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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/Facebooks_ability_to_sell_your_personal_information_is_the_real_Cambridge_Analytica_scandal.html">Facebooks ability to sell your personal information is the real Cambridge Analytica scandal</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28         21st March 2018
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>So, Cambridge Analytica is getting some well deserved criticism for
  32 (mis)using information it got from Facebook about 50 million people,
  33 mostly in the USA.  What I find a bit surprising, is how little
  34 criticism Facebook is getting for handing the information over to
  35 Cambridge Analytica and others in the first place.  And what about the
  36 people handing their private and personal information to Facebook?
  37 And last, but not least, what about the government offices who are
  38 handing information about the visitors of their web pages to Facebook?
  39 No-one who looked at the terms of use of Facebook should be surprised
  40 that information about peoples interests, political views, personal
  41 lifes and whereabouts would be sold by Facebook.</p>
  42
  43 <p>What I find to be the real scandal is the fact that Facebook is
  44 selling your personal information, not that one of the buyers used it
  45 in a way Facebook did not approve when exposed.  It is well known that
  46 Facebook is selling out their users privacy, but a scandal
  47 nevertheless.  Of course the information provided to them by Facebook
  48 would be misused by one of the parties given access to personal
  49 information about the millions of Facebook users.  Collected
  50 information will be misused sooner or later.  The only way to avoid
  51 such misuse, is to not collect the information in the first place.  If
  52 you do not want Facebook to hand out information about yourself for
  53 the use and misuse of its customers, do not give Facebook the
  54 information.</p>
  55
  56 <p>Personally, I would recommend to completely remove your Facebook
  57 account, and take back some control of your personal information.
  58 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/19/how-to-protect-your-facebook-privacy-or-delete-yourself-completely">According
  59 to The Guardian</a>, it is a bit hard to find out how to request
  60 account removal (and not just 'disabling').  You need to
  61 <a href="https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674?helpref=faq_content">visit
  62 a specific Facebook page</a> and click on 'let us know' on that page
  63 to get to <a href="https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account">the
  64 real account deletion screen</a>.  Perhaps something to consider?  I
  65 would not trust the information to really be deleted (who knows,
  66 perhaps NSA, GCHQ and FRA already got a copy), but it might reduce the
  67 exposure a bit.</p>
  68
  69 <p>If you want to learn more about the capabilities of Cambridge
  70 Analytica, I recommend to see the video recording of the one hour talk
  71 Paul-Olivier Dehaye gave to <a href="">NUUG</a> last april about
  72 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20170404-big-data-psychometric/">
  73 Data collection, psychometric profiling and their impact on
  74 politics</a>.</p>
  75
  76 <p>And if you want to communicate with your friends and loved ones,
  77 use some end-to-end encrypted method like
  78 <a href="https://www.signal.org/">Signal</a> or
  79 <a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a>, and stop sharing your private
  80 messages with strangers like Facebook and Google.</p>
  81
  82       </div>
  83       <div class="tags">
  84
  85
  86         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>.
  87
  88
  89       </div>
  90     </div>
  91     <div class="padding"></div>
  92
  93     <div class="entry">
  94       <div class="title">
  95         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_rough_draft_Norwegian_and_Spanish_edition_of_the_book_Made_with_Creative_Commons.html">First rough draft Norwegian and Spanish edition of the book Made with Creative Commons</a>
  96       </div>
  97       <div class="date">
  98         13th March 2018
  99       </div>
 100       <div class="body">
 101         <p>I am working on publishing yet another book related to Creative
 102 Commons.  This time it is a book filled with interviews and histories
 103 from those around the globe making a living using Creative
 104 Commons.</p>
 105
 106 <p>Yesterday, after many months of hard work by several volunteer
 107 translators, the first draft of a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the book
 108 <a href="https://madewith.cc">Made with Creative Commons from 2017</a>
 109 was complete.  The Spanish translation is also complete, while the
 110 Dutch, Polish, German and Ukraine edition need a lot of work.  Get in
 111 touch if you want to help make those happen, or would like to
 112 translate into your mother tongue.</p>
 113
 114 <p>The whole book project started when
 115 <a href="http://gwolf.org/node/4102">Gunnar Wolf announced</a> that he
 116 was going to make a Spanish edition of the book.  I noticed, and
 117 offered some input on how to make a book, based on my experience with
 118 translating the
 119 <a href="https://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Free
 120 Culture</a> and
 121 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian">The Debian
 122 Administrator's Handbook</a> books to Norwegian Bokmål.  To make a
 123 long story short, we ended up working on a Bokmål edition, and now the
 124 first rough translation is complete, thanks to the hard work of
 125 Ole-Erik Yrvin, Ingrid Yrvin, Allan Nordhøy and myself.  The first
 126 proof reading is almost done, and only the second and third proof
 127 reading remains.  We will also need to translate the 14 figures and
 128 create a book cover.  Once it is done we will publish the book on
 129 paper, as well as in PDF, ePub and possibly Mobi formats.</p>
 130
 131 <p>The book itself originates as a manuscript on Google Docs, is
 132 downloaded as ODT from there and converted to Markdown using pandoc.
 133 The Markdown is modified by a script before is converted to DocBook
 134 using pandoc.  The DocBook is modified again using a script before it
 135 is used to create a Gettext POT file for translators.  The translated
 136 PO file is then combined with the earlier mentioned DocBook file to
 137 create a translated DocBook file, which finally is given to dblatex to
 138 create the final PDF.  The end result is a set of editions of the
 139 manuscript, one English and one for each of the translations.</p>
 140
 141 <p>The translation is conducted using
 142 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/madewithcc/translation/">the
 143 Weblate web based translation system</a>.  Please have a look there
 144 and get in touch if you would like to help out with proof
 145 reading. :)</p>
 146
 147 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 148 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 149 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 150
 151       </div>
 152       <div class="tags">
 153
 154
 155         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>.
 156
 157
 158       </div>
 159     </div>
 160     <div class="padding"></div>
 161
 162     <div class="entry">
 163       <div class="title">
 164         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_used_in_the_subway_info_screens_in_Oslo__Norway.html">Debian used in the subway info screens in Oslo, Norway</a>
 165       </div>
 166       <div class="date">
 167          2nd March 2018
 168       </div>
 169       <div class="body">
 170         <p>Today I was pleasantly surprised to discover my operating system of
 171 choice, Debian, was used in the info screens on the subway stations.
 172 While passing Nydalen subway station in Oslo, Norway, I discovered the
 173 info screen booting with some text scrolling.  I was not quick enough
 174 with my camera to be able to record a video of the scrolling boot
 175 screen, but I did get a photo from when the boot got stuck with a
 176 corrupt file system:
 177
 178 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2018-03-02-ruter-debian-lenny.jpeg"><img align="center" width="40%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2018-03-02-ruter-debian-lenny.jpeg" alt="[photo of subway info screen]"></a></p>
 179
 180 <p>While I am happy to see Debian used more places, some details of the
 181 content on the screen worries me.</p>
 182
 183 <p>The image show the version booting is 'Debian GNU/Linux lenny/sid',
 184 indicating that this is based on code taken from Debian Unstable/Sid
 185 after Debian Etch (version 4) was released 2007-04-08 and before
 186 Debian Lenny (version 5) was released 2009-02-14.  Since Lenny Debian
 187 has released version 6 (Squeeze) 2011-02-06, 7 (Wheezy) 2013-05-04, 8
 188 (Jessie) 2015-04-25 and 9 (Stretch) 2017-06-15, according to
 189 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history">a Debian
 190 version history on Wikpedia</a>.  This mean the system is running
 191 around 10 year old code, with no security fixes from the vendor for
 192 many years.</p>
 193
 194 <p>This is not the first time I discover the Oslo subway company,
 195 Ruter, running outdated software.  In 2012,
 196 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Er_billettautomatene_til_kollektivtrafikken_i_Oslo_uten_sikkerhetsoppdateringer_.html">I
 197 discovered the ticket vending machines were running Windows 2000</a>,
 198 and this was
 199 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Fortsatt_ingen_sikkerhetsoppdateringer_for_billettautomatene_til_kollektivtrafikken_i_Oslo_.html">still
 200 the case in 2016</a>.  Given the response from the responsible people
 201 in 2016, I would assume the machines are still running unpatched
 202 Windows 2000.  Thus, an unpatched Debian setup come as no surprise.</p>
 203
 204 <p>The photo is made available under the license terms
 205 <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">Creative Commons
 206 4.0 Attribution International (CC BY 4.0)</a>.</p>
 207
 208 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 209 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 210 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 211
 212       </div>
 213       <div class="tags">
 214
 215
 216         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter</a>.
 217
 218
 219       </div>
 220     </div>
 221     <div class="padding"></div>
 222
 223     <div class="entry">
 224       <div class="title">
 225         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_SysVinit_upstream_project_just_migrated_to_git.html">The SysVinit upstream project just migrated to git</a>
 226       </div>
 227       <div class="date">
 228         18th February 2018
 229       </div>
 230       <div class="body">
 231         <p>Surprising as it might sound, there are still computers using the
 232 traditional Sys V init system, and there probably will be until
 233 systemd start working on Hurd and FreeBSD.
 234 <a href="https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/sysvinit">The upstream
 235 project still exist</a>, though, and up until today, the upstream
 236 source was available from Savannah via subversion.  I am happy to
 237 report that this just changed.</p>
 238
 239 <p>The upstream source is now in Git, and consist of three
 240 repositories:</p>
 241
 242 <ul>
 243
 244 <li><a href="http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/sysvinit.git">sysvinit</a></li>
 245 <li><a href="http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/sysvinit/insserv.git">insserv</a></li>
 246 <li><a href="http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/sysvinit/startpar.git">startpar</a></li>
 247
 248 </ul>
 249
 250 <p>I do not really spend much time on the project these days, and I
 251 has mostly retired, but found it best to migrate the source to a good
 252 version control system to help those willing to move it forward.</p>
 253
 254 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 255 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 256 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 257
 258       </div>
 259       <div class="tags">
 260
 261
 262         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 263
 264
 265       </div>
 266     </div>
 267     <div class="padding"></div>
 268
 269     <div class="entry">
 270       <div class="title">
 271         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_VLC_to_stream_bittorrent_sources.html">Using VLC to stream bittorrent sources</a>
 272       </div>
 273       <div class="date">
 274         14th February 2018
 275       </div>
 276       <div class="body">
 277         <p>A few days ago, a new major version of
 278 <a href="https://www.videolan.org/">VLC</a> was announced, and I
 279 decided to check out if it now supported streaming over
 280 <a href="http://bittorrent.org/">bittorrent</a> and
 281 <a href="https://webtorrent.io">webtorrent</a>.  Bittorrent is one of
 282 the most efficient ways to distribute large files on the Internet, and
 283 Webtorrent is a variant of Bittorrent using
 284 <a href="https://webrtc.org">WebRTC</a> as its transport channel,
 285 allowing web pages to stream and share files using the same technique.
 286 The network protocols are similar but not identical, so a client
 287 supporting one of them can not talk to a client supporting the other.
 288 I was a bit surprised with what I discovered when I started to look.
 289 Looking at
 290 <a href="https://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/3.0.0.html">the release
 291 notes</a> did not help answering this question, so I started searching
 292 the web.  I found several news articles from 2013, most of them
 293 tracing the news from Torrentfreak
 294 ("<a href=https://torrentfreak.com/open-source-giant-vlc-mulls-bittorrent-support-130211/">Open
 295 Source Giant VLC Mulls BitTorrent Streaming Support</a>"), about a
 296 initiative to pay someone to create a VLC patch for bittorrent
 297 support.  To figure out what happend with this initiative, I headed
 298 over to the #videolan IRC channel and asked if there were some bug or
 299 feature request tickets tracking such feature.  I got an answer from
 300 lead developer Jean-Babtiste Kempf, telling me that there was a patch
 301 but neither he nor anyone else knew where it was.  So I searched a bit
 302 more, and came across an independent
 303 <a href="https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent">VLC plugin to add
 304 bittorrent support</a>, created by Johan Gunnarsson in 2016/2017.
 305 Again according to Jean-Babtiste, this is not the patch he was talking
 306 about.</p>
 307
 308 <p>Anyway, to test the plugin, I made a working Debian package from
 309 the git repository, with some modifications.  After installing this
 310 package, I could stream videos from
 311 <a href="https://www.archive.org/">The Internet Archive</a> using VLC
 312 commands like this:</p>
 313
 314 <p><blockquote><pre>
 315 vlc https://archive.org/download/LoveNest/LoveNest_archive.torrent
 316 </pre></blockquote></p>
 317
 318 <p>The plugin is supposed to handle magnet links too, but since The
 319 Internet Archive do not have magnet links and I did not want to spend
 320 time tracking down another source, I have not tested it.  It can take
 321 quite a while before the video start playing without any indication of
 322 what is going on from VLC.  It took 10-20 seconds when I measured it.
 323 Some times the plugin seem unable to find the correct video file to
 324 play, and show the metadata XML file name in the VLC status line.  I
 325 have no idea why.</p>
 326
 327 <p>I have created a <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/890360">request for
 328 a new package in Debian (RFP)</a> and
 329 <a href="https://github.com/johang/vlc-bittorrent/issues/1">asked if
 330 the upstream author is willing to help make this happen</a>.  Now we
 331 wait to see what come out of this.  I do not want to maintain a
 332 package that is not maintained upstream, nor do I really have time to
 333 maintain more packages myself, so I might leave it at this.  But I
 334 really hope someone step up to do the packaging, and hope upstream is
 335 still maintaining the source.  If you want to help, please update the
 336 RFP request or the upstream issue.</p>
 337
 338 <p>I have not found any traces of webtorrent support for VLC.</p>
 339
 340 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 341 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 342 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 343
 344       </div>
 345       <div class="tags">
 346
 347
 348         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
 349
 350
 351       </div>
 352     </div>
 353     <div class="padding"></div>
 354
 355     <div class="entry">
 356       <div class="title">
 357         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Version_3_1_of_Cura__the_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian.html">Version 3.1 of Cura, the 3D print slicer, is now in Debian</a>
 358       </div>
 359       <div class="date">
 360         13th February 2018
 361       </div>
 362       <div class="body">
 363         <p>A new version of the
 364 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">3D printer slicer
 365 software Cura</a>, version 3.1.0, is now available in Debian Testing
 366 (aka Buster) and Debian Unstable (aka Sid).  I hope you find it
 367 useful.  It was uploaded the last few days, and the last update will
 368 enter testing tomorrow.  See the
 369 <a href="https://ultimaker.com/en/products/cura-software/release-notes">release
 370 notes</a> for the list of bug fixes and new features.  Version 3.2
 371 was announced 6 days ago.  We will try to get it into Debian as
 372 well.</p>
 373
 374 <p>More information related to 3D printing is available on the
 375 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3DPrinting">3D printing</a> and
 376 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/3D-printer">3D printer</a> wiki pages
 377 in Debian.</p>
 378
 379 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 380 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 381 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 382
 383       </div>
 384       <div class="tags">
 385
 386
 387         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>.
 388
 389
 390       </div>
 391     </div>
 392     <div class="padding"></div>
 393
 394     <div class="entry">
 395       <div class="title">
 396         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_hard_can______and___be_.html">How hard can æ, ø and å be?</a>
 397       </div>
 398       <div class="date">
 399         11th February 2018
 400       </div>
 401       <div class="body">
 402         <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2018-02-11-peppes-unicode.jpeg" align="right"/>
 403
 404 <p>We write 2018, and it is 30 years since Unicode was introduced.
 405 Most of us in Norway have come to expect the use of our alphabet to
 406 just work with any computer system.  But it is apparently beyond reach
 407 of the computers printing recites at a restaurant.  Recently I visited
 408 a Peppes pizza resturant, and noticed a few details on the recite.
 409 Notice how 'ø' and 'å' are replaced with strange symbols in
 410 'Servitør', 'Å BETALE', 'Beløp pr. gjest', 'Takk for besøket.' and 'Vi
 411 gleder oss til å se deg igjen'.</p>
 412
 413 <p>I would say that this state is passed sad and over in embarrassing.</p>
 414
 415 <p>I removed personal and private information to be nice.</p>
 416
 417 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 418 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 419 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 420
 421       </div>
 422       <div class="tags">
 423
 424
 425         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
 426
 427
 428       </div>
 429     </div>
 430     <div class="padding"></div>
 431
 432     <div class="entry">
 433       <div class="title">
 434         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Legal_to_share_more_than_11_000_movies_listed_on_IMDB_.html">Legal to share more than 11,000 movies listed on IMDB?</a>
 435       </div>
 436       <div class="date">
 437          7th January 2018
 438       </div>
 439       <div class="body">
 440         <p>I've continued to track down list of movies that are legal to
 441 distribute on the Internet, and identified more than 11,000 title IDs
 442 in The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) so far.  Most of them (57%) are
 443 feature films from USA published before 1923.  I've also tracked down
 444 more than 24,000 movies I have not yet been able to map to IMDB title
 445 ID, so the real number could be a lot higher.  According to the front
 446 web page for <a href="https://retrofilmvault.com/">Retro Film
 447 Vault</A>, there are 44,000 public domain films, so I guess there are
 448 still some left to identify.</p>
 449
 450 <p>The complete data set is available from
 451 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb">a
 452 public git repository</a>, including the scripts used to create it.
 453 Most of the data is collected using web scraping, for example from the
 454 "product catalog" of companies selling copies of public domain movies,
 455 but any source I find believable is used.  I've so far had to throw
 456 out three sources because I did not trust the public domain status of
 457 the movies listed.</p>
 458
 459 <p>Anyway, this is the summary of the 28 collected data sources so
 460 far:</p>
 461
 462 <p><pre>
 463  2352 entries (   66 unique) with and 15983 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-search.json
 464  2302 entries (  120 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json
 465   195 entries (   63 unique) with and   200 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-cinemovies.json
 466    89 entries (   52 unique) with and    38 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-creative-commons.json
 467   344 entries (   28 unique) with and   655 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-fesfilm.json
 468   668 entries (  209 unique) with and  1064 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-filmchest-com.json
 469   830 entries (   21 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-icheckmovies-archive-mochard.json
 470    19 entries (   19 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-c-expired-gb.json
 471  6822 entries ( 6669 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-c-expired-us.json
 472   137 entries (    0 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-externlist.json
 473  1205 entries (   57 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-pd.json
 474    84 entries (   20 unique) with and   167 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-infodigi-pd.json
 475   158 entries (  135 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-looney-tunes.json
 476   113 entries (    4 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-pd.json
 477   182 entries (  100 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-silent.json
 478   229 entries (   87 unique) with and     1 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-manual.json
 479    44 entries (    2 unique) with and    64 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-openflix.json
 480   291 entries (   33 unique) with and   474 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-profilms-pd.json
 481   211 entries (    7 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies-info.json
 482  1232 entries (   57 unique) with and  1875 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies-net.json
 483    46 entries (   13 unique) with and    81 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainreview.json
 484   698 entries (   64 unique) with and   118 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomaintorrents.json
 485  1758 entries (  882 unique) with and  3786 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-retrofilmvault.json
 486    16 entries (    0 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-thehillproductions.json
 487    63 entries (   16 unique) with and   141 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-vodo.json
 488 11583 unique IMDB title IDs in total, 8724 only in one list, 24647 without IMDB title ID
 489 </pre></p>
 490
 491 <p> I keep finding more data sources.  I found the cinemovies source
 492 just a few days ago, and as you can see from the summary, it extended
 493 my list with 63 movies.  Check out the mklist-* scripts in the git
 494 repository if you are curious how the lists are created.  Many of the
 495 titles are extracted using searches on IMDB, where I look for the
 496 title and year, and accept search results with only one movie listed
 497 if the year matches.  This allow me to automatically use many lists of
 498 movies without IMDB title ID references at the cost of increasing the
 499 risk of wrongly identify a IMDB title ID as public domain.  So far my
 500 random manual checks have indicated that the method is solid, but I
 501 really wish all lists of public domain movies would include unique
 502 movie identifier like the IMDB title ID.  It would make the job of
 503 counting movies in the public domain a lot easier.</p>
 504
 505 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 506 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 507 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 508
 509       </div>
 510       <div class="tags">
 511
 512
 513         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/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>.
 514
 515
 516       </div>
 517     </div>
 518     <div class="padding"></div>
 519
 520     <div class="entry">
 521       <div class="title">
 522         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Cura__the_nice_3D_print_slicer__is_now_in_Debian_Unstable.html">Cura, the nice 3D print slicer, is now in Debian Unstable</a>
 523       </div>
 524       <div class="date">
 525         17th December 2017
 526       </div>
 527       <div class="body">
 528         <p>After several months of working and waiting, I am happy to report
 529 that the nice and user friendly 3D printer slicer software Cura just
 530 entered Debian Unstable.  It consist of five packages,
 531 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura">cura</a>,
 532 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cura-engine">cura-engine</a>,
 533 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libarcus">libarcus</a>,
 534 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fdm-materials">fdm-materials</a>,
 535 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libsavitar">libsavitar</a> and
 536 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/uranium">uranium</a>.  The last
 537 two, uranium and cura, entered Unstable yesterday.  This should make
 538 it easier for Debian users to print on at least the Ultimaker class of
 539 3D printers.  My nearest 3D printer is an Ultimaker 2+, so it will
 540 make life easier for at least me. :)</p>
 541
 542 <p>The work to make this happen was done by Gregor Riepl, and I was
 543 happy to assist him in sponsoring the packages.  With the introduction
 544 of Cura, Debian is up to three 3D printer slicers at your service,
 545 Cura, Slic3r and Slic3r Prusa.  If you own or have access to a 3D
 546 printer, give it a go. :)</p>
 547
 548 <p>The 3D printer software is maintained by the 3D printer Debian
 549 team, flocking together on the
 550 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/3dprinter-general">3dprinter-general</a>
 551 mailing list and the
 552 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-3dprinting">#debian-3dprinting</a>
 553 IRC channel.</p>
 554
 555 <p>The next step for Cura in Debian is to update the cura package to
 556 version 3.0.3 and then update the entire set of packages to version
 557 3.1.0 which showed up the last few days.</p>
 558
 559       </div>
 560       <div class="tags">
 561
 562
 563         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>.
 564
 565
 566       </div>
 567     </div>
 568     <div class="padding"></div>
 569
 570     <div class="entry">
 571       <div class="title">
 572         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_finding_all_public_domain_movies_in_the_USA.html">Idea for finding all public domain movies in the USA</a>
 573       </div>
 574       <div class="date">
 575         13th December 2017
 576       </div>
 577       <div class="body">
 578         <p>While looking at
 579 <a href="http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/">the scanned copies
 580 for the copyright renewal entries for movies published in the USA</a>,
 581 an idea occurred to me.  The number of renewals are so few per year, it
 582 should be fairly quick to transcribe them all and add references to
 583 the corresponding IMDB title ID.  This would give the (presumably)
 584 complete list of movies published 28 years earlier that did _not_
 585 enter the public domain for the transcribed year.  By fetching the
 586 list of USA movies published 28 years earlier and subtract the movies
 587 with renewals, we should be left with movies registered in IMDB that
 588 are now in the public domain.  For the year 1955 (which is the one I
 589 have looked at the most), the total number of pages to transcribe is
 590 21.  For the 28 years from 1950 to 1978, it should be in the range
 591 500-600 pages.  It is just a few days of work, and spread among a
 592 small group of people it should be doable in a few weeks of spare
 593 time.</p>
 594
 595 <p>A typical copyright renewal entry look like this (the first one
 596 listed for 1955):</p>
 597
 598 <p><blockquote>
 599   ADAM AND EVIL, a photoplay in seven reels by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
 600   Distribution Corp. (c) 17Aug27; L24293. Loew's Incorporated (PWH);
 601   10Jun55; R151558.
 602 </blockquote></p>
 603
 604 <p>The movie title as well as registration and renewal dates are easy
 605 enough to locate by a program (split on first comma and look for
 606 DDmmmYY).  The rest of the text is not required to find the movie in
 607 IMDB, but is useful to confirm the correct movie is found.  I am not
 608 quite sure what the L and R numbers mean, but suspect they are
 609 reference numbers into the archive of the US Copyright Office.</p>
 610
 611 <p>Tracking down the equivalent IMDB title ID is probably going to be
 612 a manual task, but given the year it is fairly easy to search for the
 613 movie title using for example
 614 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/find?q=adam+and+evil+1927&s=all">http://www.imdb.com/find?q=adam+and+evil+1927&s=all</a>.
 615 Using this search, I find that the equivalent IMDB title ID for the
 616 first renewal entry from 1955 is
 617 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017588/">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017588/</a>.</p>
 618
 619 <p>I suspect the best way to do this would be to make a specialised
 620 web service to make it easy for contributors to transcribe and track
 621 down IMDB title IDs.  In the web service, once a entry is transcribed,
 622 the title and year could be extracted from the text, a search in IMDB
 623 conducted for the user to pick the equivalent IMDB title ID right
 624 away.  By spreading out the work among volunteers, it would also be
 625 possible to make at least two persons transcribe the same entries to
 626 be able to discover any typos introduced.  But I will need help to
 627 make this happen, as I lack the spare time to do all of this on my
 628 own.  If you would like to help, please get in touch.  Perhaps you can
 629 draft a web service for crowd sourcing the task?</p>
 630
 631 <p>Note, Project Gutenberg already have some
 632 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=copyright+office+renewals">transcribed
 633 copies of the US Copyright Office renewal protocols</a>, but I have
 634 not been able to find any film renewals there, so I suspect they only
 635 have copies of renewal for written works.  I have not been able to find
 636 any transcribed versions of movie renewals so far.  Perhaps they exist
 637 somewhere?</p>
 638
 639 <p>I would love to figure out methods for finding all the public
 640 domain works in other countries too, but it is a lot harder.  At least
 641 for Norway and Great Britain, such work involve tracking down the
 642 people involved in making the movie and figuring out when they died.
 643 It is hard enough to figure out who was part of making a movie, but I
 644 do not know how to automate such procedure without a registry of every
 645 person involved in making movies and their death year.</p>
 646
 647 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 648 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 649 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 650
 651       </div>
 652       <div class="tags">
 653
 654
 655         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/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>.
 656
 657
 658       </div>
 659     </div>
 660     <div class="padding"></div>
 661
 662     <div class="entry">
 663       <div class="title">
 664         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_the_short_movie__Empty_Socks__from_1927_in_the_public_domain_or_not_.html">Is the short movie «Empty Socks» from 1927 in the public domain or not?</a>
 665       </div>
 666       <div class="date">
 667          5th December 2017
 668       </div>
 669       <div class="body">
 670         <p>Three years ago, a presumed lost animation film,
 671 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_Socks">Empty Socks from
 672 1927</a>, was discovered in the Norwegian National Library.  At the
 673 time it was discovered, it was generally assumed to be copyrighted by
 674 The Walt Disney Company, and I blogged about
 675 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Opphavsretts_status_for__Empty_Socks__fra_1927_.html">my
 676 reasoning to conclude</a> that it would would enter the Norwegian
 677 equivalent of the public domain in 2053, based on my understanding of
 678 Norwegian Copyright Law.  But a few days ago, I came across
 679 <a href="http://www.toonzone.net/forums/threads/exposed-disneys-repurchase-of-oswald-the-rabbit-a-sham.4792291/">a
 680 blog post claiming the movie was already in the public domain</a>, at
 681 least in USA.  The reasoning is as follows: The film was released in
 682 November or Desember 1927 (sources disagree), and presumably
 683 registered its copyright that year.  At that time, right holders of
 684 movies registered by the copyright office received government
 685 protection for there work for 28 years.  After 28 years, the copyright
 686 had to be renewed if the wanted the government to protect it further.
 687 The blog post I found claim such renewal did not happen for this
 688 movie, and thus it entered the public domain in 1956.  Yet someone
 689 claim the copyright was renewed and the movie is still copyright
 690 protected.  Can anyone help me to figure out which claim is correct?
 691 I have not been able to find Empty Socks in Catalog of copyright
 692 entries.  Ser.3 pt.12-13 v.9-12 1955-1958 Motion Pictures
 693 <a href="http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/1955r.html#film">available
 694 from the University of Pennsylvania</a>, neither in
 695 <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015084451130;page=root;view=image;size=100;seq=83;num=45">page
 696 45 for the first half of 1955</a>, nor in
 697 <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015084451130;page=root;view=image;size=100;seq=175;num=119">page
 698 119 for the second half of 1955</a>.  It is of course possible that
 699 the renewal entry was left out of the printed catalog by mistake.  Is
 700 there some way to rule out this possibility?  Please help, and update
 701 the wikipedia page with your findings.
