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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/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_beta_release.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu beta release</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28         26th April 2015
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>I am happy to report that the Debian Edu team sent out
  32 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2015/04/msg00000.html">this
  33 announcement today</a>:</p>
  34
  35 <pre>
  36 the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is pleased to announce the first
  37 *beta* release of Debian Edu "Jessie" 8.0+edu0~b1, which for the first
  38 time is composed entirely of packages from the current Debian stable
  39 release, Debian 8 "Jessie".
  40
  41 (As most reading this will know, Debian "Jessie" hasn't actually been
  42 released by now. The release is still in progress but should finish
  43 later today ;)
  44
  45 We expect to make a final release of Debian Edu "Jessie" in the coming
  46 weeks, timed with the first point release of Debian Jessie. Upgrades
  47 from this beta release of Debian Edu Jessie to the final release will
  48 be possible and encouraged!
  49
  50 Please report feedback to debian-edu@lists.debian.org and/or submit
  51 bugs: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
  52
  53 Debian Edu - sometimes also known as "Skolelinux" - is a complete
  54 operating system for schools, universities and other
  55 organisations. Through its pre- prepared installation profiles
  56 administrators can install servers, workstations and laptops which
  57 will work in harmony on the school network.  With Debian Edu, the
  58 teachers themselves or their technical support staff can roll out a
  59 complete multi-user, multi-machine study environment within hours or
  60 days.
  61
  62 Debian Edu is already in use at several hundred schools all over the
  63 world, particularly in Germany, Spain and Norway. Installations come
  64 with hundreds of applications pre-installed, plus the whole Debian
  65 archive of thousands of compatible packages within easy reach.
  66
  67 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
  68 installation instructions are available, including detailed
  69 instructions in the manual explaining the first steps, such as setting
  70 up a network or adding users.  Please note that the password for the
  71 user your prompted for during installation must have a length of at
  72 least 5 characters!
  73
  74 == Where to download ==
  75
  76 A multi-architecture CD / usbstick image (649 MiB) for network booting
  77 can be downloaded at the following locations:
  78
  79     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso
  80     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso .
  81
  82 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 54a524d16246cddd8d2cfd6ea52f2dd78c47ee0a
  83
  84 Alternatively an extended DVD / usbstick image (4.9 GiB) is also
  85 available, with more software included (saving additional download
  86 time):
  87
  88     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
  89     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
  90
  91 The SHA1SUM of this image is: fb1f1504a490c077a48653898f9d6a461cb3c636
  92
  93 Sources are available from the Debian archive, see
  94 http://ftp.debian.org/debian-cd/8.0.0/source/ for some download
  95 options.
  96
  97 == Debian Edu Jessie manual in seven languages ==
  98
  99 Please see https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/ for
 100 the English version of the Debian Edu jessie manual.
 101
 102 This manual has been fully translated to German, French, Italian,
 103 Danish, Dutch and Norwegian Bokmål. A partly translated version exists
 104 for Spanish.  See http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/ for
 105 online version of the translated manual.
 106
 107 More information about Debian 8 "Jessie" itself is provided in the
 108 release notes and the installation manual:
 109 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes
 110 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual
 111
 112
 113 == Errata / known problems ==
 114
 115     It takes up to 15 minutes for a changed hostname to be updated via
 116     DHCP (#780461).
 117
 118     The hostname script fails to update LTSP server hostname (#783087).
 119
 120 Workaround: run update-hostname-from-ip on the client to update the
 121 hostname immediately.
 122
 123 Check https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie for a possibly
 124 more current and complete list.
 125
 126 == Some more details about Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~b1 Codename Jessie released 2015-04-25 ==
 127
 128 === Software updates ===
 129
 130 Everything which is new in Debian 8 Jessie, e.g.:
 131
 132  * Linux kernel 3.16.7-ctk9; for the i386 architecture, support for
 133    i486 processors has been dropped; oldest supported ones: i586 (like
 134    Intel Pentium and AMD K5).
 135
 136  * Desktop environments KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11.13, GNOME 3.14,
 137    Xfce 4.12, LXDE 0.5.6
 138    * new optional desktop environment: MATE 1.8
 139    * KDE Plasma Workspaces is installed by default; to choose one of
 140      the others see the manual.
 141  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 41
 142  * LibreOffice 4.3.3
 143  * GOsa 2.7.4
 144  * LTSP 5.5.4
 145  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
 146  * new boot framework: systemd
 147  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.12
 148  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
 149  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
 150  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.1
 151  * golearn 0.9
 152  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
 153  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
 154  * Debian Jessie includes about 43000 packages available for installation.
 155  * More information about Debian 8 Jessie is provided in its release
 156    notes and the installation manual, see the link above.
 157
 158 === Installation changes ===
 159
 160     Installations done via PXE now also install firmware automatically
 161     for the hardware present.
 162
 163 === Fixed bugs ===
 164
 165 A number of bugs have been fixed in this release; the most noticeable
 166 from a user perspective:
 167
 168  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
 169    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
 170    information is corrected (710362)
 171
 172  * shutdown-at-night now shuts the system down if gdm3 is used (775608).
 173
 174 === Sugar desktop removed ===
 175
 176 As the Sugar desktop was removed from Debian Jessie, it is also not
 177 available in Debian Edu jessie.
 178
 179
 180 == About Debian Edu / Skolelinux ==
 181
 182 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on
 183 Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
 184 configured school network. Directly after installation a school server
 185 running all services needed for a school network is set up just
 186 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
 187 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
 188 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
 189 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
 190 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
 191 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
 192 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
 193 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
 194 can choose between KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
 195 environment.
 196
 197 == About Debian ==
 198
 199 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
 200 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
 201 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
 202 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
 203 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
 204 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
 205 operating system.
 206
 207 == Thanks ==
 208
 209 Thanks to everyone making Debian and Debian Edu / Skolelinux happen!
 210 You rock.
 211 </pre>
 212
 213       </div>
 214       <div class="tags">
 215
 216
 217         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 218
 219
 220       </div>
 221     </div>
 222     <div class="padding"></div>
 223
 224     <div class="entry">
 225       <div class="title">
 226         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Shirish_Agarwal.html">Debian Edu interview: Shirish Agarwal</a>
 227       </div>
 228       <div class="date">
 229         15th April 2015
 230       </div>
 231       <div class="body">
 232         <p>It was a surprise to me to learn that project to create a complete
 233 computer system for schools I've involved in,
 234 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, was
 235 being used in India.  But apparently it is, and I managed to get an
 236 interview with one of the friends of the project there, Shirish
 237 Agarwal.</p>
 238
 239 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
 240
 241 <p>My name is Shirish Agarwal. Based out of the educational and
 242 historical city of Pune, from the western state of Maharashtra, India.
 243 My bread comes from giving training, giving policy tips,
 244 installations on free software to mom and pop shops in different
 245 fields from Desktop publishing to retail shops as well as work with
 246 few software start-ups as well.</p>
 247
 248 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
 249 project?</strong></p>
 250
 251 <p>It started innocently enough. I have been using Debian for a few
 252 years and in one local minidebconf / debutsav I was asked if there was
 253 anything for schools or education. I had worked / played with free
 254 educational softwares such as Gcompris and Stellarium for my many
 255 nieces and nephews so researched and found Debian Edu or Skolelinux as
 256 it was known then.  Since then I have started using the various
 257 education meta-packages provided by the project.</p>
 258
 259 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
 260 Edu?</strong></p>
 261
 262 <p>It's closest I have seen where a package full of educational
 263 software are packed, which are free and open (both literally and
 264 figuratively).  Even if I take the simplest software which is
 265 gcompris, the number of activities therein are amazing. Another one of
 266 the softwares that I have liked for a long time is stellarium. Even
 267 pysycache is cool except for couple of issues I encountered
 268 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781841">#781841</a> and
 269 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781842">#781842</a>.</p>
 270
 271 <p>I prefer software installed on the system over web based solutions,
 272 as a web site can disappear any time but the software on disk has the
 273 possibility of a larger life span.  Of course with both it's more a
 274 question if it has enough users who make it fun or sustainable or both
 275 for the developer per-se.</p>
 276
 277 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
 278 Edu?</strong></p>
 279
 280 <p>I do see that the Debian Edu team seems to be short-handed and I
 281 think more efforts should be made to make it popular and ask and take
 282 help from people and the larger community wherever possible.</p>
 283
 284 <p>I don't see any disadvantage to use Skolelinux apart from the fact
 285 that most apps. are generic which is good or bad how you see it.
 286 However, saying that I do acknowledge the fact that the canvas is
 287 pretty big and there are lot of interesting ideas that could be done
 288 but for reasons not known not done or if done I don't know about them.
 289 Let me share some of the ideas (these are more upstream based but
 290 still) I have had for a long time :</p>
 291
 292 <p>1. Classical maths question of two trains in opposing directions
 293 each running @x kmph/mph at y distance, when they will meet and how
 294 far would each travel and similar questions like these.
 295
 296 <p>The computer is a fantastic system where questions like these can
 297 be drawn, animated and the methodology and answers teased out in
 298 interactive manner. While sites such as the
 299 <a href="http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.two.trains.html">Ask
 300 Dr. Math FAQ on The Two Trains problem</a> (as an example or point of
 301 inspiration) can be used there is lot more that can be done.  I dunno
 302 if there is a free software which does something like this.  The idea
 303 being a blend of objects + animation + interaction which does
 304 this. The whole interaction could be gamified with points or sounds or
 305 colourful celebration whenever the user gets even part of the question
 306 or/and methodology right. That would help reinforce good behaviour.
 307 This understanding could be used to share/showcase everything from how
 308 the first wheel came to be, to evolution to how astronomy started,
 309 psychics and everything in-between.</p>
 310
 311 <p>One specific idea in the train part was having the Linux mascot on
 312 one train and the BSD or GNU mascot on the other train and they
 313 meeting somewhere in-between. Characters from blender movies could
 314 also be used.</p>
 315
 316 <p>2. Loads of crossword-puzzles with reference to subjects: We have
 317 enormous data sets in Wikipedia and Wikitionary.  I don't think it
 318 should be a big job to design crossword puzzles. Using categories and
 319 sub-categories it should be doable to have Q&A single word answers
 320 from the existing data-sets. What would make it easy or hard could be
 321 the length of the word + existence of many or few vowels depending on
 322 the user's input.</p>
 323
 324 <p>3. Jigsaw puzzles - We already have a great software called
 325 palapeli with number of slicers making it pretty interesting. What
 326 needs to be done is to download large number of public domain and
 327 copyleft images, tease and use IPTC tags to categorise them into
 328 nature, history etc.  and let it loose. This could turn to be really
 329 huge collection of images. One source could be taken from
 330 commons.wikimedia.org, others could be huge collection of royalty-free
 331 stock photos. Potential is immense.</p>
 332
 333 <p>Apart from this, free software suffers in two directions, we lag
 334 both in development (of using new features per-se) and maintenance a
 335 lot.  This is more so in educational software as these applications
 336 need to be timely and the opportunity cost of missing deadlines is
 337 immense. If we are able to solve issues of funding for development and
 338 maintenance of such software I don't see any big difficulties. I know
 339 of few start-ups in and around India who would love to develop and
 340 maintain such software if funding issues could be solved.</p>
 341
 342 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
 343
 344 <p>That would be huge list. Some of the softwares are obviously apt,
 345 aptitude, debdelta, leafpad, the shell of course (zsh nowadays),
 346 quassel for IRC. In games I use shisen-sho while card-games are evenly
 347 between kpat and Aiselriot.  In desktops it's a tie between
 348 gnome-flashback and mate.</p>
 349
 350 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
 351 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
 352
 353 <p>I think it should first start with using specific FOSS apps. in
 354 whatever environment they are. If it's MS-Windows or Mac so be it.
 355 Once they are habitual with the apps. and there is buy-in from the
 356 school management then it could be installed anywhere. Most of the
 357 people now understand the concept of a repository because of the
 358 various online stores so it isn't hard to convince on that front.</p>
 359
 360 <p>What is harder is having enough people with technical skills and
 361 passion to service them. If you get buy-in from one or two teachers
 362 then ideas like above could also be asked to be done as a project as
 363 well.</p>
 364
 365 <p>I think where we fall short more than anything is in marketing. For
 366 instance, Debian has this whole range of fonts in its archive but
 367 there isn't even a page where all those different fonts in the La
 368 Ipsum format could be tried out for newcomers.</p>
 369
 370 <p>One of the issues faced constantly in installations is with updates
 371 and upgrades.  People have this myth that each update and upgrade
 372 means the user interface will / has to change. I have seen this
 373 innumerable times.  That perhaps is one of the reasons which browsers
 374 like Iceweasel / Firefox change user interfaces so much, not because
 375 it might be needed or be functional but because people believe that
 376 changed user interfaces are better. This, can easily be pointed with
 377 the user interfaces changed with almost every MS-Windows and Mac OS
 378 releases.</p>
 379
 380 <p>The problems with Debian Edu for deployment are many. The biggest
 381 is the huge gap between what is taught in schools and what Debian Edu
 382 is aimed at.
 383
 384 <p>Me and my friends did teach on week-ends in a government school for
 385 around 2 years, and
 386 <a href="https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/sharings/">gathered
 387 some experience</a> there.  Some of the things we learnt/discovered
 388 there was :</p>
 389
 390 <ol>
 391
 392   <li>Most of the teachers are very territorial about their subjects
 393    and they do not want you to teach anything out of the
 394    portion/syllabus given.</li>
 395
 396   <li>They want any activity on the system in accordance to whatever
 397    is in the syllabus.</li>
 398
 399   <li>There are huge barriers both with the English language and at
 400    times with objects or whatever. An example, let's say in gcompris
 401    you have objects falling down and you have to name them and let's
 402    say the falling object is a hat or a fedora hat, this would not be
 403    as recognizable as say a
 404    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puneri_Pagadi">Puneri
 405    Pagdi</a> so there is need to inject local objects, words wherever
 406    possible. Especially for word-games there are so many hindi words
 407    which have become part of english vocabulary (for instance in
 408    parley), those could be made into a hinglish collection or
 409    something but that is something for upstream to do.</li>
 410
 411 </ol>
 412
 413       </div>
 414       <div class="tags">
 415
 416
 417         Tags: <a href="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>.
 418
 419
 420       </div>
 421     </div>
 422     <div class="padding"></div>
 423
 424     <div class="entry">
 425       <div class="title">
 426         <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>
 427       </div>
 428       <div class="date">
 429          7th April 2015
 430       </div>
 431       <div class="body">
 432         <p>I am happy to let you all know that I'm going to the <a
 433 href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/">Open Source Developers'
 434 Conference Nordic 2015</a>!</p>
 435
 436 <p>It take place Friday 8th to Sunday 10th of May in Oslo next to
 437 where I work, and I finally got around to submitting
 438 <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talk/6192">a talk proposal for
 439 it</a> (dead link for most people until the talk is accepted).  As
 440 part of my involvement with the
 441 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group member
 442 association</a> I have been slightly involved in the planning of this
 443 conference for a while now, with a focus on organising a Civic Hacking
 444 Hackathon with our friends
 445 over at <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> and
 446 <a href="http://www.holderdeord.no/">Holder de ord</a>.  This part is
 447 named the 'My Society' track in the program.  There is still space for
 448 more talks and participants.  I hope to see you there.</p>
 449
 450 <p>Check out <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talks">the talks
 451 submitted and accepted so far</a>.</p>
 452
 453       </div>
 454       <div class="tags">
 455
 456
 457         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>.
 458
 459
 460       </div>
 461     </div>
 462     <div class="padding"></div>
 463
 464     <div class="entry">
 465       <div class="title">
 466         <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>
 467       </div>
 468       <div class="date">
 469          4th April 2015
 470       </div>
 471       <div class="body">
 472         <p>During eastern I had some time to continue working on the Norwegian
 473 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
 474 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
 475 At the moment I am proof reading the finished text, looking for typos,
 476 inconsistent wordings and sentences that do not flow as they should.
 477 I'm more than two thirds done with the text, and welcome others to
 478 check the text up to chapter 13.  The current status is available on the
 479 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
 480 project pages.  You can also check out the
 481 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
 482 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
 483 and HTML version available in the
 484 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
 485 directory</a>.</p>
 486
 487 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
 488 you find any.</p>
 489
 490       </div>
 491       <div class="tags">
 492
 493
 494         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>.
 495
 496
 497       </div>
 498     </div>
 499     <div class="padding"></div>
 500
 501     <div class="entry">
 502       <div class="title">
 503         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen__Norwegian_TV_channel_for_technical_topics.html">Frikanalen, Norwegian TV channel for technical topics</a>
 504       </div>
 505       <div class="date">
 506          9th March 2015
 507       </div>
 508       <div class="body">
 509         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a>,
 510 where I am a member, and where people interested in free software,
 511 open standards and UNIX like operating systems like Linux and the BSDs
 512 come together, record our monthly technical presentations on video.
 513 The purpose is to document the talks and spread them to a wider
 514 audience.  For this, the the Norwegian nationwide open channel
 515 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is a useful venue.
 516 Since a few days ago, when I figured out the
 517 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/api/">REST API</a> to program the
 518 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/guide/">channel time schedule</a>,
 519 the channel has been filled with NUUG talks, related recordings and
 520 some Creative Commons licensed TED talks (from archive.org).  I fill
 521 all "leftover bits" on the channel with content from NUUG, which at
 522 the moment is almost 17 of 24 hours every day.</p>
 523
 524 <p>The list of NUUG videos
 525 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/organization/82">uploaded so far</a>
 526 include things like a
 527 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/625090">one hour talk by John
 528 Perry Barlow when he visited Oslo</a>, a presentation of
 529 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624275">Haiku, the BeOS
 530 re-implementation</a>, the
 531 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624493">history of FiksGataMi,
 532 the Norwegian version of FixMyStreet</a>, the good old
 533 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/623566">Warriors of the net
 534 video</A> and many others.</p>
 535
 536 <p>We have a large backlog of NUUG talks not yet uploaded to
 537 Frikanalen, and plan to upload every useful bit to the channel to
 538 spread the word there.  I also hope to find useful recordings from the
 539 Chaos Computer Club and Debian conferences and spread them on the
 540 channel as well.  But this require locating the videos and their meta
 541 information (title, description, license, etc), and preparing the
 542 recordings for broadcast, and I have not yet had the spare time to
 543 focus on this.  Perhaps you want to help.  Please join us on IRC,
 544 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
 545 if you want to help make this happen.</p>
 546
 547 <p>But as I said, already the channel is already almost exclusively
 548 filled with technical topics, and if you want to learn something new
 549 today, check out the <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">Ogg Theora
 550 web stream</a> or use one of the other ways to get access to the
 551 channel.  Unfortunately the Ogg Theora recoding for distribution still
 552 do not properly sync the video and sound.  It is generated by recoding
 553 a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to
 554 Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and we have not been able to find a way that
 555 produces acceptable quality.  Help needed, please get in touch if you
 556 know how to fix it using free software.</p>
 557
 558       </div>
 559       <div class="tags">
 560
 561
 562         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>.
 563
 564
 565       </div>
 566     </div>
 567     <div class="padding"></div>
 568
 569     <div class="entry">
 570       <div class="title">
 571         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Citizenfour_documentary_on_the_Snowden_confirmations_to_Norway.html">The Citizenfour documentary on the Snowden confirmations to Norway</a>
 572       </div>
 573       <div class="date">
 574         28th February 2015
 575       </div>
 576       <div class="body">
 577         <p>Today I was happy to learn that the documentary
 578 <a href="https://citizenfourfilm.com/">Citizenfour</a> by
 579 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Poitras">Laura Poitras</a>
 580 finally will show up in Norway.  According to the magazine
 581 <a href="http://montages.no/">Montages</a>, a deal has finally been
 582 made for
 583 <a href="http://montages.no/nyheter/snowden-dokumentaren-citizenfour-far-norsk-kinodistribusjon/">Cinema
 584 distribution in Norway</a> and the movie will have its premiere soon.
 585 This is great news.  As part of my involvement with
 586 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User Group</a>, me and
 587 a friend have
 588 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_til_Norge_.shtml">tried
 589 to get the movie to Norway</a> ourselves, but obviously
 590 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_endelig_til_Norge_.shtml">we
 591 were too late</a> and Tor Fosse beat us to it.  I am happy he did, as
 592 the movie will make its way to the public and we do not have to make
 593 it happen ourselves.
 594 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwAvd5mvM">The trailer</a>
 595 can be seen on youtube, if you are curious what kind of film this
 596 is.</p>
 597
 598 <p>The whistle blower Edward Snowden really deserve political asylum
 599 here in Norway, but I am afraid he would not be safe.</p>
 600
 601       </div>
 602       <div class="tags">
 603
 604
 605         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>.
 606
 607
 608       </div>
 609     </div>
 610     <div class="padding"></div>
 611
 612     <div class="entry">
 613       <div class="title">
 614         <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>
 615       </div>
 616       <div class="date">
 617         25th February 2015
 618       </div>
 619       <div class="body">
 620         <p>The Norwegian nationwide open channel
 621 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is still going
 622 strong.  It allow everyone to send the video they want on national
 623 television.  It is a TV station administrated completely using a web
 624 browser, running only <ahref="https://github.com/Frikanalen">Free
 625 Software</a>, providing <ahref="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api">a REST
 626 api</a> for administrators and members, and with distribution on the
 627 national DVB-T distribution network RiksTV.  But only between 12:00
 628 and 17:30 Norwegian time.  This has finally changed, after many years
 629 with limited distribution.  A few weeks ago, we set up a Ogg Theora
 630 stream via icecast to allow everyone with Internet access to check out
 631 the channel the rest of the day.  This is presented on
 632 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">the Frikanalen web site now</a>.  And
 633 since a few days ago, the channel is also available
 634 via <a href="https://www.uninett.no/iptv-tilgang">multicast on
 635 UNINETT</a>, available for those using IPTV TVs and set-top boxes in
 636 the Norwegian National Research and Education network.</p>
 637
 638 <p>If you want to see what is on the channel, point your media player
 639 to one of these sources.  The first should work with most players and
 640 browsers, while as far as I know, the multicast UDP stream only work
 641 with VLC.</p>
 642
 643 <ul>
 644   <li><a href="http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv">http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv</a></li>
 645   <li>udp://@224.17.43.129:1234</li>
 646 </ul>
 647
 648 <p>The Ogg Theora / icecast stream is not working well, as the video
 649 and audio is slightly out of sync.  We have not been able to figure
 650 out how to fix it.  It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG
 651 transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to Ogg Theora /
 652 Vorbis, and the result is less then stellar.  If you have ideas how to
 653 fix it, please let us know on frikanalen (at) nuug.no.  We currently
 654 use this with ffmpeg2theora 0.29:</p>
 655
 656 <blockquote><pre>
 657 ./ffmpeg2theora.linux &lt;OBE_gemini_URL.ts&gt; -F 25 -x 720 -y 405 \
 658  --deinterlace --inputfps 25 -c 1 -H 48000 --keyint 8 --buf-delay 100 \
 659  --nosync -V 700 -o - | oggfwd video.nuug.no 8000 &lt;pw&gt; /frikanalen.ogv
 660 </pre></blockquote>
 661
 662 <p>If you get the multicast UDP stream working, please let me know, as
 663 I am curious how far the multicast stream reach.  It do not make it to
 664 my home network, nor any other commercially available network in
 665 Norway that I am aware of.</p>
 666
 667       </div>
 668       <div class="tags">
 669
 670
 671         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>.
 672
 673
 674       </div>
 675     </div>
 676     <div class="padding"></div>
 677
 678     <div class="entry">
 679       <div class="title">
 680         <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>
 681       </div>
 682       <div class="date">
 683         10th February 2015
 684       </div>
 685       <div class="body">
 686         <p>Aftenposten, one of the largest newspapers in Norway, today report
 687 that
 688 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/reise/Slik-skannes-kroppen-din-i-fremtidens-sikkerhetskontroll-490666_1.snd">three
 689 of the nude body scanners now is put to use at Gardermoen</a>, the
 690 main airport in Norway.  This way the travelers can have their body
 691 photographed without cloths when visiting Norway.  Of course this
 692 horrible news is presented with a positive spin, stating that "now
 693 travelers can move past the security check point faster and more
 694 efficiently", but fail to mention that the machines in question take
 695 pictures of their nude bodies and store them internally in the
 696 computer, while only presenting sketch figure of the body to the
 697 public.  The article is written in a way that leave the impression
 698 that the new machines do not take these nude pictures and only create
 699 the sketch figures.  In reality the same nude pictures are still
 700 taken, but not presented to everyone.  They are still available for
 701 the owners of the system and the people doing maintenance of the
 702 scanners, as long as they are taken and stored.</p>
 703
 704 <p>Wikipedia have a more on
 705 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_body_scanner">Full body
 706 scanners</a>, including example images and a summary of the
 707 controversy about these scanners.</p>
 708
 709 <p>Personally I will decline to use these machines, as I believe strip
 710 searches of my body is a very intrusive attack on my privacy, and not
 711 something everyone should have to accept to travel.</p>
 712
 713       </div>
 714       <div class="tags">
 715
 716
 717         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>.
 718
 719
 720       </div>
 721     </div>
 722     <div class="padding"></div>
 723
 724     <div class="entry">
 725       <div class="title">
 726         <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>
 727       </div>
 728       <div class="date">
 729          8th February 2015
 730       </div>
 731       <div class="body">
 732         <p>When running a TV station with both broadcast and web stream
 733 distribution, it is useful to know that the stream is working.  As I
 734 am involved in the Norwegian open channel
 735 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> as part of my
 736 activity in the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member
 737 organisation</a>, I wrote a script to use mplayer to connect to a
 738 video stream, pick two images 35 seconds apart and compare them.  If
 739 the images are missing or identical, something is probably wrong with
 740 the stream and an alarm should be triggered.  The script is written as
 741 a Nagios plugin, allowing us to use Nagios to run the check regularly
 742 and sound the alarm when something is wrong.  It is able to detect
 743 both a hanging and a broken video stream.</p>
 744
 745 <p>I just uploaded the code for the script into the
 746 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen/frikanalen/blob/master/nagios-plugin/check_video_stream_images">Frikanalen
 747 git repository</a> on github.  If you run a TV station with web
 748 streaming, perhaps you can find it useful too.</p>
 749
 750 <p>Last year, the Frikanalen public TV station transformed into using
 751 only Linux based free software to administrate, schedule and
 752 distribute the TV content.  The
 753 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen">source code for the entire TV
 754 station</a> is available from the Github project page.  Everyone can
 755 use it to send their content on national TV, and we provide both a web
 756 GUI and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api/">a web API</a> to
 757 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/login/?next=/members/video/">add</a>
 758 and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/members/plan/">schedule
 759 content</a>.  And thanks to last weeks developer gathering and
 760 following activity, we now have the schedule
 761 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/xmltv/2015/01/01">available as
 762 XMLTV</a> too.  Still a lot of work left to do, especially with the
 763 process to add videos and with the scheduling, so your contribution is
 764 most welcome.  Perhaps you want to set up your own TV station?</p>
 765
 766 <p>Update 2015-02-25: Got a tip from Uninett about their
 767 <a href="https://scm.uninett.no/maalepaaler/qstream/">qstream
 768 monitoring system</a>, which gather connection time, jitter, packet
 769 loss and burst bandwidth usage.  It look useful to check if UDP
 770 streams are working as they should.</p>
 771
 772       </div>
 773       <div class="tags">
 774
 775
 776         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>.
 777
 778
 779       </div>
 780     </div>
 781     <div class="padding"></div>
 782
 783     <div class="entry">
 784       <div class="title">
 785         <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>
 786       </div>
 787       <div class="date">
 788         12th January 2015
 789       </div>
 790       <div class="body">
 791         <p>A few days ago, the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/">Free Software
 792 Foundation</a> announced a new video
 793 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">explaining
 794 Free software</a> in simple terms.  The video named User Liberation is
 795 3 minutes long, and I recommend showing it to everyone you know as a
 796 way to explain what Free Software is all about.  Unfortunately several
 797 of the people I know do not understand English and Spanish, so it did
 798 not make sense to show it to them.</p>
 799
 800 <p>But today I was told that
 801 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">English
 802 subtitles were available</a> and set out to provide Norwegian Bokmål
 803 subtitles based on these.  The result has been sent to FSF and made
 804 available in
 805 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/fsf-video-user-liberation-subtitles">a
 806 git repository</a> provided by Github.  Please let me know if you find
 807 errors or have improvements to the subtitles.</p>
 808
 809 <p>Update 2015-02-03: Since I publised this post, FSF created a
 810 Libreplanet
 811 <a href="http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:FSF/User_Liberation_Video_Translation">project
 812 to track subtitles</A> for the video.</p>
 813
 814       </div>
 815       <div class="tags">
 816
 817
 818         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>.
 819
 820
 821       </div>
 822     </div>
 823     <div class="padding"></div>
 824
 825     <div class="entry">
 826       <div class="title">
 827         <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>
 828       </div>
 829       <div class="date">
 830         30th December 2014
 831       </div>
 832       <div class="body">
 833         <p>I am very happy that we in the
 834 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group (NUUG)</a>,
 835 spearheaded by Marius Halden from NUUG and Matthew Somerville from
 836 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>, finally managed to
 837 upgrade the code base for the Norwegian version of
 838 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org/">FixMyStreet</a>.  This
 839 was the first major update since 2011. The refurbished
 840 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is already live, and
 841 seem to hold up the pressure.  The
 842 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__FiksGataMi_i_oppdatert_og_mobilvennlig_klesdrakt.shtml">press
 843 release and announcement</a> went out this morning.</p>
 844
 845 <p>FixMyStreet is a web platform for allowing the citizens to easily
 846 report problems with public infrastructure to the responsible
 847 authorities.  Think of it as a shared mail client with map support,
 848 allowing everyone to see what already was reported and comment on the
 849 reports in public.</p>
 850
 851       </div>
 852       <div class="tags">
 853
 854
 855         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>.
 856
 857
 858       </div>
 859     </div>
 860     <div class="padding"></div>
 861
 862     <div class="entry">
 863       <div class="title">
 864         <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>
 865       </div>
 866       <div class="date">
 867         19th December 2014
 868       </div>
 869       <div class="body">
 870         <p>So, Sony caved in
 871 (<a href="https://twitter.com/RobLowe/status/545338568512917504">according
 872 to Rob Lowe</a>) and demonstrated that America lost its first cyberwar
 873 (<a href="https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/status/545339074975109122">according
 874 to Newt Gingrich</a>).  It should not surprise anyone, after the
 875 whistle blower Edward Snowden documented that the government of USA
 876 and their allies for many years have done their best to make sure the
 877 technology used by its citizens is filled with security holes allowing
 878 the secret services to spy on its own population.  No one in their
 879 right minds could believe that the ability to snoop on the people all
 880 over the globe could only be used by the personnel authorized to do so
 881 by the president of the United States of America.  If the capabilities
 882 are there, they will be used by friend and foe alike, and now they are
 883 being used to bring Sony on its knees.</p>
 884
 885 <p>I doubt it will a lesson learned, and expect USA to lose its next
 886 cyber war too, given how eager the western intelligence communities
 887 (and probably the non-western too, but it is less in the news) seem to
 888 be to continue its current dragnet surveillance practice.</p>
 889
 890 <p>There is a reason why China and others are trying to move away from
 891 Windows to Linux and other alternatives, and it is not to avoid
 892 sending its hard earned dollars to Cayman Islands (or whatever
 893 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven">tax haven</a>
 894 Microsoft is using these days to collect the majority of its
 895 income. :)</p>
 896
 897       </div>
 898       <div class="tags">
 899
 900
 901         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>.
 902
 903
 904       </div>
 905     </div>
 906     <div class="padding"></div>
 907
 908     <div class="entry">
 909       <div class="title">
 910         <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>
 911       </div>
 912       <div class="date">
 913         22nd November 2014
 914       </div>
 915       <div class="body">
 916         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
 917 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
 918 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
 919 courtesy of
 920 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
 921 Schubert</a> and
 922 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
 923 McVittie</a>.
 924
 925 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
 926 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
 927 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
 928 you upgrade:</p>
 929
 930 <p><blockquote><pre>
 931 Package: systemd-sysv
 932 Pin: release o=Debian
 933 Pin-Priority: -1
 934 </pre></blockquote><p>
 935
 936 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
 937 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
 938 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
 939 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
 940 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
 941
 942 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
 943 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
 944 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
 945 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
 946 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
 947 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
 948
 949 <p><blockquote><pre>
 950 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
 951 </pre></blockquote><p>
 952
 953 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
 954
 955 <p><blockquote><pre>
 956 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
 957 </pre></blockquote><p>
 958
 959 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
 960 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
 961
 962 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
 963 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
 964 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
 965 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
 966 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
 967 Jessie is released.</p>
 968
 969 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
 970 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
 971 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
 972 line.</p>
 973
 974       </div>
 975       <div class="tags">
 976
 977
 978         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>.
 979
 980
 981       </div>
 982     </div>
 983     <div class="padding"></div>
 984
 985     <div class="entry">
 986       <div class="title">
 987         <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>
 988       </div>
 989       <div class="date">
 990         10th November 2014
 991       </div>
 992       <div class="body">
 993         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
 994 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
 995 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
 996
 997 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
 998 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
 999 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
1000 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
1001 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
1002 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
1003 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
1004 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
1005 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
1006 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
1007 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
1008 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
1009 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
1010 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
1011 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
1012
1013 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
1014 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
1015 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
1016 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
1017 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
1018 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
1019 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
1020 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
1021 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
1022 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
1023 were fairly easy, and
1024 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
1025 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
1026 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
1027 useful approach.</p>
1028
1029 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
1030 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
1031 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
1032 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
1033 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
1034 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
1035 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
1036 this:</p>
1037
1038 <p><blockquote><pre>
1039 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
1040   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
1041 </pre></blockquote></p>
1042
1043 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
1044 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
1045
1046 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
1047 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
1048 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
1049 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
1050 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
1051 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
1052 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
1053 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
1054 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
1055 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
1056 system.</p>
1057
1058 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
1059 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
1060 SMTorP. :)</p>
1061
1062       </div>
1063       <div class="tags">
1064
1065
1066         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>.
1067
1068
1069       </div>
1070     </div>
1071     <div class="padding"></div>
1072
1073     <div class="entry">
1074       <div class="title">
1075         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_released__alpha0_.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu released (alpha0)</a>
1076       </div>
1077       <div class="date">
1078         27th October 2014
1079       </div>
1080       <div class="body">
1081         <p>I am happy to report that I on behalf of the Debian Edu team just
1082 sent out
1083 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2014/10/msg00000.html">this
1084 announcement</a>:</p>
1085
1086 <pre>
1087 The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu
1088 Jessie 8.0+edu0~alpha0
1089
1090 Debian Edu is a complete operating system for schools. Through its
1091 various installation profiles you can install servers, workstations
1092 and laptops which will work together on the school network. With
1093 Debian Edu, the teachers themselves or their technical support can
1094 roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within
1095 hours or a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications
1096 pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.
1097
1098 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
1099 installation instructions are available, including detailed
1100 instructions in the manual[1] explaining the first steps, such as
1101 setting up a network or adding users. Please note that the password
1102 for the user your prompted for during installation must have a length
1103 of at least 5 characters!
1104
1105  [1] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie</a> &gt;
1106
1107 Would you like to give your school's computer a longer life? Are you
1108 tired of sneaker administration, running from computer to computer
1109 reinstalling the operating system? Would you like to administrate all
1110 the computers in your school using only a couple of hours every week?
1111 Check out Debian Edu Jessie!
1112
1113 Skolelinux is used by at least two hundred schools all over the world,
1114 mostly in Germany and Norway.
1115
1116 About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
1117 ===============================
1118
1119 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux[2], is a Linux distribution based
1120 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
1121 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
1122 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
1123 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
1124 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
1125 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
1126 machines can be installed via the network.  The provided school server
1127 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
1128 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
1129 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
1130 packages[3] and more are available from the Debian archive, and
1131 schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
1132 environment.
1133
1134  [2] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">http://www.skolelinux.org/</a> &gt;
1135  [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;
1136
1137 Full release notes and manual
1138 =============================
1139
1140 Below the download URLs there is a list of some of the new features
1141 and bugfixes of Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie. The full
1142 list is part of the manual. (See the feature list in the manual[4] for
1143 the English version.) For some languages manual translations are
1144 available, see the manual translation overview[5].
1145
1146  [4] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features</a> &gt;
1147  [5] &lt;URL: <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/</a> &gt;
1148
1149 Where to get it
1150 ---------------
1151
1152 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release (624 MiB) you can use
1153
1154  * <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>
1155  * <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>
1156  * rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso .
1157
1158 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 361188818e036ce67280a572f757de82ebfeb095
1159
1160 New features for Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie released 2014-10-27
1161 ===============================================================================
1162
1163
1164 Installation changes
1165 --------------------
1166
1167  * PXE installation now installs firmware automatically for the hardware present.
1168
1169 Software updates
1170 ----------------
1171
1172 Everything which is new in Debian Jessie 8.0, eg:
1173
1174  * Linux kernel 3.16.x
1175  * Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.11.12, GNOME 3.14, Xfce 4.10,
1176    LXDE 0.5.6 and MATE 1.8 (KDE "Plasma" is installed by default; to
1177    choose one of the others see manual.)
1178  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 38
1179  * !LibreOffice 4.3.3
1180  * GOsa 2.7.4
1181  * LTSP 5.5.4
1182  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
1183  * new boot framework: systemd
1184  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.07
1185  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
1186  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
1187  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.0
1188  * golearn 0.9
1189  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
1190  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
1191  * Debian Jessie includes about 42000 packages available for
1192    installation.
1193  * More information about Debian Jessie 8.0 is provided in the release
1194    notes[6] and the installation manual[7].
1195
1196  [6] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes</a> &gt;
1197  [7] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual</a> &gt;
1198
1199 Fixed bugs
1200 ----------
1201
1202  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
1203    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
1204    information is corrected (Debian bug #710362)
1205  * and many others.
1206
1207 Documentation and translation updates
1208 -------------------------------------
1209
1210  * The Debian Edu Jessie Manual is fully translated to German, French,
1211    Italian, Danish and Dutch. Partly translated versions exist for
1212    Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
1213
1214 Other changes
1215 -------------
1216
1217  * Due to new Squid settings, powering off or rebooting the main
1218    server takes more time.
1219  * To manage printers localhost:631 has to be used, currently www:631
1220    doesn't work.
1221
1222 Regressions / known problems
1223 ----------------------------
1224
1225  * Installing LTSP chroot fails with a bug related to eatmydata about
1226    exim4-config failing to run its postinst (see Debian bug #765694
1227    and Debian bug #762103).
1228  * Munin collection is not properly configured on clients (Debian bug
1229    #764594).  The fix is available in a newer version of munin-node.
1230  * PXE setup for Main Server and Thin Client Server setup does not
1231    work when installing on a machine without direct Internet access.
1232    Will be fixed when Debian bug #766960 is fixed in Jessie.
1233
1234 See the status page[8] for the complete list.
1235
1236  [8] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie</a> &gt;
1237
1238 How to report bugs
1239 ------------------
1240
1241 &lt;URL: <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a> &gt;
1242
1243 About Debian
1244 ============
1245
1246 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
1247 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
1248 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
1249 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
1250 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
1251 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
1252 operating system.
1253
1254 Contact Information
1255 For further information, please visit the Debian web pages[9] or send
1256 mail to press@debian.org.
1257
1258  [9] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a> &gt;
1259 </pre>
1260
1261       </div>
1262       <div class="tags">
1263
1264
1265         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1266
1267
1268       </div>
1269     </div>
1270     <div class="padding"></div>
1271
1272     <div class="entry">
1273       <div class="title">
1274         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html">I spent last weekend recording MakerCon Nordic</a>
1275       </div>
1276       <div class="date">
1277         23rd October 2014
1278       </div>
1279       <div class="body">
1280         <p>I spent last weekend at <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">Makercon
1281 Nordic</a>, a great conference and workshop for makers in Norway and
1282 the surrounding countries.  I had volunteered on behalf of the
1283 Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG) to video record the talks, and we
1284 had a great and exhausting time recording the entire day, two days in
1285 a row.  There were only two of us, Hans-Petter and me, and we used the
1286 regular video equipment for NUUG, with a
1287 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">dvswitch</a>, a
1288 camera and a VGA to DV convert box, and mixed video and slides
1289 live.</p>
1290
1291 <p>Hans-Petter did the post-processing, consisting of uploading the
1292 around 180 GiB of raw video to Youtube, and the result is
1293 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">now becoming
1294 public</a> on the MakerConNordic account.  The videos have the license
1295 NUUG always use on our recordings, which is
1296 <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/no/">Creative
1297 Commons Navngivelse-Del på samme vilkår 3.0 Norge</a>.  Many great
1298 talks available.  Check it out! :)</p>
1299
1300       </div>
1301       <div class="tags">
1302
1303
1304         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>.
1305
1306
1307       </div>
1308     </div>
1309     <div class="padding"></div>
1310
1311     <div class="entry">
1312       <div class="title">
1313         <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>
1314       </div>
1315       <div class="date">
1316         22nd October 2014
1317       </div>
1318       <div class="body">
1319         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
1320 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
1321 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
1322 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
1323 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
1324 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
1325 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
1326 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
1327 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
1328 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
1329 lists I recently took over:</p>
1330
1331 <p><blockquote><pre>
1332 % time listadmin xiph
1333 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
1334 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
1335
1336 real    0m1.709s
1337 user    0m0.232s
1338 sys     0m0.012s
1339 %
1340 </pre></blockquote></p>
1341
1342 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
1343 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
1344 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
1345 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
1346 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
1347 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
1348 program.</p>
1349
1350 <p>If you install
1351 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
1352 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
1353 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
1354
1355 <p><blockquote><pre>
1356 username username@example.org
1357 spamlevel 23
1358 default discard
1359 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
1360
1361 password secret
1362 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
1363 mailman-list@lists.example.com
1364
1365 password hidden
1366 other-list@otherserver.example.org
1367 </pre></blockquote></p>
1368
1369 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
1370 learn the details.</p>
1371
1372 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
1373 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
1374 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
1375 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
1376
1377 <p><blockquote><pre>
1378 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
1379 </pre></blockquote></p>
1380
1381 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
1382 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
1383 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
1384 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
1385 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
1386 email.</p>
1387
1388 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
1389 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
1390 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
1391 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
1392 software.</p>
1393
1394 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1395 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1396 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1397
1398 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
1399 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
1400 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
1401 sure why.</p>
1402
1403       </div>
1404       <div class="tags">
1405
1406
1407         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>.
1408
1409
1410       </div>
1411     </div>
1412     <div class="padding"></div>
1413
1414     <div class="entry">
1415       <div class="title">
1416         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
1417       </div>
1418       <div class="date">
1419         17th October 2014
1420       </div>
1421       <div class="body">
1422         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
1423 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
1424 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
1425 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
1426 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
1427 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
1428 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
1429
1430 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
1431 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
1432 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
1433 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
1434 of this story.)</p>
1435
1436 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
1437 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
1438 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
1439 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
1440 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
1441 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
1442 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
1443 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
1444 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
1445 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
1446
1447 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
1448 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
1449 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
1450 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
1451
1452 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
1453 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
1454
1455 <p><blockquote><pre>
1456 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
1457 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
1458 </pre></blockquote></p>
1459
1460 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
1461 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
1462 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
1463 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
1464 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
1465 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
1466 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
1467 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
1468
1469 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
1470 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
1471
1472 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
1473 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
1474 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
1475 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
1476 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
1477
1478 <p><blockquote><pre>
1479 Task: isenkram-packages
1480 Section: hardware
1481 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
1482  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
1483  proposed.
1484 Test-new-install: show show
1485 Relevance: 8
1486 Packages: for-current-hardware
1487
1488 Task: isenkram-firmware
1489 Section: hardware
1490 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
1491  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
1492  packages are proposed.
1493 Test-new-install: mark show
1494 Relevance: 8
1495 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
1496 </pre></blockquote></p>
1497
1498 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
1499 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
1500 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
1501 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
1502 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
1503
1504 <p><blockquote><pre>
1505 #!/bin/sh
1506 #
1507 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
1508 export PATH
1509 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
1510 </pre></blockquote></p>
1511
1512 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
1513 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
1514
1515 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
1516 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
1517 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
1518 install.</p>
1519
1520 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
1521 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
1522 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
1523
1524       </div>
1525       <div class="tags">
1526
1527
1528         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>.
1529
1530
1531       </div>
1532     </div>
1533     <div class="padding"></div>
1534
1535     <div class="entry">
1536       <div class="title">
1537         <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>
1538       </div>
1539       <div class="date">
1540          4th October 2014
1541       </div>
1542       <div class="body">
1543         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
1544 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
1545 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
1546 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
1547
1548 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
1549
1550 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
1551 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
1552 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
1553
1554       </div>
1555       <div class="tags">
1556
1557
1558         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>.
1559
1560
1561       </div>
1562     </div>
1563     <div class="padding"></div>
1564
1565     <div class="entry">
1566       <div class="title">
1567         <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>
1568       </div>
1569       <div class="date">
1570          4th October 2014
1571       </div>
1572       <div class="body">
1573         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
1574 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
1575 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
1576 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
1577 Dibb.</p>
1578
1579 <p>I just wrapped up
1580 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
1581 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
1582 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
1583 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
1584 0.17.</p>
1585
1586 <ul>
1587
1588  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
1589  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
1590    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
1591  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
1592  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
1593  <li>Fix include orders</li>
1594  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
1595  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
1596  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
1597    the palette size is the same.</li>
1598  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
1599  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
1600  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
1601  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
1602    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
1603
1604 </ul>
1605
1606 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
1607 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
1608 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
1609
1610       </div>
1611       <div class="tags">
1612
1613
1614         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>.
1615
1616
1617       </div>
1618     </div>
1619     <div class="padding"></div>
1620
1621     <div class="entry">
1622       <div class="title">
1623         <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>
1624       </div>
1625       <div class="date">
1626         26th September 2014
1627       </div>
1628       <div class="body">
1629         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
1630 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
1631 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
1632 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
1633 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
1634 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
1635 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
1636 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
1637 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
1638 future.  The
1639 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
1640 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
1641 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
1642 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
1643 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
1644
1645 <p>First, download the test ISO via
1646 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
1647 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
1648 or rsync (use
1649 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
1650 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
1651 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
1652 install with some tweaking.</p>
1653
1654 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
1655 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
1656
1657 <p><blockquote><pre>
1658 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
1659 </pre></blockquote></p>
1660
1661 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
1662 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
1663 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
1664 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
1665
1666 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
1667 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
1668 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
1669 your need.</p>
1670
1671 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
1672 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
1673 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
1674 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
1675 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
1676 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
1677 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
1678 days.</p>
1679
1680 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
1681 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
1682 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
1683 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
1684 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
1685 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
1686 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
1687 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
1688 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
1689
1690 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
1691 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
1692 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
1693
1694       </div>
1695       <div class="tags">
1696
1697
1698         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>.
1699
1700
1701       </div>
1702     </div>
1703     <div class="padding"></div>
1704
1705     <div class="entry">
1706       <div class="title">
1707         <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>
1708       </div>
1709       <div class="date">
1710         25th September 2014
1711       </div>
1712       <div class="body">
1713         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
1714 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
1715 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
1716 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
1717 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
1718 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
1719 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
1720 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
1721 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
1722 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
1723 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
1724 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
1725 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
1726
1727 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
1728 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
1729 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
1730 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
1731 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
1732 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
1733 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
1734 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
1735 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
1736 list</a>. :)</p>
1737
1738       </div>
1739       <div class="tags">
1740
1741
1742         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>.
1743
1744
1745       </div>
1746     </div>
1747     <div class="padding"></div>
1748
1749     <div class="entry">
1750       <div class="title">
1751         <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>
1752       </div>
1753       <div class="date">
1754         16th September 2014
1755       </div>
1756       <div class="body">
1757         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
1758 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
1759 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
1760 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
1761 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
1762 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
1763 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
1764 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
1765 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
1766 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
1767 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
1768 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
1769 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
1770 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
1771
1772 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
1773 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
1774 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
1775 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
1776 depend on the small and clever package
1777 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
1778 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
1779 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
1780 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
1781 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
1782 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
1783 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
1784 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
1785 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
1786 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
1787 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
1788
1789 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
1790 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
1791 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
1792 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
1793 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
1794 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
1795 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
1796 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
1797 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
1798 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
1799 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
1800 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
1801 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
1802 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
1803 dialog.</p>
1804
1805 <p><table>
1806
1807 <tr>
1808 <th>Machine/setup</th>
1809 <th>Original tasksel</th>
1810 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
1811 <th>Reduction</th>
1812 </tr>
1813
1814 <tr>
1815 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
1816 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
1817 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
1818 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
1819 </tr>
1820
1821 <tr>
1822 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
1823 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
1824 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
1825 <td>23 min 40%</td>
1826 </tr>
1827
1828 <tr>
1829 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
1830 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
1831 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
1832 <td>11 min 50%</td>
1833 </tr>
1834
1835 <tr>
1836 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
1837 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
1838 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
1839 <td>2 min 33%</td>
1840 </tr>
1841
1842 <tr>
1843 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
1844 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
1845 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
1846 <td>4 min 21%</td>
1847 </tr>
1848
1849 </table></p>
1850
1851 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
1852 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
1853 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
1854 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
1855 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
1856 installed.</p>
1857
1858 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
1859 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
1860 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
1861 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
1862 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
1863 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
1864 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
1865 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
1866 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
1867 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
1868 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
1869 for the entire installation.</p>
1870
1871 <p>I've implemented this in the
1872 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
1873 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
1874 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
1875 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
1876 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
1877
1878 <p><blockquote><pre>
1879 #!/bin/sh
1880 set -e
1881 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
1882 info() {
1883     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
1884 }
1885 error() {
1886     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
1887 }
1888 override_install() {
1889     apt-install eatmydata || true
1890     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
1891         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
1892             file=/usr/bin/$bin
1893             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
1894             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
1895                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
1896                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
1897                     > /target$file.edu
1898                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
1899                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
1900                     --rename --quiet --add $file
1901                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
1902             else
1903                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
1904             fi
1905         done
1906     else
1907         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
1908     fi
1909 }
1910
1911 override_install
1912 </pre></blockquote></p>
1913
1914 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
1915 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
1916
1917 <p><blockquote><pre>
1918 #! /bin/sh -e
1919 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
1920 error() {
1921     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
1922 }
1923 remove_install_override() {
1924     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
1925         file=/usr/bin/$bin
1926         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
1927             rm /target$file
1928             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
1929                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
1930             rm /target$file.edu
1931         else
1932             error "Missing divert for $file."
1933         fi
1934     done
1935     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
1936 }
1937
1938 remove_install_override
1939 </pre></blockquote></p>
1940
1941 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
1942 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
1943 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
1944
1945 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
1946 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
1947 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
1948 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
1949 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
1950 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
1951 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
1952 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
1953 everyone.</p>
1954
1955 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
1956 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
1957 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
1958 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
1959
1960 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
1961 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
1962 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
1963 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
1964 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
1965
1966 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
1967 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
1968 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
1969 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
1970 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
1971
1972       </div>
1973       <div class="tags">
1974
1975
1976         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>.
1977
1978
1979       </div>
1980     </div>
1981     <div class="padding"></div>
1982
1983     <div class="entry">
1984       <div class="title">
1985         <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>
1986       </div>
1987       <div class="date">
1988         10th September 2014
1989       </div>
1990       <div class="body">
1991         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
1992 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
1993 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
1994 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
1995 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
1996 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
1997 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
1998 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
1999 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
2000 those problems are gone now.</p>
2001
2002 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
2003 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
2004 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
2005 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
2006 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
2007
2008 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
2009 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
2010 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
2011
2012 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
2013 line:</p>
2014
2015 <p><blockquote><pre>
2016 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
2017 </pre></blockquote></p>
2018
2019 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
2020 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
2021 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
2022 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
2023
2024 <p><blockquote><pre>
2025 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
2026 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
2027 %
2028 </pre></blockquote></p>
2029
2030 <p>Now if only
2031 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
2032 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
2033 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
2034 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
2035 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
2036 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
2037 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
2038 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
2039 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
2040
2041       </div>
2042       <div class="tags">
2043
2044
2045         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>.
2046
2047
2048       </div>
2049     </div>
2050     <div class="padding"></div>
2051
2052     <div class="entry">
2053       <div class="title">
2054         <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>
2055       </div>
2056       <div class="date">
2057         25th August 2014
2058       </div>
2059       <div class="body">
2060         <p>Two years later, I am still not sure if it is legal here in Norway
2061 to use or publish a video in H.264 or MPEG4 format edited by the
2062 commercially licensed video editors, without limiting the use to
2063 create "personal" or "non-commercial" videos or get a license
2064 agreement with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com">MPEG LA</a>.  If one
2065 want to publish and broadcast video in a non-personal or commercial
2066 setting, it might be that those tools can not be used, or that video
2067 format can not be used, without breaking their copyright license.  I
2068 am not sure.
2069 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Trenger_en_avtale_med_MPEG_LA_for___publisere_og_kringkaste_H_264_video_.html">Back
2070 then</a>, I found that the copyright license terms for Adobe Premiere
2071 and Apple Final Cut Pro both specified that one could not use the
2072 program to produce anything else without a patent license from MPEG
2073 LA.  The issue is not limited to those two products, though.  Other
2074 much used products like those from Avid and Sorenson Media have terms
2075 of use are similar to those from Adobe and Apple.  The complicating
2076 factor making me unsure if those terms have effect in Norway or not is
2077 that the patents in question are not valid in Norway, but copyright
2078 licenses are.</p>
2079
2080 <p>These are the terms for Avid Artist Suite, according to their
2081 <a href="http://www.avid.com/US/about-avid/legal-notices/legal-enduserlicense2">published
2082 end user</a>
2083 <a href="http://www.avid.com/static/resources/common/documents/corporate/LICENSE.pdf">license
2084 text</a> (converted to lower case text for easier reading):</p>
2085
2086 <p><blockquote>
2087 <p>18.2. MPEG-4. MPEG-4 technology may be included with the
2088 software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice: </p>
2089
2090 <p>This product is licensed under the MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio
2091 license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer for (i)
2092 encoding video in compliance with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4
2093 video”) and/or (ii) decoding MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a
2094 consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or was
2095 obtained from a video provider licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4
2096 video.  No license is granted or shall be implied for any other
2097 use. Additional information including that relating to promotional,
2098 internal and commercial uses and licensing may be obtained from MPEG
2099 LA, LLC.  See http://www.mpegla.com. This product is licensed under
2100 the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license for encoding in compliance
2101 with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except that an additional license
2102 and payment of royalties are necessary for encoding in connection with
2103 (i) data stored or replicated in physical media which is paid for on a
2104 title by title basis and/or (ii) data which is paid for on a title by
2105 title basis and is transmitted to an end user for permanent storage
2106 and/or use, such additional license may be obtained from MPEG LA,
2107 LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for additional details.</p>
2108
2109 <p>18.3. H.264/AVC. H.264/AVC technology may be included with the
2110 software.  MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:</p>
2111
2112 <p>This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
2113 the personal use of a consumer or other uses in which it does not
2114 receive remuneration to (i) encode video in compliance with the AVC
2115 standard (“AVC video”) and/or (ii) decode AVC video that was encoded
2116 by a consumer engaged in a personal activity and/or was obtained from
2117 a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No license is granted
2118 or shall be implied for any other use. Additional information may be
2119 obtained from MPEG LA, L.L.C. See http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
2120 </blockquote></p>
2121
2122 <p>Note the requirement that the videos created can only be used for
2123 personal or non-commercial purposes.</p>
2124
2125 <p>The Sorenson Media software have
2126 <a href="http://www.sorensonmedia.com/terms/">similar terms</a>:</p>
2127
2128 <p><blockquote>
2129
2130 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4 Video
2131 Decoders and/or Encoders: Any such product is licensed under the
2132 MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio license for the personal and
2133 non-commercial use of a consumer for (i) encoding video in compliance
2134 with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4 video”) and/or (ii) decoding
2135 MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and
2136 non-commercial activity and/or was obtained from a video provider
2137 licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4 video. No license is granted or
2138 shall be implied for any other use. Additional information including
2139 that relating to promotional, internal and commercial uses and
2140 licensing may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See
2141 http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
2142
2143 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4
2144 Consumer Recorded Data Encoder, MPEG-4 Systems Internet Data Encoder,
2145 MPEG-4 Mobile Data Encoder, and/or MPEG-4 Unique Use Encoder: Any such
2146 product is licensed under the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license
2147 for encoding in compliance with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except
2148 that an additional license and payment of royalties are necessary for
2149 encoding in connection with (i) data stored or replicated in physical
2150 media which is paid for on a title by title basis and/or (ii) data
2151 which is paid for on a title by title basis and is transmitted to an
2152 end user for permanent storage and/or use. Such additional license may
2153 be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for
2154 additional details.</p>
2155
2156 </blockquote></p>
2157
2158 <p>Some free software like
2159 <a href="https://handbrake.fr/">Handbrake</A> and
2160 <a href="http://ffmpeg.org/">FFMPEG</a> uses GPL/LGPL licenses and do
2161 not have any such terms included, so for those, there is no
2162 requirement to limit the use to personal and non-commercial.</p>
2163
2164       </div>
2165       <div class="tags">
2166
2167
2168         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/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>.
2169
2170
2171       </div>
2172     </div>
2173     <div class="padding"></div>
2174
2175     <div class="entry">
2176       <div class="title">
2177         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html">Debian Edu interview: Bernd Zeitzen</a>
2178       </div>
2179       <div class="date">
2180         31st July 2014
2181       </div>
2182       <div class="body">
2183         <p>The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for
2184 schools, <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
2185 Skolelinux</a>, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
2186 involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
2187 from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
2188 the setup.  I managed to interview him this summer.</p>
2189
2190 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
2191
2192 <p>My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I'm married with Hedda, a self
2193 employed physiotherapist.  My former profession is tool maker, but I
2194 haven't worked for 30 years in this job.  30 years ago I started to
2195 support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
2196 administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
2197 Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
2198 Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
2199 works with Windows . :-(</p>
2200
2201 <p>In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
2202 Windows 98, 2000, XP, …, 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX.  Today we are running a
2203 Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of
2204 children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
2205 psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
2206 work with the documentations of our patients.</p>
2207
2208 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
2209 project?</strong></p>
2210
2211 <p>Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
2212 his school (<a href="http://www.gymnasium-harsewinkel.de/">Gymnasium
2213 Harsewinkel</a>).  They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
2214 were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
2215 software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
2216 computer skills in optional lessons.  I'm spending 4-6 hours a week
2217 with this job.</p>
2218
2219 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
2220 Edu?</strong></p>
2221
2222 <p>The independence.</p>
2223
2224 <p>First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
2225 software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
2226 included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.</p>
2227
2228 <p>Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
2229 possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices.  The
2230 servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
2231 working reliable. </p>
2232
2233 <p>We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45
2234 workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
2235 solution for all classrooms.  These machines are all booting from the
2236 terminal server.  In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile
2237 workstations.  Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
2238 machines in their classrooms.  Internet access is realized by a WLAN
2239 router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
2240 dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.</p>
2241
2242 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
2243 Edu?</strong></p>
2244
2245 <p>Teachers and pupils are Windows users.  &lt;Irony on&gt; And Linux
2246 isn't cool. It's software for freaks using the command line. &lt;Irony
2247 off&gt; They don't realize the stability of the system. </p>
2248
2249 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
2250
2251 <p>Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Samba,
2252 Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, … and Skolelinux / Debian Edu)</p>
2253
2254 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
2255 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
2256
2257 <p>In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
2258 which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
2259 teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
2260 Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
2261 Office. They don't know about the possibility to use Free Software
2262 instead.  Another problem are the publisher of school books.  They
2263 develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.</p>
2264
2265       </div>
2266       <div class="tags">
2267
2268
2269         Tags: <a href="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>.
2270
2271
2272       </div>
2273     </div>
2274     <div class="padding"></div>
2275
2276     <div class="entry">
2277       <div class="title">
2278         <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>
2279       </div>
2280       <div class="date">
2281         23rd July 2014
2282       </div>
2283       <div class="body">
2284         <p>This summer I finally had time to continue working on the Norwegian
2285 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
2286 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
2287 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with todays copyright
2288 law.  Yesterday, I finally completed translated the book text.  There
2289 are still some foot/end notes left to translate, the colophon page
2290 need to be rewritten, and a few words and phrases still need to be
2291 translated, but the Norwegian text is ready for the first proof
2292 reading. :) More spell checking is needed, and several illustrations
2293 need to be cleaned up.  The work stopped up because I had to give
2294 priority to other projects the last year, and the progress graph of
2295 the translation show this very well:</p>
2296
2297 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
2298
2299 <p>If you want to read the result, check out the
2300 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
2301 project pages and the
2302 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
2303 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
2304 and HTML version available in the
2305 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
2306 directory</a>.</p>
2307
2308 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
2309 you find any.</p>
2310
2311       </div>
2312       <div class="tags">
2313
2314
2315         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>.
2316
2317
2318       </div>
2319     </div>
2320     <div class="padding"></div>
2321
2322     <div class="entry">
2323       <div class="title">
2324         <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>
2325       </div>
2326       <div class="date">
2327         17th June 2014
2328       </div>
2329       <div class="body">
2330         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
2331 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
2332 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
2333 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
2334 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
2335
2336 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
2337 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
2338 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
2339 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
2340 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
2341 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
2342 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
2343 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
2344 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
2345 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
2346 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
2347 goals.</p>
2348
2349 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
2350 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
2351 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
2352 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
2353 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
2354 chapters together into one large web page (aka
2355 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
2356 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
2357 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
2358 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
2359 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
2360 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
2361 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
2362 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
2363 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
2364 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
2365 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
2366 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
2367 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
2368 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
2369 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
2370 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
2371 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
2372 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
2373
2374 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
2375 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
2376 track the English original.  For this we use the
2377 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
2378 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
2379 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
2380 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
2381 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
2382 files), which the translations update with the native language
2383 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
2384 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
2385 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
2386 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
2387 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
2388 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
2389 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
2390 of the documentation.</p>
2391
2392 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
2393 recommend using
2394 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
2395 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
2396 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
2397 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
2398 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
2399 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
2400 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
2401 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
2402
2403 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
2404 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
2405 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
2406 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
2407 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
2408 translated images by storing translated versions in
2409 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
2410 package maintainers know more.</p>
2411
2412 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
2413 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
2414 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
2415 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
2416 PDF version</a> or the
2417 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
2418 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
2419 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
2420
2421 <p>To learn more, check out
2422 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
2423 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
2424 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
2425 manual on the wiki</a> and
2426 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
2427 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
2428
2429       </div>
2430       <div class="tags">
2431
2432
2433         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>.
2434
2435
2436       </div>
2437     </div>
2438     <div class="padding"></div>
2439
2440     <div class="entry">
2441       <div class="title">
2442         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_car_computer_solution_.html">Free software car computer solution?</a>
2443       </div>
2444       <div class="date">
2445         29th May 2014
2446       </div>
2447       <div class="body">
2448         <p>Dear lazyweb.  I'm planning to set up a small Raspberry Pi computer
2449 in my car, connected to
2450 <a href="http://www.dx.com/p/400a-4-0-tft-lcd-digital-monitor-for-vehicle-parking-reverse-camera-1440x272-12v-dc-57776">a
2451 small screen</a> next to the rear mirror.  I plan to hook it up with a
2452 GPS and a USB wifi card too.  The idea is to get my own
2453 "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carputer">Carputer</a>".  But I
2454 wonder if someone already created a good free software solution for
2455 such car computer.</p>
2456
2457 <p>This is my current wish list for such system:</p>
2458
2459 <ul>
2460
2461  <li>Work on Raspberry Pi.</li>
2462
2463  <li>Show current speed limit based on location, and warn if going too
2464    fast (for example using color codes yellow and red on the screen,
2465    or make a sound).  This could be done either using either data from
2466    <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">Openstreetmap</a> or OCR
2467    info gathered from a dashboard camera.</li>
2468
2469  <li>Track automatic toll road passes and their cost, show total spent
2470    and make it possible to calculate toll costs for planned
2471    route.</li>
2472
2473  <li>Collect GPX tracks for use with OpenStreetMap.</li>
2474
2475  <li>Automatically detect and use any wireless connection to connect
2476    to home server.  Try IP over DNS
2477    (<a href="http://dev.kryo.se/iodine/">iodine</a>) or ICMP
2478    (<a href="http://code.gerade.org/hans/">Hans</a>) if direct
2479    connection do not work.</li>
2480
2481  <li>Set up mesh network to talk to other cars with the same system,
2482    or some standard car mesh protocol.</li>
2483
2484  <li>Warn when approaching speed cameras and speed camera ranges
2485    (speed calculated between two cameras).</li>
2486
2487  <li>Suport dashboard/front facing camera to discover speed limits and
2488    run OCR to track registration number of passing cars.</li>
2489
2490 </ul>
2491
2492 <p>If you know of any free software car computer system supporting
2493 some or all of these features, please let me know.</p>
2494
2495       </div>
2496       <div class="tags">
2497
2498
2499         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2500
2501
2502       </div>
2503     </div>
2504     <div class="padding"></div>
2505
2506     <div class="entry">
2507       <div class="title">
2508         <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>
2509       </div>
2510       <div class="date">
2511         29th April 2014
2512       </div>
2513       <div class="body">
2514         <p>I've been following <a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">the Gnash
2515 project</a> for quite a while now.  It is a free software
2516 implementation of Adobe Flash, both a standalone player and a browser
2517 plugin.  Gnash implement support for the AVM1 format (and not the
2518 newer AVM2 format - see
2519 <a href="http://lightspark.github.io/">Lightspark</a> for that one),
2520 allowing several flash based sites to work.  Thanks to the friendly
2521 developers at Youtube, it also work with Youtube videos, because the
2522 Javascript code at Youtube detect Gnash and serve a AVM1 player to
2523 those users. :) Would be great if someone found time to implement AVM2
2524 support, but it has not happened yet.  If you install both Lightspark
2525 and Gnash, Lightspark will invoke Gnash if it find a AVM1 flash file,
2526 so you can get both handled as free software.  Unfortunately,
2527 Lightspark so far only implement a small subset of AVM2, and many
2528 sites do not work yet.</p>
2529
2530 <p>A few months ago, I started looking at
2531 <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/">Coverity</a>, the static source
2532 checker used to find heaps and heaps of bugs in free software (thanks
2533 to the donation of a scanning service to free software projects by the
2534 company developing this non-free code checker), and Gnash was one of
2535 the projects I decided to check out.  Coverity is able to find lock
2536 errors, memory errors, dead code and more.  A few days ago they even
2537 extended it to also be able to find the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.
