recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
23919 worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
23920 directly with the video stream.  For this, we use the
23921 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/">dvswitch</a> package from
23922 the Debian video team.  As this require quite one computer per video
23923 source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
23924 borrow laptops.  And to avoid having to install extra software on
23925 these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
23926 bootable USB stick.  The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
23927 source, sink and mixer applications and
23928 <a href="http://www.kinodv.org/">dvgrab</a>.  To allow this setup to
23929 work without any configuration, I've patched dvswitch to use
23930 <a href="http://www.avahi.org/">avahi</a> to connect the various parts
23931 together.  And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
23932 upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
23933 with USB sources.  We have not yet tested this setup in a production
23934 setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
23935 video mixer in a very short time frame.  We will need it for
23936 <a href="http://www.goopen.no/">Go Open 2009</a>.</p>
23937
23938 <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz">The
23939 USB image</a> is for a 1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
23940 larger stick as well.</p>
23941
23942       </div>
23943       <div class="tags">
23944
23945
23946         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>.
23947
23948
23949       </div>
23950     </div>
23951     <div class="padding"></div>
23952
23953     <div class="entry">
23954       <div class="title">
23955         <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>
23956       </div>
23957       <div class="date">
23958          7th December 2008
23959       </div>
23960       <div class="body">
23961         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
23962 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
23963 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
23964 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
23965 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
23966 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
23967 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
23968 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
23969
23970 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
23971 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
23972 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
23973 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
23974 of these cards.</p>
23975
23976       </div>
23977       <div class="tags">
23978
23979
23980         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>.
23981
23982
23983       </div>
23984     </div>
23985     <div class="padding"></div>
23986
23987     <div class="entry">
23988       <div class="title">
23989         <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>
23990       </div>
23991       <div class="date">
23992         25th November 2008
23993       </div>
23994       <div class="body">
23995         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
23996 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
23997 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
23998 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
23999 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
24000 notes are available on
24001 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
24002 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
24003 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
24004 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
24005 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
24006 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
24007 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
24008 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
24009 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
24010
24011 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
24012 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
24013
24014       </div>
24015       <div class="tags">
24016
24017
24018         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>.
24019
24020
24021       </div>
24022     </div>
24023     <div class="padding"></div>
24024
24025     <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>
24026     <div id="sidebar">
24027
24028
24029
24030 <h2>Archive</h2>
24031 <ul>
24032
24033 <li>2015
24034 <ul>
24035
24036 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
24037
24038 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (6)</a></li>
24039
24040 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/03/">March (1)</a></li>
24041
24042 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/04/">April (4)</a></li>
24043
24044 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/05/">May (3)</a></li>
24045
24046 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/06/">June (4)</a></li>
24047
24048 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/07/">July (6)</a></li>
24049
24050 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/08/">August (2)</a></li>
24051
24052 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/09/">September (2)</a></li>
24053
24054 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/10/">October (9)</a></li>
24055
24056 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/11/">November (5)</a></li>
24057
24058 </ul></li>
24059
24060 <li>2014
24061 <ul>
24062
24063 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
24064
24065 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
24066
24067 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
24068
24069 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
24070
24071 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
24072
24073 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
24074
24075 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
24076
24077 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
24078
24079 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
24080
24081 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
24082
24083 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
24084
24085 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
24086
24087 </ul></li>
24088
24089 <li>2013
24090 <ul>
24091
24092 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
24093
24094 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
24095
24096 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
24097
24098 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
24099
24100 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
24101
24102 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
24103
24104 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
24105
24106 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
24107
24108 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
24109
24110 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
24111
24112 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
24113
24114 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
24115
24116 </ul></li>
24117
24118 <li>2012
24119 <ul>
24120
24121 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
24122
24123 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
24124
24125 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
24126
24127 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
24128
24129 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
24130
24131 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
24132
24133 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
24134
24135 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
24136
24137 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
24138
24139 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
24140
24141 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
24142
24143 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
24144
24145 </ul></li>
24146
24147 <li>2011
24148 <ul>
24149
24150 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
24151
24152 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
24153
24154 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
24155
24156 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
24157
24158 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
24159
24160 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
24161
24162 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
24163
24164 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
24165
24166 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
24167
24168 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
24169
24170 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
24171
24172 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
24173
24174 </ul></li>
24175
24176 <li>2010
24177 <ul>
24178
24179 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
24180
24181 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
24182
24183 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
24184
24185 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
24186
24187 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
24188
24189 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
24190
24191 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
24192
24193 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
24194
24195 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
24196
24197 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
24198
24199 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
24200
24201 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
24202
24203 </ul></li>
24204
24205 <li>2009
24206 <ul>
24207
24208 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
24209
24210 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
24211
24212 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
24213
24214 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
24215
24216 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
24217
24218 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
24219
24220 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
24221
24222 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
24223
24224 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
24225
24226 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
24227
24228 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
24229
24230 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
24231
24232 </ul></li>
24233
24234 <li>2008
24235 <ul>
24236
24237 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
24238
24239 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
24240
24241 </ul></li>
24242
24243 </ul>
24244
24245
24246
24247 <h2>Tags</h2>
24248 <ul>
24249
24250  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (13)</a></li>
24251
24252  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
24253
24254  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
24255
24256  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
24257
24258  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (9)</a></li>
24259
24260  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (15)</a></li>
24261
24262  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
24263
24264  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
24265
24266  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (113)</a></li>
24267
24268  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (153)</a></li>
24269
24270  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (10)</a></li>
24271
24272  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (15)</a></li>
24273
24274  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (20)</a></li>
24275
24276  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
24277
24278  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (295)</a></li>
24279
24280  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (23)</a></li>
24281
24282  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (12)</a></li>
24283
24284  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (24)</a></li>
24285
24286  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
24287
24288  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (16)</a></li>
24289
24290  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264 (20)</a></li>
24291
24292  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (42)</a></li>
24293
24294  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (10)</a></li>
24295
24296  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (19)</a></li>
24297
24298  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
24299
24300  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
24301
24302  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
24303
24304  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
24305
24306  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
24307
24308  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (36)</a></li>
24309
24310  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (271)</a></li>
24311
24312  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (177)</a></li>
24313
24314  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (22)</a></li>
24315
24316  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
24317
24318  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (57)</a></li>
24319
24320  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (92)</a></li>
24321
24322  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (1)</a></li>
24323
24324  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
24325
24326  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
24327
24328  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
24329
24330  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (9)</a></li>
24331
24332  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
24333
24334  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (4)</a></li>
24335
24336  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
24337
24338  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (44)</a></li>
24339
24340  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
24341
24342  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (4)</a></li>
24343
24344  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (48)</a></li>
24345
24346  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (3)</a></li>
24347
24348  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (10)</a></li>
24349
24350  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (36)</a></li>
24351
24352  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (2)</a></li>
24353
24354  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
24355
24356  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (8)</a></li>
24357
24358  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (54)</a></li>
24359
24360  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
24361
24362  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (37)</a></li>
24363
24364 </ul>
24365
24366
24367     </div>
24368     <p style="text-align: right">
24369  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
24370 </p>
24371
24372   </body>
24373 </html>