 702
 703 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 704 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 705 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 706
 707       </div>
 708       <div class="tags">
 709
 710
 711         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
 712
 713
 714       </div>
 715     </div>
 716     <div class="padding"></div>
 717
 718     <div class="entry">
 719       <div class="title">
 720         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Metadata_proposal_for_movies_on_the_Internet_Archive.html">Metadata proposal for movies on the Internet Archive</a>
 721       </div>
 722       <div class="date">
 723         28th November 2017
 724       </div>
 725       <div class="body">
 726         <p>It would be easier to locate the movie you want to watch in
 727 <a href="https://www.archive.org/">the Internet Archive</a>, if the
 728 metadata about each movie was more complete and accurate.  In the
 729 archiving community, a well known saying state that good metadata is a
 730 love letter to the future.  The metadata in the Internet Archive could
 731 use a face lift for the future to love us back.  Here is a proposal
 732 for a small improvement that would make the metadata more useful
 733 today.  I've been unable to find any document describing the various
 734 standard fields available when uploading videos to the archive, so
 735 this proposal is based on my best quess and searching through several
 736 of the existing movies.</p>
 737
 738 <p>I have a few use cases in mind.  First of all, I would like to be
 739 able to count the number of distinct movies in the Internet Archive,
 740 without duplicates.  I would further like to identify the IMDB title
 741 ID of the movies in the Internet Archive, to be able to look up a IMDB
 742 title ID and know if I can fetch the video from there and share it
 743 with my friends.</p>
 744
 745 <p>Second, I would like the Butter data provider for The Internet
 746 archive
 747 (<a href="https://github.com/butterproviders/butter-provider-archive">available
 748 from github</a>), to list as many of the good movies as possible.  The
 749 plugin currently do a search in the archive with the following
 750 parameters:</p>
 751
 752 <p><pre>
 753 collection:moviesandfilms
 754 AND NOT collection:movie_trailers
 755 AND -mediatype:collection
 756 AND format:"Archive BitTorrent"
 757 AND year
 758 </pre></p>
 759
 760 <p>Most of the cool movies that fail to show up in Butter do so
 761 because the 'year' field is missing.  The 'year' field is populated by
 762 the year part from the 'date' field, and should be when the movie was
 763 released (date or year).  Two such examples are
 764 <a href="https://archive.org/details/SidneyOlcottsBen-hur1905">Ben Hur
 765 from 1905</a> and
 766 <a href="https://archive.org/details/Caminandes2GranDillama">Caminandes
 767 2: Gran Dillama from 2013</a>, where the year metadata field is
 768 missing.</p>
 769
 770 So, my proposal is simply, for every movie in The Internet Archive
 771 where an IMDB title ID exist, please fill in these metadata fields
 772 (note, they can be updated also long after the video was uploaded, but
 773 as far as I can tell, only by the uploader):
 774
 775 <dl>
 776
 777 <dt>mediatype</dt>
 778 <dd>Should be 'movie' for movies.</dd>
 779
 780 <dt>collection</dt>
 781 <dd>Should contain 'moviesandfilms'.</dd>
 782
 783 <dt>title</dt>
 784 <dd>The title of the movie, without the publication year.</dd>
 785
 786 <dt>date</dt>
 787 <dd>The data or year the movie was released.  This make the movie show
 788 up in Butter, as well as make it possible to know the age of the
 789 movie and is useful to figure out copyright status.</dd>
 790
 791 <dt>director</dt>
 792 <dd>The director of the movie.  This make it easier to know if the
 793 correct movie is found in movie databases.</dd>
 794
 795 <dt>publisher</dt>
 796 <dd>The production company making the movie.  Also useful for
 797 identifying the correct movie.</dd>
 798
 799 <dt>links</dt>
 800
 801 <dd>Add a link to the IMDB title page, for example like this: &lt;a
 802 href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028496/"&gt;Movie in
 803 IMDB&lt;/a&gt;.  This make it easier to find duplicates and allow for
 804 counting of number of unique movies in the Archive.  Other external
 805 references, like to TMDB, could be added like this too.</dd>
 806
 807 </dl>
 808
 809 <p>I did consider proposing a Custom field for the IMDB title ID (for
 810 example 'imdb_title_url', 'imdb_code' or simply 'imdb', but suspect it
 811 will be easier to simply place it in the links free text field.</p>
 812
 813 <p>I created
 814 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb">a
 815 list of IMDB title IDs for several thousand movies in the Internet
 816 Archive</a>, but I also got a list of several thousand movies without
 817 such IMDB title ID (and quite a few duplicates).  It would be great if
 818 this data set could be integrated into the Internet Archive metadata
 819 to be available for everyone in the future, but with the current
 820 policy of leaving metadata editing to the uploaders, it will take a
 821 while before this happen.  If you have uploaded movies into the
 822 Internet Archive, you can help.  Please consider following my proposal
 823 above for your movies, to ensure that movie is properly
 824 counted. :)</p>
 825
 826 <p>The list is mostly generated using wikidata, which based on
 827 Wikipedia articles make it possible to link between IMDB and movies in
 828 the Internet Archive.  But there are lots of movies without a
 829 Wikipedia article, and some movies where only a collection page exist
 830 (like for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caminandes">the
 831 Caminandes example above</a>, where there are three movies but only
 832 one Wikidata entry).</p>
 833
 834 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 835 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 836 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 837
 838       </div>
 839       <div class="tags">
 840
 841
 842         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/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>.
 843
 844
 845       </div>
 846     </div>
 847     <div class="padding"></div>
 848
 849     <div class="entry">
 850       <div class="title">
 851         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Legal_to_share_more_than_3000_movies_listed_on_IMDB_.html">Legal to share more than 3000 movies listed on IMDB?</a>
 852       </div>
 853       <div class="date">
 854         18th November 2017
 855       </div>
 856       <div class="body">
 857         <p>A month ago, I blogged about my work to
 858 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Locating_IMDB_IDs_of_movies_in_the_Internet_Archive_using_Wikidata.html">automatically
 859 check the copyright status of IMDB entries</a>, and try to count the
 860 number of movies listed in IMDB that is legal to distribute on the
 861 Internet.  I have continued to look for good data sources, and
 862 identified a few more.  The code used to extract information from
 863 various data sources is available in
 864 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/public-domain-free-imdb">a
 865 git repository</a>, currently available from github.</p>
 866
 867 <p>So far I have identified 3186 unique IMDB title IDs.  To gain
 868 better understanding of the structure of the data set, I created a
 869 histogram of the year associated with each movie (typically release
 870 year).  It is interesting to notice where the peaks and dips in the
 871 graph are located.  I wonder why they are placed there.  I suspect
 872 World War II caused the dip around 1940, but what caused the peak
 873 around 2010?</p>
 874
 875 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-11-18-verk-i-det-fri-filmer.png" /></p>
 876
 877 <p>I've so far identified ten sources for IMDB title IDs for movies in
 878 the public domain or with a free license.  This is the statistics
 879 reported when running 'make stats' in the git repository:</p>
 880
 881 <pre>
 882   249 entries (    6 unique) with and   288 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-butter.json
 883  2301 entries (  540 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json
 884   830 entries (   29 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-icheckmovies-archive-mochard.json
 885  2109 entries (  377 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-pd.json
 886   291 entries (  122 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-pd.json
 887   144 entries (  135 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-manual.json
 888   350 entries (    1 unique) with and   801 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies.json
 889     4 entries (    0 unique) with and   124 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainreview.json
 890   698 entries (  119 unique) with and   118 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomaintorrents.json
 891     8 entries (    8 unique) with and   196 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-vodo.json
 892  3186 unique IMDB title IDs in total
 893 </pre>
 894
 895 <p>The entries without IMDB title ID are candidates to increase the
 896 data set, but might equally well be duplicates of entries already
 897 listed with IMDB title ID in one of the other sources, or represent
 898 movies that lack a IMDB title ID.  I've seen examples of all these
 899 situations when peeking at the entries without IMDB title ID.  Based
 900 on these data sources, the lower bound for movies listed in IMDB that
 901 are legal to distribute on the Internet is between 3186 and 4713.
 902
 903 <p>It would be great for improving the accuracy of this measurement,
 904 if the various sources added IMDB title ID to their metadata.  I have
 905 tried to reach the people behind the various sources to ask if they
 906 are interested in doing this, without any replies so far.  Perhaps you
 907 can help me get in touch with the people behind VODO, Public Domain
 908 Torrents, Public Domain Movies and Public Domain Review to try to
 909 convince them to add more metadata to their movie entries?</p>
 910
 911 <p>Another way you could help is by adding pages to Wikipedia about
 912 movies that are legal to distribute on the Internet.  If such page
 913 exist and include a link to both IMDB and The Internet Archive, the
 914 script used to generate free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json should
 915 pick up the mapping as soon as wikidata is updates.</p>
 916
 917 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
 918 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
 919 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
 920
 921       </div>
 922       <div class="tags">
 923
 924
 925         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/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>.
 926
 927
 928       </div>
 929     </div>
 930     <div class="padding"></div>
 931
 932     <div class="entry">
 933       <div class="title">
 934         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_fault_tolerant_storage_systems.html">Some notes on fault tolerant storage systems</a>
 935       </div>
 936       <div class="date">
 937          1st November 2017
 938       </div>
 939       <div class="body">
 940         <p>If you care about how fault tolerant your storage is, you might
 941 find these articles and papers interesting.  They have formed how I
 942 think of when designing a storage system.</p>
 943
 944 <ul>
 945
 946 <li>USENIX :login; <a
 947 href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2017/ganesan">Redundancy
 948 Does Not Imply Fault Tolerance.  Analysis of Distributed Storage
 949 Reactions to Single Errors and Corruptions</a> by Aishwarya Ganesan,
 950 Ramnatthan Alagappan, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi
 951 H. Arpaci-Dusseau</li>
 952
 953 <li>ZDNet
 954 <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/">Why
 955 RAID 5 stops working in 2009</a> by Robin Harris</li>
 956
 957 <li>ZDNet
 958 <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-6-stops-working-in-2019/">Why
 959 RAID 6 stops working in 2019</a> by Robin Harris</li>
 960
 961 <li>USENIX FAST'07
 962 <a href="http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf">Failure
 963 Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population</a> by Eduardo Pinheiro,
 964 Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz André Barroso</li>
 965
 966 <li>USENIX ;login: <a
 967 href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/hughes12-04.pdf">Data
 968 Integrity.  Finding Truth in a World of Guesses and Lies</a> by Doug
 969 Hughes</li>
 970
 971 <li>USENIX FAST'08
 972 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/events/fast08/tech/full_papers/bairavasundaram/bairavasundaram_html/">An
 973 Analysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack</a> by
 974 L. N. Bairavasundaram, G. R. Goodson, B. Schroeder, A. C.
 975 Arpaci-Dusseau, and R. H. Arpaci-Dusseau</li>
 976
 977 <li>USENIX FAST'07 <a
 978 href="https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/">Disk
 979 failures in the real world: what does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean
 980 to you?</a> by B. Schroeder and G. A. Gibson.</li>
 981
 982 <li>USENIX ;login: <a
 983 href="https://www.usenix.org/events/fast08/tech/full_papers/jiang/jiang_html/">Are
 984 Disks the Dominant Contributor for Storage Failures?  A Comprehensive
 985 Study of Storage Subsystem Failure Characteristics</a> by Weihang
 986 Jiang, Chongfeng Hu, Yuanyuan Zhou, and Arkady Kanevsky</li>
 987
 988 <li>SIGMETRICS 2007
 989 <a href="http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/latent-sigmetrics07.pdf">An
 990 analysis of latent sector errors in disk drives</a> by
 991 L. N. Bairavasundaram, G. R. Goodson, S. Pasupathy, and J. Schindler</li>
 992
 993 </ul>
 994
 995 <p>Several of these research papers are based on data collected from
 996 hundred thousands or millions of disk, and their findings are eye
 997 opening.  The short story is simply do not implicitly trust RAID or
 998 redundant storage systems.  Details matter.  And unfortunately there
 999 are few options on Linux addressing all the identified issues.  Both
1000 ZFS and Btrfs are doing a fairly good job, but have legal and
1001 practical issues on their own.  I wonder how cluster file systems like
1002 Ceph do in this regard.  After all, there is an old saying, you know
1003 you have a distributed system when the crash of a computer you have
1004 never heard of stops you from getting any work done.  The same holds
1005 true if fault tolerance do not work.</p>
1006
1007 <p>Just remember, in the end, it do not matter how redundant, or how
1008 fault tolerant your storage is, if you do not continuously monitor its
1009 status to detect and replace failed disks.</p>
1010
1011 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1012 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1013 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1014
1015       </div>
1016       <div class="tags">
1017
1018
1019         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
1020
1021
1022       </div>
1023     </div>
1024     <div class="padding"></div>
1025
1026     <div class="entry">
1027       <div class="title">
1028         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Web_services_for_writing_academic_LaTeX_papers_as_a_team.html">Web services for writing academic LaTeX papers as a team</a>
1029       </div>
1030       <div class="date">
1031         31st October 2017
1032       </div>
1033       <div class="body">
1034         <p>I was surprised today to learn that a friend in academia did not
1035 know there are easily available web services available for writing
1036 LaTeX documents as a team.  I thought it was common knowledge, but to
1037 make sure at least my readers are aware of it, I would like to mention
1038 these useful services for writing LaTeX documents.  Some of them even
1039 provide a WYSIWYG editor to ease writing even further.</p>
1040
1041 <p>There are two commercial services available,
1042 <a href="https://sharelatex.com">ShareLaTeX</a> and
1043 <a href="https://overleaf.com">Overleaf</a>.  They are very easy to
1044 use.  Just start a new document, select which publisher to write for
1045 (ie which LaTeX style to use), and start writing.  Note, these two
1046 have announced their intention to join forces, so soon it will only be
1047 one joint service.  I've used both for different documents, and they
1048 work just fine.  While
1049 <a href="https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex">ShareLaTeX is free
1050 software</a>, while the latter is not.  According to <a
1051 href="https://www.overleaf.com/help/17-is-overleaf-open-source">a
1052 announcement from Overleaf</a>, they plan to keep the ShareLaTeX code
1053 base maintained as free software.</p>
1054
1055 But these two are not the only alternatives.
1056 <a href="https://app.fiduswriter.org/">Fidus Writer</a> is another free
1057 software solution with <a href="https://github.com/fiduswriter">the
1058 source available on github</a>.  I have not used it myself.  Several
1059 others can be found on the nice
1060 <a href="https://alternativeto.net/software/sharelatex/">alterntiveTo
1061 web service</a>.
1062
1063 <p>If you like Google Docs or Etherpad, but would like to write
1064 documents in LaTeX, you should check out these services.  You can even
1065 host your own, if you want to. :)</p>
1066
1067 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1068 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1069 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1070
1071       </div>
1072       <div class="tags">
1073
1074
1075         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1076
1077
1078       </div>
1079     </div>
1080     <div class="padding"></div>
1081
1082     <div class="entry">
1083       <div class="title">
1084         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Locating_IMDB_IDs_of_movies_in_the_Internet_Archive_using_Wikidata.html">Locating IMDB IDs of movies in the Internet Archive using Wikidata</a>
1085       </div>
1086       <div class="date">
1087         25th October 2017
1088       </div>
1089       <div class="body">
1090         <p>Recently, I needed to automatically check the copyright status of a
1091 set of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/">The Internet Movie database
1092 (IMDB)</a> entries, to figure out which one of the movies they refer
1093 to can be freely distributed on the Internet.  This proved to be
1094 harder than it sounds.  IMDB for sure list movies without any
1095 copyright protection, where the copyright protection has expired or
1096 where the movie is lisenced using a permissive license like one from
1097 Creative Commons.  These are mixed with copyright protected movies,
1098 and there seem to be no way to separate these classes of movies using
1099 the information in IMDB.</p>
1100
1101 <p>First I tried to look up entries manually in IMDB,
1102 <a href="https://www.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a> and
1103 <a href="https://www.archive.org/">The Internet Archive</a>, to get a
1104 feel how to do this.  It is hard to know for sure using these sources,
1105 but it should be possible to be reasonable confident a movie is "out
1106 of copyright" with a few hours work per movie.  As I needed to check
1107 almost 20,000 entries, this approach was not sustainable.  I simply
1108 can not work around the clock for about 6 years to check this data
1109 set.</p>
1110
1111 <p>I asked the people behind The Internet Archive if they could
1112 introduce a new metadata field in their metadata XML for IMDB ID, but
1113 was told that they leave it completely to the uploaders to update the
1114 metadata.  Some of the metadata entries had IMDB links in the
1115 description, but I found no way to download all metadata files in bulk
1116 to locate those ones and put that approach aside.</p>
1117
1118 <p>In the process I noticed several Wikipedia articles about movies
1119 had links to both IMDB and The Internet Archive, and it occured to me
1120 that I could use the Wikipedia RDF data set to locate entries with
1121 both, to at least get a lower bound on the number of movies on The
1122 Internet Archive with a IMDB ID.  This is useful based on the
1123 assumption that movies distributed by The Internet Archive can be
1124 legally distributed on the Internet.  With some help from the RDF
1125 community (thank you DanC), I was able to come up with this query to
1126 pass to <a href="https://query.wikidata.org/">the SPARQL interface on
1127 Wikidata</a>:
1128
1129 <p><pre>
1130 SELECT ?work ?imdb ?ia ?when ?label
1131 WHERE
1132 {
1133   ?work wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q11424.
1134   ?work wdt:P345 ?imdb.
1135   ?work wdt:P724 ?ia.
1136   OPTIONAL {
1137         ?work wdt:P577 ?when.
1138         ?work rdfs:label ?label.
1139         FILTER(LANG(?label) = "en").
1140   }
1141 }
1142 </pre></p>
1143
1144 <p>If I understand the query right, for every film entry anywhere in
1145 Wikpedia, it will return the IMDB ID and The Internet Archive ID, and
1146 when the movie was released and its English title, if either or both
1147 of the latter two are available.  At the moment the result set contain
1148 2338 entries.  Of course, it depend on volunteers including both
1149 correct IMDB and The Internet Archive IDs in the wikipedia articles
1150 for the movie.  It should be noted that the result will include
1151 duplicates if the movie have entries in several languages.  There are
1152 some bogus entries, either because The Internet Archive ID contain a
1153 typo or because the movie is not available from The Internet Archive.
1154 I did not verify the IMDB IDs, as I am unsure how to do that
1155 automatically.</p>
1156
1157 <p>I wrote a small python script to extract the data set from Wikidata
1158 and check if the XML metadata for the movie is available from The
1159 Internet Archive, and after around 1.5 hour it produced a list of 2097
1160 free movies and their IMDB ID.  In total, 171 entries in Wikidata lack
1161 the refered Internet Archive entry.  I assume the 70 "disappearing"
1162 entries (ie 2338-2097-171) are duplicate entries.</p>
1163
1164 <p>This is not too bad, given that The Internet Archive report to
1165 contain <a href="https://archive.org/details/feature_films">5331
1166 feature films</a> at the moment, but it also mean more than 3000
1167 movies are missing on Wikipedia or are missing the pair of references
1168 on Wikipedia.</p>
1169
1170 <p>I was curious about the distribution by release year, and made a
1171 little graph to show how the amount of free movies is spread over the
1172 years:<p>
1173
1174 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-10-25-verk-i-det-fri-filmer.png"></p>
1175
1176 <p>I expect the relative distribution of the remaining 3000 movies to
1177 be similar.</p>
1178
1179 <p>If you want to help, and want to ensure Wikipedia can be used to
1180 cross reference The Internet Archive and The Internet Movie Database,
1181 please make sure entries like this are listed under the "External
1182 links" heading on the Wikipedia article for the movie:</p>
1183
1184 <p><pre>
1185 * {{Internet Archive film|id=FightingLady}}
1186 * {{IMDb title|id=0036823|title=The Fighting Lady}}
1187 </pre></p>
1188
1189 <p>Please verify the links on the final page, to make sure you did not
1190 introduce a typo.</p>
1191
1192 <p>Here is the complete list, if you want to correct the 171
1193 identified Wikipedia entries with broken links to The Internet
1194 Archive: <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1140317">Q1140317</a>,
1195 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q458656">Q458656</a>,
1196 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q458656">Q458656</a>,
1197 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q470560">Q470560</a>,
1198 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q743340">Q743340</a>,
1199 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q822580">Q822580</a>,
1200 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q480696">Q480696</a>,
1201 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q128761">Q128761</a>,
1202 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1307059">Q1307059</a>,
1203 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1335091">Q1335091</a>,
1204 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1537166">Q1537166</a>,
1205 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1438334">Q1438334</a>,
1206 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1479751">Q1479751</a>,
1207 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1497200">Q1497200</a>,
1208 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1498122">Q1498122</a>,
1209 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q865973">Q865973</a>,
1210 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q834269">Q834269</a>,
1211 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q841781">Q841781</a>,
1212 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q841781">Q841781</a>,
1213 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1548193">Q1548193</a>,
1214 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q499031">Q499031</a>,
1215 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1564769">Q1564769</a>,
1216 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1585239">Q1585239</a>,
1217 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1585569">Q1585569</a>,
1218 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1624236">Q1624236</a>,
1219 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4796595">Q4796595</a>,
1220 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4853469">Q4853469</a>,
1221 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4873046">Q4873046</a>,
1222 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q915016">Q915016</a>,
1223 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4660396">Q4660396</a>,
1224 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4677708">Q4677708</a>,
1225 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4738449">Q4738449</a>,
1226 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4756096">Q4756096</a>,
1227 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4766785">Q4766785</a>,
1228 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q880357">Q880357</a>,
1229 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q882066">Q882066</a>,
1230 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q882066">Q882066</a>,
1231 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q204191">Q204191</a>,
1232 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q204191">Q204191</a>,
1233 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1194170">Q1194170</a>,
1234 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q940014">Q940014</a>,
1235 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q946863">Q946863</a>,
1236 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q172837">Q172837</a>,
1237 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q573077">Q573077</a>,
1238 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1219005">Q1219005</a>,
1239 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1219599">Q1219599</a>,
1240 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1643798">Q1643798</a>,
1241 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1656352">Q1656352</a>,
1242 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1659549">Q1659549</a>,
1243 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1660007">Q1660007</a>,
1244 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1698154">Q1698154</a>,
1245 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1737980">Q1737980</a>,
1246 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1877284">Q1877284</a>,
1247 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199354">Q1199354</a>,
1248 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199354">Q1199354</a>,
1249 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1199451">Q1199451</a>,
1250 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1211871">Q1211871</a>,
1251 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1212179">Q1212179</a>,
1252 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1238382">Q1238382</a>,
1253 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4906454">Q4906454</a>,
1254 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q320219">Q320219</a>,
1255 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1148649">Q1148649</a>,
1256 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q645094">Q645094</a>,
1257 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5050350">Q5050350</a>,
1258 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5166548">Q5166548</a>,
1259 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2677926">Q2677926</a>,
1260 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2698139">Q2698139</a>,
1261 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2707305">Q2707305</a>,
1262 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2740725">Q2740725</a>,
1263 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2024780">Q2024780</a>,
1264 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2117418">Q2117418</a>,
1265 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2138984">Q2138984</a>,
1266 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1127992">Q1127992</a>,
1267 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1058087">Q1058087</a>,
1268 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1070484">Q1070484</a>,
1269 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1080080">Q1080080</a>,
1270 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1090813">Q1090813</a>,
1271 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1251918">Q1251918</a>,
1272 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1254110">Q1254110</a>,
1273 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1257070">Q1257070</a>,
1274 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1257079">Q1257079</a>,
1275 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1197410">Q1197410</a>,
1276 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1198423">Q1198423</a>,
1277 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q706951">Q706951</a>,
1278 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q723239">Q723239</a>,
1279 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2079261">Q2079261</a>,
1280 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1171364">Q1171364</a>,
1281 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q617858">Q617858</a>,
1282 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5166611">Q5166611</a>,
1283 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5166611">Q5166611</a>,
1284 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q324513">Q324513</a>,
1285 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q374172">Q374172</a>,
1286 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7533269">Q7533269</a>,
1287 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q970386">Q970386</a>,
1288 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q976849">Q976849</a>,
1289 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7458614">Q7458614</a>,
1290 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5347416">Q5347416</a>,
1291 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5460005">Q5460005</a>,
1292 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5463392">Q5463392</a>,
1293 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3038555">Q3038555</a>,
1294 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5288458">Q5288458</a>,
1295 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2346516">Q2346516</a>,
1296 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5183645">Q5183645</a>,
1297 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5185497">Q5185497</a>,
1298 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5216127">Q5216127</a>,
1299 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5223127">Q5223127</a>,
1300 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5261159">Q5261159</a>,
1301 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1300759">Q1300759</a>,
1302 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5521241">Q5521241</a>,
1303 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7733434">Q7733434</a>,
1304 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7736264">Q7736264</a>,
1305 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7737032">Q7737032</a>,
1306 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7882671">Q7882671</a>,
1307 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7719427">Q7719427</a>,
1308 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7719444">Q7719444</a>,
1309 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7722575">Q7722575</a>,
1310 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2629763">Q2629763</a>,
1311 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2640346">Q2640346</a>,
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1320 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2511262">Q2511262</a>,
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1322 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2543165">Q2543165</a>,
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1324 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q426628">Q426628</a>,
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1329 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2294295">Q2294295</a>,
1330 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2559509">Q2559509</a>,
1331 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2559912">Q2559912</a>,
1332 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7760469">Q7760469</a>,
1333 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q6703974">Q6703974</a>,
1334 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q4744">Q4744</a>,
1335 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7766962">Q7766962</a>,
1336 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7768516">Q7768516</a>,
1337 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7769205">Q7769205</a>,
1338 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7769988">Q7769988</a>,
1339 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2946945">Q2946945</a>,
1340 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3212086">Q3212086</a>,
1341 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3212086">Q3212086</a>,
1342 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q18218448">Q18218448</a>,
1343 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q18218448">Q18218448</a>,
1344 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q18218448">Q18218448</a>,
1345 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q6909175">Q6909175</a>,
1346 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7405709">Q7405709</a>,
1347 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7416149">Q7416149</a>,
1348 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7239952">Q7239952</a>,
1349 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7317332">Q7317332</a>,
1350 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7783674">Q7783674</a>,
1351 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7783704">Q7783704</a>,
1352 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7857590">Q7857590</a>,
1353 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3372526">Q3372526</a>,
1354 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3372642">Q3372642</a>,
1355 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3372816">Q3372816</a>,
1356 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3372909">Q3372909</a>,
1357 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7959649">Q7959649</a>,
1358 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7977485">Q7977485</a>,
1359 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q7992684">Q7992684</a>,
1360 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3817966">Q3817966</a>,
1361 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3821852">Q3821852</a>,
1362 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3420907">Q3420907</a>,
1363 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q3429733">Q3429733</a>,
1364 <a href="http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q774474">Q774474</a></p>
1365
1366 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1367 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1368 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1369
1370       </div>
1371       <div class="tags">
1372
1373
1374         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/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>.