2538 There are heaps of checks being done on the instrumented code, and the
2539 amount of bogus warnings is quite low compared to the other static
2540 code checkers I have tested over the years.</p>
2541
2542 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I've been working with the other Gnash
2543 developers squashing bugs discovered by Coverity.  I was quite happy
2544 today when I checked the current status and saw that of the 777 issues
2545 detected so far, 374 are marked as fixed.  This make me confident that
2546 the next Gnash release will be more stable and more dependable than
2547 the previous one.  Most of the reported issues were and are in the
2548 test suite, but it also found a few in the rest of the code.</p>
2549
2550 <p>If you want to help out, you find us on
2551 <a href="https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev">the
2552 gnash-dev mailing list</a> and on
2553 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#gnash">the #gnash channel on
2554 irc.freenode.net IRC server</a>.</p>
2555
2556       </div>
2557       <div class="tags">
2558
2559
2560         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>.
2561
2562
2563       </div>
2564     </div>
2565     <div class="padding"></div>
2566
2567     <div class="entry">
2568       <div class="title">
2569         <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>
2570       </div>
2571       <div class="date">
2572         23rd April 2014
2573       </div>
2574       <div class="body">
2575         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
2576 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
2577 So I implemented one, using
2578 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
2579 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
2580 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
2581 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
2582 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
2583 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
2584
2585 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
2586 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
2587 packages to install.  The first part is in
2588 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
2589 this:</p>
2590
2591 <p><blockquote><pre>
2592 Task: isenkram
2593 Section: hardware
2594 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
2595  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
2596  proposed.
2597 Test-new-install: mark show
2598 Relevance: 8
2599 Packages: for-current-hardware
2600 </pre></blockquote></p>
2601
2602 <p>The second part is in
2603 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
2604 this:</p>
2605
2606 <p><blockquote><pre>
2607 #!/bin/sh
2608 #
2609 (
2610     isenkram-lookup
2611     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
2612 ) | sort -u
2613 </pre></blockquote></p>
2614
2615 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
2616 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
2617 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
2618 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
2619 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
2620 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
2621
2622 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
2623 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
2624 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
2625 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
2626 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
2627 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
2628 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
2629 the python-apt code (bug
2630 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
2631 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
2632 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
2633 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
2634 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
2635 unstable today.</p>
2636
2637 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
2638 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
2639 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
2640 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
2641 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
2642 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
2643 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
2644 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
2645 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
2646
2647 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
2648 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
2649 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
2650 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
2651 package.  See also
2652 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
2653 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
2654 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
2655 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
2656
2657       </div>
2658       <div class="tags">
2659
2660
2661         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>.
2662
2663
2664       </div>
2665     </div>
2666     <div class="padding"></div>
2667
2668     <div class="entry">
2669       <div class="title">
2670         <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>
2671       </div>
2672       <div class="date">
2673         15th April 2014
2674       </div>
2675       <div class="body">
2676         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
2677 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
2678 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
2679 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
2680 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
2681 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
2682
2683 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
2684 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
2685 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
2686 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
2687 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
2688 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
2689 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
2690
2691 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
2692 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
2693 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
2694 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
2695 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
2696 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
2697 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
2698 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
2699 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
2700 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
2701 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
2702 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
2703
2704 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
2705 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
2706 become root:</p>
2707
2708 <p><pre>
2709 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
2710   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
2711   u-boot-tools
2712 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
2713   freedom-maker
2714 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
2715 </pre></p>
2716
2717 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
2718 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
2719 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
2720 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
2721 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
2722 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
2723 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
2724 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
2725
2726 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
2727 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
2728 the preseed values:</p>
2729
2730 <p><pre>
2731 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
2732 </pre></p>
2733
2734 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
2735 it still work.</p>
2736
2737 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
2738 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
2739 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
2740 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
2741 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
2742 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
2743 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
2744
2745 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
2746 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
2747 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
2748 irc.debian.org)</a> and
2749 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
2750 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
2751
2752       </div>
2753       <div class="tags">
2754
2755
2756         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>.
2757
2758
2759       </div>
2760     </div>
2761     <div class="padding"></div>
2762
2763     <div class="entry">
2764       <div class="title">
2765         <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>
2766       </div>
2767       <div class="date">
2768          9th April 2014
2769       </div>
2770       <div class="body">
2771         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
2772 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
2773 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
2774 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
2775 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
2776 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
2777 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
2778 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
2779 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
2780 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
2781 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
2782 have looked at a system called
2783 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
2784 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
2785
2786 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
2787 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
2788 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
2789 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
2790 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
2791 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
2792 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
2793 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
2794 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
2795 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
2796 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
2797 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
2798 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
2799
2800 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
2801 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
2802 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
2803 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
2804 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
2805 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
2806 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
2807 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
2808 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
2809 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
2810 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
2811 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
2812 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
2813 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
2814 account.</p>
2815
2816 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
2817 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
2818 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
2819 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
2820 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
2821 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
2822 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
2823
2824 <p><blockquote><pre>
2825 [s3c]
2826 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
2827 backend-login: API-login
2828 backend-password: API-password
2829 fs-passphrase: local-password
2830 </pre></blockquote></p>
2831
2832 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
2833 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
2834 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
2835 details and password to create it:</p>
2836
2837 <p><blockquote><pre>
2838 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
2839 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
2840   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
2841 Enter backend login:
2842 Enter backend password:
2843 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
2844 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
2845 Enter encryption password:
2846 Confirm encryption password:
2847 Generating random encryption key...
2848 Creating metadata tables...
2849 Dumping metadata...
2850 ..objects..
2851 ..blocks..
2852 ..inodes..
2853 ..inode_blocks..
2854 ..symlink_targets..
2855 ..names..
2856 ..contents..
2857 ..ext_attributes..
2858 Compressing and uploading metadata...
2859 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
2860 # </pre></blockquote></p>
2861
2862 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
2863
2864 <p><blockquote><pre>
2865 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
2866   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
2867 Using 4 upload threads.
2868 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
2869 Reading metadata...
2870 ..objects..
2871 ..blocks..
2872 ..inodes..
2873 ..inode_blocks..
2874 ..symlink_targets..
2875 ..names..
2876 ..contents..
2877 ..ext_attributes..
2878 Mounting filesystem...
2879 # df -h /s3ql
2880 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
2881 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
2882 #
2883 </pre></blockquote></p>
2884
2885 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
2886 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
2887 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
2888 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
2889 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
2890 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
2891
2892 <p><blockquote><pre>
2893 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
2894 #
2895 </pre></blockquote></p>
2896
2897 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
2898 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
2899 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
2900 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
2901 file system:</p>
2902
2903 <p><blockquote><pre>
2904 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
2905 Using cached metadata.
2906 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
2907 Checking DB integrity...
2908 Creating temporary extra indices...
2909 Checking lost+found...
2910 Checking cached objects...
2911 Checking names (refcounts)...
2912 Checking contents (names)...
2913 Checking contents (inodes)...
2914 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
2915 Checking objects (reference counts)...
2916 Checking objects (backend)...
2917 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
2918 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
2919 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
2920 Checking objects (sizes)...
2921 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
2922 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
2923 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
2924 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
2925 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
2926 Checking inodes (sizes)...
2927 Checking extended attributes (names)...
2928 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
2929 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
2930 Checking directory reachability...
2931 Checking unix conventions...
2932 Checking referential integrity...
2933 Dropping temporary indices...
2934 Backing up old metadata...
2935 Dumping metadata...
2936 ..objects..
2937 ..blocks..
2938 ..inodes..
2939 ..inode_blocks..
2940 ..symlink_targets..
2941 ..names..
2942 ..contents..
2943 ..ext_attributes..
2944 Compressing and uploading metadata...
2945 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
2946 #
2947 </pre></blockquote></p>
2948
2949 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
2950 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
2951 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
2952 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
2953 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
2954 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
2955 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
2956 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
2957 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
2958 working set.</p>
2959
2960 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
2961 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
2962 busy:</p>
2963
2964 <p><blockquote><pre>
2965 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
2966   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
2967 Using 8 upload threads.
2968 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
2969 #
2970 </pre></blockquote></p>
2971
2972 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
2973 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
2974 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
2975 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
2976 s3qlctrl:
2977
2978 <p><blockquote><pre>
2979 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
2980 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
2981 #
2982 </pre></blockquote></p>
2983
2984 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
2985 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
2986 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
2987 a report:</p>
2988
2989 <p><blockquote><pre>
2990 # s3qlstat /s3ql
2991 Directory entries:    9141
2992 Inodes:               9143
2993 Data blocks:          8851
2994 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
2995 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
2996 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
2997 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
2998 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
2999 #
3000 </pre></blockquote></p>
3001
3002 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
3003 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
3004 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
3005 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
3006 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
3007 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
3008 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
3009 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
3010 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
3011 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
3012 best.</p>
3013
3014 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
3015 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
3016 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
3017 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
3018 poster is titled
3019 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
3020 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
3021 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
3022 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
3023 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
3024
3025 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
3026 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
3027 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
3028 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
3029 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
3030 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
3031 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
3032 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
3033
3034 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
3035 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
3036 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
3037 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
3038 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
3039 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
3040 only read from it.</p>
3041
3042 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3043 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3044 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3045
3046       </div>
3047       <div class="tags">
3048
3049
3050         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>.
3051
3052
3053       </div>
3054     </div>
3055     <div class="padding"></div>
3056
3057     <div class="entry">
3058       <div class="title">
3059         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ReactOS_Windows_clone___nice_free_software.html">ReactOS Windows clone - nice free software</a>
3060       </div>
3061       <div class="date">
3062          1st April 2014
3063       </div>
3064       <div class="body">
3065         <p>Microsoft have announced that Windows XP reaches its end of life
3066 2014-04-08, in 7 days.  But there are heaps of machines still running
3067 Windows XP, and depending on Windows XP to run their applications, and
3068 upgrading will be expensive, both when it comes to money and when it
3069 comes to the amount of effort needed to migrate from Windows XP to a
3070 new operating system.  Some obvious options (buy new a Windows
3071 machine, buy a MacOSX machine, install Linux on the existing machine)
3072 are already well known and covered elsewhere.  Most of them involve
3073 leaving the user applications installed on Windows XP behind and
3074 trying out replacements or updated versions. In this blog post I want
3075 to mention one strange bird that allow people to keep the hardware and
3076 the existing Windows XP applications and run them on a free software
3077 operating system that is Windows XP compatible.</p>
3078
3079 <p><a href="http://www.reactos.org/">ReactOS</a> is a free software
3080 operating system (GNU GPL licensed) working on providing a operating
3081 system that is binary compatible with Windows, able to run windows
3082 programs directly and to use Windows drivers for hardware directly.
3083 The project goal is for Windows user to keep their existing machines,
3084 drivers and software, and gain the advantages from user a operating
3085 system without usage limitations caused by non-free licensing.  It is
3086 a Windows clone running directly on the hardware, so quite different
3087 from the approach taken by <a href="http://www.winehq.org/">the Wine
3088 project</a>, which make it possible to run Windows binaries on
3089 Linux.</p>
3090
3091 <p>The ReactOS project share code with the Wine project, so most
3092 shared libraries available on Windows are already implemented already.
3093 There is also a software manager like the one we are used to on Linux,
3094 allowing the user to install free software applications with a simple
3095 click directly from the Internet.  Check out the
3096 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/screenshots">screen shots on the
3097 project web site</a> for an idea what it look like (it looks just like
3098 Windows before metro).</p>
3099
3100 <p>I do not use ReactOS myself, preferring Linux and Unix like
3101 operating systems.  I've tested it, and it work fine in a virt-manager
3102 virtual machine.  The browser, minesweeper, notepad etc is working
3103 fine as far as I can tell.  Unfortunately, my main test application
3104 is the software included on a CD with the Lego Mindstorms NXT, which
3105 seem to install just fine from CD but fail to leave any binaries on
3106 the disk after the installation.  So no luck with that test software.
3107 No idea why, but hope someone else figure out and fix the problem.
3108 I've tried the ReactOS Live ISO on a physical machine, and it seemed
3109 to work just fine.  If you like Windows and want to keep running your
3110 old Windows binaries, check it out by
3111 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/download">downloading</a> the
3112 installation CD, the live CD or the preinstalled virtual machine
3113 image.</p>
3114
3115       </div>
3116       <div class="tags">
3117
3118
3119         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>.
3120
3121
3122       </div>
3123     </div>
3124     <div class="padding"></div>
3125
3126     <div class="entry">
3127       <div class="title">
3128         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Roger_Marsal.html">Debian Edu interview: Roger Marsal</a>
3129       </div>
3130       <div class="date">
3131         30th March 2014
3132       </div>
3133       <div class="body">
3134         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
3135 keep gaining new users.  Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC,
3136 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>, with a
3137 wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great
3138 contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background.</p>
3139
3140 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
3141
3142 <p>My name is Roger Marsal, I'm 27 years old (1986 generation) and I
3143 live in Barcelona, Spain. I've got a strong business background and I
3144 work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent.  Additionally,
3145 I've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the
3146 last development phase of a new social networking concept.</p>
3147
3148 <p>I'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years
3149 ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability
3150 and as a necessary step to gain expertise.</p>
3151
3152 <p>In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I
3153 can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux
3154 hunger.</p>
3155
3156 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
3157 project?</strong></p>
3158
3159 <p>I discovered the <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP</a> advantages
3160 with "Ubuntu 12.04 alternate install" and after a year of use I
3161 started looking for an alternative.  Even though I highly value and
3162 respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to
3163 change to a more robust and stable alternative.  As far as I was using
3164 Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install
3165 Debian and configure an LTSP server myself.  Surprised, I discovered
3166 that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent,
3167 and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and
3168 running.  I just loved it.</p>
3169
3170 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
3171 Edu?</strong></p>
3172
3173 <p>I found a main advantage in that, once you know "the tips and
3174 tricks", a new installation just works out of the box. It's the most
3175 complete alternative I've found to create an LTSP network. All the
3176 other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to
3177 be made of steel.</p>
3178
3179 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
3180 Edu?</strong></p>
3181
3182 <p>I found two main disadvantages.</p>
3183
3184 <p>I'm not an expert but I've got notions and I had to spent a considerable
3185 amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I'm quite
3186 stubborn and I just worked until I did but I'm sure many people with few
3187 resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched
3188 or dropped.</p>
3189
3190 <p>It's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved
3191 this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets
3192 more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can
3193 discourage many people too.</p>
3194
3195 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
3196
3197 <p>I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and
3198 Virtualbox.</p>
3199
3200
3201 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
3202 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
3203
3204 <p>I don't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free
3205 attribute in both "freedom" and "no price" meanings is what will
3206 really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of
3207 the <a href="http://www.r-project.org/">"R" statistical language</a>; a
3208 few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people.
3209 Today it's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many
3210 different level of studies.  I believe free and open software will
3211 increasingly gain popularity, but I'm sure schools will be one of the
3212 first scenarios where this will happen.</p>
3213
3214       </div>
3215       <div class="tags">
3216
3217
3218         Tags: <a href="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>.
3219
3220
3221       </div>
3222     </div>
3223     <div class="padding"></div>
3224
3225     <div class="entry">
3226       <div class="title">
3227         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">Public Trusted Timestamping services for everyone</a>
3228       </div>
3229       <div class="date">
3230         25th March 2014
3231       </div>
3232       <div class="body">
3233         <p>Did you ever need to store logs or other files in a way that would
3234 allow it to be used as evidence in court, and needed a way to
3235 demonstrate without reasonable doubt that the file had not been
3236 changed since it was created?  Or, did you ever need to document that
3237 a given document was received at some point in time, like some
3238 archived document or the answer to an exam, and not changed after it
3239 was received?  The problem in these settings is to remove the need to
3240 trust yourself and your computers, while still being able to prove
3241 that a file is the same as it was at some given time in the past.</p>
3242
3243 <p>A solution to these problems is to have a trusted third party
3244 "stamp" the document and verify that at some given time the document
3245 looked a given way.  Such
3246 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notarius">notarius</a> service
3247 have been around for thousands of years, and its digital equivalent is
3248 called a
3249 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
3250 timestamping service</a>.  <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">The Internet
3251 Engineering Task Force</a> standardised how such service could work a
3252 few years ago as <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC
3253 3161</a>.  The mechanism is simple.  Create a hash of the file in
3254 question, send it to a trusted third party which add a time stamp to
3255 the hash and sign the result with its private key, and send back the
3256 signed hash + timestamp.  Both email, FTP and HTTP can be used to
3257 request such signature, depending on what is provided by the service
3258 used. Anyone with the document and the signature can then verify that
3259 the document matches the signature by creating their own hash and
3260 checking the signature using the trusted third party public key.
3261 There are several commercial services around providing such
3262 timestamping.  A quick search for
3263 "<a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rfc+3161+service">rfc 3161
3264 service</a>" pointed me to at least
3265 <a href="https://www.digistamp.com/technical/how-a-digital-time-stamp-works/">DigiStamp</a>,
3266 <a href="http://www.quovadisglobal.co.uk/CertificateServices/SigningServices/TimeStamp.aspx">Quo
3267 Vadis</a>,
3268 <a href="https://www.globalsign.com/timestamp-service/">Global Sign</a>
3269 and <a href="http://www.globaltrustfinder.com/TSADefault.aspx">Global
3270 Trust Finder</a>.  The system work as long as the private key of the
3271 trusted third party is not compromised.</p>
3272
3273 <p>But as far as I can tell, there are very few public trusted
3274 timestamp services available for everyone.  I've been looking for one
3275 for a while now. But yesterday I found one over at
3276 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">Deutches
3277 Forschungsnetz</a> mentioned in
3278 <a href="http://www.d-mueller.de/blog/dealing-with-trusted-timestamps-in-php-rfc-3161/">a
3279 blog by David Müller</a>.  I then found
3280 <a href="http://www.rz.uni-greifswald.de/support/dfn-pki-zertifikate/zeitstempeldienst.html">a
3281 good recipe on how to use the service</a> over at the University of
3282 Greifswald.</p>
3283
3284 <p><a href="http://www.openssl.org/">The OpenSSL library</a> contain
3285 both server and tools to use and set up your own signing service.  See
3286 the ts(1SSL), tsget(1SSL) manual pages for more details.  The
3287 following shell script demonstrate how to extract a signed timestamp
3288 for any file on the disk in a Debian environment:</p>
3289
3290 <p><blockquote><pre>
3291 #!/bin/sh
3292 set -e
3293 url="http://zeitstempel.dfn.de"
3294 caurl="https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt"
3295 reqfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsq)
3296 resfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsr)
3297 cafile=chain.txt
3298 if [ ! -f $cafile ] ; then
3299     wget -O $cafile "$caurl"
3300 fi
3301 openssl ts -query -data "$1" -cert | tee "$reqfile" \
3302     | /usr/lib/ssl/misc/tsget -h "$url" -o "$resfile"
3303 openssl ts -reply -in "$resfile" -text 1>&2
3304 openssl ts -verify -data "$1" -in "$resfile" -CAfile "$cafile" 1>&2
3305 base64 < "$resfile"
3306 rm "$reqfile" "$resfile"
3307 </pre></blockquote></p>
3308
3309 <p>The argument to the script is the file to timestamp, and the output
3310 is a base64 encoded version of the signature to STDOUT and details
3311 about the signature to STDERR.  Note that due to
3312 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=742553">a bug
3313 in the tsget script</a>, you might need to modify the included script
3314 and remove the last line.  Or just write your own HTTP uploader using
3315 curl. :) Now you too can prove and verify that files have not been
3316 changed.</p>
3317
3318 <p>But the Internet need more public trusted timestamp services.
3319 Perhaps something for <a href="http://www.uninett.no/">Uninett</a> or
3320 my work place the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
3321 to set up?</p>
3322
3323       </div>
3324       <div class="tags">
3325
3326
3327         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>.
3328
3329
3330       </div>
3331     </div>
3332     <div class="padding"></div>
3333
3334     <div class="entry">
3335       <div class="title">
3336         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Video_DVD_reader_library___python_dvdvideo___nice_free_software.html">Video DVD reader library / python-dvdvideo - nice free software</a>
3337       </div>
3338       <div class="date">
3339         21st March 2014
3340       </div>
3341       <div class="body">
3342         <p>Keeping your DVD collection safe from scratches and curious
3343 children fingers while still having it available when you want to see a
3344 movie is not straight forward.  My preferred method at the moment is
3345 to store a full copy of the ISO on a hard drive, and use VLC, Popcorn
3346 Hour or other useful players to view the resulting file.  This way the
3347 subtitles and bonus material are still available and using the ISO is
3348 just like inserting the original DVD record in the DVD player.</p>
3349
3350 <p>Earlier I used dd for taking security copies, but it do not handle
3351 DVDs giving read errors (which are quite a few of them).  I've also
3352 tried using
3353 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">dvdbackup
3354 and genisoimage</a>, but these days I use the marvellous python library
3355 and program
3356 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">python-dvdvideo</a>
3357 written by Bastian Blank.  It is
3358 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/python-dvdvideo.html">in Debian
3359 already</a> and the binary package name is python3-dvdvideo. Instead
3360 of trying to read every block from the DVD, it parses the file
3361 structure and figure out which block on the DVD is actually in used,
3362 and only read those blocks from the DVD.  This work surprisingly well,
3363 and I have been able to almost backup my entire DVD collection using
3364 this method.</p>
3365
3366 <p>So far, python-dvdvideo have failed on between 10 and
3367 20 DVDs, which is a small fraction of my collection.  The most common
3368 problem is
3369 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=720831">DVDs
3370 using UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 characters</a>, which according to
3371 Bastian is against the DVD specification (and seem to cause some
3372 players to fail too).  A rarer problem is what seem to be inconsistent
3373 DVD structures, as the python library
3374 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=723079">claim
3375 there is a overlap between objects</a>.  An equally rare problem claim
3376 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=741878">some
3377 value is out of range</a>.  No idea what is going on there.  I wish I
3378 knew enough about the DVD format to fix these, to ensure my movie
3379 collection will stay with me in the future.</p>
3380
3381 <p>So, if you need to keep your DVDs safe, back them up using
3382 python-dvdvideo. :)</p>
3383
3384       </div>
3385       <div class="tags">
3386
3387
3388         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>.
3389
3390
3391       </div>
3392     </div>
3393     <div class="padding"></div>
3394
3395     <div class="entry">
3396       <div class="title">
3397         <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>
3398       </div>
3399       <div class="date">
3400         14th March 2014
3401       </div>
3402       <div class="body">
3403         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
3404 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
3405 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
3406 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
3407 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
3408 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
3409 release (0.2).</p>
3410
3411 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
3412 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
3413 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
3414 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
3415 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
3416 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
3417 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
3418 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
3419 and build using
3420 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
3421 with a user with sudo access to become root:
3422
3423 <pre>
3424 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
3425   freedom-maker
3426 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
3427   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
3428   u-boot-tools
3429 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
3430 </pre>
3431
3432 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
3433 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
3434 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
3435 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
3436 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
3437 kpartx call.</p>
3438
3439 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
3440 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
3441 the preseed values:</p>
3442
3443 <pre>
3444 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
3445 </pre>
3446
3447 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
3448 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
3449 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
3450 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
3451 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
3452 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
3453
3454 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
3455 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
3456 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
3457 irc.debian.org)</a> and
3458 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
3459 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
3460
3461       </div>
3462       <div class="tags">
3463
3464
3465         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>.
3466
3467
3468       </div>
3469     </div>
3470     <div class="padding"></div>
3471
3472     <div class="entry">
3473       <div class="title">
3474         <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>
3475       </div>
3476       <div class="date">
3477         12th March 2014
3478       </div>
3479       <div class="body">
3480         <p>On larger sites, it is useful to use a dedicated storage server for
3481 storing user home directories and data.  The design for handling this
3482 in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, is
3483 to update the automount rules in LDAP and let the automount daemon on
3484 the clients take care of the rest.  I was reminded about the need to
3485 document this better when one of the customers of
3486 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a>, where I am
3487 on the board of directors, asked about how to do this.  The steps to
3488 get this working are the following:</p>
3489
3490 <p><ol>
3491
3492 <li>Add new storage server in DNS.  I use nas-server.intern as the
3493 example host here.</li>
3494
3495 <li>Add automoun LDAP information about this server in LDAP, to allow
3496 all clients to automatically mount it on reqeust.</li>
3497
3498 <li>Add the relevant entries in tjener.intern:/etc/fstab, because
3499 tjener.intern do not use automount to avoid mounting loops.</li>
3500
3501 </ol></p>
3502
3503 <p>DNS entries are added in GOsa², and not described here.  Follow the
3504 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/GettingStarted">instructions
3505 in the manual</a> (Machine Management with GOsa² in section Getting
3506 started).</p>
3507
3508 <p>Ensure that the NFS export points on the server are exported to the
3509 relevant subnets or machines:</p>
3510
3511 <p><blockquote><pre>
3512 root@tjener:~# showmount -e nas-server
3513 Export list for nas-server:
3514 /storage         10.0.0.0/8
3515 root@tjener:~#
3516 </pre></blockquote></p>
3517
3518 <p>Here everything on the backbone network is granted access to the
3519 /storage export.  With NFSv3 it is slightly better to limit it to
3520 netgroup membership or single IP addresses to have some limits on the
3521 NFS access.</p>
3522
3523 <p>The next step is to update LDAP.  This can not be done using GOsa²,
3524 because it lack a module for automount.  Instead, use ldapvi and add
3525 the required LDAP objects using an editor.</p>
3526
3527 <p><blockquote><pre>
3528 ldapvi --ldap-conf -ZD '(cn=admin)' -b ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3529 </pre></blockquote></p>
3530
3531 <p>When the editor show up, add the following LDAP objects at the
3532 bottom of the document.  The "/&" part in the last LDAP object is a
3533 wild card matching everything the nas-server exports, removing the
3534 need to list individual mount points in LDAP.</p>
3535
3536 <p><blockquote><pre>
3537 add cn=nas-server,ou=auto.skole,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3538 objectClass: automount
3539 cn: nas-server
3540 automountInformation: -fstype=autofs --timeout=60 ldap:ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3541
3542 add ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3543 objectClass: top
3544 objectClass: automountMap
3545 ou: auto.nas-server
3546
3547 add cn=/,ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3548 objectClass: automount
3549 cn: /
3550 automountInformation: -fstype=nfs,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,rw,intr,hard,nodev,nosuid,noatime nas-server.intern:/&
3551 </pre></blockquote></p>
3552
3553 <p>The last step to remember is to mount the relevant mount points in
3554 tjener.intern by adding them to /etc/fstab, creating the mount
3555 directories using mkdir and running "mount -a" to mount them.</p>
3556
3557 <p>When this is done, your users should be able to access the files on
3558 the storage server directly by just visiting the
3559 /tjener/nas-server/storage/ directory using any application on any
3560 workstation, LTSP client or LTSP server.</p>
3561
3562       </div>
3563       <div class="tags">
3564
3565
3566         Tags: <a href="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>.
3567
3568
3569       </div>
3570     </div>
3571     <div class="padding"></div>
3572
3573     <div class="entry">
3574       <div class="title">
3575         <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>
3576       </div>
3577       <div class="date">
3578         22nd February 2014
3579       </div>
3580       <div class="body">
3581         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
3582 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
3583 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
3584 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
3585 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
3586 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
3587 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
3588 proper home since then.</p>
3589
3590 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
3591 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
3592 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
3593 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
3594 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
3595
3596 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
3597 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
3598 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
3599 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
3600 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
3601 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
3602 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
3603 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
3604 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
3605
3606       </div>
3607       <div class="tags">
3608
3609
3610         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>.
3611
3612
3613       </div>
3614     </div>
3615     <div class="padding"></div>
3616
3617     <div class="entry">
3618       <div class="title">
3619         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
3620       </div>
3621       <div class="date">
3622          3rd February 2014
3623       </div>
3624       <div class="body">
3625         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
3626 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
3627 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
3628 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
3629 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
3630 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
3631 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
3632 <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>,
3633 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
3634
3635 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
3636 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
3637 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
3638 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
3639 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
3640 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
3641
3642 <p><blockquote><pre>
3643 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
3644 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
3645 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
3646 dhclient /dev/eth0
3647 </pre></blockquote></p>
3648
3649 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
3650 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
3651 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
3652
3653 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
3654 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
3655 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
3656 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
3657 side.</p>
3658
3659 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
3660 stuff:</p>
3661
3662 <p><blockquote><pre>
3663 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
3664 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
3665 EOF
3666 apt-get update
3667 apt-get dist-upgrade
3668 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
3669     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
3670 update-alternatives --config runsystem
3671 </pre></blockquote></p>
3672
3673 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
3674 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
3675 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
3676 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
3677 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
3678 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
3679 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
3680 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
3681 ssh instead.
3682
3683 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
3684 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
3685 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
3686 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
3687 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
3688 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
3689
3690 <p><blockquote><pre>
3691 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
3692 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
3693 EOF
3694 </pre></blockquote></p>
3695
3696 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
3697 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
3698 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
3699 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
3700
3701 <p><blockquote><pre>
3702 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
3703 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
3704 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
3705 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
3706 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
3707 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
3708 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
3709 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
3710 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
3711 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
3712 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
3713 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
3714 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
3715 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
3716 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
3717 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
3718 #
3719 </pre></blockquote></p>
3720
3721 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
3722 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
3723 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
3724 command line stuff.<p>
3725
3726       </div>
3727       <div class="tags">
3728
3729
3730         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>.
3731
3732
3733       </div>
3734     </div>
3735     <div class="padding"></div>
3736
3737     <div class="entry">
3738       <div class="title">
3739         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_fist_full_of_non_anonymous_Bitcoins.html">A fist full of non-anonymous Bitcoins</a>
3740       </div>
3741       <div class="date">
3742         29th January 2014
3743       </div>
3744       <div class="body">
3745         <p>Bitcoin is a incredible use of peer to peer communication and
3746 encryption, allowing direct and immediate money transfer without any
3747 central control.  It is sometimes claimed to be ideal for illegal
3748 activity, which I believe is quite a long way from the truth.  At least
3749 I would not conduct illegal money transfers using a system where the
3750 details of every transaction are kept forever.  This point is
3751 investigated in
3752 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">USENIX ;login:</a>
3753 from December 2013, in the article
3754 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/03_meiklejohn-online.pdf">A
3755 Fistful of Bitcoins - Characterizing Payments Among Men with No
3756 Names</a>" by Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole,Grant Jordan, Kirill
3757 Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage.  They
3758 analyse the transaction log in the Bitcoin system, using it to find
3759 addresses belong to individuals and organisations and follow the flow
3760 of money from both Bitcoin theft and trades on Silk Road to where the
3761 money end up.  This is how they wrap up their article:</p>
3762
3763 <p><blockquote>
3764 <p>"To demonstrate the usefulness of this type of analysis, we turned
3765 our attention to criminal activity. In the Bitcoin economy, criminal
3766 activity can appear in a number of forms, such as dealing drugs on
3767 Silk Road or simply stealing someone else’s bitcoins. We followed the
3768 flow of bitcoins out of Silk Road (in particular, from one notorious
3769 address) and from a number of highly publicized thefts to see whether
3770 we could track the bitcoins to known services. Although some of the
3771 thieves attempted to use sophisticated mixing techniques (or possibly
3772 mix services) to obscure the flow of bitcoins, for the most part
3773 tracking the bitcoins was quite straightforward, and we ultimately saw
3774 large quantities of bitcoins flow to a variety of exchanges directly
3775 from the point of theft (or the withdrawal from Silk Road).</p>
3776
3777 <p>As acknowledged above, following stolen bitcoins to the point at
3778 which they are deposited into an exchange does not in itself identify
3779 the thief; however, it does enable further de-anonymization in the
3780 case in which certain agencies can determine (through, for example,
3781 subpoena power) the real-world owner of the account into which the
3782 stolen bitcoins were deposited.  Because such exchanges seem to serve
3783 as chokepoints into and out of the Bitcoin economy (i.e., there are
3784 few alternative ways to cash out), we conclude that using Bitcoin for
3785 money laundering or other illicit purposes does not (at least at
3786 present) seem to be particularly attractive."</p>
3787 </blockquote><p>
3788
3789 <p>These researches are not the first to analyse the Bitcoin
3790 transaction log.  The 2011 paper
3791 "<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524">An Analysis of Anonymity in
3792 the Bitcoin System</A>" by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan is
3793 summarized like this:</p>
3794
3795 <p><blockquote>
3796 "Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a
3797 complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by
3798 public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will
3799 attempt to construct the one-to-many mapping between users and
3800 public-keys and associate information external to the system with the
3801 users. Bitcoin tries to prevent this attack by storing the mapping of
3802 a user to his or her public-keys on that user's node only and by
3803 allowing each user to generate as many public-keys as required. In
3804 this chapter we consider the topological structure of two networks
3805 derived from Bitcoin's public transaction history. We show that the
3806 two networks have a non-trivial topological structure, provide
3807 complementary views of the Bitcoin system and have implications for
3808 anonymity. We combine these structures with external information and
3809 techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate
3810 an alleged theft of Bitcoins, which, at the time of the theft, had a
3811 market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars."
3812 </blockquote></p>
3813
3814 <p>I hope these references can help kill the urban myth that Bitcoin
3815 is anonymous.  It isn't really a good fit for illegal activites.  Use
3816 cash if you need to stay anonymous, at least until regular DNA
3817 sampling of notes and coins become the norm. :)</p>
3818
3819 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3820 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3821 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3822
3823       </div>
3824       <div class="tags">
3825
3826
3827         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>.
3828
3829
3830       </div>
3831     </div>
3832     <div class="padding"></div>
3833
3834     <div class="entry">
3835       <div class="title">
3836         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
3837       </div>
3838       <div class="date">
3839         14th January 2014
3840       </div>
3841       <div class="body">
3842         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
3843 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
3844 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
3845 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
3846 the source.  The company behind it provide
3847 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
3848 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
3849 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
3850 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
3851 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
3852 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
3853 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
3854 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
3855 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
3856 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
3857 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
3858 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
3859 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
3860 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
3861 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
3862 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
3863 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
3864 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
3865 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
3866
3867 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
3868
3869 <ul>
3870
3871   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
3872   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
3873   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
3874
3875 </ul>
3876
3877 <p>You can
3878 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
3879 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
3880 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
3881 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
3882 include a test suite check.</p>
3883
3884       </div>
3885       <div class="tags">
3886
3887
3888         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>.
3889
3890
3891       </div>
3892     </div>
3893     <div class="padding"></div>
3894
3895     <div class="entry">
3896       <div class="title">
3897         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html">Debian Edu interview: Dominik George</a>
3898       </div>
3899       <div class="date">
3900         25th December 2013
3901       </div>
3902       <div class="body">
3903         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
3904 project</a> consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
3905 was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
3906 up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
3907 successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School.  Say hello
3908 to <a href="https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Natureshadow">Dominik
3909 George</a>.</p>
3910
3911 <!-- http://www.dominik-george.de/images/foto.jpg -->
3912
3913 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
3914
3915 <p>I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
3916 life with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a
3917 student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
3918 Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
3919 voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
3920 a bit vacant right now however.</p>
3921
3922 <p>I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
3923 (public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
3924 around 2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
3925 it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
3926 network of that school together with a team of very interested and
3927 talented students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to
3928 learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
3929 to help building another school's informational education concept from
3930 scratch.</p>
3931
3932 <p>That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids
3933 and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
3934 ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.</p>
3935
3936 <p>When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
3937 and cycling.</p>
3938
3939 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
3940 project?</strong></p>
3941
3942 <p>I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
3943 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">FrOSCon</a> and visited the project
3944 booth. I think I wasn't too interested back then because I used to
3945 have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
3946 own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
3947 "out-of-the-box" solution ;).</p>
3948
3949 <p>The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
3950 <a href="http://www.openrheinruhr.de">OpenRheinRuhr</a> 2011 when the
3951 BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
3952 really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
3953 ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
3954 a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
3955 guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
3956 small demonstration, but there wasn't any real feedback and the guys
3957 seemed rather uninterested.</p>
3958
3959 <p>After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
3960 mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
3961 reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
3962 basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!</p>
3963
3964 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
3965 Edu?</strong></p>
3966
3967 <p>The most important advantage seems to be that it "just
3968 works". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
3969 in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
3970 without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
3971 from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't
3972 have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
3973 and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
3974 server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
3975 notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
3976 and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
3977 it. I could use 8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
3978 tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that's enough to say
3979 that it rocks!</p>
3980
3981 <p>Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no
3982 politician will ever permit a setup described as "Debian, an universal
3983 operating system, with some really cool educational tools" while they
3984 will be jsut fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
3985 school network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
3986 this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
3987 too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).</p>
3988
3989 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
3990 Edu?</strong></p>
3991
3992 <p>I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
3993 answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
3994 other words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I
3995 can list a few points about that:</p>
3996
3997 <ul>
3998
3999  <li>always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
4000  <li>be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
4001  <li>be helpful at being helpful ;)
4002
4003 </ul>
4004
4005 <p>I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!</p>
4006
4007 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
4008
4009 <p>First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
4010 all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
4011 year.</p>
4012
4013 <p>I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
4014 run text tools. I use
4015 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm">mksh</a> as shell,
4016 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/jupp.htm">jupp</a> as very advanced
4017 text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
4018 based full-featured student management software with the two),
4019 <a href="http://mcabber.com/">mcabber</a> for XMPP and
4020 <a href="http://www.irssi.org/">irssi</a> for IRC. For that overly
4021 coloured world called the WWW, I use
4022 <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/">Iceweasel
4023 (Firefox)</a>. Oh, and <a href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a> for
4024 e-mail.</p>
4025
4026 <p>However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
4027 are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
4028 least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
4029 kids. One of these things is <a href="http://jappix.org/">Jappix</a>,
4030 which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
4031 Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
4032 Facebook now ;).</p>
4033
4034 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
4035 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
4036
4037 <p>Well, that's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
4038 side is what I have experienced.</p>
4039
4040 <p>I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
4041 that won't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
4042 grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
4043 to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
4044 see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
4045 students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
4046 desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
4047 they jsut refused to use it because "Linux sucks". It is something
4048 that makes the council of our city spend around 600000 € to buy
4049 software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
4050 networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
4051 not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
4052 already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
4053 if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
4054 that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
4055 plain criminal.</p>
4056
4057 <p>That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
4058 method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
4059 founded an association named
4060 <a href="https://www.teckids.org">Teckids</a> here in Germany that does
4061 just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
4062 area of free and open source software, for example the
4063 <a href="http://kids.froscon.org">FrogLabs</a>, which share staff with
4064 Teckids and are the youth programme of
4065 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">the Free and Open Source Software
4066 Conference (FrOSCon)</a>. We do a lot more than most other conferences
4067 - this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
4068 aged 10 to 16. It was a huge success, with approx. 30 kids taking part
4069 and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
4070 of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.</p>
4071
4072 <p>Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
4073 the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
4074 their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
4075 Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
4076 clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
4077 it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
4078 who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
4079 We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
4080 open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
4081 software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
4082 group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
4083 Skolelinux in the future ;)!</p>
4084
4085 <p>So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren't for the world
4086 being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
4087 that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
4088 but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.</p>
4089
4090 <!--
4091
4092 >  * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
4093
4094 That's probably the hardest question of them all, as I do not know the
4095 community. However, I would be willing to do the following:
4096
4097  <li>Run an interview with a German headteacher who is very open to
4098    free software, and also prefers it, but cannot really use it because
4099    of the decision makers above;
4100  <li>Run interviews with some kids, both with and without previous
4101    knowledge about free software
4102
4103 If that is wanted, just let me know ;).
4104
4105 -->
4106
4107       </div>
4108       <div class="tags">
4109
4110
4111         Tags: <a href="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>.
4112
4113
4114       </div>
4115     </div>
4116     <div class="padding"></div>
4117
4118     <div class="entry">
4119       <div class="title">
4120         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html">Debian Edu interview: Klaus Knopper</a>
4121       </div>
4122       <div class="date">
4123          6th December 2013
4124       </div>
4125       <div class="body">
4126         <p>It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview,
4127 but the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
4128 Skolelinux</a> community is still going strong, and yesterday we even
4129 had a new school administrator show up on
4130 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a> to share
4131 his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school.  This
4132 time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of
4133 Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in
4134 Germany a few years ago.</p>
4135
4136 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
4137
4138 <p>I am Klaus Knopper.  I have a master degree in electrical
4139 engineering, and is currently professor in information management at
4140 the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and
4141 freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.</p>
4142
4143 <p>All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart
4144 from teaching, I'm also conducting some more or less experimental
4145 projects like the <a href="http://www.knoppix.org">Knoppix GNU/Linux live
4146 system</a> (Debian-based like Skolelinux),
4147 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html">ADRIANE</a>
4148 (a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and
4149 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/linbo/index-en.html">LINBO</a>
4150 (Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair
4151 system supporting various operating systems).</p>
4152
4153 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
4154 project?</strong></p>
4155
4156 <p>The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German
4157 coordinator for Skolelinux.  We were looking for an all-in-one open
4158 source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt
4159 introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.</p>
4160
4161 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
4162 Edu?</strong></p>
4163
4164 <ul>
4165   <li>Quick installation,</li>
4166   <li>works (almost) out of the box,</li>
4167   <li>contains many useful software packages for teaching and learning,</li>
4168   <li>is a purely community-based distro and not controlled by a
4169     single company,</li>
4170   <li>has a large number of supporters and teachers who share their
4171     experience and problem solutions.</li>
4172 </ul>
4173
4174 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
4175 Edu?</strong></p>
4176
4177 <ul>
4178   <li>Skolelinux is - as we had to learn - not easily upgradable to
4179   the next version.  Opposed to its genuine Debian base, upgrading to
4180   a new version means a full new installation from scratch to get it
4181   working again reliably.
4182
4183   <li>Skolelinux is based on Debian/stable, and therefore always a
4184   little outdated in terms of program versions compared to Edubuntu or
4185   similar educational Linux distros, which rather use Debian/testing
4186   as their base.
4187
4188   <li>Skolelinux has some very self-opinionated and stubborn default
4189   configuration which in my opinion adds unnecessary complexity and is
4190   not always suitable for a schools needs, the preset network
4191   configuration is actually a core definition feature of Skolelinux
4192   and not easy to change, so schools sometimes have to change their
4193   network configuration to make it "Skolelinux-compatible".
4194
4195   <li>Some proposed extensions, which were made available as
4196   contribution, like secure examination mode and lecture material
4197   distribution and collection, were not accepted into the mainline
4198   Skolelinux development and are now not easy to maintain in the
4199   future because of Skolelinux somewhat undeterministic update
4200   schemes.</li>
4201
4202   <li>Skolelinux has only a very tiny number of base developers
4203   compared to Debian.</li>
4204
4205 </ul>
4206
4207 <p>For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now
4208 rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until
4209 Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes
4210 upgradeable without reinstallation.</p>
4211
4212 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
4213
4214 <p>GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and
4215 programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence,
4216 occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various
4217 programming languages for teaching.</p>
4218
4219 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
4220 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
4221
4222 <p>Strong arguments are</p>
4223
4224 <ul>
4225
4226   <li>Knowledge is free, and so should be methods and tools for
4227     teaching and learning.</li>
4228
4229   <li>Students can learn with and use the same software at school, at
4230     home, and at their working place without running into license or
4231     conversion problems.</li>
4232
4233   <li>Closed source or proprietary software hides knowledge rather
4234     than exposing it, and proprietary software vendors try to bind
4235     customers to certain products.  But teachers need to teach
4236     science, not products.</li>
4237
4238   <li>If you have everything you for daily work as open source, what
4239     would you need proprietary software for?</li>
4240
4241 </ul>
4242
4243       </div>
4244       <div class="tags">
4245
4246
4247         Tags: <a href="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>.
4248
4249
4250       </div>
4251     </div>
4252     <div class="padding"></div>
4253
4254     <div class="entry">
4255       <div class="title">
4256         <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>
4257       </div>
4258       <div class="date">
4259         30th November 2013
4260       </div>
4261       <div class="body">
4262         <p>If you want the ability to electronically communicate directly with
4263 your neighbors and friends using a network controlled by your peers in
4264 stead of centrally controlled by a few corporations, or would like to
4265 experiment with interesting network technology, the
4266 <a href="http://www.dugnadsnett.no/">Dugnasnett for alle i Oslo</a>
4267 might be project for you.  39 mesh nodes are currently being planned,
4268 in the freshly started initiative from NUUG and Hackeriet to create a
4269 wireless community network.  The work is inspired by
4270 <a href="http://freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a>,
4271 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan
4272 Network</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet">Roofnet</a>
4273 and other successful mesh networks around the globe.  Two days ago we
4274 held a workshop to try to get people started on setting up their own
4275 mesh node, and there we decided to create a new mailing list
4276 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/dugnadsnett">dugnadsnett
4277 (at) nuug.no</a> and IRC channel
4278 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#dugnadsnett.no">#dugnadsnett.no</a> to
4279 coordinate the work.  See also the NUUG blog post
4280 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/E_postliste_og_IRC_kanal_for_Dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">announcing
4281 the mailing list and IRC channel</a>.</p>
4282
4283       </div>
4284       <div class="tags">
4285
4286
4287         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>.
4288
4289
4290       </div>
4291     </div>
4292     <div class="padding"></div>
4293
4294     <div class="entry">
4295       <div class="title">
4296         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
4297       </div>
4298       <div class="date">
4299         24th November 2013
4300       </div>
4301       <div class="body">
4302         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
4303 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
4304 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
4305 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
4306 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
4307 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
4308 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
4309 is working on.  I checked the
4310 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
4311 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
4312 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
4313 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
4314 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
4315 These are the release notes:</p>
4316
4317 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
4318
4319 <ul>
4320
4321   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
4322    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
4323    up.</li>
4324
4325   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
4326
4327   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
4328    Matthias Klose.</li>
4329
4330   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
4331    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
4332
4333   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
4334    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
4335    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
4336
4337 </ul>
4338
4339 <p>You can
4340 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
4341 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
4342 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
4343 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
4344 include a testsuite check.</p>
4345
4346       </div>
4347       <div class="tags">
4348
4349
4350         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>.
4351
4352
4353       </div>
4354     </div>
4355     <div class="padding"></div>
4356
4357     <div class="entry">
4358       <div class="title">
4359         <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>
4360       </div>
4361       <div class="date">
4362         21st November 2013
4363       </div>
4364       <div class="body">
4365         <p>Drones, flying robots, are getting more and more popular.  The most
4366 know ones are the killer drones used by some government to murder
4367 people they do not like without giving them the chance of a fair
4368 trial, but the technology have many good uses too, from mapping and
4369 forest maintenance to photography and search and rescue.  I am sure it
4370 is just a question of time before "bad drones" are in the hands of
4371 private enterprises and not only state criminals but petty criminals
4372 too.  The drone technology is very useful and very dangerous.  To have
4373 some control over the use of drones, I agree with Daniel Suarez in his
4374 TED talk
4375 "<a href="https://archive.org/details/DanielSuarez_2013G">The kill
4376 decision shouldn't belong to a robot</a>", where he suggested this
4377 little gem to keep the good while limiting the bad use of drones:</p>
4378
4379 <blockquote>
4380
4381 <p>Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed
4382 I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement
4383 through public spaces. We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on
4384 aircraft. This is no different. And every citizen should be able to
4385 download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous
4386 vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and
4387 historically. And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones
4388 to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their
4389 own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their
4390 presence. And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic
4391 drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility.</p>
4392
4393 <p>But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. It
4394 would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles
4395 and drones while still preserving our open, civil society.</p>
4396
4397 </blockquote>
4398
4399 <p>The key is that <em>every citizen</em> should be able to read the
4400 radio beacons sent from the drones in the area, to be able to check
4401 both the government and others use of drones.  For such control to be
4402 effective, everyone must be able to do it.  What should such beacon
4403 contain?  At least formal owner, purpose, contact information and GPS
4404 location.  Probably also the origin and target position of the current
4405 flight.  And perhaps some registration number to be able to look up
4406 the drone in a central database tracking their movement.  Robots
4407 should not have privacy.  It is people who need privacy.</p>
4408
4409       </div>
4410       <div class="tags">
4411
4412
4413         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>.
4414
4415
4416       </div>
4417     </div>
4418     <div class="padding"></div>
4419
4420     <div class="entry">
4421       <div class="title">
4422         <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>
4423       </div>
4424       <div class="date">
4425         13th November 2013
4426       </div>
4427       <div class="body">
4428         <p>Today NUUG and Hackeriet announced
4429 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Bli_med___bygge_dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">our
4430 plans to join forces and create a wireless community network in
4431 Oslo</a>.  The workshop to help people get started will take place
4432 Thursday 2013-11-28, but we already are collecting the geolocation of
4433 people joining forces to make this happen.  We have
4434 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/oslo-nodes.geojson">9
4435 locations plotted on the map</a>, but we will need more before we have
4436 a connected mesh spread across Oslo.  If this sound interesting to
4437 you, please join us at the workshop.  If you are too impatient to wait
4438 15 days, please join us on the IRC channel
4439 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
4440 right away. :)</p>
4441
4442       </div>
4443       <div class="tags">
4444
4445
4446         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>.
4447
4448
4449       </div>
4450     </div>
4451     <div class="padding"></div>
4452
4453     <div class="entry">
4454       <div class="title">
4455         <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>
4456       </div>
4457       <div class="date">
4458         10th November 2013
4459       </div>
4460       <div class="body">
4461         <p>Continuing my research into mesh networking, I was recommended to
4462 use TP-Link 3040 and 3600 access points as mesh nodes, and the pair I
4463 bought arrived on Friday.  Here are my notes on how to set up the
4464 MR3040 as a mesh node using
4465 <a href="http://www.openwrt.org/">OpenWrt</a>.</p>
4466
4467 <p>I started by following the instructions on the OpenWRT wiki for
4468 <a href="http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3040">TL-MR3040</a>,
4469 and downloaded
4470 <a href="http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin">the
4471 recommended firmware image</a>
4472 (openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin) and
4473 uploaded it into the original web interface.  The flashing went fine,
4474 and the machine was available via telnet on the ethernet port.  After
4475 logging in and setting the root password, ssh was available and I
4476 could start to set it up as a batman-adv mesh node.</p>
4477
4478 <p>I started off by reading the instructions from
4479 <a href="http://wirelessafrica.meraka.org.za/wiki/index.php?title=Antoine's_Research">Wireless
4480 Africa</a>, which had quite a lot of useful information, but
4481 eventually I followed the recipe from the Open Mesh wiki for
4482 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Batman-adv-openwrt-config">using
4483 batman-adv on OpenWrt</a>.  A small snag was the fact that the
4484 <tt>opkg install kmod-batman-adv</tt> command did not work as it
4485 should.  The batman-adv kernel module would fail to load because its
4486 dependency crc16 was not already loaded.  I
4487 <a href="https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/14452">reported the bug</a> to
4488 the openwrt project and hope it will be fixed soon.  But the problem
4489 only seem to affect initial testing of batman-adv, as configuration
4490 seem to work when booting from scratch.</p>
4491
4492 <p>The setup is done using files in /etc/config/.  I did not bridge
4493 the Ethernet and mesh interfaces this time, to be able to hook up the
4494 box on my local network and log into it for configuration updates.
4495 The following files were changed and look like this after modifying
4496 them:</p>
4497
4498 <p><tt>/etc/config/network</tt></p>
4499
4500 <pre>
4501
4502 config interface 'loopback'
4503         option ifname 'lo'
4504         option proto 'static'
4505         option ipaddr '127.0.0.1'
4506         option netmask '255.0.0.0'
4507
4508 config globals 'globals'
4509         option ula_prefix 'fdbf:4c12:3fed::/48'
4510
4511 config interface 'lan'
4512         option ifname 'eth0'
4513         option type 'bridge'
4514         option proto 'dhcp'
4515         option ipaddr '192.168.1.1'
4516         option netmask '255.255.255.0'
4517         option hostname 'tl-mr3040'
4518         option ip6assign '60'
4519
4520 config interface 'mesh'
4521         option ifname 'adhoc0'
4522         option mtu '1528'
4523         option proto 'batadv'
4524         option mesh 'bat0'
4525 </pre>
4526
4527 <p><tt>/etc/config/wireless</tt></p>
4528 <pre>
4529
4530 config wifi-device 'radio0'
4531         option type 'mac80211'
4532         option channel '11'
4533         option hwmode '11ng'
4534         option path 'platform/ar933x_wmac'
4535         option htmode 'HT20'
4536         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-20'
4537         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-40'
4538         list ht_capab 'RX-STBC1'
4539         list ht_capab 'DSSS_CCK-40'
4540         option disabled '0'
4541
4542 config wifi-iface 'wmesh'
4543         option device 'radio0'
4544         option ifname 'adhoc0'
4545         option network 'mesh'
4546         option encryption 'none'
4547         option mode 'adhoc'
4548         option bssid '02:BA:00:00:00:01'
4549         option ssid 'meshfx@hackeriet'
4550 </pre>
4551 <p><tt>/etc/config/batman-adv</tt></p>
4552 <pre>
4553
4554 config 'mesh' 'bat0'
4555         option interfaces 'adhoc0'
4556         option 'aggregated_ogms'
4557         option 'ap_isolation'
4558         option 'bonding'
4559         option 'fragmentation'
4560         option 'gw_bandwidth'
4561         option 'gw_mode'
4562         option 'gw_sel_class'
4563         option 'log_level'
4564         option 'orig_interval'
4565         option 'vis_mode'
4566         option 'bridge_loop_avoidance'
4567         option 'distributed_arp_table'
4568         option 'network_coding'
4569         option 'hop_penalty'
4570
4571 # yet another batX instance
4572 # config 'mesh' 'bat5'
4573 #       option 'interfaces' 'second_mesh'
4574 </pre>
4575
4576 <p>The mesh node is now operational.  I have yet to test its range,
4577 but I hope it is good.  I have not yet tested the TP-Link 3600 box
4578 still wrapped up in plastic.</p>
4579
4580       </div>
4581       <div class="tags">
4582
4583
4584         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>.
4585
4586
4587       </div>
4588     </div>
4589     <div class="padding"></div>
4590
4591     <div class="entry">
4592       <div class="title">
4593         <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>
4594       </div>
4595       <div class="date">
4596          2nd November 2013
4597       </div>
4598       <div class="body">
4599         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
4600 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
4601 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
4602 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
4603 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
4604
4605 <p><pre>
4606 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
4607 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
4608 # Provides:          rsyslog
4609 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
4610 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
4611 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
4612 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
4613 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
4614 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
4615 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
4616 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
4617 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
4618 ### END INIT INFO
4619 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
4620 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
4621 </pre></p>
4622
4623 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
4624 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
4625 info/comments.</p>
4626
4627 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
4628 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
4629
4630 <p><pre>
4631 #!/bin/sh
4632
4633 # Define LSB log_* functions.
4634 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
4635 # and status_of_proc is working.
4636 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
4637
4638 #
4639 # Function that starts the daemon/service
4640
4641 #
4642 do_start()
4643 {
4644         # Return
4645         #   0 if daemon has been started
4646         #   1 if daemon was already running
4647         #   2 if daemon could not be started
4648         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
4649                 || return 1
4650         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
4651                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
4652                 || return 2
4653         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
4654         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
4655         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
4656 }
4657
4658 #
4659 # Function that stops the daemon/service
4660 #
4661 do_stop()
4662 {
4663         # Return
4664         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
4665         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
4666         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
4667         #   other if a failure occurred
4668         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
4669         RETVAL="$?"
4670         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
4671         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
4672         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
4673         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
4674         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
4675         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
4676         # sleep for some time.
4677         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
4678         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
4679         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
4680         rm -f $PIDFILE
4681         return "$RETVAL"
4682 }
4683
4684 #
4685 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
4686 #
4687 do_reload() {
4688         #
4689         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
4690         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
4691         # then implement that here.
4692         #
4693         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
4694         return 0
4695 }
4696
4697 SCRIPTNAME=$1
4698 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
4699 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
4700 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
4701     script="$1"
4702     shift
4703     . $script
4704 else
4705     exit 0
4706 fi
4707
4708 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
4709 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
4710
4711 # Exit if the package is not installed
4712 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
4713
4714 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
4715 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
4716
4717 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
4718 . /lib/init/vars.sh
4719
4720 case "$1" in
4721   start)
4722         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
4723         do_start
4724         case "$?" in
4725                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
4726                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
4727         esac
4728         ;;
4729   stop)
4730         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
4731         do_stop
4732         case "$?" in
4733                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
4734                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
4735         esac
4736         ;;
4737   status)
4738         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
4739         ;;
4740   #reload|force-reload)
4741         #
4742         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
4743         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
4744         #
4745         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
4746         #do_reload
4747         #log_end_msg $?
4748         #;;
4749   restart|force-reload)
4750         #
4751         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
4752         # 'force-reload' alias
4753         #
4754         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
4755         do_stop
4756         case "$?" in
4757           0|1)
4758                 do_start
4759                 case "$?" in
4760                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
4761                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
4762                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
4763                 esac
4764                 ;;
4765           *)
4766                 # Failed to stop
4767                 log_end_msg 1
4768                 ;;
4769         esac
4770         ;;
4771   *)
4772         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
4773         exit 3
4774         ;;
4775 esac
4776
4777 :
4778 </pre></p>
4779
4780 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
4781 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
4782 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
4783 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
4784
4785 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
4786 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
4787 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
4788 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
4789 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
4790
4791       </div>
4792       <div class="tags">
4793
4794
4795         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>.
4796
4797
4798       </div>
4799     </div>
4800     <div class="padding"></div>
4801
4802     <div class="entry">
4803       <div class="title">
4804         <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>
4805       </div>
4806       <div class="date">
4807          1st November 2013
4808       </div>
4809       <div class="body">
4810         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
4811 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
4812 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
4813 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
4814 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
4815 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
4816 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
4817 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
4818 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
4819 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
4820 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
4821 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
4822
4823 <p>The source is now available from
4824 <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>
4825
4826       </div>
4827       <div class="tags">
4828
4829
4830         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>.
4831
4832
4833       </div>
4834     </div>
4835     <div class="padding"></div>
4836
4837     <div class="entry">
4838       <div class="title">
4839         <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>
4840       </div>
4841       <div class="date">
4842         27th October 2013
4843       </div>
4844       <div class="body">
4845         <p>The
4846 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
4847 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
4848 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
4849 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
4850 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
4851 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
4852 of a plan to simplify the build system for
4853 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
4854 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
4855 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
4856 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
4857 Raspberry Pi.</p>
4858
4859 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
4860 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
4861 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
4862 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
4863 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
4864 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
4865 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
4866 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
4867 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
4868 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
4869 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
4870 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
4871 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
4872 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
4873 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
4874 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
4875 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
4876 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
4877 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
4878 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
4879 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
4880 available from
4881 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
4882 upstream project page</a>.</p>
4883
4884 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
4885 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
4886 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
4887 list:</p>
4888
4889 <p><pre>
4890 #!/bin/sh
4891 set -e # Exit on first error
4892 rootdir="$1"
4893 cd "$rootdir"
4894 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
4895 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
4896 EOF
4897 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
4898 # install a kernel somewhere too.
4899 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
4900     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
4901 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
4902 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
4903 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
4904 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
4905 </pre></p>
4906
4907 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
4908 to build the image:</p>
4909
4910 <pre>
4911 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
4912     --variant minbase \
4913     --arch armel \
4914     --distribution jessie \
4915     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
4916     --image test.img \
4917     --size 600M \
4918     --bootsize 64M \
4919     --boottype vfat \
4920     --log-level debug \
4921     --verbose \
4922     --no-kernel \
4923     --no-extlinux \
4924     --root-password raspberry \
4925     --hostname raspberrypi \
4926     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
4927     --customize `pwd`/customize \
4928     --package netbase \
4929     --package git-core \
4930     --package binutils \
4931     --package ca-certificates \
4932     --package wget \
4933     --package kmod
4934 </pre></p>
4935
4936 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
4937 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
4938 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
4939 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
4940 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
4941 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
4942 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
4943
4944 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
4945 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
4946 build dependency list.</p>
4947
4948 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
4949 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
4950 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
4951 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
4952
4953       </div>
4954       <div class="tags">
4955
4956
4957         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>.
4958
4959
4960       </div>
4961     </div>
4962     <div class="padding"></div>
4963
4964     <div class="entry">
4965       <div class="title">
4966         <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>
4967       </div>
4968       <div class="date">
4969         21st October 2013
4970       </div>
4971       <div class="body">
4972         <p>The last few days I have been experimenting with
4973 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki">the
4974 batman-adv mesh technology</a>.  I want to gain some experience to see
4975 if it will fit <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the
4976 Freedombox project</a>, and together with my neighbors try to build a
4977 mesh network around the park where I live.  Batman-adv is a layer 2
4978 mesh system ("ethernet" in other words), where the mesh network appear
4979 as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch.</p>
4980
4981 <p>My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying
4982 around, but I've been unable to get them working with batman-adv.  So
4983 instead, I started playing with a
4984 <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org/">Raspberry Pi</a>, and tried to
4985 get it working as a mesh node.  My idea is to use it to create a mesh
4986 node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to
4987 the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh
4988 network.  This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys
4989 WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow
4990 non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh.  This in turn is useful for
4991 Android phones using <a href="http://servalproject.org/">the Serval
4992 Project</a> voip client, allowing every one around the playground to
4993 phone and message each other for free.  The reason is that Android
4994 phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from
4995 the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted.  But if
4996 they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to
4997 every client on the local network.</p>
4998
4999 <p>To get this working, I've created a debian package
5000 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node">meshfx-node</a>
5001 and a script
5002 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/build-rpi-mesh-node">build-rpi-mesh-node</a>
5003 to create the Raspberry Pi boot image.  I'm using Debian Jessie (and
5004 not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available.
5005 Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot
5006 image to get it booting, but I'll ignore that for now.  Also, as
5007 Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry
5008 Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit.  I hope
5009 the routing performance isn't affected by the lack of hardware FPU
5010 support.</p>
5011
5012 <p>To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user
5013 after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:</p>
5014
5015 <p><pre>
5016 % wget -O build-rpi-mesh-node \
5017     https://raw.github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
5018 % sudo bash -x ./build-rpi-mesh-node > build.log 2>&1
5019 % dd if=/root/rpi/rpi_basic_jessie_$(date +%Y%m%d).img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M
5020 %
5021 </pre></p>
5022
5023 <p>Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB
5024 wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node.  At least it does for
5025 me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the
5026 ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in
5027 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">an
5028 earlier blog post about this mesh testing</a>.</p>
5029
5030 <p>The mesh node was not horribly expensive either.  I bought
5031 everything over the counter in shops nearby.  If I had ordered online
5032 from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:</p>
5033
5034 <p><table>
5035
5036 <tr><th>Supplier</th><th>Model</th><th>NOK</th></tr>
5037 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi model B</td><td>349.90</td></tr>
5038 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi type B case</td><td>99.90</td></tr>
5039 <tr><td>Lefdal</td><td>Jensen Air:Link 25150</td><td>295.-</td></tr>
5040 <tr><td>Clas Ohlson</td><td>Kingston 16 GB SD card</td><td>199.-</td></tr>
5041 <tr><td>Total cost</td><td></td><td>943.80</td></tr>
5042
5043 </table></p>
5044
5045 <p>Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement
5046 connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the 1th
5047 floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one
5048 play-node I use to develop the image building script.  And some times
5049 I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it.  I look forward
5050 to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give,
5051 and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)</p>
5052
5053       </div>
5054       <div class="tags">
5055
5056
5057         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>.
5058
5059
5060       </div>
5061     </div>
5062     <div class="padding"></div>
5063
5064     <div class="entry">
5065       <div class="title">
5066         <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>
5067       </div>
5068       <div class="date">
5069         19th October 2013
5070       </div>
5071       <div class="body">
5072         <p>Back in 2010, I created a Perl library to talk to
5073 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spykee">the Spykee robot</a>
5074 (with two belts, wifi, USB and Linux) and made it available from my
5075 web page.  Today I concluded that it should move to a site that is
5076 easier to use to cooperate with others, and moved it to github.  If
5077 you got a Spykee robot, you might want to check out
5078 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/libspykee-perl">the
5079 libspykee-perl github repository</a>.</p>
5080
5081       </div>
5082       <div class="tags">
5083
5084
5085         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>.
5086
5087
5088       </div>
5089     </div>
5090     <div class="padding"></div>
5091
5092     <div class="entry">
5093       <div class="title">
5094         <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>
5095       </div>
5096       <div class="date">
5097         15th October 2013
5098       </div>
5099       <div class="body">
5100         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
5101 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
5102 these. :)</p>
5103
5104 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
5105 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
5106 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
5107 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
5108 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
5109 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
5110 hope you will to. :)</p>
5111
5112 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
5113 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
5114 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
5115 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
5116 donated.  Are you next?</p>
5117
5118 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
5119 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
5120 statement under the heading
5121 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
5122 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
5123 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
5124 too.</p>
5125
5126       </div>
5127       <div class="tags">
5128
5129
5130         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>.