1375
1376
1377       </div>
1378     </div>
1379     <div class="padding"></div>
1380
1381     <div class="entry">
1382       <div class="title">
1383         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_one_way_wall_on_the_border_.html">A one-way wall on the border?</a>
1384       </div>
1385       <div class="date">
1386         14th October 2017
1387       </div>
1388       <div class="body">
1389         <p>I find it fascinating how many of the people being locked inside
1390 the proposed border wall between USA and Mexico support the idea.  The
1391 proposal to keep Mexicans out reminds me of
1392 <a href="http://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-berlin-wall">the
1393 propaganda twist from the East Germany government</a> calling the wall
1394 the “Antifascist Bulwark” after erecting the Berlin Wall, claiming
1395 that the wall was erected to keep enemies from creeping into East
1396 Germany, while it was obvious to the people locked inside it that it
1397 was erected to keep the people from escaping.</p>
1398
1399 <p>Do the people in USA supporting this wall really believe it is a
1400 one way wall, only keeping people on the outside from getting in,
1401 while not keeping people in the inside from getting out?</p>
1402
1403 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1404 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1405 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1406
1407       </div>
1408       <div class="tags">
1409
1410
1411         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1412
1413
1414       </div>
1415     </div>
1416     <div class="padding"></div>
1417
1418     <div class="entry">
1419       <div class="title">
1420         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Generating_3D_prints_in_Debian_using_Cura_and_Slic3r__prusa_.html">Generating 3D prints in Debian using Cura and Slic3r(-prusa)</a>
1421       </div>
1422       <div class="date">
1423          9th October 2017
1424       </div>
1425       <div class="body">
1426         <p>At my nearby maker space,
1427 <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Sonen</a>, I heard the story that it
1428 was easier to generate gcode files for theyr 3D printers (Ultimake 2+)
1429 on Windows and MacOS X than Linux, because the software involved had
1430 to be manually compiled and set up on Linux while premade packages
1431 worked out of the box on Windows and MacOS X.  I found this annoying,
1432 as the software involved,
1433 <a href="https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura">Cura</a>, is free software
1434 and should be trivial to get up and running on Linux if someone took
1435 the time to package it for the relevant distributions.  I even found
1436 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/706656">a request for adding into
1437 Debian</a> from 2013, which had seem some activity over the years but
1438 never resulted in the software showing up in Debian.  So a few days
1439 ago I offered my help to try to improve the situation.</p>
1440
1441 <p>Now I am very happy to see that all the packages required by a
1442 working Cura in Debian are uploaded into Debian and waiting in the NEW
1443 queue for the ftpmasters to have a look.  You can track the progress
1444 on
1445 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=3dprinter-general%40lists.alioth.debian.org">the
1446 status page for the 3D printer team</a>.</p>
1447
1448 <p>The uploaded packages are a bit behind upstream, and was uploaded
1449 now to get slots in <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW
1450 queue</a> while we work up updating the packages to the latest
1451 upstream version.</p>
1452
1453 <p>On a related note, two competitors for Cura, which I found harder
1454 to use and was unable to configure correctly for Ultimaker 2+ in the
1455 short time I spent on it, are already in Debian.  If you are looking
1456 for 3D printer "slicers" and want something already available in
1457 Debian, check out
1458 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r">slic3r</a> and
1459 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/slic3r-prusa">slic3r-prusa</a>.
1460 The latter is a fork of the former.</p>
1461
1462 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
1463 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
1464 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
1465
1466       </div>
1467       <div class="tags">
1468
1469
1470         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>.
1471
1472
1473       </div>
1474     </div>
1475     <div class="padding"></div>
1476
1477     <div class="entry">
1478       <div class="title">
1479         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Visualizing_GSM_radio_chatter_using_gr_gsm_and_Hopglass.html">Visualizing GSM radio chatter using gr-gsm and Hopglass</a>
1480       </div>
1481       <div class="date">
1482         29th September 2017
1483       </div>
1484       <div class="body">
1485         <p>Every mobile phone announce its existence over radio to the nearby
1486 mobile cell towers.  And this radio chatter is available for anyone
1487 with a radio receiver capable of receiving them.  Details about the
1488 mobile phones with very good accuracy is of course collected by the
1489 phone companies, but this is not the topic of this blog post.  The
1490 mobile phone radio chatter make it possible to figure out when a cell
1491 phone is nearby, as it include the SIM card ID (IMSI).  By paying
1492 attention over time, one can see when a phone arrive and when it leave
1493 an area.  I believe it would be nice to make this information more
1494 available to the general public, to make more people aware of how
1495 their phones are announcing their whereabouts to anyone that care to
1496 listen.</p>
1497
1498 <p>I am very happy to report that we managed to get something
1499 visualizing this information up and running for
1500 <a href="http://norwaymakers.org/osf17">Oslo Skaperfestival 2017</a>
1501 (Oslo Makers Festival) taking place today and tomorrow at Deichmanske
1502 library.  The solution is based on the
1503 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">simple
1504 recipe for listening to GSM chatter</a> I posted a few days ago, and
1505 will show up at the stand of <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Åpen
1506 Sone from the Computer Science department of the University of
1507 Oslo</a>.  The presentation will show the nearby mobile phones (aka
1508 IMSIs) as dots in a web browser graph, with lines to the dot
1509 representing mobile base station it is talking to. It was working in
1510 the lab yesterday, and was moved into place this morning.</p>
1511
1512 <p>We set up a fairly powerful desktop machine using Debian
1513 Buster/Testing with several (five, I believe) RTL2838 DVB-T receivers
1514 connected and visualize the visible cell phone towers using an
1515 <a href="https://github.com/marlow925/hopglass">English version of
1516 Hopglass</a>.  A fairly powerfull machine is needed as the
1517 grgsm_livemon_headless processes from
1518 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a> converting
1519 the radio signal to data packages is quite CPU intensive.</p>
1520
1521 <p>The frequencies to listen to, are identified using a slightly
1522 patched scan-and-livemon (to set the --args values for each receiver),
1523 and the Hopglass data is generated using the
1524 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/IMSI-catcher/tree/meshviewer-output">patches
1525 in my meshviewer-output branch</a>.  For some reason we could not get
1526 more than four SDRs working.  There is also a geographical map trying
1527 to show the location of the base stations, but I believe their
1528 coordinates are hardcoded to some random location in Germany, I
1529 believe.  The code should be replaced with code to look up location in
1530 a text file, a sqlite database or one of the online databases
1531 mentioned in
1532 <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher/issues/14">the github
1533 issue for the topic</a>.
1534
1535 <p>If this sound interesting, visit the stand at the festival!</p>
1536
1537       </div>
1538       <div class="tags">
1539
1540
1541         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
1542
1543
1544       </div>
1545     </div>
1546     <div class="padding"></div>
1547
1548     <div class="entry">
1549       <div class="title">
1550         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">Easier recipe to observe the cell phones around you</a>
1551       </div>
1552       <div class="date">
1553         24th September 2017
1554       </div>
1555       <div class="body">
1556         <p>A little more than a month ago I wrote
1557 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">how
1558 to observe the SIM card ID (aka IMSI number) of mobile phones talking
1559 to nearby mobile phone base stations using Debian GNU/Linux and a
1560 cheap USB software defined radio</a>, and thus being able to pinpoint
1561 the location of people and equipment (like cars and trains) with an
1562 accuracy of a few kilometer.  Since then we have worked to make the
1563 procedure even simpler, and it is now possible to do this without any
1564 manual frequency tuning and without building your own packages.</p>
1565
1566 <p>The <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a>
1567 package is now included in Debian testing and unstable, and the
1568 IMSI-catcher code no longer require root access to fetch and decode
1569 the GSM data collected using gr-gsm.</p>
1570
1571 <p>Here is an updated recipe, using packages built by Debian and a git
1572 clone of two python scripts:</p>
1573
1574 <ol>
1575
1576 <li>Start with a Debian machine running the Buster version (aka
1577   testing).</li>
1578
1579 <li>Run '<tt>apt install gr-gsm python-numpy python-scipy
1580   python-scapy</tt>' as root to install required packages.</li>
1581
1582 <li>Fetch the code decoding GSM packages using '<tt>git clone
1583   github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher.git</tt>'.</li>
1584
1585 <li>Insert USB software defined radio supported by GNU Radio.</li>
1586
1587 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
1588   scan-and-livemon</tt>' to locate the frequency of nearby base
1589   stations and start listening for GSM packages on one of them.</li>
1590
1591 <li>Enter the IMSI-catcher directory and run '<tt>python
1592   simple_IMSI-catcher.py</tt>' to display the collected information.</li>
1593
1594 </ol>
1595
1596 <p>Note, due to a bug somewhere the scan-and-livemon program (actually
1597 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/issues/336">its underlying
1598 program grgsm_scanner</a>) do not work with the HackRF radio.  It does
1599 work with RTL 8232 and other similar USB radio receivers you can get
1600 very cheaply
1601 (<a href="https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=rtl+2832">for example
1602 from ebay</a>), so for now the solution is to scan using the RTL radio
1603 and only use HackRF for fetching GSM data.</p>
1604
1605 <p>As far as I can tell, a cell phone only show up on one of the
1606 frequencies at the time, so if you are going to track and count every
1607 cell phone around you, you need to listen to all the frequencies used.
1608 To listen to several frequencies, use the --numrecv argument to
1609 scan-and-livemon to use several receivers.  Further, I am not sure if
1610 phones using 3G or 4G will show as talking GSM to base stations, so
1611 this approach might not see all phones around you.  I typically see
1612 0-400 IMSI numbers an hour when looking around where I live.</p>
1613
1614 <p>I've tried to run the scanner on a
1615 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi 2 and 3
1616 running Debian Buster</a>, but the grgsm_livemon_headless process seem
1617 to be too CPU intensive to keep up.  When GNU Radio print 'O' to
1618 stdout, I am told there it is caused by a buffer overflow between the
1619 radio and GNU Radio, caused by the program being unable to read the
1620 GSM data fast enough.  If you see a stream of 'O's from the terminal
1621 where you started scan-and-livemon, you need a give the process more
1622 CPU power.  Perhaps someone are able to optimize the code to a point
1623 where it become possible to set up RPi3 based GSM sniffers?  I tried
1624 using Raspbian instead of Debian, but there seem to be something wrong
1625 with GNU Radio on raspbian, causing glibc to abort().</p>
1626
1627       </div>
1628       <div class="tags">
1629
1630
1631         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
1632
1633
1634       </div>
1635     </div>
1636     <div class="padding"></div>
1637
1638     <div class="entry">
1639       <div class="title">
1640         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Simpler_recipe_on_how_to_make_a_simple__7_IMSI_Catcher_using_Debian.html">Simpler recipe on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher using Debian</a>
1641       </div>
1642       <div class="date">
1643          9th August 2017
1644       </div>
1645       <div class="body">
1646         <p>On friday, I came across an interesting article in the Norwegian
1647 web based ICT news magazine digi.no on
1648 <a href="https://www.digi.no/artikler/sikkerhetsforsker-lagde-enkel-imsi-catcher-for-60-kroner-na-kan-mobiler-kartlegges-av-alle/398588">how
1649 to collect the IMSI numbers of nearby cell phones</a> using the cheap
1650 DVB-T software defined radios.  The article refered to instructions
1651 and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjwgNd_as30">a recipe by
1652 Keld Norman on Youtube on how to make a simple $7 IMSI Catcher</a>, and I decided to test them out.</p>
1653
1654 <p>The instructions said to use Ubuntu, install pip using apt (to
1655 bypass apt), use pip to install pybombs (to bypass both apt and pip),
1656 and the ask pybombs to fetch and build everything you need from
1657 scratch.  I wanted to see if I could do the same on the most recent
1658 Debian packages, but this did not work because pybombs tried to build
1659 stuff that no longer build with the most recent openssl library or
1660 some other version skew problem.  While trying to get this recipe
1661 working, I learned that the apt->pip->pybombs route was a long detour,
1662 and the only piece of software dependency missing in Debian was the
1663 gr-gsm package.  I also found out that the lead upstream developer of
1664 gr-gsm (the name stand for GNU Radio GSM) project already had a set of
1665 Debian packages provided in an Ubuntu PPA repository.  All I needed to
1666 do was to dget the Debian source package and built it.</p>
1667
1668 <p>The IMSI collector is a python script listening for packages on the
1669 loopback network device and printing to the terminal some specific GSM
1670 packages with IMSI numbers in them.  The code is fairly short and easy
1671 to understand.  The reason this work is because gr-gsm include a tool
1672 to read GSM data from a software defined radio like a DVB-T USB stick
1673 and other software defined radios, decode them and inject them into a
1674 network device on your Linux machine (using the loopback device by
1675 default).  This proved to work just fine, and I've been testing the
1676 collector for a few days now.</p>
1677
1678 <p>The updated and simpler recipe is thus to</p>
1679
1680 <ol>
1681
1682 <li>start with a Debian machine running Stretch or newer,</li>
1683
1684 <li>build and install the gr-gsm package available from
1685 <a href="http://ppa.launchpad.net/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gr-gsm/">http://ppa.launchpad.net/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gr-gsm/</a>,</li>
1686
1687 <li>clone the git repostory from <a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher">https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher</a>,</li>
1688
1689 <li>run grgsm_livemon and adjust the frequency until the terminal
1690 where it was started is filled with a stream of text (meaning you
1691 found a GSM station).</li>
1692
1693 <li>go into the IMSI-catcher directory and run 'sudo python simple_IMSI-catcher.py' to extract the IMSI numbers.</li>
1694
1695 </ol>
1696
1697 <p>To make it even easier in the future to get this sniffer up and
1698 running, I decided to package
1699 <a href="https://github.com/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/">the gr-gsm project</a>
1700 for Debian (<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/871055">WNPP
1701 #871055</a>), and the package was uploaded into the NEW queue today.
1702 Luckily the gnuradio maintainer has promised to help me, as I do not
1703 know much about gnuradio stuff yet.</p>
1704
1705 <p>I doubt this "IMSI cacher" is anywhere near as powerfull as
1706 commercial tools like
1707 <a href="https://www.thespyphone.com/portable-imsi-imei-catcher/">The
1708 Spy Phone Portable IMSI / IMEI Catcher</a> or the
1709 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker">Harris
1710 Stingray</a>, but I hope the existance of cheap alternatives can make
1711 more people realise how their whereabouts when carrying a cell phone
1712 is easily tracked.  Seeing the data flow on the screen, realizing that
1713 I live close to a police station and knowing that the police is also
1714 wearing cell phones, I wonder how hard it would be for criminals to
1715 track the position of the police officers to discover when there are
1716 police near by, or for foreign military forces to track the location
1717 of the Norwegian military forces, or for anyone to track the location
1718 of government officials...</p>
1719
1720 <p>It is worth noting that the data reported by the IMSI-catcher
1721 script mentioned above is only a fraction of the data broadcasted on
1722 the GSM network.  It will only collect one frequency at the time,
1723 while a typical phone will be using several frequencies, and not all
1724 phones will be using the frequencies tracked by the grgsm_livemod
1725 program.  Also, there is a lot of radio chatter being ignored by the
1726 simple_IMSI-catcher script, which would be collected by extending the
1727 parser code.  I wonder if gr-gsm can be set up to listen to more than
1728 one frequency?</p>
1729
1730       </div>
1731       <div class="tags">
1732
1733
1734         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
1735
1736
1737       </div>
1738     </div>
1739     <div class="padding"></div>
1740
1741     <div class="entry">
1742       <div class="title">
1743         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_is_now_available.html">Norwegian Bokmål edition of Debian Administrator's Handbook is now available</a>
1744       </div>
1745       <div class="date">
1746         25th July 2017
1747       </div>
1748       <div class="body">
1749         <p align="center"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-07-25-debian-handbook-nb-testprint.png"/></p>
1750
1751 <p>I finally received a copy of the Norwegian Bokmål edition of
1752 "<a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian Administrator's
1753 Handbook</a>".  This test copy arrived in the mail a few days ago, and
1754 I am very happy to hold the result in my hand.   We spent around one and a half year translating it. This paperbook edition
1755 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/#norwegian">is available
1756 from lulu.com</a>.  If you buy it quickly, you save 25% on the list
1757 price.  The book is also available for download in electronic form as
1758 PDF, EPUB and Mobipocket, as can be
1759 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/browse/nb-NO/stable/">read online
1760 as a web page</a>.</p>
1761
1762 <p>This is the second book I publish (the first was the book
1763 "<a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>" by Lawrence Lessig
1764 in
1765 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>,
1766 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">French</a>
1767 and
1768 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
1769 Bokmål</a>), and I am very excited to finally wrap up this
1770 project.  I hope
1771 "<a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/rapha%C3%ABl-hertzog-and-roland-mas/h%C3%A5ndbok-for-debian-administratoren/paperback/product-23262290.html">Håndbok
1772 for Debian-administratoren</a>" will be well received.</p>
1773
1774       </div>
1775       <div class="tags">
1776
1777
1778         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1779
1780
1781       </div>
1782     </div>
1783     <div class="padding"></div>
1784
1785     <div class="entry">
1786       <div class="title">
1787         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Updated_sales_number_for_my_Free_Culture_paper_editions.html">Updated sales number for my Free Culture paper editions</a>
1788       </div>
1789       <div class="date">
1790         12th June 2017
1791       </div>
1792       <div class="body">
1793         <p>It is pleasing to see that the work we put down in publishing new
1794 editions of the classic <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free
1795 Culture book</a> by the founder of the Creative Commons movement,
1796 Lawrence Lessig, is still being appreciated.  I had a look at the
1797 latest sales numbers for the paper edition today.  Not too impressive,
1798 but happy to see some buyers still exist.  All the revenue from the
1799 books is sent to the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative
1800 Commons Corporation</a>, and they receive the largest cut if you buy
1801 directly from Lulu.  Most books are sold via Amazon, with Ingram
1802 second and only a small fraction directly from Lulu.  The ebook
1803 edition is available for free from
1804 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Github</a>.</p>
1805
1806 <table border="0">
1807 <tr><th rowspan="2" valign="bottom">Title / language</th><th colspan="3">Quantity</th></tr>
1808 <tr><th>2016 jan-jun</th><th>2016 jul-dec</th><th>2017 jan-may</th></tr>
1809
1810 <tr>
1811   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Culture Libre / French</a></td>
1812   <td align="right">3</td>
1813   <td align="right">6</td>
1814   <td align="right">15</td>
1815 </tr>
1816
1817 <tr>
1818   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Fri kultur / Norwegian</a></td>
1819   <td align="right">7</td>
1820   <td align="right">1</td>
1821   <td align="right">0</td>
1822 </tr>
1823
1824 <tr>
1825   <td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">Free Culture / English</a></td>
1826   <td align="right">14</td>
1827   <td align="right">27</td>
1828   <td align="right">16</td>
1829 </tr>
1830
1831 <tr>
1832   <td>Total</td>
1833   <td align="right">24</td>
1834   <td align="right">34</td>
1835   <td align="right">31</td>
1836 </tr>
1837
1838 </table>
1839
1840 <p>A bit sad to see the low sales number on the Norwegian edition, and
1841 a bit surprising the English edition still selling so well.</p>
1842
1843 <p>If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native
1844 language, I would be happy to help make it happen.  Please get in
1845 touch.</p>
1846
1847       </div>
1848       <div class="tags">
1849
1850
1851         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>.
1852
1853
1854       </div>
1855     </div>
1856     <div class="padding"></div>
1857
1858     <div class="entry">
1859       <div class="title">
1860         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Release_0_1_1_of_free_software_archive_system_Nikita_announced.html">Release 0.1.1 of free software archive system Nikita announced</a>
1861       </div>
1862       <div class="date">
1863         10th June 2017
1864       </div>
1865       <div class="body">
1866         <p>I am very happy to report that the
1867 <a href="https://github.com/hiOA-ABI/nikita-noark5-core">Nikita Noark 5
1868 core project</a> tagged its second release today.  The free software
1869 solution is an implementation of the Norwegian archive standard Noark
1870 5 used by government offices in Norway.  These were the changes in
1871 version 0.1.1 since version 0.1.0 (from NEWS.md):
1872
1873 <ul>
1874
1875  <li>Continued work on the angularjs GUI, including document upload.</li>
1876  <li>Implemented correspondencepartPerson, correspondencepartUnit and
1877    correspondencepartInternal</li>
1878  <li>Applied for coverity coverage and started submitting code on
1879    regualr basis.</li>
1880  <li>Started fixing bugs reported by coverity</li>
1881  <li>Corrected and completed HATEOAS links to make sure entire API is
1882    available via URLs in _links.</li>
1883  <li>Corrected all relation URLs to use trailing slash.</li>
1884  <li>Add initial support for storing data in ElasticSearch.</li>
1885  <li>Now able to receive and store uploaded files in the archive.</li>
1886  <li>Changed JSON output for object lists to have relations in _links.</li>
1887  <li>Improve JSON output for empty object lists.</li>
1888  <li>Now uses correct MIME type application/vnd.noark5-v4+json.</li>
1889  <li>Added support for docker container images.</li>
1890  <li>Added simple API browser implemented in JavaScript/Angular.</li>
1891  <li>Started on archive client implemented in JavaScript/Angular.</li>
1892  <li>Started on prototype to show the public mail journal.</li>
1893  <li>Improved performance by disabling Sprint FileWatcher.</li>
1894  <li>Added support for 'arkivskaper', 'saksmappe' and 'journalpost'.</li>
1895  <li>Added support for some metadata codelists.</li>
1896  <li>Added support for Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS).</li>
1897  <li>Changed login method from Basic Auth to JSON Web Token (RFC 7519)
1898    style.</li>
1899  <li>Added support for GET-ing ny-* URLs.</li>
1900  <li>Added support for modifying entities using PUT and eTag.</li>
1901  <li>Added support for returning XML output on request.</li>
1902  <li>Removed support for English field and class names, limiting ourself
1903    to the official names.</li>
1904  <li>...</li>
1905
1906 </ul>
1907
1908 <p>If this sound interesting to you, please contact us on IRC (#nikita
1909 on irc.freenode.net) or email
1910 (<a href="https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark">nikita-noark
1911 mailing list).</p>
1912
1913       </div>
1914       <div class="tags">
1915
1916
1917         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
1918
1919
1920       </div>
1921     </div>
1922     <div class="padding"></div>
1923
1924     <div class="entry">
1925       <div class="title">
1926         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_trusted_timestamps_in_a_Noark_5_archive.html">Idea for storing trusted timestamps in a Noark 5 archive</a>
1927       </div>
1928       <div class="date">
1929          7th June 2017
1930       </div>
1931       <div class="body">
1932         <p><em>This is a copy of
1933 <a href="https://lists.nuug.no/pipermail/nikita-noark/2017-June/000297.html">an
1934 email I posted to the nikita-noark mailing list</a>.  Please follow up
1935 there if you would like to discuss this topic.  The background is that
1936 we are making a free software archive system based on the Norwegian
1937 <a href="https://www.arkivverket.no/forvaltning-og-utvikling/regelverk-og-standarder/noark-standarden">Noark
1938 5 standard</a> for government archives.</em></p>
1939
1940 <p>I've been wondering a bit lately how trusted timestamps could be
1941 stored in Noark 5.
1942 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">Trusted
1943 timestamps</a> can be used to verify that some information
1944 (document/file/checksum/metadata) have not been changed since a
1945 specific time in the past.  This is useful to verify the integrity of
1946 the documents in the archive.</p>
1947
1948 <p>Then it occured to me, perhaps the trusted timestamps could be
1949 stored as dokument variants (ie dokumentobjekt referered to from
1950 dokumentbeskrivelse) with the filename set to the hash it is
1951 stamping?</p>
1952
1953 <p>Given a "dokumentbeskrivelse" with an associated "dokumentobjekt",
1954 a new dokumentobjekt is associated with "dokumentbeskrivelse" with the
1955 same attributes as the stamped dokumentobjekt except these
1956 attributes:</p>
1957
1958 <ul>
1959
1960 <li>format -> "RFC3161"
1961 <li>mimeType -> "application/timestamp-reply"
1962 <li>formatDetaljer -> "&lt;source URL for timestamp service&gt;"
1963 <li>filenavn -> "&lt;sjekksum&gt;.tsr"
1964
1965 </ul>
1966
1967 <p>This assume a service following
1968 <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">IETF RFC 3161</a> is
1969 used, which specifiy the given MIME type for replies and the .tsr file
1970 ending for the content of such trusted timestamp.  As far as I can
1971 tell from the Noark 5 specifications, it is OK to have several
1972 variants/renderings of a dokument attached to a given
1973 dokumentbeskrivelse objekt.  It might be stretching it a bit to make
1974 some of these variants represent crypto-signatures useful for
1975 verifying the document integrity instead of representing the dokument
1976 itself.</p>
1977
1978 <p>Using the source of the service in formatDetaljer allow several
1979 timestamping services to be used.  This is useful to spread the risk
1980 of key compromise over several organisations.  It would only be a
1981 problem to trust the timestamps if all of the organisations are
1982 compromised.</p>
1983
1984 <p>The following oneliner on Linux can be used to generate the tsr
1985 file.  $input is the path to the file to checksum, and $sha256 is the
1986 SHA-256 checksum of the file (ie the "<sjekksum>.tsr" value mentioned
1987 above).</p>
1988
1989 <p><blockquote><pre>
1990 openssl ts -query -data "$inputfile" -cert -sha256 -no_nonce \
1991   | curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/timestamp-query" \
1992       --data-binary "@-" http://zeitstempel.dfn.de > $sha256.tsr
1993 </pre></blockquote></p>
1994
1995 <p>To verify the timestamp, you first need to download the public key
1996 of the trusted timestamp service, for example using this command:</p>
1997
1998 <p><blockquote><pre>
1999 wget -O ca-cert.txt \
2000   https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
2001 </pre></blockquote></p>
2002
2003 <p>Note, the public key should be stored alongside the timestamps in
2004 the archive to make sure it is also available 100 years from now.  It
2005 is probably a good idea to standardise how and were to store such
2006 public keys, to make it easier to find for those trying to verify
2007 documents 100 or 1000 years from now. :)</p>
2008
2009 <p>The verification itself is a simple openssl command:</p>
2010
2011 <p><blockquote><pre>
2012 openssl ts -verify -data $inputfile -in $sha256.tsr \
2013   -CAfile ca-cert.txt -text
2014 </pre></blockquote></p>
2015
2016 <p>Is there any reason this approach would not work?  Is it somehow against
2017 the Noark 5 specification?</p>
2018
2019       </div>
2020       <div class="tags">
2021
2022
2023         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
2024
2025
2026       </div>
2027     </div>
2028     <div class="padding"></div>
2029
2030     <div class="entry">
2031       <div class="title">
2032         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_archive_system_Nikita_now_able_to_store_documents.html">Free software archive system Nikita now able to store documents</a>
2033       </div>
2034       <div class="date">
2035         19th March 2017
2036       </div>
2037       <div class="body">
2038         <p>The <a href="https://github.com/hiOA-ABI/nikita-noark5-core">Nikita
2039 Noark 5 core project</a> is implementing the Norwegian standard for
2040 keeping an electronic archive of government documents.
2041 <a href="http://www.arkivverket.no/arkivverket/Offentlig-forvaltning/Noark/Noark-5/English-version">The
2042 Noark 5 standard</a> document the requirement for data systems used by
2043 the archives in the Norwegian government, and the Noark 5 web interface
2044 specification document a REST web service for storing, searching and
2045 retrieving documents and metadata in such archive.  I've been involved
2046 in the project since a few weeks before Christmas, when the Norwegian
2047 Unix User Group
2048 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/NOARK5_kjerne_som_fri_programvare_f_r_epostliste_hos_NUUG.shtml">announced
2049 it supported the project</a>.  I believe this is an important project,
2050 and hope it can make it possible for the government archives in the
2051 future to use free software to keep the archives we citizens depend
2052 on.  But as I do not hold such archive myself, personally my first use
2053 case is to store and analyse public mail journal metadata published
2054 from the government.  I find it useful to have a clear use case in
2055 mind when developing, to make sure the system scratches one of my
2056 itches.</p>
2057
2058 <p>If you would like to help make sure there is a free software
2059 alternatives for the archives, please join our IRC channel
2060 (<a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nikita"">#nikita on
2061 irc.freenode.net</a>) and
2062 <a href="https://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/nikita-noark">the
2063 project mailing list</a>.</p>
2064
2065 <p>When I got involved, the web service could store metadata about
2066 documents.  But a few weeks ago, a new milestone was reached when it
2067 became possible to store full text documents too.  Yesterday, I
2068 completed an implementation of a command line tool
2069 <tt>archive-pdf</tt> to upload a PDF file to the archive using this
2070 API.  The tool is very simple at the moment, and find existing
2071 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonds">fonds</a>, series and
2072 files while asking the user to select which one to use if more than
2073 one exist.  Once a file is identified, the PDF is associated with the
2074 file and uploaded, using the title extracted from the PDF itself.  The
2075 process is fairly similar to visiting the archive, opening a cabinet,
2076 locating a file and storing a piece of paper in the archive.  Here is
2077 a test run directly after populating the database with test data using
2078 our API tester:</p>
2079
2080 <p><blockquote><pre>
2081 ~/src//noark5-tester$ ./archive-pdf mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
2082 using arkiv: Title of the test fonds created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
2083 using arkivdel: Title of the test series created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
2084
2085  0 - Title of the test case file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
2086  1 - Title of the test file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
2087 Select which mappe you want (or search term): 0
2088 Uploading mangelmelding/mangler.pdf
2089   PDF title: Mangler i spesifikasjonsdokumentet for NOARK 5 Tjenestegrensesnitt
2090   File 2017/1: Title of the test case file created 2017-03-18T23:49:32.103446
2091 ~/src//noark5-tester$
2092 </pre></blockquote></p>
2093
2094 <p>You can see here how the fonds (arkiv) and serie (arkivdel) only had
2095 one option, while the user need to choose which file (mappe) to use
2096 among the two created by the API tester.  The <tt>archive-pdf</tt>
2097 tool can be found in the git repository for the API tester.</p>
2098
2099 <p>In the project, I have been mostly working on
2100 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester">the API
2101 tester</a> so far, while getting to know the code base.  The API
2102 tester currently use
2103 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS">the HATEOAS links</a>
2104 to traverse the entire exposed service API and verify that the exposed
2105 operations and objects match the specification, as well as trying to
2106 create objects holding metadata and uploading a simple XML file to
2107 store.  The tester has proved very useful for finding flaws in our
2108 implementation, as well as flaws in the reference site and the
2109 specification.</p>
2110
2111 <p>The test document I uploaded is a summary of all the specification
2112 defects we have collected so far while implementing the web service.
2113 There are several unclear and conflicting parts of the specification,
2114 and we have
2115 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester/tree/master/mangelmelding">started
2116 writing down</a> the questions we get from implementing it.  We use a
2117 format inspired by how <a href="http://www.opengroup.org/austin/">The
2118 Austin Group</a> collect defect reports for the POSIX standard with
2119 <a href="http://www.opengroup.org/austin/mantis.html">their
2120 instructions for the MANTIS defect tracker system</a>, in lack of an official way to structure defect reports for Noark 5 (our first submitted defect report was a <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/noark5-tester/blob/master/mangelmelding/sendt/2017-03-15-mangel-prosess.md">request for a procedure for submitting defect reports</a> :).
2121
2122 <p>The Nikita project is implemented using Java and Spring, and is
2123 fairly easy to get up and running using Docker containers for those
2124 that want to test the current code base.  The API tester is
2125 implemented in Python.</p>
2126
2127       </div>
2128       <div class="tags">
2129
2130
2131         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
2132
2133
2134       </div>
2135     </div>
2136     <div class="padding"></div>
2137
2138     <div class="entry">
2139       <div class="title">
2140         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detecting_NFS_hangs_on_Linux_without_hanging_yourself___.html">Detecting NFS hangs on Linux without hanging yourself...</a>
2141       </div>
2142       <div class="date">
2143          9th March 2017
2144       </div>
2145       <div class="body">
2146         <p>Over the years, administrating thousand of NFS mounting linux
2147 computers at the time, I often needed a way to detect if the machine
2148 was experiencing NFS hang.  If you try to use <tt>df</tt> or look at a
2149 file or directory affected by the hang, the process (and possibly the
2150 shell) will hang too.  So you want to be able to detect this without
2151 risking the detection process getting stuck too.  It has not been
2152 obvious how to do this.  When the hang has lasted a while, it is
2153 possible to find messages like these in dmesg:</p>
2154
2155 <p><blockquote>
2156 nfs: server nfsserver not responding, still trying
2157 <br>nfs: server nfsserver OK
2158 </blockquote></p>
2159
2160 <p>It is hard to know if the hang is still going on, and it is hard to
2161 be sure looking in dmesg is going to work.  If there are lots of other
2162 messages in dmesg the lines might have rotated out of site before they
2163 are noticed.</p>
2164
2165 <p>While reading through the nfs client implementation in linux kernel
2166 code, I came across some statistics that seem to give a way to detect
2167 it.  The om_timeouts sunrpc value in the kernel will increase every
2168 time the above log entry is inserted into dmesg.  And after digging a
2169 bit further, I discovered that this value show up in
2170 /proc/self/mountstats on Linux.</p>
2171
2172 <p>The mountstats content seem to be shared between files using the
2173 same file system context, so it is enough to check one of the
2174 mountstats files to get the state of the mount point for the machine.
2175 I assume this will not show lazy umounted NFS points, nor NFS mount
2176 points in a different process context (ie with a different filesystem
2177 view), but that does not worry me.</p>
2178
2179 <p>The content for a NFS mount point look similar to this:</p>
2180
2181 <p><blockquote><pre>
2182 [...]
2183 device /dev/mapper/Debian-var mounted on /var with fstype ext3
2184 device nfsserver:/mnt/nfsserver/home0 mounted on /mnt/nfsserver/home0 with fstype nfs statvers=1.1
2185         opts:   rw,vers=3,rsize=65536,wsize=65536,namlen=255,acregmin=3,acregmax=60,acdirmin=30,acdirmax=60,soft,nolock,proto=tcp,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,mountaddr=129.240.3.145,mountvers=3,mountport=4048,mountproto=udp,local_lock=all
2186         age:    7863311
2187         caps:   caps=0x3fe7,wtmult=4096,dtsize=8192,bsize=0,namlen=255
2188         sec:    flavor=1,pseudoflavor=1
2189         events: 61063112 732346265 1028140 35486205 16220064 8162542 761447191 71714012 37189 3891185 45561809 110486139 4850138 420353 15449177 296502 52736725 13523379 0 52182 9016896 1231 0 0 0 0 0
2190         bytes:  166253035039 219519120027 0 0 40783504807 185466229638 11677877 45561809
2191         RPC iostats version: 1.0  p/v: 100003/3 (nfs)
2192         xprt:   tcp 925 1 6810 0 0 111505412 111480497 109 2672418560317 0 248 53869103 22481820
2193         per-op statistics
2194                 NULL: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2195              GETATTR: 61063106 61063108 0 9621383060 6839064400 453650 77291321 78926132
2196              SETATTR: 463469 463470 0 92005440 66739536 63787 603235 687943
2197               LOOKUP: 17021657 17021657 0 3354097764 4013442928 57216 35125459 35566511
2198               ACCESS: 14281703 14290009 5 2318400592 1713803640 1709282 4865144 7130140
2199             READLINK: 125 125 0 20472 18620 0 1112 1118
2200                 READ: 4214236 4214237 0 715608524 41328653212 89884 22622768 22806693
2201                WRITE: 8479010 8494376 22 187695798568 1356087148 178264904 51506907 231671771
2202               CREATE: 171708 171708 0 38084748 46702272 873 1041833 1050398
2203                MKDIR: 3680 3680 0 773980 993920 26 23990 24245
2204              SYMLINK: 903 903 0 233428 245488 6 5865 5917
2205                MKNOD: 80 80 0 20148 21760 0 299 304
2206               REMOVE: 429921 429921 0 79796004 61908192 3313 2710416 2741636
2207                RMDIR: 3367 3367 0 645112 484848 22 5782 6002
2208               RENAME: 466201 466201 0 130026184 121212260 7075 5935207 5961288
2209                 LINK: 289155 289155 0 72775556 67083960 2199 2565060 2585579
2210              READDIR: 2933237 2933237 0 516506204 13973833412 10385 3190199 3297917
2211          READDIRPLUS: 1652839 1652839 0 298640972 6895997744 84735 14307895 14448937
2212               FSSTAT: 6144 6144 0 1010516 1032192 51 9654 10022
2213               FSINFO: 2 2 0 232 328 0 1 1
2214             PATHCONF: 1 1 0 116 140 0 0 0
2215               COMMIT: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2216
2217 device binfmt_misc mounted on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc with fstype binfmt_misc
2218 [...]
2219 </pre></blockquote></p>
2220
2221 <p>The key number to look at is the third number in the per-op list.
2222 It is the number of NFS timeouts experiences per file system
2223 operation.  Here 22 write timeouts and 5 access timeouts.  If these
2224 numbers are increasing, I believe the machine is experiencing NFS
2225 hang.  Unfortunately the timeout value do not start to increase right
2226 away.  The NFS operations need to time out first, and this can take a
2227 while.  The exact timeout value depend on the setup.  For example the
2228 defaults for TCP and UDP mount points are quite different, and the
2229 timeout value is affected by the soft, hard, timeo and retrans NFS
2230 mount options.</p>
2231
2232 <p>The only way I have been able to get working on Debian and RedHat
2233 Enterprise Linux for getting the timeout count is to peek in /proc/.
2234 But according to
2235 <ahref="http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/816-4555/netmonitor-12/index.html">Solaris
2236 10 System Administration Guide: Network Services</a>, the 'nfsstat -c'
2237 command can be used to get these timeout values.  But this do not work
2238 on Linux, as far as I can tell.  I
2239 <ahref="http://bugs.debian.org/857043">asked Debian about this</a>,
2240 but have not seen any replies yet.</p>
2241
2242 <p>Is there a better way to figure out if a Linux NFS client is
2243 experiencing NFS hangs?  Is there a way to detect which processes are
2244 affected?  Is there a way to get the NFS mount going quickly once the
2245 network problem causing the NFS hang has been cleared?  I would very
2246 much welcome some clues, as we regularly run into NFS hangs.</p>
2247
2248       </div>
2249       <div class="tags">
2250
2251
2252         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin</a>.
2253
2254
2255       </div>
2256     </div>
2257     <div class="padding"></div>
2258
2259     <div class="entry">
2260       <div class="title">
2261         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_does_it_feel_to_be_wiretapped__when_you_should_be_doing_the_wiretapping___.html">How does it feel to be wiretapped, when you should be doing the wiretapping...</a>
2262       </div>
2263       <div class="date">
2264          8th March 2017
2265       </div>
2266       <div class="body">
2267         <p>So the new president in the United States of America claim to be
2268 surprised to discover that he was wiretapped during the election
2269 before he was elected president.  He even claim this must be illegal.
2270 Well, doh, if it is one thing the confirmations from Snowden
2271 documented, it is that the entire population in USA is wiretapped, one
2272 way or another.  Of course the president candidates were wiretapped,
2273 alongside the senators, judges and the rest of the people in USA.</p>
2274
2275 <p>Next, the Federal Bureau of Investigation ask the Department of
2276 Justice to go public rejecting the claims that Donald Trump was
2277 wiretapped illegally.  I fail to see the relevance, given that I am
2278 sure the surveillance industry in USA believe they have all the legal
2279 backing they need to conduct mass surveillance on the entire
2280 world.</p>
2281
2282 <p>There is even the director of the FBI stating that he never saw an
2283 order requesting wiretapping of Donald Trump.  That is not very
2284 surprising, given how the FISA court work, with all its activity being
2285 secret.  Perhaps he only heard about it?</p>
2286
2287 <p>What I find most sad in this story is how Norwegian journalists
2288 present it.  In a news reports the other day in the radio from the
2289 Norwegian National broadcasting Company (NRK), I heard the journalist
2290 claim that 'the FBI denies any wiretapping', while the reality is that
2291 'the FBI denies any illegal wiretapping'.  There is a fundamental and
2292 important difference, and it make me sad that the journalists are
2293 unable to grasp it.</p>
2294
2295 <p><strong>Update 2017-03-13:</strong> Look like
2296 <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/03/13/rand-paul-is-right-nsa-routinely-monitors-americans-communications-without-warrants/">The
2297 Intercept report that US Senator Rand Paul confirm what I state above</a>.</p>
2298
2299       </div>
2300       <div class="tags">
2301
2302
2303         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>.
2304
2305
2306       </div>
2307     </div>
2308     <div class="padding"></div>
2309
2310     <div class="entry">
2311       <div class="title">
2312         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_complete__proofreading_in_progress.html">Norwegian Bokmål translation of The Debian Administrator's Handbook complete, proofreading in progress</a>
2313       </div>
2314       <div class="date">
2315          3rd March 2017
2316       </div>
2317       <div class="body">
2318         <p>For almost a year now, we have been working on making a Norwegian
2319 Bokmål edition of <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/">The Debian
2320 Administrator's Handbook</a>.  Now, thanks to the tireless effort of
2321 Ole-Erik, Ingrid and Andreas, the initial translation is complete, and
2322 we are working on the proof reading to ensure consistent language and
2323 use of correct computer science terms.  The plan is to make the book
2324 available on paper, as well as in electronic form.  For that to
2325 happen, the proof reading must be completed and all the figures need
2326 to be translated.  If you want to help out, get in touch.</p>
2327
2328 <p><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-handbook/debian-handbook-nb-NO.pdf">A
2329
2330 fresh PDF edition</a> in A4 format (the final book will have smaller
2331 pages) of the book created every morning is available for
2332 proofreading.  If you find any errors, please
2333 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">visit
2334 Weblate and correct the error</a>.  The
2335 <a href="http://l.github.io/debian-handbook/stat/nb-NO/index.html">state
2336 of the translation including figures</a> is a useful source for those
2337 provide Norwegian bokmål screen shots and figures.</p>
2338
2339       </div>
2340       <div class="tags">
2341
2342
2343         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2344
2345
2346       </div>
2347     </div>
2348     <div class="padding"></div>
2349
2350     <div class="entry">
2351       <div class="title">
2352         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlimited_randomness_with_the_ChaosKey_.html">Unlimited randomness with the ChaosKey?</a>
2353       </div>
2354       <div class="date">
2355          1st March 2017
2356       </div>
2357       <div class="body">
2358         <p>A few days ago I ordered a small batch of
2359 <a href="http://altusmetrum.org/ChaosKey/">the ChaosKey</a>, a small
2360 USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith
2361 Packard.  Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it
2362 work great!  According to its designers, to get it to work out of the
2363 box, you need the Linux kernel version 4.1 or later.  I tested on a
2364 Debian Stretch machine (kernel version 4.9), and there it worked just
2365 fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly.  I wrote a small
2366 test oneliner to test.  It first print the current entropy level,
2367 drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds.
2368 Here is the situation without the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
2369
2370 <blockquote><pre>
2371 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
2372   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
2373   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
2374      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
2375      sleep 1; \
2376   done
2377 300
2378 0+1 oppføringer inn
2379 0+1 oppføringer ut
2380 28 byte kopiert, 0,000264565 s, 106 kB/s
2381 4
2382 8
2383 12
2384 17
2385 21
2386 %
2387 </pre></blockquote>
2388
2389 <p>The entropy level increases by 3-4 every second.  In such case any
2390 application requiring random bits (like a HTTPS enabled web server)
2391 will halt and wait for more entrpy.  And here is the situation with
2392 the ChaosKey inserted:</p>
2393
2394 <blockquote><pre>
2395 % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
2396   dd bs=1M if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1; \
2397   for n in $(seq 1 5); do \
2398      cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail; \
2399      sleep 1; \
2400   done
2401 1079
2402 0+1 oppføringer inn
2403 0+1 oppføringer ut
2404 104 byte kopiert, 0,000487647 s, 213 kB/s
2405 433
2406 1028
2407 1031
2408 1035
2409 1038
2410 %
2411 </pre></blockquote>
2412
2413 <p>Quite the difference. :) I bought a few more than I need, in case
2414 someone want to buy one here in Norway. :)</p>
2415
2416 <p>Update: The dongle was presented at Debconf last year.  You might
2417 find <a href="https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/94/">the talk
2418 recording illuminating</a>.  It explains exactly what the source of
2419 randomness is, if you are unable to spot it from the schema drawing
2420 available from the ChaosKey web site linked at the start of this blog
2421 post.</p>
2422
2423       </div>
2424       <div class="tags">
2425
2426
2427         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2428
2429
2430       </div>
2431     </div>
2432     <div class="padding"></div>
2433
2434     <div class="entry">
2435       <div class="title">
2436         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Detect_OOXML_files_with_undefined_behaviour_.html">Detect OOXML files with undefined behaviour?</a>
2437       </div>
2438       <div class="date">
2439         21st February 2017
2440       </div>
2441       <div class="body">
2442         <p>I just noticed
2443 <a href="http://www.arkivrad.no/aktuelt/riksarkivarens-forskrift-pa-horing">the
2444 new Norwegian proposal for archiving rules in the goverment</a> list
2445 <a href="http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-376.htm">ECMA-376</a>
2446 / ISO/IEC 29500 (aka OOXML) as valid formats to put in long term
2447 storage.  Luckily such files will only be accepted based on
2448 pre-approval from the National Archive.  Allowing OOXML files to be
2449 used for long term storage might seem like a good idea as long as we
2450 forget that there are plenty of ways for a "valid" OOXML document to
2451 have content with no defined interpretation in the standard, which
2452 lead to a question and an idea.</p>
2453
2454 <p>Is there any tool to detect if a OOXML document depend on such
2455 undefined behaviour?  It would be useful for the National Archive (and
2456 anyone else interested in verifying that a document is well defined)
2457 to have such tool available when considering to approve the use of
2458 OOXML.  I'm aware of the
2459 <a href="https://github.com/arlm/officeotron/">officeotron OOXML
2460 validator</a>, but do not know how complete it is nor if it will
2461 report use of undefined behaviour.  Are there other similar tools
2462 available?  Please send me an email if you know of any such tool.</p>
2463
2464       </div>
2465       <div class="tags">
2466
2467
2468         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>.
2469
2470
2471       </div>
2472     </div>
2473     <div class="padding"></div>
2474
2475     <div class="entry">
2476       <div class="title">
2477         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ruling_ignored_our_objections_to_the_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no___domstolkontroll_.html">Ruling ignored our objections to the seizure of popcorn-time.no (#domstolkontroll)</a>
2478       </div>
2479       <div class="date">
2480         13th February 2017
2481       </div>
2482       <div class="body">
2483         <p>A few days ago, we received the ruling from
2484 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_day_in_court_challenging_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no_for__domstolkontroll.html">my
2485 day in court</a>.  The case in question is a challenge of the seizure
2486 of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no.  The ruling simply did not mention
2487 most of our arguments, and seemed to take everything ØKOKRIM said at
2488 face value, ignoring our demonstration and explanations.  But it is
2489 hard to tell for sure, as we still have not seen most of the documents
2490 in the case and thus were unprepared and unable to contradict several
2491 of the claims made in court by the opposition.  We are considering an
2492 appeal, but it is partly a question of funding, as it is costing us
2493 quite a bit to pay for our lawyer.  If you want to help, please
2494 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">donate to the
2495 NUUG defense fund</a>.</p>
2496
2497 <p>The details of the case, as far as we know it, is available in
2498 Norwegian from
2499 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/tags/dns-domenebeslag/">the NUUG
2500 blog</a>.  This also include
2501 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/Avslag_etter_rettslig_h_ring_om_DNS_beslaget___vurderer_veien_videre.shtml">the
2502 ruling itself</a>.</p>
2503
2504       </div>
2505       <div class="tags">
2506
2507
2508         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
2509
2510
2511       </div>
2512     </div>
2513     <div class="padding"></div>
2514
2515     <div class="entry">
2516       <div class="title">
2517         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_day_in_court_challenging_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no_for__domstolkontroll.html">A day in court challenging seizure of popcorn-time.no for #domstolkontroll</a>
2518       </div>
2519       <div class="date">
2520          3rd February 2017
2521       </div>
2522       <div class="body">
2523         <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-02-01-popcorn-time-in-court.jpeg"></p>
2524
2525 <p>On Wednesday, I spent the entire day in court in Follo Tingrett
2526 representing <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the member association
2527 NUUG</a>, alongside <a href="https://www.efn.no/">the member
2528 association EFN</a> and <a href="http://www.imc.no">the DNS registrar
2529 IMC</a>, challenging the seizure of the DNS name popcorn-time.no.  It
2530 was interesting to sit in a court of law for the first time in my
2531 life.  Our team can be seen in the picture above: attorney Ola
2532 Tellesbø, EFN board member Tom Fredrik Blenning, IMC CEO Morten Emil
2533 Eriksen and NUUG board member Petter Reinholdtsen.</p>
2534
2535 <p><a href="http://www.domstol.no/no/Enkelt-domstol/follo-tingrett/Nar-gar-rettssaken/Beramming/?cid=AAAA1701301512081262234UJFBVEZZZZZEJBAvtale">The
2536 case at hand</a> is that the Norwegian National Authority for
2537 Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime (aka
2538 Økokrim) decided on their own, to seize a DNS domain early last
2539 year, without following
2540 <a href="https://www.norid.no/no/regelverk/navnepolitikk/#link12">the
2541 official policy of the Norwegian DNS authority</a> which require a
2542 court decision.  The web site in question was a site covering Popcorn
2543 Time.  And Popcorn Time is the name of a technology with both legal
2544 and illegal applications.  Popcorn Time is a client combining
2545 searching a Bittorrent directory available on the Internet with
2546 downloading/distribute content via Bittorrent and playing the
2547 downloaded content on screen.  It can be used illegally if it is used
2548 to distribute content against the will of the right holder, but it can
2549 also be used legally to play a lot of content, for example the
2550 millions of movies
2551 <a href="https://archive.org/details/movies">available from the
2552 Internet Archive</a> or the collection
2553 <a href="http://vodo.net/films/">available from Vodo</a>.  We created
2554 <a href="magnet:?xt=urn:btih:86c1802af5a667ca56d3918aecb7d3c0f7173084&dn=PresentasjonFolloTingrett.mov&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fpublic.popcorn-tracker.org%3A6969%2Fannounce">a
2555 video demonstrating legally use of Popcorn Time</a> and played it in
2556 Court.  It can of course be downloaded using Bittorrent.</p>
2557
2558 <p>I did not quite know what to expect from a day in court.  The
2559 government held on to their version of the story and we held on to
2560 ours, and I hope the judge is able to make sense of it all.  We will
2561 know in two weeks time.  Unfortunately I do not have high hopes, as
2562 the Government have the upper hand here with more knowledge about the
2563 case, better training in handling criminal law and in general higher
2564 standing in the courts than fairly unknown DNS registrar and member
2565 associations.  It is expensive to be right also in Norway.  So far the
2566 case have cost more than NOK 70 000,-.  To help fund the case, NUUG
2567 and EFN have asked for donations, and managed to collect around NOK 25
2568 000,- so far.  Given the presentation from the Government, I expect
2569 the government to appeal if the case go our way.  And if the case do
2570 not go our way, I hope we have enough funding to appeal.</p>
2571
2572 <p>From the other side came two people from Økokrim.  On the benches,
2573 appearing to be part of the group from the government were two people
2574 from the Simonsen Vogt Wiik lawyer office, and three others I am not
2575 quite sure who was.  Økokrim had proposed to present two witnesses
2576 from The Motion Picture Association, but this was rejected because
2577 they did not speak Norwegian and it was a bit late to bring in a
2578 translator, but perhaps the two from MPA were present anyway.  All
2579 seven appeared to know each other.  Good to see the case is take
2580 seriously.</p>
2581
2582 <p>If you, like me, believe the courts should be involved before a DNS
2583 domain is hijacked by the government, or you believe the Popcorn Time
2584 technology have a lot of useful and legal applications, I suggest you
2585 too <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">donate to
2586 the NUUG defense fund</a>.  Both Bitcoin and bank transfer are
2587 available. If NUUG get more than we need for the legal action (very
2588 unlikely), the rest will be spend promoting free software, open
2589 standards and unix-like operating systems in Norway, so no matter what
2590 happens the money will be put to good use.</p>
2591
2592 <p>If you want to lean more about the case, I recommend you check out
2593 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/news/tags/dns-domenebeslag/">the blog
2594 posts from NUUG covering the case</a>.  They cover the legal arguments
2595 on both sides.</p>
2596
2597       </div>
2598       <div class="tags">
2599
2600
2601         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
2602
2603
2604       </div>
2605     </div>
2606     <div class="padding"></div>
2607
2608     <div class="entry">
2609       <div class="title">
2610         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Where_did_that_package_go___mdash__geolocated_IP_traceroute.html">Where did that package go? &mdash; geolocated IP traceroute</a>
2611       </div>
2612       <div class="date">
2613          9th January 2017
2614       </div>
2615       <div class="body">
2616         <p>Did you ever wonder where the web trafic really flow to reach the
2617 web servers, and who own the network equipment it is flowing through?
2618 It is possible to get a glimpse of this from using traceroute, but it
2619 is hard to find all the details.  Many years ago, I wrote a system to
2620 map the Norwegian Internet (trying to figure out if our plans for a
2621 network game service would get low enough latency, and who we needed
2622 to talk to about setting up game servers close to the users.  Back
2623 then I used traceroute output from many locations (I asked my friends
2624 to run a script and send me their traceroute output) to create the
2625 graph and the map.  The output from traceroute typically look like
2626 this:
2627
2628 <p><pre>
2629 traceroute to www.stortinget.no (85.88.67.10), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
2630  1  uio-gw10.uio.no (129.240.202.1)  0.447 ms  0.486 ms  0.621 ms
2631  2  uio-gw8.uio.no (129.240.24.229)  0.467 ms  0.578 ms  0.675 ms
2632  3  oslo-gw1.uninett.no (128.39.65.17)  0.385 ms  0.373 ms  0.358 ms
2633  4  te3-1-2.br1.fn3.as2116.net (193.156.90.3)  1.174 ms  1.172 ms  1.153 ms
2634  5  he16-1-1.cr1.san110.as2116.net (195.0.244.234)  2.627 ms he16-1-1.cr2.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.244.48)  3.172 ms he16-1-1.cr1.san110.as2116.net (195.0.244.234)  2.857 ms
2635  6  ae1.ar8.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.242.39)  0.662 ms  0.637 ms ae0.ar8.oslosda310.as2116.net (195.0.242.23)  0.622 ms
2636  7  89.191.10.146 (89.191.10.146)  0.931 ms  0.917 ms  0.955 ms
2637  8  * * *
2638  9  * * *
2639 [...]
2640 </pre></p>
2641
2642 <p>This show the DNS names and IP addresses of (at least some of the)
2643 network equipment involved in getting the data traffic from me to the
2644 www.stortinget.no server, and how long it took in milliseconds for a
2645 package to reach the equipment and return to me.  Three packages are
2646 sent, and some times the packages do not follow the same path.  This
2647 is shown for hop 5, where three different IP addresses replied to the
2648 traceroute request.</p>
2649
2650 <p>There are many ways to measure trace routes.  Other good traceroute
2651 implementations I use are traceroute (using ICMP packages) mtr (can do
2652 both ICMP, UDP and TCP) and scapy (python library with ICMP, UDP, TCP
2653 traceroute and a lot of other capabilities).  All of them are easily
2654 available in <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>.</p>
2655
2656 <p>This time around, I wanted to know the geographic location of
2657 different route points, to visualize how visiting a web page spread
2658 information about the visit to a lot of servers around the globe.  The
2659 background is that a web site today often will ask the browser to get
2660 from many servers the parts (for example HTML, JSON, fonts,
2661 JavaScript, CSS, video) required to display the content.  This will
2662 leak information about the visit to those controlling these servers
2663 and anyone able to peek at the data traffic passing by (like your ISP,
2664 the ISPs backbone provider, FRA, GCHQ, NSA and others).</p>
2665
2666 <p>Lets pick an example, the Norwegian parliament web site
2667 www.stortinget.no.  It is read daily by all members of parliament and
2668 their staff, as well as political journalists, activits and many other
2669 citizens of Norway.  A visit to the www.stortinget.no web site will
2670 ask your browser to contact 8 other servers: ajax.googleapis.com,
2671 insights.hotjar.com, script.hotjar.com, static.hotjar.com,
2672 stats.g.doubleclick.net, www.google-analytics.com,
2673 www.googletagmanager.com and www.netigate.se.  I extracted this by
2674 asking <a href="http://phantomjs.org/">PhantomJS</a> to visit the
2675 Stortinget web page and tell me all the URLs PhantomJS downloaded to
2676 render the page (in HAR format using
2677 <a href="https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/blob/master/examples/netsniff.js">their
2678 netsniff example</a>.  I am very grateful to Gorm for showing me how
2679 to do this).  My goal is to visualize network traces to all IP
2680 addresses behind these DNS names, do show where visitors personal
2681 information is spread when visiting the page.</p>
2682
2683 <p align="center"><a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml"><img
2684 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geoip-small.png" alt="map of combined traces for URLs used by www.stortinget.no using GeoIP"/></a></p>
2685
2686 <p>When I had a look around for options, I could not find any good
2687 free software tools to do this, and decided I needed my own traceroute
2688 wrapper outputting KML based on locations looked up using GeoIP.  KML
2689 is easy to work with and easy to generate, and understood by several
2690 of the GIS tools I have available.  I got good help from by NUUG
2691 colleague Anders Einar with this, and the result can be seen in
2692 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/kmltraceroute">my
2693 kmltraceroute git repository</a>.  Unfortunately, the quality of the
2694 free GeoIP databases I could find (and the for-pay databases my
2695 friends had access to) is not up to the task.  The IP addresses of
2696 central Internet infrastructure would typically be placed near the
2697 controlling companies main office, and not where the router is really
2698 located, as you can see from <a href="www.stortinget.no-geoip.kml">the
2699 KML file I created</a> using the GeoLite City dataset from MaxMind.
2700
2701 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg"><img
2702 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy-small.png" alt="scapy traceroute graph for URLs used by www.stortinget.no"/></a></p>
2703
2704 <p>I also had a look at the visual traceroute graph created by
2705 <a href="http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/">the scrapy project</a>,
2706 showing IP network ownership (aka AS owner) for the IP address in
2707 question.