5131
5132
5133       </div>
5134     </div>
5135     <div class="padding"></div>
5136
5137     <div class="entry">
5138       <div class="title">
5139         <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>
5140       </div>
5141       <div class="date">
5142         11th October 2013
5143       </div>
5144       <div class="body">
5145         <p>Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
5146 networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
5147 areas, depending on the radio technology used.  Normal wifi equipment
5148 can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
5149 successful examples like
5150 <a href="http://www.freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a> and
5151 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network</a>
5152 (see
5153 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece">wikipedia
5154 for a large list</a>) around the globe.  To give you an idea how it
5155 work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
5156 can be seen from their
5157 <a href="http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html">dynamically
5158 updated node graph and map</a>, where one can see how the mesh nodes
5159 automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
5160 There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
5161 and that is the main topic of this blog post.</p>
5162
5163 <p>I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
5164 to do it as part of my involvement with the <a
5165 href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member organisation</a> community, and
5166 my recent involvement in
5167 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the Freedombox project</a>
5168 finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
5169 Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
5170 when possible, given that most communication between people are
5171 between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
5172 communication patterns).  It also allow people to communicate without
5173 any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
5174 private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
5175 important over the years.</p>
5176
5177 <p>So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
5178 working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
5179 <a href="http://hackeriet.no/">Hackeriet</a> at Husmania.  They seem to
5180 have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
5181 <a href="http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page">the Oslo
5182 Freifunk project</a>, but that effort is now dead and the people
5183 behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
5184 <a href="http://meshfx.org/trac">meshfx</a>.  Unfortunately the wiki
5185 site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
5186 reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to
5187 the new project.  A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
5188 from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks.  I
5189 came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
5190 speakers about this talk (from
5191 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Kd7CLkhSY">youtube</a>):</p>
5192
5193 <p><iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
5194
5195 <p>I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
5196 There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
5197 figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but
5198 given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
5199 is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
5200 completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
5201 batman-adv for now.  It sure help me to  know that the very cool
5202 <a href="http://www.servalproject.org/">Serval project in Australia</a>
5203 is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
5204 organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
5205 less industrialized communities.  Check out this cool video presenting
5206 that project (from
5207 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30qNfzJCQOA">youtube</a>):</p>
5208
5209 <p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/30qNfzJCQOA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
5210
5211 <p>According to the wikipedia page on
5212 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network">Wireless
5213 mesh network</a> there are around 70 competing schemes for routing
5214 packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
5215 B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
5216 based community mesh networks.</p>
5217
5218 <p>The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer 2
5219 (as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
5220 network.  One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
5221 vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
5222 computer.  The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
5223 least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up.  A
5224 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide">good
5225 introduction</a> is available from the Open Mesh project.  These are
5226 the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:</p>
5227
5228 <p><table>
5229 <tr><th>Setting</th><th>Value</th></tr>
5230 <tr><td>Protocol / kernel module</td><td>batman-adv</td></tr>
5231 <tr><td>ESSID</td><td>meshfx@hackeriet</td></tr>
5232 <td>Channel / Frequency</td><td>11 / 2462</td></tr>
5233 <td>Cell ID</td><td>02:BA:00:00:00:01</td>
5234 </table></p>
5235
5236 <p>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
5237 in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers.  (See a nice post from
5238 VillageTelco about
5239 "<a href="http://tiebing.blogspot.no/2009/12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html">Information
5240 about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!</a>
5241 for details.)  When these settings are activated and you have some
5242 other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
5243 network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
5244 any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)</p>
5245
5246 <p>My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
5247 but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
5248 firmware supporting batman-adv.  If anyone know how to use that old
5249 wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.</p>
5250
5251 <p>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
5252 us on IRC, either channel
5253 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace">#oslohackerspace</a>
5254 or <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug">#nuug</a> on
5255 irc.freenode.net.</p>
5256
5257 <p>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
5258 research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
5259 and Innovation called
5260 <a href="http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-2008.pdf">The
5261 reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks</a> and elsewhere
5262 learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
5263 Grünerløkka in Oslo.  So mesh networks are also interesting for
5264 commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
5265 to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
5266 know have closed down the experiment.  Perhaps Telenor or others would
5267 be interested in a cooperation?</p>
5268
5269 <p><strong>Update 2013-10-12</strong>: I was just
5270 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2013-October/005900.html">told
5271 by the Serval project developers</a> that they no longer use
5272 batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
5273 mesh system.</p>
5274
5275       </div>
5276       <div class="tags">
5277
5278
5279         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>.
5280
5281
5282       </div>
5283     </div>
5284     <div class="padding"></div>
5285
5286     <div class="entry">
5287       <div class="title">
5288         <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>
5289       </div>
5290       <div class="date">
5291          8th October 2013
5292       </div>
5293       <div class="body">
5294         <p>The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
5295 Salvador had published a
5296 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GgpdqgLFc">video on
5297 Youtube</a> showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu /
5298 Skolelinux profile.  This is the profile intended for use at home or
5299 on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network
5300 services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc,
5301 in other word a single user machine).  The result is 11 minutes long,
5302 and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked).
5303 Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium
5304 showing the <a href="http://www.zygotebody.com/">Zygote Body 3D model
5305 of the human body</a>, but I guess he did not know about those or find
5306 other programs more interesting. :) And the video do not show the
5307 advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian
5308 Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of
5309 computers without hard drives by installing one central
5310 <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP server</a>.</p>
5311
5312 <p>Anyway, check out the video, embedded below and linked to above:</p>
5313
5314 <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/w-GgpdqgLFc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
5315
5316 <p>Are there other nice videos demonstrating Skolelinux?  Please let
5317 me know. :)</p>
5318
5319       </div>
5320       <div class="tags">
5321
5322
5323         Tags: <a href="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>.
5324
5325
5326       </div>
5327     </div>
5328     <div class="padding"></div>
5329
5330     <div class="entry">
5331       <div class="title">
5332         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Finally__Debian_Edu_Wheezy_is_released_today_.html">Finally, Debian Edu Wheezy is released today!</a>
5333       </div>
5334       <div class="date">
5335         29th September 2013
5336       </div>
5337       <div class="body">
5338         <p>A few hours ago, the announcement for the first stable release of
5339 Debian Edu Wheezy went out from the Debian publicity team.  The
5340 complete announcement text can be found at
5341 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130928">the Debian News
5342 section</a>, translated to several languages.  Please check it out.</p>
5343
5344 <p>There is one minor known problem that we will fix very soon.  One
5345 can not install a amd64 Thin Client Server using PXE, as the /var/
5346 partition is too small.  A workaround is to extend the partition (use
5347 lvresize + resize2fs in tty 2 while installing).</p>
5348
5349       </div>
5350       <div class="tags">
5351
5352
5353         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5354
5355
5356       </div>
5357     </div>
5358     <div class="padding"></div>
5359
5360     <div class="entry">
5361       <div class="title">
5362         <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>
5363       </div>
5364       <div class="date">
5365         27th September 2013
5366       </div>
5367       <div class="body">
5368         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
5369 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
5370 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
5371 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
5372
5373 <ul>
5374
5375 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
5376 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
5377
5378 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
5379 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
5380
5381 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
5382 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
5383 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
5384 (Youtube)</li>
5385
5386 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
5387 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
5388
5389 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
5390 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
5391
5392 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
5393 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
5394 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
5395
5396 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
5397 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
5398 (Youtube)</li>
5399
5400 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
5401 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
5402
5403 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
5404 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
5405
5406 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
5407 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
5408 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
5409
5410 </ul>
5411
5412 <p>A larger list is available from
5413 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
5414 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
5415
5416 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
5417 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
5418 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
5419 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
5420 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
5421 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
5422 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
5423 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
5424 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
5425 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
5426 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
5427
5428       </div>
5429       <div class="tags">
5430
5431
5432         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>.
5433
5434
5435       </div>
5436     </div>
5437     <div class="padding"></div>
5438
5439     <div class="entry">
5440       <div class="title">
5441         <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>
5442       </div>
5443       <div class="date">
5444         16th September 2013
5445       </div>
5446       <div class="body">
5447         <p>The third wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
5448 today.  This is the release announcement from Holger Levsen:</p>
5449
5450 <blockquote>
5451 <p>Hi,</p>
5452
5453 <p>it is my pleasure to announce the third beta release (beta 2 for
5454 short) of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
5455 Skolelinux</a> based on Debian Wheezy!</p>
5456
5457 <p>Please test these images extensivly, if no new problems are found
5458 we plan to do this final Debian Edu Wheezy release this coming
5459 weekend.  We are not aware of any major problems or blockers in beta2,
5460 if you find something, please notify us immediately!</p>
5461
5462 <p>(More about the remaining steps for the Edu Wheezy release in
5463 another mail to the edu list tonight or tomorrow...)</p>
5464
5465 <p>Noteworthy changes and software updates for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b2
5466 compared to beta1:</p>
5467
5468 <ul>
5469
5470 <li>The KDE proxy setup has been adjusted to use the provided wpad.dat. This
5471 also gets Chromium to use this proxy.</li>
5472 <li>Install kdepim-groupware with KDE desktops to make sure korganizer
5473 understand ical/dav sources.</li>
5474 <li>Increased default maximum size of /var/spool/squid and /skole/backup on the
5475 main server.</li>
5476 <li>A source DVD image containing all source packages is now available as well.</li>
5477 <li>Updates for chromium (29.0.1547.57-1~deb7u1), imagemagick
5478 (6.7.7.10-5+deb7u2), php5 (5.4.4-14+deb7u4), libmodplug
5479 (0.8.8.4-3+deb7u1+git20130828), tiff (4.0.2-6+deb7u2), linux-image
5480 (3.2.0-4-486_3.2.46-1+deb7u1).</li>
5481
5482 </ul>
5483
5484 <p>Where to get it:</p>
5485
5486 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
5487
5488 <ul>
5489 <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>
5490 <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>
5491 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso .</li>
5492 </ul>
5493
5494 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is:  3a1c89f4666df80eebcd46c5bf5fedb866f9472f</p>
5495
5496 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
5497 <ul>
5498 <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>
5499 <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>
5500 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso .</li>
5501 </ul>
5502
5503 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 702d1718548f401c74bfa6df9f032cc3ee16597e</p>
5504
5505 <p>The Source DVD image has the filename
5506 debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-source-DVD.iso and the SHA1SUM
5507 089eed8b3f962db47aae1f6a9685e9bb2fa30ca5 and is available the same way
5508 as the other isos.</p>
5509
5510 <p>How to report bugs</p>
5511
5512 <p>For information how to report bugs please see
5513 <br><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
5514
5515
5516 <p>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</p>
5517
5518 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
5519 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
5520 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
5521 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
5522 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
5523 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
5524 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
5525 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
5526 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
5527 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
5528 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
5529 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
5530 can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
5531
5532 <p>This is the seventh test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
5533 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
5534 Squeeze release.</p>
5535
5536 <p>Notes for upgrades from Alpha Prereleases</p>
5537
5538 <p>Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
5539 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
5540 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
5541 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
5542 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (2)
5543 Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin
5544 password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one
5545 (backup copy!). In both cases all users need to change their password
5546 to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home
5547 directory.</p>
5548
5549
5550 <p>cheers,
5551 <br>        Holger</p>
5552 </blockquote>
5553
5554       </div>
5555       <div class="tags">
5556
5557
5558         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5559
5560
5561       </div>
5562     </div>
5563     <div class="padding"></div>
5564
5565     <div class="entry">
5566       <div class="title">
5567         <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>
5568       </div>
5569       <div class="date">
5570         10th September 2013
5571       </div>
5572       <div class="body">
5573         <p>I was introduced to the
5574 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
5575 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
5576 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
5577 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
5578 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
5579 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
5580 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
5581 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
5582
5583 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
5584 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
5585 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
5586 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
5587 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
5588
5589 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
5590 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
5591 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
5592 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
5593 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
5594 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
5595 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
5596 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
5597 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
5598 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
5599 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
5600 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
5601 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
5602 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
5603 missing in Debian).</p>
5604
5605 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
5606 scripts
5607 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
5608 and a administrative web interface
5609 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
5610 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
5611 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
5612 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
5613 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
5614 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
5615 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
5616 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
5617 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
5618 this is really working yet, see
5619 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
5620 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
5621 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
5622 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
5623 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
5624 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
5625 with lots of half baked features.</p>
5626
5627 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
5628 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
5629 at.</p>
5630
5631 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
5632
5633 <ol>
5634
5635 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
5636 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
5637 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
5638 to the Debian installer:<p>
5639 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
5640
5641 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
5642 install on.</li>
5643
5644 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
5645 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
5646
5647 </ol>
5648
5649 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
5650
5651 <ol>
5652
5653 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
5654 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
5655 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
5656 <pre>
5657 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
5658 </pre></li>
5659 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
5660 <pre>
5661 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
5662    apt-key add -
5663 apt-get update
5664 apt-get install freedombox-setup
5665 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
5666 </pre></li>
5667 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
5668
5669 </ol>
5670
5671 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
5672 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
5673 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
5674 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
5675 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
5676
5677 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
5678 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
5679 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
5680 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
5681
5682 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
5683 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
5684 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
5685 irc.debian.org and the
5686 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
5687 mailing list</a>.</p>
5688
5689 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
5690 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
5691 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
5692 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
5693 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
5694 default password is 'secret'.</p>
5695
5696       </div>
5697       <div class="tags">
5698
5699
5700         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>.
5701
5702
5703       </div>
5704     </div>
5705     <div class="padding"></div>
5706
5707     <div class="entry">
5708       <div class="title">
5709         <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>
5710       </div>
5711       <div class="date">
5712         22nd August 2013
5713       </div>
5714       <div class="body">
5715         <p>The second wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
5716 today, slightly delayed because of some bugs in the initial Windows
5717 integration fixes .  This is the release announcement:</p>
5718
5719 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b1 released 2013-08-22</strong></p>
5720
5721 <p>These are the release notes for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
5722 7.1+edu0~b1, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
5723
5724 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
5725
5726 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
5727 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
5728 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
5729 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
5730 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
5731 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
5732 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
5733 the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be
5734 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
5735 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
5736 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
5737 desktop contains
5738 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
5739 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
5740 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
5741 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
5742
5743 <p>This is the sixth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically this
5744 is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze
5745 release.</p>
5746
5747 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
5748 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
5749 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
5750 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
5751 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined
5752 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/08/msg00127.html">on
5753 the mailing list</a>. (2) Accept the new version of gosa.conf and
5754 replace both contained admin password placeholders with the password
5755 hashes found in the old one (backup copy!). In both cases every user
5756 need to change their their password to make sure a password is set for
5757 CIFS access to their home directory.</p>
5758
5759 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
5760
5761 <ul>
5762
5763 <li>Added ssh askpass packages to default installation, to ensure ssh
5764     work also without a attached tty.</li>
5765 <li>Add the command-not-found package to the default installation to
5766     make it easier to figure out where to find missing command line
5767     tools. Please note, that the command 'update-command-not-found'
5768     has to be run as root to actually make it useful (internet access
5769     required).</li>
5770
5771 </ul>
5772
5773 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
5774
5775 <ul>
5776
5777 <li>Adjusted the USB stick ISO image build to include every tool
5778 needed for desktop=xfce installations.</li>
5779 <li>Adjust thin-client-server task to work when installing from USB
5780 stick ISO image.</li>
5781 <li>Made new grub artwork (changed png from indexed to RGB format).</li>
5782 <li>Minor cleanup in the CUPS setup.</li>
5783 <li>Make sure that bootstrapping of the Samba domain really happens
5784     during installation of the main server and adjust SID handling to
5785     cope with this.</li>
5786 <li>Make Samba passwords changeable (again) via GOsa².</li>
5787 <li>Fix generation of LM and NT password hashes via GOsa² to avoid
5788     empty password hashes.</li>
5789 <li>Adapted Samba machine domain joining to latest change in the
5790     smbldap-tools Perl package, fixing bugs blocking Windows machines
5791     from joining the Samba domain.</li>
5792
5793 </ul>
5794
5795 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
5796
5797 <ul>
5798
5799 <li>KDE fails to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
5800     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
5801 <li>Chromium also fails to use the proxy when using the KDE desktop
5802     (using the KDE configuration).</li>
5803
5804 </ul>
5805
5806 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
5807
5808 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
5809
5810 <ul>
5811
5812 <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>
5813
5814 <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>
5815
5816 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso .</li>
5817
5818 </ul>
5819
5820 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 1e357f80b55e703523f2254adde6d78b
5821 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 7157f9be5fd27c7694d713c6ecfed61c3edda3b2</p>
5822
5823 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
5824
5825 <ul>
5826
5827 <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>
5828 <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>
5829 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso .</li>
5830
5831 </ul>
5832
5833 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 7a8408ead59cf7e3cef25afb6e91590b
5834 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: f1817c031f02790d5edb3bfa0dcf8451088ad119</p>
5835
5836
5837 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
5838
5839 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
5840
5841       </div>
5842       <div class="tags">
5843
5844
5845         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5846
5847
5848       </div>
5849     </div>
5850     <div class="padding"></div>
5851
5852     <div class="entry">
5853       <div class="title">
5854         <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>
5855       </div>
5856       <div class="date">
5857         18th August 2013
5858       </div>
5859       <div class="body">
5860         <p>Earlier, I reported about
5861 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
5862 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
5863 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
5864 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
5865 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
5866 currently on the disk.</p>
5867
5868 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
5869 <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>
5870 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
5871 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
5872 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
5873 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
5874 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
5875 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
5876 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
5877 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
5878 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
5879 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
5880 the broken disks.</p>
5881
5882       </div>
5883       <div class="tags">
5884
5885
5886         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>.
5887
5888
5889       </div>
5890     </div>
5891     <div class="padding"></div>
5892
5893     <div class="entry">
5894       <div class="title">
5895         <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>
5896       </div>
5897       <div class="date">
5898          2nd August 2013
5899       </div>
5900       <div class="body">
5901         <p>It has been a while since my last update.  Since last summer, I
5902 have worked on a Norwegian
5903 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
5904 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
5905 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright
5906 law.  Yesterday, I finally broken the 90% mark, when counting the
5907 number of strings to translate.  Due to real life constraints, I have
5908 not had time to work on it since March, but when the summer broke out,
5909 I found time to work on it again.  Still lots of work left, but the
5910 first draft is nearing completion.  I created a graph to show the
5911 progress of the translation:</p>
5912
5913 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
5914
5915 <p>When the first draft is done, the translated text need to be
5916 proof read, and the remaining formatting problems with images and SVG
5917 drawings need to be fixed.  There are probably also some index entries
5918 missing that need to be added.  This can be done by comparing the
5919 index entries listed in the SiSU version of the book, or comparing the
5920 English docbook version with the paper version.  Last, the colophon
5921 page with ISBN numbers etc need to be wrapped up before the release is
5922 done.  I should also figure out how to get correct Norwegian sorting
5923 of the index pages.  All docbook tools I have tried so far (xmlto,
5924 docbook-xsl, dblatex) get the order of symbols and the special
5925 Norwegian letters ÆØÅ wrong.</p>
5926
5927 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
5928 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
5929 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
5930 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
5931 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
5932 around?  There are also some legal terms that are unfamiliar to me.
5933 If you want to help, please get in touch with me, and check out the
5934 project files currently available from
5935 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
5936
5937 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
5938 the updated
5939 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
5940 and
5941 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
5942 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
5943 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
5944 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
5945
5946       </div>
5947       <div class="tags">
5948
5949
5950         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>.
5951
5952
5953       </div>
5954     </div>
5955     <div class="padding"></div>
5956
5957     <div class="entry">
5958       <div class="title">
5959         <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>
5960       </div>
5961       <div class="date">
5962         27th July 2013
5963       </div>
5964       <div class="body">
5965         <p>The first wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
5966 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
5967
5968 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b0 released
5969 2013-07-27</strong></p>
5970
5971 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
5972 7.1+edu0~b0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
5973
5974 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
5975
5976 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
5977 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
5978 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
5979 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
5980 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
5981 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
5982 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
5983 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
5984 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
5985 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
5986 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
5987 desktop contains
5988 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
5989 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
5990 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
5991 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
5992
5993 <p>This is the fifth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
5994 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
5995 Squeeze release.</p>
5996
5997 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
5998 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
5999 release.</p>
6000
6001 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
6002
6003 <ul>
6004
6005 <li>Switched roaming workstation profiles from wicd to network-manager
6006    for network configuration, as wicd didn't work any more.</li>
6007 <li>Changed version numbers of patched gosa and libpam-mklocaluser
6008    packages to make sure our locally patched versions will be replaced
6009    by the official packages when they are released from Debian. Those
6010    installing alpha version need to reinstall or manually downgrade gosa
6011    and libpam-mklocaluser.</li>
6012 <li>Added bluetooth tools to the default desktop (bluedevil, blueman).</li>
6013 <li>Added tools for sharing the desktop on KDE (krdc, krfb).</li>
6014 <li>Added valgrind to the default installation for easier debugging of
6015    crash bugs.</li>
6016
6017 </ul>
6018
6019 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
6020
6021 <ul>
6022
6023 <li>Fixed artwork package to work with gnome, no longer break
6024    desktop=gnome installations.</li>
6025 <li>Adjusted installer to now work when forced to use a proxy with the
6026    netinst CD.</li>
6027 <li>Fixed code detecting and setting/loading hardware specific
6028    setup/firmware to work more robust out of the box.</li>
6029 <li>Adjusted Kerberos setup to detect realm and server settings at
6030    install time instead of dynamically at run time. This avoid a crash
6031    with krb5-auth-dialog on diskless workstations without a DNS name.</li>
6032 <li>Worked around misfeature in network-manager not calling the dhclient
6033    exit hooks, causing automatic proxy configuration and automatic host
6034    name setting at run time to work again.</li>
6035 <li>Fixed feature setting the default Iceweasel start page from URL
6036    fetched from LDAP, to allow schools to set the global default by
6037    updating the dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no LDAP object.</li>
6038 <li>Changed default host name on all networked machines to be unique
6039    (generated from MAC or reverse DNS) after boot.</li>
6040 <li>Adjusted partition sizes to make sure they are big enough.</li>
6041
6042 </ul>
6043
6044 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
6045
6046 <ul>
6047
6048 <li>Grub is missing the new artwork.</li>
6049 <li>KDE fail to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
6050     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
6051 <li>Chromium also fail to use the proxy.</li>
6052
6053 </ul>
6054
6055 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
6056
6057 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
6058
6059 <ul>
6060
6061 <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>
6062
6063 <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>
6064
6065 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso .</li>
6066
6067 </ul>
6068
6069 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 55d5de9765b6dccd5d9ec33cf1a07109
6070 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 996a1d9517740e4d627d100de2d12b23dd545a3f</p>
6071
6072 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
6073
6074 <ul>
6075
6076 <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>
6077 <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>
6078 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso .</li>
6079
6080 </ul>
6081
6082 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: d8f0818c51a78d357de794066f289f69
6083 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 49185ca354e8d0543240423746924f76a6cee733</p>
6084
6085
6086 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
6087
6088 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
6089
6090       </div>
6091       <div class="tags">
6092
6093
6094         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6095
6096
6097       </div>
6098     </div>
6099     <div class="padding"></div>
6100
6101     <div class="entry">
6102       <div class="title">
6103         <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>
6104       </div>
6105       <div class="date">
6106         17th July 2013
6107       </div>
6108       <div class="body">
6109         <p>Today I switched to
6110 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
6111 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
6112 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
6113 <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
6114 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
6115 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
6116 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
6117 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
6118 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
6119 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
6120 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
6121 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
6122 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
6123 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
6124 station from now on.</p>
6125
6126 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
6127 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
6128 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
6129 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
6130 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
6131 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
6132 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
6133 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
6134 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
6135 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
6136 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
6137 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
6138
6139 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
6140 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
6141 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
6142 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
6143 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
6144 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
6145 parameters are tuned:</p>
6146
6147 <ul>
6148
6149 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
6150     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
6151
6152 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
6153     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
6154     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
6155
6156 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
6157     systems.</li>
6158
6159 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
6160     /etc/fstab.</li>
6161
6162 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
6163
6164 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
6165     cron.daily).</li>
6166
6167 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
6168     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
6169
6170 </ul>
6171
6172 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
6173 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
6174 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
6175 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
6176 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
6177 from getting the data on the disk (see
6178 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
6179 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
6180 right thing to do.</p>
6181
6182 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
6183 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
6184 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
6185
6186 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
6187 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
6188 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
6189 instead of during my work.</p>
6190
6191 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
6192 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
6193
6194 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
6195 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
6196 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
6197
6198 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
6199 there.</p>
6200
6201 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
6202 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
6203 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
6204 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
6205 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
6206 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
6207 back.</p>
6208
6209       </div>
6210       <div class="tags">
6211
6212
6213         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>.
6214
6215
6216       </div>
6217     </div>
6218     <div class="padding"></div>
6219
6220     <div class="entry">
6221       <div class="title">
6222         <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>
6223       </div>
6224       <div class="date">
6225         10th July 2013
6226       </div>
6227       <div class="body">
6228         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
6229 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
6230 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
6231 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
6232 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
6233 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
6234 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
6235 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
6236
6237 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
6238 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
6239 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
6240 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
6241 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
6242 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
6243 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
6244 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
6245 lock up when I download a new
6246 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
6247 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
6248 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
6249
6250 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
6251 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
6252 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
6253 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
6254 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
6255 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
6256
6257 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
6258 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
6259 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
6260 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
6261 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
6262 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
6263
6264 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
6265 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
6266 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
6267 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
6268 exist).</p>
6269
6270       </div>
6271       <div class="tags">
6272
6273
6274         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>.
6275
6276
6277       </div>
6278     </div>
6279     <div class="padding"></div>
6280
6281     <div class="entry">
6282       <div class="title">
6283         <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>
6284       </div>
6285       <div class="date">
6286          9th July 2013
6287       </div>
6288       <div class="body">
6289         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
6290 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
6291 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
6292 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
6293 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
6294 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
6295 Bitraf</a>.</p>
6296
6297 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
6298 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
6299 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
6300 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
6301 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
6302
6303       </div>
6304       <div class="tags">
6305
6306
6307         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>.
6308
6309
6310       </div>
6311     </div>
6312     <div class="padding"></div>
6313
6314     <div class="entry">
6315       <div class="title">
6316         <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>
6317       </div>
6318       <div class="date">
6319          5th July 2013
6320       </div>
6321       <div class="body">
6322         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
6323 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
6324 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
6325 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
6326 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
6327 ended up picking a
6328 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
6329 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
6330 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
6331 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
6332 on that below.</p>
6333
6334 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
6335 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
6336 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
6337 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
6338 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
6339 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
6340 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
6341 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
6342 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
6343
6344 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
6345 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
6346 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
6347 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
6348 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
6349 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
6350 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
6351
6352 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
6353 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
6354
6355 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
6356 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
6357 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
6358 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
6359 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
6360 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
6361 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
6362 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
6363 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
6364 kernel developers as
6365 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
6366 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
6367 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
6368 Lenovo forums, both for
6369 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
6370 2012-11-10</a> and for
6371 <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
6372 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
6373 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
6374 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
6375 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
6376 There is even a
6377 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
6378 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
6379 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
6380
6381 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
6382 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
6383 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
6384 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
6385 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
6386 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
6387 fixed. :)</p>
6388
6389       </div>
6390       <div class="tags">
6391
6392
6393         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>.
6394
6395
6396       </div>
6397     </div>
6398     <div class="padding"></div>
6399
6400     <div class="entry">
6401       <div class="title">
6402         <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>
6403       </div>
6404       <div class="date">
6405          4th July 2013
6406       </div>
6407       <div class="body">
6408         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
6409 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
6410 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
6411 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
6412 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
6413 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
6414 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
6415 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
6416 with an expencive door stop.</p>
6417
6418 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
6419 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
6420 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
6421 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
6422 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
6423 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
6424 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
6425
6426 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
6427 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
6428 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
6429 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
6430 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
6431 new laptop now. :)</p>
6432
6433 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</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/Fourth_alpha_release_of_Debian_Edu_Skolelinux_based_on_Debian_Wheezy.html">Fourth alpha release of Debian Edu/Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy</a>
6449       </div>
6450       <div class="date">
6451          3rd July 2013
6452       </div>
6453       <div class="body">
6454         <p>The fourth wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
6455 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
6456
6457 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~alpha3 released
6458 2013-07-03</strong></p>
6459
6460 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
6461 7.1+edu0~alpha3, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
6462
6463 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
6464
6465 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
6466 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
6467 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
6468 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
6469 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
6470 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
6471 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
6472 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
6473 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
6474 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
6475 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
6476 desktop contains
6477 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
6478 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
6479 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
6480 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
6481
6482 <p>This is the fourth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
6483 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
6484 Squeeze release.</p>
6485
6486 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
6487 <ul>
6488   <li>Dropped ispell dictionaries from our default installation.</li>
6489   <li>Dropped menu-xdg from the KDE desktop option, to drop the Debian
6490     submenu.  It was not included with Gnome, LXDE or Xfce, so this
6491     brings KDE in line with the others.</li>
6492   <li>Dropped xdrawchem, xjig and xsok from our default installation as
6493     they don't have a desktop menu entry and thus won't show up in the
6494     menu now that menu-xdg was removed.</li>
6495   <li>Removed the killer system to kill left behind processes on
6496     multi-user machines, as it was no longer able to understand when a
6497     X display was in use and killed the processes of the active users
6498     too.</li>
6499   <li>Dropped the golearn (from goplay) package as the debtags in wheezy
6500     are too few to make the package useful.</li>
6501 </ul>
6502 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
6503 <ul>
6504   <li>Updated artwork matching http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Joy
6505   <li>Multi-arch i386/amd64 USB stick ISO available.</li>
6506   <li>Got rid of ispell/wordlist related debconf questions that showed
6507     up for some language options.</li>
6508   <li>Switched to using http.debian.net as APT source by default.</li>
6509   <li>Fixed proxy configuration on Main Server installations.</li>
6510   <li>Changed LTSP setup to ask dpkg to use force-unsafe-io the same way
6511     d-i is doing it.</li>
6512   <li>Made sure root and user passwords were not left behind in the
6513     debconf database after installation on Main Server installations.</li>
6514   <li>Made Roaming Workstation dynamic setup more robust and added draft
6515     script setup-ad-client to hook a Roaming Workstation up to a
6516     Active Directory server instead of a Debian Edu Main Server.</li>
6517   <li>Update system to install needed firmware packages during
6518     installation, to work properly in Wheezy.</li>
6519   <li>Update system to handle hardware quirks (debian-edu-hwsetup).</li>
6520   <li>Corrected PXE installation setup to properly pass selected desktop
6521     and keymap settings to PXE installation clients.</li>
6522   <li>LTSP diskless workstations use sshfs by default, allowing them to
6523     work without adding them to DNS and NIS netgroups for NFS access.</li>
6524 </ul>
6525 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
6526 <ul>
6527   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
6528     available yet (698840).</li>
6529   <li>Artwork not enabled for all desktops.</li>
6530 </ul>
6531 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
6532
6533 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
6534 <ul>
6535   <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>
6536   <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>
6537   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso .</li>
6538 </ul>
6539
6540 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 2b161a99d2a848c376d8d04e3854e30c
6541 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 498922e9c508c0a7ee9dbe1dfe5bf830d779c3c8</p>
6542
6543 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
6544 <ul>
6545   <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>
6546   <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>
6547   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso .</li>
6548 </ul>
6549
6550 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 25e808e403a4c15dbef1d13c37d572ac
6551 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 15ecfc93eb6b4f453b7eb0bc04b6a279262d9721</p>
6552
6553 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
6554
6555 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
6556
6557       </div>
6558       <div class="tags">
6559
6560
6561         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6562
6563
6564       </div>
6565     </div>
6566     <div class="padding"></div>
6567
6568     <div class="entry">
6569       <div class="title">
6570         <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>
6571       </div>
6572       <div class="date">
6573         25th June 2013
6574       </div>
6575       <div class="body">
6576         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
6577 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
6578 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
6579 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
6580 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
6581 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
6582 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
6583 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
6584 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
6585 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
6586 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
6587
6588 <p><pre>
6589 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
6590 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
6591 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
6592 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
6593 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
6594 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
6595 firmware-ipw2x00
6596 firmware-ipw2x00
6597 Preconfiguring packages ...
6598 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
6599 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
6600 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
6601 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
6602 #
6603 </pre></p>
6604
6605 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
6606 printed instead:</p>
6607
6608 <p><pre>
6609 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
6610 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
6611 #
6612 </pre></p>
6613
6614 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
6615 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
6616
6617 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
6618 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
6619 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
6620 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
6621 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
6622 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
6623 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
6624 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
6625 machine.</p>
6626
6627 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
6628 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
6629 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
6630 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
6631 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
6632 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
6633
6634       </div>
6635       <div class="tags">
6636
6637
6638         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>.
6639
6640
6641       </div>
6642     </div>
6643     <div class="padding"></div>
6644
6645     <div class="entry">
6646       <div class="title">
6647         <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>
6648       </div>
6649       <div class="date">
6650         22nd June 2013
6651       </div>
6652       <div class="body">
6653         <p>In the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
6654 Skolelinux</a> project, we include a post-installation test suite,
6655 which check that services are running, working, and return the
6656 expected results.  It runs automatically just after the first boot on
6657 test installations (using test ISOs), but not on production
6658 installations (using non-test ISOs).  It test that the LDAP service is
6659 operating, Kerberos is responding, DNS is replying, file systems are
6660 online resizable, etc, etc.  And it check that the PXE service is
6661 configured, which is the topic of this post.</p>
6662
6663 <p>The last week I've fixed the DVD and USB stick ISOs for our Debian
6664 Edu Wheezy release.  These ISOs are supposed to be able to install a
6665 complete system without any Internet connection, but for that to
6666 happen all the needed packages need to be on them.  Thanks to our test
6667 suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
6668 cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
6669 When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
6670 using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
6671 working packages to get it working.  And the packages changed name
6672 from debian-installer-6.0-netboot-$arch to
6673 debian-installer-7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
6674 packages during installation.  Without our test suite, I suspect we
6675 would never have discovered this before release.  Now it is fixed
6676 right after we got the ISOs operational.</p>
6677
6678 <p>Another by-product of the test suite is that we can ask system
6679 administrators with problems getting Debian Edu to work, to run the
6680 test suite using <tt>/usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install</tt> and see if
6681 any errors are detected.  This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
6682 the problem.</p>
6683
6684 <p>If you want to help us help kids learn how to share and create,
6685 please join us on
6686 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
6687 irc.debian.org</a> and the
6688 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@</a> mailing
6689 list.</p>
6690
6691       </div>
6692       <div class="tags">
6693
6694
6695         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6696
6697
6698       </div>
6699     </div>
6700     <div class="padding"></div>
6701
6702     <div class="entry">
6703       <div class="title">
6704         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html">Debian Edu interview: Victor Nițu</a>
6705       </div>
6706       <div class="date">
6707         17th June 2013
6708       </div>
6709       <div class="body">
6710         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
6711 Skolelinux</a> distribution have users and contributors all around the
6712 globe.  And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
6713 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">our IRC channel
6714 #debian-edu</a> and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
6715 worked.  We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
6716 help us with translations.  And today I managed to get an interview
6717 with him, to learn more about him.</p>
6718
6719 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
6720
6721 <p>I'm a 25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
6722 which is also my country of origin. Back in 2009, at a New Year's Eve
6723 party, I had a very nice <strike>beer</strike> discussion with a
6724 friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
6725 country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
6726 community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
6727 began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
6728 constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
6729 field.</p>
6730
6731 <p>A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
6732 provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
6733 activities. For the last 13 months, I have been the Technical Director
6734 of <a href="http://ceata.org/">Fundația Ceata</a>, which is a free
6735 software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
6736 the only one we have in our country.</p>
6737
6738 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
6739 project?</strong></p>
6740
6741 <p>The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
6742 even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
6743 it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
6744 educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
6745 love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
6746 technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
6747 ways to contribute.</p>
6748
6749 <p>My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
6750 configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
6751 haven't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
6752 areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
6753 software in my country is pretty low, I'll be happy to be the first
6754 one around here advocating for the project's adoption in educational
6755 environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
6756 for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
6757 from now on, time will tell what I'll be doing next, but I think I
6758 have a pretty consistent starting point.</p>
6759
6760 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
6761 Edu?</strong></p>
6762
6763 <p>Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
6764 maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
6765 took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
6766 Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
6767 time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
6768 with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
6769 out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
6770 it comes to managing a school's network, for example.</p>
6771
6772 <p>Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
6773 availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
6774 scenarios is something I can't wait to experiment "into the wild" (I
6775 only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
6776 lot more I haven't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
6777 project.</p>
6778
6779 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6780 Edu?</strong></p>
6781
6782 <p>As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
6783 disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
6784 project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
6785 a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story.  I'd like to see
6786 Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
6787 ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
6788 lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
6789 opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project's dynamics. Not
6790 to mention it's a very fun blend to work on!</p>
6791
6792 <p>Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
6793 with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
6794 to all blends and derivatives, but it's an issue we can all work
6795 on.</p>
6796
6797 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
6798
6799 <p>I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
6800 daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
6801 am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
6802 Enlightenment project a lot!),
6803 <a href="http://www.claws-mail.org/‎">Claws Mail</a> due to its ease of
6804 use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
6805 <a href="https://launchpad.net/redshift">Redshift</a>, which helps me
6806 get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
6807 stuff in this bag, but I'll need a blog on my own for doing this!</p>
6808
6809 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
6810 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
6811
6812 <p>Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
6813 now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
6814 that:</p>
6815
6816 <ul>
6817
6818 <li>schools would like to get rid of proprietary software</li>
6819
6820 <li>students will love the openness of the system, and will want to
6821     experiment with it - maybe we need to harvest the native curiosity
6822     of teenagers more?</li>
6823
6824 <li>there is no "right one" when it comes to strategies, but it would
6825     be useful to have some success stories published somewhere, so
6826     other can get some inspiration from them (I know I'd promote
6827     them!)</li>
6828
6829 <li>more active promotion - talks, conferences, even small school
6830     lectures can do magical things if they encounter at least one
6831     person interested. Who knows who that person might be? ;-)</li>
6832
6833 </ul>
6834
6835 <p>I also see some problems in getting Skolelinux into schools; for
6836 example, in our country we have a great deal of corruption issues, so
6837 it might be hard(er) to fight against proprietary solutions. Also,
6838 people who relied on commercial software for all their lives, would be
6839 very hard to convert against their will.</p>
6840
6841       </div>
6842       <div class="tags">
6843
6844
6845         Tags: <a href="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>.
6846
6847
6848       </div>
6849     </div>
6850     <div class="padding"></div>
6851
6852     <div class="entry">
6853       <div class="title">
6854         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jonathan_Carter.html">Debian Edu interview: Jonathan Carter</a>
6855       </div>
6856       <div class="date">
6857         12th June 2013
6858       </div>
6859       <div class="body">
6860         <p>There is a certain cross-over between the
6861 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
6862 project</a> and <a href="http://www.edubuntu.org/">the Edubuntu
6863 project</a>, and for example the LTSP packages in Debian are a joint
6864 effort between the projects.  One person with a foot in both camps is
6865 Jonathan Carter, which I am now happy to present to you.</p>
6866
6867 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
6868
6869 <p>I'm a South-African free software geek who lives in Cape Town. My
6870 days vary quite a bit since I'm involved in too many things. As I'm
6871 getting older I'm learning how to focus a bit more :)</p>
6872
6873 <p>I'm also an Edubuntu contributor and I love when there are
6874 opportunities for the Edubuntu and Debian Edu projects to benefit from
6875 each other.</p>
6876
6877 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
6878 project?</strong></p>
6879
6880 <p>I've been somewhat familiar with the project before, but I think my
6881 first direct exposure to the project was when I met Petter
6882 [Reinholdtsen] and Knut [Yrvin] at the Edubuntu summit in 2005 in
6883 London. They provided great feedback that helped the bootstrapping of
6884 Edubuntu. Back then Edubuntu (and even Ubuntu) was still very new and
6885 it was great getting input from people who have been around longer. I
6886 was also still very excitable and said yes to everything and to this
6887 day I have a big todo list backlog that I'm catching up with. I think
6888 over the years the relationship between Edubuntu and Debian-Edu has
6889 been gradually improving, although I think there's a lot that we could
6890 still improve on in terms of working together on packages. I'm sure
6891 we'll get there one day.</p>
6892
6893 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6894 Edu?</strong></p>
6895
6896 <p>Debian itself already has so many advantages. I could go on about
6897 it for pages, but in essence I love that it's a very honest project
6898 that puts its users first with no hidden agendas and also produces
6899 very high quality work.</p>
6900
6901 <p>I think the advantage of Debian Edu is that it makes many common
6902 set-up tasks simpler so that administrators can get up and running
6903 with a lot less effort and frustration. At the same time I think it
6904 helps to standardise installations in schools so that it's easier for
6905 community members and commercial suppliers to support.</p>
6906
6907 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
6908 Edu?</strong></p>
6909
6910 <p>I had to re-type this one a few times because I'm trying to
6911 separate "disadvantages" from "areas that need improvement" (which is
6912 what I originally rambled on about)</p>
6913
6914 <p>The biggest disadvantage I can think of is lack of manpower. The
6915 project could do so much more if there were more good contributors. I
6916 think some of the problems are external too. Free software and free
6917 content in education is a no-brainer but it takes some time to catch
6918 on. When you've been working with the same proprietary eco-system for
6919 years and have gotten used to it, it can be hard to adjust to some
6920 concepts in the free software world. It would be nice if there were
6921 more Debian Edu consultants across the world. I'd love to be one
6922 myself but I'm already so over-committed that it's just not possible
6923 currently.</p>
6924
6925 <p>I think the best short-term solution to that large-scale problem is
6926 for schools to be pro-active and share their experiences and grow
6927 their skills in-house. I'm often saddened to see how much money
6928 educational institutions spend on 3rd party solutions that they don't
6929 have access to after the service has ended and they could've gotten so
6930 much more value otherwise by being more self-sustainable and
6931 autonomous.</p>
6932
6933 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
6934
6935 <p>My main laptop dual-boots between Debian and Windows 7. I was
6936 Windows free for years but started dual-booting again last year for
6937 some games which help me focus and relax (Starcraft II in
6938 particular). Gaming support on Linux is improving in leaps and bounds
6939 so I suppose I'll soon be able to regain that disk space :)</p>
6940
6941 <p>Besides that I rely on Icedove, Chromium, Terminator, Byobu, irssi,
6942 git, Tomboy, KVM, VLC and LibreOffice. Recently I've been torn on
6943 which desktop environment I like and I'm taking some refuge in Xfce
6944 while I figure that out. I like tools that keep things simple. I enjoy
6945 Python and shell scripting. I went to an Arduino workshop recently and
6946 it was awesome seeing how easy and simple the IDE software was to get
6947 up and running in Debian compared to the users running Windows and OS
6948 X.</p>
6949
6950 <p>I also use mc which some people frown upon slightly. I got used to
6951 using Norton Commander in the early 90's and it stuck (I think the
6952 people who sneer at it is just jealous that they don't know how to use
6953 it :p)
6954
6955 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
6956 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
6957
6958 <p>I think trying to force it is unproductive. I also think that in
6959 many cases it's appropriate for schools to use non-free systems and I
6960 don't think that there's any particular moral or ethical problem with
6961 that.</p>
6962
6963 <p>I do think though that free software can already solve so so many
6964 problems in educational institutions and it's just a shame not taking
6965 advantage of that.</p>
6966
6967 <p>I also think that some curricula need serious review. For example,
6968 some areas of the world rely heavily on very specific versions of MS
6969 Office, teaching students to parrot menu items instead of learning the
6970 general concepts. I think that's very unproductive because firstly, MS
6971 Office's interface changes drastically every few years and on top of
6972 that it also locks in a generation to a product that might not be the
6973 best solution for them.</p>
6974
6975 <p>To answer your question, I believe that the right strategy is to
6976 educate and inform, giving someone the information they require to
6977 make a decision that would work for them.</p>
6978
6979       </div>
6980       <div class="tags">
6981
6982
6983         Tags: <a href="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>.
6984
6985
6986       </div>
6987     </div>
6988     <div class="padding"></div>
6989
6990     <div class="entry">
6991       <div class="title">
6992         <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>
6993       </div>
6994       <div class="date">
6995         11th June 2013
6996       </div>
6997       <div class="body">
6998         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
6999 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
7000 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
7001 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
7002 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
7003 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
7004 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
7005 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
7006 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
7007 i915 driver used by the
7008 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
7009 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
7010
7011 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
7012 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
7013 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
7014 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
7015 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
7016
7017 <pre>
7018 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
7019 update-initramfs -u -k all
7020 </pre>
7021
7022 <p>Since March 2012 there is
7023 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
7024 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
7025 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
7026 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
7027 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
7028 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
7029 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
7030 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
7031 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
7032 number.</p>
7033
7034 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
7035 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
7036
7037 <p><pre>
7038 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
7039     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
7040     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
7041  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
7042  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
7043     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
7044  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
7045     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
7046  Latency: 0
7047  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
7048  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
7049  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
7050  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
7051  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
7052  Capabilities: <access denied>
7053  Kernel driver in use: i915
7054 </pre></p>
7055
7056 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
7057
7058 <p><pre>
7059 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
7060        ...
7061         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
7062         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
7063        ...
7064 }
7065 </pre></p>
7066
7067 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
7068 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
7069 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
7070 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
7071 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
7072 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
7073 yet shown up in
7074 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
7075 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
7076 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
7077 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
7078 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
7079 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
7080
7081 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
7082 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
7083 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
7084 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
7085 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
7086 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
7087 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
7088 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
7089 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
7090 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
7091 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
7092 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
7093
7094 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
7095 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
7096 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
7097 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
7098 backlight.</p>
7099
7100       </div>
7101       <div class="tags">
7102
7103
7104         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>.
7105
7106
7107       </div>
7108     </div>
7109     <div class="padding"></div>
7110
7111     <div class="entry">
7112       <div class="title">
7113         <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>
7114       </div>
7115       <div class="date">
7116         10th June 2013
7117       </div>
7118       <div class="body">
7119         <p>The third wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
7120 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
7121
7122 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha2 released
7123 2013-06-10</strong></p>
7124
7125 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
7126 alpha2, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
7127
7128 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
7129
7130 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
7131 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
7132 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
7133 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
7134 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
7135 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
7136 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
7137 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
7138 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
7139 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
7140 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
7141 desktop contains
7142 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
7143 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
7144 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
7145 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
7146
7147 <p>This is the third test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
7148 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
7149 Squeeze release.</p>
7150
7151 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
7152
7153 <ul>
7154
7155 <li>Iceweasel was updated from 10 to 17. (DSA 2699-1)
7156 <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).
7157 <li>Switched xrdp on thin client servers to use tightvncserver instead of xvnc4.
7158 <li>Now install software oscilloscope xoscope by default.
7159 <li>Now install music tools gtick, lingot and pianobooster by default.
7160
7161 </ul>
7162
7163 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
7164
7165 <ul>
7166
7167 <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.
7168 <li>Updated translation of the installation.
7169 <li>New Romanian translation.
7170 <li>Fix security problem causing root and first user password to no longer show up in /var/cache/debconf/templates.dat.
7171 <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).
7172 <li>Made roaming workstation setup more robust in non-Debian Edu environments.
7173 <li>New script debian-edu-bless to transform a Debian installation to a Debian Edu profile.
7174 <li>Adjust Iceweasel setup to improve performance when $HOME is on NFS.
7175 <li>More testsuite tests.
7176 <li>Make automatic proxy configuration more robust.
7177 <li>Adjust GOsa² GUI configuration.
7178
7179 <li>Update thin client and diskless workstation setup to work with
7180 LTSP in Wheezy.</li>
7181
7182 <li>Diskless workstations now run out of the box -- no need to set
7183 them up with GOsa².</li>
7184
7185 <li>Update IMAP server setup. </li>
7186
7187 <li>Fix login into Skolelinux Backup Tool (Closed in
7188 slbackup-php/0.4.4-1: #700257: slbackup-php: Fails to submit correctly
7189 entered password). </li>
7190
7191 </ul>
7192
7193 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
7194
7195 <ul>
7196
7197 <li>DVD binary and source images are not yet ready.</li>
7198
7199 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
7200 available yet (Open in gosa/2.7.4-4: #698840: gosa-plugin-ldapmanager:
7201 missing import feature).</li>
7202
7203 <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others). </li>
7204
7205 <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons (Closed: #502192: menu-xdg: invents
7206 own icon names instead of using existing). This will remain
7207 unfixed.</li>
7208
7209 </ul>
7210
7211 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
7212
7213 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
7214
7215 <ul>
7216
7217 <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>
7218
7219 <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>
7220
7221 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso .</li>
7222
7223 </ul>
7224
7225 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 27bbcace407743382f3c42c08dbe8178
7226 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: e35f7d7908566cd3075375b3721fa10ee420d419</p>
7227
7228 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
7229
7230 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
7231
7232       </div>
7233       <div class="tags">
7234
7235
7236         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7237
7238
7239       </div>
7240     </div>
7241     <div class="padding"></div>
7242
7243     <div class="entry">
7244       <div class="title">
7245         <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>
7246       </div>
7247       <div class="date">
7248          5th June 2013
7249       </div>
7250       <div class="body">
7251         <p>Here is a call for help from the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project.
7252 We have two problems blocking the release of the Wheezy version we
7253 hope to get released soon.  The two problems require some with PHP
7254 skills, and we seem to lack anyone with both time and PHP skills in
7255 the project:
7256
7257 <ol>
7258
7259 <li>It is impossible to log into the slbackup web interface
7260   (slbackup-php) using the root user and password.  This is
7261   <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">BTS report #700257</a>.
7262   This used to work, but stopped working some time since Squeeze.
7263   Perhaps some obsolete PHP feature was used?</li>
7264
7265 <li>It is not possible to "mass import" user lists in Gosa, neither
7266   using ldif nor using CSV files.  The feature was disabled after a
7267   major rewrite of Gosa, and need to be ported to the new system.
7268   This is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">BTS report
7269   #698840</a>.</li>
7270
7271 </ol>
7272
7273 <p>If you can help us, please join us on IRC
7274 (<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
7275 irc.debian.org</a>) and provide patches via the BTS.</p>
7276
7277       </div>
7278       <div class="tags">
7279
7280
7281         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7282
7283
7284       </div>
7285     </div>
7286     <div class="padding"></div>
7287
7288     <div class="entry">
7289       <div class="title">
7290         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html">Debian Edu interview: Cédric Boutillier</a>
7291       </div>
7292       <div class="date">
7293          4th June 2013
7294       </div>
7295       <div class="body">
7296         <p>It has been a while since my last English
7297 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
7298 interview last November.  But the developers and translators are still
7299 pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this
7300 time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators
7301 in the project, Cédric Boutillier.</p>
7302
7303 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
7304
7305 <p>I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
7306 professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
7307 mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
7308 probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.</p>
7309
7310 <p>I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
7311 and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
7312 packaging, publicity and translation.</p>
7313
7314 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
7315 project?</strong></p>
7316
7317 <p>I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
7318 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Manuals">the
7319 Debian Edu manual</a> for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
7320 then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
7321 manual.
7322
7323 <p>I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
7324 virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
7325 shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
7326 how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.</p>
7327
7328 <p>What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
7329 ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
7330 by <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa²</a>.  What pleased
7331 me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
7332 there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages,
7333 to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
7334 artistic skills with music (<a href="http://ardour.org/">Ardour</a>,
7335 <a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a>) and
7336 movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
7337 <a href="http://linuxstopmotion.sourceforge.net/">Stopmotion</a>).</p>
7338
7339 <p>I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
7340 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>.
7341 Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this
7342 beautiful project.</p>
7343
7344 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
7345 Edu?</strong></p>
7346
7347 <p>For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
7348 community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
7349 fact that it provides a solution ready to use.</p>
7350
7351 <p>I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
7352 distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
7353 of educational free software.</p>
7354
7355 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
7356 Edu?</strong></p>
7357
7358 <p>Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
7359 project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
7360 not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
7361 solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
7362 is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.</p>
7363
7364 <p>One can find support from a company by looking at
7365 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Help/ProfessionalHelp">the
7366 wiki dokumentation</a>, where some countries already have a number of
7367 companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
7368 Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
7369 for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
7370 consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
7371 support for Debian Edu as well.</p>
7372
7373 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
7374
7375 <p>I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
7376 most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
7377 scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice.  I am
7378 also using the mathematical software
7379 <a href="http://www.scilab.org/en/scilab/about‎">Scilab</a> and
7380 <a href="http://www.sagemath.org/index.html‎">Sage</a> (built from
7381 source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).
7382
7383 <p><strong>Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
7384 using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
7385 statistics?</strong></p>
7386
7387 <p>I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our
7388 university, we use both <a href="http://www.r-project.org/‎">R</a> and
7389 Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
7390 geometry, there are nice programs:</p>
7391
7392 <ul>
7393
7394 <li><a href="http://www.drgeo.eu/">drgeo</a> and
7395 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/kig‎">kig</a> to do
7396 constructions in planar geometry
7397
7398 <li><a href="http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/software/download/kali.html">kali</a>
7399 to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze
7400 groups), although the interface looks a bit old.</li>
7401
7402 </ul>
7403
7404 <p>I like also
7405 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/cantor">cantor</a>, which
7406 provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage,
7407 <a href="http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Octave‎">Octave</a>, etc...</p>
7408
7409 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
7410 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
7411
7412 <p>My suggestions would be to</p>
7413
7414 <ul>
7415
7416 <li>advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.</li>
7417
7418 <li>communicate about the quality of free software projects, using
7419     well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and
7420     OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.</li>
7421
7422 <li>advertise the living and strong community around the project.</li>
7423
7424 <li>show that it is not more difficult to use than any other
7425     system.</li>
7426
7427 </ul>
7428
7429       </div>
7430       <div class="tags">
7431
7432
7433         Tags: <a href="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>.
7434
7435
7436       </div>
7437     </div>
7438     <div class="padding"></div>
7439
7440     <div class="entry">
7441       <div class="title">
7442         <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>
7443       </div>
7444       <div class="date">
7445          1st June 2013
7446       </div>
7447       <div class="body">
7448         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
7449 Skolelinux</a>, there are quite a lot of educational software.
7450 Created to help teachers teach, and pupils learn.  We have tried to
7451 tag them all using debtags use::learning and role::program, and using
7452 the debtags I was happy to be able to create a collage of the
7453 educational software packages installed by default, sorted by the
7454 debtag field.  Here it is.  Click on a image to learn more about the
7455 program.</p>
7456
7457 <!-- 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 -->
7458
7459 <p><strong>field::arts</strong></p>
7460 <p>
7461 <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>
7462 <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>
7463 <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>
7464 <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>
7465 <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>
7466 <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>
7467 <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>
7468 <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>
7469 <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>
7470 <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>
7471 <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>
7472 <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>
7473 <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>
7474 <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>
7475 </p>
7476
7477 <p><strong>field::astronomy</strong></p>
7478 <p>
7479 <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>
7480 <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>
7481 <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>
7482 <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>
7483 <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>
7484 <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>
7485 </p>
7486
7487 <p><strong>field::biology:structural</strong></p>
7488 <p>
7489 <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>
7490 </p>
7491
7492 <p><strong>field::chemistry</strong></p>
7493 <p>
7494 <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>
7495 <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>
7496 <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>
7497 <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>
7498 <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>
7499 <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>
7500 <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>
7501 <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>
7502 <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>
7503 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=viewmol'>[viewmol]</a>
7504 <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>
7505 </p>
7506
7507 <p><strong>field::electronics</strong></p>
7508 <p>
7509 <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>
7510 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gpsim'>[gpsim]</a>
7511 </p>
7512
7513 <p><strong>field::geography</strong></p>
7514 <p>
7515 <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>
7516 <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>
7517 <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>
7518 </p>
7519
7520 <p><strong>field::linguistics</strong></p>
7521 <p>
7522 <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>
7523 <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>
7524 <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>
7525 <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>
7526 <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>
7527 </p>
7528
7529 <p><strong>field::mathematics</strong></p>
7530 <p>
7531 <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>
7532 <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>
7533 <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>
7534 <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>
7535 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=geomview'>[geomview]</a>
7536 <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>
7537 <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>
7538 <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>
7539 <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>
7540 <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>
7541 <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>
7542 <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>
7543 <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>
7544 <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>
7545 <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>
7546 <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>
7547 <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>
7548 </p>
7549
7550 <p><strong>field::physics</strong></p>
7551 <p>
7552 <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>
7553 <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>
7554 </p>
7555
7556 <p><strong>field::TODO</strong></p>
7557 <p>
7558 <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>
7559 <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>
7560 <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>
7561 <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>
7562 <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>
7563 <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>
7564 <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>
7565 <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>
7566 <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>
7567 <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>
7568 </p>
7569
7570 <p>In total, 61 applications.  3 of them lacked screen shots on
7571 <a href="http://screenshot.debian.net">screenshot.debian.net</a>.  If
7572 you know of some packages we should install by default, please let us
7573 know on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu
7574 on irc.debian.org</a>, or our
7575 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">mailing list
7576 debian-edu@</a>.</p>
7577
7578       </div>
7579       <div class="tags">
7580
7581
7582         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7583
7584
7585       </div>
7586     </div>
7587     <div class="padding"></div>
7588
7589     <div class="entry">
7590       <div class="title">
7591         <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>
7592       </div>
7593       <div class="date">
7594         27th May 2013
7595       </div>
7596       <div class="body">
7597         <p>Two days ago, I asked
7598 <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
7599 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
7600 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
7601 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
7602 and Windows 8.</p>
7603
7604 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
7605 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
7606 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
7607 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
7608 enough to tell.</p>
7609
7610 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
7611 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
7612 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
7613 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
7614 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
7615 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
7616 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
7617 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
7618 to follow.</p>
7619
7620 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
7621 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
7622 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
7623 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
7624 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
7625 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
7626 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
7627 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
7628
7629 <p>I've updated the
7630 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
7631 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
7632 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
7633 machine.</p>
7634
7635 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
7636 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
7637
7638       </div>
7639       <div class="tags">
7640
7641
7642         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>.
7643
7644
7645       </div>
7646     </div>
7647     <div class="padding"></div>
7648
7649     <div class="entry">
7650       <div class="title">
7651         <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>
7652       </div>
7653       <div class="date">
7654         25th May 2013
7655       </div>
7656       <div class="body">
7657         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
7658 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
7659 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
7660 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
7661 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
7662 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
7663
7664 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
7665 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
7666 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
7667 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
7668 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
7669 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
7670 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
7671 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
7672 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
7673 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
7674
7675 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
7676 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
7677 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
7678 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
7679 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
7680 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
7681
7682 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
7683 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
7684 on new Laptops?</p>
7685
7686       </div>
7687       <div class="tags">
7688
7689
7690         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>.
7691
7692
7693       </div>
7694     </div>
7695     <div class="padding"></div>
7696
7697     <div class="entry">
7698       <div class="title">
7699         <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>
7700       </div>
7701       <div class="date">
7702         17th May 2013
7703       </div>
7704       <div class="body">
7705         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
7706 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
7707 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
7708 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
7709 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
7710 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
7711 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
7712 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
7713 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
7714 donate some money</a>.
7715
7716 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
7717 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
7718 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
7719 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
7720 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
7721
7722 <p>The script,
7723 <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/>
7724 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
7725 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
7726 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
7727
7728 <ol>
7729
7730 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
7731 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
7732 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
7733     our configuration.</li>
7734 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
7735     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
7736     according to the profile specified in the config above,
7737     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
7738 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
7739     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
7740 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
7741
7742 </ol>
7743
7744 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
7745 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
7746 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
7747 the needed packages.</p>
7748
7749 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
7750 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
7751 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
7752 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
7753 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
7754 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
7755
7756 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
7757 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
7758 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
7759
7760 <p><pre>
7761 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
7762 DESKTOP="lxde"
7763 </pre></p>
7764
7765 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
7766 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
7767 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
7768 boot.</p>
7769
7770       </div>
7771       <div class="tags">
7772
7773
7774         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>.
7775
7776
7777       </div>
7778     </div>
7779     <div class="padding"></div>
7780
7781     <div class="entry">
7782       <div class="title">
7783         <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>
7784       </div>
7785       <div class="date">
7786         14th May 2013
7787       </div>
7788       <div class="body">
7789         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7790 project</a> is making great progress and made its second Wheezy based
7791 release today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
7792
7793 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha1 released
7794 2013-05-14</strong></p>
7795
7796 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
7797 alpha1, based on <a href="http://www.debian.org">Debian</a> with
7798 codename "Wheezy".</p>
7799
7800 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
7801
7802 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
7803 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
7804 configured school network. Immediatly after installation a school
7805 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
7806 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
7807 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
7808 initial installation of the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all
7809 other machines can be installed via the network.</p>
7810
7811 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
7812 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
7813 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
7814
7815 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
7816 <ul>
7817   <li>Install freemind (0.9.0) by default, and stop installing vym by
7818     default.</li>
7819   <li>Install chromium (26.0.1410.43) by default.</li>
7820   <li>Install goplay (0.5-1.1) to make golearn available by default.</li>
7821   <li>Updated support for Japanese input methods, now based on
7822     ibus-anthy.</li>
7823 </ul>
7824
7825 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
7826 <ul>
7827
7828   <li>Switched default file system from ext3 to ext4 for speed and
7829     reliability improvements.</li>
7830   <li>Got rid of unwanted winbind daemon and PAM setup activated because
7831     of <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706434">706434</a>.</li>
7832   <li>Extended and improved the testsuite tests to detect more possible
7833     problems.</li>
7834   <li>Corrected proxy handling to not set http_proxy to a bogus
7835     direct:// URL.</li>
7836   <li>Corrected proxy setup for diskless workstations.</li>
7837   <li>Corrected PXE setup to use our updated udebs during installation.</li>
7838   <li>Made installation handling of low entropy level more robust.</li>
7839   <li>Create larger partitions for Roaming workstations and Thin client
7840     servers, to make room for all the software installed.</li>
7841   <li>Fix bug in Roaming workstation PAM setup, making it impossible to
7842     log in (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706753">706753</a>).</li>
7843 </ul>
7844
7845 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
7846 <ul>
7847
7848   <li>IP resolution for the local hostname give useless IPv6 address
7849     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/705900">705900</a>).  Only install
7850     libnss-myhostname on roaming workstations until it is fixed.</li>
7851   <li>DVD images are not yet ready.</li>
7852   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
7853     available yet (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">698840</a>).</li>
7854   <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others).</li>
7855   <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons.</li>
7856   <li>LXDE menu lacks entry for changing GOsa password
7857     (website). Installing gosa-desktop will be an option.</li>
7858   <li>Backup configuration via web interface is impossible due to
7859     password submission problem
7860     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">700257</a>).</li>
7861
7862 </ul>
7863
7864 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
7865
7866 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
7867 <ul>
7868
7869   <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>
7870   <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>
7871   <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>
7872
7873 </ul>
7874
7875 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 685ed76c1aa8e44b12d3fde21faf450b</p>
7876
7877 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 6c874de157024da13e115bab29c068080a11ec4c</p>
7878
7879 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
7880
7881 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
7882
7883       </div>
7884       <div class="tags">
7885
7886
7887         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7888
7889
7890       </div>
7891     </div>
7892     <div class="padding"></div>
7893
7894     <div class="entry">
7895       <div class="title">
7896         <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>
7897       </div>
7898       <div class="date">
7899         11th May 2013
7900       </div>
7901       <div class="body">
7902         <P>In January,
7903 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
7904 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
7905 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
7906 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
7907 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
7908 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
7909 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
7910 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
7911 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
7912 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
7913 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
7914 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
7915
7916 <p><table>
7917 <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>
7918 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
7919 <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>
7920 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
7921 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
7922 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
7923 <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>
7924 <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>
7925 <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>
7926 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
7927 </table></p>
7928
7929 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
7930 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
7931 available in experimental.</p>
7932
7933 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
7934 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
7935 for LEGO designers.</p>
7936
7937       </div>
7938       <div class="tags">
7939
7940
7941         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>.
7942
7943
7944       </div>
7945     </div>
7946     <div class="padding"></div>
7947
7948     <div class="entry">
7949       <div class="title">
7950         <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>
7951       </div>
7952       <div class="date">
7953          5th May 2013
7954       </div>
7955       <div class="body">
7956         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
7957 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
7958 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
7959 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
7960 soon.</p>
7961
7962 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
7963 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
7964 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
7965 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
7966 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
7967 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
7968 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
7969 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
7970 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
7971 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
7972 Edu.</a>
7973
7974 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
7975 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
7976 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
7977 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
7978 follow.<p>
7979
7980       </div>
7981       <div class="tags">
7982
7983
7984         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>.
7985
7986
7987       </div>
7988     </div>
7989     <div class="padding"></div>
7990
7991     <div class="entry">
7992       <div class="title">
7993         <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>
7994       </div>
7995       <div class="date">
7996         26th April 2013
7997       </div>
7998       <div class="body">
7999         <p>The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is still going strong and made
8000 its first Wheezy based release today.  This is the release
8001 announcement:</p>
8002
8003 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu ~7.0.0 alpha0 released
8004 2013-04-26</strong></p>
8005
8006 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux ~7.0.0
8007 edu alpha0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
8008
8009 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
8010
8011 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
8012 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
8013 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
8014 network. Immediatly after installation a school server running all
8015 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
8016 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
8017 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
8018 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
8019 installed via the network.</p>
8020
8021 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
8022 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
8023 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
8024
8025 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
8026
8027 <ul>
8028 <li>Everything which is new in Debian Wheezy, eg:
8029   <ul>
8030      <li>Linux kernel 3.2.x</li>
8031      <li>Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.8.4, GNOME 3.4, and LXDE 4
8032          (KDE is installed by default; to choose GNOME or LXDE: see
8033          manual.)</li>
8034      <li>Web browser Iceweasel 10 ESR</li>
8035      <li>LibreOffice 3.5.4</li>
8036      <li>LTSP 5.4.2</li>
8037      <li>GOsa 2.7.4</li>
8038      <li>CUPS print system 1.5.3</li>
8039      <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 12.01</li>
8040      <li>Music creator Rosegarden 12.04</li>
8041      <li>Image editor Gimp 2.8.2</li>
8042      <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.1</li>
8043      <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.11.3</li>
8044      <li>Scratch visual programming environment 1.4.0.6</li>
8045      <li>New version of debian-installer from Debian Wheezy, see
8046          <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual">installation
8047          manual</a> for more details.</li>
8048      <li>Debian Wheezy includes about 37000 packages available for
8049          installation.</li>
8050      <li>More information about Debian Wheezy 7.0 is provided in the
8051          <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>
8052   </ul></li>
8053 </ul>
8054
8055 <p><strong>Documentation</strong></p>
8056 <ul>
8057 <li>The (<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy">English</a>) Debian Edu Wheezy Manual is fully translated to
8058     German, French, Italian and Danish. Partly translated versions exist
8059     for Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.</li>
8060 </ul>
8061
8062 <p><Strong>LDAP related changes</strong></p>
8063 <ul>
8064 <li>Slight changes to some objects and acls to have more types to
8065     choose from when adding systems in GOsa. Now systems can be of type
8066     server, workstation, printer, terminal or netdevice.</li>
8067 </ul>
8068
8069 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
8070 <ul>
8071 <li>LTSP clients start as diskless workstation / thin client can be
8072     configured via command line argument -- or individually adding an
8073     entry in lts.conf or LDAP.<li>
8074 <li>GOsa gui: Now some options that seemed to be available, but are non
8075     functional, are greyed out (or are not clickable). Some tabs are
8076     completely hidden to the end user, others even to the GOsa admin.</li>
8077 </ul>
8078
8079 <p><strong>Regressions</strong></p>
8080 <ul>
8081 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv) available
8082     yet.</li>
8083 </ul>
8084
8085 <p><strong>No updated artwork</strong></p>
8086
8087 <ul>
8088 <li>Updated artwork which is visible during installation, in the login
8089     screen and as desktop wallpaper is still missing or the same as we
8090     had for our Squeeze based release.</li>
8091 </ul>
8092
8093 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
8094
8095 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
8096 <ul>
8097 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
8098 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
8099 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</li>
8100 </ul>
8101
8102 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: c5e773ddafdaa4f48c409c682f598b6c</p>
8103
8104 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 25934fabb9b7d20235499a0a51f08ce6c54215f2</p>
8105
8106 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
8107
8108 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
8109
8110       </div>
8111       <div class="tags">
8112
8113
8114         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8115
8116
8117       </div>
8118     </div>
8119     <div class="padding"></div>
8120
8121     <div class="entry">
8122       <div class="title">
8123         <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>
8124       </div>
8125       <div class="date">
8126         16th April 2013
8127       </div>
8128       <div class="body">
8129         <p>This years first <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux /
8130 Debian Edu</a> developer gathering take place the coming weekend in Trondheim.
8131 Details about the gathering can be found
8132 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2013-04-19-21-Trondheim">on
8133 the FRiSK wiki</a>.  The dates are 19-21th of April 2013, and online
8134 participation for those unable to make it in person is very welcome,
8135 and I plan to participate online myself as I could not leave Oslo this
8136 weekend.</p>
8137
8138 <p>The focus of the gathering is to work on the web pages and project
8139 infrastructure, and to continue the work on the Wheezy based Debian
8140 Edu release.</p>
8141
8142 <p>See you on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu on irc.debian.org,</a> then?</p>
8143
8144       </div>
8145       <div class="tags">
8146
8147
8148         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8149
8150
8151       </div>
8152     </div>
8153     <div class="padding"></div>
8154
8155     <div class="entry">
8156       <div class="title">
8157         <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>
8158       </div>
8159       <div class="date">
8160          3rd April 2013
8161       </div>
8162       <div class="body">
8163         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
8164 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
8165 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
8166 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
8167
8168 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
8169 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
8170 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
8171 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
8172 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
8173 BTS. :)</p>
8174
8175       </div>
8176       <div class="tags">
8177
8178
8179         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>.