2708 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-scapy.svg">The
2709 graph display a lot of useful information about the traceroute in SVG
2710 format</a>, and give a good indication on who control the network
2711 equipment involved, but it do not include geolocation.  This graph
2712 make it possible to see the information is made available at least for
2713 UNINETT, Catchcom, Stortinget, Nordunet, Google, Amazon, Telia, Level
2714 3 Communications and NetDNA.</p>
2715
2716 <p align="center"><a href="https://geotraceroute.com/index.php?node=4&host=www.stortinget.no"><img
2717 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-small.png" alt="example geotraceroute view for www.stortinget.no"/></a></p>
2718
2719 <p>In the process, I came across the
2720 <a href="https://geotraceroute.com/">web service GeoTraceroute</a> by
2721 Salim Gasmi.  Its methology of combining guesses based on DNS names,
2722 various location databases and finally use latecy times to rule out
2723 candidate locations seemed to do a very good job of guessing correct
2724 geolocation.  But it could only do one trace at the time, did not have
2725 a sensor in Norway and did not make the geolocations easily available
2726 for postprocessing.  So I contacted the developer and asked if he
2727 would be willing to share the code (he refused until he had time to
2728 clean it up), but he was interested in providing the geolocations in a
2729 machine readable format, and willing to set up a sensor in Norway.  So
2730 since yesterday, it is possible to run traces from Norway in this
2731 service thanks to a sensor node set up by
2732 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG assosiation</a>, and get the
2733 trace in KML format for further processing.</p>
2734
2735 <p align="center"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.kml"><img
2736 src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2017-01-09-www.stortinget.no-geotraceroute-kml-join.png" alt="map of combined traces for URLs used by www.stortinget.no using geotraceroute"/></a></p>
2737
2738 <p>Here we can see a lot of trafic passes Sweden on its way to
2739 Denmark, Germany, Holland and Ireland.  Plenty of places where the
2740 Snowden confirmations verified the traffic is read by various actors
2741 without your best interest as their top priority.</p>
2742
2743 <p>Combining KML files is trivial using a text editor, so I could loop
2744 over all the hosts behind the urls imported by www.stortinget.no and
2745 ask for the KML file from GeoTraceroute, and create a combined KML
2746 file with all the traces (unfortunately only one of the IP addresses
2747 behind the DNS name is traced this time.  To get them all, one would
2748 have to request traces using IP number instead of DNS names from
2749 GeoTraceroute).  That might be the next step in this project.</p>
2750
2751 <p>Armed with these tools, I find it a lot easier to figure out where
2752 the IP traffic moves and who control the boxes involved in moving it.
2753 And every time the link crosses for example the Swedish border, we can
2754 be sure Swedish Signal Intelligence (FRA) is listening, as GCHQ do in
2755 Britain and NSA in USA and cables around the globe.  (Hm, what should
2756 we tell them? :) Keep that in mind if you ever send anything
2757 unencrypted over the Internet.</p>
2758
2759 <p>PS: KML files are drawn using
2760 <a href="http://ivanrublev.me/kml/">the KML viewer from Ivan
2761 Rublev<a/>, as it was less cluttered than the local Linux application
2762 Marble.  There are heaps of other options too.</p>
2763
2764 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2765 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2766 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2767
2768       </div>
2769       <div class="tags">
2770
2771
2772         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
2773
2774
2775       </div>
2776     </div>
2777     <div class="padding"></div>
2778
2779     <div class="entry">
2780       <div class="title">
2781         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Introducing_ical_archiver_to_split_out_old_iCalendar_entries.html">Introducing ical-archiver to split out old iCalendar entries</a>
2782       </div>
2783       <div class="date">
2784          4th January 2017
2785       </div>
2786       <div class="body">
2787         <p>Do you have a large <a href="https://icalendar.org/">iCalendar</a>
2788 file with lots of old entries, and would like to archive them to save
2789 space and resources?  At least those of us using KOrganizer know that
2790 turning on and off an event set become slower and slower the more
2791 entries are in the set.  While working on migrating our calendars to a
2792 <a href="http://radicale.org/">Radicale CalDAV server</a> on our
2793 <a href="https://freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox server</a/>, my
2794 loved one wondered if I could find a way to split up the calendar file
2795 she had in KOrganizer, and I set out to write a tool.  I spent a few
2796 days writing and polishing the system, and it is now ready for general
2797 consumption.  The
2798 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/ical-archiver">code for
2799 ical-archiver</a> is publicly available from a git repository on
2800 github.  The system is written in Python and depend on
2801 <a href="http://eventable.github.io/vobject/">the vobject Python
2802 module</a>.</p>
2803
2804 <p>To use it, locate the iCalendar file you want to operate on and
2805 give it as an argument to the ical-archiver script.  This will
2806 generate a set of new files, one file per component type per year for
2807 all components expiring more than two years in the past.  The vevent,
2808 vtodo and vjournal entries are handled by the script.  The remaining
2809 entries are stored in a 'remaining' file.</p>
2810
2811 <p>This is what a test run can look like:
2812
2813 <p><pre>
2814 % ical-archiver t/2004-2016.ics
2815 Found 3612 vevents
2816 Found 6 vtodos
2817 Found 2 vjournals
2818 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2004.ics
2819 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2005.ics
2820 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2006.ics
2821 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2007.ics
2822 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2008.ics
2823 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2009.ics
2824 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2010.ics
2825 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2011.ics
2826 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2012.ics
2827 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2013.ics
2828 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vevent-2014.ics
2829 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vjournal-2007.ics
2830 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vjournal-2011.ics
2831 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-subset-vtodo-2012.ics
2832 Writing t/2004-2016.ics-remaining.ics
2833 %
2834 </pre></p>
2835
2836 <p>As you can see, the original file is untouched and new files are
2837 written with names derived from the original file.  If you are happy
2838 with their content, the *-remaining.ics file can replace the original
2839 the the others can be archived or imported as historical calendar
2840 collections.</p>
2841
2842 <p>The script should probably be improved a bit.  The error handling
2843 when discovering broken entries is not good, and I am not sure yet if
2844 it make sense to split different entry types into separate files or
2845 not.  The program is thus likely to change.  If you find it
2846 interesting, please get in touch. :)</p>
2847
2848 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2849 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2850 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2851
2852       </div>
2853       <div class="tags">
2854
2855
2856         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>.
2857
2858
2859       </div>
2860     </div>
2861     <div class="padding"></div>
2862
2863     <div class="entry">
2864       <div class="title">
2865         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Appstream_just_learned_how_to_map_hardware_to_packages_too_.html">Appstream just learned how to map hardware to packages too!</a>
2866       </div>
2867       <div class="date">
2868         23rd December 2016
2869       </div>
2870       <div class="body">
2871         <p>I received a very nice Christmas present today.  As my regular
2872 readers probably know, I have been working on the
2873 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the Isenkram
2874 system</a> for many years.  The goal of the Isenkram system is to make
2875 it easier for users to figure out what to install to get a given piece
2876 of hardware to work in Debian, and a key part of this system is a way
2877 to map hardware to packages.  Isenkram have its own mapping database,
2878 and also uses data provided by each package using the AppStream
2879 metadata format.  And today,
2880 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/appstream">AppStream</a> in
2881 Debian learned to look up hardware the same way Isenkram is doing it,
2882 ie using fnmatch():</p>
2883
2884 <p><pre>
2885 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias \
2886   usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
2887 Identifier: pymissile [generic]
2888 Name: pymissile
2889 Summary: Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher
2890 Package: pymissile
2891 % appstreamcli what-provides modalias usb:v0694p0002d0000
2892 Identifier: libnxt [generic]
2893 Name: libnxt
2894 Summary: utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT brick
2895 Package: libnxt
2896 ---
2897 Identifier: t2n [generic]
2898 Name: t2n
2899 Summary: Simple command-line tool for Lego NXT
2900 Package: t2n
2901 ---
2902 Identifier: python-nxt [generic]
2903 Name: python-nxt
2904 Summary: Python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot
2905 Package: python-nxt
2906 ---
2907 Identifier: nbc [generic]
2908 Name: nbc
2909 Summary: C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
2910 Package: nbc
2911 %
2912 </pre></p>
2913
2914 <p>A similar query can be done using the combined AppStream and
2915 Isenkram databases using the isenkram-lookup tool:</p>
2916
2917 <p><pre>
2918 % isenkram-lookup usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
2919 pymissile
2920 % isenkram-lookup usb:v0694p0002d0000
2921 libnxt
2922 nbc
2923 python-nxt
2924 t2n
2925 %
2926 </pre></p>
2927
2928 <p>You can find modalias values relevant for your machine using
2929 <tt>cat $(find /sys/devices/ -name modalias)</tt>.
2930
2931 <p>If you want to make this system a success and help Debian users
2932 make the most of the hardware they have, please
2933 help<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add
2934 AppStream metadata for your package following the guidelines</a>
2935 documented in the wiki.  So far only 11 packages provide such
2936 information, among the several hundred hardware specific packages in
2937 Debian. The Isenkram database on the other hand contain 101 packages,
2938 mostly related to USB dongles.  Most of the packages with hardware
2939 mapping in AppStream are LEGO Mindstorms related, because I have, as
2940 part of my involvement in
2941 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the Debian LEGO
2942 team</a> given priority to making sure LEGO users get proposed the
2943 complete set of packages in Debian for that particular hardware.  The
2944 team also got a nice Christmas present today.  The
2945 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nxt-firmware">nxt-firmware
2946 package</a> made it into Debian.  With this package in place, it is
2947 now possible to use the LEGO Mindstorms NXT unit with only free
2948 software, as the nxt-firmware package contain the source and firmware
2949 binaries for the NXT brick.</p>
2950
2951 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
2952 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
2953 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
2954
2955       </div>
2956       <div class="tags">
2957
2958
2959         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>.
2960
2961
2962       </div>
2963     </div>
2964     <div class="padding"></div>
2965
2966     <div class="entry">
2967       <div class="title">
2968         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_updated_with_a_lot_more_hardware_package_mappings.html">Isenkram updated with a lot more hardware-package mappings</a>
2969       </div>
2970       <div class="date">
2971         20th December 2016
2972       </div>
2973       <div class="body">
2974         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
2975 system</a> I wrote two years ago to make it easier in Debian to find
2976 and install packages to get your hardware dongles to work, is still
2977 going strong.  It is a system to look up the hardware present on or
2978 connected to the current system, and map the hardware to Debian
2979 packages.  It can either be done using the tools in isenkram-cli or
2980 using the user space daemon in the isenkram package.  The latter will
2981 notify you, when inserting new hardware, about what packages to
2982 install to get the dongle working.  It will even provide a button to
2983 click on to ask packagekit to install the packages.</p>
2984
2985 <p>Here is an command line example from my Thinkpad laptop:</p>
2986
2987 <p><pre>
2988 % isenkram-lookup
2989 bluez
2990 cheese
2991 ethtool
2992 fprintd
2993 fprintd-demo
2994 gkrellm-thinkbat
2995 hdapsd
2996 libpam-fprintd
2997 pidgin-blinklight
2998 thinkfan
2999 tlp
3000 tp-smapi-dkms
3001 tp-smapi-source
3002 tpb
3003 %
3004 </pre></p>
3005
3006 <p>It can also list the firware package providing firmware requested
3007 by the load kernel modules, which in my case is an empty list because
3008 I have all the firmware my machine need:
3009
3010 <p><pre>
3011 % /usr/sbin/isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
3012 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
3013 %
3014 </pre></p>
3015
3016 <p>The last few days I had a look at several of the around 250
3017 packages in Debian with udev rules.  These seem like good candidates
3018 to install when a given hardware dongle is inserted, and I found
3019 several that should be proposed by isenkram.  I have not had time to
3020 check all of them, but am happy to report that now there are 97
3021 packages packages mapped to hardware by Isenkram.  11 of these
3022 packages provide hardware mapping using AppStream, while the rest are
3023 listed in the modaliases file provided in isenkram.</p>
3024
3025 <p>These are the packages with hardware mappings at the moment.  The
3026 <strong>marked packages</strong> are also announcing their hardware
3027 support using AppStream, for everyone to use:</p>
3028
3029 <p>air-quality-sensor, alsa-firmware-loaders, argyll,
3030 <strong>array-info</strong>, avarice, avrdude, b43-fwcutter,
3031 bit-babbler, bluez, bluez-firmware, <strong>brltty</strong>,
3032 <strong>broadcom-sta-dkms</strong>, calibre, cgminer, cheese, colord,
3033 <strong>colorhug-client</strong>, dahdi-firmware-nonfree, dahdi-linux,
3034 dfu-util, dolphin-emu, ekeyd, ethtool, firmware-ipw2x00, fprintd,
3035 fprintd-demo, <strong>galileo</strong>, gkrellm-thinkbat, gphoto2,
3036 gpsbabel, gpsbabel-gui, gpsman, gpstrans, gqrx-sdr, gr-fcdproplus,
3037 gr-osmosdr, gtkpod, hackrf, hdapsd, hdmi2usb-udev, hpijs-ppds, hplip,
3038 ipw3945-source, ipw3945d, kde-config-tablet, kinect-audio-setup,
3039 <strong>libnxt</strong>, libpam-fprintd, <strong>lomoco</strong>,
3040 madwimax, minidisc-utils, mkgmap, msi-keyboard, mtkbabel,
3041 <strong>nbc</strong>, <strong>nqc</strong>, nut-hal-drivers, ola,
3042 open-vm-toolbox, open-vm-tools, openambit, pcgminer, pcmciautils,
3043 pcscd, pidgin-blinklight, printer-driver-splix,
3044 <strong>pymissile</strong>, python-nxt, qlandkartegt,
3045 qlandkartegt-garmin, rosegarden, rt2x00-source, sispmctl,
3046 soapysdr-module-hackrf, solaar, squeak-plugins-scratch, sunxi-tools,
3047 <strong>t2n</strong>, thinkfan, thinkfinger-tools, tlp, tp-smapi-dkms,
3048 tp-smapi-source, tpb, tucnak, uhd-host, usbmuxd, viking,
3049 virtualbox-ose-guest-x11, w1retap, xawtv, xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse,
3050 xserver-xorg-input-wacom, xserver-xorg-video-qxl,
3051 xserver-xorg-video-vmware, yubikey-personalization and
3052 zd1211-firmware</p>
3053
3054 <p>If you know of other packages, please let me know with a wishlist
3055 bug report against the isenkram-cli package, and ask the package
3056 maintainer to
3057 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">add AppStream
3058 metadata according to the guidelines</a> to provide the information
3059 for everyone.  In time, I hope to get rid of the isenkram specific
3060 hardware mapping and depend exclusively on AppStream.</p>
3061
3062 <p>Note, the AppStream metadata for broadcom-sta-dkms is matching too
3063 much hardware, and suggest that the package with with any ethernet
3064 card.  See <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/838735">bug #838735</a> for
3065 the details.  I hope the maintainer find time to address it soon.  In
3066 the mean time I provide an override in isenkram.</p>
3067
3068       </div>
3069       <div class="tags">
3070
3071
3072         Tags: <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>.
3073
3074
3075       </div>
3076     </div>
3077     <div class="padding"></div>
3078
3079     <div class="entry">
3080       <div class="title">
3081         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oolite__a_life_in_space_as_vagabond_and_mercenary___nice_free_software.html">Oolite, a life in space as vagabond and mercenary - nice free software</a>
3082       </div>
3083       <div class="date">
3084         11th December 2016
3085       </div>
3086       <div class="body">
3087         <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-12-11-nice-oolite.png"/></p>
3088
3089 <p>In my early years, I played
3090 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Classic_Elite">the epic game
3091 Elite</a> on my PC.  I spent many months trading and fighting in
3092 space, and reached the 'elite' fighting status before I moved on.  The
3093 original Elite game was available on Commodore 64 and the IBM PC
3094 edition I played had a 64 KB executable.  I am still impressed today
3095 that the authors managed to squeeze both a 3D engine and details about
3096 more than 2000 planet systems across 7 galaxies into a binary so
3097 small.</p>
3098
3099 <p>I have known about <a href="http://www.oolite.org/">the free
3100 software game Oolite inspired by Elite</a> for a while, but did not
3101 really have time to test it properly until a few days ago.  It was
3102 great to discover that my old knowledge about trading routes were
3103 still valid.  But my fighting and flying abilities were gone, so I had
3104 to retrain to be able to dock on a space station.  And I am still not
3105 able to make much resistance when I am attacked by pirates, so I
3106 bougth and mounted the most powerful laser in the rear to be able to
3107 put up at least some resistance while fleeing for my life. :)</p>
3108
3109 <p>When playing Elite in the late eighties, I had to discover
3110 everything on my own, and I had long lists of prices seen on different
3111 planets to be able to decide where to trade what.  This time I had the
3112 advantages of the
3113 <a href="http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Main_Page">Elite wiki</a>,
3114 where information about each planet is easily available with common
3115 price ranges and suggested trading routes.  This improved my ability
3116 to earn money and I have been able to earn enough to buy a lot of
3117 useful equipent in a few days.  I believe I originally played for
3118 months before I could get a docking computer, while now I could get it
3119 after less then a week.</p>
3120
3121 <p>If you like science fiction and dreamed of a life as a vagabond in
3122 space, you should try out Oolite.  It is available for Linux, MacOSX
3123 and Windows, and is included in Debian and derivatives since 2011.</p>
3124
3125 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3126 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3127 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3128
3129       </div>
3130       <div class="tags">
3131
3132
3133         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
3134
3135
3136       </div>
3137     </div>
3138     <div class="padding"></div>
3139
3140     <div class="entry">
3141       <div class="title">
3142         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_installations_using_eatmydata.html">Quicker Debian installations using eatmydata</a>
3143       </div>
3144       <div class="date">
3145         25th November 2016
3146       </div>
3147       <div class="body">
3148         <p>Two years ago, I did some experiments with eatmydata and the Debian
3149 installation system, observing how using
3150 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html">eatmydata
3151 could speed up the installation</a> quite a bit.  My testing measured
3152 speedup around 20-40 percent for Debian Edu, where we install around
3153 1000 packages from within the installer.  The eatmydata package
3154 provide a way to disable/delay file system flushing.  This is a bit
3155 risky in the general case, as files that should be stored on disk will
3156 stay only in memory a bit longer than expected, causing problems if a
3157 machine crashes at an inconvenient time.  But for an installation, if
3158 the machine crashes during installation the process is normally
3159 restarted, and avoiding disk operations as much as possible to speed
3160 up the process make perfect sense.
3161
3162 <p>I added code in the Debian Edu specific installation code to enable
3163 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libeatmydata">eatmydata</a>,
3164 but did not have time to push it any further.  But a few months ago I
3165 picked it up again and worked with the libeatmydata package maintainer
3166 Mattia Rizzolo to make it easier for everyone to get this installation
3167 speedup in Debian.  Thanks to our cooperation There is now an
3168 eatmydata-udeb package in Debian testing and unstable, and simply
3169 enabling/installing it in debian-installer (d-i) is enough to get the
3170 quicker installations.  It can be enabled using preseeding.  The
3171 following untested kernel argument should do the trick:</p>
3172
3173 <blockquote><pre>
3174 preseed/early_command="anna-install eatmydata-udeb"
3175 </pre></blockquote>
3176
3177 <p>This should ask d-i to install the package inside the d-i
3178 environment early in the installation sequence.  Having it installed
3179 in d-i in turn will make sure the relevant scripts are called just
3180 after debootstrap filled /target/ with the freshly installed Debian
3181 system to configure apt to run dpkg with eatmydata.  This is enough to
3182 speed up the installation process.  There is a proposal to
3183 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/841153">extend the idea a bit further
3184 by using /etc/ld.so.preload instead of apt.conf</a>, but I have not
3185 tested its impact.</p>
3186
3187
3188       </div>
3189       <div class="tags">
3190
3191
3192         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>.
3193
3194
3195       </div>
3196     </div>
3197     <div class="padding"></div>
3198
3199     <div class="entry">
3200       <div class="title">
3201         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_profiler_for_multi_threaded_software_is_now_in_Debian.html">Coz profiler for multi-threaded software is now in Debian</a>
3202       </div>
3203       <div class="date">
3204         13th November 2016
3205       </div>
3206       <div class="body">
3207         <p><a href="http://coz-profiler.org/">The Coz profiler</a>, a nice
3208 profiler able to run benchmarking experiments on the instrumented
3209 multi-threaded program, finally
3210 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/coz-profiler">made it into
3211 Debian unstable yesterday</A>.  Lluís Vilanova and I have spent many
3212 months since
3213 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">I
3214 blogged about the coz tool</a> in August working with upstream to make
3215 it suitable for Debian.  There are still issues with clang
3216 compatibility, inline assembly only working x86 and minimized
3217 JavaScript libraries.</p>
3218
3219 <p>To test it, install 'coz-profiler' using apt and run it like this:</p>
3220
3221 <p><blockquote>
3222 <tt>coz run --- /path/to/binary-with-debug-info</tt>
3223 </blockquote></p>
3224
3225 <p>This will produce a profile.coz file in the current working
3226 directory with the profiling information.  This is then given to a
3227 JavaScript application provided in the package and available from
3228 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">a project web page</a>.
3229 To start the local copy, invoke it in a browser like this:</p>
3230
3231 <p><blockquote>
3232 <tt>sensible-browser /usr/share/coz-profiler/viewer/index.htm</tt>
3233 </blockquote></p>
3234
3235 <p>See the project home page and the
3236 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">USENIX
3237 ;login: article on Coz</a> for more information on how it is
3238 working.</p>
3239
3240       </div>
3241       <div class="tags">
3242
3243
3244         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3245
3246
3247       </div>
3248     </div>
3249     <div class="padding"></div>
3250
3251     <div class="entry">
3252       <div class="title">
3253         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_talk_with_your_loved_ones_in_private.html">How to talk with your loved ones in private</a>
3254       </div>
3255       <div class="date">
3256          7th November 2016
3257       </div>
3258       <div class="body">
3259         <p>A few days ago I ran a very biased and informal survey to get an
3260 idea about what options are being used to communicate with end to end
3261 encryption with friends and family.  I explicitly asked people not to
3262 list options only used in a work setting.  The background is the
3263 uneasy feeling I get when using Signal, a feeling shared by others as
3264 a blog post from Sander Venima about
3265 <a href="https://sandervenema.ch/2016/11/why-i-wont-recommend-signal-anymore/">why
3266 he do not recommend Signal anymore</a> (with
3267 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12883410">feedback from
3268 the Signal author available from ycombinator</a>).  I wanted an
3269 overview of the options being used, and hope to include those options
3270 in a less biased survey later on.  So far I have not taken the time to
3271 look into the individual proposed systems.  They range from text
3272 sharing web pages, via file sharing and email to instant messaging,
3273 VOIP and video conferencing.  For those considering which system to
3274 use, it is also useful to have a look at
3275 <a href="https://www.eff.org/secure-messaging-scorecard">the EFF Secure
3276 messaging scorecard</a> which is slightly out of date but still
3277 provide valuable information.</p>
3278
3279 <p>So, on to the list.  There were some used by many, some used by a
3280 few, some rarely used ones and a few mentioned but without anyone
3281 claiming to use them.  Notice the grouping is in reality quite random
3282 given the biased self selected set of participants.  First the ones
3283 used by many:</p>
3284
3285 <ul>
3286
3287 <li><a href="https://whispersystems.org/">Signal</a></li>
3288 <li>Email w/<a href="http://openpgp.org/">OpenPGP</a> (Enigmail, GPGSuite,etc)</li>
3289 <li><a href="https://www.whatsapp.com/">Whatsapp</a></li>
3290 <li>IRC w/<a href="https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/">OTR</a></li>
3291 <li>XMPP w/<a href="https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/">OTR</a></li>
3292
3293 </ul>
3294
3295 <p>Then the ones used by a few.</p>
3296
3297 <ul>
3298
3299 <li><a href="https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page">Mumble</a></li>
3300 <li>iMessage (included in iOS from Apple)</li>
3301 <li><a href="https://telegram.org/">Telegram</a></li>
3302 <li><a href="https://jitsi.org/">Jitsi</a></li>
3303 <li><a href="https://keybase.io/download">Keybase file</a></li>
3304
3305 </ul>
3306
3307 <p>Then the ones used by even fewer people</p>
3308
3309 <ul>
3310
3311 <li><a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a></li>
3312 <li><a href="https://bitmessage.org/">Bitmessage</a></li>
3313 <li><a href="https://wire.com/">Wire</a></li>
3314 <li>VoIP w/<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZRTP">ZRTP</a> or controlled <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Real-time_Transport_Protocol">SRTP</a> (e.g using <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSipSimple">CSipSimple</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linphone">Linphone</a>)</li>
3315 <li><a href="https://matrix.org/">Matrix</a></li>
3316 <li><a href="https://kontalk.org/">Kontalk</a></li>
3317 <li><a href="https://0bin.net/">0bin</a> (encrypted pastebin)</li>
3318 <li><a href="https://appear.in">Appear.in</a></li>
3319 <li><a href="https://riot.im/">riot</a></li>
3320 <li><a href="https://www.wickr.com/">Wickr Me</a></li>
3321
3322 </ul>
3323
3324 <p>And finally the ones mentioned by not marked as used by
3325 anyone. This might be a mistake, perhaps the person adding the entry
3326 forgot to flag it as used?</p>
3327
3328 <ul>
3329
3330 <li>Email w/Certificates <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME">S/MIME</a></li>
3331 <li><a href="https://www.crypho.com/">Crypho</a></li>
3332 <li><a href="https://cryptpad.fr/">CryptPad</a></li>
3333 <li><a href="https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet">ricochet</a></li>
3334
3335 </ul>
3336
3337 <p>Given the network effect it seem obvious to me that we as a society
3338 have been divided and conquered by those interested in keeping
3339 encrypted and secure communication away from the masses.  The
3340 finishing remarks <a href="https://vimeo.com/97505679">from Aral Balkan
3341 in his talk "Free is a lie"</a> about the usability of free software
3342 really come into effect when you want to communicate in private with
3343 your friends and family.  We can not expect them to allow the
3344 usability of communication tool to block their ability to talk to
3345 their loved ones.</p>
3346
3347 <p>Note for example the option IRC w/OTR.  Most IRC clients do not
3348 have OTR support, so in most cases OTR would not be an option, even if
3349 you wanted to.  In my personal experience, about 1 in 20 I talk to
3350 have a IRC client with OTR.  For private communication to really be
3351 available, most people to talk to must have the option in their
3352 currently used client.  I can not simply ask my family to install an
3353 IRC client.  I need to guide them through a technical multi-step
3354 process of adding extensions to the client to get them going.  This is
3355 a non-starter for most.</p>
3356
3357 <p>I would like to be able to do video phone calls, audio phone calls,
3358 exchange instant messages and share files with my loved ones, without
3359 being forced to share with people I do not know.  I do not want to
3360 share the content of the conversations, and I do not want to share who
3361 I communicate with or the fact that I communicate with someone.
3362 Without all these factors in place, my private life is being more or
3363 less invaded.</p>
3364
3365       </div>
3366       <div class="tags">
3367
3368
3369         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>.