8180
8181
8182       </div>
8183     </div>
8184     <div class="padding"></div>
8185
8186     <div class="entry">
8187       <div class="title">
8188         <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>
8189       </div>
8190       <div class="date">
8191         26th March 2013
8192       </div>
8193       <div class="body">
8194         <p>Would you like to help the environment and save money at the same
8195 time, without much sacrifice?  A small step could be to change the
8196 font you use when printing.</p>
8197
8198 <p>Three years ago,
8199 <a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/04/last-year-printer-comparison-website/">Ars
8200 Technica</a> reported how the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
8201 changed their default front from
8202 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial">Arial</a> to
8203 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Gothic">Century
8204 Gothic</a> to save money.  The Century Gothic font uses 30% less toner
8205 than Arial to print the same text.  In other word, you could cut your
8206 toner costs by 30% (or actually, increase your toner supply life time
8207 by more than 30%), by simply changing the default font used in your
8208 prints.</p>
8209
8210 <p>But it is not quite obvious how much one will save by switching.
8211 The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay said it used $100,000 per year
8212 on ink and toner cartridges, according to
8213 <a href="http://www.twincities.com/ci_14833097">a report from
8214 TwinCities.com</a>, and expected to save between $5,000 and $10,000
8215 per year by asking staff and students to use a different font.  Not
8216 all PDFs and documents are created internally, and those from external
8217 sources will most likely still use a different font.  Also, the
8218 Century Gothic font is slightly wider than Arial, and thus might use
8219 more sheets of paper to print the same text, so the total saving
8220 depend on the documents printed.</p>
8221
8222 <p>But it is definitely something to consider, if you want to reduce
8223 the amount of trash, decrease the amount of toner used in the world,
8224 and save some money in the process.</p>
8225
8226 <p>Update 2013-04-10: If you want to know how much ink/toner could be
8227 saved when switching between fonts, Inkfarm got a
8228 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/What-the-Font">service to calculate the
8229 difference between font pairs</a>.  They also
8230 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/Recommended-Ink-Saving-Fonts---">recommend
8231 which fonts to use</a> to save ink.  Check it out. :) While updating
8232 this blog post, I also came across a blog post from InkCloners,
8233 <a href="http://inkcloners.com/blog/ink-cartridges/change-fonts-to-save-ink-costs/">listing
8234 the fonts they recommend</a>, with Centory Gothic at the top.</p>
8235
8236       </div>
8237       <div class="tags">
8238
8239
8240         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8241
8242
8243       </div>
8244     </div>
8245     <div class="padding"></div>
8246
8247     <div class="entry">
8248       <div class="title">
8249         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_a_short_story_using_docbook_for_PDF__HTML_and_EPUB.html">Typesetting a short story using docbook for PDF, HTML and EPUB</a>
8250       </div>
8251       <div class="date">
8252         24th March 2013
8253       </div>
8254       <div class="body">
8255         <p>A few days ago, during a discussion in
8256 <a href="http://www.efn.no/">EFN</a> about interesting books to read
8257 about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
8258 the 1968 short story Kodémus by
8259 <a href="http://web2.gyldendal.no/toraage/">Tore Åge Bringsværd</a>
8260 came up.  The text was only available in old paper books, and thus not
8261 easily available for current and future generations.  Some of the
8262 people participating in the discussion contacted the author, and
8263 reported back 2013-03-19 that the author was OK with releasing the
8264 short story using a <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org/">Creative
8265 Commons</a> license.  The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
8266 were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.</p>
8267
8268 <p>As I already had some experience formatting text in my project to
8269 provide a Norwegian version of the Free Culture book by Lawrence
8270 Lessig, I chipped in and set up a
8271 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">DocBook</a> processing framework to
8272 generate PDF, HTML and EPUB version of the short story.  The tools to
8273 transform DocBook to different formats are already in my Linux
8274 distribution of choice, <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>, so
8275 all I had to do was to use the
8276 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a>,
8277 <a href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/epub/README">dbtoepub</a>
8278 and <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/xmlto/">xmlto</a> tools to do the
8279 conversion.  After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
8280 xsltproc/fop (aka
8281 <a href="http://wiki.docbook.org/DocBookXslStylesheets">docbook-xsl</a>),
8282 to get the copyright information to show up in the PDF and to get a
8283 nicer &lt;variablelist&gt; typesetting, but that is just a minor
8284 technical detail.</p>
8285
8286 <p>There were a few challenges, of course.  We want to typeset the
8287 short story to look like the original, and that require fairly good
8288 control over the layout.  The original short story have three
8289 parts/scenes separated by a single horizontally centred star (*), and
8290 the paragraphs do not contain only flowing text, but dialogs and text
8291 that started on a new line in the middle of the paragraph.</p>
8292
8293 <p>I initially solved the first challenge by using a paragraph with a
8294 single star in it, ie &lt;para&gt;*&lt;/para&gt;, but it made sure a
8295 placeholder indicated where the scene shifted.  This did not look too
8296 good without the centring.  The next approach was to create a new
8297 preprocessor directive &lt;?newscene?&gt;, mapping to "&lt;hr/&gt;"
8298 for HTML and "&lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;&lt;fo:leader
8299 leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;&lt;/fo:block&gt;"
8300 for FO/PDF output (did not try to implement this in dblatex, as we had
8301 switched at this time).  The HTML XSL file looked like this:</p>
8302
8303 <p><blockquote><pre>
8304 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
8305 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
8306   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
8307     &lt;hr/&gt;
8308   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
8309 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
8310 </pre></blockquote></p>
8311
8312 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
8313
8314 <p><blockquote><pre>
8315 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
8316 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
8317   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
8318     &lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;
8319       &lt;fo:leader leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;
8320     &lt;/fo:block&gt;
8321   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
8322 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
8323 </pre></blockquote></p>
8324
8325 <p>Finally, I came across the &lt;bridgehead&gt; tag, which seem to be
8326 a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced &lt;?newscene?&gt;
8327 with &lt;bridgehead&gt;*&lt;/bridgehead&gt;.  It isn't centred, but we
8328 can fix it with some XSL rule if the current visual layout isn't
8329 enough.</p>
8330
8331 <p>I did not find a good DocBook compliant way to solve the
8332 linebreak/paragraph challenge, so I ended up creating a new processor
8333 directive &lt;?linebreak?&gt;, mapping to &lt;br/&gt; in HTML, and
8334 &lt;fo:block/&gt; in FO/PDF.  I suspect there are better ways to do
8335 this, and welcome ideas and patches on github.  The HTML XSL file now
8336 look like this:</p>
8337
8338 <p><blockquote><pre>
8339 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
8340 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
8341   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
8342     &lt;br/&gt;
8343   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
8344 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
8345 </pre></blockquote></p>
8346
8347 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
8348
8349 <p><blockquote><pre>
8350 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
8351 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'
8352   xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"&gt;
8353   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
8354     &lt;fo:block/&gt;
8355   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
8356 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
8357 </pre></blockquote></p>
8358
8359 <p>One unsolved challenge is our wish to expose different ISBN numbers
8360 per publication format, while keeping all of them in some conditional
8361 structure in the DocBook source.  No idea how to do this, so we ended
8362 up listing all the ISBN numbers next to their format in the colophon
8363 page.</p>
8364
8365 <p>If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
8366 <a href="https://github.com/sickel/kodemus">source repository at
8367 github</a>
8368 (<a href="https://github.com/EFN/kodemus">future/new/official
8369 repository</a>).  We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
8370 days.</p>
8371
8372       </div>
8373       <div class="tags">
8374
8375
8376         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>.
8377
8378
8379       </div>
8380     </div>
8381     <div class="padding"></div>
8382
8383     <div class="entry">
8384       <div class="title">
8385         <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>
8386       </div>
8387       <div class="date">
8388         17th March 2013
8389       </div>
8390       <div class="body">
8391         <p>Via
8392 <a href="https://twitter.com/pcwizz/status/313044373262716930">twitter</a>
8393 I just discovered that <a href="http://pcwizz.net/">Pcwizz</a> have
8394 done a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPzTZ61Pcuc">video
8395 review</a> on Youtube of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
8396 / Debian Edu</a> version 6.  He installed the standalone profile and
8397 the video show a walk-through of of the menu content, demonstration of
8398 a few programs and his view of our distribution.</p>
8399
8400 <p>There is also some really nice quotes (transcribed by me, might
8401 have heard wrong).  While looking thought the Graphics menu:</p>
8402
8403 <blockquote>
8404 "Basically everything you ever need in a school environment."
8405 </blockquote>
8406
8407 <p>And as a general evaluation of the entire distribution:</p>
8408
8409 <blockquote>
8410 "So, yeah, a bit bloated.  It kept all the Debian stuff in there, just
8411 to keep it nice and GNU.  So, I do not want to go on about it, but
8412 lets give it 7 out of 10.  I am not going to use it.  That is because
8413 I am not deploying a school network.  There may be some mythical
8414 feature to help you deploy Skolelinux on a school network."
8415 </blockquote>
8416
8417 <p>To bad he did not test the server profile, and discovered the PXE
8418 installation option.  It make it possible to install only the main
8419 server from CD, and the rest of the machines via the net, and might be
8420 considered the mythical feature he talk about. :)</p>
8421
8422 <p>While looking through the menus, there is also this funny comment
8423 about the part of the K menu generated from the Debian menu subsystem:
8424
8425 <blockquote>
8426 "[The K menu] have a special Debian section for software that no-one
8427 is going to look at, because it contain lots of junky stuff that you
8428 actually don't need in the education distribution, but have just been
8429 included because it isn't stripped out for some reason."
8430 </blockquote>
8431
8432 <p>I guess it is yet another argument for merging the Debian menu and
8433 Gnome/KDE desktop menu entries into
8434 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/DebianMenuUsingDesktopEntries">one
8435 consistent menu system</a> instead of two incomplete and partly
8436 inconsistent menu systems.</p>
8437
8438 <p>The entire video is available below for those accepting iframe
8439 embedding:</p>
8440
8441 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wPzTZ61Pcuc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
8442
8443       </div>
8444       <div class="tags">
8445
8446
8447         Tags: <a href="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>.
8448
8449
8450       </div>
8451     </div>
8452     <div class="padding"></div>
8453
8454     <div class="entry">
8455       <div class="title">
8456         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_update_released.html">First Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze update released</a>
8457       </div>
8458       <div class="date">
8459          8th March 2013
8460       </div>
8461       <div class="body">
8462         <p>Last Sunday, 2013-03-03,, Holger Levsen announced the first update
8463 of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
8464 based on Debian Squeeze.  This is the first update since
8465 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
8466 initial release 2012-03-11</a>.  This is the
8467 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2013/03/msg00000.html">release
8468 announcement email from Holger</a>:</p>
8469
8470 <blockquote><p>Hi,</p>
8471
8472 <p>it's my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of Debian
8473 Edu 6.0.7+r1 ("Debian Edu Squeeze").</p>
8474
8475 <p>Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 is an incremental update to Debian Edu
8476 6.0.4+r0, containing all the changes between Debian 6.0.4 and 6.0.7 as
8477 well Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements. See below (in this
8478 mail) for the full list of (edu) changes.  Please see
8479 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311">http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311</a>
8480 for more information on "Debian Edu Squeeze".</p>
8481
8482 <p>Images are available for download at
8483 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/</a></p>
8484
8485 <p>md5sums:
8486 <br>1fe79eb4f0f9ae1c58fc318e26cc1e2e  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
8487 <br>a6ddd924a8bd9a1b5ca122e8fe1c34ec  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
8488 <br>ac6c72cd7925ccec51bfbf58e2a7c69c  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
8489
8490 <p>sha1sums:
8491 <br>a4b58233b672a99c7df8dc24fb6de3327654a5c3  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
8492 <br>9b524915e0ff2aa793f13d93123e5bd2bab2dbaa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
8493 <br>43997614893fc5e9e59ad6ce066b05d07fd836fa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
8494
8495 <p>These images are suitable for amd64+i386.</p>
8496
8497 <p>Changes for Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 Codename "Squeeze", released
8498 2013-03-03:</p>
8499
8500 <ul>
8501   <li>sitesummary was updated from 0.1.3 to 0.1.8
8502   <ul>
8503         <li>Make Nagios configuration more robust and efficient</li>
8504         <li>Comply with 3.X kernel</li>
8505   </ul></li>
8506   <li>debian-edu-doc from 1.4~20120310~6.0.4+r0 to 1.4~20130228~6.0.7+r1
8507   <ul>
8508         <li>Minor updates from the wiki</li>
8509         <li>Danish translation now complete</li>
8510   </ul></li>
8511   <li>debian-edu-config from 1.453 to 1.455
8512      <ul>
8513         <li>Fix /etc/hosts for LTSP diskless workstations. Closes: #699880</li>
8514         <li>Make ltsp_local_mount script work for multiple devices.</li>
8515         <li>Correct Kerberos user policy: don't expire password after 2 days.
8516                 Closes: #664596</li>
8517         <li>Handle '#' characters in the root or first users password.
8518                 Closes: #664976</li>
8519         <li>Fixes for gosa-sync:
8520            <ul>
8521                 <li>Don't fail if password contains "</li>
8522                 <li>Don't disclose new password string in syslog</li>
8523            </ul></li>
8524         <li>Fixes for gosa-create:
8525            <ul>
8526                 <li>Invalidate libnss cache before applying changes</li>
8527                 <li>Multiple failures during mass user import into GOsa²</li>
8528                 <li>gosa-netgroups plugin: don't erase entries of attribute type
8529                          "memberNisNetgroup". Closes: #687256</li>
8530                 <li>First user now uses the same Kerberos policy as all other users</li>
8531            </ul></li>
8532         <li>Add Danish web page</li>
8533     </ul>
8534   <li>debian-edu-install from 1.528 to 1.530
8535     <ul>
8536         <li>Improve preseeding support and documentation</li>
8537     </ul></li>
8538 </ul>
8539
8540 <p>End-user documentation in English is available at
8541 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/</a>
8542 - translations to French, Italian, Danish and German are available in
8543 the debian-edu-doc package. (Other languages could use your help!)</p>
8544
8545 <p>If you want to contribute to Debian Edu, please join our
8546 mailinglist
8547 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@lists.debian.org</a>!
8548 </p></blockquote>
8549
8550 <p>I am very happy to see the fruits of a year of hard work. :)</p>
8551
8552       </div>
8553       <div class="tags">
8554
8555
8556         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8557
8558
8559       </div>
8560     </div>
8561     <div class="padding"></div>
8562
8563     <div class="entry">
8564       <div class="title">
8565         <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>
8566       </div>
8567       <div class="date">
8568          3rd March 2013
8569       </div>
8570       <div class="body">
8571         <p>Do you want to set up your own TV station, schedule videos and
8572 broadcast them on the air?  Using free software?  With video on demand
8573 support using
8574 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
8575 open standards</a>?  Included a web based video stream as well?  And
8576 administrate it all in your web browser from anywhere in the world?  A
8577 few years now the Norwegian public access TV-channel
8578 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> have been building a
8579 system to do just this.  The source code for the solution is licensed
8580 using the GNU LGPL, and
8581 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from github</a>.</p>
8582
8583 <p>The idea is simple.  You upload a video file over the web, and
8584 attach meta information to the file.  You select a time slot in the
8585 program schedule, and when the time come it is played on the air and
8586 in the web stream.  It is also made available in a video on demand
8587 solution for anyone to see it also outside its scheduled time.  All
8588 you need to run a TV station - using your web browser.</p>
8589
8590 <p>There are several parts to this web based solution.  I'll mention
8591 the three most important ones.  The first part is the database of
8592 videos and the schedule.  This is written in Django and include a REST
8593 API.  The current database is SQLite, but the plan is to migrate it to
8594 PostgreSQL.  At the moment this system can be tested on
8595 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/">beta.frikanalen.tv</a>.  The
8596 second part is the video playout, taking the schedule information from
8597 the database and providing a video stream to broadcast.  This is done
8598 using <a href="http://www.casparcg.com/">CasparCG from SVT</a> and
8599 <a href="http://www.mltframework.org/">Media Lovin' Toolkit</a>.  Video
8600 signal distribution is handled using
8601 <a href="http://www.ob-encoder.com/">Open Broadcast Encoder</a>.  The
8602 third part is the converter, handling the transformation of uploaded
8603 video files to a format useful for broadcasting, streaming and video
8604 on demand.  It is still very much work in progress, so it is not yet
8605 decided what it will end up using.  Note that the source of the latter
8606 two parts are not yet pushed to github.  The lead author want to clean
8607 them up a bit more first.</p>
8608
8609 <p>The development is coordinated on the
8610 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23frikanalen">#frikanalen IRC
8611 channel</a> (irc.freenode.net), and discussed on
8612 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/frikanalen">the
8613 frikanalen mailing list</a>. The lead developer is Benjamin Bruheim
8614 (phed on IRC).  Anyone is welcome to participate in the
8615 development.</p>
8616
8617       </div>
8618       <div class="tags">
8619
8620
8621         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>.
8622
8623
8624       </div>
8625     </div>
8626     <div class="padding"></div>
8627
8628     <div class="entry">
8629       <div class="title">
8630         <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>
8631       </div>
8632       <div class="date">
8633         27th February 2013
8634       </div>
8635       <div class="body">
8636         <p>Dr. <a href="http://www.stallman.org/">Richard Stallman</a>,
8637 founder of <a href="http://www.fsf.org/">Free Software Foundation</a>,
8638 is giving <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">a
8639 talk in Oslo March 1st 2013 17:00 to 19:00</a>.  The event is public
8640 and organised by <a href="">Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG)</a>
8641 (where I am the chair of the board) and
8642 <a href="http://www.friprog.no/">The Norwegian Open Source Competence
8643 Center</a>.  The title of the talk is «The Free Software Movement and
8644 GNU», with this description:
8645
8646 <p><blockquote>
8647 The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users' freedom to
8648 cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software Movement
8649 developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the
8650 kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms possible.
8651 </blockquote></p>
8652
8653 <p>The meeting is open for everyone.  Due to space limitations, the
8654 doors opens for NUUG members at 16:15, and everyone else at 16:45.  I
8655 am really curious how many will show up.  See
8656 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">the event
8657 page</a> for the location details.</p>
8658
8659       </div>
8660       <div class="tags">
8661
8662
8663         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>.
8664
8665
8666       </div>
8667     </div>
8668     <div class="padding"></div>
8669
8670     <div class="entry">
8671       <div class="title">
8672         <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>
8673       </div>
8674       <div class="date">
8675         15th February 2013
8676       </div>
8677       <div class="body">
8678         <p>If you, like me, want an updated a map for your Garmin GPS, there is
8679 now a great source of free maps available from
8680 <a href="http://www.frikart.no/garmin/index.html">Frikart</a>.  To
8681 download a map, just click on the country you are interested in, and
8682 download the map type you want.  There are 8 different maps available,
8683 using different colours and data selection.  Pick one of Roadmap, Topo
8684 Summer, Topo Winter, Roadmap II, Topo Summer II, Topo Winter II,
8685 "Trails - overlay map" and "Cross country - overlay map" (see the web
8686 page for descriptions).</p>
8687
8688 <p>The maps are updated weekly, so if you find something wrong in the
8689 map you can just edit the
8690 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> map source
8691 (anyone can contribute) and fetch a fixed map a week later. :)</p>
8692
8693       </div>
8694       <div class="tags">
8695
8696
8697         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>.
8698
8699
8700       </div>
8701     </div>
8702     <div class="padding"></div>
8703
8704     <div class="entry">
8705       <div class="title">
8706         <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>
8707       </div>
8708       <div class="date">
8709         12th February 2013
8710       </div>
8711       <div class="body">
8712         <p>Here in Norway, electronic invoices are spreading, and the
8713 <a href="http://www.anskaffelser.no/e-handel/faktura">solution promoted
8714 by the Norwegian government</a> require that invoices are sent through
8715 one of the approved facilitators, and it is not possible to send
8716 electronic invoices without an agreement with one of these
8717 facilitators.  This seem like a needless limitation to be able to
8718 transfer invoice information between buyers and sellers.  My preferred
8719 solution would be to just transfer the invoice information directly
8720 between seller and buyer, for example using SMTP, or some HTTP based
8721 protocol like REST or SOAP.  But this might also be overkill, as the
8722 "electronic" information can be transferred using paper invoices too,
8723 using a simple bar code.  My bar code encoding of choice would be QR
8724 codes, as this encoding can be read by any smart phone out there.  The
8725 content of the code could be anything, but I would go with
8726 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard">the vCard format</a>, as
8727 it too is supported by a lot of computer equipment these days.</p>
8728
8729 <p>The vCard format support extentions, and the invoice specific
8730 information can be included using such extentions.  For example an
8731 invoice from SLX Debian Labs (picked because we
8732 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">ask
8733 for donations to the Debian Edu project</a> and thus have bank account
8734 information publicly available) for NOK 1000.00 could have these extra
8735 fields:</p>
8736
8737 <p><pre>
8738 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
8739 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
8740 X-INVOICE-KID:123412341234
8741 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
8742 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
8743 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
8744 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
8745 </pre></p>
8746
8747 <p>The X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER field was proposed in a stackoverflow
8748 answer regarding
8749 <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10045664/storing-bank-account-in-vcard-file">how
8750 to put bank account information into a vCard</a>.  For payments in
8751 Norway, either X-INVOICE-KID (payment ID) or X-INVOICE-MSG could be
8752 used to pass on information to the seller when paying the invoice.</p>
8753
8754 <p>The complete vCard could look like this:</p>
8755
8756 <p><pre>
8757 BEGIN:VCARD
8758 VERSION:2.1
8759 ORG:SLX Debian Labs Foundation
8760 ADR;WORK:;;Gunnar Schjelderups vei 29D;OSLO;;0485;Norway
8761 URL;WORK:http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/
8762 EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:sdl-styret@rt.nuug.no
8763 REV:20130212T095000Z
8764 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
8765 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
8766 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
8767 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
8768 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
8769 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
8770 END:VCARD
8771 </pre></p>
8772
8773 <p>The resulting QR code created using
8774 <a href="http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/">qrencode</a> would look
8775 like this, and should be readable (and thus checkable) by any smart
8776 phone, or for example the <a href="http://zbar.sourceforge.net/">zbar
8777 bar code reader</a> and feed right into the approval and accounting
8778 system.</p>
8779
8780 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-12-qr-invoice.png"></p>
8781
8782 <p>The extension fields will most likely not show up in any normal
8783 vCard reader, so those parts would have to go directly into a system
8784 handling invoices.  I am a bit unsure how vCards without name parts
8785 are handled, but a simple test indicate that this work just fine.</p>
8786
8787 <p><strong>Update 2013-02-12 11:30</strong>: Added KID to the proposal
8788 based on feedback from Sturle Sunde.</p>
8789
8790       </div>
8791       <div class="tags">
8792
8793
8794         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>.
8795
8796
8797       </div>
8798     </div>
8799     <div class="padding"></div>
8800
8801     <div class="entry">
8802       <div class="title">
8803         <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>
8804       </div>
8805       <div class="date">
8806         10th February 2013
8807       </div>
8808       <div class="body">
8809         <p><img align="left" style="margin-right:25px;" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-10-morning-light.jpeg"></p>
8810
8811 <p>With kids in the house, one challenge is getting them to sleep
8812 during the night and wake up when it is morning.  I mean, when I
8813 believe it is morning, and not two hours earlier.  In our household we
8814 have decided that 07:00 is the turning point, but getting the kids to
8815 sleep until 07:00 is a small challenge every day.  They have adapted
8816 quite well, and rarely wake up at 05:00 any more, but some times wake
8817 up at times like 05:50, 06:15, 06:30 or 06:45, and it is hard to put
8818 the awake one to bed again without disturbing and waking the rest.
8819 And I understand perfectly well that they fail to sleep until 07:00
8820 some times, as there is no way for them to know if it is before or
8821 after the magic moment without coming and asking us parents.</p>
8822
8823 <p>But yesterday I came up with a method to solve this problem.  It
8824 involve home automation.  A few years ago I bought a
8825 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick">Tellstick</a> and RF
8826 switches at the local <a href="http://www.clasohlson.com/">Clas
8827 Ohlson</a> shop, allowing me to control lights and other electrical
8828 gadgets using my Linux server.  When I moved from the old flat to a
8829 small house, I put away all this equipment as most of the lighting in
8830 the house was not using wall sockets and thus not easy to connect to
8831 the gadgets I had.  But recently I bought a
8832 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick_net">Tellstick
8833 Net</a> to be able to read sensor input as well as control power
8834 sockets.  I want to control ovens in the basement to avoid the pipes
8835 to freeze, and monitor the humidity to detect flooding.  The default
8836 setup for Tellstick Net is to be controlled by the vendor web service,
8837 which to me is a security problem, but it is also possible to build
8838 ones own
8839 <a href="http://developer.telldus.com/blog/2012/03/02/help-us-develop-local-access-using-tellstick-net-build-your-own-firmware">firmware
8840 with local access</A> instead of being controlled by a Swedish
8841 company, thanks to the release of the GPL licensed firmware source
8842 code.  I plan to get that running before I let it control anything
8843 important.  But while working on this, one idea to make it easier for
8844 the kids came to me yesterday.  We can set up a night light controlled
8845 by the computer, and turn it automatically on at 07:00.  The kids can
8846 then check the light in the morning to know if they are supposed to
8847 get up or not.  They joined me in setting everything up, and I
8848 repeated the concept several times before bed times to make sure they
8849 remembered to check the light before getting up in the morning.</p>
8850
8851 <p>We tested it this morning, and all the kids stayed in bed until
8852 after 07:00, and every one of them commented on the fact that the
8853 "morning light" was turned on and signalled that the morning had
8854 arrived.  So this look like a success, and I am excited to see how
8855 this develops the next few days. :) I really hope this can allow us
8856 all to sleep a bit longer in the morning.</p>
8857
8858 <p>A nice advantage of this setup is that we can remote control when
8859 to tell the kids to get up.  We do not have to wait until 07:00, and
8860 can also delay it if we want to.</p>
8861
8862       </div>
8863       <div class="tags">
8864
8865
8866         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
8867
8868
8869       </div>
8870     </div>
8871     <div class="padding"></div>
8872
8873     <div class="entry">
8874       <div class="title">
8875         <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>
8876       </div>
8877       <div class="date">
8878          2nd February 2013
8879       </div>
8880       <div class="body">
8881         <p>My
8882 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
8883 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
8884 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
8885 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
8886 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
8887 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
8888 version too.</p>
8889
8890 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
8891 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
8892 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
8893 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
8894 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
8895 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
8896 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
8897 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
8898
8899 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
8900 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
8901 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
8902 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
8903 it. :)</p>
8904
8905 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
8906 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
8907 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
8908
8909       </div>
8910       <div class="tags">
8911
8912
8913         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>.
8914
8915
8916       </div>
8917     </div>
8918     <div class="padding"></div>
8919
8920     <div class="entry">
8921       <div class="title">
8922         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
8923       </div>
8924       <div class="date">
8925         22nd January 2013
8926       </div>
8927       <div class="body">
8928         <p>Yesterday, I
8929 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
8930 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
8931 pluggable hardware devices, which I
8932 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
8933 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
8934 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
8935 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
8936 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
8937 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
8938 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
8939 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
8940 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
8941 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
8942
8943 <pre>
8944 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
8945 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
8946 </pre>
8947
8948 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
8949 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
8950 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
8951 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
8952
8953 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
8954 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
8955 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
8956 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
8957 word.</p>
8958
8959 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
8960 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
8961 process.</p>
8962
8963 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
8964 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
8965
8966       </div>
8967       <div class="tags">
8968
8969
8970         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>.
8971
8972
8973       </div>
8974     </div>
8975     <div class="padding"></div>
8976
8977     <div class="entry">
8978       <div class="title">
8979         <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>
8980       </div>
8981       <div class="date">
8982         21st January 2013
8983       </div>
8984       <div class="body">
8985         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
8986 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
8987 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
8988 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
8989 it, fetch the
8990 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
8991 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
8992 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
8993 autostart script.</p>
8994
8995 <p>The design is simple:</p>
8996
8997 <ul>
8998
8999 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
9000 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
9001
9002 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
9003 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
9004 initially did.</li>
9005
9006 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
9007 the APT database, a database
9008 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
9009 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
9010
9011 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
9012 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
9013 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
9014 package or packages.</li>
9015
9016 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
9017 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
9018
9019 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
9020 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
9021
9022 </ul>
9023
9024 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
9025 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
9026 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
9027 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
9028
9029 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
9030 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
9031 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
9032 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
9033 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
9034
9035 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
9036 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
9037 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
9038 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
9039 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
9040 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
9041 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
9042 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
9043
9044 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
9045 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
9046 '<tt>svn checkout
9047 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
9048 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
9049 devscripts package.</p>
9050
9051 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
9052 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
9053 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
9054 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
9055 instructions</a> for details.</p>
9056
9057       </div>
9058       <div class="tags">
9059
9060
9061         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>.
9062
9063
9064       </div>
9065     </div>
9066     <div class="padding"></div>
9067
9068     <div class="entry">
9069       <div class="title">
9070         <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>
9071       </div>
9072       <div class="date">
9073         19th January 2013
9074       </div>
9075       <div class="body">
9076         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
9077 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
9078 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
9079 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
9080 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
9081 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
9082 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
9083 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
9084 not a durable solution.
9085
9086 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
9087 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
9088
9089 <ul>
9090
9091 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
9092   than A4).</li>
9093 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
9094 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
9095 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
9096 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
9097 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
9098 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
9099 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
9100 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
9101 size).</li>
9102 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
9103   X.org packages.</li>
9104 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
9105   the time).
9106
9107 </ul>
9108
9109 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
9110 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
9111 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
9112 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
9113 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
9114 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
9115 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
9116 still be useful.</p>
9117
9118 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
9119 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
9120 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
9121 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
9122 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
9123 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
9124
9125       </div>
9126       <div class="tags">
9127
9128
9129         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>.
9130
9131
9132       </div>
9133     </div>
9134     <div class="padding"></div>
9135
9136     <div class="entry">
9137       <div class="title">
9138         <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>
9139       </div>
9140       <div class="date">
9141         18th January 2013
9142       </div>
9143       <div class="body">
9144         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
9145 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
9146 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
9147 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
9148 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
9149 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
9150 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
9151
9152 <pre>
9153 #!/usr/bin/python
9154 import sys
9155 import apt
9156 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
9157     cache = apt.Cache()
9158     cache.open(None)
9159     thepkgs = []
9160     for pkg in cache:
9161         version = pkg.candidate
9162         if version is None:
9163             version = pkg.installed
9164         if version is None:
9165             continue
9166         record = version.record
9167         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
9168             continue
9169         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
9170         for t in mime_types:
9171             t = t.rstrip().strip()
9172             if t == mimetype:
9173                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
9174     return thepkgs
9175 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
9176 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
9177     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
9178 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
9179 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
9180     print "  %s" %pkg
9181 </pre>
9182
9183 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
9184
9185 <pre>
9186 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
9187 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
9188   gecko-mediaplayer
9189 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
9190 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
9191   browser-plugin-gnash
9192 %
9193 </pre>
9194
9195 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
9196 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
9197 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
9198 anyone working on adding it?</p>
9199
9200 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
9201 request for icweasel support for this feature is
9202 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
9203 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
9204 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
9205 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
9206
9207       </div>
9208       <div class="tags">
9209
9210
9211         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>.
9212
9213
9214       </div>
9215     </div>
9216     <div class="padding"></div>
9217
9218     <div class="entry">
9219       <div class="title">
9220         <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>
9221       </div>
9222       <div class="date">
9223         16th January 2013
9224       </div>
9225       <div class="body">
9226         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
9227 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
9228 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
9229 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
9230 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
9231 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
9232 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
9233 downloaded by the browser.</p>
9234
9235 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
9236 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
9237 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
9238 can be found on the
9239 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
9240 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
9241 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
9242 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
9243 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
9244
9245 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
9246
9247 <pre>
9248   count MIME type
9249   ----- -----------------------
9250      32 text/plain
9251      30 audio/mpeg
9252      29 image/png
9253      28 image/jpeg
9254      27 application/ogg
9255      26 audio/x-mp3
9256      25 image/tiff
9257      25 image/gif
9258      22 image/bmp
9259      22 audio/x-wav
9260      20 audio/x-flac
9261      19 audio/x-mpegurl
9262      18 video/x-ms-asf
9263      18 audio/x-musepack
9264      18 audio/x-mpeg
9265      18 application/x-ogg
9266      17 video/mpeg
9267      17 audio/x-scpls
9268      17 audio/ogg
9269      16 video/x-ms-wmv
9270 </pre>
9271
9272 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
9273
9274 <pre>
9275   count MIME type
9276   ----- -----------------------
9277      33 text/plain
9278      32 image/png
9279      32 image/jpeg
9280      29 audio/mpeg
9281      27 image/gif
9282      26 image/tiff
9283      26 application/ogg
9284      25 audio/x-mp3
9285      22 image/bmp
9286      21 audio/x-wav
9287      19 audio/x-mpegurl
9288      19 audio/x-mpeg
9289      18 video/mpeg
9290      18 audio/x-scpls
9291      18 audio/x-flac
9292      18 application/x-ogg
9293      17 video/x-ms-asf
9294      17 text/html
9295      17 audio/x-musepack
9296      16 image/x-xbitmap
9297 </pre>
9298
9299 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
9300
9301 <pre>
9302   count MIME type
9303   ----- -----------------------
9304      31 text/plain
9305      31 image/png
9306      31 image/jpeg
9307      29 audio/mpeg
9308      28 application/ogg
9309      27 image/gif
9310      26 image/tiff
9311      26 audio/x-mp3
9312      23 audio/x-wav
9313      22 image/bmp
9314      21 audio/x-flac
9315      20 audio/x-mpegurl
9316      19 audio/x-mpeg
9317      18 video/x-ms-asf
9318      18 video/mpeg
9319      18 audio/x-scpls
9320      18 application/x-ogg
9321      17 audio/x-musepack
9322      16 video/x-ms-wmv
9323      16 video/x-msvideo
9324 </pre>
9325
9326 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
9327 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
9328 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
9329 issues.</p>
9330
9331 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
9332 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
9333
9334       </div>
9335       <div class="tags">
9336
9337
9338         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>.
9339
9340
9341       </div>
9342     </div>
9343     <div class="padding"></div>
9344
9345     <div class="entry">
9346       <div class="title">
9347         <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>
9348       </div>
9349       <div class="date">
9350         15th January 2013
9351       </div>
9352       <div class="body">
9353         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
9354 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
9355 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
9356 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
9357 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
9358 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
9359 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
9360 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
9361 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
9362 packages.</p>
9363
9364 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
9365 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
9366 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
9367 modalias.</p>
9368
9369 <p><blockquote>
9370 Package: package-name
9371 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
9372 </blockquote></p>
9373
9374 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
9375 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
9376
9377 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
9378 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
9379
9380 <p><blockquote>
9381 Package: cheese
9382 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
9383 </blockquote></p>
9384
9385 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
9386 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
9387
9388 <p><blockquote>
9389 Package: pcmciautils
9390 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
9391 </blockquote></p>
9392
9393 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
9394 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
9395
9396 <p><blockquote>
9397 Package: colorhug-client
9398 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
9399 </blockquote></p>
9400
9401 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
9402 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
9403 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
9404
9405 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
9406 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
9407 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
9408 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
9409 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
9410 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
9411 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
9412 Raring.</p>
9413
9414 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
9415 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
9416 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
9417 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
9418 try the
9419 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
9420 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
9421 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
9422 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
9423
9424 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
9425 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
9426
9427 <p><blockquote>
9428 % ./hw-support-lookup
9429 <br>yubikey-personalization
9430 <br>%
9431 </blockquote></p>
9432
9433 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
9434 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
9435
9436 <p><blockquote>
9437 % ./hw-support-lookup
9438 <br>pcmciautils
9439 <br>%
9440 </blockquote></p>
9441
9442 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
9443 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
9444 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
9445
9446 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
9447 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
9448 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
9449 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
9450 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
9451 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
9452 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
9453 see if it work.</p>
9454
9455 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
9456 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
9457 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
9458 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
9459
9460       </div>
9461       <div class="tags">
9462
9463
9464         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>.
9465
9466
9467       </div>
9468     </div>
9469     <div class="padding"></div>
9470
9471     <div class="entry">
9472       <div class="title">
9473         <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>
9474       </div>
9475       <div class="date">
9476         14th January 2013
9477       </div>
9478       <div class="body">
9479         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
9480 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
9481 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
9482 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
9483 in
9484 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
9485 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
9486
9487 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
9488
9489 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
9490 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
9491 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
9492 &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;,
9493 &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
9494 &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;.
9495
9496 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
9497 this shell script:</p>
9498
9499 <pre>
9500 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
9501 </pre>
9502
9503 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
9504 using modinfo:</p>
9505
9506 <pre>
9507 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
9508 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
9509 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
9510 %
9511 </pre>
9512
9513 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
9514
9515 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
9516 Bridge memory controller:</p>
9517
9518 <p><blockquote>
9519 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
9520 </blockquote></p>
9521
9522 <p>This represent these values:</p>
9523
9524 <pre>
9525  v   00008086  (vendor)
9526  d   00002770  (device)
9527  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
9528  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
9529  bc  06        (bus class)
9530  sc  00        (bus subclass)
9531  i   00        (interface)
9532 </pre>
9533
9534 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
9535 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
9536 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
9537 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
9538
9539 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
9540 means.</p>
9541
9542 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
9543
9544 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
9545 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
9546
9547 <p><blockquote>
9548 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
9549 </blockquote></p>
9550
9551 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
9552
9553 <pre>
9554  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
9555  p    0001  (device product)
9556  d    0206  (bcddevice)
9557  dc     09  (device class)
9558  dsc    00  (device subclass)
9559  dp     00  (device protocol)
9560  ic     09  (interface class)
9561  isc    00  (interface subclass)
9562  ip     00  (interface protocol)
9563 </pre>
9564
9565 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
9566 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
9567 these alias entries show up:</p>
9568
9569 <p><blockquote>
9570 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
9571 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
9572 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
9573 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
9574 </blockquote></p>
9575
9576 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
9577 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
9578 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
9579
9580 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
9581
9582 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
9583 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
9584
9585 <p><blockquote>
9586 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
9587 </blockquote></p>
9588
9589 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
9590
9591 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
9592
9593 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
9594 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
9595 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
9596
9597 <p><blockquote>
9598 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
9599 </blockquote></p>
9600
9601 <p>The values present are</p>
9602
9603 <pre>
9604  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
9605  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
9606  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
9607  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
9608  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
9609  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
9610  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
9611  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
9612  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
9613  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
9614  ct   10             (chassis type)
9615  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
9616 </pre>
9617
9618 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
9619 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
9620
9621 <pre>
9622   3 Desktop
9623   4 Low Profile Desktop
9624   5 Pizza Box
9625   6 Mini Tower
9626   7 Tower
9627   8 Portable
9628   9 Laptop
9629  10 Notebook
9630  11 Hand Held
9631  12 Docking Station
9632  13 All In One
9633  14 Sub Notebook
9634  15 Space-saving
9635  16 Lunch Box
9636  17 Main Server Chassis
9637  18 Expansion Chassis
9638  19 Sub Chassis
9639  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
9640  21 Peripheral Chassis
9641  22 RAID Chassis
9642  23 Rack Mount Chassis
9643  24 Sealed-case PC
9644  25 Multi-system
9645  26 CompactPCI
9646  27 AdvancedTCA
9647  28 Blade
9648  29 Blade Enclosing
9649 </pre>
9650
9651 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
9652 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
9653 claim it is a desktop.</p>
9654
9655 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
9656
9657 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
9658 test machine:</p>
9659
9660 <p><blockquote>
9661 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
9662 </blockquote></p>
9663
9664 <p>The values present are</p>
9665
9666 <pre>
9667   ty  01  (type)
9668   pr  00  (prototype)
9669   id  00  (id)
9670   ex  00  (extra)
9671 </pre>
9672
9673 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
9674 the valid values are.</p>
9675
9676 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
9677
9678 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
9679 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
9680 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
9681 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
9682 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
9683 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
9684 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
9685
9686 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
9687
9688 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
9689 one can use the following shell script:</p>
9690
9691 <pre>
9692   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
9693     echo "$id" ; \
9694     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
9695   done
9696 </pre>
9697
9698 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
9699 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
9700
9701 <pre>
9702   acpi:ACPI0003:
9703     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
9704   acpi:device:
9705   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
9706   acpi:IBM0068:
9707     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
9708     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
9709     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
9710     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
9711   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
9712     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
9713     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
9714     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
9715   [...]
9716 </pre>
9717
9718 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
9719 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
9720 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
9721 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
9722
9723 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
9724 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
9725 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
9726
9727       </div>
9728       <div class="tags">
9729
9730
9731         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>.
9732
9733
9734       </div>
9735     </div>
9736     <div class="padding"></div>
9737
9738     <div class="entry">
9739       <div class="title">
9740         <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>
9741       </div>
9742       <div class="date">
9743         10th January 2013
9744       </div>
9745       <div class="body">
9746         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
9747 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
9748 Launcher and updated the Debian package
9749 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
9750 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
9751 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
9752 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
9753 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
9754 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
9755 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
9756 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
9757 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
9758 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
9759 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
9760 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
9761 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
9762 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
9763 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
9764
9765       </div>
9766       <div class="tags">
9767
9768
9769         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>.
9770
9771
9772       </div>
9773     </div>
9774     <div class="padding"></div>
9775
9776     <div class="entry">
9777       <div class="title">
9778         <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>
9779       </div>
9780       <div class="date">
9781          9th January 2013
9782       </div>
9783       <div class="body">
9784         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
9785 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
9786 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
9787 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
9788 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
9789 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
9790 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
9791 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
9792 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
9793 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
9794 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
9795
9796 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
9797 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
9798 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
9799 simple:
9800
9801 <ul>
9802
9803 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
9804   starting when a user log in.</li>
9805
9806 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
9807   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
9808
9809 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
9810   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
9811   packages.</li>
9812
9813 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
9814   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
9815
9816 </ul>
9817
9818 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
9819 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
9820 discover database to find packages and
9821 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
9822 packages.</p>
9823
9824 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
9825 draft package is now checked into
9826 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
9827 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
9828 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
9829 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
9830 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
9831 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
9832 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
9833 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
9834 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
9835 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
9836 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
9837 because of the freeze).</p>
9838
9839 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
9840 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
9841 inserted):</p>
9842
9843 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
9844
9845 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
9846 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
9847 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
9848
9849 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
9850 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
9851 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
9852 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
9853 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
9854 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
9855 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
9856
9857 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
9858 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
9859 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
9860 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
9861 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
9862 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
9863 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
9864 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
9865 not be installed?</p>
9866
9867 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
9868 please send me an email. :)</p>
9869
9870       </div>
9871       <div class="tags">
9872
9873
9874         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>.
9875
9876
9877       </div>
9878     </div>
9879     <div class="padding"></div>
9880
9881     <div class="entry">
9882       <div class="title">
9883         <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>
9884       </div>
9885       <div class="date">
9886          2nd January 2013
9887       </div>
9888       <div class="body">
9889         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
9890 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
9891 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
9892 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
9893 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
9894 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
9895 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
9896 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
9897 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
9898 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
9899
9900 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
9901 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
9902 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
9903
9904       </div>
9905       <div class="tags">
9906
9907
9908         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>.
9909
9910
9911       </div>
9912     </div>
9913     <div class="padding"></div>
9914
9915     <div class="entry">
9916       <div class="title">
9917         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html">A Christmas present for Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
9918       </div>
9919       <div class="date">
9920         28th December 2012
9921       </div>
9922       <div class="body">
9923         <p>I was happy to discover a few days ago that the
9924 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
9925 project also this year received a Christmas present from Another
9926 Agency in Trondheim.  NOK 1000,- showed up on our donation account
9927 December 24th.  I want to express our thanks for this very welcome
9928 present.  As the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is very short on
9929 funding these days, and thus lack the money to do regular developer
9930 gatherings, this donation was most welcome.  One developer gathering
9931 cost around NOK 15&nbsp;000,-, so we need quite a lot more to keep the
9932 development pace we want.  Thus, I hope their example this year is
9933 followed by many others. :)</p>
9934
9935 <p>The public list of donors can be found on
9936 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">the
9937 donation page</a> for the project, which also contain instructions if
9938 you want to donate to the project.</p>
9939
9940       </div>
9941       <div class="tags">
9942
9943
9944         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9945
9946
9947       </div>
9948     </div>
9949     <div class="padding"></div>
9950
9951     <div class="entry">
9952       <div class="title">
9953         <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>
9954       </div>
9955       <div class="date">
9956         25th December 2012
9957       </div>
9958       <div class="body">
9959         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
9960 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
9961
9962 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
9963 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
9964 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
9965 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
9966 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
9967 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
9968 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
9969 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
9970 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
9971 name.</p>
9972
9973 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
9974 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
9975 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
9976
9977 <blockquote><pre>
9978 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
9979 cd bitcoin
9980 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
9981 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
9982 </pre></blockquote>
9983
9984 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
9985 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
9986 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
9987 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
9988 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
9989 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
9990 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
9991 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
9992 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
9993
9994 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
9995 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
9996 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
9997
9998       </div>
9999       <div class="tags">
10000
10001
10002         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>.
10003
10004
10005       </div>
10006     </div>
10007     <div class="padding"></div>
10008
10009     <div class="entry">
10010       <div class="title">
10011         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
10012       </div>
10013       <div class="date">
10014         21st December 2012
10015       </div>
10016       <div class="body">
10017         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
10018 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
10019 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
10020 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
10021 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
10022 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
10023 is now maintained by a
10024 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
10025 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
10026 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
10027 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
10028 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
10029 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
10030 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
10031 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
10032 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
10033 Corallo in a
10034 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
10035 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
10036 Debian package.</p>
10037
10038 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
10039 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
10040 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
10041 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
10042 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
10043 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
10044 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
10045 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
10046 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
10047 new version to unstable.
10048
10049 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
10050 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
10051 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
10052 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
10053 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
10054 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
10055 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
10056 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
10057 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
10058 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
10059 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
10060 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
10061 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
10062 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
10063 have not tested them.</p>
10064
10065 <p>My
10066 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
10067 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
10068 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
10069 years ago, as can be
10070 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
10071 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
10072 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
10073 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
10074 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
10075 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
10076 the same address as last time,
10077 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
10078
10079       </div>
10080       <div class="tags">
10081
10082
10083         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>.
10084
10085
10086       </div>
10087     </div>
10088     <div class="padding"></div>
10089
10090     <div class="entry">
10091       <div class="title">
10092         <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>
10093       </div>
10094       <div class="date">
10095         18th December 2012
10096       </div>
10097       <div class="body">
10098         <p>A few days ago I came across
10099 <a href="http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/hledger/">a blog post from Joey
10100 Hess</a> describing <a href="http://ledger-cli.org/">ledger</a> and
10101 hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting.  I found it
10102 interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
10103 accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
10104 the different web based systems we use.  I find it hard to find what I
10105 look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
10106 the systems.  Ledger seem different.  The accounting data is kept in
10107 text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
10108
10109 are at least <a href="https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Ports">five
10110 different implementations</a> able to read the format.  An example
10111 entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
10112 generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:</p>
10113
10114 <blockquote><pre>
10115 2004-05-27 Book Store
10116       Expenses:Books                 $20.00
10117       Liabilities:Visa
10118 </pre></blockquote>
10119
10120 <p>The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
10121 look for others using it.  I found blog posts from
10122 <a href="http://blog.spang.cc/posts/hledger_rocks_my_world/">Christine
10123 Spang</a>,
10124 <a href="http://bugsplat.info/2010-05-23-keeping-finances-with-ledger.html">Pete
10125 Keen</a>,
10126 <a href="http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2010/11/06/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/">Andrew
10127 Cantino</a> and
10128 <a href="http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/2012/11/29/command-line-double-entry-accounting/">Ronald
10129 Ip</a> describing how they use it, as well as a post from
10130 <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ledger-cli/r0oWjwbQ9Bo">Bradley
10131 M. Kuhn</a> at the Software Freedom Conservancy.  All seemed like good
10132 recommendations fitting my need.</p>
10133
10134 <p>The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/ledger.html">ledger</a>
10135 package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
10136 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/haskell-hledger.html">hledger</a>
10137 package only is available in Debian Sid.  As I use Squeeze, ledger
10138 seemed the best choice to get started.</p>
10139
10140 <p>To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
10141 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/tools/lodo2ledger">web scraper</a> for
10142 <a href="http://www.lodo.no/">LODO</a>, the accounting system used by
10143 the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> association, and started to
10144 play with the data set.  I'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
10145 am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
10146 using the "<tt>ledger balance</tt>" command.  But I will have to
10147 gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
10148 for the organisations I am involved in.</p>
10149
10150       </div>
10151       <div class="tags">
10152
10153
10154         Tags: <a href="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>.
10155
10156
10157       </div>
10158     </div>
10159     <div class="padding"></div>
10160
10161     <div class="entry">
10162       <div class="title">
10163         <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>
10164       </div>
10165       <div class="date">
10166          6th December 2012
10167       </div>
10168       <div class="body">
10169         <p>Where I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of
10170 Oslo</a>, we use the
10171 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/cerebrum/">Cerebrum user
10172 administration system</a> to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
10173 I've known since the system was written that the server is providing
10174 an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC">XML-RPC</a> API, but
10175 I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we
10176 always use the bofh command line client at work.  Until today.  I want
10177 to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up
10178 virtual machines.  Here are a few notes on how to use it with
10179 Python.</p>
10180
10181 <p>I started by looking at the source of the Java
10182 <a href="http://cerebrum.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cerebrum/trunk/cerebrum/clients/jbofh/">bofh
10183 client</a>, to figure out how it connected to the API server.  I also
10184 googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
10185 <a href="http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XML-RPC-HOWTO/xmlrpc-howto-python.html">a
10186 simple example in</a> the XML-RPC howto.</p>
10187
10188 <p>This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
10189 commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
10190 user currently logged in:</p>
10191
10192 <blockquote><pre>
10193 #!/usr/bin/env python
10194 import getpass
10195 import xmlrpclib
10196 server_url = 'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:8000';
10197 username = getpass.getuser()
10198 password = getpass.getpass()
10199 server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
10200 #print server.get_commands(sessionid)
10201 sessionid = server.login(username, password)
10202 print server.run_command(sessionid, "user_info", username)
10203 result = server.logout(sessionid)
10204 print result
10205 </pre></blockquote>
10206
10207 <p>Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
10208 and DHCP updates I wanted to do.</p>
10209
10210       </div>
10211       <div class="tags">
10212
10213
10214         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>.
10215
10216
10217       </div>
10218     </div>
10219     <div class="padding"></div>
10220
10221     <div class="entry">
10222       <div class="title">
10223         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_the_value_of_copyright_taxed_.html">Why isn't the value of copyright taxed?</a>
10224       </div>
10225       <div class="date">
10226         17th November 2012
10227       </div>
10228       <div class="body">
10229         <p>While working on a
10230 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Norwegian
10231 translation of the Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig</a> (76% done),
10232 which cover the problems with todays copyright law and how it stifles
10233 creativity, one idea occurred to me.  The idea is to get the tax
10234 office to help make more works enter the public domain and also help
10235 make it easier to clear rights for using copyrighted works.</p>
10236
10237 <p>I mentioned this idea briefly during Yesterdays
10238 <a href="http://www.farmann.no/2012/11/14/john-perry-barlow-in-oslo-friday-nov-16
10239 -15-30-19-00/">presentation
10240 by John Perry Barlow</a>, and concluded that it was best to put it
10241 in writing for a wider audience.  The idea is not really based on the
10242 argument that copyrighted works are "intellectual property", as the
10243 core requirement is that copyrighted work have value for the copyright
10244 holder and the tax office like to collect their share from any value
10245 controlled by the citizens in a country.  I'm sharing the idea here to
10246 let others consider it and perhaps shoot it down with a fresh set of
10247 arguments.</p>
10248
10249 <p>Most valuables are taxed by the government.  At least here in
10250 Norway, the amount of money you have, the value of our land property,
10251 the value of your house, the value of your car, the value of our
10252 stocks and other valuables are all added together.  If the tax value
10253 of these values exceed your debt, you have to pay the tax office some
10254 taxes for these values.  And copyrighted work have value.  It have
10255 value for the rights holder, who can earn money selling access to the
10256 work.  But it is not included in the tax calculations?  Why not?</p>
10257
10258 <p>If the government want to tax copyrighted works, it would want to
10259 maintain a database of all the copyrighted works and who are the
10260 rights holders for a given works, to be able to associate the works
10261 value to the right citizen or company for tax purposes.  If such
10262 database exist, it will become a lot easier to find out who to talk to
10263 for clearing permissions to use a copyrighted work, which is a very
10264 hard operation with todays copyright law.  To ensure that copyright
10265 holders keep the database up-to-date, it would have to become a
10266 requirement to be able to collect money for granting access to
10267 copyrighted works that the work is listed in the database with the
10268 correct right holder.</p>
10269
10270 <p>If copyright causes copyright holders to have to pay more taxes,
10271 they will have a small incentive to "disown" their copyright, and let
10272 the work enter the public domain. For works with several right holders
10273 one of the right holders could state (and get it registered in the
10274 database) that she do not need to be consulted when clearing rights to
10275 use the work in question and thus will not get any income from that
10276 work.  Stating this would have to be impossible to revert and stop the
10277 tax office from adding the value of that work to the given citizens
10278 tax calculation.  I assume the copyright law would stay the same,
10279 allowing creators to pick a license of their choosing, and also
10280 allowing them to put their work directly in the public domain.  The
10281 existence of such database will make it even easier to clear rights,
10282 and if the right holders listed in the database is taxed, this system
10283 would increase the amount of works that enter the public domain.</p>
10284
10285 <p>The effect would be that the tax office help to make it easier to
10286 get rights to use the works that have not yet entered the public
10287 domain and help to get more work into the public domain and .</p>
10288
10289 <p>Why have such taxing not happened yet?  I am sure the tax office
10290 would like to tax copyrighted work values if they could.</p>
10291
10292       </div>
10293       <div class="tags">
10294
10295
10296         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>.
10297
10298
10299       </div>
10300     </div>
10301     <div class="padding"></div>
10302
10303     <div class="entry">
10304       <div class="title">
10305         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html">Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß</a>
10306       </div>
10307       <div class="date">
10308         14th November 2012
10309       </div>
10310       <div class="body">
10311         <p>Here is another interview with one of the people in the <a
10312 href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
10313 community.  I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
10314 if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
10315 After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
10316 the people behind the German
10317 "<a href="http://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/">IT-Zukunft Schule</a>"
10318 project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview.  Give a warm
10319 welcome to Angela Fuß. :)</p>
10320
10321 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
10322
10323 <p>I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
10324 Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my
10325 two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.
10326
10327 <p>At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
10328 the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
10329 Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
10330 growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
10331 system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-).  We are also
10332 in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.</p>
10333
10334 <p>In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
10335 nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there.  Besides
10336 that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
10337 working in our own school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" in North
10338 Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
10339 relationship management and the communication processes in the
10340 project.</p>
10341
10342 <p>Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
10343 and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
10344 and a yoga teacher.</p>
10345
10346 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
10347 project?</strong></p>
10348
10349 <p>I fell in love with Mike ;-).</p>
10350
10351 <p>Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
10352 Free Software.  At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
10353 founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
10354 their IT environment.  Often when Mike came home from working at the
10355 newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
10356 several points where the communication with the schools head or the
10357 teachers did not work.  So we were clear that he would not work for
10358 one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
10359 between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
10360 parents.</p>
10361
10362 <p>Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
10363 started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
10364 schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
10365 Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
10366 networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
10367 Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
10368 Germany.</p>
10369
10370 <p>For information about our school project you can read
10371 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">the
10372 interview with Mike Gabriel</a>.</p>
10373
10374 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10375 Edu?</strong></p>
10376
10377 <p>First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
10378 answer comes rather from a social point of view.</p>
10379
10380 <p>The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
10381 and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
10382 background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
10383 and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
10384 something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
10385 ;-). This is of course a user experience.  What I also get as a big
10386 advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
10387 works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
10388 teachers, parents...</p>
10389
10390 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10391 Edu?</strong></p>
10392
10393 <p>I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
10394 Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
10395
10396 <p>What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
10397 the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
10398 marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
10399 schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
10400 I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
10401
10402 <p>Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
10403 do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
10404 democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
10405 and helpful.  I am also missing some kind of contact between the
10406 Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
10407 level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
10408 different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
10409
10410 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
10411
10412 <p>On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
10413 on.  As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
10414 LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
10415 my N900 running with Maemo.</p>
10416
10417 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10418 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
10419
10420 <p>I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft
10421 Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
10422 schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
10423 that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
10424 strategy has three crucial pillars:</p>
10425
10426 <ul>
10427
10428 <li>We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
10429 concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
10430 kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.</li>
10431
10432 <li>Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
10433 are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
10434 beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
10435 they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
10436 they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
10437 needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
10438 we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.</li>
10439
10440 <li>Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
10441 co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
10442 contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
10443 offer to become more and more independent from us.</li>
10444
10445 </ul>
10446
10447       </div>
10448       <div class="tags">
10449
10450
10451         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
10452
10453
10454       </div>
10455     </div>
10456     <div class="padding"></div>
10457
10458     <div class="entry">
10459       <div class="title">
10460         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_European_Central_Bank__ECB__take_a_look_at_bitcoin.html">The European Central Bank (ECB) take a look at bitcoin</a>
10461       </div>
10462       <div class="date">
10463          4th November 2012
10464       </div>
10465       <div class="body">
10466         <p>Slashdot just ran a story about the European Central Bank (ECB)
10467 <a href="http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemes201210en.pdf">releasing
10468 a report (PDF)</a> about virtual currencies and
10469 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>.  It is interesting to
10470 see how a member of the bitcoin community
10471 <a href="http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/10/30/the-ecb-report-on-bitcoin-and-virtual-currencies.html">receive
10472 the report</a>.  As for the future, I suspect the central banks and
10473 the governments will outlaw bitcoin if it gain any popularity, to avoid
10474 competition.  My thoughts go to the
10475 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wörgl">Wörgl experiment</a> with
10476 negative inflation on cash which was such a success that it was
10477 terminated by the Austrian National Bank in 1933.  A successful
10478 alternative would be a threat to the current money system and gain
10479 powerful forces to work against it.</p>
10480
10481 <p>While checking out the current status of bitcoin, I also discovered
10482 that the community already seem to have
10483 <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/27/3271637/bitcoin-savings-trust-pyramid-scheme-shuts-down">experienced
10484 its first pyramid game / Ponzi scheme</a>.  Not very surprising, given
10485 how members of "small" communities tend to trust each other.  I guess
10486 enterprising crocks will try again and again, as they do anywhere
10487 wealth is available.</p>
10488
10489       </div>
10490       <div class="tags">
10491
10492
10493         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>.
10494
10495
10496       </div>
10497     </div>
10498     <div class="padding"></div>
10499
10500     <div class="entry">
10501       <div class="title">
10502         <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>
10503       </div>
10504       <div class="date">
10505         26th October 2012
10506       </div>
10507       <div class="body">
10508         <p>I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
10509 looking after the computers, mostly on the unix side, but in general
10510 all over the place.  I am also a member (and currently leader) of
10511 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG association</a>, which in turn
10512 make me a member of <a href="http://www.usenix.org/">USENIX</a>.  NUUG
10513 is an member organisation for us in Norway interested in free
10514 software, open standards and unix like operating systems, and USENIX
10515 is a US based member organisation with similar targets.  And thanks to
10516 these memberships, I get all issues of the great USENIX magazine
10517 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">;login:</a> in the
10518 mail several times a year.  The magazine is great, and I read most of
10519 it every time.</p>
10520
10521 <p>In the last issue of the USENIX magazine ;login:, there is an
10522 article by <a href="http://www.skendric.com/">Stuart Kendrick</a> from
10523 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center titled
10524 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/october-2012-volume-37-number-5/what-takes-us-down">What
10525 Takes Us Down</a>" (longer version also
10526 <a href="http://www.skendric.com/problem/incident-analysis/2012-06-30/What-Takes-Us-Down.pdf">available
10527 from his own site</a>), where he report what he found when he
10528 processed the outage reports (both planned and unplanned) from the
10529 last twelve years and classified them according to cause, time of day,
10530 etc etc.  The article is a good read to get some empirical data on
10531 what kind of problems affect a data centre, but what really inspired
10532 me was the kind of reporting they had put in place since 2000.<p>
10533
10534 <p>The centre set up a mailing list, and started to send fairly
10535 standardised messages to this list when a outage was planned or when
10536 it already occurred, to announce the plan and get feedback on the
10537 assumtions on scope and user impact.  Here is the two example from the
10538 article: First the unplanned outage:
10539
10540 <blockquote><pre>
10541 Subject:     Exchange 2003 Cluster Issues
10542 Severity:    Critical (Unplanned)
10543 Start:       Monday, May 7, 2012, 11:58
10544 End:         Monday, May 7, 2012, 12:38
10545 Duration:    40 minutes
10546 Scope:       Exchange 2003
10547 Description: The HTTPS service on the Exchange cluster crashed, triggering
10548              a cluster failover.
10549
10550 User Impact: During this period, all Exchange users were unable to
10551              access e-mail. Zimbra users were unaffected.
10552 Technician:  [xxx]
10553 </pre></blockquote>
10554
10555 Next the planned outage:
10556
10557 <blockquote><pre>
10558 Subject:     H Building Switch Upgrades
10559 Severity:    Major (Planned)
10560 Start:       Saturday, June 16, 2012, 06:00
10561 End:         Saturday, June 16, 2012, 16:00
10562 Duration:    10 hours
10563 Scope:       H2 Transport
10564 Description: Currently, Catalyst 4006s provide 10/100 Ethernet to end-
10565              stations. We will replace these with newer Catalyst
10566              4510s.
10567 User Impact: All users on H2 will be isolated from the network during
10568              this work. Afterward, they will have gigabit
10569              connectivity.
10570 Technician:  [xxx]
10571 </pre></blockquote>
10572
10573 <p>He notes in his article that the date formats and other fields have
10574 been a bit too free form to make it easy to automatically process them
10575 into a database for further analysis, and I would have used ISO 8601
10576 dates myself to make it easier to process (in other words I would ask
10577 people to write '2012-06-16 06:00 +0000' instead of the start time
10578 format listed above).  There are also other issues with the format
10579 that could be improved, read the article for the details.</p>
10580
10581 <p>I find the idea of standardising outage messages seem to be such a
10582 good idea that I would like to get it implemented here at the
10583 university too.  We do register
10584 <a href="http://www.uio.no/tjenester/it/aktuelt/planlagte-tjenesteavbrudd/">planned
10585 changes and outages in a calendar</a>, and report the to a mailing
10586 list, but we do not do so in a structured format and there is not a
10587 report to the same location for unplanned outages.  Perhaps something
10588 for other sites to consider too?</p>
10589
10590       </div>
10591       <div class="tags">
10592
10593
10594         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>.
10595
10596
10597       </div>
10598     </div>
10599     <div class="padding"></div>
10600
10601     <div class="entry">
10602       <div class="title">
10603         <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>
10604       </div>
10605       <div class="date">
10606         22nd October 2012
10607       </div>
10608       <div class="body">
10609         <p>A blog post from Martin Bekkelund today tell the story of
10610 <a href="http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/">how
10611 Amazon erased the books from a customer's kindle, locked the account
10612 and refuse to tell the customer why</a>.  If a real book store did
10613 this to a customer, it would be called breaking into private property
10614 and theft.  The story has spread around the net today.  A bit more
10615 background information is available in Norwegian from
10616 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904658/hun-ble-kastet-ut-av-amazon">digi.no</a>.
10617 It is no surprise that digital restriction mechanisms (DRM) are used
10618 this way, as it has been warned about such abuse since DRM was
10619 introduced many years back.  And Amazon proved in 2009 that it was
10620 willing to
10621 <a href="http://boingboing.net/2009/07/20/amazons-orwellian-de.html">
10622 break into customers equipment and remove the books</a> people had
10623 bought, when it removed the book 1984 by George Orwell from all the
10624 customers who had bought it.  From the official comments, it even
10625 sounded like
10626 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html">Amazon
10627 would never do that again</a>.  And here we are, three years
10628 later.</p>
10629
10630 <p>And thought this action is
10631 <a href="http://www.itavisen.no/904648/forbrukerraadet-helt-haarreisende">against
10632 Norwegian regulations and law</a>, it is according to the terms of use
10633 as written by Amazon, and it is hard to hold Amazon accountable to
10634 Norwegian laws.  It is just yet another example of unacceptable terms
10635 of use on the web, and how they are used to remove customer
10636 rights.</p>
10637
10638 <p>Luckily for electronic books, there are alternatives without
10639 unacceptable terms.  For example
10640 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about 40,000
10641 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a> (1,652
10642 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The Internet
10643 Archive</a> (3,641,797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which
10644 can read by anyone and shared with anyone.</p>
10645
10646 <p>Update 2012-10-23: This story broke in the morning on Monday. In
10647 the evening after the story had spread all across the Internet, Amazon
10648 restored the account of the user, as reported by
10649 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904675/helomvending-fra-amazon">digi.no</a>
10650 and <a href="http://nrk.no/kultur-og-underholdning/1.8368487">NRK</a>.
10651 Apparently public pressure work.  The story from Martin have seen
10652 several twitter messages per minute the last 24 hours, which is quite
10653 a lot, and is still drawing a lot of attention.  But even when the
10654 account is restored, the fundamental problem still exist.  I recommend
10655 reading two opinions from
10656 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm">Simon
10657 Phipps</a> and
10658 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/10/is-amazon-playing-fair/index.htm">Glen
10659 Moody</a> if you want to learn more about the fundamentals and more
10660 details about the original story.</p>
10661
10662       </div>
10663       <div class="tags">
10664
10665
10666         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>.
10667
10668
10669       </div>
10670     </div>
10671     <div class="padding"></div>
10672
10673     <div class="entry">
10674       <div class="title">
10675         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_fight_for_freedom_and_privacy.html">The fight for freedom and privacy</a>
10676       </div>
10677       <div class="date">
10678         18th October 2012
10679       </div>
10680       <div class="body">
10681         <p>Civil liberties and privacy in the western world are going down the
10682 drain, and it is hard to fight against it.  I try to do my best, but
10683 time is limited.  I hope you do your best too.  A few years ago I came
10684 across a marvellous drawing by
10685 <a href="http://www.claybennett.com/about.html">Clay Bennett</a>
10686 visualising some of what is going on.
10687
10688 <p><a href="http://www.claybennett.com/pages/security_fence.html">
10689 <img src="http://www.claybennett.com/images/archivetoons/security_fence.jpg"></a></p>
10690
10691 <blockquote>
10692 «They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
10693 safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.» - Benjamin Franklin
10694 </blockquote>
10695
10696 <p>Do you feel safe at the airport?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when
10697 you see a surveillance camera?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when you
10698 leave electronic traces of your behaviour and opinions?  I do not.  I
10699 just remember <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon">the
10700 Panopticon</a>, and can not help to think that we are slowly
10701 transforming our society to a huge Panopticon on our own.</p>
10702
10703       </div>
10704       <div class="tags">
10705
10706
10707         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>.
10708
10709
10710       </div>
10711     </div>
10712     <div class="padding"></div>
10713
10714     <div class="entry">
10715       <div class="title">
10716         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColonHelp_produser_sue_WordPress_to_silence_critic.html">ColonHelp produser sue WordPress to silence critic</a>
10717       </div>
10718       <div class="date">
10719         12th October 2012
10720       </div>
10721       <div class="body">
10722         <p>Thanks to a blog post by
10723 <a href="http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.no/2012/10/a-shitstorm-is-comming.html">Eddy
10724 Petrișor</a>, I became aware of yet another "alternative medicine"
10725 company using legal intimidation tactics to scare off critics.
10726 According to the originating blog post about the detox "cure"
10727 <a href="http://insulaindoielii.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/colon-help-sues-wordpress/">ColonHelp
10728 and its producers Zenyth Pharmaceuticals actions</a>, the producer
10729 sues Wordpress to get rid of the critical information.  To check if
10730 the story was for real, I contacted Automattic, the company behind
10731 wordpress.com, and they reply was "We can confirm that Zenyth is
10732 seeking a court order against WordPress / Automattic.  However, we
10733 don't believe the Terms of Service have been violated in this
10734 matter".</p>
10735
10736 <p>The story seem to be simply that a blogger checked the scientific
10737 foundation for a popular health product in Rumania, ColonHelp, and
10738 reported that there was no reason at all to believe it improved the
10739 health of its users.  This caused the company behind the product,
10740 Zenyth Pharmaceuticals, to use legal intimidation to try to silence
10741 the critic, instead of presenting its views and scientific foundation
10742 to argue its side.</p>
10743
10744 <p>This is the usual story, and the Zenyth Pharmaceuticals company
10745 deserve everyone to know how it failed to act properly.  Lets hope the
10746 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect">Streisand
10747 effect</a> can make it rethink its strategy.</p>
10748
10749 <p>What is the harm, you might think.  I suggest you take a look at
10750 <a href="http://www.whatstheharm.net/detoxification.html">a list of
10751 victims of detoxification</a>.</p>
10752
10753       </div>
10754       <div class="tags">
10755
10756
10757         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>.
10758
10759
10760       </div>
10761     </div>
10762     <div class="padding"></div>
10763
10764     <div class="entry">
10765       <div class="title">
10766         <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>
10767       </div>
10768       <div class="date">
10769          3rd October 2012
10770       </div>
10771       <div class="body">
10772         <p>I just read the blog post from Tim Retout
10773 <a href="http://retout.co.uk/blog/2012/10/02/the-library-challenge">about
10774 the computer science book collection available in his local
10775 library</a>, and just wanted to share my comment on his theory about
10776 computer books becoming obsolete so soon.  That is part of the reason
10777 why the selection is so sad in almost any local library (it is in mine
10778 too), but I believe the major contributing factor is that the people
10779 buying books to the library have no way to know a good and future
10780 computer classic from trash.  And they need to know which one will
10781 become a classic in the future, as they would normally buy one of the
10782 recently published books.</p>
10783
10784 <p>During my university years, I worked for a while at the university
10785 library, and even there the person in charge of buying computer
10786 related books (and in fact any natural science related book), did not
10787 know enough about computers to make a good educated guess.  Once, just
10788 before Christmas, they had some leftover money on the book budget and
10789 I was asked if I could pick out a lot of computer books in the
10790 university book store, for the library to buy for their collection.  I
10791 had a great time picking all the books I dreamt of buying and reading,
10792 and the books I knew were classics (like most of the
10793 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens">Stevens
10794 collection</a>).  I picked several of the generic O'Reilly books (ie
10795 documenting protocols, formats and systems, not specific versions of
10796 products) and stayed away from the 'teach yourself X in N days' class.
10797 I had a great time, and probably picked out more than a hundred books
10798 for the library that evening.</p>
10799
10800 <p>The sad fact is that there is no way a overworked librarian is
10801 going to know that for example
10802 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming">The
10803 Practice of Programming</a> is a must-have in any computer library,
10804 and they will most of the time end up picking the wrong books to buy.
10805 Perhaps you can help your local library make better choices by giving
10806 the suggestions for books to get?  I know they would love to hear from
10807 you, even if their budget might block them from getting your favourite
10808 book right away.</p>
10809
10810       </div>
10811       <div class="tags">
10812
10813
10814         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10815
10816
10817       </div>
10818     </div>
10819     <div class="padding"></div>
10820
10821     <div class="entry">
10822       <div class="title">
10823         <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>
10824       </div>
10825       <div class="date">
10826         23rd September 2012
10827       </div>
10828       <div class="body">
10829         <p>Since this summer, I have worked in my spare time on a Norwegian <a
10830 href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book <a
10831 href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
10832 The reason is that this book is a great primer on what problems exist
10833 in the current copyright laws, and I want it to be available also for
10834 those that are reluctant do read an English book.
10835
10836 When I started, I
10837 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
10838 for volunteers</a> to help me, but too few have volunteered so far,
10839 and progress is a bit slow.  Anyway, today I broken the 70 percent
10840 mark for the first rough translation.  At the moment, less than 700
10841 strings (paragraphs, index terms, titles) are left to translate.  With
10842 my current progress of 10-20 strings per day, it will take a while to
10843 complete the translation.  This graph show the updated progress:</p>
10844
10845 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
10846
10847 <p>Progress have slowed down lately due to family and work
10848 commitments.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out
10849 the project files currently available from
10850 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
10851
10852 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
10853 the updated
10854 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
10855 and
10856 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
10857 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
10858 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
10859 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
10860
10861       </div>
10862       <div class="tags">
10863
10864
10865         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>.
10866
10867
10868       </div>
10869     </div>
10870     <div class="padding"></div>
10871
10872     <div class="entry">
10873       <div class="title">
10874         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html">Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda</a>
10875       </div>
10876       <div class="date">
10877         17th September 2012
10878       </div>
10879       <div class="body">
10880         <p>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
10881 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
10882 community, I finally found time to wrap up another.  This time it is
10883 Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
10884 this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
10885 administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
10886 conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.</p>
10887
10888 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
10889
10890 <p>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
10891 in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
10892 university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
10893 Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
10894 IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
10895 got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
10896 labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
10897 the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
10898 training is anyway very important</p>
10899
10900 <p>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
10901 <a href="http://www.spse.ch/">SPSE school</a> (secondary) is a very
10902 special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
10903 all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
10904 recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
10905
10906 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
10907 project?</strong></p>
10908
10909 <p>Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
10910 already several years ago. But since the system was still not
10911 Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
10912 use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
10913 next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
10914 hole.</p>
10915
10916 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
10917 Edu?</strong></p>
10918
10919 <p>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
10920 very generous for help and hints.  Chat help is crucial, together with
10921 the mailing list.  Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
10922 engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
10923 and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
10924 can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
10925 platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
10926 head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
10927 hassle.</p>
10928
10929 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
10930 Edu?</strong></p>
10931
10932 <p>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
10933 flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
10934 there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
10935 need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
10936 devices that have specific software packages for another specific
10937 distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
10938 Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
10939 and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)</p>
10940
10941 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
10942
10943 <p>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
10944 mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
10945 combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
10946 <a href="http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html">Perceus</a>
10947 has the same...</p>
10948
10949 <p>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
10950 only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
10951 something breaks.  Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
10952 statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.</p>
10953
10954 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10955 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
10956
10957 <P>I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
10958 cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
10959 just because they are normally not open to change.</p>
10960
10961 <p>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
10962 to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
10963 don't.</p>
10964
10965 <p>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
10966 laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
10967 we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
10968 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
10969 reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
10970 repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
10971 Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.</p>
10972
10973       </div>
10974       <div class="tags">
10975
10976
10977         Tags: <a href="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>.
10978
10979
10980       </div>
10981     </div>
10982     <div class="padding"></div>
10983
10984     <div class="entry">
10985       <div class="title">
10986         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html">IETF activity to standardise video codec</a>
10987       </div>
10988       <div class="date">
10989         15th September 2012
10990       </div>
10991       <div class="body">
10992         <p>After the
10993 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">Opus
10994 codec made</a> it into <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> as
10995 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716</a>, I had a look
10996 to see if there is any activity in IETF to standardise a video codec
10997 too, and I was happy to discover that there is some activity in this
10998 area.  A non-"working group" mailing list
10999 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/video-codec">video-codec</a>
11000 was
11001 <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
11002 formal working group should be formed.</p>
11003
11004 <p>I look forward to see how this plays out.  There is already
11005 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/video-codec/current/msg00003.html">an
11006 email from someone</a> in the MPEG group at ISO asking people to
11007 participate in the ISO group.  Given how ISO failed with OOXML and given
11008 that it so far (as far as I can remember) only have produced
11009 multimedia formats requiring royalty payments, I suspect
11010 joining the ISO group would be a complete waste of time, but I am not
11011 involved in any codec work and my opinion will not matter much.</p>
11012
11013 <p>If one of my readers is involved with codec work, I hope she will
11014 join this work to standardise a royalty free video codec within
11015 IETF.</p>
11016
11017       </div>
11018       <div class="tags">
11019
11020
11021         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>.
11022
11023
11024       </div>
11025     </div>
11026     <div class="padding"></div>
11027
11028     <div class="entry">
11029       <div class="title">
11030         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">IETF standardize its first multimedia codec: Opus</a>
11031       </div>
11032       <div class="date">
11033         12th September 2012
11034       </div>
11035       <div class="body">
11036         <p>Yesterday, <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> announced the
11037 publication of of
11038 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716, the Definition
11039 of the Opus Audio Codec</a>, a low latency, variable bandwidth, codec
11040 intended for both VoIP, film and music.  This is the first time, as
11041 far as I know, that IETF have standardized a multimedia codec.  In
11042 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3533">RFC 3533</a>, IETF
11043 standardized the OGG container format, and it has proven to be a great
11044 royalty free container for audio, video and movies.  I hope IETF will
11045 continue to standardize more royalty free codeces, after ISO and MPEG
11046 have proven incapable of securing everyone equal rights to publish
11047 multimedia content on the Internet.</p>
11048
11049 <p>IETF require two interoperating independent implementations to
11050 ratify a standard, and have so far ensured to only standardize royalty
11051 free specifications.  Both are key factors to allow everyone (rich and
11052 poor), to compete on equal terms on the Internet.</p>
11053
11054 <p>Visit the <a href="http://opus-codec.org/">Opus project page</a> if
11055 you want to learn more about the solution.</p>
11056
11057       </div>
11058       <div class="tags">
11059
11060
11061         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>.
11062
11063
11064       </div>
11065     </div>
11066     <div class="padding"></div>
11067
11068     <div class="entry">
11069       <div class="title">
11070         <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>
11071       </div>
11072       <div class="date">
11073          7th September 2012
11074       </div>
11075       <div class="body">
11076         <p>As I
11077 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
11078 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
11079 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
11080 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
11081 repository for the project</a>.</p>
11082
11083 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
11084 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
11085 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
11086 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
11087
11088 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
11089 PostScript formats at
11090 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
11091 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
11092
11093       </div>
11094       <div class="tags">
11095
11096
11097         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>.
11098
11099
11100       </div>
11101     </div>
11102     <div class="padding"></div>
11103
11104     <div class="entry">
11105       <div class="title">
11106         <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>
11107       </div>
11108       <div class="date">
11109         23rd August 2012
11110       </div>
11111       <div class="body">
11112         <p>I came across a great comment from Simon Phipps today, about how
11113 <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/how-microsoft-was-forced-open-office-200233">Microsoft
11114 have been forced to open Office</a>, and it made me remember and
11115 revisit the great site
11116 <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">officeshots</a> which allow you
11117 to check out how different programs present the ODF file format.  I
11118 recommend both to those of my readers interested in ODF. :)</p>
11119
11120       </div>
11121       <div class="tags">
11122
11123
11124         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>.
11125
11126
11127       </div>
11128     </div>
11129     <div class="padding"></div>
11130
11131     <div class="entry">
11132       <div class="title">
11133         <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>
11134       </div>
11135       <div class="date">
11136         17th August 2012
11137       </div>
11138       <div class="body">
11139         <p>In my spare time, I currently work on a Norwegian
11140 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
11141 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
11142 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law
11143 I can give to my parents and others that are reluctant to read an
11144 English book.  It is a marvellous set of examples on how the ever
11145 expanding copyright regulations hurt culture and society.  When the
11146 translation is done, I hope to find funding to print and ship a copy
11147 to all the members of the Norwegian parliament, before they sit down
11148 to debate the latest revisions to the Norwegian copyright law.  This
11149 summer I
11150 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
11151 for volunteers</a> to help me, and I have been able to secure the
11152 valuable contribution from at least one other Norwegian.</p>
11153
11154 <p>Two days ago, we finally broke the 50% mark.  Then more than 50% of
11155 the number of strings to translate (normally paragraphs, but also
11156 titles and index entries are also counted).  All parts from the
11157 beginning up to and including chapter four is translated.  So is
11158 chapters six, seven and the conclusion.  I created a graph to show the
11159 progress:</p>
11160
11161 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
11162
11163 <p>The number of strings to translate increase as I insert the index
11164 entries into the docbook.  They were missing with the docbook version
11165 I initially started with.  There are still quite a few index entries
11166 missing, but everyone starting with A, B, O, Z and Y are done.  I
11167 currently focus on completing the index entries, to get a complete
11168 english version of the docbook source.</p>
11169
11170 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
11171 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
11172 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
11173 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
11174 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
11175 around?  I am sure there are some legal terms that are unfamiliar to
11176 me.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out the
11177 project files currently available from <a
11178 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
11179
11180 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
11181 the updated
11182 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
11183 and
11184 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
11185 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
11186 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
11187 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
11188
11189       </div>
11190       <div class="tags">
11191
11192
11193         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>.
11194
11195
11196       </div>
11197     </div>
11198     <div class="padding"></div>
11199
11200     <div class="entry">
11201       <div class="title">
11202         <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>
11203       </div>
11204       <div class="date">
11205         10th August 2012
11206       </div>
11207       <div class="body">
11208         <p>In <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> one can specify
11209 the language used at the top, and the processing pipeline will use
11210 this information to pick the correct translations for 'chapter', 'see
11211 also', 'index' etc.  And for most languages used with docbook, I guess
11212 this work just fine.  For example a German user can start the document
11213 with &lt;book lang="de"&gt;, and the document will show up with the
11214 correct content with any of the docbook processors.  This is not the
11215 case for the language
11216 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html">I
11217 am working with at the moment</a>, Norwegian Bokmål.</p>
11218
11219 <p>For a while, I was confused about which language code to use,
11220 because I was unable to find any language code that would work across
11221 all tools.  I am currently testing dblatex, xmlto, docbook-xsl, and
11222 dbtoepub, and they do not handle Norwegian Bokmål the same way.  Some
11223 of them do not handle it at all.</p>
11224
11225 <p>A bit of background information is probably needed to understand
11226 this mess.  Norwegian is not one, but two written variants.  The
11227 variants are Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål.  There are three
11228 two letter language codes associated with these languages, Norwegian
11229 is 'no', Norwegian Nynorsk is 'nn' and Norwegian Bokmål is 'nb'.
11230 Historically the 'no' language code was used for Norwegian Bokmål, but
11231 many years ago this was found to be å bad idea, and the recommendation
11232 is to use the most specific language code instead, to avoid confusion.
11233 In the transition period it is a good idea to make sure 'no' was an
11234 alias for 'nb'.</p>
11235
11236 <p>Back to docbook processing tools in Debian.  The dblatex tool only
11237 understand 'nn'.  There are translations for 'no', but not 'nb' (BTS
11238 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/684391">#684391</a>), but due to a bug
11239 (BTS <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">#682936</a>) the 'no'
11240 language code is not recognised.  The docbook-xsl tool chain only
11241 recognise 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The xmlto tool only recognise
11242 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The end result that there is no language
11243 code I can use to get the docbook file working with all of these tools
11244 at the same time. :(</p>
11245
11246 <p>The correct solution is to use &lt;book lang="nb"&gt;, but it will
11247 take time before that will work with all the free software docbook
11248 processors. :(</p>
11249
11250 <p>Oh, the joy of well integrated tools. :/</p>
11251
11252       </div>
11253       <div class="tags">
11254
11255
11256         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>.
11257
11258
11259       </div>
11260     </div>
11261     <div class="padding"></div>
11262
11263     <div class="entry">
11264       <div class="title">
11265         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html">Best way to create a docbook book?</a>
11266       </div>
11267       <div class="date">
11268         31st July 2012
11269       </div>
11270       <div class="body">
11271         <p>I tried to send this text to the
11272 <a href="https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/">docbook-apps
11273 mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org</a>, but it only accept messages
11274 from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
11275 bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
11276 try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
11277 out.</p>
11278
11279 <p>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
11280 learning curve at the moment.</p>
11281
11282 <p>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
11283 translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
11284 docbook to handle the process.  The files to build the book are
11285 available from
11286 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.
11287 The book got around 400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
11288 index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
11289 software docbook processors.  My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
11290 Squeeze.</p>
11291
11292 <p>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
11293 tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
11294 formats.  I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
11295 problems.</p>
11296
11297 <ul>
11298
11299 <li>Using dblatex, the &lt;part&gt; handling is not the way I want to,
11300    as &lt;/part&gt; do not really end the &lt;part&gt;. (See
11301    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683166">BTS report #683166</a>), the
11302    xetex backend (needed to process UTF-8) give incorrect hyphens in
11303    index references spanning several pages (See
11304    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682901">BTS report #682901</a>), and
11305    I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
11306    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">BTS report #682936</a>).</li>
11307
11308 <li>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
11309    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683163">BTS report
11310    #683163</a>).</li>
11311
11312 <li>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
11313    show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
11314    footnote and text body, see
11315    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683197">BTS report #683197</a>), and
11316    fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
11317    refs listed are not right).</li>
11318
11319 <li>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.</li>
11320
11321 <li>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
11322    index problems the xmlto + fop processing.</li>
11323
11324 </ul>
11325
11326 <p>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
11327 of this book?  Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
11328 experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?</p>
11329
11330 <p>What about HTML and EPUB versions?</p>
11331
11332       </div>
11333       <div class="tags">
11334
11335
11336         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>.
11337
11338
11339       </div>
11340     </div>
11341     <div class="padding"></div>
11342
11343     <div class="entry">
11344       <div class="title">
11345         <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>
11346       </div>
11347       <div class="date">
11348         21st July 2012
11349       </div>
11350       <div class="body">
11351         <p>I reported earlier that I am working on
11352 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">a
11353 norwegian version</a> of the book
11354 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
11355 Progress is good, and yesterday I got a major contribution from Anders
11356 Hagen Jarmund completing chapter six.  The source files as well as a
11357 PDF and EPUB version of this book are available from
11358 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
11359
11360 <p>I am happy to report that the draft for the first two chapters
11361 (preface, introduction) is complete, and three other chapters are also
11362 completely translated.  This completes 26 percent of the number of
11363 strings (equivalent to paragraphs) in the book, and there is thus 74
11364 percent left to translate.  A graph of the progress is present at the
11365 bottom of the github project page.  There is still room for more
11366 contributors.  Get in touch or send github pull requests with fixes if
11367 you got time and are willing to help make this book make it to
11368 print. :)</p>
11369
11370 <p>The book translation framework could also be a good basis for other
11371 translations, if you want the book to be available in your
11372 language.</p>
11373
11374       </div>
11375       <div class="tags">
11376
11377
11378         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>.
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/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>
11388       </div>
11389       <div class="date">
11390         16th July 2012
11391       </div>
11392       <div class="body">
11393         <p>I am currently working on a
11394 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">project
11395 to translate</a> the book
11396 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig
11397 to Norwegian.  And the source we base our translation on is the
11398 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook">docbook</a> version, to
11399 allow us to use po4a and .po files to handle the translation, and for
11400 this to work well the docbook source document need to be properly
11401 tagged.  The source files of this project is available from
11402 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
11403
11404 <p>The problem is that the docbook source have flaws, and we have
11405 no-one involved in the project that is a docbook expert.  Is there a
11406 docbook expert somewhere that is interested in helping us create a
11407 well tagged docbook version of the book, and adjust our build process
11408 for the PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book?  This will provide a
11409 well tagged English version (our source document), and make it a lot
11410 easier for us to create a good Norwegian version.  If you can and want
11411 to help, please get in touch with me or fork the github project and
11412 send pull requests with fixes. :)</p>
11413
11414       </div>
11415       <div class="tags">
11416
11417
11418         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>.
11419
11420
11421       </div>
11422     </div>
11423     <div class="padding"></div>
11424
11425     <div class="entry">
11426       <div class="title">
11427         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html">Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg</a>
11428       </div>
11429       <div class="date">
11430          9th July 2012
11431       </div>
11432       <div class="body">
11433         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
11434 Skolelinux</a> project have users all over the globe, but until
11435 recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
11436 country Sweden.  This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
11437 this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
11438 to adjust and scale the just released
11439 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
11440 Wheezy</a> setup to his liking.  He granted me an interview, and I am
11441 happy to share his answers with you here.</p>
11442
11443 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
11444
11445 <p>I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
11446 the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
11447 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
11448 "folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups.  In
11449 Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
11450 in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
11451 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
11452 perspective when working with IT.</p>
11453
11454 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
11455 project?</strong></p>
11456
11457 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
11458 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
11459 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
11460 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
11461 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
11462 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
11463
11464 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
11465 Edu?</strong></p>
11466
11467 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
11468 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
11469 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
11470 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
11471 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
11472 well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
11473 when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
11474 showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
11475 mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
11476 same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
11477 setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
11478 workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
11479 thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
11480 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
11481 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
11482 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
11483 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
11484 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time.  Our
11485 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
11486 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
11487 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
11488 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
11489 quicker to update.
11490
11491 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
11492 Edu?</strong></p>
11493
11494 <p>Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
11495 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
11496 year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
11497 sound from working with them.  It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
11498 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
11499 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.</p>
11500
11501 <p>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
11502 install time.  In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
11503 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
11504 That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
11505 Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
11506 to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
11507 support for single-sign on.  That will make the transition to free
11508 software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
11509 need.  No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
11510 some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
11511 run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes.  We run a journalist
11512 education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
11513 by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association).  Our
11514 education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
11515 are done.  This is important if you want to get a job.</p>
11516
11517 <p>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
11518 magazines.  We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
11519 market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
11520 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
11521 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
11522 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
11523 edit and compile a newspaper.  But politically at our school we are not
11524 there yet.  And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.</p>
11525
11526 <p>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
11527 the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
11528 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
11529 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
11530 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
11531 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
11532 studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
11533 want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise.  Those
11534 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
11535 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
11536 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
11537 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
11538 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
11539 sound file.</p>
11540
11541 <p>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
11542 will try.  The problem is the students have certain expectations when
11543 they start an education towards a profession.  So the programs has to
11544 look and feel professional.  Good thing with radio, there are many
11545 programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
11546 as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
11547 program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
11548 learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
11549 the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.</p>
11550
11551 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
11552
11553 <p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days.  I use almost
11554 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
11555 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
11556 )</p>
11557
11558 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
11559 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
11560
11561 <p>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
11562 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
11563 it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
11564 flawlessly.  The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
11565 will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
11566 students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
11567 clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
11568 idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
11569 the administration.  It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
11570 open source, if the principal has to run Windows.  It also creates a
11571 problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
11572 will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
11573 support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
11574 desktop is essential.  At least at our school, where we have mixed
11575 level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
11576
11577 <p>Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
11578 useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
11579 article <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/481607/">Radio station
11580 management with Airtime</a>,
11581 <a href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/">Airtime</a> which
11582 claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
11583 <a href="http://www.rivendellaudio.org/">Rivendell</a> which claim to
11584 be complete radio broadcast automation solution.  All of them seem
11585 useful to the aspiring radio producer.</p>
11586
11587       </div>
11588       <div class="tags">
11589
11590
11591         Tags: <a href="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>.
11592
11593
11594       </div>
11595     </div>
11596     <div class="padding"></div>
11597
11598     <div class="entry">
11599       <div class="title">
11600         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html">Why do schools waste money on IT?</a>
11601       </div>
11602       <div class="date">
11603          8th July 2012
11604       </div>
11605       <div class="body">
11606         <p>In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
11607 of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
11608 in schools and municipalities.  We provide what the happy users of
11609 Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
11610 alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution.  I
11611 was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
11612 Steinberg in his blog post
11613 "<a href="http://www.mysociety.org/2012/06/19/can-you-recognize-the-million-pound-chair/">Can
11614 you recognize the million pound chair?</a>".  Read it and weep for the
11615 spending of your tax money.</p>
11616
11617 <p>Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
11618 projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
11619 causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
11620 to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
11621 public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
11622 purchases.</p>
11623
11624       </div>
11625       <div class="tags">
11626
11627
11628         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11629
11630
11631       </div>
11632     </div>
11633     <div class="padding"></div>
11634
11635     <div class="entry">
11636       <div class="title">
11637         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html">Free Timetabling Software - nice free software</a>
11638       </div>
11639       <div class="date">
11640          7th July 2012
11641       </div>
11642       <div class="body">
11643         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
11644 Skolelinux</a> is a large collection of end user and school specific
11645 software.  It is one of the packages not installed by default but
11646 provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
11647 is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
11648 information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
11649 the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
11650 receive.  The software is
11651
11652 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/">named FET</a>, and it provide a
11653 graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
11654 result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
11655 both teachers and students.  It is available both for
11656 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download.html">Linux, MacOSX and
11657 Windows</a>.</p>
11658
11659 <p>This is <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/features.html">the
11660 feature list</a>, liftet from the project web site:</p>
11661
11662 <p><ul>
11663
11664   <li>FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
11665     You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it </li>
11666
11667   <li>Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
11668     (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
11669     (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
11670     (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
11671     (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
11672     (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
11673     sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
11674     (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
11675     </li>
11676
11677   <li>Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
11678     semi-automatic or manual allocation</li>
11679
11680   <li>Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
11681     GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports </li>
11682
11683   <li>Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
11684     with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)</li>
11685
11686   <li>Import/export from CSV format</li>
11687
11688   <li>The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
11689     formats </li>
11690
11691   <li>Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
11692     and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
11693     non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
11694     (as separate sets)</li>
11695
11696   <li>Each constraint has a weight percentage, from 0.0% to 100.0%
11697     (but some special constraints are allowed to have only 100% weight
11698     percentage)</li>
11699
11700   <li>Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
11701     demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
11702     memory):
11703     <ul>
11704       <li>Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day: 60</li>
11705       <li>Maximum number of working days per week: 35</li>
11706       <li>Maximum total number of teachers: 6000</li>
11707       <li>Maximum total number of sets of students: 30000</li>
11708       <li>Maximum total number of subjects: 6000</li>
11709       <li>Virtually unlimited number of activity tags</li>
11710       <li>Maximum number of activities: 30000</li>
11711       <li>Maximum number of rooms: 6000</li>
11712       <li>Maximum number of buildings: 6000</li>
11713       <li>Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
11714           students sets for each activity.  (it is possible
11715           also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
11716           activity)</li>
11717       <li>Virtually unlimited number of time constraints</li>
11718       <li>Virtually unlimited number of space constraints</li>
11719     </ul></li>
11720
11721   <li>A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
11722     <ul>
11723       <li>Break periods</li>
11724       <li>For teacher(s):
11725         <ul>
11726           <li>Not available periods</li>
11727           <li>Max/min days per week</li>
11728           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
11729           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
11730           <li>Min hours daily</li>
11731           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
11732
11733           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
11734             days per week</li>
11735         </ul></li>
11736       <li>For students (sets):
11737         <ul>
11738           <li>Not available periods</li>
11739           <li>Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)</li>
11740           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
11741           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
11742           <li>Min hours daily</li>
11743           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
11744
11745           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
11746             days per week</li>
11747         </ul></li>
11748       <li>For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
11749         <ul>
11750           <li>A single preferred starting time</li>
11751           <li>A set of preferred starting times</li>
11752           <li>A set of preferred time slots</li>
11753           <li>Min/max days between them</li>
11754           <li>End(s) students day</li>
11755           <li>Same starting time/day/hour</li>
11756           <li>Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
11757             flexible constraint, useful in many situations)</li>
11758           <li>Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for 2 or 3 (sub)activities)</li>
11759           <li>Not overlapping</li>
11760           <li>Max simultaneous in selected time slots</li>
11761           <li>Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities</li>
11762         </ul></li>
11763     </ul></li>
11764
11765   <li>A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
11766     <ul>
11767       <li>Room not available periods</li>
11768       <li>For teacher(s):
11769         <ul>
11770           <li>Home room(s)</li>
11771           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
11772           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
11773         </ul>
11774       </li>
11775
11776       <li>For students (sets):
11777         <ul>
11778           <li>Home room(s)</li>
11779           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
11780           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
11781         </ul>
11782       </li>
11783       <li>Preferred room(s):
11784         <ul>
11785           <li>For a subject</li>
11786           <li>For an activity tag</li>
11787           <li>For a subject and an activity tag</li>
11788           <li>Individually for a (sub)activity</li>
11789         </ul>
11790       </li>
11791
11792       <li>For a set of activities:
11793         <ul>
11794           <li>Occupy a maximum number of different rooms</li>
11795         </ul>
11796       </li>
11797     </ul>
11798   </li>
11799 </ul></p>
11800
11801 <p>I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
11802 planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it.  If you
11803 need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
11804 manually, check it out.
11805
11806 A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
11807 <a href="http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/2012/03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/">a
11808 blog post from MarvelSoft</a>.  If you find FET useful, please provide
11809 a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
11810 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos">Debian Edu HowTo
11811 section</a>.</p>
11812
11813       </div>
11814       <div class="tags">
11815
11816
11817         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11818
11819
11820       </div>
11821     </div>
11822     <div class="padding"></div>
11823
11824     <div class="entry">
11825       <div class="title">
11826         <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>
11827       </div>
11828       <div class="date">
11829          3rd July 2012
11830       </div>
11831       <div class="body">
11832         <p>In the NUUG <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a>
11833 project (Norwegian version of
11834 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> from
11835 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>), we have discovered
11836 a problem with the municipalities using
11837 <a href="http://www.zimbra.com/">Zimbra</a>.  When FiksGataMi send a
11838 problem report to the government, the email From: address is set to
11839 the address of the person reporting the problem, while envelope sender
11840 is set to the FiksGataMi contact address.  The intention is to make
11841 sure the municipality send any replies to the person reporting the
11842 problem, while any email delivery problems are sent to us in NUUG.
11843 This work well in most cases, but not for Karmøy municipality using
11844 Zimbra.  Karmøy is using the vacation message function in Zimbra to
11845 send an automatic reply to report that the message has been received,
11846 and this message is sent to the envelope sender and not the address in
11847 the From: header.</p>
11848
11849 <p>This causes the automatic message from Karmøy to go to NUUGs
11850 request-tracker instance instead of to the person reporting the
11851 problem.  We can not really change the envelope sender address, as
11852 this would make it impossible for us to discover when there are
11853 problems with the MTAs receiving problem reports.  We have been in
11854 contact with the people at Karmøy municipality, and they are willing
11855 to adjust Zimbra if something can be changed there to get a better
11856 behaviour.</p>
11857
11858 <p>The default behaviour of Zimbra is as far as I can tell according
11859 to the specification in RFC 3834, which recommend that vacation
11860 messages are sent to the envelope sender and not to the From: address.
11861 But I wonder if it is possible to adjust or configure Zimbra to behave
11862 differently.  Anyone know?  Please let us know at
11863 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
11864 (at) nuug.no</a>.</p>
11865
11866       </div>
11867       <div class="tags">
11868
11869
11870         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>.
11871
11872
11873       </div>
11874     </div>
11875     <div class="padding"></div>
11876
11877     <div class="entry">
11878       <div class="title">
11879         <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>
11880       </div>
11881       <div class="date">
11882         26th June 2012
11883       </div>
11884       <div class="body">
11885         <p>I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
11886 another interview with the people behind
11887 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
11888 This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
11889 helpers from Spain.  His effort was the reason we added support for
11890 several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
11891 Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
11892 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
11893 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
11894
11895 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
11896
11897 <p>I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
11898 ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
11899 ICT in schools</p>
11900
11901 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
11902 project?</strong></p>
11903
11904 <p>At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
11905 project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
11906 similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
11907 I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.</p>
11908
11909 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
11910 Edu?</strong></p>
11911
11912 <p>A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
11913 really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
11914 concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
11915 been used everyday inside Debian Edu.</p>
11916
11917 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
11918 Edu?</strong></p>
11919
11920 <p>Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
11921 economical and technical resources in the different countries don't
11922 allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
11923 approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
11924 lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
11925 technologies in school.</p>
11926
11927 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
11928
11929 <p>Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
11930 between Iceweasel, <a href="http://www.geany.org/">Geany</a> and
11931 <a href="http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator">Terminator</a>.</p>
11932
11933 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
11934 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
11935
11936 <p>I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
11937 different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
11938 environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
11939 laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.</p>
11940
11941 <p>Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
11942 not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
11943 universities. So different strategies are needed.</p>
11944
11945 <p>But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
11946 we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
11947 our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
11948 multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
11949 more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
11950 using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in
11951 the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
11952 them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
11953 working there.</p>
11954
11955       </div>
11956       <div class="tags">
11957
11958
11959         Tags: <a href="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>.
11960
11961
11962       </div>
11963     </div>
11964     <div class="padding"></div>
11965
11966     <div class="entry">
11967       <div class="title">
11968         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
11969       </div>
11970       <div class="date">
11971         24th June 2012
11972       </div>
11973       <div class="body">
11974         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
11975 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
11976 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
11977 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
11978 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
11979 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
11980 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
11981 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
11982 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
11983 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
11984 missing in my book.</p>
11985
11986 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
11987 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
11988 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
11989 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
11990 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
11991 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
11992 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
11993
11994       </div>
11995       <div class="tags">
11996
11997
11998         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>.
11999
12000
12001       </div>
12002     </div>
12003     <div class="padding"></div>
12004
12005     <div class="entry">
12006       <div class="title">
12007         <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>
12008       </div>
12009       <div class="date">
12010         11th June 2012
12011       </div>
12012       <div class="body">
12013         <p>During my work on
12014 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.nb.html">Debian Edu
12015 based on Squeeze</a>, I came across some issues that should be
12016 addressed in the Wheezy release.  I finally found time to wrap up my
12017 notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
12018 explanation.</p>
12019
12020 <p><ul>
12021
12022 <li>We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
12023 changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
12024 with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
12025 system depend on tasksel tasks in
12026 /usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
12027 installation.</li>
12028
12029 <li>Enable Kerberos login for more services.  Now with the Kerberos
12030 foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
12031 services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions.  We should
12032 at least try to enable it for these services:
12033 <ul>
12034
12035   <li>CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
12036     quotas.</li>
12037   <li>Nagios for admins checking the system status.</li>
12038   <li>GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.</li>
12039   <li>LDAP for admins updating LDAP.</li>
12040   <li>Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.</li>
12041   <li>ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.</li>
12042
12043 </ul></li>
12044
12045 <li>When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
12046 authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
12047 use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
12048 is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind</li>
12049
12050 <li>Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install.  The split made
12051 sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
12052 inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.</li>
12053
12054 <li>Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
12055 touching the disk if the disk is too small.  This is
12056 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/653305">BTS report #653305</a> and the
12057 d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
12058 it and upload.  After this is done we need to adjust
12059 debian-edu-install to use this new hook.</li>
12060
12061 <li>Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
12062 time config).  LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
12063 packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
12064 in Wheezy.
12065
12066 <li>Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
12067 the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
12068 up KDE login on slow networks.</li>
12069
12070 <li>Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
12071 change on first login.  This is useful when handing out password on
12072 paper, to make sure only the user know the password.  This require
12073 fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.</li>
12074
12075 <li>Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
12076 The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
12077 familiar with GUIs.  This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
12078 have it available where the admin will be looking for it..</li>
12079
12080 <li>We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
12081 actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses).  None of the
12082 Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.</li>
12083
12084 <li>We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
12085 using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
12086 packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.</li>
12087
12088 <li>We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
12089 when changing password using the Kerberos protocol.  The hook was
12090 requested in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/588968">BTS report
12091 #588968</a> and is now available in Wheezy.  We might need to write a
12092 MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.</li>
12093
12094 <li>We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
12095 <ul>
12096
12097 <li>reduce the number of chemistry visualisers</li>
12098 <li>consider dropping xpaint</li>
12099 <li>and probably more?</li>
12100 </ul></li>
12101
12102 <li>Some hardware need external firmware to work properly.  This is
12103 mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
12104 examples too.  For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
12105 firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
12106 some GUI to do this.  Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
12107 could consider using their packages.  At the moment we have some
12108 command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
12109 for the LTSP chroot).</li>
12110
12111
12112 <li>In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options.  We
12113 should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
12114 install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
12115 use.</li>
12116
12117 <li>The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
12118 interesting educational packages.  We should work on the package
12119 tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
12120 packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
12121 new applications with a simple mouse click.</li>
12122
12123 <li>The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
12124 with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
12125 be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
12126 filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled.  We should
12127 implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
12128 instead of the "it is documented" method of today.</li>
12129
12130 <li>A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
12131 "take over" the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
12132 There are at least three implementations,
12133 <a href="italc.sourceforge.net/">italc</a>,
12134 <a href="http://www.itais.net/help/en/">controlaula</a> og
12135 <a href="http://www.epoptes.org/">epoptes</a> and we should pick one of
12136 them and make it trivial to set it up in a school.  The challenges is
12137 how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
12138 and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
12139 given room.</li>
12140
12141 <li>Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
12142 should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
12143 the Debian Edu network.  Not quite sure how.  Perhaps we should
12144 provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
12145 them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
12146 configuration and data with the central server.  This should be
12147 investigated.</li>
12148
12149 </ul></p>
12150
12151 <p>I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
12152 version.</p>
12153
12154       </div>
12155       <div class="tags">
12156
12157
12158         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12159
12160
12161       </div>
12162     </div>
12163     <div class="padding"></div>
12164
12165     <div class="entry">
12166       <div class="title">
12167         <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>
12168       </div>
12169       <div class="date">
12170          9th June 2012
12171       </div>
12172       <div class="body">
12173         <p>Slashdot got a story about Intel planning a
12174 <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
12175 with face recognition</a> to recognise the viewer, and it occurred to
12176 me that it would be more interesting to turn it around, and do face
12177 recognition on the TV image itself.  It could let the viewer know who
12178 is present on the screen, and perhaps look up their credibility,
12179 company affiliation, previous appearances etc for the viewer to better
12180 evaluate what is being said and done.  That would be a feature I would
12181 be willing to pay for.</p>
12182
12183 <p>I would not be willing to pay for a TV that point a camera on my
12184 household, like the big brother feature apparently proposed by Intel.
12185 It is the telescreen idea fetched straight out of the book
12186 <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt">1984 by George
12187 Orwell</a>.</p>
12188
12189       </div>
12190       <div class="tags">
12191
12192
12193         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>.
12194
12195
12196       </div>
12197     </div>
12198     <div class="padding"></div>
12199
12200     <div class="entry">
12201       <div class="title">
12202         <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>
12203       </div>
12204       <div class="date">
12205          6th June 2012
12206       </div>
12207       <div class="body">
12208         <p>A few days ago
12209 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">I
12210 reported how to get</a> the support status out of Dell using an
12211 unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was
12212 <a href="http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2012-February/045959.html">discovered
12213 by Daniel De Marco in february</a>.  Combined with my web scraping
12214 code for HP, Dell and IBM
12215 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">from
12216 2009</a>, I got inspired and wrote
12217 <a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/">a
12218 web service</a> based on Scraperwiki to make it easy to look up the
12219 support status and get a machine readable result back.</p>
12220
12221 <p>This is what it look like at the moment when asking for the JSON
12222 output:
12223
12224 <blockquote><pre>
12225 % 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>
12226 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": ""})
12227 %
12228 </pre></blockquote>
12229
12230 <p>It currently support Dell and HP, and I am hoping for help to add
12231 support for other vendors.  The python source is available on
12232 Scraperwiki and I welcome help with adding more features.</p>
12233
12234       </div>
12235       <div class="tags">
12236
12237
12238         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>.
12239
12240
12241       </div>
12242     </div>
12243     <div class="padding"></div>
12244
12245     <div class="entry">
12246       <div class="title">
12247         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel</a>
12248       </div>
12249       <div class="date">
12250          2nd June 2012
12251       </div>
12252       <div class="body">
12253         <p>Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
12254 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
12255 mailing list.  He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
12256 thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
12257 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
12258 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
12259
12260 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12261
12262 <p>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
12263 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
12264 (Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
12265 by Angela).</p>
12266
12267 <p>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
12268 and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
12269 touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
12270 the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
12271 becoming an osteopath.</p>
12272
12273 <p>Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
12274 have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
12275 introducing free software into schools. The project's name is
12276 "IT-Zukunft Schule" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
12277 skills with communication skills.</p>
12278
12279 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
12280 project?</strong></p>
12281
12282 <p>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
12283 "IT-Zukunft Schule" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
12284 reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
12285 people said.  From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
12286 distributions that target being used for school networks.</p>
12287
12288 <p>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
12289 commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
12290 Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
12291 went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
12292 and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
12293 Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
12294 got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
12295 attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
12296 the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.</p>
12297
12298 <p>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
12299 people.  People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
12300 protection experts, other IT professionals.</p>
12301
12302 <p>We came to two conclusions:</p>
12303
12304 <p>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
12305 bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
12306 by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
12307 whereas most of each school's requirements could mapped by a standard
12308 IT solution.  The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
12309 customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
12310 possible.  In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
12311 standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
12312 degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
12313 locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
12314 point.</p>
12315
12316 <p>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
12317 all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
12318 for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
12319 has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
12320 of people into using IT and teaching with IT. "IT-Zukunft Schule"
12321 tries to provide an approach for this.</p>
12322
12323 <p>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
12324 defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
12325 Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school's IT
12326 equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
12327 teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
12328 spare time.</p>
12329
12330 <p>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
12331 networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
12332 here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
12333 teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
12334 non-existent until 2010/2011.</p>
12335
12336 <p>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
12337 class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
12338 avoidance do exist.</p>
12339
12340 <p>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
12341 social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
12342 for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
12343 several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
12344 they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
12345 at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
12346 and probably a gain for all.</p>
12347
12348 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12349 Edu?</strong></p>
12350
12351 <p>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
12352 any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
12353 the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
12354 workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
12355 project communication, honest communication within the group of
12356 developers, etc.</p>
12357
12358 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12359 Edu?</strong></p>
12360
12361 <p>Every coin has two sides:</p>
12362
12363 <p>Technically: <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/311188">BTS issue
12364 #311188</a>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
12365 client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
12366 should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
12367 about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
12368 several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
12369 contribute).</p>
12370
12371 <p>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
12372 find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
12373 Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
12374 promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
12375 there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
12376 these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
12377 all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
12378 meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
12379 there being rather disconnected from the development department of
12380 Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
12381
12382 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
12383
12384 <p>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.</p>
12385
12386 <p>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
12387 serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
12388 more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.</p>
12389
12390 <p>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
12391 development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
12392 PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
12393 is being integrated in Ubuntu's software center.</p>
12394
12395 <p>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
12396 as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
12397 I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
12398 the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
12399 whiteboard.</p>
12400
12401 <p>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.</p>
12402
12403 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12404 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
12405
12406 <p>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
12407 enrol people.</p>
12408
12409       </div>
12410       <div class="tags">
12411
12412
12413         Tags: <a href="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>.
12414
12415
12416       </div>
12417     </div>
12418     <div class="padding"></div>
12419
12420     <div class="entry">
12421       <div class="title">
12422         <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>
12423       </div>
12424       <div class="date">
12425          1st June 2012
12426       </div>
12427       <div class="body">
12428         <p>A few years ago I wrote
12429 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">how
12430 to extract support status</a> for your Dell and HP servers.  Recently
12431 I have learned from colleges here at the
12432 <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> that Dell have
12433 made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service.  Given
12434 the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
12435 readable information about the support status.  This perl code
12436 demonstrate how to do it:</p>
12437
12438 <p><pre>
12439 use strict;
12440 use warnings;
12441 use SOAP::Lite;
12442 use Data::Dumper;
12443 my $GUID = '11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111';
12444 my $App = 'test';
12445 my $servicetag = $ARGV[0] or die "Please supply a servicetag. $!\n";
12446 my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
12447 my $s = SOAP::Lite
12448     -> uri('http://support.dell.com/WebServices/')
12449     -> on_action( sub { join '', @_ } )
12450     -> proxy('http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx')
12451     ;
12452 my $a = $s->GetAssetInformation(
12453     SOAP::Data->name('guid')->value($GUID)->type(''),
12454     SOAP::Data->name('applicationName')->value($App)->type(''),
12455     SOAP::Data->name('serviceTags')->value($servicetag)->type(''),
12456 );
12457 print Dumper($a -> result) ;
12458 </pre></p>
12459
12460 <p>The output can look like this:</p>
12461
12462 <p><pre>
12463 $VAR1 = {
12464           'Asset' => {
12465                      'Entitlements' => {
12466                                        'EntitlementData' => [
12467                                                             {
12468                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
12469                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
12470                                                               'Provider' => '',
12471                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
12472                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
12473                                                             },
12474                                                             {
12475                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
12476                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
12477                                                               'Provider' => '',
12478                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
12479                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
12480                                                             },
12481                                                             {
12482                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
12483                                                               'EndDate' => '2007-07-29T00:00:00',
12484                                                               'Provider' => '',
12485                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
12486                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
12487                                                             }
12488                                                           ]
12489                                      },
12490                      'AssetHeaderData' => {
12491                                           'SystemModel' => 'GX620',
12492                                           'ServiceTag' => '8DSGD2J',
12493                                           'SystemShipDate' => '2006-07-29T19:00:00-05:00',
12494                                           'Buid' => '2323',
12495                                           'Region' => 'Europe',
12496                                           'SystemID' => 'PLX_GX620',
12497                                           'SystemType' => 'OptiPlex'
12498                                         }
12499                    }
12500         };
12501 </pre></p>
12502
12503 <p>I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
12504 service outside the
12505 <a href="http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation">inline
12506 documentation</a>, and according to
12507 <a href="http://iboyd.net/index.php/2012/02/14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/">one
12508 comment</a> it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
12509 scraping HTML pages. :)</p>
12510
12511 <p>Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service.  If
12512 you know of one, drop me an email. :)</p>
12513
12514       </div>
12515       <div class="tags">
12516
12517
12518         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>.
12519
12520
12521       </div>
12522     </div>
12523     <div class="padding"></div>
12524
12525     <div class="entry">
12526       <div class="title">
12527         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html">First monitor calibration using ColorHug</a>
12528       </div>
12529       <div class="date">
12530         31st May 2012
12531       </div>
12532       <div class="body">
12533         <p>A few days ago my color calibration gadget
12534 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">ColorHug</a> arrived in the
12535 mail, and I've had a few days to test it.  As all my machines are
12536 running Debian Squeeze, where
12537 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">the
12538 calibration software</a> is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid),
12539 I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD.  This worked
12540 just fine.  So far I have only done the quick calibration.  It was
12541 slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for
12542 another day.</p>
12543
12544 <p>After calibration, I get a
12545 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile">ICC color
12546 profile</a> file that can be passed to programs understanding such
12547 tools.  KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched
12548 for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X.
12549 xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single
12550 monitor setups.  But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen
12551 attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct
12552 monitor.  After searching a bit, I
12553 <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347896">discovered</a>
12554 that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted,
12555 and a simple</p>
12556
12557 <p><pre>
12558 dispwin -d 1 profile.icc
12559 </pre></p>
12560
12561 <p>later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor.  The
12562 result was a bit more pink than I expected.  I guess I picked the
12563 wrong monitor type for the "led" monitor I got, but the result is good
12564 enough for now.</p>
12565
12566       </div>
12567       <div class="tags">
12568
12569
12570         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12571
12572
12573       </div>
12574     </div>
12575     <div class="padding"></div>
12576
12577     <div class="entry">
12578       <div class="title">
12579         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html">Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter</a>
12580       </div>
12581       <div class="date">
12582         27th May 2012
12583       </div>
12584       <div class="body">
12585         <p>In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the
12586 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
12587 mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
12588 up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils.  His name was Ralf
12589 Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
12590 since then, helping to make sure the
12591 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
12592 Squeeze</a> release became as good as it is..</p>
12593
12594 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12595
12596 <p>I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
12597 Mathematics, and Computer Science ("Informatik"). During the past 12
12598 years (since 2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
12599 also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
12600 O- or A-level ("Abitur").  For quite as long, I've been taking care of
12601 our computer network.</p>
12602
12603 <p>Now, in my early 40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
12604 spare time together with my wife, our son (3 years) and our daughter
12605 (4 months).</p>
12606
12607 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
12608 project?</strong></p>
12609
12610 <p>We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
12611 my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
12612 very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
12613 ("Best Newcomer Distribution", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
12614 to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt, 2005 (IIRC). Few
12615 months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
12616 (Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others.  For more
12617 than 7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
12618 our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
12619 approximately 50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
12620 locally installed Skolelinux image.  As a consequence, I joined quite
12621 a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
12622 (Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
12623 one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.</p>
12624
12625 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12626 Edu?</strong></p>
12627
12628 <p>Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
12629 project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
12630 the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
12631 computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
12632 free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
12633 up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
12634 labs).  Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
12635 administration costs tend towards zero.</p>
12636
12637 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12638 Edu?</strong></p>
12639
12640 <p>While Debian's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
12641 might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
12642 budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
12643 supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
12644 office packages or desktop environments.  These schools have the
12645 option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
12646 capacity to do so.  Another issue is that Debian release cycles
12647 include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
12648 power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
12649 within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
12650 the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
12651 i.e. harder to understand for novices.</p>
12652
12653 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
12654
12655 <p>LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
12656 KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
12657 PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)</p>
12658
12659 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12660 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
12661
12662 <p><ol>
12663
12664 <li>Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
12665 people really "own" their hardware, to make them understand the
12666 difference between proprietary software products, and free software
12667 developing.</li>
12668
12669 <li>Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany's public schools
12670 there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
12671 licenses), so schools won't benefit from any savings here. This
12672 privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
12673 share among German Skolelinux schools.</li>
12674
12675 <li>Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
12676 trained. In many cases, teachers' software customs are respected by
12677 decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.</li>
12678
12679 <li>Don't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
12680 free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
12681 general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
12682 shared world wide (school books e.g.).</li>
12683
12684 <li>Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
12685 office suites is much above 20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don't
12686 need to know the "ribbon menu" in order to get employed.</li>
12687
12688 <li>Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.</li>
12689
12690 <li>Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
12691 for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
12692 Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials.  And
12693 keep sending documents in ODF formats.</li>
12694
12695 </ol></p>
12696
12697       </div>
12698       <div class="tags">
12699
12700
12701         Tags: <a href="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>.
12702
12703
12704       </div>
12705     </div>
12706     <div class="padding"></div>
12707
12708     <div class="entry">
12709       <div class="title">
12710         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html">The cost of ODF and OOXML</a>
12711       </div>
12712       <div class="date">
12713         26th May 2012
12714       </div>
12715       <div class="body">
12716         <p>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
12717 claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
12718 government.  I just sent him an email to let him know that his
12719 assumption are most likely wrong.  Sharing it here in case some of my
12720 blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.</p>
12721
12722 <p><blockquote> <p>Hi.  I just noted your
12723 <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>
12724 comment:</p>
12725
12726 <p><blockquote>"They're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
12727 with the help of Google Translate I can't find any figures about the
12728 savings of "moving to a flexible two standard" as claimed by the
12729 Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let's take
12730 it, and the £500 million figure for the UK, on trust."
12731 </blockquote></p>
12732
12733 <p>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated.  I believe it is
12734 the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around 2007,
12735 and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
12736 at the content.  In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
12737 will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
12738 existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
12739 formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
12740 ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
12741 10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver.  In
12742 reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
12743 receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
12744 would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not 20 minutes
12745 of wasted effort.</p>
12746
12747 <p>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
12748 transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending 10
12749 minutes converting to ODF. :)</p>
12750
12751 <p>See
12752 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php</a>
12753 and
12754 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php</a>
12755 for background information.  Norwegian only, sorry. :)</p>
12756 </blockquote></p>
12757
12758       </div>
12759       <div class="tags">
12760
12761
12762         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>.
12763
12764
12765       </div>
12766     </div>
12767     <div class="padding"></div>
12768
12769     <div class="entry">
12770       <div class="title">
12771         <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>
12772       </div>
12773       <div class="date">
12774         18th May 2012
12775       </div>
12776       <div class="body">
12777         <p>In january, I
12778 <a href="http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2012/01/17/colorhug-has-arrived/">discovered
12779 the ColorHug</a>, a USB dongle from
12780 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">Hughski</a> to calibrate
12781 the color on a computer screen.  The software required is
12782 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">included
12783 in Debian</a>, and I decided back then to preorder from the next
12784 batch.  Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the
12785 opportunity to order.  Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the
12786 delivery.  I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it
12787 should go in the mail on monday. :)</p>
12788
12789 <p>If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended
12790 colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software
12791 drivers. :)</p>
12792
12793       </div>
12794       <div class="tags">
12795
12796
12797         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12798
12799
12800       </div>
12801     </div>
12802     <div class="padding"></div>
12803
12804     <div class="entry">
12805       <div class="title">
12806         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html">Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner</a>
12807       </div>
12808       <div class="date">
12809         13th May 2012
12810       </div>
12811       <div class="body">
12812         <p>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
12813 publish another interview with the people behind
12814 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
12815 This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
12816 years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
12817 details get right before release.
12818
12819 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
12820
12821 <p>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
12822 Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany.  I worked nearly 20 years as
12823 certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
12824 international company for machinery and equipment.  Since 2011 I'm a
12825 certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
12826 documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer.  From April this year
12827 I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
12828 manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.</p>
12829
12830 <p>My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
12831 it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
12832 home since 2006.</p>
12833
12834 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
12835 project?</strong></p>
12836
12837 <p>Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
12838 daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
12839 middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
12840 him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
12841 asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
12842 computers in use. I answered: "Yes".</p>
12843
12844 <p>Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
12845 running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
12846 gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
12847 network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
12848 and with a lot of fun.  About one year later the school was connected
12849 to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
12850 building.  That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
12851 Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
12852 being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
12853 costs for things like licence and software.  So I searched for a
12854 school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
12855 people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
12856 prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school.  I
12857 managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
12858 the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
12859 Bielefeld in December of 2006.</p>
12860
12861 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12862 Edu?</strong></p>
12863
12864 <p>When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
12865 for me as today.</p>
12866
12867 <p>In the past there were advantages like:</p>
12868
12869 <p><ul>
12870
12871 <li>I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
12872 they had little money to spent for computers and software.</li>
12873
12874 <li>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
12875 cost.</li>
12876
12877 <li>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
12878 schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
12879 clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
12880 infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
12881 server</li>
12882
12883 <li>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
12884 school.</li>
12885
12886 </ul></p>
12887
12888 <p>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
12889 came up in this way:</p>
12890
12891 <p><ul>
12892
12893 <li>Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
12894 now.</li>
12895
12896 <li>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
12897 have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
12898 because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.</li>
12899
12900 <li>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
12901 management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
12902 interfaces used in the past.</li>
12903
12904 <li>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
12905 different needs.</li>
12906
12907 <li>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.</li>
12908
12909 <li>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
12910 world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
12911 is sharing knowledge and minds.</li>
12912
12913 <li>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
12914 solved today by Debian Edu. </li>
12915
12916 </ul></p>
12917
12918 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
12919 Edu?</strong></p>
12920
12921 <p><ul>
12922
12923 <li>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
12924 their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
12925 whole municipality areas.</li>
12926
12927 <li>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
12928 enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
12929 politicians.</li>
12930
12931 <li>Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.</li>
12932
12933 </ul></p>
12934
12935 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
12936
12937 <p>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
12938 computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
12939 use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
12940 KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
12941 need from the KDE environment.  On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
12942 screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.</p>
12943
12944 <p>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
12945 and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
12946 rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
12947 with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
12948 and the whole family.  I probably forgot something.</p>
12949
12950 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
12951 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
12952
12953 <p>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
12954 Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
12955 countries and areas all over the world.</p>
12956
12957       </div>
12958       <div class="tags">
12959
12960
12961         Tags: <a href="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>.
12962
12963
12964       </div>
12965     </div>
12966     <div class="padding"></div>
12967
12968     <div class="entry">
12969       <div class="title">
12970         <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>
12971       </div>
12972       <div class="date">
12973         30th April 2012
12974       </div>
12975       <div class="body">
12976         <p><!-- IMG_5869.JPG -->
12977 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-1611.jpeg"></p>
12978
12979 <p>I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a
12980 common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway.
12981 But the last ones have not really been up to the task.  My last
12982 cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the
12983 time, and cutting my head took forever.  And the one before that did
12984 not work very well either.  We have looked for something better for a
12985 while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we
12986 discovered that there are indeed better tools available.  But these
12987 are not marketed and sold to "regular consumers".  The hair saloons
12988 can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell
12989 companies.  The models they sell, are very different from the ones
12990 available from Elkjøp and Lefdal.  The main difference is their
12991 efficiency.  It would cut my hair in 5 minutes, instead of the 30-40
12992 minutes required by my impotent Braun.  The hairdresser I visited had
12993 a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the
12994 producer.  But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.</p>
12995
12996 <p>The next step was to find somewhere to buy it.  This was not
12997 straight forward.  The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser
12998 did not want to sell anything to me.  But searching for the model on
12999 the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for
13000 around NOK 4000,-.  This was a bit much.  We kept searching and
13001 finally found a Danish supplier
13002 <a href="http://nicehair.dk/panasonic-er-1611-professionel-hartrimmer.html">selling
13003 it for around NOK 1800,-</a>.  We ordered one, and it arrived a few
13004 days ago.</p>
13005
13006 <p>The instructions said it had to charge for 8 hours when we started
13007 to use it, so we left it charging over night.  Normally it will only
13008 need one hour to charge.  The following evening we successfully tested
13009 it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair
13010 cutter.  The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter
13011 toys.</p>
13012
13013       </div>
13014       <div class="tags">
13015
13016
13017         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13018
13019
13020       </div>
13021     </div>
13022     <div class="padding"></div>
13023
13024     <div class="entry">
13025       <div class="title">
13026         <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>
13027       </div>
13028       <div class="date">
13029         26th April 2012
13030       </div>
13031       <div class="body">
13032         <p>In <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article243690.ece">an
13033 article today</a> published by Computerworld Norway, the photographer
13034 <a href="http://www.urke.com/eirik/">Eirik Helland Urke</a> reports
13035 that the video editor application included with
13036 <a href="http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs">HTC One
13037 X</a> have some quite surprising terms of use.  The article is mostly
13038 based on the twitter message from mister Urke, stating:
13039
13040 <p><blockquote>
13041 "<a href="http://twitter.com/urke/status/194062269724897280">Drøy
13042 brukeravtale: HTC kan bruke MINE redigerte videoer kommersielt. Selv
13043 kan jeg KUN bruke dem privat.</a>"
13044 </blockquote></p>
13045
13046 <p>I quickly translated it to this English message:</p>
13047
13048 <p><blockquote>
13049 "Arrogant user agreement: HTC can use MY edited videos
13050 commercially.  Although I can ONLY use them privately."
13051 </blockquote></p>
13052
13053 <p>I've been unable to find the text of the license term myself, but
13054 suspect it is a variation of the MPEG-LA terms I
13055 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html">discovered
13056 with my Canon IXUS 130</a>.  The HTC One X specification specifies that
13057 the recording format of the phone is .amr for audio and .mp3 for
13058 video.  AMR is
13059 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec#Licensing_and_patent_issues">Adaptive
13060 Multi-Rate audio codec</a> with patents which according to the
13061 Wikipedia article require an license agreement with
13062 <a href="http://www.voiceage.com/">VoiceAge</a>.  MP4 is
13063 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing">MPEG4 with
13064 H.264</a>, which according to Wikipedia require a licence agreement
13065 with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/">MPEG-LA</a>.</p>
13066
13067 <p>I know why I prefer
13068 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and open
13069 standards</a> also for video.</p>
13070
13071       </div>
13072       <div class="tags">
13073
13074
13075         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
13076
13077
13078       </div>
13079     </div>
13080     <div class="padding"></div>
13081
13082     <div class="entry">
13083       <div class="title">
13084         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html">RAND terms - non-reasonable and discriminatory</a>
13085       </div>
13086       <div class="date">
13087         19th April 2012
13088       </div>
13089       <div class="body">
13090         <p>Here in Norway, the
13091 <a href="http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad.html?id=339"> Ministry of
13092 Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs</a> is behind
13093 a <a href="http://standard.difi.no/forvaltningsstandarder">directory of
13094 standards</a> that are recommended or mandatory for use by the
13095 government.  When the directory was created, the people behind it made
13096 an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the
13097 standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions
13098 to the government.  Free software and non-free software could compete
13099 on the same level.</p>
13100
13101 <p>But recently, some standards with RAND
13102 (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing">Reasonable
13103 And Non-Discriminatory</a>) terms have made their way into the
13104 directory.  And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that
13105 standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from
13106 implementing them.  The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per
13107 user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone
13108 willing to pay will get a license.  Both sound great in theory.  In
13109 practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and
13110 be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user.  By
13111 definition, users of free software do not need to register their use.
13112 So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects.
13113 And given that people will use the software without handing any money
13114 to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free
13115 software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights
13116 to implement a standard when the income available is zero.  The result
13117 in these situations is that free software are locked out from
13118 implementing standards with RAND terms.</p>
13119
13120 <p>Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a
13121 standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is
13122 how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory.  Because free
13123 software developers are working in a global market, it does not really
13124 help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable
13125 in Norway.  The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here.
13126 I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more
13127 attention to these issues in the future.</p>
13128
13129 <p>You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms
13130 from Simon Phipps
13131 (<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/11/rand-not-so-reasonable/">RAND:
13132 Not So Reasonable?</a>).</p>
13133
13134 <p>Update 2012-04-21: Just came across a
13135 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/of-microsoft-netscape-patents-and-open-standards/index.htm">blog
13136 post from Glyn Moody</a> over at Computer World UK warning about the
13137 same issue, and urging people to speak out to the UK government.  I
13138 can only urge Norwegian users to do the same for
13139 <a href="http://www.standard.difi.no/hoyring/hoyring-om-nye-anbefalte-it-standarder">the
13140 hearing taking place at the moment</a> (respond before 2012-04-27).
13141 It proposes to require video conferencing standards including
13142 specifications with RAND terms.</p>
13143
13144       </div>
13145       <div class="tags">
13146
13147
13148         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>.