3370
3371
3372       </div>
3373     </div>
3374     <div class="padding"></div>
3375
3376     <div class="entry">
3377       <div class="title">
3378         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/My_own_self_balancing_Lego_Segway.html">My own self balancing Lego Segway</a>
3379       </div>
3380       <div class="date">
3381          4th November 2016
3382       </div>
3383       <div class="body">
3384         <p>A while back I received a Gyro sensor for the NXT
3385 <a href="mindstorms.lego.com">Mindstorms</a> controller as a birthday
3386 present.  It had been on my wishlist for a while, because I wanted to
3387 build a Segway like balancing lego robot.  I had already built
3388 <a href="http://www.nxtprograms.com/NXT2/segway/">a simple balancing
3389 robot</a> with the kids, using the light/color sensor included in the
3390 NXT kit as the balance sensor, but it was not working very well.  It
3391 could balance for a while, but was very sensitive to the light
3392 condition in the room and the reflective properties of the surface and
3393 would fall over after a short while.  I wanted something more robust,
3394 and had
3395 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=NGY1044">the
3396 gyro sensor from HiTechnic</a> I believed would solve it on my
3397 wishlist for some years before it suddenly showed up as a gift from my
3398 loved ones. :)</p>
3399
3400 <p>Unfortunately I have not had time to sit down and play with it
3401 since then.  But that changed some days ago, when I was searching for
3402 lego segway information and came across a recipe from HiTechnic for
3403 building
3404 <a href="http://www.hitechnic.com/blog/gyro-sensor/htway/">the
3405 HTWay</a>, a segway like balancing robot.  Build instructions and
3406 <a href="https://www.hitechnic.com/upload/786-HTWayC.nxc">source
3407 code</a> was included, so it was just a question of putting it all
3408 together.  And thanks to the great work of many Debian developers, the
3409 compiler needed to build the source for the NXT is already included in
3410 Debian, so I was read to go in less than an hour.  The resulting robot
3411 do not look very impressive in its simplicity:</p>
3412
3413 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-robot.jpeg"></p>
3414
3415 <p>Because I lack the infrared sensor used to control the robot in the
3416 design from HiTechnic, I had to comment out the last task
3417 (taskControl).  I simply placed /* and */ around it get the program
3418 working without that sensor present.  Now it balances just fine until
3419 the battery status run low:</p>
3420
3421 <p align="center"><video width="70%" controls="true">
3422    <source src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-11-04-lego-htway-balancing.ogv" type="video/ogg">
3423 </video></p>
3424
3425 <p>Now we would like to teach it how to follow a line and take remote
3426 control instructions using the included Bluetooth receiver in the NXT.</p>
3427
3428 <p>If you, like me, love LEGO and want to make sure we find the tools
3429 they need to work with LEGO in Debian and all our derivative
3430 distributions like Ubuntu, check out
3431 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">the LEGO designers
3432 project page</a> and join the Debian LEGO team.  Personally I own a
3433 RCX and NXT controller (no EV3), and would like to make sure the
3434 Debian tools needed to program the systems I own work as they
3435 should.</p>
3436
3437       </div>
3438       <div class="tags">
3439
3440
3441         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
3442
3443
3444       </div>
3445     </div>
3446     <div class="padding"></div>
3447
3448     <div class="entry">
3449       <div class="title">
3450         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile phone</a>
3451       </div>
3452       <div class="date">
3453         10th October 2016
3454       </div>
3455       <div class="body">
3456         <p>In July
3457 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html">I
3458 wrote how to get the Signal Chrome/Chromium app working</a> without
3459 the ability to receive SMS messages (aka without a cell phone).  It is
3460 time to share some experiences and provide an updated setup.</p>
3461
3462 <p>The Signal app have worked fine for several months now, and I use
3463 it regularly to chat with my loved ones.  I had a major snag at the
3464 end of my summer vacation, when the the app completely forgot my
3465 setup, identity and keys.  The reason behind this major mess was
3466 running out of disk space.  To avoid that ever happening again I have
3467 started storing everything in <tt>userdata/</tt> in git, to be able to
3468 roll back to an earlier version if the files are wiped by mistake.  I
3469 had to use it once after introducing the git backup.  When rolling
3470 back to an earlier version, one need to use the 'reset session' option
3471 in Signal to get going, and notify the people you talk with about the
3472 problem.  I assume there is some sequence number tracking in the
3473 protocol to detect rollback attacks.  The git repository is rather big
3474 (674 MiB so far), but I have not tried to figure out if some of the
3475 content can be added to a .gitignore file due to lack of spare
3476 time.</p>
3477
3478 <p>I've also hit the 90 days timeout blocking, and noticed that this
3479 make it impossible to send messages using Signal.  I could still
3480 receive them, but had to patch the code with a new timestamp to send.
3481 I believe the timeout is added by the developers to force people to
3482 upgrade to the latest version of the app, even when there is no
3483 protocol changes, to reduce the version skew among the user base and
3484 thus try to keep the number of support requests down.</p>
3485
3486 <p>Since my original recipe, the Signal source code changed slightly,
3487 making the old patch fail to apply cleanly.  Below is an updated
3488 patch, including the shell wrapper I use to start Signal.  The
3489 original version required a new user to locate the JavaScript console
3490 and call a function from there.  I got help from a friend with more
3491 JavaScript knowledge than me to modify the code to provide a GUI
3492 button instead.  This mean that to get started you just need to run
3493 the wrapper and click the 'Register without mobile phone' to get going
3494 now.  I've also modified the timeout code to always set it to 90 days
3495 in the future, to avoid having to patch the code regularly.</p>
3496
3497 <p>So, the updated recipe for Debian Jessie:</p>
3498
3499 <ol>
3500
3501 <li>First, install required packages to get the source code and the
3502 browser you need.  Signal only work with Chrome/Chromium, as far as I
3503 know, so you need to install it.
3504
3505 <pre>
3506 apt install git tor chromium
3507 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
3508 </pre></li>
3509
3510 <li>Modify the source code using command listed in the the patch
3511 block below.</li>
3512
3513 <li>Start Signal using the run-signal-app wrapper (for example using
3514 <tt>`pwd`/run-signal-app</tt>).
3515
3516 <li>Click on the 'Register without mobile phone', will in a phone
3517 number you can receive calls to the next minute, receive the
3518 verification code and enter it into the form field and press
3519 'Register'.  Note, the phone number you use will be user Signal
3520 username, ie the way others can find you on Signal.</li>
3521
3522 <li>You can now use Signal to contact others.  Note, new contacts do
3523 not show up in the contact list until you restart Signal, and there is
3524 no way to assign names to Contacts.  There is also no way to create or
3525 update chat groups.  I suspect this is because the web app do not have
3526 a associated contact database.</li>
3527
3528 </ol>
3529
3530 <p>I am still a bit uneasy about using Signal, because of the way its
3531 main author moxie0 reject federation and accept dependencies to major
3532 corporations like Google (part of the code is fetched from Google) and
3533 Amazon (the central coordination point is owned by Amazon).  See for
3534 example
3535 <a href="https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37">the
3536 LibreSignal issue tracker</a> for a thread documenting the authors
3537 view on these issues.  But the network effect is strong in this case,
3538 and several of the people I want to communicate with already use
3539 Signal.  Perhaps we can all move to <a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a>
3540 once it <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/830265">work on my
3541 laptop</a>?  It already work on Windows and Android, and is included
3542 in <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ring">Debian</a> and
3543 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ring">Ubuntu</a>, but not
3544 working on Debian Stable.</p>
3545
3546 <p>Anyway, this is the patch I apply to the Signal code to get it
3547 working.  It switch to the production servers, disable to timeout,
3548 make registration easier and add the shell wrapper:</p>
3549
3550 <pre>
3551 cd Signal-Desktop; cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p1
3552 diff --git a/js/background.js b/js/background.js
3553 index 24b4c1d..579345f 100644
3554 --- a/js/background.js
3555 +++ b/js/background.js
3556 @@ -33,9 +33,9 @@
3557          });
3558      });
3559
3560 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
3561 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org';
3562      var SERVER_PORTS = [80, 4433, 8443];
3563 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
3564 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
3565      var messageReceiver;
3566      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
3567          if (messageReceiver) {
3568 diff --git a/js/expire.js b/js/expire.js
3569 index 639aeae..beb91c3 100644
3570 --- a/js/expire.js
3571 +++ b/js/expire.js
3572 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
3573  ;(function() {
3574      'use strict';
3575 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
3576 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = Date.now() + (90 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
3577
3578      window.extension = window.extension || {};
3579
3580 diff --git a/js/views/install_view.js b/js/views/install_view.js
3581 index 7816f4f..1d6233b 100644
3582 --- a/js/views/install_view.js
3583 +++ b/js/views/install_view.js
3584 @@ -38,7 +38,8 @@
3585              return {
3586                  'click .step1': this.selectStep.bind(this, 1),
3587                  'click .step2': this.selectStep.bind(this, 2),
3588 -                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3)
3589 +                'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3),
3590 +                'click .callreg': function() { extension.install('standalone') },
3591              };
3592          },
3593          clearQR: function() {
3594 diff --git a/options.html b/options.html
3595 index dc0f28e..8d709f6 100644
3596 --- a/options.html
3597 +++ b/options.html
3598 @@ -14,7 +14,10 @@
3599          &lt;div class='nav'>
3600            &lt;h1>{{ installWelcome }}&lt;/h1>
3601            &lt;p>{{ installTagline }}&lt;/p>
3602 -          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a> &lt;/div>
3603 +          &lt;div> &lt;a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}&lt;/a>
3604 +           &lt;br> &lt;a class="button callreg">Register without mobile phone&lt;/a>
3605 +
3606 +         &lt;/div>
3607            &lt;span class='dot step1 selected'>&lt;/span>
3608            &lt;span class='dot step2'>&lt;/span>
3609            &lt;span class='dot step3'>&lt;/span>
3610 --- /dev/null   2016-10-07 09:55:13.730181472 +0200
3611 +++ b/run-signal-app   2016-10-10 08:54:09.434172391 +0200
3612 @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
3613 +#!/bin/sh
3614 +set -e
3615 +cd $(dirname $0)
3616 +mkdir -p userdata
3617 +userdata="`pwd`/userdata"
3618 +if [ -d "$userdata" ] && [ ! -d "$userdata/.git" ] ; then
3619 +    (cd $userdata && git init)
3620 +fi
3621 +(cd $userdata && git add . && git commit -m "Current status." || true)
3622 +exec chromium \
3623 +  --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
3624 +  --user-data-dir=$userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
3625 EOF
3626 chmod a+rx run-signal-app
3627 </pre>
3628
3629 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3630 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3631 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3632
3633       </div>
3634       <div class="tags">
3635
3636
3637         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
3638
3639
3640       </div>
3641     </div>
3642     <div class="padding"></div>
3643
3644     <div class="entry">
3645       <div class="title">
3646         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram__Appstream_and_udev_make_life_as_a_LEGO_builder_easier.html">Isenkram, Appstream and udev make life as a LEGO builder easier</a>
3647       </div>
3648       <div class="date">
3649          7th October 2016
3650       </div>
3651       <div class="body">
3652         <p><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">The Isenkram
3653 system</a> provide a practical and easy way to figure out which
3654 packages support the hardware in a given machine.  The command line
3655 tool <tt>isenkram-lookup</tt> and the tasksel options provide a
3656 convenient way to list and install packages relevant for the current
3657 hardware during system installation, both user space packages and
3658 firmware packages. The GUI background daemon on the other hand provide
3659 a pop-up proposing to install packages when a new dongle is inserted
3660 while using the computer.  For example, if you plug in a smart card
3661 reader, the system will ask if you want to install <tt>pcscd</tt> if
3662 that package isn't already installed, and if you plug in a USB video
3663 camera the system will ask if you want to install <tt>cheese</tt> if
3664 cheese is currently missing.  This already work just fine.</p>
3665
3666 <p>But Isenkram depend on a database mapping from hardware IDs to
3667 package names.  When I started no such database existed in Debian, so
3668 I made my own data set and included it with the isenkram package and
3669 made isenkram fetch the latest version of this database from git using
3670 http.  This way the isenkram users would get updated package proposals
3671 as soon as I learned more about hardware related packages.</p>
3672
3673 <p>The hardware is identified using modalias strings.  The modalias
3674 design is from the Linux kernel where most hardware descriptors are
3675 made available as a strings that can be matched using filename style
3676 globbing.  It handle USB, PCI, DMI and a lot of other hardware related
3677 identifiers.</p>
3678
3679 <p>The downside to the Isenkram specific database is that there is no
3680 information about relevant distribution / Debian version, making
3681 isenkram propose obsolete packages too.  But along came AppStream, a
3682 cross distribution mechanism to store and collect metadata about
3683 software packages.  When I heard about the proposal, I contacted the
3684 people involved and suggested to add a hardware matching rule using
3685 modalias strings in the specification, to be able to use AppStream for
3686 mapping hardware to packages.  This idea was accepted and AppStream is
3687 now a great way for a package to announce the hardware it support in a
3688 distribution neutral way.  I wrote
3689 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">a
3690 recipe on how to add such meta-information</a> in a blog post last
3691 December.  If you have a hardware related package in Debian, please
3692 announce the relevant hardware IDs using AppStream.</p>
3693
3694 <p>In Debian, almost all packages that can talk to a LEGO Mindestorms
3695 RCX or NXT unit, announce this support using AppStream.  The effect is
3696 that when you insert such LEGO robot controller into your Debian
3697 machine, Isenkram will propose to install the packages needed to get
3698 it working.  The intention is that this should allow the local user to
3699 start programming his robot controller right away without having to
3700 guess what packages to use or which permissions to fix.</p>
3701
3702 <p>But when I sat down with my son the other day to program our NXT
3703 unit using his Debian Stretch computer, I discovered something
3704 annoying.  The local console user (ie my son) did not get access to
3705 the USB device for programming the unit.  This used to work, but no
3706 longer in Jessie and Stretch.  After some investigation and asking
3707 around on #debian-devel, I discovered that this was because udev had
3708 changed the mechanism used to grant access to local devices.  The
3709 ConsoleKit mechanism from <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>
3710 no longer applied, because LDAP users no longer was added to the
3711 plugdev group during login.  Michael Biebl told me that this method
3712 was obsolete and the new method used ACLs instead.  This was good
3713 news, as the plugdev mechanism is a mess when using a remote user
3714 directory like LDAP.  Using ACLs would make sure a user lost device
3715 access when she logged out, even if the user left behind a background
3716 process which would retain the plugdev membership with the ConsoleKit
3717 setup.  Armed with this knowledge I moved on to fix the access problem
3718 for the LEGO Mindstorms related packages.</p>
3719
3720 <p>The new system uses a udev tag, 'uaccess'.  It can either be
3721 applied directly for a device, or is applied in
3722 /lib/udev/rules.d/70-uaccess.rules for classes of devices.  As the
3723 LEGO Mindstorms udev rules did not have a class, I decided to add the
3724 tag directly in the udev rules files included in the packages.  Here
3725 is one example.  For the nqc C compiler for the RCX, the
3726 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/60-nqc.rules</tt> file now look like this:
3727
3728 <p><pre>
3729 SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ACTION=="add", ATTR{idVendor}=="0694", ATTR{idProduct}=="0001", \
3730     SYMLINK+="rcx-%k", TAG+="uaccess"
3731 </pre></p>
3732
3733 <p>The key part is the 'TAG+="uaccess"' at the end.  I suspect all
3734 packages using plugdev in their /lib/udev/rules.d/ files should be
3735 changed to use this tag (either directly or indirectly via
3736 <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>).  Perhaps a lintian check should be created
3737 to detect this?</p>
3738
3739 <p>I've been unable to find good documentation on the uaccess feature.
3740 It is unclear to me if the uaccess tag is an internal implementation
3741 detail like the udev-acl tag used by
3742 <tt>/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules</tt>.  If it is, I guess the
3743 indirect method is the preferred way.  Michael
3744 <a href="https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4288">asked for more
3745 documentation from the systemd project</a> and I hope it will make
3746 this clearer.  For now I use the generic classes when they exist and
3747 is already handled by <tt>70-uaccess.rules</tt>, and add the tag
3748 directly if no such class exist.</p>
3749
3750 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
3751 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
3752 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
3753
3754 <p>To help out making life for LEGO constructors in Debian easier,
3755 please join us on our IRC channel
3756 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> and join
3757 the <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/debian-lego/">Debian
3758 LEGO team</a> in the Alioth project we created yesterday.  A mailing
3759 list is not yet created, but we are working on it. :)</p>
3760
3761 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
3762 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
3763 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
3764
3765       </div>
3766       <div class="tags">
3767
3768
3769         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>.
3770
3771
3772       </div>
3773     </div>
3774     <div class="padding"></div>
3775
3776     <div class="entry">
3777       <div class="title">
3778         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_draft_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook_now_public.html">First draft Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook now public</a>
3779       </div>
3780       <div class="date">
3781         30th August 2016
3782       </div>
3783       <div class="body">
3784         <p>In April we
3785 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">started
3786 to work</a> on a Norwegian Bokmål edition of the "open access" book on
3787 how to set up and administrate a Debian system.  Today I am happy to
3788 report that the first draft is now publicly available.  You can find
3789 it on <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/get/">get the Debian
3790 Administrator's Handbook page</a> (under Other languages).  The first
3791 eight chapters have a first draft translation, and we are working on
3792 proofreading the content.  If you want to help out, please start
3793 contributing using
3794 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
3795 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
3796 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
3797 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
3798 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
3799 contributors</a>.  A good way to contribute is to proofread the text
3800 and update weblate if you find errors.</p>
3801
3802 <p>Our goal is still to make the Norwegian book available on paper as well as
3803 electronic form.</p>
3804
3805       </div>
3806       <div class="tags">
3807
3808
3809         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3810
3811
3812       </div>
3813     </div>
3814     <div class="padding"></div>
3815
3816     <div class="entry">
3817       <div class="title">
3818         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Coz_can_help_you_find_bottlenecks_in_multi_threaded_software___nice_free_software.html">Coz can help you find bottlenecks in multi-threaded software - nice free software</a>
3819       </div>
3820       <div class="date">
3821         11th August 2016
3822       </div>
3823       <div class="body">
3824         <p>This summer, I read a great article
3825 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/summer2016/curtsinger">coz:
3826 This Is the Profiler You're Looking For</a>" in USENIX ;login: about
3827 how to profile multi-threaded programs.  It presented a system for
3828 profiling software by running experiences in the running program,
3829 testing how run time performance is affected by "speeding up" parts of
3830 the code to various degrees compared to a normal run.  It does this by
3831 slowing down parallel threads while the "faster up" code is running
3832 and measure how this affect processing time.  The processing time is
3833 measured using probes inserted into the code, either using progress
3834 counters (COZ_PROGRESS) or as latency meters (COZ_BEGIN/COZ_END).  It
3835 can also measure unmodified code by measuring complete the program
3836 runtime and running the program several times instead.</p>
3837
3838 <p>The project and presentation was so inspiring that I would like to
3839 get the system into Debian.  I
3840 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=830708">created
3841 a WNPP request for it</a> and contacted upstream to try to make the
3842 system ready for Debian by sending patches.  The build process need to
3843 be changed a bit to avoid running 'git clone' to get dependencies, and
3844 to include the JavaScript web page used to visualize the collected
3845 profiling information included in the source package.
3846 But I expect that should work out fairly soon.</p>
3847
3848 <p>The way the system work is fairly simple.  To run an coz experiment
3849 on a binary with debug symbols available, start the program like this:
3850
3851 <p><blockquote><pre>
3852 coz run --- program-to-run
3853 </pre></blockquote></p>
3854
3855 <p>This will create a text file profile.coz with the instrumentation
3856 information.  To show what part of the code affect the performance
3857 most, use a web browser and either point it to
3858 <a href="http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/">http://plasma-umass.github.io/coz/</a>
3859 or use the copy from git (in the gh-pages branch).  Check out this web
3860 site to have a look at several example profiling runs and get an idea what the end result from the profile runs look like.  To make the
3861 profiling more useful you include &lt;coz.h&gt; and insert the
3862 COZ_PROGRESS or COZ_BEGIN and COZ_END at appropriate places in the
3863 code, rebuild and run the profiler.  This allow coz to do more
3864 targeted experiments.</p>
3865
3866 <p>A video published by ACM
3867 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE0V-p1odPg">presenting the
3868 Coz profiler</a> is available from Youtube.  There is also a paper
3869 from the 25th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles available
3870 titled
3871 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/curtsinger">Coz:
3872 finding code that counts with causal profiling</a>.</p>
3873
3874 <p><a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz">The source code</a>
3875 for Coz is available from github.  It will only build with clang
3876 because it uses a
3877 <a href="https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=55606">C++
3878 feature missing in GCC</a>, but I've submitted
3879 <a href="https://github.com/plasma-umass/coz/pull/67">a patch to solve
3880 it</a> and hope it will be included in the upstream source soon.</p>
3881
3882 <p>Please get in touch if you, like me, would like to see this piece
3883 of software in Debian.  I would very much like some help with the
3884 packaging effort, as I lack the in depth knowledge on how to package
3885 C++ libraries.</p>
3886
3887       </div>
3888       <div class="tags">
3889
3890
3891         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
3892
3893
3894       </div>
3895     </div>
3896     <div class="padding"></div>
3897
3898     <div class="entry">
3899       <div class="title">
3900         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sales_number_for_the_Free_Culture_translation__first_half_of_2016.html">Sales number for the Free Culture translation, first half of 2016</a>
3901       </div>
3902       <div class="date">
3903          5th August 2016
3904       </div>
3905       <div class="body">
3906         <p>As my regular readers probably remember, the last year I published
3907 a French and Norwegian translation of the classic
3908 <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free Culture book</a> by the
3909 founder of the Creative Commons movement, Lawrence Lessig.  A bit less
3910 known is the fact that due to the way I created the translations,
3911 using docbook and po4a, I also recreated the English original.  And
3912 because I already had created a new the PDF edition, I published it
3913 too.  The revenue from the books are sent to the Creative Commons
3914 Corporation.  In other words, I do not earn any money from this
3915 project, I just earn the warm fuzzy feeling that the text is available
3916 for a wider audience and more people can learn why the Creative
3917 Commons is needed.</p>
3918
3919 <p>Today, just for fun, I had a look at the sales number over at
3920 Lulu.com, which take care of payment, printing and shipping.  Much to
3921 my surprise, the English edition is selling better than both the
3922 French and Norwegian edition, despite the fact that it has been
3923 available in English since it was first published.  In total, 24 paper
3924 books was sold for USD $19.99 between 2016-01-01 and 2016-07-31:</p>
3925
3926 <table border="0">
3927 <tr><th>Title / language</th><th>Quantity</th></tr>
3928 <tr><td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Culture Libre / French</a></td><td align="right">3</td></tr>
3929 <tr><td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Fri kultur / Norwegian</a></td><td align="right">7</td></tr>
3930 <tr><td><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">Free Culture / English</a></td><td align="right">14</td></tr>
3931 </table>
3932
3933 <p>The books are available both from Lulu.com and from large book
3934 stores like Amazon and Barnes&Noble.  Most revenue, around $10 per
3935 book, is sent to the Creative Commons project when the book is sold
3936 directly by Lulu.com.  The other channels give less revenue.  The
3937 summary from Lulu tell me 10 books was sold via the Amazon channel, 10
3938 via Ingram (what is this?) and 4 directly by Lulu.  And Lulu.com tells
3939 me that the revenue sent so far this year is USD $101.42.  No idea
3940 what kind of sales numbers to expect, so I do not know if that is a
3941 good amount of sales for a 10 year old book or not.  But it make me
3942 happy that the buyers find the book, and I hope they enjoy reading it
3943 as much as I did.</p>
3944
3945 <p>The ebook edition is available for free from
3946 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Github</a>.</p>
3947
3948 <p>If you would like to translate and publish the book in your native
3949 language, I would be happy to help make it happen.  Please get in
3950 touch.</p>
3951
3952       </div>
3953       <div class="tags">
3954
3955
3956         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>.
3957
3958
3959       </div>
3960     </div>
3961     <div class="padding"></div>
3962
3963     <div class="entry">
3964       <div class="title">
3965         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Techno_TV_broadcasting_live_across_Norway_and_the_Internet___debconf16___nuug__on__frikanalen.html">Techno TV broadcasting live across Norway and the Internet (#debconf16, #nuug) on @frikanalen</a>
3966       </div>
3967       <div class="date">
3968          1st August 2016
3969       </div>
3970       <div class="body">
3971         <p>Did you know there is a TV channel broadcasting talks from DebConf
3972 16 across an entire country?  Or that there is a TV channel
3973 broadcasting talks by or about
3974 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625529/">Linus Torvalds</a>,
3975 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625599/">Tor</a>,
3976 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/624019/">OpenID</A>,
3977 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625624/">Common Lisp</a>,
3978 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625446/">Civic Tech</a>,
3979 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625090/">EFF founder John Barlow</a>,
3980 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625432/">how to make 3D
3981 printer electronics</a> and many more fascinating topics?  It works
3982 using only free software (all of it
3983 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from Github</a>), and
3984 is administrated using a web browser and a web API.</p>
3985
3986 <p>The TV channel is the Norwegian open channel
3987 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, and I am involved
3988 via <a href="https://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG member association</a> in
3989 running and developing the software for the channel.  The channel is
3990 organised as a member organisation where its members can upload and
3991 broadcast what they want (think of it as Youtube for national
3992 broadcasting television).  Individuals can broadcast too.  The time
3993 slots are handled on a first come, first serve basis.  Because the
3994 channel have almost no viewers and very few active members, we can
3995 experiment with TV technology without too much flack when we make
3996 mistakes.  And thanks to the few active members, most of the slots on
3997 the schedule are free.  I see this as an opportunity to spread
3998 knowledge about technology and free software, and have a script I run
3999 regularly to fill up all the open slots the next few days with
4000 technology related video.  The end result is a channel I like to
4001 describe as Techno TV - filled with interesting talks and
4002 presentations.</p>
4003
4004 <p>It is available on channel 50 on the Norwegian national digital TV
4005 network (RiksTV).  It is also available as a multicast stream on
4006 Uninett.  And finally, it is available as
4007 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/">a WebM unicast stream</a> from
4008 Frikanalen and NUUG.  Check it out. :)</p>
4009
4010       </div>
4011       <div class="tags">
4012
4013
4014         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>.
4015
4016
4017       </div>
4018     </div>
4019     <div class="padding"></div>
4020
4021     <div class="entry">
4022       <div class="title">
4023         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Unlocking_HTC_Desire_HD_on_Linux_using_unruu_and_fastboot.html">Unlocking HTC Desire HD on Linux using unruu and fastboot</a>
4024       </div>
4025       <div class="date">
4026          7th July 2016
4027       </div>
4028       <div class="body">
4029         <p>Yesterday, I tried to unlock a HTC Desire HD phone, and it proved
4030 to be a slight challenge.  Here is the recipe if I ever need to do it
4031 again.  It all started by me wanting to try the recipe to set up
4032 <a href="https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardening-android-security-and-privacy">an
4033 hardened Android installation</a> from the Tor project blog on a
4034 device I had access to.  It is a old mobile phone with a broken
4035 microphone The initial idea had been to just
4036 <a href="http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_ace">install
4037 CyanogenMod on it</a>, but did not quite find time to start on it
4038 until a few days ago.</p>
4039
4040 <p>The unlock process is supposed to be simple: (1) Boot into the boot
4041 loader (press volume down and power at the same time), (2) select
4042 'fastboot' before (3) connecting the device via USB to a Linux
4043 machine, (4) request the device identifier token by running 'fastboot
4044 oem get_identifier_token', (5) request the device unlocking key using
4045 the <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader/">HTC developer web
4046 site</a> and unlock the phone using the key file emailed to you.</p>
4047
4048 <p>Unfortunately, this only work fi you have hboot version 2.00.0029
4049 or newer, and the device I was working on had 2.00.0027.  This
4050 apparently can be easily fixed by downloading a Windows program and
4051 running it on your Windows machine, if you accept the terms Microsoft
4052 require you to accept to use Windows - which I do not.  So I had to
4053 come up with a different approach.  I got a lot of help from AndyCap
4054 on #nuug, and would not have been able to get this working without
4055 him.</p>
4056
4057 <p>First I needed to extract the hboot firmware from
4058 <a href="http://www.htcdev.com/ruu/PD9810000_Ace_Sense30_S_hboot_2.00.0029.exe">the
4059 windows binary for HTC Desire HD</a> downloaded as 'the RUU' from HTC.