13149
13150
13151       </div>
13152     </div>
13153     <div class="padding"></div>
13154
13155     <div class="entry">
13156       <div class="title">
13157         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html">Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt</a>
13158       </div>
13159       <div class="date">
13160         15th April 2012
13161       </div>
13162       <div class="body">
13163         <p>Behind <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
13164 Skolelinux</a> there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
13165 setting together all the pieces.  This time I present to you Andreas
13166 Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
13167 years.  He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
13168 up in the recently released
13169 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
13170 Edu Squeeze</a> version.</p>
13171
13172 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13173
13174 <p>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany.  After
13175 studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
13176 Quantum Optics.  After that I worked some years in an optics company.
13177 Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
13178 teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school.  I teach math, physics,
13179 information technology and science/technology.</p>
13180
13181 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
13182 project?</strong></p>
13183
13184 <p>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
13185 project because of my interest in education and Debian.  Within the
13186 qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
13187 contributing.</p>
13188
13189 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13190 Edu?</strong></p>
13191
13192 <p>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
13193 out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
13194 Debian Project!</p>
13195
13196 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13197 Edu?</strong></p>
13198
13199 <p>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
13200 downside, too.  In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
13201 setup, if you need or want that.  Further more, it is not easily
13202 possible to upgrade the system to a new release.  It takes much too
13203 long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
13204 because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
13205 rather small and often busy elsewhere.</p>
13206
13207 <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN">Debian LAN</a>
13208 project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.</p>
13209
13210 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13211
13212 <p>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
13213 on all my machines.  For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
13214 mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing.  At school I
13215 have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.</p>
13216
13217 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13218 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13219
13220 <p>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
13221 Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
13222 politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader".  The school
13223 administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
13224 Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats.  Even
13225 free browsers do not work for the school administration.  Publishers
13226 of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.</p>
13227
13228 <p>To change this, political work is very important.  Parts of the
13229 political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
13230 However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free'
13231 the system.  There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and
13232 "Free/Open Standards".  I am not sure if all the involved parties have
13233 a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
13234 fraction takes them seriously.  However it might slowly make free
13235 software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.</p>
13236
13237       </div>
13238       <div class="tags">
13239
13240
13241         Tags: <a href="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>.
13242
13243
13244       </div>
13245     </div>
13246     <div class="padding"></div>
13247
13248     <div class="entry">
13249       <div class="title">
13250         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html">Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye</a>
13251       </div>
13252       <div class="date">
13253          8th April 2012
13254       </div>
13255       <div class="body">
13256         <p>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
13257 like <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>,
13258 and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
13259 contributor to the
13260 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
13261 Edu Squeeze release manual</a>.
13262
13263 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13264
13265 <p>I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
13266 occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.</p>
13267
13268 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
13269 project?</strong></p>
13270
13271 <p>I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user!  The only
13272 reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
13273 around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
13274 they'd like a native English speaker to proofread...  So I did a sweep
13275 through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
13276 "localisation".</p>
13277
13278 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13279 Edu?</strong></p>
13280
13281 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13282 Edu?</strong></p>
13283
13284 <p>These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it!  In fact I
13285 had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the
13286 education system.</p>
13287
13288 <p>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
13289 as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
13290 everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
13291 money on the latest hardware.</p>
13292
13293 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13294
13295 <p>I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
13296 software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
13297 words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).</p>
13298
13299 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13300 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13301
13302 <p>Well, I don't know.  I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning
13303 with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
13304 you would hardly need a strategy.</p>
13305
13306       </div>
13307       <div class="tags">
13308
13309
13310         Tags: <a href="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>.
13311
13312
13313       </div>
13314     </div>
13315     <div class="padding"></div>
13316
13317     <div class="entry">
13318       <div class="title">
13319         <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>
13320       </div>
13321       <div class="date">
13322          6th April 2012
13323       </div>
13324       <div class="body">
13325         <p>Recently I have spent time with
13326 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a> on speeding
13327 up a <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
13328 Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
13329 process I discovered something very surprising.  The reason the KDE
13330 menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
13331 due to the way KDE find application icons.  I discovered that showing
13332 the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
13333 passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server.  Most of these were
13334
13335 NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response.  Because the
13336 ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
13337 ms, the menus would be very slow.  Looking at the strace of kicker in
13338 Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
13339 the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
13340 non-existing files.  KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
13341 one icon file.  In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
13342 around 230 access(2) calls.</p>
13343
13344 <p>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
13345 directories, and the list of possible directories is large.  In
13346 (almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
13347 and .xpm.  The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
13348 mounted.  Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
13349 requests.  I am not the first one to discover this.  I found a
13350 <a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211416">KDE bug report
13351 from 2009</a> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.</p>
13352
13353 <p>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
13354 kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
13355 used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
13356 for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
13357 icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/.  Finally, I add symlinks to
13358 these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
13359 for them.  This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
13360 one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
13361 almost instantaneous.  I'm not quite sure where to make the package
13362 publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.</p>
13363
13364 <p>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
13365 and icon handling, but also the login process.  Not quite sure how to
13366 speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
13367 that is not really an option at the moment.</p>
13368
13369 <p>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
13370 (at) lists.debian.org.</p>
13371
13372       </div>
13373       <div class="tags">
13374
13375
13376         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13377
13378
13379       </div>
13380     </div>
13381     <div class="padding"></div>
13382
13383     <div class="entry">
13384       <div class="title">
13385         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html">Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News</a>
13386       </div>
13387       <div class="date">
13388          5th April 2012
13389       </div>
13390       <div class="body">
13391         <p>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
13392 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a> by
13393 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News.  The result was made public for
13394 non-subscribers today.  I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
13395 for schools.  Check out his article
13396 <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/488805/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
13397 distribution for education</a> if you want to learn more.</p>
13398
13399       </div>
13400       <div class="tags">
13401
13402
13403         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13404
13405
13406       </div>
13407     </div>
13408     <div class="padding"></div>
13409
13410     <div class="entry">
13411       <div class="title">
13412         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html">Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer</a>
13413       </div>
13414       <div class="date">
13415          1st April 2012
13416       </div>
13417       <div class="body">
13418         <p>Germany is a core area for the
13419 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
13420 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
13421 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
13422
13423 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13424
13425 <p>I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
13426 Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
13427 "<a href="http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/">Westfalen-Kolleg
13428 Dortmund</a>", a second chance school.  Here, young adults is given
13429 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
13430 examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This
13431 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
13432 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.</p>
13433
13434 <p>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
13435 blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other
13436 information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been
13437 teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my
13438 school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at
13439 the end of April this year.</p>
13440
13441 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
13442 project?</strong></p>
13443
13444 <p>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
13445 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
13446 Project).  At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
13447 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
13448 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
13449 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
13450 reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
13451 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
13452 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
13453 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
13454 Skolelinux.</p>
13455
13456 <p>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
13457 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
13458 clients.  The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
13459 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
13460 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
13461 the admin teachers.</p>
13462
13463 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13464 Edu?</strong></p>
13465
13466 <p>It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
13467 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
13468 So it was a perfect choice.</p>
13469
13470 <p>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's
13471 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
13472 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp.  It's of
13473 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
13474 a school and to choose where to get support for this.</p>
13475
13476 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13477 Edu?</strong></p>
13478
13479 <p>Nothing yet.</p>
13480
13481 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13482
13483 <p>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
13484 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
13485 Annotator).  At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
13486 LibreOffice.</p>
13487
13488 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13489 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13490
13491 <p>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
13492 that doesn't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
13493 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.</p>
13494
13495       </div>
13496       <div class="tags">
13497
13498
13499         Tags: <a href="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>.
13500
13501
13502       </div>
13503     </div>
13504     <div class="padding"></div>
13505
13506     <div class="entry">
13507       <div class="title">
13508         <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>
13509       </div>
13510       <div class="date">
13511         25th March 2012
13512       </div>
13513       <div class="body">
13514         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
13515
13516 <p>The same Debian Edu developer that did the last screen cast I
13517 published, Wolfgang Schweer, has created a new screen cast showing how
13518 to set up Kmail in Debian Edu Squeze to authenticate using Kerberos,
13519 allowing users to check their local email account without providing
13520 any password. The video is embedded here in quarter size,
13521 and also available from <a href="https://vimeo.com/38601767">vimeo</a>
13522 and download as a
13523 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg
13524 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
13525
13526 <p><video id="kmail-kerberos-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
13527   <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"' />
13528     <p>Download video as
13529       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
13530 </video></p>
13531
13532       </div>
13533       <div class="tags">
13534
13535
13536         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13537
13538
13539       </div>
13540     </div>
13541     <div class="padding"></div>
13542
13543     <div class="entry">
13544       <div class="title">
13545         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html">Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby</a>
13546       </div>
13547       <div class="date">
13548         19th March 2012
13549       </div>
13550       <div class="body">
13551         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
13552 users are spread all across the globe.  The second inteview after
13553 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
13554 Squeeze release</a> was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
13555 long time Linux user in United Kingdom.</p>
13556
13557 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13558
13559 <p>I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
13560 Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
13561 author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
13562 contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
13563 encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
13564 years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
13565 weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
13566 installations.</p>
13567
13568 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
13569 project?</strong></p>
13570
13571 <p>Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
13572 London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
13573 just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
13574 along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
13575 mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
13576 well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
13577 have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
13578 LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
13579 these things we decided to try it.</p>
13580
13581 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13582 Edu?</strong></p>
13583
13584 <p>By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
13585 from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
13586 goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
13587 would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
13588 low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
13589 that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
13590 Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
13591 proprietary software everywhere.</p>
13592
13593 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13594 Edu?</strong></p>
13595
13596 <p>As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
13597 how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
13598 various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
13599 English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
13600 users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!</p>
13601
13602 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13603
13604 <p>Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
13605 OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
13606 desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
13607 use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
13608 that counts...)</p>
13609
13610 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13611 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13612
13613 <p>That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
13614 and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
13615 the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
13616 applications".  However, schools today are experiencing budget
13617 constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
13618 XP.  At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
13619 iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
13620 longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
13621 realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
13622 putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
13623 first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.</p>
13624
13625 <p>I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
13626 free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
13627 Edu users in this country has to be part of it.</p>
13628
13629       </div>
13630       <div class="tags">
13631
13632
13633         Tags: <a href="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>.
13634
13635
13636       </div>
13637     </div>
13638     <div class="padding"></div>
13639
13640     <div class="entry">
13641       <div class="title">
13642         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html">Writing and translating documentation in Debian Edu</a>
13643       </div>
13644       <div class="date">
13645         16th March 2012
13646       </div>
13647       <div class="body">
13648         <p>Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
13649 it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
13650 translated versions in sync.  To do this we have come up with what we
13651 believe is a very efficient work flow.</p>
13652
13653 <ol>
13654
13655 <li>The documentation is written in a
13656 <a href="http://moinmo.in">moinmoin wiki</a> (see for example
13657 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">the
13658 Squeeze release manual</a>) with support for exporting the content as
13659 docbook XML.</li>
13660
13661 <li>This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
13662 .pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
13663 with the translated text.</li>
13664
13665 <li>The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
13666 which part of the original wiki document is new or changed.  They can
13667 use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
13668 the translation.  There is even a system in place to handle translated
13669 images.</li>
13670
13671 <li>The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
13672 XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.</li>
13673
13674 <li>The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
13675 create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.</li>
13676
13677 </ol>
13678
13679 <p>This setup work very well, but have a few issues.  The biggest
13680 issue is that <a href="http://moinmo.in/DocBook">the docbook support
13681 we use in moinmoin</a> is not actively maintained.  The docbook
13682 support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
13683 make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.</p>
13684
13685 <p>If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
13686 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc">debian-edu-doc
13687 package</a>.</p>
13688
13689       </div>
13690       <div class="tags">
13691
13692
13693         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13694
13695
13696       </div>
13697     </div>
13698     <div class="padding"></div>
13699
13700     <div class="entry">
13701       <div class="title">
13702         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html">Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze is out!</a>
13703       </div>
13704       <div class="date">
13705         11th March 2012
13706       </div>
13707       <div class="body">
13708         <p>This weekend we finally published the first stable release of
13709 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> based
13710 on Debian/Squeeze.  The full announcement is
13711 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">available</a>
13712 from the project announcement list.  Now is a good time to test if it
13713 you have not done so already.</p>
13714
13715 <p>I plan to present the new version at
13716 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20120313-skolelinux/">a NUUG
13717 meeting</a> on tuesday.  I look forward to seeing you there if you are
13718 in Oslo, Norway.</p>
13719
13720       </div>
13721       <div class="tags">
13722
13723
13724         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13725
13726
13727       </div>
13728     </div>
13729     <div class="padding"></div>
13730
13731     <div class="entry">
13732       <div class="title">
13733         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html">Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker</a>
13734       </div>
13735       <div class="date">
13736          9th March 2012
13737       </div>
13738       <div class="body">
13739         <p>Inspired by <a href="http://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/interview/">the
13740 interview series</a> conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
13741 interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
13742 community.  This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
13743 more international audience.</p>
13744
13745 <p>While <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
13746 Skolelinux</a> originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
13747 Europe, there are users all around the globe.  One of those far away
13748 from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
13749 and contributor.  It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
13750 work out of the box in Japan.  I got him to answer a few questions,
13751 and am happy to share the response with you. :)
13752
13753
13754 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
13755
13756 <p>My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
13757 and we have three lovely children, aged 15, 14 and 4(!) I am the IT
13758 Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
13759 teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
13760 Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
13761 I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
13762 primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
13763 so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
13764 also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
13765 to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
13766 appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.</p>
13767
13768 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
13769 project?</strong></p>
13770
13771 <p>In around 2004 or 5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
13772 server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
13773 samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
13774 Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn't really improve my setup. I
13775 did various desperate searches for things like "school Linux server"
13776 and ended up in a document called "Drift" something or other. Reading
13777 there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
13778 problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
13779 previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
13780 Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
13781 downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
13782 Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
13783 my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.</p>
13784
13785 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13786 Edu?</strong></p>
13787
13788 <p>For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
13789 workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
13790 ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
13791 designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
13792 doesn't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
13793 school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
13794 Japan.</p>
13795
13796 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
13797 Edu?</strong></p>
13798
13799 <p>The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
13800 have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
13801 make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
13802 who don't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
13803 important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
13804 instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
13805 default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
13806 kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
13807 Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is.  A
13808 second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
13809 customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
13810 multiplies. For example, backup wasn't working properly in Lenny. It
13811 took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
13812 I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
13813 help.</p>
13814
13815 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
13816
13817 <p>Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
13818 studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
13819 (customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
13820 still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
13821 house, that's very useful for the family photos and music.  At school
13822 the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
13823 have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
13824 day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
13825 installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS.  We also
13826 have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
13827 and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.</p>
13828
13829 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
13830 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
13831
13832 <p>Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
13833 and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
13834 popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
13835 to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
13836 file formats and Word than they did 5 years ago.  The Edu aspect is
13837 also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
13838 Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu?  But of course the main attraction is
13839 budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
13840 compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
13841 is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
13842 are not impressed when their USB drive doesn't work, or their browser
13843 doesn't play flash, for example.</p>
13844
13845       </div>
13846       <div class="tags">
13847
13848
13849         Tags: <a href="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>.
13850
13851
13852       </div>
13853     </div>
13854     <div class="padding"></div>
13855
13856     <div class="entry">
13857       <div class="title">
13858         <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>
13859       </div>
13860       <div class="date">
13861          7th March 2012
13862       </div>
13863       <div class="body">
13864         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
13865
13866 <p>One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a
13867 screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on
13868 Debian Edu Squeeze.  The video is embedded here in quarter size, and
13869 also available from <a href="http://vimeo.com/37675399">vimeo</a> and
13870 download as a
13871 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg
13872 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
13873
13874 <p><video id="gosa-mass-user-create-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
13875   <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"' />
13876     <p>Download video as
13877       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
13878 </video></p>
13879
13880       </div>
13881       <div class="tags">
13882
13883
13884         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13885
13886
13887       </div>
13888     </div>
13889     <div class="padding"></div>
13890
13891     <div class="entry">
13892       <div class="title">
13893         <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>
13894       </div>
13895       <div class="date">
13896          4th March 2012
13897       </div>
13898       <div class="body">
13899         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the third release
13900 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
13901 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
13902 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00000.html">available</a>
13903 from the project announcement list.  Check it out if you
13904 need a software solution for your school.</p>
13905
13906       </div>
13907       <div class="tags">
13908
13909
13910         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13911
13912
13913       </div>
13914     </div>
13915     <div class="padding"></div>
13916
13917     <div class="entry">
13918       <div class="title">
13919         <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>
13920       </div>
13921       <div class="date">
13922          3rd March 2012
13923       </div>
13924       <div class="body">
13925         <p>Many years ago, the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
13926 / Debian Edu project</a> initiated a student project to create a tool
13927 for making stop motion movies.  The proposal came from a teacher
13928 needing such tool on Skolelinux.  The project, called "stopmotion",
13929 was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a
13930 national aware with this great project.  The project was initiated and
13931 mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bjørn Erik Nilsen
13932 and Fredrik Berg Kjølstad.  They got in touch with people at Aardman
13933 Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like
13934 such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by
13935 animators around the globe.  But as is usual after studying, both got
13936 jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the
13937 project, and it has been lingering for a few years now.  Until last
13938 year...</p>
13939
13940 <p>Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the
13941 project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new
13942 name,
13943 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxstopmotion/">linuxstopmotion</a>.
13944 The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using
13945 Internet search engines (try to search for 'stopmotion' to see what I
13946 mean). I've been following
13947 <a href="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxstopmotion-community">the
13948 mailing list</a> and the improvement already in place and planned for
13949 the future is encouraging.  If you want to make stop motion movies.
13950 Check it out. :)</p>
13951
13952       </div>
13953       <div class="tags">
13954
13955
13956         Tags: <a href="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>.
13957
13958
13959       </div>
13960     </div>
13961     <div class="padding"></div>
13962
13963     <div class="entry">
13964       <div class="title">
13965         <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>
13966       </div>
13967       <div class="date">
13968         27th February 2012
13969       </div>
13970       <div class="body">
13971         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the second release
13972 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
13973 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement did for some
13974 reason not make it the project announcement list, but is
13975 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/02/msg00015.html">available</a>
13976 from the Debian development announcement list.  Check it out if you
13977 need a software solution for your school.</p>
13978
13979       </div>
13980       <div class="tags">
13981
13982
13983         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13984
13985
13986       </div>
13987     </div>
13988     <div class="padding"></div>
13989
13990     <div class="entry">
13991       <div class="title">
13992         <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>
13993       </div>
13994       <div class="date">
13995         19th February 2012
13996       </div>
13997       <div class="body">
13998         <p>One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
13999 wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
14000 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
14001 on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
14002 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00001.html">available</a>
14003 on the project announcement list.  Check it out if you need a software
14004 solution for your school.</p>
14005
14006       </div>
14007       <div class="tags">
14008
14009
14010         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14011
14012
14013       </div>
14014     </div>
14015     <div class="padding"></div>
14016
14017     <div class="entry">
14018       <div class="title">
14019         <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>
14020       </div>
14021       <div class="date">
14022         14th February 2012
14023       </div>
14024       <div class="body">
14025         <p>Once in a while my home server have disk problems.  Thanks to Linux
14026 Software RAID, I have not lost data yet (but
14027 <a href="http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/34532">I was
14028 close</a> this summer :).  But once a disk is starting to behave
14029 funny, a practical problem present itself.  How to get from the Linux
14030 device name (like /dev/sdd) to something that can be used to identify
14031 the disk when the computer is turned off?  In my case I have SATA
14032 disks with a unique ID printed on the label.  All I need is a way to
14033 figure out how to query the disk to get the ID out.</p>
14034
14035 <p>After fumbling a bit, I
14036 <a href="http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-getting-scsi-ide-harddisk-information/">found
14037 that hdparm -I</a> will report the disk serial number, which is
14038 printed on the disk label.  The following (almost) one-liner can be
14039 used to look up the ID of all the failed disks:</p>
14040
14041 <blockquote><pre>
14042 for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep '(F)'|tr ' ' "\n"|grep '(F)'|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u);
14043 do
14044     printf "Failed disk $d: "
14045     hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep 'Serial Num'
14046 done
14047 </blockquote></pre>
14048
14049 <p>Putting it here to make sure I do not have to search for it the
14050 next time, and in case other find it useful.</p>
14051
14052 <p>At the moment I have two failing disk. :(</p>
14053
14054 <blockquote><pre>
14055 Failed disk sdd1:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
14056 Failed disk sdd2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
14057 Failed disk sde2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1840589
14058 </blockquote></pre>
14059
14060 <p>The last time I had failing disks, I added the serial number on
14061 labels I printed and stuck on the short sides of each disk, to be able
14062 to figure out which disk to take out of the box without having to
14063 remove each disk to look at the physical vendor label.  The vendor
14064 label is at the top of the disk, which is hidden when the disks are
14065 mounted inside my box.</p>
14066
14067 <p>I really wish the check_linux_raid Nagios plugin for checking Linux
14068 Software RAID in the
14069 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nagios-plugins.html">nagios-plugins-standard</a>
14070 debian package would look up this value automatically, as it would
14071 make the plugin a lot more useful when my disks fail.  At the moment
14072 it only report a failure when there are no more spares left (it really
14073 should warn as soon as a disk is failing), and it do not tell me which
14074 disk(s) is failing when the RAID is running short on disks.</p>
14075
14076       </div>
14077       <div class="tags">
14078
14079
14080         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>.
14081
14082
14083       </div>
14084     </div>
14085     <div class="padding"></div>
14086
14087     <div class="entry">
14088       <div class="title">
14089         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">Automatic proxy configuration with Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
14090       </div>
14091       <div class="date">
14092         13th February 2012
14093       </div>
14094       <div class="body">
14095         <p>New in the Squeeze version of
14096 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is the
14097 ability for clients to automatically configure their proxy settings
14098 based on their environment.  We want all systems on the client to use
14099 the WPAD based proxy definition fetched from <tt>http://wpad/wpad.dat</tt>, to
14100 allow sites to control the proxy setting from a central place and make
14101 sure clients do not have hard coded proxy settings.  The schools can
14102 change the global proxy setting by editing
14103 <tt>tjener:/etc/debian-edu/www/wpad.dat</tt> and the change propagate
14104 to all Debian Edu clients in the network.</p>
14105
14106 <p>The problem is that some systems do not understand the WPAD system.
14107 In other words, how do one get from a WPAD file like this (this is a
14108 simple one, they can run arbitrary code):</p>
14109
14110 <blockquote><pre>
14111 function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
14112 {
14113    if (!isResolvable(host) ||
14114        isPlainHostName(host) ||
14115        dnsDomainIs(host, ".intern"))
14116       return "DIRECT";
14117    else
14118       return "PROXY webcache:3128; DIRECT";
14119 }
14120 </pre></blockquote>
14121
14122 <p>to a proxy setting in the process environment looking like this:</p>
14123
14124 <blockquote><pre>
14125 http_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
14126 ftp_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
14127 </pre></blockquote>
14128
14129 <p>To do this conversion I developed a perl script that will execute
14130 the javascript fragment in the WPAD file and return the proxy that
14131 would be used for
14132 <tt><a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a></tt>,
14133 and insert this extracted proxy URL in <tt>/etc/environment</tt> and
14134 <tt>/etc/apt/apt.conf</tt>.  The perl script wpad-extract work just
14135 fine in Squeeze, but in Wheezy the library it need to run the
14136 javascript code is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/631045">no longer
14137 able to build</a> because the C library it depended on is now a C++
14138 library.  I hope someone find a solution to that problem before Wheezy
14139 is frozen.  An alternative would be for us to rewrite wpad-extract to
14140 use some other javascript library currently working in Wheezy, but no
14141 known alternative is known at the moment.</p>
14142
14143 <p>This automatic proxy system allow the roaming workstation (aka
14144 laptop) setup in Debian Edu/Squeeze to use the proxy when the laptop
14145 is connected to the backbone network in a Debian Edu setup, and to
14146 automatically use any proxy present and announced using the WPAD
14147 feature when it is connected to other networks.  And if no proxy is
14148 announced, direct connections will be used instead.</p>
14149
14150 <p>Silently using a proxy announced on the network might be a privacy
14151 or security problem.  But those controlling DHCP and DNS on a network
14152 could just as easily set up a transparent proxy, and force all HTTP
14153 and FTP connections to use a proxy anyway, so I consider that
14154 distinction to be academic.  If you are afraid of using the wrong
14155 proxy, you should avoid connecting to the network in question in the
14156 first place.  In Debian Edu, the proxy setup is updated using dhcp and
14157 ifupdown hooks, to make sure the configuration is updated every time
14158 the network setup changes.</p>
14159
14160 <p>The WPAD system is documented in a
14161 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-01">IETF
14162 draft</a> and a
14163 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol">Wikipedia
14164 page</a> for those that want to learn more.</p>
14165
14166       </div>
14167       <div class="tags">
14168
14169
14170         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14171
14172
14173       </div>
14174     </div>
14175     <div class="padding"></div>
14176
14177     <div class="entry">
14178       <div class="title">
14179         <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>
14180       </div>
14181       <div class="date">
14182          5th February 2012
14183       </div>
14184       <div class="body">
14185         <p>Since the Lenny version of
14186 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, a
14187 feature to save power have been included.  It is as simple as it is
14188 practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again
14189 in the morning.  This is done using the
14190 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/shutdown-at-night.html">shutdown-at-night</a> Debian package.</p>
14191
14192 <p>To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to
14193 the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts.  For Debian Edu, this is done in
14194 LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check
14195 every hour from 16:00 until 06:00 to see if the machine is unused, and
14196 shut it down if it is.  If the hardware in question is supported by
14197 the
14198 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvram-wakeup.html">nvram-wakeup</a>
14199 package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around 07:00 +-
14200 10 minutes.  If this isn't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to
14201 try to turn on the client.  The wake-on-lan option is only documented
14202 and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.</p>
14203
14204 <p>It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can
14205 blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like
14206 the common setup for a classroom.  The nvram-wakeup method only work
14207 for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock.  I've seen old
14208 machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were
14209 starting from 0 (or was it 1990?) every boot.  If you have one of
14210 those, you have to turn on the computer manually.</p>
14211
14212 <p>The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can
14213 also be used outside the Debian Edu environment.  For those without a
14214 central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file
14215 <tt>/etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night</tt> to enable it.
14216 Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?</p>
14217
14218       </div>
14219       <div class="tags">
14220
14221
14222         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14223
14224
14225       </div>
14226     </div>
14227     <div class="padding"></div>
14228
14229     <div class="entry">
14230       <div class="title">
14231         <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>
14232       </div>
14233       <div class="date">
14234          4th February 2012
14235       </div>
14236       <div class="body">
14237         <p>I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and
14238 publish the third beta version of
14239 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
14240 on Squeeze.  If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with
14241 out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and
14242 installing new machines, check it out.  If you need a software
14243 solution for your school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
14244 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00000.html">available</a>
14245 on the project announcement list.</p>
14246
14247 <p>I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since
14248 beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):</p>
14249
14250 <ul>
14251
14252 <li>It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from
14253   10.0.0.0/8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after
14254   the installation.</li>
14255
14256 <li>Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main
14257   Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.</li>
14258
14259 <li>The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all
14260   disabled queues are restarted every hour.  This should cut down on
14261   the amount of manual administration needed for printers.</li>
14262
14263 <li>The set of initial users have been changed.  Now a personal user
14264   for the local system administrator is created during installation
14265   instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users,
14266   and this user is granted administrative privileges using group
14267   membership.  This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep
14268   up to date on the system.</li>
14269
14270 </ul>
14271
14272 <p>The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my
14273 private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home.  I will use it look
14274 for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the
14275 final Squeeze release is published.</p>
14276
14277 <p>Next weekend the project organise a
14278 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00001.html">developer
14279 gathering</a> in Oslo.  We will continue the work on the Squeeze
14280 version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version.  Perhaps I
14281 will see you there?</p>
14282
14283       </div>
14284       <div class="tags">
14285
14286
14287         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14288
14289
14290       </div>
14291     </div>
14292     <div class="padding"></div>
14293
14294     <div class="entry">
14295       <div class="title">
14296         <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>
14297       </div>
14298       <div class="date">
14299         27th January 2012
14300       </div>
14301       <div class="body">
14302         <p>With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
14303 This is the sad fact of todays computers.  In the next version of
14304 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
14305 on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
14306 firmware blobs easier to handle.  The common use case I run into is a
14307 laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
14308 work, but there are other use cases as well.</p>
14309
14310 <p>First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
14311 with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
14312 included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
14313 during installation.  This take care firmware for network devices used
14314 by the installer when installing from from local media.  But for
14315 example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
14316 not taken care of by this.</p>
14317
14318 <p>For non-network devices, we provide the script
14319 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware</tt> which
14320 search through the <tt>dmesg</tt> output for drivers requesting extra
14321 firmware.  The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
14322 file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
14323 the requested firmware file(s) is installed.  I have proposed to do
14324 something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
14325 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">#655507</a>), to allow PXE
14326 installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better.  Run the
14327 script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
14328 firmware packages.</p>
14329
14330 <p>Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
14331 because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
14332 working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
14333 included to be able to install at all.  To fill the PXE installation
14334 initrd with extra firmware, the
14335 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware</tt> script is
14336 provided.  Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
14337 PXE initrd with firmware packages.</p>
14338
14339 <p>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
14340 network cards working.  For this,
14341 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware</tt> is
14342 provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs.  It is used
14343 the same way as the other firmware related tools.</p>
14344
14345 <p>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation.  We
14346 do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
14347 non-free software, and it is their choice.</p>
14348
14349 <p>We plan to release beta3 this weekend.  You might want to give it a
14350 try.</p>
14351
14352       </div>
14353       <div class="tags">
14354
14355
14356         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14357
14358
14359       </div>
14360     </div>
14361     <div class="padding"></div>
14362
14363     <div class="entry">
14364       <div class="title">
14365         <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>
14366       </div>
14367       <div class="date">
14368         25th January 2012
14369       </div>
14370       <div class="body">
14371         <p>The next version of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu
14372 / Skolelinux</a> will include a new tool
14373 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp</tt>, which can be used to quickly set up all
14374 the computers in a school without much manual labour.  Here is a short
14375 summary on how to use it to set up a new school.</p>
14376
14377 <p>First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
14378 central server in the network.  Next, PXE boot all the client machines
14379 as thin clients and wait 5 minutes after the last client booted to
14380 allow the clients to report their existence to the central server.  When
14381 this is done, log on to the central server and run
14382 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a</tt> in the <tt>konsole</tt> to use the
14383 collected information to generate system objects in LDAP.  The output
14384 will look similar to this:</p>
14385
14386 <p><blockquote><pre>
14387 % sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
14388 info: Updating machine tjener.intern [10.0.2.2] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:05.
14389 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.
14390
14391 Enter password if you want to activate these changes, and ^c to abort.
14392
14393 Connecting to LDAP as cn=admin,ou=ldap-access,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
14394 enter password: *******
14395 %
14396 </pre></blockquote></p>
14397
14398 <p>After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
14399 root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
14400 populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
14401 automatically generated names.  The final step to set up the school is
14402 then to log into <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa</a>,
14403 the web based user, group and system administration system to change
14404 system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
14405 enable DHCP and DNS for the systems.  All clients that should be used
14406 as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
14407 group.  After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
14408 and get their assigned names and group based configuration
14409 automatically.</p>
14410
14411 <p>We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
14412 enabled this weekend.  You might want to give it a try.</p>
14413
14414 <p>Update 2012-01-28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
14415 hosts, one need to add the option -a.  I forgot to mention this in my
14416 original text, and have added it to the text now.</p>
14417
14418       </div>
14419       <div class="tags">
14420
14421
14422         Tags: <a href="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>.
14423
14424
14425       </div>
14426     </div>
14427     <div class="padding"></div>
14428
14429     <div class="entry">
14430       <div class="title">
14431         <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>
14432       </div>
14433       <div class="date">
14434         10th January 2012
14435       </div>
14436       <div class="body">
14437         <p>In the Squeeze version of
14438 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> soon
14439 to be released, users of the system will get their default browser
14440 start page set from LDAP, allowing the system administrator to point
14441 all users to the school web page by updating one setting in LDAP.  In
14442 addition to setting the default start page when a machine boots, users
14443 are shown the same page as a welcome page when they log in for the
14444 first time.</p>
14445
14446 <p>The LDAP object dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no have an attribute
14447 labeledURI with "http://www/ LDAP for Debian Edu/Skolelinux" as the
14448 default content.  By changing this value to another URL, all users get
14449 to see the page behind this new URL.</p>
14450
14451 <p>An easy way to update it is by using the ldapvi tool.  It can be
14452 called as "<tt>ldapvi -ZD '(cn=admin)'</tt>' to update LDAP with the
14453 new setting.</p>
14454
14455 <p>We have written the code to adjust the default start page and show
14456 the welcome page, and I wonder if there is an easier way to do this
14457 from within Iceweasel instead.</p>
14458
14459       </div>
14460       <div class="tags">
14461
14462
14463         Tags: <a href="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>.
14464
14465
14466       </div>
14467     </div>
14468     <div class="padding"></div>
14469
14470     <div class="entry">
14471       <div class="title">
14472         <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>
14473       </div>
14474       <div class="date">
14475          7th January 2012
14476       </div>
14477       <div class="body">
14478         <p>I am happy to announce that today we managed to wrap up and publish
14479 the second beta version of
14480 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>.  If
14481 you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE
14482 configuration for running diskless machines and installing new
14483 machines, check it out.  If you need a software solution for your
14484 school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
14485 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00000.html">available</a>
14486 on the project announcement list.</p>
14487
14488       </div>
14489       <div class="tags">
14490
14491
14492         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14493
14494
14495       </div>
14496     </div>
14497     <div class="padding"></div>
14498
14499     <div class="entry">
14500       <div class="title">
14501         <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>
14502       </div>
14503       <div class="date">
14504          3rd January 2012
14505       </div>
14506       <div class="body">
14507         <p>During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of
14508 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ready
14509 for release.  The initial problem I looked at was particularly
14510 interesting.</p>
14511
14512 <P>The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it
14513 post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find
14514 the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I
14515 integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from
14516 scratch.  I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors,
14517 remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and
14518 wrap up its tasks.</p>
14519
14520 <p>Eventually the cause was found.  The kernel was simply running out
14521 of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more.
14522 Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries
14523 to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but
14524 because I was typing.</P>
14525
14526 <p>The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at
14527 the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking
14528 /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the
14529 installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do 'find /' to
14530 generate some disk IO.  Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is
14531 one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to
14532 generate entropy.</p>
14533
14534 <p>The fix is in
14535 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/Installation">beta1
14536 of the Debian Edu/Squeeze</a> version, and we
14537 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu">welcome more testers and
14538 developers</a>.  We plan to release beta2 this weekend.</p>
14539
14540       </div>
14541       <div class="tags">
14542
14543
14544         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14545
14546
14547       </div>
14548     </div>
14549     <div class="padding"></div>
14550
14551     <div class="entry">
14552       <div class="title">
14553         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
14554       </div>
14555       <div class="date">
14556         21st November 2011
14557       </div>
14558       <div class="body">
14559         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
14560 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
14561 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
14562 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
14563 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
14564 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
14565 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
14566 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
14567 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
14568 the tools to do so.</p>
14569
14570 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
14571 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
14572 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
14573 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
14574
14575 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
14576 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
14577 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
14578 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
14579 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
14580 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
14581 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
14582 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
14583
14584 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
14585 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
14586 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
14587
14588 <p><pre>
14589 #!/usr/bin/perl
14590 use strict;
14591 use warnings;
14592 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
14593 BEGIN {
14594     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
14595     my %rhelmodules = (
14596         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
14597         );
14598     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
14599         eval "use $module;";
14600         if ($@) {
14601             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
14602             system("yum install -y $pkg");
14603             eval "use $module;";
14604         }
14605     }
14606 }
14607 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
14608
14609 upgrade_dell();
14610
14611 exit 0;
14612
14613 sub run_firmware_script {
14614     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
14615     unless ($script) {
14616         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
14617         exit 1
14618     }
14619     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
14620
14621     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
14622         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
14623     } else {
14624         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
14625     }
14626 }
14627
14628 sub run_firmware_scripts {
14629     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
14630     # Run firmware packages
14631     for my $dir (@dirs) {
14632         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
14633         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
14634         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
14635             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
14636             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
14637         }
14638         closedir $dh;
14639     }
14640 }
14641
14642 sub download {
14643     my $url = shift;
14644     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
14645     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
14646 }
14647
14648 sub upgrade_dell {
14649     my @dirs;
14650     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
14651     chomp $product;
14652
14653     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
14654
14655         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
14656         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
14657
14658         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
14659             CLEANUP => 1
14660             );
14661         chdir($tmpdir);
14662         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
14663         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
14664         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
14665         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
14666         my $fwopts = "-q";
14667         if (@paths) {
14668             for my $url (@paths) {
14669                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
14670             }
14671             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
14672         } else {
14673             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
14674             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
14675         }
14676         chdir('/');
14677     } else {
14678         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
14679         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
14680     }
14681 }
14682
14683 sub fetch_dell_fw {
14684     my $path = shift;
14685     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
14686     download($url);
14687 }
14688
14689 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
14690 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
14691 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
14692 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
14693     my $filename = shift;
14694
14695     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
14696     chomp $product;
14697     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
14698
14699     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
14700
14701     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
14702     my @paths;
14703     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
14704         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
14705         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
14706         my $oscode;
14707         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
14708             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
14709         } else {
14710             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
14711         }
14712         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
14713         {
14714             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
14715         }
14716     }
14717     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
14718         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
14719
14720         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
14721         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
14722
14723         my $cpath = $component->{path};
14724         for my $path (@paths) {
14725             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
14726                 push(@paths, $cpath);
14727             }
14728         }
14729     }
14730     return @paths;
14731 }
14732 </pre>
14733
14734 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
14735 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
14736 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
14737 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
14738 outdated.</p>
14739
14740       </div>
14741       <div class="tags">
14742
14743
14744         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>.
14745
14746
14747       </div>
14748     </div>
14749     <div class="padding"></div>
14750
14751     <div class="entry">
14752       <div class="title">
14753         <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>
14754       </div>
14755       <div class="date">
14756          7th October 2011
14757       </div>
14758       <div class="body">
14759         <p>Here in Norway the public libraries are debating with the
14760 publishing houses how to handle electronic books.  Surprisingly, the
14761 libraries seem to be willing to accept digital restriction mechanisms
14762 (DRM) on books and renting e-books with artificial scarcity from the
14763 publishing houses.  Time limited renting (2-3 years) is one proposed
14764 model, and only allowing X borrowers for each book is another.
14765 Personally I find it amazing that libraries are even considering such
14766 models.</p>
14767
14768 <p>Anyway, while reading <a href="http://boklaben.no/?p=220">part of
14769 this debate</a>, it occurred to me that someone should present a more
14770 sensible approach to the libraries, to allow its borrowers to get used
14771 to a better model.  The idea is simple:</p>
14772
14773 <p>Create a computer system for the libraries, either in the form of a
14774 Live DVD or a installable distribution, that provide a simple kiosk
14775 solution to hand out free e-books.  As a start, the books distributed
14776 by <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about
14777 36,000 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a>
14778 (1149 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The
14779 Internet Archive</a> (3,033,748 books) could be included, but any book
14780 where the copyright has expired or with a free licence could be
14781 distributed.</p>
14782
14783 <p>The computer system would make it easy to:</p>
14784
14785 <ul>
14786
14787 <li>Copy e-books into a USB stick, reading tablets, cell phones and
14788   other relevant equipment.</li>
14789
14790 <li>Show the books for reading on the the screen in the library.</li>
14791
14792 </ul>
14793
14794 <p>In addition to such kiosk solution, there should probably be a web
14795 site as well to allow people easy access to these books without
14796 visiting the library.  The site would be the distribution point for
14797 the kiosk systems, which would connect regularly to fetch any new
14798 books available.</p>
14799
14800 <p>Are there anyone working on a system like this?  I guess it would
14801 fit any library in the world, and not just the Norwegian public
14802 libraries. :)</p>
14803
14804       </div>
14805       <div class="tags">
14806
14807
14808         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>.
14809
14810
14811       </div>
14812     </div>
14813     <div class="padding"></div>
14814
14815     <div class="entry">
14816       <div class="title">
14817         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">Ripping problematic DVDs using dvdbackup and genisoimage</a>
14818       </div>
14819       <div class="date">
14820         17th September 2011
14821       </div>
14822       <div class="body">
14823         <p>For convenience, I want to store copies of all my DVDs on my file
14824 server.  It allow me to save shelf space flat while still having my
14825 movie collection easily available.  It also make it possible to let
14826 the kids see their favourite DVDs without wearing the physical copies
14827 down.  I prefer to store the DVDs as ISOs to keep the DVD menu and
14828 subtitle options intact.  It also ensure that the entire film is one
14829 file on the disk.  As this is for personal use, the ripping is
14830 perfectly legal here in Norway.</p>
14831
14832 <p>Normally I rip the DVDs using dd like this:</p>
14833
14834 <blockquote><pre>
14835 #!/bin/sh
14836 # apt-get install lsdvd
14837 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
14838 dd if=/dev/dvd of=/storage/dvds/$title.iso bs=1M
14839 </pre></blockquote>
14840
14841 <p>But some DVDs give a input/output error when I read it, and I have
14842 been looking for a better alternative.  I have no idea why this I/O
14843 error occur, but suspect my DVD drive, the Linux kernel driver or
14844 something fishy with the DVDs in question.  Or perhaps all three.</p>
14845
14846 <p>Anyway, I believe I found a solution today using dvdbackup and
14847 genisoimage.  This script gave me a working ISO for a problematic
14848 movie by first extracting the DVD file system and then re-packing it
14849 back as an ISO.
14850
14851 <blockquote><pre>
14852 #!/bin/sh
14853 # apt-get install lsdvd dvdbackup genisoimage
14854 set -e
14855 tmpdir=/storage/dvds/
14856 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
14857 dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M -o $tmpdir -n$title
14858 genisoimage -dvd-video -o $tmpdir/$title.iso $tmpdir/$title
14859 rm -rf $tmpdir/$title
14860 </pre></blockquote>
14861
14862 <p>Anyone know of a better way available in Debian/Squeeze?</p>
14863
14864 <p>Update 2011-09-18: I got a tip from Konstantin Khomoutov about the
14865 readom program from the wodim package.  It is specially written to
14866 read optical media, and is called like this: <tt>readom dev=/dev/dvd
14867 f=image.iso</tt>.  It got 6 GB along with the problematic Cars DVD
14868 before it failed, and failed right away with a Timmy Time DVD.</p>
14869
14870 <p>Next, I got a tip from Bastian Blank about
14871 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">his
14872 program python-dvdvideo</a>, which seem to be just what I am looking
14873 for.  Tested it with my problematic Timmy Time DVD, and it succeeded
14874 creating a ISO image.  The git source built and installed just fine in
14875 Squeeze, so I guess this will be my tool of choice in the future.</p>
14876
14877       </div>
14878       <div class="tags">
14879
14880
14881         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>.
14882
14883
14884       </div>
14885     </div>
14886     <div class="padding"></div>
14887
14888     <div class="entry">
14889       <div class="title">
14890         <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>
14891       </div>
14892       <div class="date">
14893          4th August 2011
14894       </div>
14895       <div class="body">
14896         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
14897 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
14898 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
14899 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
14900 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
14901 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
14902 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
14903 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
14904 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
14905
14906 <p><blockquote>
14907 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
14908 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
14909 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
14910 </blockquote></p>
14911
14912 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
14913 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
14914 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
14915 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
14916 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
14917 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
14918 hard to explain.</p>
14919
14920 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
14921 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
14922 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
14923 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
14924 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
14925 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
14926 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
14927 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
14928 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
14929 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
14930 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
14931 mode).</p>
14932
14933 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
14934 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
14935 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
14936 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
14937 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
14938 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
14939 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
14940 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
14941 after visiting single user mode.</p>
14942
14943 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
14944 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
14945 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
14946 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
14947 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
14948 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
14949 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
14950 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
14951
14952 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
14953 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
14954 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
14955
14956       </div>
14957       <div class="tags">
14958
14959
14960         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>.
14961
14962
14963       </div>
14964     </div>
14965     <div class="padding"></div>
14966
14967     <div class="entry">
14968       <div class="title">
14969         <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>
14970       </div>
14971       <div class="date">
14972         30th July 2011
14973       </div>
14974       <div class="body">
14975         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
14976 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
14977 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
14978 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
14979 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
14980 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
14981 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
14982 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
14983 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
14984 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
14985 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
14986 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
14987 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
14988
14989 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
14990 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
14991 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
14992 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
14993 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
14994 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
14995 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
14996 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
14997 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
14998
14999 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
15000 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
15001 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
15002 is presented.</p>
15003
15004 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
15005 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
15006 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
15007 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
15008 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
15009 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
15010 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
15011 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
15012 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
15013 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
15014 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
15015 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
15016 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
15017 find time to push this forward.</p>
15018
15019       </div>
15020       <div class="tags">
15021
15022
15023         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>.
15024
15025
15026       </div>
15027     </div>
15028     <div class="padding"></div>
15029
15030     <div class="entry">
15031       <div class="title">
15032         <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>
15033       </div>
15034       <div class="date">
15035         29th July 2011
15036       </div>
15037       <div class="body">
15038         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
15039 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
15040 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
15041 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
15042 issues.</p>
15043
15044 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
15045 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
15046 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
15047
15048 <ol>
15049
15050 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
15051 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
15052 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
15053 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
15054 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
15055 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
15056 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
15057 Debian.</li>
15058
15059 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
15060 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
15061 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
15062 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
15063 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
15064 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
15065 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
15066 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
15067 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
15068 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
15069 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
15070 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
15071 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
15072
15073 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
15074 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
15075 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
15076 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
15077 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
15078 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
15079 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
15080 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
15081 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
15082 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
15083
15084 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
15085 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
15086 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
15087 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
15088 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
15089 latter behaviour.</li>
15090
15091 </ol>
15092
15093 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
15094 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
15095 it do not matter much.</p>
15096
15097 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
15098 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
15099 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
15100
15101       </div>
15102       <div class="tags">
15103
15104
15105         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
15106
15107
15108       </div>
15109     </div>
15110     <div class="padding"></div>
15111
15112     <div class="entry">
15113       <div class="title">
15114         <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>
15115       </div>
15116       <div class="date">
15117         26th July 2011
15118       </div>
15119       <div class="body">
15120         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
15121 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
15122 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
15123 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
15124 security support for a few years.</p>
15125
15126 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
15127 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
15128 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
15129 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
15130 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
15131 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
15132 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
15133 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
15134 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
15135 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
15136 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
15137 easier in the future.</p>
15138
15139 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
15140 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
15141 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
15142 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
15143 do not have time for.</p>
15144
15145       </div>
15146       <div class="tags">
15147
15148
15149         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>.
15150
15151
15152       </div>
15153     </div>
15154     <div class="padding"></div>
15155
15156     <div class="entry">
15157       <div class="title">
15158         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html">Free Software vs. proprietary softare...</a>
15159       </div>
15160       <div class="date">
15161         20th June 2011
15162       </div>
15163       <div class="body">
15164         <p>Reading
15165 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/06/20/open-source-vs-closed-source-eulas/">the
15166 thingiverse blog</a>, I came across two highlights of interesting
15167 parts of the
15168 <a href="http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Autodesk_EULA">Autodesk</a>
15169 and
15170 <a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/06/things-you-cant-do-with-the-microsoft-kinect-sdk.html">Microsoft
15171 Kinect</a> End User License Agreements (EULAs), which illustrates
15172 quite well why I stay away from software with EULAs.  Whenever I take
15173 the time to read their content, the terms are simply unacceptable.</p>
15174
15175       </div>
15176       <div class="tags">
15177
15178
15179         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>.
15180
15181
15182       </div>
15183     </div>
15184     <div class="padding"></div>
15185
15186     <div class="entry">
15187       <div class="title">
15188         <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>
15189       </div>
15190       <div class="date">
15191         30th April 2011
15192       </div>
15193       <div class="body">
15194         <p>Today, the first draft implementation of an
15195 <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> for the Norwegian
15196 service <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> started to
15197 work.  It is only available on the developer server for now, and I
15198 have not tested it using any existing Open311 client (I lack the
15199 platforms needed to run the clients I have found so far), but it is
15200 able to query the database and extract a list of open and closed
15201 requests within a given category and reported to a given municipality.
15202 I believe that is a good start to create a useful service for those
15203 that want to do data mining on the requests submitted so far.</p>
15204
15205 <p>Where is it?  Visit
15206 <a href="http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/">http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/</a>
15207 to have a look.  Please send feedback to the
15208 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
15209 (at) nuug.no</a> mailing list.</p>
15210
15211       </div>
15212       <div class="tags">
15213
15214
15215         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>.
15216
15217
15218       </div>
15219     </div>
15220     <div class="padding"></div>
15221
15222     <div class="entry">
15223       <div class="title">
15224         <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>
15225       </div>
15226       <div class="date">
15227         29th April 2011
15228       </div>
15229       <div class="body">
15230         <p>The last few days I have spent some time trying to add support for
15231 the <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> in the
15232 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">Norwegian FixMyStreet service</a>.
15233 Earlier I believed Open311 would be a useful API to use to submit
15234 reports to the municipalities, but when I noticed that the
15235 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org.nz/">New Zealand version</a> of
15236 FixMyStreet had implemented Open311 on the server side, it occurred to
15237 me that this was a nice way to allow the public, press and
15238 municipalities to do data mining directly in the FixMyStreet service.
15239 Thus I went to work implementing the Open311 specification for
15240 FixMyStreet.  The implementation is not yet ready, but I am starting
15241 to get a draft limping along.  In the process, I have discovered a few
15242 issues with the Open311 specification.</p>
15243
15244 <p>One obvious missing feature is the lack of natural language
15245 handling in the specification.  The specification seem to assume all
15246 reports will be written in English, and do not provide a way for the
15247 receiving end to specify which languages are understood there.  To be
15248 able to use the same client and submit to several Open311 receivers,
15249 it would be useful to know which language to use when writing reports.
15250 I believe the specification should be extended to allow the receivers
15251 of problem reports to specify which language they accept, and the
15252 submitter to specify which language the report is written in.
15253 Language of a text can also be automatically guessed using statistical
15254 methods, but for multi-lingual persons like myself, it is useful to
15255 know which language to use when writing a problem report.  I suspect
15256 some lang=nb,nn kind of attribute would solve it.</p>
15257
15258 <p>A key part of the Open311 API is the list of services provided,
15259 which is similar to the categories used by FixMyStreet.  One issue I
15260 run into is the need to specify both name and unique identifier for
15261 each category.  The specification do not state that the identifier
15262 should be numeric, but all example implementations have used numbers
15263 here.  In FixMyStreet, there is no number associated with each
15264 category.  As the specification do not forbid it, I will use the name
15265 as the unique identifier for now and see how open311 clients handle
15266 it.</p>
15267
15268 <p>The report format in open311 and the report format in FixMyStreet
15269 differ in a key part.  FixMyStreet have a title and a description,
15270 while Open311 only have a description and lack the title.  I'm not
15271 quite sure how to best handle this yet.  When asking for a FixMyStreet
15272 report in Open311 format, I just merge title an description into the
15273 open311 description, but this is not going to work if the open311 API
15274 should be used for submitting new reports to FixMyStreet.</p>
15275
15276 <p>The search feature in Open311 is missing a way to ask for problems
15277 near a geographic location.  I believe this is important if one is to
15278 use Open311 as the query language for mobile units.  The specification
15279 should be extended to handle this, probably using some new lat=, lon=
15280 and range= options.</p>
15281
15282 <p>The final challenge I see is that the FixMyStreet code handle
15283 several administrations in one interface, while the Open311 API seem
15284 to assume only one administration.  For FixMyStreet, this mean a
15285 report can be sent to several administrations, and the categories
15286 available depend on the location of the problem.  Not quite sure how
15287 to best handle this.  I've noticed
15288 <a href="http://seeclickfix.com/open311/">SeeClickFix</a> added
15289 latitude and longitude options to the services request, but it do not
15290 solve the problem of what to return when no location is specified.
15291 Will have to investigate this a bit more.</p>
15292
15293 <p>My distaste for web forums have kept me from bringing these issues
15294 up with the open311 developer group.  I really wish they had a email
15295 list available via <a href="http://www.gmane.org/">Gmane</a> to use for
15296 discussions instead of only
15297 <a href="http://lists.open311.org/groups/discuss">a forum<a/>.  Oh,
15298 well.  That will probably resolve itself, one way or another.  I've
15299 also tried visiting the IRC channel #open311 on FreeNode, but no-one
15300 seem to reply to my questions there.  This make me wonder if I just
15301 fail to understand how the open311 community work.  It sure do not
15302 work like the free software project communities I am used to.</p>
15303
15304       </div>
15305       <div class="tags">
15306
15307
15308         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>.
15309
15310
15311       </div>
15312     </div>
15313     <div class="padding"></div>
15314
15315     <div class="entry">
15316       <div class="title">
15317         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html">Gnash enteres Google Summer of Code 2011</a>
15318       </div>
15319       <div class="date">
15320          6th April 2011
15321       </div>
15322       <div class="body">
15323         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is still
15324 the most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation.
15325 A few days ago the project
15326 <a href="http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/2011-04/msg00011.html">announced</a>
15327 that it will participate in Google Summer of Code.  I hope many
15328 students apply, and that some of them succeed in getting AVM2 support
15329 into Gnash.</p>
15330
15331       </div>
15332       <div class="tags">
15333
15334
15335         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>.
15336
15337
15338       </div>
15339     </div>
15340     <div class="padding"></div>
15341
15342     <div class="entry">
15343       <div class="title">
15344         <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>
15345       </div>
15346       <div class="date">
15347          3rd April 2011
15348       </div>
15349       <div class="body">
15350         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
15351 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
15352 update in English.</p>
15353
15354 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
15355 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
15356 of the British service
15357 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
15358 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
15359 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
15360 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
15361 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
15362 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
15363 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
15364 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
15365 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
15366 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
15367 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
15368 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
15369 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
15370
15371 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
15372 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
15373 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
15374 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
15375 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
15376 public infrastructure.</p>
15377
15378 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
15379 such service?</p>
15380
15381       </div>
15382       <div class="tags">
15383
15384
15385         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>.
15386
15387
15388       </div>
15389     </div>
15390     <div class="padding"></div>
15391
15392     <div class="entry">
15393       <div class="title">
15394         <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>
15395       </div>
15396       <div class="date">
15397         28th January 2011
15398       </div>
15399       <div class="body">
15400         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
15401 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
15402 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
15403 available on the Internet, and check our locally
15404 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
15405 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
15406 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
15407 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
15408 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
15409 out which security holes were present in our free software
15410 collection.</p>
15411
15412 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
15413 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
15414 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
15415 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
15416 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
15417 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
15418 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
15419 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
15420 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
15421 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
15422 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
15423 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
15424 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
15425 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
15426 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
15427 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
15428
15429 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
15430 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
15431 check out, one could look up
15432 <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
15433 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
15434 The most recent one is
15435 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
15436 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
15437 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
15438
15439 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
15440 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
15441 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
15442 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
15443 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
15444 security issues out.</p>
15445
15446 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
15447 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
15448 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
15449 RHEL is providing
15450 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
15451 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
15452 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
15453
15454 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
15455 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
15456 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
15457 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
15458 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
15459 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
15460 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
15461 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
15462 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
15463 established soon.</p>
15464
15465 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
15466 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
15467 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
15468 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
15469 for their packages.</p>
15470
15471       </div>
15472       <div class="tags">
15473
15474
15475         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>.
15476
15477
15478       </div>
15479     </div>
15480     <div class="padding"></div>
15481
15482     <div class="entry">
15483       <div class="title">
15484         <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>
15485       </div>
15486       <div class="date">
15487         23rd January 2011
15488       </div>
15489       <div class="body">
15490         <p>In the
15491 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
15492 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
15493 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
15494 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
15495 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
15496 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
15497 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
15498 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
15499 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
15500 one of my machines like this:</p>
15501
15502 <pre>
15503 loaded modules:
15504 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
15505 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
15506 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
15507 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
15508 10de:03ec pata_amd
15509 10de:03f6 sata_nv
15510 1022:1103 k8temp
15511 109e:036e bttv
15512 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
15513 11ab:4364 sky2
15514 </pre>
15515
15516 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
15517 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
15518
15519 <pre>
15520 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
15521     echo loaded pci modules:
15522     (
15523         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
15524         for address in * ; do
15525             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
15526                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
15527                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
15528                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
15529                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
15530                     echo "$id $module"
15531                 fi
15532             fi
15533         done
15534     )
15535     echo
15536 fi
15537 </pre>
15538
15539 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
15540 mappings:</p>
15541
15542 <pre>
15543 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
15544     echo loaded usb modules:
15545     (
15546         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
15547         for address in * ; do
15548             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
15549                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
15550                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
15551                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
15552                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
15553                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
15554                         echo "$id $module"
15555                     fi
15556                 fi
15557             fi
15558         done
15559     )
15560     echo
15561 fi
15562 </pre>
15563
15564 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
15565 well.</p>
15566
15567       </div>
15568       <div class="tags">
15569
15570
15571         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>.
15572
15573
15574       </div>
15575     </div>
15576     <div class="padding"></div>
15577
15578     <div class="entry">
15579       <div class="title">
15580         <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>
15581       </div>
15582       <div class="date">
15583         16th January 2011
15584       </div>
15585       <div class="body">
15586         <p>The video format struggle on the web continues, and the three
15587 contenders seem to be Ogg Theora, H.264 and WebM.  Most video sites
15588 seem to use H.264, while others use Ogg Theora.  Interestingly enough,
15589 the comments I see give me the feeling that a lot of people believe
15590 H.264 is the most supported video format in browsers, but according to
15591 the Wikipedia article on
15592 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">HTML5 video</a>,
15593 this is not true.  Check out the nice table of supprted formats in
15594 different browsers there.  The format supported by most browsers is
15595 Ogg Theora, supported by released versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google
15596 Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Origyn Web Browser and
15597 BOLT browser, while not supported by Internet Explorer nor Safari.
15598 The runner up is WebM supported by released versions of Google Chrome
15599 Chromium Opera and Origyn Web Browser, and test versions of Mozilla
15600 Firefox.  H.264 is supported by released versions of Safari, Origyn
15601 Web Browser and BOLT browser, and the test version of Internet
15602 Explorer.  Those wanting Ogg Theora support in Internet Explorer and
15603 Safari can install plugins to get it.</p>
15604
15605 <p>To me, the simple conclusion from this is that to reach most users
15606 without any extra software installed, one uses Ogg Theora with the
15607 HTML5 video tag.   Of course to reach all those without a browser
15608 handling HTML5, one need fallback mechanisms.  In
15609 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a>, we provide first fallback to a
15610 plugin capable of playing MPEG1 video, and those without such support
15611 we have a second fallback to the Cortado java applet playing Ogg
15612 Theora.  This seem to work quite well, as can be seen in an <a
15613 href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20110111-semantic-web/">example
15614 from last week</a>.</p>
15615
15616 <p>The reason Ogg Theora is the most supported format, and H.264 is
15617 the least supported is simple.  Implementing and using H.264
15618 require royalty payment to MPEG-LA, and the terms of use from MPEG-LA
15619 are incompatible with free software licensing.  If you believed H.264
15620 was without royalties and license terms, check out
15621 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
15622 Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps.</p>
15623
15624 <p>A incomplete list of sites providing video in Ogg Theora is
15625 available from
15626 <a href="http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_Theora_videos">the
15627 Xiph.org wiki</a>, if you want to have a look.  I'm not aware of a
15628 similar list for WebM nor H.264.</p>
15629
15630 <p>Update 2011-01-16 09:40: A question from Tollef on IRC made me
15631 realise that I failed to make it clear enough this text is about the
15632 &lt;video&gt; tag support in browsers and not the video support
15633 provided by external plugins like the Flash plugins.</p>
15634
15635       </div>
15636       <div class="tags">
15637
15638
15639         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
15640
15641
15642       </div>
15643     </div>
15644     <div class="padding"></div>
15645
15646     <div class="entry">
15647       <div class="title">
15648         <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>
15649       </div>
15650       <div class="date">
15651         12th January 2011
15652       </div>
15653       <div class="body">
15654         <p>Today I discovered
15655 <a href="http://www.digi.no/860070/google-dropper-h264-stotten-i-chrome">via
15656 digi.no</a> that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
15657 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html">yesterday
15658 announced</a> plans to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt; in
15659 the browser.  The argument used is that H.264 is not a "completely
15660 open" codec technology.  If you believe H.264 was free for everyone
15661 to use, I recommend having a look at the essay
15662 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
15663 Free That Matters</a>".  It is not free of cost for creators of video
15664 tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the
15665 terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from
15666 licensing the patents needed for H.264.  Some background information
15667 on the Google announcement is available from
15668 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24243/Google_To_Drop_H264_Support_from_Chrome">OSnews</a>.
15669 A good read. :)</p>
15670
15671 <p>Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to
15672 promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on
15673 the Internet.  This can only be done by publishing using free and open
15674 standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support
15675 for these free and open standards.  At the moment there seem to be two
15676 camps in the web browser world when it come to video support.  Some
15677 browsers support H.264, and others support
15678 <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg Theora</a> and
15679 <a href="http://www.webmproject.org/">WebM</a>
15680 (<a href="http://www.diracvideo.org/">Dirac</a> is not really an option
15681 yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet
15682 and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for
15683 H.264 to not reach all potential viewers.
15684 Wikipedia keep <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">an
15685 updated summary</a> of the current browser support.</p>
15686
15687 <p>Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
15688 promoting H.264, and John Gruber
15689 <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/simple_questions">presents
15690 the mind set</a> of these people quite well.  His rhetorical questions
15691 provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
15692 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24245/10_Questions_for_John_Gruber_Regarding_H_264_WebM">presenting
15693 the issues with H.264</a>. Both are worth a read.</p>
15694
15695 <p>Some argue that if Google is dropping H.264 because it isn't free,
15696 they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin.  This
15697 argument was covered by Simon Phipps in
15698 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/01/google-and-h264---far-from-hypocritical/index.htm">todays
15699 blog post</a>, which I find to put the issue in context.  To me it
15700 make perfect sense to drop native H.264 support for HTML5 in the
15701 browser while still allowing plugins.</p>
15702
15703 <p>I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest,
15704 is that all the users and promoters of H.264 suddenly get an uneasy
15705 feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse.  A lot of TV
15706 broadcasters have been moving to H.264 the last few years, and a lot
15707 of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they
15708 could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web
15709 publishing.  Suddenly this belief is shaken.</p>
15710
15711 <p>An interesting question is why Google is doing this.  While the
15712 presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only
15713 present the argument if the change make sense from a business
15714 perspective.  One reason might be that they are currently negotiating
15715 with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the
15716 feeling that dropping H.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and
15717 Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google.
15718 Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having
15719 to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a
15720 video format not requiring royalties at all.  A third reason might be
15721 that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the
15722 Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome.
15723 I guess time will tell.</p>
15724
15725 <p>Update 2011-01-15: The Google Chrome team provided
15726 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html">more
15727 background and information on the move</a> it a blog post yesterday.</p>
15728
15729       </div>
15730       <div class="tags">
15731
15732
15733         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
15734
15735
15736       </div>
15737     </div>
15738     <div class="padding"></div>
15739
15740     <div class="entry">
15741       <div class="title">
15742         <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>
15743       </div>
15744       <div class="date">
15745         30th December 2010
15746       </div>
15747       <div class="body">
15748         <p>After trying to
15749 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html">compare
15750 Ogg Theora</a> to
15751 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the Digistan
15752 definition</a> of a free and open standard, I concluded that this need
15753 to be done for more standards and started on a framework for doing
15754 this.  As a start, I want to get the status for all the standards in
15755 the Norwegian reference directory, which include UTF-8, HTML, PDF, ODF,
15756 JPEG, PNG, SVG and others.  But to be able to complete this in a
15757 reasonable time frame, I will need help.</p>
15758
15759 <p>If you want to help out with this work, please visit
15760 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/standard/digistan-analyse">the
15761 wiki pages I have set up for this</a>, and let me know that you want
15762 to help out.  The IRC channel #nuug on irc.freenode.net is a good
15763 place to coordinate this for now, as it is the IRC channel for the
15764 NUUG association where I have created the framework (I am the leader
15765 of the Norwegian Unix User Group).</p>
15766
15767 <p>The framework is still forming, and a lot is left to do.  Do not be
15768 scared by the sketchy form of the current pages. :)</p>
15769
15770       </div>
15771       <div class="tags">
15772
15773
15774         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>.
15775
15776
15777       </div>
15778     </div>
15779     <div class="padding"></div>
15780
15781     <div class="entry">
15782       <div class="title">
15783         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html">The many definitions of a open standard</a>
15784       </div>
15785       <div class="date">
15786         27th December 2010
15787       </div>
15788       <div class="body">
15789         <p>One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of
15790 "<a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">Free and
15791 Open Standard</a>" is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of
15792 the term has been decided by Digistan.  The term "Open Standard" has
15793 become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking
15794 about standards.  One end up discussing which definition is the best
15795 one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of
15796 de-facto standards and proprietary solutions.</p>
15797
15798 <p>But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open
15799 standards, here are a few that I know about.  This list is not
15800 complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a
15801 complete survey.  More definitions are available on the
15802 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard">wikipedia
15803 page</a>.</p>
15804
15805 <p>First off is my favourite, the definition from the European
15806 Interoperability Framework version 1.0.  Really sad to notice that BSA
15807 and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version 2.0 of the
15808 framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with
15809 their own people.  Anyway, the definition is still available and it
15810 include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a
15811 specification on equal terms.</p>
15812
15813 <blockquote>
15814
15815 <p>The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification
15816 and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an
15817 open standard:</p>
15818
15819 <ul>
15820
15821 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
15822 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
15823 open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties
15824 (consensus or majority decision etc.).</li>
15825
15826 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
15827 document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be
15828 permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a
15829 nominal fee.</li>
15830
15831 <li>The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of
15832 (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-
15833 free basis.</li>
15834
15835 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
15836
15837 </ul>
15838 </blockquote>
15839
15840 <p>Another one originates from my friends over at
15841 <a href="http://www.dkuug.dk/">DKUUG</a>, who coined and gathered
15842 support for <a href="http://www.aaben-standard.dk/">this
15843 definition</a> in 2004.  It even made it into the Danish parlament as
15844 <a href="http://www.ft.dk/dokumenter/tingdok.aspx?/samling/20051/beslutningsforslag/B103/som_fremsat.htm">their
15845 definition of a open standard</a>.  Another from a different part of
15846 the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.</p>
15847
15848 <blockquote>
15849
15850 <p>En åben standard opfylder følgende krav:</p>
15851
15852 <ol>
15853
15854 <li>Veldokumenteret med den fuldstændige specifikation offentligt
15855 tilgængelig.</li>
15856
15857 <li>Frit implementerbar uden økonomiske, politiske eller juridiske
15858 begrænsninger på implementation og anvendelse.</li>
15859
15860 <li>Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et åbent forum (en såkaldt
15861 "standardiseringsorganisation") via en åben proces.</li>
15862
15863 </ol>
15864
15865 </blockquote>
15866
15867 <p>Then there is <a href="http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/def.html">the
15868 definition</a> from Free Software Foundation Europe.</p>
15869
15870 <blockquote>
15871
15872 <p>An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is</p>
15873
15874 <ol>
15875
15876 <li>subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a
15877 manner equally available to all parties;</li>
15878
15879 <li>without any components or extensions that have dependencies on
15880 formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open
15881 Standard themselves;</li>
15882
15883 <li>free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by
15884 any party or in any business model;</li>
15885
15886 <li>managed and further developed independently of any single vendor
15887 in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third
15888 parties;</li>
15889
15890 <li>available in multiple complete implementations by competing
15891 vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all
15892 parties.</li>
15893
15894 </ol>
15895
15896 </blockquote>
15897
15898 <p>A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created
15899 its
15900 <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/dennisding/resource/Open%20Standard%20Definition.pdf">Open
15901 Standards Checklist</a> with a fairly detailed description.</p>
15902
15903 <blockquote>
15904 <p>Creation and Management of an Open Standard
15905
15906 <ul>
15907
15908 <li>Its development and management process must be collaborative and
15909   democratic:
15910
15911          <ul>
15912
15913          <li>Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to
15914             participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria
15915             imposed by the organization under which it is developed
15916             and managed.</li>
15917
15918          <li>The processes must be documented and, through a known
15919             method, can be changed through input from all
15920             participants.</li>
15921
15922          <li>The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for
15923             the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.</li>
15924
15925          <li>Development and management should strive for consensus,
15926             and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.</li>
15927
15928          <li>The standard specification must be open to extensive
15929             public review at least once in its life-cycle, with
15930             comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.</li>
15931
15932          </ul>
15933
15934 </li>
15935
15936 </ul>
15937
15938 <p>Use and Licensing of an Open Standard</p>
15939 <ul>
15940
15941 <li>The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation,
15942   and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing
15943   implementations to the interface described in the standard without
15944   undue or restrictive constraints.  Interfaces include APIs,
15945   protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.</li>
15946
15947 <li> The standard must not contain any proprietary "hooks" that create
15948   a technical or economic barriers</li>
15949
15950 <li>Faithful implementations of the standard must
15951   interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer
15952   program to communicate and exchange information with other computer
15953   programs and mutually to use the information which has been
15954   exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange
15955   file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or
15956   conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other
15957   computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are
15958   intended to function.</li>
15959
15960 <li>It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the
15961   standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it
15962   must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.</li>
15963
15964 <li>It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or
15965   fees; also known as "royalty free"), worldwide, non-exclusive and
15966   perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and
15967   sell products based on the standard.  The only exceptions are
15968   terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms
15969   outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished
15970   patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is
15971   only for the exact scope of the standard in question.
15972
15973       <ul>
15974
15975       <li> May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of
15976         licensees' patent claims essential to practice that standard
15977         (also known as a reciprocity clause)</li>
15978
15979       <li> May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor
15980         or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims
15981         essential to practice that standard (also known as a
15982         "defensive suspension" clause)</li>
15983
15984       <li> The same licensing terms are available to every potential
15985         licensor</li>
15986
15987       </ul>
15988 </li>
15989
15990 <li>The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude
15991   implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms
15992   or restricted licensing terms</li>
15993
15994 </ul>
15995
15996 </blockquote>
15997
15998 <p>It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that
15999 there are so many of them.  As you can see, the same holds true for
16000 open standard definitions.  Most of the definitions have a lot in
16001 common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open
16002 standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it
16003 possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real
16004 competition to downplay the significance of open standards.  I hope we
16005 can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open
16006 Standards.</p>
16007
16008       </div>
16009       <div class="tags">
16010
16011
16012         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>.
16013
16014
16015       </div>
16016     </div>
16017     <div class="padding"></div>
16018
16019     <div class="entry">
16020       <div class="title">
16021         <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>
16022       </div>
16023       <div class="date">
16024         25th December 2010
16025       </div>
16026       <div class="body">
16027         <p><a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">The
16028 Digistan definition</a> of a free and open standard reads like this:</p>
16029
16030 <blockquote>
16031
16032 <p>The Digital Standards Organization defines free and open standard
16033 as follows:</p>
16034
16035 <ol>
16036
16037 <li>A free and open standard is immune to vendor capture at all stages
16038 in its life-cycle. Immunity from vendor capture makes it possible to
16039 freely use, improve upon, trust, and extend a standard over time.</li>
16040
16041 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
16042 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
16043 open decision-making procedure available to all interested
16044 parties.</li>
16045
16046 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
16047 document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy,
16048 distribute, and use it freely.</li>
16049
16050 <li>The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made
16051 irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.</li>
16052
16053 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
16054
16055 </ol>
16056
16057 <p>The economic outcome of a free and open standard, which can be
16058 measured, is that it enables perfect competition between suppliers of
16059 products based on the standard.</p>
16060 </blockquote>
16061
16062 <p>For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free
16063 and open standard according to this definition.  Here is a short
16064 writeup of what I have been able to gather so far.  I brought up the
16065 topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list
16066 <a href="http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/advocacy/2009-July/001632.html">in
16067 July 2009</a>, for those that want to see some background information.
16068 According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list
16069 the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.</p>
16070
16071 <p><strong>Free from vendor capture?</strong></p>
16072
16073 <p>As far as I can see, there is no single vendor that can control the
16074 Ogg Theora specification.  It can be argued that the
16075 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/">Xiph foundation</A> is such vendor, but
16076 given that it is a non-profit foundation with the expressed goal
16077 making free and open protocols and standards available, it is not
16078 obvious that this is a real risk.  One issue with the Xiph
16079 foundation is that its inner working (as in board member list, or who
16080 control the foundation) are not easily available on the web.  I've
16081 been unable to find out who is in the foundation board, and have not
16082 seen any accounting information documenting how money is handled nor
16083 where is is spent in the foundation.  It is thus not obvious for an
16084 external observer who control The Xiph foundation, and for all I know
16085 it is possible for a single vendor to take control over the
16086 specification.  But it seem unlikely.</p>
16087
16088 <p><strong>Maintained by open not-for-profit organisation?</strong></p>
16089
16090 <p>Assuming that the Xiph foundation is the organisation its web pages
16091 claim it to be, this point is fulfilled.  If Xiph foundation is
16092 controlled by a single vendor, it isn't, but I have not found any
16093 documentation indicating this.</p>
16094
16095 <p>According to
16096 <a href="http://media.hiof.no/diverse/fad/rapport_4.pdf">a report</a>
16097 prepared by Audun Vaaler og Børre Ludvigsen for the Norwegian
16098 government, the Xiph foundation is a non-commercial organisation and
16099 the development process is open, transparent and non-Discrimatory.
16100 Until proven otherwise, I believe it make most sense to believe the
16101 report is correct.</p>
16102
16103 <p><strong>Specification freely available?</strong></p>
16104
16105 <p>The specification for the <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/">Ogg
16106 container format</a> and both the
16107 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/">Vorbis</a> and
16108 <a href="http://theora.org/doc/">Theora</a> codeces are available on
16109 the web.  This are the terms in the Vorbis and Theora specification:
16110
16111 <blockquote>
16112
16113 Anyone may freely use and distribute the Ogg and [Vorbis/Theora]
16114 specifications, whether in private, public, or corporate
16115 capacity. However, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the Ogg project reserve
16116 the right to set the Ogg [Vorbis/Theora] specification and certify
16117 specification compliance.
16118
16119 </blockquote>
16120
16121 <p>The Ogg container format is specified in IETF
16122 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/rfc3533.txt">RFC 3533</a>, and
16123 this is the term:<p>
16124
16125 <blockquote>
16126
16127 <p>This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
16128 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
16129 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
16130 distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
16131 provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
16132 included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
16133 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
16134 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
16135 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
16136 Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
16137 in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to
16138 translate it into languages other than English.</p>
16139
16140 <p>The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
16141 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.</p>
16142 </blockquote>
16143
16144 <p>All these terms seem to allow unlimited distribution and use, an
16145 this term seem to be fulfilled.  There might be a problem with the
16146 missing permission to distribute modified versions of the text, and
16147 thus reuse it in other specifications.  Not quite sure if that is a
16148 requirement for the Digistan definition.</p>
16149
16150 <p><strong>Royalty-free?</strong></p>
16151
16152 <p>There are no known patent claims requiring royalties for the Ogg
16153 Theora format.
16154 <a href="http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=65782">MPEG-LA</a>
16155 and
16156 <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/237238/Steve-Jobs-Hints-At-Theora-Lawsuit">Steve
16157 Jobs</a> in Apple claim to know about some patent claims (submarine
16158 patents) against the Theora format, but no-one else seem to believe
16159 them.  Both Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation have looked into
16160 this and decided to implement Ogg Theora support in their browsers
16161 without paying any royalties.  For now the claims from MPEG-LA and
16162 Steve Jobs seem more like FUD to scare people to use the H.264 codec
16163 than any real problem with Ogg Theora.</p>
16164
16165 <p><strong>No constraints on re-use?</strong></p>
16166
16167 <p>I am not aware of any constraints on re-use.</p>
16168
16169 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
16170
16171 <p>3 of 5 requirements seem obviously fulfilled, and the remaining 2
16172 depend on the governing structure of the Xiph foundation.  Given the
16173 background report used by the Norwegian government, I believe it is
16174 safe to assume the last two requirements are fulfilled too, but it
16175 would be nice if the Xiph foundation web site made it easier to verify
16176 this.</p>
16177
16178 <p>It would be nice to see other analysis of other specifications to
16179 see if they are free and open standards.</p>
16180
16181       </div>
16182       <div class="tags">
16183
16184
16185         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
16186
16187
16188       </div>
16189     </div>
16190     <div class="padding"></div>
16191
16192     <div class="entry">
16193       <div class="title">
16194         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_reply_from_Edgar_Villanueva_to_Microsoft_in_Peru.html">The reply from Edgar Villanueva to Microsoft in Peru</a>
16195       </div>
16196       <div class="date">
16197         25th December 2010
16198       </div>
16199       <div class="body">
16200         <p>A few days ago
16201 <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article189879.ece">an
16202 article</a> in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version
16203 2.0 of
16204 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Framework">European
16205 Interoperability Framework</a> has been successfully lobbied by the
16206 proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software.
16207 Nothing very surprising there, given
16208 <a href="http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/29/2115235/Open-Source-Open-Standards-Under-Attack-In-Europe">earlier
16209 reports</a> on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in
16210 this work.  But I find this very sad.   The definition of
16211 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dokumenter/standard-presse-def-200506.txt">an
16212 open standard from version 1</a> was very good, and something I
16213 believe should be used also in the future, alongside
16214 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the
16215 definition from Digistan</A>.  Version 2 have removed the open
16216 standard definition from its content.</p>
16217
16218 <p>Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar
16219 Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply
16220 to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software
16221 in the public sector in Peru.  As the text was not available from a
16222 few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from
16223 <a href="http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/articles/en/reponseperou/villanueva_to_ms.html">my
16224 source</a> to ensure it is available also in the future.  Some
16225 background information about that story is available in
16226 <a href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6099">an article</a> from
16227 Linux Journal in 2002.</p>
16228
16229 <blockquote>
16230 <p>Lima, 8th of April, 2002<br>
16231 To: Señor JUAN ALBERTO GONZÁLEZ<br>
16232 General Manager of Microsoft Perú</p>
16233
16234 <p>Dear Sir:</p>
16235
16236 <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>
16237
16238 <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>
16239
16240 <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>
16241
16242 <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>
16243
16244 <p>
16245 <ul>
16246 <li>Free access to public information by the citizen. </li>
16247 <li>Permanence of public data. </li>
16248 <li>Security of the State and citizens.</li>
16249 </ul>
16250 </p>
16251
16252 <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>
16253
16254 <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>
16255
16256 <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>
16257
16258 <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>
16259
16260 <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>
16261
16262
16263 <p>From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:<br>
16264 <li>the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software</li>
16265 <li>the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software</li>
16266 <li>the law does not specify which concrete software to use</li>
16267 <li>the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought</li>
16268 <li>the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.</li>
16269
16270 </p>
16271
16272 <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>
16273
16274 <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>
16275
16276 <p>As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail:</p>
16277
16278 <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>
16279
16280 <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>
16281
16282 <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>
16283
16284 <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>
16285
16286 <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>
16287
16288 <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>
16289
16290 <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>
16291
16292 <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>
16293
16294 <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>
16295
16296 <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>
16297
16298 <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>
16299
16300 <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>
16301
16302 <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>
16303
16304 <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>
16305
16306 <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>
16307
16308 <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>
16309
16310 <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>
16311
16312 <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>
16313
16314 <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>
16315
16316 <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>
16317
16318 <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>
16319
16320 <p>On security:</p>
16321
16322 <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>
16323
16324 <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>
16325
16326 <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>
16327
16328 <p>In respect of the guarantee:</p>
16329
16330 <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>
16331
16332 <p>On Intellectual Property:</p>
16333
16334 <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>
16335
16336 <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>
16337
16338 <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>
16339
16340 <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>
16341
16342 <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>
16343
16344 <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>
16345
16346 <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>
16347
16348 <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>
16349
16350 <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>
16351
16352 <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>
16353
16354 <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>
16355
16356 <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>
16357
16358 <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>
16359
16360 <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>
16361
16362 <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>
16363
16364 <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>
16365
16366 <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>
16367
16368 <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>
16369
16370 <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>
16371
16372 <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>
16373
16374 <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>
16375
16376 <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>
16377
16378 <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>
16379
16380 <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>
16381
16382 <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>
16383
16384 <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>
16385
16386 <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>
16387
16388 <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>
16389
16390 <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>
16391
16392 <p>Cordially,<br>
16393 DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NUÑEZ<br>
16394 Congressman of the Republic of Perú.</p>
16395 </blockquote>
16396
16397       </div>
16398       <div class="tags">
16399
16400
16401         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>.
16402
16403
16404       </div>
16405     </div>
16406     <div class="padding"></div>
16407
16408     <div class="entry">
16409       <div class="title">
16410         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html">Officeshots still going strong</a>
16411       </div>
16412       <div class="date">
16413         25th December 2010
16414       </div>
16415       <div class="body">
16416         <p>Half a year ago I
16417 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">wrote
16418 a bit</a> about <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>,
16419 a web service to allow anyone to test how ODF documents are handled by
16420 the different programs reading and writing the ODF format.</p>
16421
16422 <p>I just had a look at the service, and it seem to be going strong.
16423 Very interesting to see the results reported in the gallery, how
16424 different Office implementations handle different ODF features.  Sad
16425 to see that KOffice was not doing it very well, and happy to see that
16426 LibreOffice has been tested already (but sadly not listed as a option
16427 for OfficeShots users yet).  I am glad to see that the ODF community
16428 got such a great test tool available.</p>
16429
16430       </div>
16431       <div class="tags">
16432
16433
16434         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>.
16435
16436
16437       </div>
16438     </div>
16439     <div class="padding"></div>
16440
16441     <div class="entry">
16442       <div class="title">
16443         <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>
16444       </div>
16445       <div class="date">
16446         22nd December 2010
16447       </div>
16448       <div class="body">
16449         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
16450 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
16451 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
16452 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
16453 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
16454 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
16455 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
16456 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
16457 university.</p>
16458
16459 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
16460 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
16461 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
16462 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
16463 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
16464 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
16465 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
16466 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
16467
16468 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
16469 I perform on a new model.</p>
16470
16471 <ul>
16472
16473 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
16474 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
16475 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
16476
16477 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
16478 installation, X.org is working.</li>
16479
16480 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
16481 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
16482 reported by the program.</li>
16483
16484 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
16485 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
16486 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
16487 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
16488 normally test this by playing
16489 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
16490 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
16491
16492 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
16493 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
16494
16495 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
16496 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
16497
16498 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
16499 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
16500
16501 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
16502 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
16503 few.</li>
16504
16505 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
16506 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
16507 notice this.</li>
16508
16509 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
16510 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
16511 resume.</li>
16512
16513 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
16514 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
16515 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
16516 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
16517 not.</li>
16518
16519 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
16520 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
16521 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
16522 existence.</li>
16523
16524 </ul>
16525
16526 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
16527 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
16528 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
16529 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
16530 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
16531 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
16532 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
16533 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
16534
16535       </div>
16536       <div class="tags">
16537
16538
16539         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>.
16540
16541
16542       </div>
16543     </div>
16544     <div class="padding"></div>
16545
16546     <div class="entry">
16547       <div class="title">
16548         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
16549       </div>
16550       <div class="date">
16551         11th December 2010
16552       </div>
16553       <div class="body">
16554         <p>As I continue to explore
16555 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
16556 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
16557 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
16558
16559 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
16560 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
16561 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
16562 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
16563 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
16564 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
16565 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
16566 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
16567 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
16568 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
16569 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
16570 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
16571 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
16572 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
16573 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
16574 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
16575 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
16576 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
16577 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
16578 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
16579
16580 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
16581 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
16582 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
16583 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
16584 If the Skolelinux foundation
16585 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
16586 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
16587 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
16588 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
16589 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
16590 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
16591 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
16592 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
16593
16594 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
16595 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
16596 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
16597 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
16598 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
16599 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
16600 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
16601 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
16602 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
16603 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
16604 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
16605 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
16606 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
16607 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
16608 currencies.</p>
16609
16610 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
16611 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
16612 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
16613 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
16614 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
16615 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
16616 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
16617 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
16618 BitCoins.  Check out
16619 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
16620 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
16621 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
16622 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
16623 yet.</p>
16624
16625 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
16626 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
16627 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
16628 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
16629 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
16630
16631       </div>
16632       <div class="tags">
16633
16634
16635         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>.
16636
16637
16638       </div>
16639     </div>
16640     <div class="padding"></div>
16641
16642     <div class="entry">
16643       <div class="title">
16644         <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>
16645       </div>
16646       <div class="date">
16647         10th December 2010
16648       </div>
16649       <div class="body">
16650         <p>With this weeks lawless
16651 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
16652 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
16653 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
16654 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
16655 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
16656 A blog post from
16657 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
16658 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
16659 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
16660 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
16661 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
16662 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
16663 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
16664
16665 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
16666 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
16667 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
16668 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
16669 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
16670 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
16671 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
16672 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
16673 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
16674 Debian</a> soon.</p>
16675
16676 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
16677 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
16678 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
16679 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
16680 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
16681 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
16682 you can even get
16683 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
16684 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
16685 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
16686 on the current exchange rates.</p>
16687
16688 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
16689 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
16690 donations to the address
16691 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
16692
16693       </div>
16694       <div class="tags">
16695
16696
16697         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>.
16698
16699
16700       </div>
16701     </div>
16702     <div class="padding"></div>
16703
16704     <div class="entry">
16705       <div class="title">
16706         <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>
16707       </div>
16708       <div class="date">
16709          9th December 2010
16710       </div>
16711       <div class="body">
16712         <p>A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot
16713 student assosiation <a href="http://www.robotica.no/">Robotica
16714 Osloensis</a> at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to
16715 get their own 3D printer.  They wanted to learn from me based on my
16716 work in the area.  After having a short lunch meeting with them, I
16717 offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete
16718 the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon.  I look
16719 forward to see how this goes.  This monday their volunteer driver
16720 picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the
16721 last exam is over so they can start work on getting the 3D printer
16722 operational.</p>
16723
16724 <p>The robotic group have already build several robots on their own,
16725 and seem capable of getting the reprap operational.  I really look
16726 forward to being able to print all the cool 3D designs published on
16727 <a href="http://www.thingiverse.com/">Thingiverse</a>.  I even got
16728 some 3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at
16729 the computer science department at the university demonstrated their
16730 very cool 3D scanner.</p>
16731
16732       </div>
16733       <div class="tags">
16734
16735
16736         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>.
16737
16738
16739       </div>
16740     </div>
16741     <div class="padding"></div>
16742
16743     <div class="entry">
16744       <div class="title">
16745         <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>
16746       </div>
16747       <div class="date">
16748         29th November 2010
16749       </div>
16750       <div class="body">
16751         <p>On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
16752 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2010-12-03-05-Oslo">development
16753 gathering</a> in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway.  I
16754 really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
16755 Squeeze release.  The gathering is open for everyone interested in
16756 learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
16757
16758 <p>On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
16759 organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
16760 will hold its
16761 <a href="http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Genfors/2010">General Assembly
16762 for 2010</a>.  Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388
16763 people registered as members.  Last year 32 members cast their vote in
16764 the memberdb based election system.  I hope more people find time to
16765 vote this year.</p>
16766
16767       </div>
16768       <div class="tags">
16769
16770
16771         Tags: <a href="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>.
16772
16773
16774       </div>
16775     </div>
16776     <div class="padding"></div>
16777
16778     <div class="entry">
16779       <div class="title">
16780         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
16781       </div>
16782       <div class="date">
16783         27th November 2010
16784       </div>
16785       <div class="body">
16786         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
16787 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
16788 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
16789 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
16790 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
16791 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
16792 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
16793 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
16794
16795 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
16796 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
16797 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
16798 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
16799 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
16800 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
16801 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
16802 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
16803 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
16804 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
16805 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
16806
16807 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
16808 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
16809 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
16810 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
16811 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
16812 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
16813 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
16814 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
16815 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
16816 what is going on.</p>
16817
16818       </div>
16819       <div class="tags">
16820
16821
16822         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>.
16823
16824
16825       </div>
16826     </div>
16827     <div class="padding"></div>
16828
16829     <div class="entry">
16830       <div class="title">
16831         <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>
16832       </div>
16833       <div class="date">
16834         22nd November 2010
16835       </div>
16836       <div class="body">
16837         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
16838 upgrade testing of the
16839 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
16840 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
16841 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
16842 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
16843
16844 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
16845
16846 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
16847
16848 <blockquote><p>
16849   apache2.2-bin
16850   aptdaemon
16851   baobab
16852   binfmt-support
16853   browser-plugin-gnash
16854   cheese-common
16855   cli-common
16856   cups-pk-helper
16857   dmz-cursor-theme
16858   empathy
16859   empathy-common
16860   freedesktop-sound-theme
16861   freeglut3
16862   gconf-defaults-service
16863   gdm-themes
16864   gedit-plugins
16865   geoclue
16866   geoclue-hostip
16867   geoclue-localnet
16868   geoclue-manual
16869   geoclue-yahoo
16870   gnash
16871   gnash-common
16872   gnome
16873   gnome-backgrounds
16874   gnome-cards-data
16875   gnome-codec-install
16876   gnome-core
16877   gnome-desktop-environment
16878   gnome-disk-utility
16879   gnome-screenshot
16880   gnome-search-tool
16881   gnome-session-canberra
16882   gnome-system-log
16883   gnome-themes-extras
16884   gnome-themes-more
16885   gnome-user-share
16886   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
16887   gstreamer0.10-tools
16888   gtk2-engines
16889   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
16890   gtk2-engines-smooth
16891   hamster-applet
16892   libapache2-mod-dnssd
16893   libapr1
16894   libaprutil1
16895   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
16896   libaprutil1-ldap
16897   libart2.0-cil
16898   libboost-date-time1.42.0
16899   libboost-python1.42.0
16900   libboost-thread1.42.0
16901   libchamplain-0.4-0
16902   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
16903   libcheese-gtk18
16904   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
16905   libcryptui0
16906   libdiscid0
16907   libelf1
16908   libepc-1.0-2
16909   libepc-common
16910   libepc-ui-1.0-2
16911   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
16912   libfreerdp0
16913   libgconf2.0-cil
16914   libgdata-common
16915   libgdata7
16916   libgdu-gtk0
16917   libgee2
16918   libgeoclue0
16919   libgexiv2-0
16920   libgif4
16921   libglade2.0-cil
16922   libglib2.0-cil
16923   libgmime2.4-cil
16924   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
16925   libgnome2.24-cil
16926   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
16927   libgpod-common
16928   libgpod4
16929   libgtk2.0-cil
16930   libgtkglext1
16931   libgtksourceview2.0-common
16932   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
16933   libmono-addins0.2-cil
16934   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
16935   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
16936   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
16937   libmono-posix2.0-cil
16938   libmono-security2.0-cil
16939   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
16940   libmono-system2.0-cil
16941   libmtp8
16942   libmusicbrainz3-6
16943   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
16944   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
16945   libopal3.6.8
16946   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
16947   libpt2.6.7
16948   libpython2.6
16949   librpm1
16950   librpmio1
16951   libsdl1.2debian
16952   libsrtp0
16953   libssh-4
16954   libtelepathy-farsight0
16955   libtelepathy-glib0
16956   libtidy-0.99-0
16957   media-player-info
16958   mesa-utils
16959   mono-2.0-gac
16960   mono-gac
16961   mono-runtime
16962   nautilus-sendto
16963   nautilus-sendto-empathy
16964   p7zip-full
16965   pkg-config
16966   python-aptdaemon
16967   python-aptdaemon-gtk
16968   python-axiom
16969   python-beautifulsoup
16970   python-bugbuddy
16971   python-clientform
16972   python-coherence
16973   python-configobj
16974   python-crypto
16975   python-cupshelpers
16976   python-elementtree
16977   python-epsilon
16978   python-evolution
16979   python-feedparser
16980   python-gdata
16981   python-gdbm
16982   python-gst0.10
16983   python-gtkglext1
16984   python-gtksourceview2
16985   python-httplib2
16986   python-louie
16987   python-mako
16988   python-markupsafe
16989   python-mechanize
16990   python-nevow
16991   python-notify
16992   python-opengl
16993   python-openssl
16994   python-pam
16995   python-pkg-resources
16996   python-pyasn1
16997   python-pysqlite2
16998   python-rdflib
16999   python-serial
17000   python-tagpy
17001   python-twisted-bin
17002   python-twisted-conch
17003   python-twisted-core
17004   python-twisted-web
17005   python-utidylib
17006   python-webkit
17007   python-xdg
17008   python-zope.interface
17009   remmina
17010   remmina-plugin-data
17011   remmina-plugin-rdp
17012   remmina-plugin-vnc
17013   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
17014   rhythmbox-plugins
17015   rpm-common
17016   rpm2cpio
17017   seahorse-plugins
17018   shotwell
17019   software-center
17020   system-config-printer-udev
17021   telepathy-gabble
17022   telepathy-mission-control-5
17023   telepathy-salut
17024   tomboy
17025   totem
17026   totem-coherence
17027   totem-mozilla
17028   totem-plugins
17029   transmission-common
17030   xdg-user-dirs
17031   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
17032   xserver-xephyr
17033 </p></blockquote>
17034
17035 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
17036
17037 <blockquote><p>
17038   cheese
17039   ekiga
17040   eog
17041   epiphany-extensions
17042   evolution-exchange
17043   fast-user-switch-applet
17044   file-roller
17045   gcalctool
17046   gconf-editor
17047   gdm
17048   gedit
17049   gedit-common
17050   gnome-games
17051   gnome-games-data
17052   gnome-nettool
17053   gnome-system-tools
17054   gnome-themes
17055   gnuchess
17056   gucharmap
17057   guile-1.8-libs
17058   libavahi-ui0
17059   libdmx1
17060   libgalago3
17061   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
17062   libgtksourceview2.0-0
17063   liblircclient0
17064   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
17065   libspeexdsp1
17066   libsvga1
17067   rhythmbox
17068   seahorse
17069   sound-juicer
17070   system-config-printer
17071   totem-common
17072   transmission-gtk
17073   vinagre
17074   vino
17075 </p></blockquote>
17076
17077 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
17078
17079 <blockquote><p>
17080   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
17081 </p></blockquote>
17082
17083 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
17084
17085 <blockquote><p>
17086 [nothing]
17087 </p></blockquote>
17088
17089 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
17090
17091 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
17092
17093 <blockquote><p>
17094   ksmserver
17095 </p></blockquote>
17096
17097 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
17098
17099 <blockquote><p>
17100   kwin
17101   network-manager-kde
17102 </p></blockquote>
17103
17104 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
17105
17106 <blockquote><p>
17107   arts
17108   dolphin
17109   freespacenotifier
17110   google-gadgets-gst
17111   google-gadgets-xul
17112   kappfinder
17113   kcalc
17114   kcharselect
17115   kde-core
17116   kde-plasma-desktop
17117   kde-standard
17118   kde-window-manager
17119   kdeartwork
17120   kdeartwork-emoticons
17121   kdeartwork-style
17122   kdeartwork-theme-icon
17123   kdebase
17124   kdebase-apps
17125   kdebase-workspace
17126   kdebase-workspace-bin
17127   kdebase-workspace-data
17128   kdeeject
17129   kdelibs
17130   kdeplasma-addons
17131   kdeutils
17132   kdewallpapers
17133   kdf
17134   kfloppy
17135   kgpg
17136   khelpcenter4
17137   kinfocenter
17138   konq-plugins-l10n
17139   konqueror-nsplugins
17140   kscreensaver
17141   kscreensaver-xsavers
17142   ktimer
17143   kwrite
17144   libgle3
17145   libkde4-ruby1.8
17146   libkonq5
17147   libkonq5-templates
17148   libnetpbm10
17149   libplasma-ruby
17150   libplasma-ruby1.8
17151   libqt4-ruby1.8
17152   marble-data
17153   marble-plugins
17154   netpbm
17155   nuvola-icon-theme
17156   plasma-dataengines-workspace
17157   plasma-desktop
17158   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
17159   plasma-runners-addons
17160   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
17161   plasma-scriptengine-python
17162   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
17163   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
17164   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
17165   plasma-scriptengines
17166   plasma-wallpapers-addons
17167   plasma-widget-folderview
17168   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
17169   ruby
17170   sweeper
17171   update-notifier-kde
17172   xscreensaver-data-extra
17173   xscreensaver-gl
17174   xscreensaver-gl-extra
17175   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
17176 </p></blockquote>
17177
17178 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
17179
17180 <blockquote><p>
17181   ark
17182   google-gadgets-common
17183   google-gadgets-qt
17184   htdig
17185   kate
17186   kdebase-bin
17187   kdebase-data
17188   kdepasswd
17189   kfind
17190   klipper
17191   konq-plugins
17192   konqueror
17193   ksysguard
17194   ksysguardd
17195   libarchive1
17196   libcln6
17197   libeet1
17198   libeina-svn-06
17199   libggadget-1.0-0b
17200   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
17201   libgps19
17202   libkdecorations4
17203   libkephal4
17204   libkonq4
17205   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
17206   libkscreensaver5
17207   libksgrd4
17208   libksignalplotter4
17209   libkunitconversion4
17210   libkwineffects1a
17211   libmarblewidget4
17212   libntrack-qt4-1
17213   libntrack0
17214   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
17215   libplasmaclock4a
17216   libplasmagenericshell4
17217   libprocesscore4a
17218   libprocessui4a
17219   libqalculate5
17220   libqedje0a
17221   libqtruby4shared2
17222   libqzion0a
17223   libruby1.8
17224   libscim8c2a
17225   libsmokekdecore4-3
17226   libsmokekdeui4-3
17227   libsmokekfile3
17228   libsmokekhtml3
17229   libsmokekio3
17230   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
17231   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
17232   libsmokekparts3
17233   libsmokektexteditor3
17234   libsmokekutils3
17235   libsmokenepomuk3
17236   libsmokephonon3
17237   libsmokeplasma3
17238   libsmokeqtcore4-3
17239   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
17240   libsmokeqtgui4-3
17241   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
17242   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
17243   libsmokeqtscript4-3
17244   libsmokeqtsql4-3
17245   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
17246   libsmokeqttest4-3
17247   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
17248   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
17249   libsmokeqtxml4-3
17250   libsmokesolid3
17251   libsmokesoprano3
17252   libtaskmanager4a
17253   libtidy-0.99-0
17254   libweather-ion4a
17255   libxklavier16
17256   libxxf86misc1
17257   okteta
17258   oxygencursors
17259   plasma-dataengines-addons
17260   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
17261   plasma-widget-lancelot
17262   plasma-widgets-addons
17263   plasma-widgets-workspace
17264   polkit-kde-1
17265   ruby1.8
17266   systemsettings
17267   update-notifier-common
17268 </p></blockquote>
17269
17270 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
17271 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
17272 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
17273 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
17274
17275       </div>
17276       <div class="tags">
17277
17278
17279         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>.
17280
17281
17282       </div>
17283     </div>
17284     <div class="padding"></div>
17285
17286     <div class="entry">
17287       <div class="title">
17288         <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>
17289       </div>
17290       <div class="date">
17291         22nd November 2010
17292       </div>
17293       <div class="body">
17294         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
17295 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
17296 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
17297 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
17298 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
17299 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
17300 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
17301 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
17302 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
17303
17304 <p>I found
17305 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
17306 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
17307 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
17308 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
17309 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
17310 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
17311
17312 <pre>
17313 #!/bin/sh
17314
17315 # Based on
17316 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
17317
17318 set -e
17319 set -x
17320
17321 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
17322     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
17323     exit 1
17324 else
17325     host="$1"
17326 fi
17327
17328 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
17329     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
17330     exit 1
17331 fi
17332
17333 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
17334 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
17335 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
17336 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
17337
17338 img=$host.img
17339 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
17340 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
17341
17342 parted $img mklabel msdos
17343 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
17344 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
17345 parted $img set 1 boot on
17346
17347 modprobe dm-mod
17348 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
17349 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
17350
17351 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
17352 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
17353 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
17354
17355 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
17356 losetup -d /dev/loop0
17357 </pre>
17358
17359 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
17360 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
17361
17362 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
17363 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
17364 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
17365 seem to work just fine.</p>
17366
17367       </div>
17368       <div class="tags">
17369
17370
17371         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>.
17372
17373
17374       </div>
17375     </div>
17376     <div class="padding"></div>
17377
17378     <div class="entry">
17379       <div class="title">
17380         <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>
17381       </div>
17382       <div class="date">
17383         20th November 2010
17384       </div>
17385       <div class="body">
17386         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
17387 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
17388 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
17389 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
17390
17391 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
17392 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
17393 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
17394
17395 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
17396
17397 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
17398
17399 <blockquote><p>
17400   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
17401   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
17402   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
17403   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
17404   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
17405   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
17406   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
17407   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
17408   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
17409   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
17410   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
17411   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
17412   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
17413   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
17414   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
17415   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
17416   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
17417   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
17418   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
17419   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
17420   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
17421   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
17422   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
17423   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
17424   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
17425   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
17426   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
17427   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
17428   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
17429   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
17430   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
17431   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
17432   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
17433   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
17434   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
17435   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
17436   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
17437   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
17438   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
17439   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
17440   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
17441   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
17442   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
17443   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
17444   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
17445   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
17446   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
17447   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
17448   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
17449   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
17450   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
17451   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
17452   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
17453   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
17454   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
17455   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
17456   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
17457   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
17458   zip
17459 </p></blockquote>
17460
17461 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
17462
17463 <blockquote><p>
17464   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
17465   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
17466   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
17467   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
17468   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
17469   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
17470   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
17471   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
17472   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
17473   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
17474   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
17475   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
17476   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
17477   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
17478   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
17479   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
17480   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
17481   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
17482   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
17483   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
17484   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
17485   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
17486   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
17487   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
17488   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
17489   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
17490   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
17491   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
17492   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
17493 </p></blockquote>
17494
17495 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
17496
17497 <blockquote><p>
17498   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
17499 </p></blockquote>
17500
17501 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
17502
17503 <blockquote><p>
17504 [nothing]
17505 </p></blockquote>
17506
17507 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
17508
17509 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
17510
17511 <blockquote><p>
17512   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
17513   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
17514   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
17515   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
17516   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
17517   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
17518   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
17519   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
17520   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
17521   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
17522   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
17523   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
17524   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
17525   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
17526   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
17527   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
17528   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
17529   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
17530   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
17531   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
17532   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
17533   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
17534   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
17535   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
17536   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
17537   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
17538   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
17539   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
17540   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
17541   ttf-sazanami-gothic
17542 </p></blockquote>
17543
17544 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
17545
17546 <blockquote><p>
17547   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
17548   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
17549   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
17550   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
17551   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
17552   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
17553   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
17554   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
17555   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
17556   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
17557   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
17558   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
17559   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
17560   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
17561   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
17562   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
17563   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
17564   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
17565   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
17566   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
17567   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
17568   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
17569   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
17570   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
17571   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
17572   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
17573   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
17574   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
17575   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
17576   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
17577   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
17578   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
17579   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
17580 </p></blockquote>
17581
17582 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
17583
17584 <blockquote><p>
17585   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
17586   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
17587   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
17588   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
17589   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
17590   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
17591   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
17592 </p></blockquote>
17593
17594 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
17595
17596 <blockquote><p>
17597   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
17598 </p></blockquote>
17599
17600       </div>
17601       <div class="tags">
17602
17603
17604         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>.
17605
17606
17607       </div>
17608     </div>
17609     <div class="padding"></div>
17610
17611     <div class="entry">
17612       <div class="title">
17613         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
17614       </div>
17615       <div class="date">
17616         20th November 2010
17617       </div>
17618       <div class="body">
17619         <p>Answering
17620 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
17621 call from the Gnash project</a> for
17622 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
17623 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
17624 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
17625 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
17626 releases out more often.</p>
17627
17628 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
17629 I have considered setting up a <a
17630 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
17631 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
17632 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
17633 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
17634 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
17635 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
17636 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
17637 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
17638 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
17639 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
17640 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
17641 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
17642
17643       </div>
17644       <div class="tags">
17645
17646
17647         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>.
17648
17649
17650       </div>
17651     </div>
17652     <div class="padding"></div>
17653
17654     <div class="entry">
17655       <div class="title">
17656         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
17657       </div>
17658       <div class="date">
17659          9th November 2010
17660       </div>
17661       <div class="body">
17662         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
17663
17664 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
17665 3D linked in from
17666 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
17667 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
17668
17669       </div>
17670       <div class="tags">
17671
17672
17673         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>.
17674
17675
17676       </div>
17677     </div>
17678     <div class="padding"></div>
17679
17680     <div class="entry">
17681       <div class="title">
17682         <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>
17683       </div>
17684       <div class="date">
17685          7th November 2010
17686       </div>
17687       <div class="body">
17688         <p>Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
17689 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> DVD, which is
17690 supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
17691 needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard.  Even
17692 schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
17693 working using this DVD.</p>
17694
17695 <p>The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
17696 installing recommended packages by default.  We want the same set of
17697 packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
17698 that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD.  I created
17699 a patch for debian-cd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/601203">BTS
17700 report #601203</a> to do this, and since this change was applied to
17701 the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.</p>
17702
17703 <p>A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
17704 the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
17705 those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
17706 Debian archive.</p>
17707
17708 <p>Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
17709 were using most space.  A few large packages are well know;
17710 openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont.  But I also
17711 discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB.
17712 The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
17713 when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were
17714 the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
17715 I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
17716 our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
17717 documentation.  Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
17718 which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
17719 free X driver should work.</p>
17720
17721 <p>With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
17722 desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
17723 DVD more useful again.</p>
17724
17725       </div>
17726       <div class="tags">
17727
17728
17729         Tags: <a href="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>.
17730
17731
17732       </div>
17733     </div>
17734     <div class="padding"></div>
17735
17736     <div class="entry">
17737       <div class="title">
17738         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
17739       </div>
17740       <div class="date">
17741         24th October 2010
17742       </div>
17743       <div class="body">
17744         <p>Some updates.</p>
17745
17746 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
17747 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
17748 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
17749 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
17750 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
17751 :)</p>
17752
17753 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
17754 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
17755 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
17756 It is called
17757 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
17758 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
17759 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
17760 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
17761 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
17762 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
17763
17764 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
17765 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
17766 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
17767 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
17768 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
17769 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
17770 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
17771 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
17772 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
17773 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
17774
17775       </div>
17776       <div class="tags">
17777
17778
17779         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>.
17780
17781
17782       </div>
17783     </div>
17784     <div class="padding"></div>
17785
17786     <div class="entry">
17787       <div class="title">
17788         <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>
17789       </div>
17790       <div class="date">
17791         19th October 2010
17792       </div>
17793       <div class="body">
17794         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is the
17795 most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation. It
17796 has done great so far, but there is still far to go, and recently its
17797 funding has dried up.  I believe AVM2 support in Gnash is vital to the
17798 continued progress of the project, as more and more sites show up with
17799 AVM2 flash files.</p>
17800
17801 <p>To try to get funding for developing such support, I have started
17802 <a href="http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">a pledge</a> with the
17803 following text:</P>
17804
17805 <p><blockquote>
17806
17807   <p>"I will pay 100$ to the Gnash project to develop AVM2 support but
17808   only if 10 other people will do the same."</p>
17809
17810   <p>- Petter Reinholdtsen, free software developer</p>
17811
17812   <p>Deadline to sign up by: 24th December 2010</p>
17813
17814   <p>The Gnash project need to get support for the new Flash file
17815   format AVM2 to work with a lot of sites using Flash on the
17816   web. Gnash already work with a lot of Flash sites using the old AVM1
17817   format, but more and more sites are using the AVM2 format these
17818   days. The project web page is available from
17819   http://www.getgnash.org/ . Gnash is a free software implementation
17820   of Adobe Flash, allowing those of us that do not accept the terms of
17821   the Adobe Flash license to get access to Flash sites.</p>
17822
17823   <p>The project need funding to get developers to put aside enough
17824   time to develop the AVM2 support, and this pledge is my way to try
17825   to get this to happen.</p>
17826
17827   <p>The project accept donations via the OpenMediaNow foundation,
17828   <a href="http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32">http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32</a> .</p>
17829
17830 </blockquote></p>
17831
17832 <p>I hope you will support this effort too.  I hope more than 10
17833 people will participate to make this happen.  The more money the
17834 project gets, the more features it can develop using these funds.
17835 :)</p>
17836
17837       </div>
17838       <div class="tags">
17839
17840
17841         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>.
17842
17843
17844       </div>
17845     </div>
17846     <div class="padding"></div>
17847
17848     <div class="entry">
17849       <div class="title">
17850         <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>
17851       </div>
17852       <div class="date">
17853          9th October 2010
17854       </div>
17855       <div class="body">
17856         <p>This summer I got the chance to buy cheap Spykee robots, and since
17857 then I have worked on getting Linux software in place to control them.
17858 The firmware for the robot is available from the producer, and using
17859 that source it was trivial to figure out the protocol specification.
17860 I've started on a perl library to control it, and made some demo
17861 programs using this perl library to allow one to control the
17862 robots.</p>
17863
17864 <p>The library is quite functional already, and capable of controlling
17865 the driving, fetching video, uploading MP3s and play them.  There are
17866 a few less important features too.</p>
17867
17868 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I ran out of time to spend on this project,
17869 but I never got around to releasing the current source.  I decided
17870 today that it was time to do something about it, and uploaded the
17871 source to my Debian package store at people.skolelinux.org.</p>
17872
17873 <p>Because it was simpler for me, I made a Debian package and
17874 published the source and deb.  If you got a spykee robot, grab the
17875 source or binary package:</p>
17876
17877 <p><ul>
17878 <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>
17879 <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>
17880 <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>
17881 </ul></p>
17882
17883 <p>If you are interested in helping out with developing this library,
17884 please let me know.</p>
17885
17886       </div>
17887       <div class="tags">
17888
17889
17890         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>.
17891
17892
17893       </div>
17894     </div>
17895     <div class="padding"></div>
17896
17897     <div class="entry">
17898       <div class="title">
17899         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html">Links for 2010-10-03</a>
17900       </div>
17901       <div class="date">
17902          3rd October 2010
17903       </div>
17904       <div class="body">
17905         <p><ul>
17906
17907 <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
17908 is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly</a></li>
17909
17910 <li>Scanner looking under clothes
17911 <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/10/03/nyheter/utenriks/reise/overvakingskamera/flyplasser/13667192/">has
17912 already been misused at Heathrow</a>.</li>
17913
17914 <li><a href="http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Landell">Landell
17915 Webcasting</a> - interesting alternative for
17916 <ahref="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">DVSwitch</a> with
17917 simple setup.
17918
17919 </ul></p>
17920
17921       </div>
17922       <div class="tags">
17923
17924
17925         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>.
17926
17927
17928       </div>
17929     </div>
17930     <div class="padding"></div>
17931
17932     <div class="entry">
17933       <div class="title">
17934         <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>
17935       </div>
17936       <div class="date">
17937          9th September 2010
17938       </div>
17939       <div class="body">
17940         <p>A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital
17941 camera, a Canon IXUS 130.  It was instructive and very disturbing to
17942 be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to
17943 specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera.
17944 Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras
17945 are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway.  What is the
17946 problem, you might ask?  It is software patents, MPEG-4, H.264 and the
17947 MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences
17948 without asking for permissions that is at risk.
17949
17950 <p>On page 27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is
17951 written:</p>
17952
17953 <blockquote>
17954 <p>This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard
17955 and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding
17956 MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and
17957 non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the
17958 AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video.</p>
17959
17960 <p>No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4
17961 standard.</p>
17962 </blockquote>
17963
17964 <p>In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology
17965 (MPEG-4/H.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and
17966 non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations
17967 holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.</p>
17968
17969 <p>This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to
17970 read
17971 "<a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA">Why
17972 Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the
17973 MPEG-LA</a>" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and
17974 "<a href="http://webmink.com/2010/09/03/h-264-and-foss/">H.264 Is Not
17975 The Sort Of Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps to learn more about
17976 the issue.  The solution is to support the
17977 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
17978 open standards</a> for video, like <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg
17979 Theora</a>, and avoid MPEG-4 and H.264 if you can.</p>
17980
17981       </div>
17982       <div class="tags">
17983
17984
17985         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
17986
17987
17988       </div>
17989     </div>
17990     <div class="padding"></div>
17991
17992     <div class="entry">
17993       <div class="title">
17994         <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>
17995       </div>
17996       <div class="date">
17997          4th September 2010
17998       </div>
17999       <div class="body">
18000         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
18001 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
18002 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
18003 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
18004 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
18005 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
18006 installed.</p>
18007
18008 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
18009 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
18010 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
18011 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
18012 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
18013 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
18014 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
18015 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
18016 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
18017
18018 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
18019 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
18020 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
18021 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
18022 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
18023 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
18024 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
18025 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
18026 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
18027 pages they want to visit.</p>
18028
18029 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
18030 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
18031 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
18032 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
18033 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
18034 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
18035 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
18036 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
18037 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
18038 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
18039 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
18040
18041       </div>
18042       <div class="tags">
18043
18044
18045         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>.
18046
18047
18048       </div>
18049     </div>
18050     <div class="padding"></div>
18051
18052     <div class="entry">
18053       <div class="title">
18054         <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>
18055       </div>
18056       <div class="date">
18057          1st September 2010
18058       </div>
18059       <div class="body">
18060         <p>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application.  The last few
18061 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
18062 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
18063 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
18064 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
18065 allow me to drive the robot around.  I picked PerlQt as I have had
18066 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
18067 browsing the web for examples.  Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
18068 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
18069 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
18070 libqt-perl.  Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
18071 drive around.</p>
18072
18073 <p>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
18074 controlling the robot.  Here is an small example on how to use it:</p>
18075
18076 <p><pre>
18077 use Spykee;
18078 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
18079 my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
18080 my $spykee = Spykee->new();
18081 $spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
18082 $spykee->left();
18083 sleep 2;
18084 $spykee->right();
18085 sleep 2;
18086 $spykee->forward();
18087 sleep 2;
18088 $spykee->back();
18089 sleep 2;
18090 $spykee->stop();
18091 </pre></p>
18092
18093 <p>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
18094 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
18095 implement the protocol used by the robot.  I've implemented several of
18096 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
18097 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote.  First I
18098 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
18099 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
18100 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
18101 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
18102 going. :).</p>
18103
18104 <p>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
18105 where to make it available first.  I will add a link to
18106 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/">the NUUG wiki</a> for
18107 those that want to check back later to find it.</p>
18108
18109       </div>
18110       <div class="tags">
18111
18112
18113         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>.
18114
18115
18116       </div>
18117     </div>
18118     <div class="padding"></div>
18119
18120     <div class="entry">
18121       <div class="title">
18122         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken hard link handling with sshfs</a>
18123       </div>
18124       <div class="date">
18125         30th August 2010
18126       </div>
18127       <div class="body">
18128         <p>Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
18129 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">previous
18130 post about sshfs</a>.  He reported another problem with sshfs.  It
18131 fail to handle hard links properly.  A simple way to spot this is to
18132 look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree.  These should have
18133 a link count >1, but on sshfs the count is 1.  I just tested to see
18134 what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:</p>
18135
18136 <pre>
18137 % ln foo bar
18138 ln: creating hard link `bar' => `foo': Function not implemented
18139 %
18140 </pre>
18141
18142 <p>I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
18143 system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
18144 avoid surprised unix programs.  Not as useful as working file locking
18145 and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
18146 nevertheless. :)</p>
18147
18148 <p>The latest version of the file system test code is available via
18149 git from
18150 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a></p>
18151
18152       </div>
18153       <div class="tags">
18154
18155
18156         Tags: <a href="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>.
18157
18158
18159       </div>
18160     </div>
18161     <div class="padding"></div>
18162
18163     <div class="entry">
18164       <div class="title">
18165         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken umask handling with sshfs</a>
18166       </div>
18167       <div class="date">
18168         26th August 2010
18169       </div>
18170       <div class="body">
18171         <p>My file system sematics program
18172 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">presented
18173 a few days ago</a> is very useful to verify that a file system can
18174 work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit.  I'm
18175 looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
18176 University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs.  My friend
18177 Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
18178 Edu, but stopped because of problems.  I asked today what the problems
18179 where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
18180 Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
18181 script:</p>
18182
18183 <pre>
18184 mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
18185   mode_t retval = 0;
18186   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
18187   if (-1 != fd) {
18188     unlink(name);
18189     struct stat statbuf;
18190     if (-1 != fstat(fd, &statbuf)) {
18191       retval = statbuf.st_mode & 0x1ff;
18192     }
18193     close(fd);
18194   }
18195   return retval;
18196 }
18197
18198 /* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
18199 int test_umask(void) {
18200   printf("info: testing umask effect on file creation\n");
18201
18202   mode_t orig_umask = umask(000);
18203   mode_t newmode;
18204   if (0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
18205     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 000\n",
18206            newmode);
18207   }
18208   umask(007);
18209   if (0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
18210     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 007\n",
18211            newmode);
18212   }
18213
18214   umask (orig_umask);
18215   return 0;
18216 }
18217
18218 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
18219   [...]
18220   test_umask();
18221   return 0;
18222 }
18223 </pre>
18224
18225 <p>Sure enough.  On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:</p>
18226
18227 <pre>
18228 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
18229 info: testing symlink creation
18230 info: testing subdirectory creation
18231 info: testing fcntl locking
18232   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
18233   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
18234   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
18235   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
18236   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
18237   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
18238 info: testing umask effect on file creation
18239 </pre>
18240
18241 <p>When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this
18242 result:</p>
18243
18244 <pre>
18245 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
18246 info: testing symlink creation
18247 info: testing subdirectory creation
18248 info: testing fcntl locking
18249   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
18250   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
18251   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
18252   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
18253   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
18254   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
18255 info: testing umask effect on file creation
18256   error: Wrong file mode 644 when creating using mode 666 and umask 000
18257   error: Wrong file mode 640 when creating using mode 666 and umask 007
18258 </pre>
18259
18260 <p>So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a
18261 Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home
18262 directory.</p>
18263
18264 <p>Update 2010-08-26: Reported the issue in
18265 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/594498">BTS report #594498</a></p>
18266
18267 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
18268 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
18269 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
18270
18271       </div>
18272       <div class="tags">
18273
18274
18275         Tags: <a href="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>.
18276
18277
18278       </div>
18279     </div>
18280     <div class="padding"></div>
18281
18282     <div class="entry">
18283       <div class="title">
18284         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html">Rob Weir: How to Crush Dissent</a>
18285       </div>
18286       <div class="date">
18287         15th August 2010
18288       </div>
18289       <div class="body">
18290         <p>I found the notes from Rob Weir on
18291 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/VGb23-kta8c/how-to-crush-dissent.html">how
18292 to crush dissent</a> matching my own thoughts on the matter quite
18293 well.  Highly recommended for those wondering which road our society
18294 should go down.  In my view we have been heading the wrong way for a
18295 long time.</p>
18296
18297       </div>
18298       <div class="tags">
18299
18300
18301         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>.
18302
18303
18304       </div>
18305     </div>
18306     <div class="padding"></div>
18307
18308     <div class="entry">
18309       <div class="title">
18310         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html">No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients</a>
18311       </div>
18312       <div class="date">
18313          9th August 2010
18314       </div>
18315       <div class="body">
18316         <p>As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
18317 Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
18318 configuration settings on the clients.  I believe the work to be
18319 mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
18320 generated configuration.</p>
18321
18322 <p>What is the point, you might ask?  The point is to allow a Debian
18323 Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
18324 without any manual configuration.</p>
18325
18326 <p>This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
18327 the University of Oslo using PXE.  With the PXE installation, I am
18328 asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
18329 layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
18330 accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
18331 popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret).  After answering
18332 these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
18333 after around 50 minutes it is done.  I press enter to finish the
18334 installation, and the machine reboots into KDE.  When the machine is
18335 ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
18336 username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
18337 been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
18338 same username and password to the KDE 4.4 desktop.  At no point during
18339 this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
18340 required configuration was dynamically detected using information
18341 fetched via DHCP and DNS.  The roaming workstation is now ready for
18342 use.</p>
18343
18344 <p>How was this done, you might wonder?  First of all, here is the
18345 list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
18346 working properly out of the box:</p>
18347
18348 <ul>
18349 <li>IP address/netmask and DNS server.</li>
18350 <li>Web proxy URL.</li>
18351 <li>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).</li>
18352 <li>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.</li>
18353 <li>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)</li>
18354 <li>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)</li>
18355 <li>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)</li>
18356 </ul>
18357
18358 <p>(Hm, did I forget anything?  Let me knew if I did.)</p>
18359
18360 <p>The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
18361 machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
18362 administrators to track their machines.  Since yesterday, everything
18363 but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
18364 and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.</p>
18365
18366 <p>The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
18367 When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
18368 http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
18369 configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
18370 /etc/apt/apt.conf.  I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
18371 hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
18372 it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
18373 proxy present on the new network when it moves around.</p>
18374
18375 <p>The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
18376 configuration are generated using DNS information at boot.  First the
18377 installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain.  If
18378 not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead.  If an
18379 LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
18380 attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
18381 determine which LDAP base to use for NSS.  If there are several
18382 namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
18383 LDAP subtree is used as the base.  If defaultNamingContext is missing,
18384 the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
18385 object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
18386 such an object is used as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
18387 search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
18388 for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record.  I've been unable to find a way to
18389 look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
18390 current DNS domain is used.</p>
18391
18392 <p>For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
18393 for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
18394 found.  This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
18395 Oslo.  A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
18396 server, but have not been implemented yet.  I decided to fetch and
18397 save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
18398 different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
18399 log in nor the passwords required to log in.  Usernames and passwords
18400 will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
18401 network, and will not change as the laptop move around.  For a
18402 non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
18403 supposed to stay in place it should not matter much.  Perhaps we
18404 should switch those to use sssd too?</p>
18405
18406 <p>The user's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
18407 located when the user logs in for the first time.  The LDAP server is
18408 consulted to look for the user's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
18409 attribute is used if found.  If it isn't found, the home directory
18410 path fetched from NSS is used instead.  Assuming the path is of the
18411 form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
18412 DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
18413 smb://server.domain/username.  This algorithm works for both Debian
18414 edu and the University of Oslo.  Perhaps there are better attributes
18415 to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
18416 do for now. :)</p>
18417
18418 <p>This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
18419 into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
18420 more flexible than before.  I suspect it will also work for thin
18421 client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
18422 existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
18423 yet.</p>
18424
18425 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
18426 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
18427
18428 <p>Update 2010-08-09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
18429 detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
18430 before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name.  Will have to
18431 implement it for Debian Edu. :)</p>
18432
18433       </div>
18434       <div class="tags">
18435
18436
18437         Tags: <a href="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>.
18438
18439
18440       </div>
18441     </div>
18442     <div class="padding"></div>
18443
18444     <div class="entry">
18445       <div class="title">
18446         <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>
18447       </div>
18448       <div class="date">
18449          8th August 2010
18450       </div>
18451       <div class="body">
18452         <p>A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
18453 Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
18454 Edu/Skolelinux machines.  This was thought to be no problem, as the
18455 access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
18456 knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
18457 mount home directories without any problems.  But, after months of
18458 struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.</p>
18459
18460 <p>The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
18461 directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
18462 work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
18463 underlying file system is a unix file system.  When using a Windows
18464 file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
18465 and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
18466 want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.</p>
18467
18468 <p>As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
18469 with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
18470 OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
18471 it should.  If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
18472 help you find your way out again.  This is the fs-test.c source:</p>
18473
18474 <pre>
18475 /*
18476  * Some tests to check the file system sematics.  Used to verify that
18477  * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
18478  * directory.
18479  * License: GPL v2 or later
18480  *
18481  * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
18482  * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
18483 */
18484
18485 #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
18486 #define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE 1
18487 #define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE 1
18488
18489 #define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
18490
18491 #include &lt;errno.h>
18492 #include &lt;fcntl.h>
18493 #include &lt;stdio.h>
18494 #include &lt;string.h>
18495 #include &lt;stdlib.h>
18496 #include &lt;sys/file.h>
18497 #include &lt;sys/stat.h>
18498 #include &lt;sys/types.h>
18499 #include &lt;unistd.h>
18500
18501 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
18502 /*
18503  * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
18504  * package and linking with -lsqlite3.  A more low level test is
18505  * below.
18506  * See also &lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 >.
18507  */
18508 #include &lt;sqlite3.h>
18509 #define CREATE_TABLE_USERS                                              \
18510   "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); "
18511 int test_sqlite_open(void) {
18512   char *zErrMsg;
18513   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
18514   sqlite3 *db=NULL;
18515   unlink(name);
18516   int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &db);
18517   if( rc ){
18518     printf("error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
18519     sqlite3_close(db);
18520     return -1;
18521   }
18522
18523   /* create tables */
18524   rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,  0, &zErrMsg);
18525   if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
18526     printf("error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n", zErrMsg);
18527     sqlite3_close(db);
18528     return -1;
18529   }
18530   printf("info: sqlite worked\n");
18531   sqlite3_close(db);
18532   return 0;
18533 }
18534 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
18535
18536 /*
18537  * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3.  This
18538  * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows 2003.  This is
18539  * done in the sqlite3 library.
18540  * See also
18541  * &lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html> and the
18542  * POSIX specification
18543  * &lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html>.
18544  */
18545 int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
18546   struct flock fl;
18547   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
18548   unlink(name);
18549   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
18550   printf("info: testing fcntl locking\n");
18551
18552   fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
18553   fl.l_pid    = getpid();
18554   printf("  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
18555   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
18556   fl.l_len    = 1;
18557   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
18558   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
18559
18560   printf("  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
18561   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
18562   fl.l_len    = 510;
18563   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
18564   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
18565
18566   printf("  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824");
18567   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
18568   fl.l_len    = 1;
18569   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
18570   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
18571
18572   printf("  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
18573   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
18574   fl.l_len    = 1;
18575   fl.l_type   = F_WRLCK;
18576   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
18577
18578   printf("  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
18579   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
18580   fl.l_len    = 510;
18581   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
18582
18583   printf("  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824");
18584   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
18585   fl.l_len    = 2;
18586   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
18587   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
18588
18589   close(fd);
18590   return 0;
18591 }
18592
18593 /*
18594  * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
18595  * below them.  This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
18596  * Mounting with option 'sync' seem to solve this problem while
18597  * slowing down file operations.
18598  */
18599 int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
18600 #define LEVELS 5
18601   char *path = strdup("test");
18602   char *dirs[LEVELS];
18603   int level;
18604   printf("info: testing subdirectory creation\n");
18605   for (level = 0; level &lt; LEVELS; level++) {
18606     char *newpath = NULL;
18607     if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777)) {
18608       printf("  error: Unable to create directory '%s': %s\n",
18609              path, strerror(errno));
18610       break;
18611     }
18612     asprintf(&newpath, "%s/%s", path, "test");
18613     free(path);
18614     path = newpath;
18615   }
18616   return 0;
18617 }
18618
18619 /*
18620  * Test if symlinks can be created.  This was a problem detected with
18621  * KDE.
18622  */
18623 int test_symlinks(void) {
18624   printf("info: testing symlink creation\n");
18625   unlink("symlink");
18626   if (-1 == symlink("file", "symlink"))
18627     printf("  error: Unable to create symlink\n");
18628   return 0;
18629 }
18630
18631 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
18632   printf("Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n");
18633   test_symlinks();
18634   test_subdirectory_creation();
18635 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
18636   test_sqlite_open();
18637 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
18638   test_gcompris_locking();
18639   return 0;
18640 }
18641 </pre>
18642
18643 <p>When everything is working, it should print something like
18644 this:</p>
18645
18646 <pre>
18647 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
18648 info: testing symlink creation
18649 info: testing subdirectory creation
18650 info: sqlite worked
18651 info: testing fcntl locking
18652   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
18653   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
18654   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
18655   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
18656   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
18657   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
18658 </pre>
18659
18660 <p>I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
18661 of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
18662 read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
18663 the read-only lock (while Windows do not).  Another was a bug in the
18664 CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
18665 meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
18666 OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
18667 not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.</p>
18668
18669 <p>Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
18670 it. :)</p>
18671
18672 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
18673 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
18674 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
18675
18676       </div>
18677       <div class="tags">
18678
18679
18680         Tags: <a href="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>.
18681
18682
18683       </div>
18684     </div>
18685     <div class="padding"></div>
18686
18687     <div class="entry">
18688       <div class="title">
18689         <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>
18690       </div>
18691       <div class="date">
18692          7th August 2010
18693       </div>
18694       <div class="body">
18695         <p>A few days ago, I
18696 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">tried
18697 to install</a> a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
18698 while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
18699 noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
18700 university infrastructure.  It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
18701 that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
18702 connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
18703 itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
18704 around it.  Now I am a huge step further along that road.</p>
18705
18706 <p>With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
18707 workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
18708 university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
18709 servers for Kerberos authentication.  All this without any
18710 configuration at all during installation.  My users home directory got
18711 a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
18712 In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured.  In addition to
18713 this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
18714 proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
18715 /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf.  Iceweasel and KDE is
18716 configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
18717 a proxy when at the university network.  If the machine is moved to a
18718 network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
18719 gave it a IP address.</p>
18720
18721 <p>The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
18722 entry ldap.$domain.  If this do not exist, it look for the
18723 _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
18724 server.  Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
18725 namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
18726 pick the first one as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
18727 algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
18728 uppercase version of $domain.</p>
18729
18730 <p>So, what is not working, you might ask.  SMB mounting my home
18731 directory do not work.  No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
18732 Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
18733 the cause.  These are not properly configured during installation, and
18734 had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
18735 but SMB mounting still do not work. :(</p>
18736
18737 <p>With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
18738 roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
18739 connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
18740 authentication.  It should also work out of the box in a Active
18741 Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
18742 with UID and GID values.</p>
18743
18744 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
18745 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
18746
18747       </div>
18748       <div class="tags">
18749
18750
18751         Tags: <a href="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>.
18752
18753
18754       </div>
18755     </div>
18756     <div class="padding"></div>
18757
18758     <div class="entry">
18759       <div class="title">
18760         <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>
18761       </div>
18762       <div class="date">
18763          3rd August 2010
18764       </div>
18765       <div class="body">
18766         <p>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
18767 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
18768 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
18769 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
18770 infrastructure.  In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
18771 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
18772 servers.</p>
18773
18774 <p>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
18775 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
18776 /etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
18777 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
18778 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
18779 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
18780 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
18781 .uio.no.</p>
18782
18783 <p>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
18784 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
18785 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
18786 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
18787 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
18788 university servers.</p>
18789
18790 <p>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
18791 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
18792 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
18793 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
18794 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
18795 uses.</p>
18796
18797       </div>
18798       <div class="tags">
18799
18800
18801         Tags: <a href="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>.
18802
18803
18804       </div>
18805     </div>
18806     <div class="padding"></div>
18807
18808     <div class="entry">
18809       <div class="title">
18810         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
18811       </div>
18812       <div class="date">
18813         27th July 2010
18814       </div>
18815       <div class="body">
18816         <p>I discovered this while doing
18817 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
18818 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
18819 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
18820 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
18821 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
18822
18823 <p>An example is from todays
18824 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
18825 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
18826 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
18827 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
18828 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
18829 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
18830 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
18831
18832 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
18833
18834 <blockquote><pre>
18835 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
18836  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
18837   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
18838 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
18839  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
18840 </pre></blockquote>
18841
18842 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
18843 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
18844 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
18845 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
18846 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
18847 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
18848 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
18849 of dependency loops.</p>
18850
18851 <p>Thanks to
18852 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
18853 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
18854 dependencies
18855 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
18856 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
18857
18858 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
18859 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
18860 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
18861 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
18862 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
18863 it.</p>
18864
18865       </div>
18866       <div class="tags">
18867
18868
18869         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>.
18870
18871
18872       </div>
18873     </div>
18874     <div class="padding"></div>
18875
18876     <div class="entry">
18877       <div class="title">
18878         <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>
18879       </div>
18880       <div class="date">
18881         27th July 2010
18882       </div>
18883       <div class="body">
18884         <p>I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
18885 with the next Debian Edu release.  Not nearly done, but one major step
18886 completed.</p>
18887
18888 <blockquote>
18889 <p>This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
18890 release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
18891 install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
18892 of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
18893 user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
18894 longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
18895 Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
18896 language of choice, please let us know too.</p>
18897
18898 <p>In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
18899 artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
18900 and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.</p>
18901
18902 <p>The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
18903 work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
18904 much.</p>
18905
18906 <p>Changes compared to the lenny based version</p>
18907
18908 <ul>
18909 <li>Everything from Debian Squeeze
18910 <ul>
18911   <li>Desktop environment KDE 4.4 => the new KDE desktop in
18912          combination with some new artwork
18913   <li>Web browser Iceweasel 3.5
18914   <li>OpenOffice.org 3.2
18915   <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3
18916   <li>Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2
18917   <li>Image editor Gimp 2.6.10
18918   <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0
18919   <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4
18920   <li>3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)
18921   <li>Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)
18922 </ul></li>
18923 <li>Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
18924     Enabled for:
18925 <ul>
18926   <li>PAM
18927   <li>LDAP
18928   <li>IMAP
18929   <li>SMTP (sender verification)
18930 </ul>
18931 </li>
18932 <li>New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.</li>
18933 <li>Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
18934     fetched from LDAP.</li>
18935 <li>New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.</li>
18936 <li>General cleanup (not finished)</li>
18937 </ul>
18938 <p>The following features are not working as they should</p>
18939
18940 <ul>
18941 <li>No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
18942     scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
18943     for testing.</li>
18944 <li>DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
18945     and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
18946     clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.</li>
18947 <li>The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.</li>
18948 <li>The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.</li>
18949 <li>The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.</li>
18950 <li>Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
18951     netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.</li>
18952 <li>The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
18953     some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
18954     jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.</li>
18955 <li>Some packages lack translations. See
18956     http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
18957     and help out with translations.</li>
18958 </ul>
18959
18960 <p>To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use</p>
18961
18962 <ul>
18963 <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>
18964 <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>
18965 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
18966 </ul>
18967 <p>To download this multiarch dvd release you can use</p>
18968
18969 <ul>
18970 <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>
18971 <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>
18972 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
18973 </ul>
18974
18975 <p>There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
18976 get closer to the final release.</p>
18977
18978 <p>The MD5SUM of these images are</p>
18979
18980 <ul>
18981 <li>3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
18982 <li>22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
18983 </ul>
18984
18985 <p>The SHA1SUM of these images are</p>
18986 <ul>
18987 <li>c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
18988 <li>2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
18989 </ul>
18990 <p>How to report bugs:
18991 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla</p>
18992
18993 <p>Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org</p>
18994 </blockquote>
18995
18996       </div>
18997       <div class="tags">
18998
18999
19000         Tags: <a href="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>.
19001
19002
19003       </div>
19004     </div>
19005     <div class="padding"></div>
19006
19007     <div class="entry">
19008       <div class="title">
19009         <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>
19010       </div>
19011       <div class="date">
19012         25th July 2010
19013       </div>
19014       <div class="body">
19015         <p>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
19016 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
19017 Edu/Skolelinux into shape.  This future version will use Kerberos for
19018 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
19019 getting rid of password questions one at the time.</p>
19020
19021 <p>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
19022 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
19023 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
19024 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server.  This
19025 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
19026 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
19027 package.  I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.</p>
19028
19029 <p>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
19030 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
19031 password when mounting the SMB volume.  A simple click on the shortcut
19032 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
19033 up. :)</p>
19034
19035 <p>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
19036 Debian Edu.  We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
19037 also Samba.  Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.</p>
19038
19039 <p>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
19040 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
19041 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
19042 the release.  It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
19043 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
19044 time for a alpha0 release today.  As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
19045 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
19046 release another day.</p>
19047
19048 <p>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
19049 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
19050
19051       </div>
19052       <div class="tags">
19053
19054
19055         Tags: <a href="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>.
19056
19057
19058       </div>
19059     </div>
19060     <div class="padding"></div>
19061
19062     <div class="entry">
19063       <div class="title">
19064         <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>
19065       </div>
19066       <div class="date">
19067         18th July 2010
19068       </div>
19069       <div class="body">
19070         <p>Thanks to
19071 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home">todays
19072 opengeodata blog entry</a>, I just discovered that the
19073 OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
19074 <a href="http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT">support
19075 for calculating routes</a>.  The support is still experimental and
19076 only available from the development server, until more experience is
19077 gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.</p>
19078
19079 <p>Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
19080 was provided by <a href="http://maps.cloudmade.com/">Cloudmade</a>,
19081 but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
19082 the issue.  I've had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
19083 alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
19084 and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
19085 www.openstreetmap.org front page.</p>
19086
19087       </div>
19088       <div class="tags">
19089
19090
19091         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>.