4060 For this there is is <a href="https://github.com/kmdm/unruu/">a github
4061 project named unruu</a> using libunshield.  The unshield tool did not
4062 recognise the file format, but unruu worked and extracted rom.zip,
4063 containing the new hboot firmware and a text file describing which
4064 devices it would work for.</p>
4065
4066 <p>Next, I needed to get the new firmware into the device.  For this I
4067 followed some instructions
4068 <a href="http://www.htc1guru.com/2013/09/new-ruu-zips-posted/">available
4069 from HTC1Guru.com</a>, and ran these commands as root on a Linux
4070 machine with Debian testing:</p>
4071
4072 <p><pre>
4073 adb reboot-bootloader
4074 fastboot oem rebootRUU
4075 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
4076 fastboot flash zip rom.zip
4077 fastboot reboot
4078 </pre></p>
4079
4080 <p>The flash command apparently need to be done twice to take effect,
4081 as the first is just preparations and the second one do the flashing.
4082 The adb command is just to get to the boot loader menu, so turning the
4083 device on while holding volume down and the power button should work
4084 too.</p>
4085
4086 <p>With the new hboot version in place I could start following the
4087 instructions on the HTC developer web site.  I got the device token
4088 like this:</p>
4089
4090 <p><pre>
4091 fastboot oem get_identifier_token 2>&1 | sed 's/(bootloader) //'
4092 </pre>
4093
4094 <p>And once I got the unlock code via email, I could use it like
4095 this:</p>
4096
4097 <p><pre>
4098 fastboot flash unlocktoken Unlock_code.bin
4099 </pre></p>
4100
4101 <p>And with that final step in place, the phone was unlocked and I
4102 could start stuffing the software of my own choosing into the device.
4103 So far I only inserted a replacement recovery image to wipe the phone
4104 before I start.  We will see what happen next.  Perhaps I should
4105 install <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> on it. :)</p>
4106
4107       </div>
4108       <div class="tags">
4109
4110
4111         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
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/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html">How to use the Signal app if you only have a land line (ie no mobile phone)</a>
4121       </div>
4122       <div class="date">
4123          3rd July 2016
4124       </div>
4125       <div class="body">
4126         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to test
4127 <a href="https://whispersystems.org/">the Signal app</a>, as it is
4128 said to provide end to end encrypted communication and several of my
4129 friends and family are already using it.  As I by choice do not own a
4130 mobile phone, this proved to be harder than expected.  And I wanted to
4131 have the source of the client and know that it was the code used on my
4132 machine.  But yesterday I managed to get it working.  I used the
4133 Github source, compared it to the source in
4134 <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/signal-private-messenger/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk?hl=en-US">the
4135 Signal Chrome app</a> available from the Chrome web store, applied
4136 patches to use the production Signal servers, started the app and
4137 asked for the hidden "register without a smart phone" form.  Here is
4138 the recipe how I did it.</p>
4139
4140 <p>First, I fetched the Signal desktop source from Github, using
4141
4142 <pre>
4143 git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
4144 </pre>
4145
4146 <p>Next, I patched the source to use the production servers, to be
4147 able to talk to other Signal users:</p>
4148
4149 <pre>
4150 cat &lt;&lt;EOF | patch -p0
4151 diff -ur ./js/background.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js
4152 --- ./js/background.js  2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
4153 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/background.js    2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
4154 @@ -47,8 +47,8 @@
4155          });
4156      });
4157
4158 -    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
4159 -    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
4160 +    var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org:4433';
4161 +    var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
4162      var messageReceiver;
4163      window.getSocketStatus = function() {
4164          if (messageReceiver) {
4165 diff -ur ./js/expire.js userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js
4166 --- ./js/expire.js      2016-06-29 13:43:15.630344628 +0200
4167 +++ userdata/Default/Extensions/bikioccmkafdpakkkcpdbppfkghcmihk/0.15.0_0/js/expire.js2016-06-29 14:06:29.530300934 +0200
4168 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
4169  ;(function() {
4170      'use strict';
4171 -    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
4172 +    var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 1474492690000;
4173
4174      window.extension = window.extension || {};
4175
4176 EOF
4177 </pre>
4178
4179 <p>The first part is changing the servers, and the second is updating
4180 an expiration timestamp.  This timestamp need to be updated regularly.
4181 It is set 90 days in the future by the build process (Gruntfile.js).
4182 The value is seconds since 1970 times 1000, as far as I can tell.</p>
4183
4184 <p>Based on a tip and good help from the #nuug IRC channel, I wrote a
4185 script to launch Signal in Chromium.</p>
4186
4187 <pre>
4188 #!/bin/sh
4189 cd $(dirname $0)
4190 mkdir -p userdata
4191 exec chromium \
4192   --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
4193   --user-data-dir=`pwd`/userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
4194 </pre>
4195
4196 <p> The script start the app and configure Chromium to use the Tor
4197 SOCKS5 proxy to make sure those controlling the Signal servers (today
4198 Amazon and Whisper Systems) as well as those listening on the lines
4199 will have a harder time location my laptop based on the Signal
4200 connections if they use source IP address.</p>
4201
4202 <p>When the script starts, one need to follow the instructions under
4203 "Standalone Registration" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the git
4204 repository.  I right clicked on the Signal window to get up the
4205 Chromium debugging tool, visited the 'Console' tab and wrote
4206 'extension.install("standalone")' on the console prompt to get the
4207 registration form.  Then I entered by land line phone number and
4208 pressed 'Call'.  5 seconds later the phone rang and a robot voice
4209 repeated the verification code three times.  After entering the number
4210 into the verification code field in the form, I could start using
4211 Signal from my laptop.
4212
4213 <p>As far as I can tell, The Signal app will leak who is talking to
4214 whom and thus who know who to those controlling the central server,
4215 but such leakage is hard to avoid with a centrally controlled server
4216 setup.  It is something to keep in mind when using Signal - the
4217 content of your chats are harder to intercept, but the meta data
4218 exposing your contact network is available to people you do not know.
4219 So better than many options, but not great.  And sadly the usage is
4220 connected to my land line, thus allowing those controlling the server
4221 to associate it to my home and person.  I would prefer it if only
4222 those I knew could tell who I was on Signal.  There are options
4223 avoiding such information leakage, but most of my friends are not
4224 using them, so I am stuck with Signal for now.</p>
4225
4226 <p><strong>Update 2017-01-10</strong>: There is an updated blog post
4227 on this topic in
4228 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience
4229 and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile
4230 phone</a>.</p>
4231
4232       </div>
4233       <div class="tags">
4234
4235
4236         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance</a>.
4237
4238
4239       </div>
4240     </div>
4241     <div class="padding"></div>
4242
4243     <div class="entry">
4244       <div class="title">
4245         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?</a>
4246       </div>
4247       <div class="date">
4248          6th June 2016
4249       </div>
4250       <div class="body">
4251         <p>When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out
4252 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">which
4253 multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats /
4254 MIME types</a>, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types
4255 the various players claimed support for.  The range was from 55 to 130
4256 MIME types.  I suspect most media formats are supported by all
4257 players, but this is not really reflected in the MimeTypes values in
4258 their desktop files.  There are probably also some bogus MIME types
4259 listed, but it is hard to identify which one this is.</p>
4260
4261 <p>Anyway, in the mean time I got in touch with upstream for some of
4262 the players suggesting to add more MIME types to their desktop files,
4263 and decided to spend some time myself improving the situation for my
4264 favorite media player VLC.  The fixes for VLC entered Debian unstable
4265 yesterday. The complete list of MIME types can be seen on the
4266 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">Multimedia
4267 player MIME type support status</a> Debian wiki page.</p>
4268
4269 <p>The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?  It is VLC, followed by
4270 totem, parole, kplayer, gnome-mpv, mpv, smplayer, mplayer-gui and
4271 kmplayer.  I am sure some of the other players desktop files support
4272 several of the formats currently listed as working only with vlc,
4273 toten and parole.</p>
4274
4275 <p>A sad observation is that only 14 MIME types are listed as
4276 supported by all the tested multimedia players in Debian in their
4277 desktop files: audio/mpeg, audio/vnd.rn-realaudio, audio/x-mpegurl,
4278 audio/x-ms-wma, audio/x-scpls, audio/x-wav, video/mp4, video/mpeg,
4279 video/quicktime, video/vnd.rn-realvideo, video/x-matroska,
4280 video/x-ms-asf, video/x-ms-wmv and video/x-msvideo.  Personally I find
4281 it sad that video/ogg and video/webm is not supported by all the media
4282 players in Debian.  As far as I can tell, all of them can handle both
4283 formats.</p>
4284
4285       </div>
4286       <div class="tags">
4287
4288
4289         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>.
4290
4291
4292       </div>
4293     </div>
4294     <div class="padding"></div>
4295
4296     <div class="entry">
4297       <div class="title">
4298         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_program_should_be_able_to_open_its_own_files_on_Linux.html">A program should be able to open its own files on Linux</a>
4299       </div>
4300       <div class="date">
4301          5th June 2016
4302       </div>
4303       <div class="body">
4304         <p>Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I
4305 decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a
4306 talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine.  I
4307 wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed
4308 the day before I would give the talk.  The next day I took a plane to
4309 the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I
4310 started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover
4311 that kpresenter refused to load its own data file.  I cursed a bit and
4312 started making the slides again from memory, to have something to
4313 present when I arrived.  I tested that the saved files could be
4314 loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued.  I continued to polish the
4315 slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer
4316 be loaded into kpresenter.  In the end I had to rewrite the slides
4317 three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and
4318 shorter.  After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem &ndash;
4319 kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand.
4320 Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great
4321 program to make slides.  The point I'm trying to make is that we
4322 expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is
4323 embarrassing to its developers if it can't.</p>
4324
4325 <p>Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data
4326 files from the desktop file browser?  It is not a uncommon problem.  A
4327 while back I discovered that the screencast recorder
4328 gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file
4329 browser would refuse to open.  No video player claimed to understand
4330 such file.  I tracked down the cause being <tt>file --mime-type</tt>
4331 returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had
4332 installed listed as a MIME type they would understand.  I asked for
4333 <a href="http://bugs.gw.com/view.php?id=382">file to change its
4334 behavour</a> and use the MIME type video/ogg instead.  I also asked
4335 several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give
4336 the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files.  After a
4337 while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the
4338 output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly.</p>
4339
4340 <p>But history repeats itself.  A few days ago I tested the music
4341 system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file
4342 browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files
4343 (*.rg).  I've reported <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/825993">the
4344 rosegarden problem to BTS</a> and a fix is commited to git and will be
4345 included in the next upload.  To increase the chance of me remembering
4346 how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files
4347 from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it.</p>
4348
4349 <p>The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types.
4350 There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file.  The output from
4351 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> mentioned above, and the content of the
4352 shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/).  The file MIME
4353 type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this
4354 information is collected from
4355 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/">the
4356 desktop files</a> available in /usr/share/applications/.  If there is
4357 one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is
4358 activated when asking to open a given file.  If there are more, one
4359 can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and
4360 selecting the wanted one using 'Open with' or similar.  In general
4361 this work well.  But it depend on each program picking a good MIME
4362 type (preferably
4363 <a href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">a
4364 MIME type registered with IANA</a>), file and/or the shared MIME
4365 registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME
4366 type in its list of supported MIME types.</p>
4367
4368 <p>The <tt>/usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml</tt> entry for
4369 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec">the
4370 Shared MIME database</a> look like this:</p>
4371
4372 <p><blockquote><pre>
4373 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
4374 &lt;mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info"&gt;
4375   &lt;mime-type type="audio/x-rosegarden"&gt;
4376     &lt;sub-class-of type="application/x-gzip"/&gt;
4377     &lt;comment&gt;Rosegarden project file&lt;/comment&gt;
4378     &lt;glob pattern="*.rg"/&gt;
4379   &lt;/mime-type&gt;
4380 &lt;/mime-info&gt;
4381 </pre></blockquote></p>
4382
4383 <p>This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip
4384 (it is a gzipped XML file).  Note, it is much better to use an
4385 official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own
4386 unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden.</p>
4387
4388 <p>The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list
4389 audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the
4390 file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:</p>
4391
4392 <p><blockquote><pre>
4393 % grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
4394 MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
4395 X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
4396 %
4397 </pre></blockquote></p>
4398
4399 <p>The fix was to add "audio/x-rosegarden;" at the end of the
4400 MimeType= line.</p>
4401
4402 <p>If you run into a file which fail to open the correct program when
4403 selected from the file browser, please check out the output from
4404 <tt>file --mime-type</tt> for the file, ensure the file ending and
4405 MIME type is registered somewhere under /usr/share/mime/ and check
4406 that some desktop file under /usr/share/applications/ is claiming
4407 support for this MIME type.  If not, please report a bug to have it
4408 fixed. :)</p>
4409
4410       </div>
4411       <div class="tags">
4412
4413
4414         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4415
4416
4417       </div>
4418     </div>
4419     <div class="padding"></div>
4420
4421     <div class="entry">
4422       <div class="title">
4423         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Tor___from_its_creators_mouth_11_years_ago.html">Tor - from its creators mouth 11 years ago</a>
4424       </div>
4425       <div class="date">
4426         28th May 2016
4427       </div>
4428       <div class="body">
4429         <p>A little more than 11 years ago, one of the creators of Tor, and
4430 the current President of <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">the Tor
4431 project</a>, Roger Dingledine, gave a talk for the members of the
4432 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group</a> (NUUG).  A
4433 video of the talk was recorded, and today, thanks to the great help
4434 from David Noble, I finally was able to publish the video of the talk
4435 on Frikanalen, the Norwegian open channel TV station where NUUG
4436 currently publishes its talks.  You can
4437 <a href="http://frikanalen.no/se">watch the live stream using a web
4438 browser</a> with WebM support, or check out the recording on the video
4439 on demand page for the talk
4440 "<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/625599">Tor: Anonymous
4441 communication for the US Department of Defence...and you.</a>".</p>
4442
4443 <p>Here is the video included for those of you using browsers with
4444 HTML video and Ogg Theora support:</p>
4445
4446 <p><video width="70%" poster="http://simula.gunkies.org/media/625599/large_thumb/20050421-tor-frikanalen.jpg" controls>
4447   <source src="http://simula.gunkies.org/media/625599/theora/20050421-tor-frikanalen.ogv" type="video/ogg"/>
4448 </video></p>
4449
4450 <p>I guess the gist of the talk can be summarised quite simply: If you
4451 want to help the military in USA (and everyone else), use Tor. :)</p>
4452
4453       </div>
4454       <div class="tags">
4455
4456
4457         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>.
4458
4459
4460       </div>
4461     </div>
4462     <div class="padding"></div>
4463
4464     <div class="entry">
4465       <div class="title">
4466         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Isenkram_with_PackageKit_support___new_version_0_23_available_in_Debian_unstable.html">Isenkram with PackageKit support - new version 0.23 available in Debian unstable</a>
4467       </div>
4468       <div class="date">
4469         25th May 2016
4470       </div>
4471       <div class="body">
4472         <p><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/isenkram">The isenkram
4473 system</a> is a user-focused solution in Debian for handling hardware
4474 related packages.  The idea is to have a database of mappings between
4475 hardware and packages, and pop up a dialog suggesting for the user to
4476 install the packages to use a given hardware dongle.  Some use cases
4477 are when you insert a Yubikey, it proposes to install the software
4478 needed to control it; when you insert a braille reader list it
4479 proposes to install the packages needed to send text to the reader;
4480 and when you insert a ColorHug screen calibrator it suggests to
4481 install the driver for it.  The system work well, and even have a few
4482 command line tools to install firmware packages and packages for the
4483 hardware already in the machine (as opposed to hotpluggable hardware).</p>
4484
4485 <p>The system was initially written using aptdaemon, because I found
4486 good documentation and example code on how to use it.  But aptdaemon
4487 is going away and is generally being replaced by
4488 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/PackageKit/">PackageKit</a>,
4489 so Isenkram needed a rewrite.  And today, thanks to the great patch
4490 from my college Sunil Mohan Adapa in the FreedomBox project, the
4491 rewrite finally took place.  I've just uploaded a new version of
4492 Isenkram into Debian Unstable with the patch included, and the default
4493 for the background daemon is now to use PackageKit.  To check it out,
4494 install the <tt>isenkram</tt> package and insert some hardware dongle
4495 and see if it is recognised.</p>
4496
4497 <p>If you want to know what kind of packages isenkram would propose for
4498 the machine it is running on, you can check out the isenkram-lookup
4499 program.  This is what it look like on a Thinkpad X230:</p>
4500
4501 <p><blockquote><pre>
4502 % isenkram-lookup
4503 bluez
4504 cheese
4505 fprintd
4506 fprintd-demo
4507 gkrellm-thinkbat
4508 hdapsd
4509 libpam-fprintd
4510 pidgin-blinklight
4511 thinkfan
4512 tleds
4513 tp-smapi-dkms
4514 tp-smapi-source
4515 tpb
4516 %p
4517 </pre></blockquote></p>
4518
4519 <p>The hardware mappings come from several places.  The preferred way
4520 is for packages to announce their hardware support using
4521 <a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
4522 cross distribution appstream system</a>.
4523 See
4524 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">previous
4525 blog posts about isenkram</a> to learn how to do that.</p>
4526
4527       </div>
4528       <div class="tags">
4529
4530
4531         Tags: <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>.
4532
4533
4534       </div>
4535     </div>
4536     <div class="padding"></div>
4537
4538     <div class="entry">
4539       <div class="title">
4540         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Discharge_rate_estimate_in_new_battery_statistics_collector_for_Debian.html">Discharge rate estimate in new battery statistics collector for Debian</a>
4541       </div>
4542       <div class="date">
4543         23rd May 2016
4544       </div>
4545       <div class="body">
4546         <p>Yesterday I updated the
4547 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats
4548 package in Debian</a> with a few patches sent to me by skilled and
4549 enterprising users.  There were some nice user and visible changes.
4550 First of all, both desktop menu entries now work.  A design flaw in
4551 one of the script made the history graph fail to show up (its PNG was
4552 dumped in ~/.xsession-errors) if no controlling TTY was available.
4553 The script worked when called from the command line, but not when
4554 called from the desktop menu.  I changed this to look for a DISPLAY
4555 variable or a TTY before deciding where to draw the graph, and now the
4556 graph window pop up as expected.</p>
4557
4558 <p>The next new feature is a discharge rate estimator in one of the
4559 graphs (the one showing the last few hours).  New is also the user of
4560 colours showing charging in blue and discharge in red.  The percentages
4561 of this graph is relative to last full charge, not battery design
4562 capacity.</p>
4563
4564 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-rate.png"/></p>
4565
4566 <p>The other graph show the entire history of the collected battery
4567 statistics, comparing it to the design capacity of the battery to
4568 visualise how the battery life time get shorter over time.  The red
4569 line in this graph is what the previous graph considers 100 percent:
4570
4571 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-history.png"/></p>
4572
4573 <p>In this graph you can see that I only charge the battery to 80
4574 percent of last full capacity, and how the capacity of the battery is
4575 shrinking. :(</p>
4576
4577 <p>The last new feature is in the collector, which now will handle
4578 more hardware models.  On some hardware, Linux power supply
4579 information is stored in /sys/class/power_supply/ACAD/, while the
4580 collector previously only looked in /sys/class/power_supply/AC/.  Now
4581 both are checked to figure if there is power connected to the
4582 machine.</p>
4583
4584 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
4585 check out the
4586 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
4587 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
4588 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from <a
4589 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
4590 Patches are very welcome.</p>
4591
4592 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
4593 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
4594 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
4595
4596       </div>
4597       <div class="tags">
4598
4599
4600         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4601
4602
4603       </div>
4604     </div>
4605     <div class="padding"></div>
4606
4607     <div class="entry">
4608       <div class="title">
4609         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/French_edition_of_Lawrence_Lessigs_book_Cultura_Libre_on_Amazon_and_Barnes___Noble.html">French edition of Lawrence Lessigs book Cultura Libre on Amazon and Barnes & Noble</a>
4610       </div>
4611       <div class="date">
4612         21st May 2016
4613       </div>
4614       <div class="body">
4615         <p>A few weeks ago the French paperback edition of Lawrence Lessigs
4616 2004 book Cultura Libre was published.  Today I noticed that the book
4617 is now available from book stores.  You can now buy it from
4618 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Libre-French-Lawrence-Lessig/dp/8269018260">Amazon</a>
4619 ($19.99),
4620 <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/culture-libre-lawrence-lessig/1123776705">Barnes
4621 & Noble</a> ($?) and as always from
4622 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">Lulu.com</a>
4623 ($19.99).  The revenue is donated to the Creative Commons project.  If
4624 you buy from Lulu.com, they currently get $10.59, while if you buy
4625 from one of the book stores most of the revenue go to the book store
4626 and the Creative Commons project get much (not sure how much
4627 less).</p>
4628
4629 <p>I was a bit surprised to discover that there is a kindle edition
4630 sold by Amazon Digital Services LLC on Amazon.  Not quite sure how
4631 that edition was created, but if you want to download a electronic
4632 edition (PDF, EPUB, Mobi) generated from the same files used to create
4633 the paperback edition, they are
4634 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">available
4635 from github</a>.</p>
4636
4637       </div>
4638       <div class="tags">
4639
4640
4641         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>.
4642
4643
4644       </div>
4645     </div>
4646     <div class="padding"></div>
4647
4648     <div class="entry">
4649       <div class="title">
4650         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_want_the_courts_to_be_involved_before_the_police_can_hijack_a_news_site_DNS_domain___domstolkontroll_.html">I want the courts to be involved before the police can hijack a news site DNS domain (#domstolkontroll)</a>
4651       </div>
4652       <div class="date">
4653         19th May 2016
4654       </div>
4655       <div class="body">
4656         <p>I just donated to the
4657 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">NUUG defence
4658 "fond"</a> to fund the effort in Norway to get the seizure of the news
4659 site popcorn-time.no tested in court.  I hope everyone that agree with
4660 me will do the same.</p>
4661
4662 <p>Would you be worried if you knew the police in your country could
4663 hijack DNS domains of news sites covering free software system without
4664 talking to a judge first?  I am.  What if the free software system
4665 combined search engine lookups, bittorrent downloads and video playout
4666 and was called Popcorn Time?  Would that affect your view?  It still
4667 make me worried.</p>
4668
4669 <p>In March 2016, the Norwegian police seized (as in forced NORID to
4670 change the IP address pointed to by it to one controlled by the
4671 police) the DNS domain popcorn-time.no, without any supervision from
4672 the courts.  I did not know about the web site back then, and assumed
4673 the courts had been involved, and was very surprised when I discovered
4674 that the police had hijacked the DNS domain without asking a judge for
4675 permission first.  I was even more surprised when I had a look at
4676 <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://popcorn-time.no">the web
4677 site content on the Internet Archive</A>, and only found news coverage
4678 about Popcorn Time, not any material published without the right
4679 holders permissions.</p>
4680
4681 <p>The seizure was widely covered in the Norwegian press (see for
4682 example <a href="http://www.hegnar.no/Nyheter/Naeringsliv/2016/03/Popcorn-time.no-beslaglagt-av-OEkokrim">Hegnar Online</a> and
4683 <a href="http://itavisen.no/2016/03/08/okokrim-har-beslaglagt-popcorn-time-no/">ITavisen<a/>
4684 and
4685 <a href="http://www.nrk.no/kultur/okokrim-gar-til-aksjon-mot-popcorn-time-1.12842452">NRK</a>),
4686 at first due to the press release sent out by Økokrim, but then based
4687 on
4688 <a href="http://blogg.torvund.net/2016/03/09/okokrims-beslag-i-domenet-popcorn-time-no/">protests
4689 from the law professor Olav Torvund</a> and
4690 <a href="http://www.klassekampen.no/article/20160311/ARTICLE/160319995">lawyer
4691 Jon Wessel-Aas</a>.  It even got some
4692 <a href="https://torrentfreak.com/norwegian-authorities-sued-over-popcorn-time-domain-seizure-160418/">coverage
4693 on TorrentFreak</a>.</p>
4694
4695 <p>I
4696 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html">
4697 wrote about the case a month ago</a>, when the
4698 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> (NUUG),
4699 where I am an active member, decided to ask the courts to test this seizure.
4700 The request was denied, but NUUG and its co-requestor EFN have not
4701 given up, and now they are rallying for support to get the seizure
4702 legally challenged.  They accept both bank and Bitcoin transfer for
4703 those that want to support the request.</p>
4704
4705 <p>If you as me believe news sites about free software should not be
4706 censored, even if the free software have both legal and illegal
4707 applications, and that DNS hijacking should be tested by the courts, I
4708 suggest you <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dns-beslag-donasjon.shtml">show
4709 your support by donating to NUUG</a>.</a>
4710
4711       </div>
4712       <div class="tags">
4713
4714
4715         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
4716
4717
4718       </div>
4719     </div>
4720     <div class="padding"></div>
4721
4722     <div class="entry">
4723       <div class="title">
4724         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_now_with_ZFS_on_Linux_included.html">Debian now with ZFS on Linux included</a>
4725       </div>
4726       <div class="date">
4727         12th May 2016
4728       </div>
4729       <div class="body">
4730         <p>Today, after many years of hard work from many people,
4731 <a href="http://zfsonlinux.org/">ZFS for Linux</a> finally entered
4732 Debian.  The package status can be seen on
4733 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/zfs-linux">the package tracker
4734 for zfs-linux</a>.  and
4735 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
4736 team status page</a>. If you want to help out, please join us.
4737 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">The
4738 source code</a> is available via git on Alioth.  It would also be
4739 great if you could help out with
4740 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dkms">the dkms package</a>, as
4741 it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.</p>
4742
4743       </div>
4744       <div class="tags">
4745
4746
4747         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4748
4749
4750       </div>
4751     </div>
4752     <div class="padding"></div>
4753
4754     <div class="entry">
4755       <div class="title">
4756         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">What is the best multimedia player in Debian?</a>
4757       </div>
4758       <div class="date">
4759          8th May 2016
4760       </div>
4761       <div class="body">
4762         <p><strong>Where I set out to figure out which multimedia player in
4763 Debian claim support for most file formats.</strong></p>
4764
4765 <p>A few years ago, I had a look at the media support for Browser
4766 plugins in Debian, to get an idea which plugins to include in Debian
4767 Edu.  I created a script to extract the set of supported MIME types
4768 for each plugin, and used this to find out which multimedia browser
4769 plugin supported most file formats / media types.
4770 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">The
4771 result</a> can still be seen on the Debian wiki, even though it have
4772 not been updated for a while.  But browser plugins are less relevant
4773 these days, so I thought it was time to look at standalone
4774 players.</p>
4775
4776 <p>A few days ago I was tired of VLC not being listed as a viable
4777 player when I wanted to play videos from the Norwegian National
4778 Broadcasting Company, and decided to investigate why.  The cause is a
4779 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/822245">missing MIME type in the VLC
4780 desktop file</a>.  In the process I wrote a script to compare the set
4781 of MIME types announced in the desktop file and the browser plugin,
4782 only to discover that there is quite a large difference between the
4783 two for VLC.  This discovery made me dig up the script I used to
4784 compare browser plugins, and adjust it to compare desktop files
4785 instead, to try to figure out which multimedia player in Debian
4786 support most file formats.</p>
4787
4788 <p>The result can be seen on the Debian Wiki, as
4789 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">a
4790 table listing all MIME types supported by one of the packages included
4791 in the table</a>, with the package supporting most MIME types being
4792 listed first in the table.</p>
4793
4794 </p>The best multimedia player in Debian?  It is totem, followed by
4795 parole, kplayer, mpv, vlc, smplayer mplayer-gui gnome-mpv and
4796 kmplayer.  Time for the other players to update their announced MIME
4797 support?</p>
4798
4799       </div>
4800       <div class="tags">
4801
4802
4803         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>.