19092
19093
19094       </div>
19095     </div>
19096     <div class="padding"></div>
19097
19098     <div class="entry">
19099       <div class="title">
19100         <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>
19101       </div>
19102       <div class="date">
19103         17th July 2010
19104       </div>
19105       <div class="body">
19106         <p>This is a
19107 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
19108 on my
19109 <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
19110 work</a> on
19111 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
19112 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
19113
19114 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
19115 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
19116 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
19117 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
19118
19119 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
19120 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
19121 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
19122
19123 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
19124
19125 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
19126 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
19127 the web.
19128
19129 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
19130 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
19131 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
19132 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
19133 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
19134 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
19135
19136 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
19137 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
19138 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
19139 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
19140 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
19141 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
19142 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
19143 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
19144 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
19145 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
19146 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
19147 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
19148 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
19149 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
19150 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
19151 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
19152
19153 <blockquote><pre>
19154 ldapsearch -h ldap \
19155   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
19156   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
19157   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
19158   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
19159   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
19160   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
19161
19162 ldapsearch -h ldap \
19163   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
19164   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
19165   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
19166   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
19167   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
19168 </pre></blockquote>
19169
19170 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
19171 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
19172 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
19173 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
19174 also exist.</p>
19175
19176 <blockquote><pre>
19177 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
19178 objectclass: top
19179 objectclass: dnsdomain
19180 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
19181 dc: tjener
19182 arecord: 10.0.2.2
19183 associateddomain: tjener.intern
19184
19185 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
19186 objectclass: top
19187 objectclass: dnsdomain2
19188 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
19189 dc: 2
19190 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
19191 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
19192 </pre></blockquote>
19193
19194 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
19195 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
19196 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
19197 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
19198 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
19199 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
19200 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
19201 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
19202 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
19203 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
19204 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
19205 instead.</p>
19206
19207 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
19208 like this:</p>
19209
19210 <blockquote><pre>
19211 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
19212   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
19213   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
19214   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
19215   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
19216   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
19217
19218 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
19219   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
19220 </pre></blockquote>
19221
19222 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
19223 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
19224 reverse lookups.</p>
19225
19226 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
19227 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
19228 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
19229 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
19230
19231 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
19232 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
19233 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
19234
19235 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
19236 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
19237 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
19238 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
19239 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
19240
19241 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
19242 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
19243 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
19244 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
19245 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
19246
19247 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
19248 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
19249 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
19250 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
19251 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
19252 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
19253
19254 <blockquote><pre>
19255 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
19256     SUP top
19257     AUXILIARY
19258     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
19259           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
19260           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
19261           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
19262           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
19263     ))
19264 </pre></blockquote>
19265
19266 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
19267 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
19268 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
19269 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
19270 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
19271 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
19272
19273 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
19274
19275 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
19276 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
19277 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
19278 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
19279 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
19280
19281 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
19282 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
19283 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
19284 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
19285
19286 <blockquote><pre>
19287 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
19288 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
19289 </pre></blockquote>
19290
19291 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
19292 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
19293 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
19294 search result is this entry:</p>
19295
19296 <blockquote><pre>
19297 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
19298 cn: dhcp
19299 objectClass: top
19300 objectClass: dhcpServer
19301 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
19302 </pre></blockquote>
19303
19304 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
19305 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
19306 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
19307 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
19308 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
19309 The search result is this entry:</p>
19310
19311 <blockquote><pre>
19312 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
19313 cn: DHCP Config
19314 objectClass: top
19315 objectClass: dhcpService
19316 objectClass: dhcpOptions
19317 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
19318 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
19319 dhcpStatements: authoritative
19320 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
19321 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
19322 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
19323 </pre></blockquote>
19324
19325 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
19326 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
19327 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
19328 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
19329 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
19330 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
19331 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
19332 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
19333 related computer objects.</p>
19334
19335 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
19336 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
19337 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
19338 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
19339 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
19340 like:</p>
19341
19342 <blockquote><pre>
19343 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
19344 cn: hostname
19345 objectClass: top
19346 objectClass: dhcpHost
19347 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
19348 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
19349 </pre></blockquote>
19350
19351 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
19352 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
19353 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
19354 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
19355 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
19356 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
19357 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
19358 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
19359 structural object class.
19360
19361 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
19362
19363 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
19364 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
19365 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
19366 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
19367 in the configuration.</p>
19368
19369 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
19370 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
19371 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
19372 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
19373 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
19374 structure.</p>
19375
19376 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
19377 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
19378
19379 <blockquote><pre>
19380 ou=services
19381   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
19382     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
19383     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
19384       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
19385         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
19386     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
19387       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
19388         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
19389     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
19390       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
19391 </pre></blockquote>
19392
19393 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
19394 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
19395 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
19396 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
19397
19398 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
19399 like this:</p>
19400
19401 <blockquote><pre>
19402 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
19403 dc: hostname
19404 objectClass: top
19405 objectClass: dhcpHost
19406 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
19407 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
19408 associateddomain: hostname.intern
19409 arecord: 10.11.12.13
19410 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
19411 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
19412 </pre></blockquote>
19413
19414 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
19415 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
19416 auxiliary object class.</p>
19417
19418       </div>
19419       <div class="tags">
19420
19421
19422         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>.
19423
19424
19425       </div>
19426     </div>
19427     <div class="padding"></div>
19428
19429     <div class="entry">
19430       <div class="title">
19431         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
19432       </div>
19433       <div class="date">
19434         14th July 2010
19435       </div>
19436       <div class="body">
19437         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
19438 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
19439 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
19440 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
19441 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
19442
19443 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
19444 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
19445
19446 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
19447 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
19448 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
19449 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
19450 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
19451 to a slave DNS server.</p>
19452
19453 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
19454 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
19455 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
19456 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
19457 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
19458 seem to work.</p>
19459
19460 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
19461 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
19462 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
19463 this:</p>
19464
19465 <blockquote><pre>
19466   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
19467   cn: hostname
19468   objectClass: dhcphost
19469   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
19470   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
19471   associateddomain: hostname.intern
19472   arecord: 10.11.12.13
19473   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
19474   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
19475   ldapconfigsound: Y
19476 </pre></blockquote>
19477
19478 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
19479 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
19480 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
19481 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
19482
19483 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
19484 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
19485 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
19486 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
19487 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
19488 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
19489 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
19490 might be a good place to put it.</p>
19491
19492 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
19493 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
19494
19495       </div>
19496       <div class="tags">
19497
19498
19499         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>.
19500
19501
19502       </div>
19503     </div>
19504     <div class="padding"></div>
19505
19506     <div class="entry">
19507       <div class="title">
19508         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
19509       </div>
19510       <div class="date">
19511         11th July 2010
19512       </div>
19513       <div class="body">
19514         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
19515 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
19516 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
19517 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
19518
19519 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
19520 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
19521 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
19522 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
19523 LTSP clients.</p>
19524
19525 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
19526 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
19527 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
19528
19529 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
19530 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
19531 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
19532
19533 <blockquote><pre>
19534 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
19535 #
19536 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
19537 #
19538 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
19539 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
19540 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
19541 #
19542 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
19543 # existence of attribute names.
19544 #
19545 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
19546 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
19547 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
19548 #
19549 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
19550 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
19551 #
19552 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
19553 #     SUP top
19554 #     AUXILIARY
19555 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
19556
19557 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
19558 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
19559     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
19560     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
19561         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
19562         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
19563             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
19564             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
19565             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
19566             # bass value on to clients
19567             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
19568         done
19569     done
19570 fi
19571 </pre></blockquote>
19572
19573 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
19574 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
19575 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
19576 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
19577 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
19578
19579 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
19580 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
19581
19582 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
19583 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
19584 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
19585 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
19586 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
19587 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
19588
19589       </div>
19590       <div class="tags">
19591
19592
19593         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>.
19594
19595
19596       </div>
19597     </div>
19598     <div class="padding"></div>
19599
19600     <div class="entry">
19601       <div class="title">
19602         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
19603       </div>
19604       <div class="date">
19605          9th July 2010
19606       </div>
19607       <div class="body">
19608         <p>Since
19609 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
19610 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
19611 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
19612 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
19613 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
19614 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
19615 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
19616 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
19617 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
19618 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
19619 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
19620 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
19621 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
19622
19623       </div>
19624       <div class="tags">
19625
19626
19627         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>.
19628
19629
19630       </div>
19631     </div>
19632     <div class="padding"></div>
19633
19634     <div class="entry">
19635       <div class="title">
19636         <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>
19637       </div>
19638       <div class="date">
19639          3rd July 2010
19640       </div>
19641       <div class="body">
19642         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
19643 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
19644 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
19645 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
19646 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
19647 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
19648 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
19649 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
19650
19651 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
19652 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
19653 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
19654 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
19655 publish the difference.</p>
19656
19657 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
19658
19659 <blockquote><p>
19660   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
19661   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
19662   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
19663   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
19664   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
19665   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
19666   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
19667   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
19668 </p></blockquote>
19669
19670 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
19671
19672 <blockquote><p>
19673   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
19674   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
19675   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
19676   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
19677   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
19678   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
19679   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
19680   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
19681   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
19682   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
19683   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
19684   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
19685   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
19686   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
19687   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
19688   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
19689   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
19690   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
19691   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
19692   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
19693 </p></blockquote>
19694
19695 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
19696
19697 <blockquote><p>
19698   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
19699   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
19700   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
19701   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
19702   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
19703   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
19704   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
19705   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
19706   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
19707   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
19708   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
19709   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
19710   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
19711   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
19712   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
19713   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
19714   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
19715   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
19716   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
19717   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
19718   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
19719 </p></blockquote>
19720
19721 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
19722
19723 <blockquote><p>
19724   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
19725   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
19726   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
19727 </p></blockquote>
19728
19729 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
19730 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
19731 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
19732 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
19733 the difference somewhat.
19734
19735       </div>
19736       <div class="tags">
19737
19738
19739         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>.
19740
19741
19742       </div>
19743     </div>
19744     <div class="padding"></div>
19745
19746     <div class="entry">
19747       <div class="title">
19748         <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>
19749       </div>
19750       <div class="date">
19751          1st July 2010
19752       </div>
19753       <div class="body">
19754         <p>For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
19755 a bit troubling.  Laptops are typically used also when not connected
19756 to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
19757 unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
19758 This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
19759 and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
19760 in Debian.  Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
19761 It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
19762 setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.</p>
19763
19764 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
19765
19766 This is the traditional method with a twist.  The password caching is
19767 provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on
19768 Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd.  The directory
19769 lookup and password checking is done using LDAP.  If one want to use
19770 Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
19771 replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal.  If one is happy having a
19772 local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
19773 pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
19774 using libpam-mklocaluser.  A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
19775 pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
19776 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/568577">bug #568577</a> is in the
19777 archive.  Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
19778 directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
19779 prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/.  This
19780 is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.</p>
19781
19782 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured</p>
19783
19784 <blockquote><pre>
19785 libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
19786 </pre></blockquote>
19787
19788 <p>The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
19789 one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site.  Make sure the
19790 PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
19791 sent in clear text to the LDAP server.  I've been unable to get TLS
19792 certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
19793 LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
19794 is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
19795 on how to get this working.</p>
19796
19797 <p>Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
19798 caching until <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">bug #485282</a>
19799 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
19800 currently in /etc/nscd.conf.  The changes are in the fields
19801 reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
19802 instructions I found in the
19803 <a href="http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/">LDAP for Mobile Laptops</a>
19804 instructions by Flyn Computing.</p>
19805
19806 <blockquote><pre>
19807         debug-level             0
19808         reload-count            unlimited
19809         paranoia                no
19810
19811         enable-cache            passwd          yes
19812         positive-time-to-live   passwd          2592000
19813         negative-time-to-live   passwd          20
19814         suggested-size          passwd          211
19815         check-files             passwd          yes
19816         persistent              passwd          yes
19817         shared                  passwd          yes
19818         max-db-size             passwd          33554432
19819         auto-propagate          passwd          yes
19820
19821         enable-cache            group           yes
19822         positive-time-to-live   group           2592000
19823         negative-time-to-live   group           20
19824         suggested-size          group           211
19825         check-files             group           yes
19826         persistent              group           yes
19827         shared                  group           yes
19828         max-db-size             group           33554432
19829         auto-propagate          group           yes
19830
19831         enable-cache            hosts           no
19832         positive-time-to-live   hosts           2592000
19833         negative-time-to-live   hosts           20
19834         suggested-size          hosts           211
19835         check-files             hosts           yes
19836         persistent              hosts           yes
19837         shared                  hosts           yes
19838         max-db-size             hosts           33554432
19839
19840         enable-cache            services        yes
19841         positive-time-to-live   services        2592000
19842         negative-time-to-live   services        20
19843         suggested-size          services        211
19844         check-files             services        yes
19845         persistent              services        yes
19846         shared                  services        yes
19847         max-db-size             services        33554432
19848 </pre></blockquote>
19849
19850 <p>While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
19851 automatically like the one provided in
19852 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/496915">bug #496915</a>, the file
19853 content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
19854 directory service on the machine.  /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
19855 look like this:</p>
19856
19857 <blockquote><pre>
19858 passwd:         files ldap
19859 group:          files ldap
19860 shadow:         files ldap
19861 hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
19862 networks:       files
19863 protocols:      files
19864 services:       files
19865 ethers:         files
19866 rpc:            files
19867 netgroup:       files ldap
19868 </pre></blockquote>
19869
19870 <p>The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
19871 shadow and netgroup.</p>
19872
19873 <p>With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
19874 in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
19875 directory created and have the password as well as user and group
19876 attributes cached.
19877
19878 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
19879   libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
19880
19881 <p>Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
19882 problems doing proper caching, I've seen suggestions and recipes to
19883 use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
19884 LDAP database is available.  I have not tested such setup, because I
19885 discovered sssd.</p>
19886
19887 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser</h2>
19888
19889 <p>A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
19890 mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
19891 <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/">sssd</a> package from Redhat.
19892 It is part of the <a href="http://www.freeipa.org/">FreeIPA</A> project
19893 to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
19894 machines.  The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
19895 information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
19896 libpam-ccreds.  It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS.  Version
19897 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
19898 in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010.  Because the
19899 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd package</a>
19900 was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
19901 version 1.2 is now in testing.
19902
19903 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
19904 roaming setup I want</p>
19905
19906 <blockquote><pre>
19907 libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
19908 </pre></blockquote>
19909
19910 The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
19911 <tt>/etc/sssd/sssd.conf</tt>.
19912
19913 <blockquote><pre>
19914 [sssd]
19915 config_file_version = 2
19916 reconnection_retries = 3
19917 sbus_timeout = 30
19918 services = nss, pam
19919 domains = INTERN
19920
19921 [nss]
19922 filter_groups = root
19923 filter_users = root
19924 reconnection_retries = 3
19925
19926 [pam]
19927 reconnection_retries = 3
19928
19929 [domain/INTERN]
19930 enumerate = false
19931 cache_credentials = true
19932
19933 id_provider = ldap
19934 auth_provider = ldap
19935 chpass_provider = ldap
19936
19937 ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
19938 ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
19939 ldap_tls_reqcert = never
19940 ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
19941 </pre></blockquote>
19942
19943 <p>I got the same problem here with certificate checking.  Had to set
19944 "ldap_tls_reqcert = never" to get it working.</p>
19945
19946 <p>With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
19947 nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
19948 modify it manually.</p>
19949
19950 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
19951 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
19952
19953       </div>
19954       <div class="tags">
19955
19956
19957         Tags: <a href="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>.
19958
19959
19960       </div>
19961     </div>
19962     <div class="padding"></div>
19963
19964     <div class="entry">
19965       <div class="title">
19966         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
19967       </div>
19968       <div class="date">
19969         28th June 2010
19970       </div>
19971       <div class="body">
19972         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
19973 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
19974 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
19975 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
19976 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
19977 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
19978 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
19979 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
19980 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
19981 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
19982
19983 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
19984 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
19985 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
19986 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
19987 released.</p>
19988
19989 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
19990 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
19991 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
19992 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
19993
19994 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
19995 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
19996
19997 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
19998 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
19999 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
20000 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
20001 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
20002
20003       </div>
20004       <div class="tags">
20005
20006
20007         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>.
20008
20009
20010       </div>
20011     </div>
20012     <div class="padding"></div>
20013
20014     <div class="entry">
20015       <div class="title">
20016         <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>
20017       </div>
20018       <div class="date">
20019         24th June 2010
20020       </div>
20021       <div class="body">
20022         <p>A while back, I
20023 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
20024 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
20025 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
20026 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
20027
20028 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
20029 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
20030 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
20031 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
20032
20033 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
20034 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
20035 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
20036 Debian Edu.</p>
20037
20038 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
20039 the
20040 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
20041 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
20042 available today from IETF.</p>
20043
20044 <pre>
20045 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
20046 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
20047 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
20048  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
20049         NAME 'dhcpHost'
20050         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
20051 -       SUP top
20052 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
20053         MUST cn
20054         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
20055         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
20056 </pre>
20057
20058 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
20059 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
20060 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
20061
20062 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
20063 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
20064
20065       </div>
20066       <div class="tags">
20067
20068
20069         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>.
20070
20071
20072       </div>
20073     </div>
20074     <div class="padding"></div>
20075
20076     <div class="entry">
20077       <div class="title">
20078         <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>
20079       </div>
20080       <div class="date">
20081         16th June 2010
20082       </div>
20083       <div class="body">
20084         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
20085 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
20086 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
20087 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
20088 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
20089 this:
20090
20091 <blockquote><pre>
20092 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
20093 tasksel --new-install
20094 </pre></blockquote>
20095
20096 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
20097 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
20098 any output what so ever.
20099
20100 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
20101 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
20102 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
20103 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
20104 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
20105 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
20106 code like this:
20107
20108 <blockquote><pre>
20109 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
20110 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
20111 $cmd
20112 </pre></blockquote>
20113
20114 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
20115 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
20116 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
20117 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
20118 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
20119 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
20120 installation.</p>
20121
20122 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
20123 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
20124 like this.</p>
20125
20126       </div>
20127       <div class="tags">
20128
20129
20130         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>.
20131
20132
20133       </div>
20134     </div>
20135     <div class="padding"></div>
20136
20137     <div class="entry">
20138       <div class="title">
20139         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">Officeshots taking shape</a>
20140       </div>
20141       <div class="date">
20142         13th June 2010
20143       </div>
20144       <div class="body">
20145         <p>For those of us caring about document exchange and
20146 interoperability, <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>
20147 is a great service.  It is to ODF documents what
20148 <a href="http://browsershots.org/">BrowserShots</a> is for web
20149 pages.</p>
20150
20151 <p>A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
20152 that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
20153 and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
20154 interested in supporting the project.  I helped him to navigate his
20155 request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
20156 a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
20157 arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot.  The machine is
20158 administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
20159 contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
20160 see how the project is doing.</p>
20161
20162 <p>Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
20163 machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
20164 OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
20165 in 17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
20166 Windows.  This is great.</p>
20167
20168       </div>
20169       <div class="tags">
20170
20171
20172         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>.
20173
20174
20175       </div>
20176     </div>
20177     <div class="padding"></div>
20178
20179     <div class="entry">
20180       <div class="title">
20181         <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>
20182       </div>
20183       <div class="date">
20184         13th June 2010
20185       </div>
20186       <div class="body">
20187         <p>My
20188 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
20189 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
20190 finally made the upgrade logs available from
20191 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
20192 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
20193 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
20194 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
20195
20196 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
20197 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
20198 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
20199 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
20200 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
20201 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
20202 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
20203 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
20204
20205 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
20206 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
20207 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
20208 too surprising.</p>
20209
20210 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
20211 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
20212 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
20213 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
20214 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
20215 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
20216 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
20217 continue.</p>
20218
20219 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
20220 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
20221   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
20222   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
20223   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
20224   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
20225   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
20226   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
20227   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
20228   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
20229   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
20230   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
20231   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
20232   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
20233   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
20234   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
20235   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
20236   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
20237   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
20238   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
20239   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
20240   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
20241   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
20242   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
20243   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
20244   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
20245   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
20246   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
20247   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
20248   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
20249
20250 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
20251
20252 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
20253   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
20254   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
20255   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
20256   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
20257   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
20258   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
20259   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
20260   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
20261   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
20262   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
20263   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
20264   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
20265   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
20266   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
20267   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
20268   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
20269   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
20270   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
20271   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
20272   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
20273   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
20274   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
20275   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
20276   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
20277   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
20278   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
20279   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
20280   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
20281   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
20282   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
20283   zip</p>
20284
20285 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
20286
20287 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
20288   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
20289   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
20290   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
20291   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
20292   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
20293   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
20294   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
20295   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
20296   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
20297   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
20298   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
20299   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
20300   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
20301   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
20302   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
20303   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
20304   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
20305   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
20306   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
20307   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
20308   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
20309   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
20310   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
20311   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
20312   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
20313   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
20314   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
20315
20316 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
20317 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
20318   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
20319   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
20320   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
20321   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
20322   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
20323   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
20324   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
20325   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
20326   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
20327   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
20328   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
20329   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
20330   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
20331   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
20332   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
20333   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
20334   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
20335   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
20336   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
20337   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
20338   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
20339   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
20340   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
20341   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
20342   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
20343   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
20344   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
20345   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
20346   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
20347   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
20348   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
20349   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
20350   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
20351   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
20352   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
20353   xulrunner-1.9</p>
20354
20355
20356       </div>
20357       <div class="tags">
20358
20359
20360         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>.
20361
20362
20363       </div>
20364     </div>
20365     <div class="padding"></div>
20366
20367     <div class="entry">
20368       <div class="title">
20369         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
20370       </div>
20371       <div class="date">
20372         11th June 2010
20373       </div>
20374       <div class="body">
20375         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
20376 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
20377 have been discovered and reported in the process
20378 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
20379 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
20380 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
20381 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
20382 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
20383
20384 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
20385 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
20386 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
20387 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
20388 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
20389 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
20390
20391 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
20392 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
20393 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
20394 is created.  The bug report
20395 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
20396 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
20397 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
20398 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
20399 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
20400 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
20401 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
20402 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
20403 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
20404 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
20405 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
20406 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
20407 Debian Squeeze.</p>
20408
20409 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
20410 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
20411 trick:</p>
20412
20413 <blockquote><pre>
20414 #!/bin/sh
20415 set -ex
20416
20417 if [ "$1" ] ; then
20418     desktop=$1
20419 else
20420     desktop=gnome
20421 fi
20422
20423 from=lenny
20424 to=squeeze
20425
20426 exec &lt; /dev/null
20427 unset LANG
20428 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
20429 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
20430 fuser -mv .
20431 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
20432 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
20433 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
20434 #!/bin/sh
20435 exit 101
20436 EOF
20437 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
20438 exit_cleanup() {
20439     umount $tmpdir/proc
20440 }
20441 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
20442 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
20443 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
20444
20445 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
20446
20447 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
20448 # to return the correct answers.
20449 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
20450     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
20451
20452 # Include the desktop and laptop task
20453 for test in desktop laptop ; do
20454     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
20455 #!/bin/sh
20456 exit 2
20457 EOF
20458     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
20459 done
20460
20461 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
20462 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
20463 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
20464 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
20465
20466 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
20467 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
20468 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
20469 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
20470 fuser -mv
20471 </pre></blockquote>
20472
20473 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
20474 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
20475 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
20476 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
20477 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
20478 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
20479
20480 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
20481 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
20482 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
20483 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
20484 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
20485 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
20486 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
20487
20488 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
20489 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
20490 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
20491 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
20492 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
20493 packages.</p>
20494
20495       </div>
20496       <div class="tags">
20497
20498
20499         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>.
20500
20501
20502       </div>
20503     </div>
20504     <div class="padding"></div>
20505
20506     <div class="entry">
20507       <div class="title">
20508         <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>
20509       </div>
20510       <div class="date">
20511          6th June 2010
20512       </div>
20513       <div class="body">
20514         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
20515 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
20516 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
20517 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
20518 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
20519 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
20520 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
20521
20522 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
20523 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
20524 COLUMNS):</p>
20525
20526 <blockquote><pre>
20527 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
20528 previous=N
20529 PREVLEVEL=
20530 RUNLEVEL=
20531 runlevel=S
20532 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
20533 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
20534 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
20535 </pre></blockquote>
20536
20537 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
20538 script.</p>
20539
20540 <blockquote><pre>
20541 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
20542 previous=N
20543 PREVLEVEL=N
20544 RUNLEVEL=S
20545 runlevel=S
20546 </pre></blockquote>
20547
20548 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
20549 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
20550 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
20551
20552 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
20553 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
20554 choice.</p>
20555
20556       </div>
20557       <div class="tags">
20558
20559
20560         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>.
20561
20562
20563       </div>
20564     </div>
20565     <div class="padding"></div>
20566
20567     <div class="entry">
20568       <div class="title">
20569         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
20570       </div>
20571       <div class="date">
20572          6th June 2010
20573       </div>
20574       <div class="body">
20575         <p>Via the
20576 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
20577 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
20578 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
20579 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
20580 following the standards wars of today.</p>
20581
20582       </div>
20583       <div class="tags">
20584
20585
20586         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>.
20587
20588
20589       </div>
20590     </div>
20591     <div class="padding"></div>
20592
20593     <div class="entry">
20594       <div class="title">
20595         <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>
20596       </div>
20597       <div class="date">
20598          3rd June 2010
20599       </div>
20600       <div class="body">
20601         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
20602 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
20603 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
20604 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
20605 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
20606
20607 <blockquote><pre>
20608 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
20609   vendor                    count
20610   Dell Computer Corporation     1
20611     PowerEdge 1750              1
20612   IBM                           1
20613     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
20614   Intel                         2
20615   [no-dmi-info]                 3
20616 maintainer:~#
20617 </pre></blockquote>
20618
20619 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
20620 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
20621 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
20622 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
20623 option to list the individual machines.</p>
20624
20625 <p>A larger list is
20626 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
20627 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
20628 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
20629 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
20630 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
20631 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
20632 collector.</p>
20633
20634       </div>
20635       <div class="tags">
20636
20637
20638         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>.
20639
20640
20641       </div>
20642     </div>
20643     <div class="padding"></div>
20644
20645     <div class="entry">
20646       <div class="title">
20647         <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>
20648       </div>
20649       <div class="date">
20650          1st June 2010
20651       </div>
20652       <div class="body">
20653         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
20654 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
20655 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
20656 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
20657 wait.</p>
20658
20659 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
20660 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
20661 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
20662 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
20663 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
20664 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
20665
20666 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
20667 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
20668 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
20669 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
20670 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
20671 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
20672 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
20673 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
20674
20675 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
20676
20677       </div>
20678       <div class="tags">
20679
20680
20681         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>.
20682
20683
20684       </div>
20685     </div>
20686     <div class="padding"></div>
20687
20688     <div class="entry">
20689       <div class="title">
20690         <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>
20691       </div>
20692       <div class="date">
20693         27th May 2010
20694       </div>
20695       <div class="body">
20696         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
20697 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
20698 issues are known and should be solved:
20699
20700 <p><ul>
20701
20702 <li>The wicd package seen to
20703 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
20704 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
20705 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
20706 seem to be on the case.</li>
20707
20708 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
20709 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
20710 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
20711 maintainer is on the case.</li>
20712
20713 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
20714 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
20715 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
20716 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
20717 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
20718 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
20719 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
20720 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
20721
20722 </ul></p>
20723
20724 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
20725 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
20726 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
20727 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
20728
20729 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
20730 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
20731 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
20732 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
20733
20734 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
20735
20736       </div>
20737       <div class="tags">
20738
20739
20740         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>.
20741
20742
20743       </div>
20744     </div>
20745     <div class="padding"></div>
20746
20747     <div class="entry">
20748       <div class="title">
20749         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
20750       </div>
20751       <div class="date">
20752         22nd May 2010
20753       </div>
20754       <div class="body">
20755         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
20756 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
20757 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
20758 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
20759
20760 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
20761 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
20762 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
20763 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
20764 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
20765 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
20766 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
20767 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
20768 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
20769 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
20770 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
20771 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
20772 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
20773 going to work.</p>
20774
20775 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
20776 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
20777 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
20778 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
20779 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
20780 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
20781 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
20782 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
20783 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
20784 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
20785 Edu.</p>
20786
20787 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
20788 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
20789 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
20790 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
20791 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
20792 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
20793
20794 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
20795 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
20796
20797       </div>
20798       <div class="tags">
20799
20800
20801         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>.
20802
20803
20804       </div>
20805     </div>
20806     <div class="padding"></div>
20807
20808     <div class="entry">
20809       <div class="title">
20810         <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>
20811       </div>
20812       <div class="date">
20813         19th May 2010
20814       </div>
20815       <div class="body">
20816         <p>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
20817 Edu finally entered the Debian archive.  Today, the new
20818 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html">libpam-mklocaluser</a>
20819 package was accepted.  Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
20820 into unstable.  The
20821 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html">pam-python</a>
20822 package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
20823 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd</a> package
20824 passed NEW on Monday.  In addition, the
20825 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
20826 package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
20827 hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.</p>
20828
20829 <p>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
20830 roaming laptops.  The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
20831 nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
20832 which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
20833 for nscd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">BTS report
20834 #485282</a> is implemented.  The alternative setup is to use sssd with
20835 libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
20836 care of the caching of passwords and group information.</p>
20837
20838 <p>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
20839 at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
20840 problem with the server certificate.  I plan to update the Debian
20841 package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
20842 find time to make sure the next release will include both the
20843 Debian/Ubuntu specific patches.  Upstream is friendly and responsive,
20844 and I am sure we will find a good solution.</p>
20845
20846 <p>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
20847 LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
20848 when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
20849 cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
20850 memberhips and other relevant LDAP information.  The
20851 libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
20852 directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
20853 be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used.  To avoid confusion
20854 with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
20855 to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
20856 on the home directory servers.</p>
20857
20858 <p>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
20859 message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
20860 is created.  Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
20861 message.  The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
20862 a bug in gdm.  Have not investigated if there is some other message
20863 type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.</p>
20864
20865 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
20866 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
20867
20868       </div>
20869       <div class="tags">
20870
20871
20872         Tags: <a href="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>.
20873
20874
20875       </div>
20876     </div>
20877     <div class="padding"></div>
20878
20879     <div class="entry">
20880       <div class="title">
20881         <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>
20882       </div>
20883       <div class="date">
20884         14th May 2010
20885       </div>
20886       <div class="body">
20887         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
20888 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
20889 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
20890 expected, if I am to believe the
20891 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
20892 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
20893 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
20894 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
20895 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
20896 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
20897 version.</p>
20898
20899 More information about
20900 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
20901 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
20902 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
20903 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
20904
20905 <blockquote><pre>
20906 CONCURRENCY=none
20907 </pre></blockquote>
20908
20909 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
20910 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
20911 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
20912 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
20913
20914       </div>
20915       <div class="tags">
20916
20917
20918         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>.
20919
20920
20921       </div>
20922     </div>
20923     <div class="padding"></div>
20924
20925     <div class="entry">
20926       <div class="title">
20927         <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>
20928       </div>
20929       <div class="date">
20930         14th May 2010
20931       </div>
20932       <div class="body">
20933         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
20934 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
20935 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
20936 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
20937 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
20938 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
20939 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
20940 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
20941
20942 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
20943 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
20944 this on the collector host:</p>
20945
20946 <blockquote><pre>
20947 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
20948 </pre></blockquote>
20949
20950 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
20951 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
20952
20953 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
20954 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
20955 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
20956 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
20957 written yet.</p>
20958
20959       </div>
20960       <div class="tags">
20961
20962
20963         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>.
20964
20965
20966       </div>
20967     </div>
20968     <div class="padding"></div>
20969
20970     <div class="entry">
20971       <div class="title">
20972         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
20973       </div>
20974       <div class="date">
20975         13th May 2010
20976       </div>
20977       <div class="body">
20978         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
20979 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
20980 has been
20981 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
20982
20983 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
20984 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
20985 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
20986 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
20987 based boot system.  Tollef is
20988 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
20989 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
20990 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
20991 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
20992 at the moment do not.</p>
20993
20994 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
20995 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
20996 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
20997 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
20998 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
20999 way forward.</p>
21000
21001 <p>In the mean time, based on the
21002 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
21003 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
21004 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
21005 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
21006 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
21007 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
21008 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
21009 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
21010
21011       </div>
21012       <div class="tags">
21013
21014
21015         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>.
21016
21017
21018       </div>
21019     </div>
21020     <div class="padding"></div>
21021
21022     <div class="entry">
21023       <div class="title">
21024         <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>
21025       </div>
21026       <div class="date">
21027          6th May 2010
21028       </div>
21029       <div class="body">
21030         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
21031 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
21032 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
21033 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
21034 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
21035 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
21036 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
21037
21038 <blockquote><pre>
21039 CONCURRENCY=makefile
21040 </pre></blockquote>
21041
21042 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
21043 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
21044 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
21045 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
21046 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
21047 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
21048 make this happen.</p>
21049
21050 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
21051 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
21052 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
21053 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
21054 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
21055
21056 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
21057 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
21058 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
21059 fix the remaining issues.</p>
21060
21061 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
21062 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
21063 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
21064 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
21065
21066       </div>
21067       <div class="tags">
21068
21069
21070         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>.
21071
21072
21073       </div>
21074     </div>
21075     <div class="padding"></div>
21076
21077     <div class="entry">
21078       <div class="title">
21079         <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>
21080       </div>
21081       <div class="date">
21082          2nd May 2010
21083       </div>
21084       <div class="body">
21085         <p>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
21086 create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
21087 change the password on the first login attempt.</p>
21088
21089 <p>I'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
21090 Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account.  The account
21091 and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
21092 unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
21093 passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.</p>
21094
21095 <p>A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
21096 settings in /etc/shadow:</p>
21097
21098 <blockquote><pre>
21099 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
21100 Last password change                                    : May 02, 2010
21101 Password expires                                        : never
21102 Password inactive                                       : never
21103 Account expires                                         : never
21104 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
21105 Maximum number of days between password change          : 99999
21106 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
21107 root@tjener:~#
21108 </pre></blockquote>
21109
21110 <p>The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
21111 account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
21112 lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
21113 to the difference in days between that date and today.  To make it
21114 simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
21115 avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).</p>
21116
21117 <p>After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
21118 intended:</p>
21119
21120 <blockquote><pre>
21121 root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test
21122 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
21123 Last password change                                    : Jan 02, 1970
21124 Password expires                                        : never
21125 Password inactive                                       : never
21126 Account expires                                         : never
21127 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
21128 Maximum number of days between password change          : 10950
21129 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
21130 root@tjener:~#
21131 </pre></blockquote>
21132
21133 <p>So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
21134 Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
21135 user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).</p>
21136
21137 <p>Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
21138 sure only the user itself have the account password?</p>
21139
21140 <p>If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
21141 Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
21142
21143 <p>Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
21144 shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
21145 last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
21146 on the first login.  This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
21147 I did not notice this in my initial testing.  I have tested it on
21148 Squeeze, and '<tt>chage -d 0 username</tt>' do work there.  I have not
21149 tested it on Lenny yet.</p>
21150
21151 <p>Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
21152 equivalent command to expire a password is '<tt>passwd -e
21153 username</tt>', which insert zero into the date of the last password
21154 change.</p>
21155
21156       </div>
21157       <div class="tags">
21158
21159
21160         Tags: <a href="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>.
21161
21162
21163       </div>
21164     </div>
21165     <div class="padding"></div>
21166
21167     <div class="entry">
21168       <div class="title">
21169         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thoughts_on_roaming_laptop_setup_for_Debian_Edu.html">Thoughts on roaming laptop setup for Debian Edu</a>
21170       </div>
21171       <div class="date">
21172         28th April 2010
21173       </div>
21174       <div class="body">
21175         <p>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
21176 Debian Edu.  The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
21177 handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
21178 and go.</p>
21179
21180 <p>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
21181 Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
21182 example called Roaming Workstations.  Here are my thought on this.
21183 The setup would consist of the following:</p>
21184
21185 <ul>
21186
21187  <li>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
21188    the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
21189    the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
21190    server.  This allow the user to work also when offline.  The
21191    central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
21192    request, for example mounted via CIFS.  It could be mounted
21193    automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
21194    and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
21195    hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
21196    request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
21197    can be used to access it when needed.  Perhaps it is enough to use
21198    the fish protocol in KDE?</li>
21199
21200  <li>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
21201    authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
21202    to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
21203    to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server.  This can be done using
21204    <a href="http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
21205    or the Fedora developed
21206    <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD">System
21207    Security Services Daemon</a> packages.</li>
21208
21209  <li>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
21210    using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
21211    directory, using unison.</li>
21212
21213  <li>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
21214    their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
21215    the box with CUPS.  For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
21216    system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
21217    implemented.</li>
21218
21219  <li>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
21220    sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.</li>
21221
21222  <li>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
21223    cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
21224    local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.</li>
21225
21226 </ul>
21227
21228 <p>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
21229 the moment.  If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
21230 in time for the Squeeze release to freeze.  Some of the pieces need
21231 tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
21232 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566718">#566718</a>) and nslcd (or
21233 perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
21234 its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
21235 when disconnected from the net.  If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
21236 to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.</p>
21237
21238 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
21239 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
21240
21241       </div>
21242       <div class="tags">
21243
21244
21245         Tags: <a href="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>.
21246
21247
21248       </div>
21249     </div>
21250     <div class="padding"></div>
21251
21252     <div class="entry">
21253       <div class="title">
21254         <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>
21255       </div>
21256       <div class="date">
21257         19th April 2010
21258       </div>
21259       <div class="body">
21260         <p>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
21261 thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
21262 touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
21263 conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
21264 book titled "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
21265 Copyright, and the Future of the Future" is available with few
21266 restrictions on the web, for example from
21267 <a href="http://craphound.com/content/">his own site</a>. I read the
21268 epub-version from
21269 <a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2883">feedbooks</a> using
21270 <a href="http://www.fbreader.org/">fbreader</a> and my N810. I
21271 strongly recommend this book.</p>
21272
21273       </div>
21274       <div class="tags">
21275
21276
21277         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>.
21278
21279
21280       </div>
21281     </div>
21282     <div class="padding"></div>
21283
21284     <div class="entry">
21285       <div class="title">
21286         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html">Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?</a>
21287       </div>
21288       <div class="date">
21289         14th April 2010
21290       </div>
21291       <div class="body">
21292         <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/">Yesterdays
21293 NUUG presentation</a> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
21294 about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux.  Setting up a
21295 Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
21296 place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
21297 have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
21298 directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
21299 not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
21300 users and cryptographic keys instead.</p>
21301
21302 <p>A challenge will be integration and administration.  Is there a
21303 Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
21304 administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups?  With it, the
21305 school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
21306 files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.</p>
21307
21308 <p>A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
21309 pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together.  Anyone know?</p>
21310
21311 <p>Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
21312 Nagios.  I have no idea how much work that will be to implement.  We
21313 would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
21314 shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
21315 to work properly.</p>
21316
21317 <p>I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
21318 skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
21319 configuration and integration.  A natural starting point would be
21320 setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
21321 rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
21322 time.</p>
21323
21324 <p>If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
21325 I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
21326 presentation, and start using Kerberos at home.  The video show show
21327 up in a few days.</p>
21328
21329       </div>
21330       <div class="tags">
21331
21332
21333         Tags: <a href="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>.
21334
21335
21336       </div>
21337     </div>
21338     <div class="padding"></div>
21339
21340     <div class="entry">
21341       <div class="title">
21342         <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>
21343       </div>
21344       <div class="date">
21345          6th March 2010
21346       </div>
21347       <div class="body">
21348         <p>6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
21349 in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
21350 when the user log out.  A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
21351 package in 2004 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/230422">#230422</a>),
21352 and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
21353 Today, this finally paid off.</p>
21354
21355 <p>The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
21356 repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
21357 been updated to use this framework.  Next on my agenda is to make sure
21358 kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.</p>
21359
21360 <p>In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
21361 user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
21362 after a user.  With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
21363 a generic way that work with all display managers using this
21364 framework.  My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
21365 similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.<p>
21366
21367       </div>
21368       <div class="tags">
21369
21370
21371         Tags: <a href="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>.
21372
21373
21374       </div>
21375     </div>
21376     <div class="padding"></div>
21377
21378     <div class="entry">
21379       <div class="title">
21380         <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>
21381       </div>
21382       <div class="date">
21383         11th February 2010
21384       </div>
21385       <div class="body">
21386         <p>On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
21387 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> was finally
21388 shipped.  This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
21389 pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up.  Work on the first
21390 point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
21391 month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
21392 and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.</p>
21393
21394 <p>Perhaps it even is time for some partying?</p>
21395
21396 <p>After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
21397 next major release, based on Squeeze.  We will try to get as many of
21398 the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
21399 and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.</p>
21400
21401       </div>
21402       <div class="tags">
21403
21404
21405         Tags: <a href="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>.
21406
21407
21408       </div>
21409     </div>
21410     <div class="padding"></div>
21411
21412     <div class="entry">
21413       <div class="title">
21414         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html">Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration</a>
21415       </div>
21416       <div class="date">
21417         27th January 2010
21418       </div>
21419       <div class="body">
21420         <p>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
21421 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
21422 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
21423 Nagios.  The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
21424 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
21425 further.</p>
21426
21427 <p>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
21428 configured as a Munin and Nagios server.  In addition, it is
21429 configured to be a server for the
21430 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">SiteSummary
21431 system</a> I have written for use in Debian Edu.  The SiteSummary
21432 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
21433 work.  In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
21434 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
21435 computer submitting information to this collector.  This allow for
21436 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
21437 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
21438 packages got etc.  This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
21439 and Nagios configuration.</p>
21440
21441 <p>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
21442 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
21443 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
21444 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.</p>
21445
21446 <p>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
21447 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
21448 services detected).  In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
21449 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
21450 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
21451 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
21452 the machine.</p>
21453
21454 <p>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
21455 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
21456 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
21457 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.</p>
21458
21459 <p>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
21460 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP.  The system
21461 administrator need to run "<tt>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
21462 nagiosadmin</tt>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
21463 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages.  After that,
21464 everything is taken care of.</p>
21465
21466       </div>
21467       <div class="tags">
21468
21469
21470         Tags: <a href="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>.
21471
21472
21473       </div>
21474     </div>
21475     <div class="padding"></div>
21476
21477     <div class="entry">
21478       <div class="title">
21479         <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>
21480       </div>
21481       <div class="date">
21482         12th August 2009
21483       </div>
21484       <div class="body">
21485         <p>Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
21486 and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
21487 OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage.  I searched using
21488 'filetype:odt' and equvalent terms, and got these results:</P>
21489
21490 <table>
21491 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
21492 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:282000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
21493 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:75600</td> <td>pptx:183000</td></tr>
21494 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:145000</td></tr>
21495 </table>
21496
21497 <p>Next, I added a 'site:no' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
21498 got these numbers:</p>
21499
21500 <table>
21501 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
21502 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480 </td> <td>docx:4460</td></tr>
21503 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:299   </td> <td>pptx:741</td></tr>
21504 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:187       </td> <td>xlsx:372</td></tr>
21505 </table>
21506
21507 <p>I wonder how these numbers change over time.</p>
21508
21509 <p>I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
21510 on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
21511 they are conduced in another country.  Because of this, I did the same
21512 search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
21513 search done from a machine here in Norway.</p>
21514
21515
21516 <table>
21517 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
21518 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:129000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
21519 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:44200</td> <td>pptx:93900</td></tr>
21520 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:82400</td></tr>
21521 </table>
21522
21523 <p>And with 'site:no':
21524
21525 <table>
21526 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
21527 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480</td> <td>docx:3410</td></tr>
21528 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:175</td> <td>pptx:604</td></tr>
21529 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:186       </td> <td>xlsx:296</td></tr>
21530 </table>
21531
21532 <p>Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
21533 numbers.</p>
21534
21535       </div>
21536       <div class="tags">
21537
21538
21539         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>.
21540
21541
21542       </div>
21543     </div>
21544     <div class="padding"></div>
21545
21546     <div class="entry">
21547       <div class="title">
21548         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html">ISO still hope to fix OOXML</a>
21549       </div>
21550       <div class="date">
21551          8th August 2009
21552       </div>
21553       <div class="body">
21554         <p>According to <a
21555 href="http://twerner.blogspot.com/2009/08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html">a
21556 blog post from Torsten Werner</a>, the current defect report for ISO
21557 29500 (ISO OOXML) is 809 pages.  His interesting point is that the
21558 defect report is 71 pages more than the full ODF 1.1 specification.
21559 Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
21560 can be fixed in ISO.  Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
21561 and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
21562 close to solving the problems.  I was part of the Norwegian committee
21563 involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
21564 Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.</p>
21565
21566 <p>These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
21567 with the future ahead of it.  We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
21568 seminar this autumn.</p>
21569
21570       </div>
21571       <div class="tags">
21572
21573
21574         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>.
21575
21576
21577       </div>
21578     </div>
21579     <div class="padding"></div>
21580
21581     <div class="entry">
21582       <div class="title">
21583         <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>
21584       </div>
21585       <div class="date">
21586         27th July 2009
21587       </div>
21588       <div class="body">
21589         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
21590 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
21591 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
21592 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
21593 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
21594 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
21595 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
21596
21597 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
21598 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
21599 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
21600
21601       </div>
21602       <div class="tags">
21603
21604
21605         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>.
21606
21607
21608       </div>
21609     </div>
21610     <div class="padding"></div>
21611
21612     <div class="entry">
21613       <div class="title">
21614         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
21615       </div>
21616       <div class="date">
21617         22nd July 2009
21618       </div>
21619       <div class="body">
21620         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
21621 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
21622 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
21623 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
21624 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
21625 the package up to date.</p>
21626
21627 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
21628 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
21629 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
21630 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
21631 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
21632 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
21633 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
21634 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
21635 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
21636 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
21637 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
21638 working on the future release.</p>
21639
21640 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
21641 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
21642
21643       </div>
21644       <div class="tags">
21645
21646
21647         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>.
21648
21649
21650       </div>
21651     </div>
21652     <div class="padding"></div>
21653
21654     <div class="entry">
21655       <div class="title">
21656         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
21657       </div>
21658       <div class="date">
21659         24th June 2009
21660       </div>
21661       <div class="body">
21662         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
21663 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
21664 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
21665 funded
21666 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
21667 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
21668 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
21669 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
21670 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
21671 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
21672
21673 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
21674 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
21675 boot:</p>
21676
21677 <ul>
21678
21679 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
21680
21681 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
21682    clock is in UTC.</li>
21683
21684 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
21685    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
21686    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
21687
21688 </ul>
21689
21690 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
21691 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
21692 Villegas</a>.
21693
21694 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
21695 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
21696 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
21697 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
21698 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
21699 using this.</p>
21700
21701 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
21702 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
21703 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
21704 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
21705 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
21706 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
21707 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
21708
21709       </div>
21710       <div class="tags">
21711
21712
21713         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>.
21714
21715
21716       </div>
21717     </div>
21718     <div class="padding"></div>
21719
21720     <div class="entry">
21721       <div class="title">
21722         <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>
21723       </div>
21724       <div class="date">
21725          2nd May 2009
21726       </div>
21727       <div class="body">
21728         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
21729 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
21730 do not yet know them.</p>
21731
21732 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
21733 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
21734 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
21735 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
21736 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
21737 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
21738 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
21739 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
21740 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
21741 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
21742 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
21743
21744 <p>The second one is
21745 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
21746 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
21747 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
21748 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
21749 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
21750 and the company behind it is running
21751 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
21752 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
21753 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
21754 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
21755 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
21756 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
21757 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
21758 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
21759
21760 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
21761 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
21762 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
21763 surrounded by today.</p>
21764
21765       </div>
21766       <div class="tags">
21767
21768
21769         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>.
21770
21771
21772       </div>
21773     </div>
21774     <div class="padding"></div>
21775
21776     <div class="entry">
21777       <div class="title">
21778         <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>
21779       </div>
21780       <div class="date">
21781         28th April 2009
21782       </div>
21783       <div class="body">
21784         <p>Julien Blache
21785 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
21786 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
21787 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
21788 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
21789 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
21790 properties.</p>
21791
21792       </div>
21793       <div class="tags">
21794
21795
21796         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>.
21797
21798
21799       </div>
21800     </div>
21801     <div class="padding"></div>
21802
21803     <div class="entry">
21804       <div class="title">
21805         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html">Recording video from cron using VLC</a>
21806       </div>
21807       <div class="date">
21808          5th April 2009
21809       </div>
21810       <div class="body">
21811         <p>One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
21812 run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net.  The
21813 task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
21814 of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
21815 vlc.  I finally found a way to do it today.  I spent an hour or so
21816 searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation.  The
21817 hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
21818 dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:</p>
21819
21820 <blockquote><pre>URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
21821 SAVEFILE=rms.ogg
21822 DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
21823   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
21824   --intf=dummy</pre></blockquote>
21825
21826 <p>The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
21827 duplicating the output stream to "nodisplay" and the file, using the
21828 dummy interface.  The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
21829 sure no X interface is needed.</p>
21830
21831 <p>The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
21832 and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
21833 the vlc process with SIGTERM.  Here is a complete script
21834 <tt>vlc-record</tt> to use from <tt>at</tt> or <tt>cron</tt>:</p>
21835
21836 <blockquote><pre>#!/bin/sh
21837 set -e
21838 URL="$1"
21839 SAVEFILE="$2"
21840 DURATION="$3"
21841 DISPLAY= vlc -q "$URL" \
21842   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
21843   --intf=dummy < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 &
21844 pid=$!
21845 sleep $DURATION
21846 kill $pid
21847 wait $pid</pre></blockquote>
21848
21849       </div>
21850       <div class="tags">
21851
21852
21853         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>.
21854
21855
21856       </div>
21857     </div>
21858     <div class="padding"></div>
21859
21860     <div class="entry">
21861       <div class="title">
21862         <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>
21863       </div>
21864       <div class="date">
21865         30th March 2009
21866       </div>
21867       <div class="body">
21868         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
21869 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
21870 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
21871 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
21872 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
21873 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
21874 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
21875 application.</p>
21876
21877 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
21878 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
21879 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
21880 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
21881 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
21882 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
21883 blocked from doing so.</p>
21884
21885 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
21886 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
21887 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
21888 requirements change.</p>
21889
21890 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
21891 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
21892 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
21893
21894       </div>
21895       <div class="tags">
21896
21897
21898         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>.
21899
21900
21901       </div>
21902     </div>
21903     <div class="padding"></div>
21904
21905     <div class="entry">
21906       <div class="title">
21907         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
21908       </div>
21909       <div class="date">
21910         29th March 2009
21911       </div>
21912       <div class="body">
21913         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
21914 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
21915 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
21916 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
21917 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
21918 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
21919 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
21920 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
21921 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
21922 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
21923 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
21924 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
21925 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
21926 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
21927 now. :)</p>
21928
21929       </div>
21930       <div class="tags">
21931
21932
21933         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>.
21934
21935
21936       </div>
21937     </div>
21938     <div class="padding"></div>
21939
21940     <div class="entry">
21941       <div class="title">
21942         <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>
21943       </div>
21944       <div class="date">
21945         29th March 2009
21946       </div>
21947       <div class="body">
21948         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
21949 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
21950 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
21951 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
21952 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
21953 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
21954
21955 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
21956 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
21957 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
21958 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
21959 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
21960 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
21961 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
21962 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
21963 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
21964 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
21965 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
21966 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
21967 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
21968
21969 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
21970 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
21971 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
21972 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
21973
21974 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
21975 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
21976
21977 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
21978 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
21979 new IETF work group?</p>
21980
21981       </div>
21982       <div class="tags">
21983
21984
21985         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>.
21986
21987
21988       </div>
21989     </div>
21990     <div class="padding"></div>
21991
21992     <div class="entry">
21993       <div class="title">
21994         <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>
21995       </div>
21996       <div class="date">
21997         28th February 2009
21998       </div>
21999       <div class="body">
22000         <p>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
22001 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
22002 contract expire for each server.  We have a machine (and service)
22003 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
22004 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
22005 each machine.  To make it easier for us to track support contract
22006 status, I've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
22007 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
22008 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
22009 machines.  I extended a perl script already being used to import
22010 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
22011 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
22012 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
22013 for the relevant machines.  This make the support status information
22014 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
22015 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
22016 The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
22017 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
22018 them.  27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
22019 using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
22020 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
22021 services.  After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
22022 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
22023 them break down.  When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
22024 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
22025 machine.</p>
22026
22027 <p>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
22028 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
22029 Werner Forsbring.  The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
22030 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
22031 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code.  I know the HTML
22032 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
22033 introduce more dependencies.  This is the current incarnation:</p>
22034
22035 <pre>
22036 use LWP::Simple;
22037 use POSIX;
22038 use WWW::Mechanize;
22039 use Date::Parse;
22040 [...]
22041 sub get_support_info {
22042     my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
22043     my $str;
22044
22045     if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
22046         # fetch website from Dell support
22047         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";
22048         my $webpage = get($url);
22049         return undef unless ($webpage);
22050
22051         my $daysleft = -1;
22052         my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
22053         foreach my $line (@lines) {
22054             next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
22055             $line =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
22056             $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;
22057
22058             my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
22059             @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
22060             my $lastend = "";
22061             while ($f[3] eq "DELL") {
22062                 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];
22063
22064                 my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
22065                                             localtime(str2time($startstr)));
22066                 my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
22067                                           localtime(str2time($endstr)));
22068                 $str .= "$type $start -> $end ";
22069                 @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
22070                 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
22071             }
22072             my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
22073             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
22074                 if ($lastend lt $today);
22075         }
22076     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
22077         my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
22078         my $url =
22079             'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do';
22080         $mech->get($url);
22081         my $fields = {
22082             'BODServiceID' => 'NA',
22083             'RegisteredPurchaseDate' => '',
22084             'country' => 'NO',
22085             'productNumber' => $productnumber,
22086             'serialNumber1' => $serial,
22087         };
22088         $mech->submit_form( form_number => 2,
22089                             fields      => $fields );
22090         # Next step is screen scraping
22091         my $content = $mech->content();
22092
22093         $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
22094         $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
22095         $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
22096         $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
22097
22098         my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
22099
22100         while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
22101             my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
22102                 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
22103             $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
22104             my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
22105                                         localtime(str2time($startstr)));
22106             my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
22107                                       localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
22108
22109             $str .= "$type ($status) $start -> $end ";
22110
22111             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
22112                 if ($end lt $today);
22113         }
22114     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
22115         # This code ignore extended support contracts.
22116         my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
22117         if ($producttype &amp;&amp; $serial) {
22118             my $content =
22119                 get("http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;brandind=5000008&amp;Submit=Submit&amp;type=$producttype&amp;serial=$serial");
22120             if ($content) {
22121                 $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
22122                 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
22123                 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
22124                 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
22125
22126                 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
22127                 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
22128
22129                 $str .= "($status) -> $end ";
22130
22131                 my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
22132                 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
22133                     if ($end lt $today);
22134             }
22135         }
22136     }
22137     return $str;
22138 }
22139 </pre>
22140
22141 <p>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
22142 serial numbers.  The information passed in as arguments are fetched
22143 from dmidecode.</p>
22144
22145 <pre>
22146 print get_support_info("hp.host", "HP ProLiant BL460c G1", "1234567890"
22147                        "447707-B21");
22148 print get_support_info("dell.host", "Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950", "1234567");
22149 print get_support_info("ibm.host", "IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-",
22150                        "1234567");
22151 </pre>
22152
22153 <p>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
22154 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)</p>
22155
22156 <p>Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
22157 contracts, so it is useless in that case.  The original Dell code do
22158 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
22159 do so.</p>
22160
22161       </div>
22162       <div class="tags">
22163
22164
22165         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>.
22166
22167
22168       </div>
22169     </div>
22170     <div class="padding"></div>
22171
22172     <div class="entry">
22173       <div class="title">
22174         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html">Using bar codes at a computing center</a>
22175       </div>
22176       <div class="date">
22177         20th February 2009
22178       </div>
22179       <div class="body">
22180         <p>At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
22181 in our computing center.  This give us a challenge in tracking the
22182 location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
22183 removed.  Some times the location register is not updated when a
22184 computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
22185 the "missing" computer.</p>
22186
22187 <p>In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
22188 <a href="http://www.libdmtx.org/">libdmtx</a> to write and read bar
22189 code blocks as defined in the
22190 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix">The Data Matrix
22191 Standard</a>.  This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
22192 digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
22193 codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture.  The bar code standard
22194 allow up to 2 KiB to be written in the tag.  There is another project
22195 with <a href="http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/">a bar code
22196 writer written in postscript</a> capable of creating such bar codes,
22197 but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
22198 codes.</p>
22199
22200 <p>It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
22201 machines in our computing center.  If both racks and computers are
22202 tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
22203 computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
22204 If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
22205 locations, and can detect movements and removals.</p>
22206
22207 <p>I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
22208 random rack and tagged all the machines with their names.  Next, I
22209 took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
22210 these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read.  This worked
22211 fairly well.  If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
22212 side, all tags in the image could be read.  Because of limited space
22213 between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
22214 rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
22215 about half the rack.  I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
22216 to 60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.</p>
22217
22218 <p>My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
22219 at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
22220 easier automatic tracking of computers.</p>
22221
22222       </div>
22223       <div class="tags">
22224
22225
22226         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>.
22227
22228
22229       </div>
22230     </div>
22231     <div class="padding"></div>
22232
22233     <div class="entry">
22234       <div class="title">
22235         <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>
22236       </div>
22237       <div class="date">
22238         17th January 2009
22239       </div>
22240       <div class="body">
22241         <p>As part of the work we do in <a href="http://www.nuug.no">NUUG</a>
22242 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
22243 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording.  Putting a
22244 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
22245 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy.  I hope this
22246 will become easier when the &lt;video&gt; tag is implemented in all
22247 browsers, but I am not sure.  We provide the recordings in several
22248 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
22249 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
22250 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
22251 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
22252 &lt;video&gt; tag, the &lt;object&gt; tag, the &lt;embed&gt; tag and
22253 the &lt;applet&gt; tag.  All of these take a lot of options, and
22254 finding the best options is a major challenge.</p>
22255
22256 <p>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from <a
22257 href="http://labs.opera.com">labs.opera.com</a>, to see how it handled
22258 a &lt;video&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
22259 I was not very impressed.  The browser start by fetching a picture
22260 from the video stream.  Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
22261 definitely very early in the recording.  So far, so good. Next,
22262 instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
22263 of it, but do not start to play the video.  This mean I have to wait
22264 for several minutes for the downloading to finish.  When the download
22265 is done, the playing of the video do not start!  Waiting for the
22266 download, but I do not get to see the video?  Some testing later, I
22267 discover that I have to add the controls="true" attribute to be able
22268 to get a play button to pres to start the video.  Adding
22269 autoplay="true" did not help.  I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
22270 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
22271 &lt;video&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
22272 playing when the download is done.</p>
22273
22274 <p>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
22275 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/">available
22276 from the nuug site</a>.  Will have to test it with the new Firefox
22277 too.</p>
22278
22279 <p>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature.  I was unable
22280 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
22281 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video.  I
22282 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)</p>
22283
22284       </div>
22285       <div class="tags">
22286
22287
22288         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>.
22289
22290
22291       </div>
22292     </div>
22293     <div class="padding"></div>
22294
22295     <div class="entry">
22296       <div class="title">
22297         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html">Software video mixer on a USB stick</a>
22298       </div>
22299       <div class="date">
22300         28th December 2008
22301       </div>
22302       <div class="body">
22303         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> is
22304 recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
22305 worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
22306 directly with the video stream.  For this, we use the
22307 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/">dvswitch</a> package from
22308 the Debian video team.  As this require quite one computer per video
22309 source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
22310 borrow laptops.  And to avoid having to install extra software on
22311 these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
22312 bootable USB stick.  The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
22313 source, sink and mixer applications and
22314 <a href="http://www.kinodv.org/">dvgrab</a>.  To allow this setup to
22315 work without any configuration, I've patched dvswitch to use
22316 <a href="http://www.avahi.org/">avahi</a> to connect the various parts
22317 together.  And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
22318 upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
22319 with USB sources.  We have not yet tested this setup in a production
22320 setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
22321 video mixer in a very short time frame.  We will need it for
22322 <a href="http://www.goopen.no/">Go Open 2009</a>.</p>
22323
22324 <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz">The
22325 USB image</a> is for a 1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
22326 larger stick as well.</p>
22327
22328       </div>
22329       <div class="tags">
22330
22331
22332         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>.
22333
22334
22335       </div>
22336     </div>
22337     <div class="padding"></div>
22338
22339     <div class="entry">
22340       <div class="title">
22341         <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>
22342       </div>
22343       <div class="date">
22344          7th December 2008
22345       </div>
22346       <div class="body">
22347         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
22348 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
22349 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
22350 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
22351 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
22352 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
22353 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
22354 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
22355
22356 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
22357 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
22358 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
22359 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
22360 of these cards.</p>
22361
22362       </div>
22363       <div class="tags">
22364
22365
22366         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>.
22367
22368
22369       </div>
22370     </div>
22371     <div class="padding"></div>
22372
22373     <div class="entry">
22374       <div class="title">
22375         <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>
22376       </div>
22377       <div class="date">
22378         25th November 2008
22379       </div>
22380       <div class="body">
22381         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
22382 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
22383 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
22384 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
22385 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
22386 notes are available on
22387 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
22388 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
22389 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
22390 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
22391 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
22392 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
22393 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
22394 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
22395 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
22396
22397 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
22398 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
22399
22400       </div>
22401       <div class="tags">
22402
22403
22404         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>.
22405
22406
22407       </div>
22408     </div>
22409     <div class="padding"></div>
22410
22411     <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>
22412     <div id="sidebar">
22413
22414
22415
22416 <h2>Archive</h2>
22417 <ul>
22418
22419 <li>2015
22420 <ul>
22421
22422 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
22423
22424 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (6)</a></li>
22425
22426 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/03/">March (1)</a></li>
22427
22428 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/04/">April (4)</a></li>
22429
22430 </ul></li>
22431
22432 <li>2014
22433 <ul>
22434
22435 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
22436
22437 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
22438
22439 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
22440
22441 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
22442
22443 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
22444
22445 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
22446
22447 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
22448
22449 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
22450
22451 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
22452
22453 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
22454
22455 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
22456
22457 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
22458
22459 </ul></li>
22460
22461 <li>2013
22462 <ul>
22463
22464 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
22465
22466 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
22467
22468 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
22469
22470 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
22471
22472 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
22473
22474 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
22475
22476 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
22477
22478 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
22479
22480 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
22481
22482 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
22483
22484 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
22485
22486 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
22487
22488 </ul></li>
22489
22490 <li>2012
22491 <ul>
22492
22493 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
22494
22495 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
22496
22497 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
22498
22499 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
22500
22501 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
22502
22503 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
22504
22505 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
22506
22507 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
22508
22509 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
22510
22511 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
22512
22513 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
22514
22515 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
22516
22517 </ul></li>
22518
22519 <li>2011
22520 <ul>
22521
22522 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
22523
22524 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
22525
22526 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
22527
22528 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
22529
22530 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
22531
22532 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
22533
22534 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
22535
22536 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
22537
22538 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
22539
22540 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
22541
22542 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
22543
22544 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
22545
22546 </ul></li>
22547
22548 <li>2010
22549 <ul>
22550
22551 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
22552
22553 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
22554
22555 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
22556
22557 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
22558
22559 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
22560
22561 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
22562
22563 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
22564
22565 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
22566
22567 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
22568
22569 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
22570
22571 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
22572
22573 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
22574
22575 </ul></li>
22576
22577 <li>2009
22578 <ul>
22579
22580 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
22581
22582 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
22583
22584 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
22585
22586 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
22587
22588 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
22589
22590 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
22591
22592 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
22593
22594 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
22595
22596 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
22597
22598 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
22599
22600 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
22601
22602 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
22603
22604 </ul></li>
22605
22606 <li>2008
22607 <ul>
22608
22609 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
22610
22611 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
22612
22613 </ul></li>
22614
22615 </ul>
22616
22617
22618
22619 <h2>Tags</h2>
22620 <ul>
22621
22622  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (13)</a></li>
22623
22624  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
22625
22626  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
22627
22628  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
22629
22630  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (8)</a></li>
22631
22632  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (15)</a></li>
22633
22634  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
22635
22636  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
22637
22638  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (109)</a></li>
22639
22640  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (153)</a></li>
22641
22642  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (10)</a></li>
22643
22644  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (15)</a></li>
22645
22646  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (13)</a></li>
22647
22648  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
22649
22650  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (275)</a></li>
22651
22652  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (23)</a></li>
22653
22654  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (12)</a></li>
22655
22656  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (15)</a></li>
22657
22658  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
22659
22660  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (14)</a></li>
22661
22662  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (42)</a></li>
22663
22664  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (10)</a></li>
22665
22666  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (19)</a></li>
22667
22668  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
22669
22670  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
22671
22672  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
22673
22674  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
22675
22676  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
22677
22678  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (32)</a></li>
22679
22680  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (260)</a></li>
22681
22682  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (176)</a></li>
22683
22684  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (16)</a></li>
22685
22686  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
22687
22688  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (51)</a></li>
22689
22690  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (83)</a></li>
22691
22692  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (1)</a></li>
22693
22694  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
22695
22696  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
22697
22698  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
22699
22700  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (9)</a></li>
22701
22702  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
22703
22704  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (4)</a></li>
22705
22706  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
22707
22708  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (41)</a></li>
22709
22710  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
22711
22712  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (4)</a></li>
22713
22714  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (46)</a></li>
22715
22716  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (3)</a></li>
22717
22718  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (9)</a></li>
22719
22720  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (30)</a></li>
22721
22722  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (2)</a></li>
22723
22724  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
22725
22726  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (8)</a></li>
22727
22728  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (50)</a></li>
22729
22730  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
22731
22732  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (35)</a></li>
22733
22734 </ul>
22735
22736
22737     </div>
22738     <p style="text-align: right">
22739  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
22740 </p>
22741
22742   </body>
22743 </html>