4804
4805
4806       </div>
4807     </div>
4808     <div class="padding"></div>
4809
4810     <div class="entry">
4811       <div class="title">
4812         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Pyra___handheld_computer_with_Debian_preinstalled.html">The Pyra - handheld computer with Debian preinstalled</a>
4813       </div>
4814       <div class="date">
4815          4th May 2016
4816       </div>
4817       <div class="body">
4818         A friend of mine made me aware of
4819 <a href="https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/">The Pyra</a>, a
4820 handheld computer which will be delivered with Debian preinstalled.  I
4821 would love to get one of those for my birthday. :)</p>
4822
4823 <p>The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB
4824 plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a 5"
4825 LCD touch screen.  The 6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole
4826 day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests
4827 confirming this.  The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the
4828 last I heard last night was that 22 more orders were needed before
4829 production started.</p>
4830
4831 <p>As far as I know, this is the first handheld preinstalled with
4832 Debian.  Please let me know if you know of any others.  Is it the
4833 first computer being sold with Debian preinstalled?</p>
4834
4835       </div>
4836       <div class="tags">
4837
4838
4839         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4840
4841
4842       </div>
4843     </div>
4844     <div class="padding"></div>
4845
4846     <div class="entry">
4847       <div class="title">
4848         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/NUUG_contests_Norwegian_police_DNS_seizure_of_popcorn_time_no.html">NUUG contests Norwegian police DNS seizure of popcorn-time.no</a>
4849       </div>
4850       <div class="date">
4851         18th April 2016
4852       </div>
4853       <div class="body">
4854         <p>It is days like today I am really happy to be a member of
4855 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User group</a>, a
4856 member association for those of us believing in free software, open
4857 standards and unix-like operating systems.  NUUG announced today it
4858 will
4859 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__NUUG_og_EFN_begj_rer_rettslig_pr_ving_for_DNS_domenebeslag_av_popcorn_time_no.shtml">try
4860 to bring the seizure of the DNS domain popcorn-time.no as
4861 unlawful</a>, to stand up for the principle that writing about a
4862 controversial topic is not infringing copyrights, and censuring web
4863 pages by hijacking DNS domain should be decided by the courts, not the
4864 police.  The DNS domain was seized by the Norwegian National Authority
4865 for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime
4866 a month ago.  I hope this bring more paying members to NUUG to give
4867 the association the financial muscle needed to bring this case as far
4868 as it must go to stop this kind of DNS hijacking.</p>
4869
4870       </div>
4871       <div class="tags">
4872
4873
4874         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
4875
4876
4877       </div>
4878     </div>
4879     <div class="padding"></div>
4880
4881     <div class="entry">
4882       <div class="title">
4883         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_F__Stone___an_inspiration_for_us_all.html">I.F. Stone - an inspiration for us all</a>
4884       </div>
4885       <div class="date">
4886         13th April 2016
4887       </div>
4888       <div class="body">
4889         <p>I first got to know I.F. Stone when I came across an article by Jon
4890 Schwarz on The Intercept
4891 <a href="https://theintercept.com/2015/05/07/new-documentary-legacy-f-stone/">about
4892 his extraordinary contribution to investigative journalism in
4893 USA</a>. The article is about a new documentary in two parts
4894 (<a href="https://vimeo.com/123974841">part one is 12 minutes</a> and
4895 <a href="https://vimeo.com/123974842">part two is 30 minutes</a>), and
4896 I found both truly fascinating.  It is amazing what he was able to
4897 find by digging up public sources and government papers.  He
4898 documented lots of government abuse and cover ups, and I find
4899 <a href="http://www.ifstone.org/weekly.php">his weekly news letters</a>
4900 inspiring to read even today.</p>
4901
4902 <p><blockquote>
4903 All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.
4904 <br>- I. F. Stone
4905 </blockquote></p>
4906
4907 <p>His starting point was that reporters should not assume governments
4908 and corporations are telling the truth, but verify all their claims as
4909 much as possible.  I wonder how many Norwegian reporters can be said
4910 to follow the principles of I. F. Stone.  They are definitely in short
4911 supply.  If you, like me half a year ago, have never heard of him,
4912 check him out.</p>
4913
4914       </div>
4915       <div class="tags">
4916
4917
4918         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>.
4919
4920
4921       </div>
4922     </div>
4923     <div class="padding"></div>
4924
4925     <div class="entry">
4926       <div class="title">
4927         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_French_paperback_edition_of_the_book_Free_Culture_by_Lawrence_Lessig_is_now_available.html">A French paperback edition of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig is now available</a>
4928       </div>
4929       <div class="date">
4930         12th April 2016
4931       </div>
4932       <div class="body">
4933         <p>I'm happy to report that
4934 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/culture-libre/paperback/product-22645082.html">the
4935 French paperback edition</a> of
4936 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
4937 project to translate</a> the <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free
4938 Culture</a> book by Lawrence Lessig is now available for sale on
4939 Lulu.com.  Once I have formally verified my proof reading copy, which
4940 should be in the mail, the paperback edition should be available in
4941 book stores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble too.</p>
4942
4943 <p>This French edition, Culture Libre, is the work of the
4944 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a> developer Benoît
4945 Guillon, who created the PO file from the initial translation
4946 available from
4947 <a href="http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre">the Wikilivres
4948 wiki pages</a> and completed and corrected the translation to match
4949 the original docbook edition my project is using, as well as
4950 coordinated the proof reading of the final result.  I believe the end
4951 result look great, but I am biased and do not read French.  In
4952 addition to the paperback edition, the book is available in PDF, EPUB
4953 and Mobi format from the github project page linked to above.</p>
4954
4955 <p>When enabling book store distribution on Lulu.com, I had to nearly
4956 triple the price to allow the book stores some profit.  I also had to
4957 accept that I will get some revenue when a book is sold via Lulu.com.
4958 But because of the non-commercial clause in the book license
4959 (CC-BY-NC), this might be a problem.  To bypass the problem I
4960 discussed how to handle the revenue with the author, and we agreed
4961 that the revenue for these editions go to the
4962 <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons non-profit
4963 Corporation</a> who handle donations to the Creative Commons project.
4964 So far they have earned around USD 70 on sales of the
4965 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22440520.html">English</a>
4966 and
4967 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22441576.html">Norwegian
4968 Bokmål</a> editions, according to Lulu.com.  They will get the revenue
4969 for the French edition too.  Their revenue is higher if you buy the
4970 book directly from Lulu.com instead of via a book store, so I
4971 recommend you buy directly from Lulu.com.</p>
4972
4973 <p>Perhaps you would like to get the book published in your language?
4974 The translation is done using a web based translator service, so the
4975 technical bar to enter is fairly low.  Get in touch if you would like
4976 to make this happen.</p>
4977
4978       </div>
4979       <div class="tags">
4980
4981
4982         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>.
4983
4984
4985       </div>
4986     </div>
4987     <div class="padding"></div>
4988
4989     <div class="entry">
4990       <div class="title">
4991         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_edition_of_The_Debian_Administrator_s_Handbook.html">Lets make a Norwegian Bokmål edition of The Debian Administrator's Handbook</a>
4992       </div>
4993       <div class="date">
4994         10th April 2016
4995       </div>
4996       <div class="body">
4997         <p>During this weekends
4998 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Oslo__Takk_for_feilfiksingsfesten.shtml">bug
4999 squashing party and developer gathering</a>, we decided to do our part
5000 to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian
5001 Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the
5002 <a href="http://debian-handbook.info/">Debian Administrator's Handbook
5003 project</a> to get started.  If you want to help out, please start
5004 contributing using
5005 <a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/">the
5006 hosted weblate project page</a>, and get in touch using
5007 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-handbook-translators">the
5008 translators mailing list</a>.  Please also check out
5009 <a href="https://debian-handbook.info/contribute/">the instructions for
5010 contributors</a>.</p>
5011
5012 <p>The book is already available on paper in English, French and
5013 Japanese, and our goal is to get it available on paper in Norwegian
5014 Bokmål too.  In addition to the paper edition, there are also EPUB and
5015 Mobi versions available.  And there are incomplete translations
5016 available for many more languages.</p>
5017
5018       </div>
5019       <div class="tags">
5020
5021
5022         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5023
5024
5025       </div>
5026     </div>
5027     <div class="padding"></div>
5028
5029     <div class="entry">
5030       <div class="title">
5031         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/One_in_two_hundred_Debian_users_using_ZFS_on_Linux_.html">One in two hundred Debian users using ZFS on Linux?</a>
5032       </div>
5033       <div class="date">
5034          7th April 2016
5035       </div>
5036       <div class="body">
5037         <p>Just for fun I had a look at the popcon number of ZFS related
5038 packages in Debian, and was quite surprised with what I found.  I use
5039 ZFS myself at home, but did not really expect many others to do so.
5040 But I might be wrong.</p>
5041
5042 <p>According to
5043 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=spl-linux">the popcon
5044 results for spl-linux</a>, there are 1019 Debian installations, or
5045 0.53% of the population, with the package installed.  As far as I know
5046 the only use of the spl-linux package is as a support library for ZFS
5047 on Linux, so I use it here as proxy for measuring the number of ZFS
5048 installation on Linux in Debian.  In the kFreeBSD variant of Debian
5049 the ZFS feature is already available, and there
5050 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=zfsutils">the popcon
5051 results for zfsutils</a> show 1625 Debian installations or 0.84% of
5052 the population.  So I guess I am not alone in using ZFS on Debian.</p>
5053
5054 <p>But even though the Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum
5055 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00006.html">announced
5056 in April 2015</a> that the legal obstacles blocking ZFS on Debian were
5057 cleared, the package is still not in Debian.  The package is again in
5058 the NEW queue.  Several uploads have been rejected so far because the
5059 debian/copyright file was incomplete or wrong, but there is no reason
5060 to give up.  The current status can be seen on
5061 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-zfsonlinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
5062 team status page</a>, and
5063 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-zfsonlinux/zfs.git">the
5064 source code</a> is available on Alioth.</p>
5065
5066 <p>As I want ZFS to be included in next version of Debian to make sure
5067 my home server can function in the future using only official Debian
5068 packages, and the current blocker is to get the debian/copyright file
5069 accepted by the FTP masters in Debian, I decided a while back to try
5070 to help out the team.  This was the background for my blog post about
5071 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">creating,
5072 updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>, and I
5073 used the techniques I explored there to try to find any errors in the
5074 copyright file.  It is not very easy to check every one of the around
5075 2000 files in the source package, but I hope we this time got it
5076 right.  If you want to help out, check out the git source and try to
5077 find missing entries in the debian/copyright file.</p>
5078
5079       </div>
5080       <div class="tags">
5081
5082
5083         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5084
5085
5086       </div>
5087     </div>
5088     <div class="padding"></div>
5089
5090     <div class="entry">
5091       <div class="title">
5092         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/syslog_trusted_timestamp___chain_of_trusted_timestamps_for_your_syslog.html">syslog-trusted-timestamp - chain of trusted timestamps for your syslog</a>
5093       </div>
5094       <div class="date">
5095          2nd April 2016
5096       </div>
5097       <div class="body">
5098         <p>Two years ago, I had
5099 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">a
5100 look at trusted timestamping options available</a>, and among
5101 other things noted a still open
5102 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/742553">bug in the tsget script</a>
5103 included in openssl that made it harder than necessary to use openssl
5104 as a trusted timestamping client.  A few days ago I was told
5105 <a href="https:/www.difi.no/">the Norwegian government office DIFI</a> is
5106 close to releasing their own trusted timestamp service, and in the
5107 process I was happy to learn about a replacement for the tsget script
5108 using only curl:</p>
5109
5110 <p><pre>
5111 openssl ts -query -data "/etc/shells" -cert -sha256 -no_nonce \
5112   | curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/timestamp-query" \
5113          --data-binary "@-" http://zeitstempel.dfn.de > etc-shells.tsr
5114 openssl ts -reply -text -in etc-shells.tsr
5115 </pre></p>
5116
5117 <p>This produces a binary timestamp file (etc-shells.tsr) which can be
5118 used to verify that the content of the file /etc/shell with the
5119 calculated sha256 hash existed at the point in time when the request
5120 was made.  The last command extract the content of the etc-shells.tsr
5121 in human readable form.  The idea behind such timestamp is to be able
5122 to prove using cryptography that the content of a file have not
5123 changed since the file was stamped.</p>
5124
5125 <p>To verify that the file on disk match the public key signature in
5126 the timestamp file, run the following commands.  It make sure you have
5127 the required certificate for the trusted timestamp service available
5128 and use it to compare the file content with the timestamp.  In
5129 production, one should of course use a better method to verify the
5130 service certificate.</p>
5131
5132 <p><pre>
5133 wget -O ca-cert.txt https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
5134 openssl ts -verify -data /etc/shells -in etc-shells.tsr -CAfile ca-cert.txt -text
5135 </pre></p>
5136
5137 <p>Wikipedia have a lot more information about
5138 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
5139 Timestamping</a> and
5140 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_timestamping">linked
5141 timestamping</a>, and there are several trusted timestamping services
5142 around, both as commercial services and as free and public services.
5143 Among the latter is
5144 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">the
5145 zeitstempel.dfn.de service</a> mentioned above and
5146 <a href="https://freetsa.org/">freetsa.org service</a> linked to from the
5147 wikipedia web site.  I believe the DIFI service should show up on
5148 https://tsa.difi.no, but it is not available to the public at the
5149 moment.  I hope this will change when it is into production.  The
5150 <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC 3161</a> trusted
5151 timestamping protocol standard is even implemented in LibreOffice,
5152 Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat, making it possible to verify when
5153 a document was created.</p>
5154
5155 <p>I would find it useful to be able to use such trusted timestamp
5156 service to make it possible to verify that my stored syslog files have
5157 not been tampered with.  This is not a new idea.  I found one example
5158 implemented on the Endian network appliances where
5159 <a href="http://help.endian.com/entries/21518508-Enabling-Timestamping-on-log-files-">the
5160 configuration of such feature was described in 2012</a>.</p>
5161
5162 <p>But I could not find any free implementation of such feature when I
5163 searched, so I decided to try to
5164 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp">build
5165 a prototype named syslog-trusted-timestamp</a>.  My idea is to
5166 generate a timestamp of the old log files after they are rotated, and
5167 store the timestamp in the new log file just after rotation.  This
5168 will form a chain that would make it possible to see if any old log
5169 files are tampered with.  But syslog is bad at handling kilobytes of
5170 binary data, so I decided to base64 encode the timestamp and add an ID
5171 and line sequence numbers to the base64 data to make it possible to
5172 reassemble the timestamp file again.  To use it, simply run it like
5173 this:
5174
5175 <p><pre>
5176 syslog-trusted-timestamp /path/to/list-of-log-files
5177 </pre></p>
5178
5179 <p>This will send a timestamp from one or more timestamp services (not
5180 yet decided nor implemented) for each listed file to the syslog using
5181 logger(1).  To verify the timestamp, the same program is used with the
5182 --verify option:</p>
5183
5184 <p><pre>
5185 syslog-trusted-timestamp --verify /path/to/log-file /path/to/log-with-timestamp
5186 </pre></p>
5187
5188 <p>The verification step is not yet well designed.  The current
5189 implementation depend on the file path being unique and unchanging,
5190 and this is not a solid assumption.  It also uses process number as
5191 timestamp ID, and this is bound to create ID collisions.  I hope to
5192 have time to come up with a better way to handle timestamp IDs and
5193 verification later.</p>
5194
5195 <p>Please check out
5196 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/syslog-trusted-timestamp">the
5197 prototype for syslog-trusted-timestamp on github</a> and send
5198 suggestions and improvement, or let me know if there already exist a
5199 similar system for timestamping logs already to allow me to join
5200 forces with others with the same interest.</p>
5201
5202 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5203 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5204 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5205
5206       </div>
5207       <div class="tags">
5208
5209
5210         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>.
5211
5212
5213       </div>
5214     </div>
5215     <div class="padding"></div>
5216
5217     <div class="entry">
5218       <div class="title">
5219         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Full_battery_stats_collector_is_now_available_in_Debian.html">Full battery stats collector is now available in Debian</a>
5220       </div>
5221       <div class="date">
5222         23rd March 2016
5223       </div>
5224       <div class="body">
5225         <p>Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an
5226 extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for
5227 later processing and graphing.  The original collector store the
5228 battery level as percentage of last full level, while the new
5229 collector also record battery vendor, model, serial number, design
5230 full level, last full level and current battery level.  This make it
5231 possible to predict the lifetime of the battery as well as visualise
5232 the energy flow when the battery is charging or discharging.</p>
5233
5234 <p>The new tools are available in <tt>/usr/share/battery-stats/</tt>
5235 in the version 0.5.1 package in unstable.  Get the new battery level graph
5236 and lifetime prediction by running:
5237
5238 <p><pre>
5239 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph /var/log/battery-stats.csv
5240 </pre></p>
5241
5242 <p>Or select the 'Battery Level Graph' from your application menu.</p>
5243
5244 <p>The flow in/out of the battery can be seen by running (no menu
5245 entry yet):</p>
5246
5247 <p><pre>
5248 /usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph-flow
5249 </pre></p>
5250
5251 <p>I'm not quite happy with the way the data is visualised, at least
5252 when there are few data points.  The graphs look a bit better with a
5253 few years of data.</p>
5254
5255 <p>A while back one important feature I use in the battery stats
5256 collector broke in Debian.  The scripts in
5257 <tt>/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/</tt> were no longer executed.  I
5258 suspect it happened when Jessie started using systemd, but I do not
5259 know.  The issue is reported as
5260 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/818649">bug #818649</a> against
5261 pm-utils.  I managed to work around it by adding an udev rule to call
5262 the collector script every time the power connector is connected and
5263 disconnected.  With this fix in place it was finally time to make a
5264 new release of the package, and get it into Debian.</p>
5265
5266 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
5267 check out the
5268 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
5269 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
5270 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
5271 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
5272 As always, patches are very welcome.</p>
5273
5274       </div>
5275       <div class="tags">
5276
5277
5278         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5279
5280
5281       </div>
5282     </div>
5283     <div class="padding"></div>
5284
5285     <div class="entry">
5286       <div class="title">
5287         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/UsingQR____Electronic__paper_invoices_using_JSON_and_QR_codes.html">UsingQR - "Electronic" paper invoices using JSON and QR codes</a>
5288       </div>
5289       <div class="date">
5290         19th March 2016
5291       </div>
5292       <div class="body">
5293         <p>Back in 2013 I proposed
5294 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html">a
5295 way to make paper and PDF invoices easier to process electronically by
5296 adding a QR code with the key information about the invoice</a>.  I
5297 suggested using vCard field definition, to get some standard format
5298 for name and address, but any format would work.  I did not do
5299 anything about the proposal, but hoped someone one day would make
5300 something like it.  It would make it possible to efficiently send
5301 machine readable invoices directly between seller and buyer.</p>
5302
5303 <p>This was the background when I came across a proposal and
5304 specification from the web based accounting and invoicing supplier
5305 <a href="http://www.visma.com/">Visma</a> in Sweden called
5306 <a href="http://usingqr.com/">UsingQR</a>.  Their PDF invoices contain
5307 a QR code with the key information of the invoice in JSON format.
5308 This is the typical content of a QR code following the UsingQR
5309 specification (based on a real world example, some numbers replaced to
5310 get a more bogus entry).  I've reformatted the JSON to make it easier
5311 to read.  Normally this is all on one long line:</p>
5312
5313 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-03-19-qr-invoice.png" align="right"><pre>
5314 {
5315  "vh":500.00,
5316  "vm":0,
5317  "vl":0,
5318  "uqr":1,
5319  "tp":1,
5320  "nme":"Din Leverandør",
5321  "cc":"NO",
5322  "cid":"997912345 MVA",
5323  "iref":"12300001",
5324  "idt":"20151022",
5325  "ddt":"20151105",
5326  "due":2500.0000,
5327  "cur":"NOK",
5328  "pt":"BBAN",
5329  "acc":"17202612345",
5330  "bc":"BIENNOK1",
5331  "adr":"0313 OSLO"
5332 }
5333 </pre></p>
5334
5335 </p>The interpretation of the fields can be found in the
5336 <a href="http://usingqr.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/UsingQR_specification1.pdf">format
5337 specification</a> (revision 2 from june 2014).  The format seem to
5338 have most of the information needed to handle accounting and payment
5339 of invoices, at least the fields I have needed so far here in
5340 Norway.</p>
5341
5342 <p>Unfortunately, the site and document do not mention anything about
5343 the patent, trademark and copyright status of the format and the
5344 specification.  Because of this, I asked the people behind it back in
5345 November to clarify.  Ann-Christine Savlid (ann-christine.savlid (at)
5346 visma.com) replied that Visma had not applied for patent or trademark
5347 protection for this format, and that there were no copyright based
5348 usage limitations for the format.  I urged her to make sure this was
5349 explicitly written on the web pages and in the specification, but
5350 unfortunately this has not happened yet.  So I guess if there is
5351 submarine patents, hidden trademarks or a will to sue for copyright
5352 infringements, those starting to use the UsingQR format might be at
5353 risk, but if this happen there is some legal defense in the fact that
5354 the people behind the format claimed it was safe to do so.  At least
5355 with patents, there is always
5356 <a href="http://www.paperspecs.com/paper-news/beware-the-qr-code-patent-trap/">a
5357 chance of getting sued...</a></p>
5358
5359 <p>I also asked if they planned to maintain the format in an
5360 independent standard organization to give others more confidence that
5361 they would participate in the standardization process on equal terms
5362 with Visma, but they had no immediate plans for this.  Their plan was
5363 to work with banks to try to get more users of the format, and
5364 evaluate the way forward if the format proved to be popular.  I hope
5365 they conclude that using an open standard organisation like
5366 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> is the correct place to
5367 maintain such specification.</p>
5368
5369 <p><strong>Update 2016-03-20</strong>: Via Twitter I became aware of
5370 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11319492">some comments
5371 about this blog post</a> that had several useful links and references to
5372 similar systems.  In the Czech republic, the Czech Banking Association
5373 standard #26, with short name SPAYD, uses QR codes with payment
5374 information.  More information is available from the Wikipedia page on
5375 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Payment_Descriptor">Short
5376 Payment Descriptor</a>.  And in Germany, there is a system named
5377 <a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/">BezahlCode</a>,
5378 (<a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/wp-content/uploads/BezahlCode_TechDok.pdf">specification
5379 v1.8 2013-12-05 available as PDF</a>), which uses QR codes with
5380 URL-like formatting using "bank:" as the URI schema/protocol to
5381 provide the payment information.  There is also the
5382 <a href="http://www.ferd-net.de/front_content.php?idcat=231">ZUGFeRD</a>
5383 file format that perhaps could be transfered using QR codes, but I am
5384 not sure if it is done already.  Last, in Bolivia there are reports
5385 that tax information since november 2014 need to be printed in QR
5386 format on invoices.  I have not been able to track down a
5387 specification for this format, because of my limited language skill
5388 sets.</p>
5389
5390       </div>
5391       <div class="tags">
5392
5393
5394         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>.
5395
5396
5397       </div>
5398     </div>
5399     <div class="padding"></div>
5400
5401     <div class="entry">
5402       <div class="title">
5403         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_battery_measurements_a_little_easier_in_Debian.html">Making battery measurements a little easier in Debian</a>
5404       </div>
5405       <div class="date">
5406         15th March 2016
5407       </div>
5408       <div class="body">
5409         <p>Back in September, I blogged about
5410 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">the
5411 system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery</a>, and
5412 how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced).  I
5413 created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing,
5414 but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already
5415 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">a battery-stats
5416 package in Debian</a> that should do the same thing, and I did not see
5417 a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be
5418 fixed instead.  I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and
5419 hoped someone would step in and fix it.  But no-one did.</p>
5420
5421 <p>I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own
5422 hands.  The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of
5423 battery stats (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">available from github</a>) and part of the team maintaining
5424 battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally
5425 able to collect battery status using the <tt>/sys/class/power_supply/</tt>
5426 information provided by the Linux kernel.  If you install the
5427 battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a
5428 graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the
5429 status of the battery.  The source package build and work just fine in
5430 Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not
5431 tested).  The default graph you get for that system look like this:</p>
5432
5433 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-03-15-battery-stats-graph-example.png" width="70%" align="center"></p>
5434
5435 <p>My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
5436 battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
5437 about the battery.  The scripts are merged into the upstream
5438 battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
5439 yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way.  Will have to test a
5440 bit more before I make a new release.</p>
5441
5442 <p>I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
5443 suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
5444 impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
5445 and graphing.</p>
5446
5447 <p>If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
5448 battery, check out the battery-stats package in
5449 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">Debian</a> and
5450 on
5451 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
5452 I would love some help to improve the system further.</p>
5453
5454       </div>
5455       <div class="tags">
5456
5457
5458         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5459
5460
5461       </div>
5462     </div>
5463     <div class="padding"></div>
5464
5465     <div class="entry">
5466       <div class="title">
5467         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html">Creating, updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</a>
5468       </div>
5469       <div class="date">
5470         19th February 2016
5471       </div>
5472       <div class="body">
5473         <p>Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to
5474 details.  And one of the details is the content of the
5475 debian/copyright file, which should list all relevant licenses used by
5476 the code in the package in question, preferably in
5477 <a href="https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/">machine
5478 readable DEP5 format</a>.</p>
5479
5480 <p>For large packages with lots of contributors it is hard to write
5481 and update this file manually, and if you get some detail wrong, the
5482 package is normally rejected by the ftpmasters.  So getting it right
5483 the first time around get the package into Debian faster, and save
5484 both you and the ftpmasters some work..  Today, while trying to figure
5485 out what was wrong with
5486 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=686447">the
5487 zfsonlinux copyright file</a>, I decided to spend some time on
5488 figuring out the options for doing this job automatically, or at least
5489 semi-automatically.</p>
5490
5491 <p>Lucikly, there are at least two tools available for generating the
5492 file based on the code in the source package,
5493 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debmake">debmake</a></tt>
5494 and <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cme">cme</a></tt>.  I'm
5495 not sure which one of them came first, but both seem to be able to
5496 create a sensible draft file.  As far as I can tell, none of them can
5497 be trusted to get the result just right, so the content need to be
5498 polished a bit before the file is OK to upload.  I found the debmake
5499 option in
5500 <a href="http://goofying-with-debian.blogspot.com/2014/07/debmake-checking-source-against-dep-5.html">a
5501 blog posts from 2014</a>.
5502
5503 <p>To generate using debmake, use the -cc option:
5504
5505 <p><pre>
5506 debmake -cc > debian/copyright
5507 </pre></p>
5508
5509 <p>Note there are some problems with python and non-ASCII names, so
5510 this might not be the best option.</p>
5511
5512 <p>The cme option is based on a config parsing library, and I found
5513 this approach in
5514 <a href="https://ddumont.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/improving-creation-of-debian-copyright-file/">a
5515 blog post from 2015</a>.  To generate using cme, use the 'update
5516 dpkg-copyright' option:
5517
5518 <p><pre>
5519 cme update dpkg-copyright
5520 </pre></p>
5521
5522 <p>This will create or update debian/copyright.  The cme tool seem to
5523 handle UTF-8 names better than debmake.</p>
5524
5525 <p>When the copyright file is created, I would also like some help to
5526 check if the file is correct.  For this I found two good options,
5527 <tt>debmake -k</tt> and <tt>license-reconcile</tt>.  The former seem
5528 to focus on license types and file matching, and is able to detect
5529 ineffective blocks in the copyright file.  The latter reports missing
5530 copyright holders and years, but was confused by inconsistent license
5531 names (like CDDL vs. CDDL-1.0).  I suspect it is good to use both and
5532 fix all issues reported by them before uploading.  But I do not know
5533 if the tools and the ftpmasters agree on what is important to fix in a
5534 copyright file, so the package might still be rejected.</p>
5535
5536 <p>The devscripts tool <tt>licensecheck</tt> deserve mentioning.  It
5537 will read through the source and try to find all copyright statements.
5538 It is not comparing the result to the content of debian/copyright, but
5539 can be useful when verifying the content of the copyright file.</p>
5540
5541 <p>Are you aware of better tools in Debian to create and update
5542 debian/copyright file.  Please let me know, or blog about it on
5543 planet.debian.org.</p>
5544
5545 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
5546 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
5547 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
5548
5549 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-20</strong>: I got a tip from Mike Gabriel
5550 on how to use licensecheck and cdbs to create a draft copyright file
5551
5552 <p><pre>
5553 licensecheck --copyright -r `find * -type f` | \
5554   /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5 > debian/copyright.auto
5555 </pre></p>
5556
5557 <p>He mentioned that he normally check the generated file into the
5558 version control system to make it easier to discover license and
5559 copyright changes in the upstream source.  I will try to do the same
5560 with my packages in the future.</p>
5561
5562 <p><strong>Update 2016-02-21</strong>: The cme author recommended
5563 against using -quiet for new users, so I removed it from the proposed
5564 command line.</p>
5565
5566       </div>
5567       <div class="tags">
5568
5569
5570         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5571
5572
5573       </div>
5574     </div>
5575     <div class="padding"></div>
5576
5577     <div class="entry">
5578       <div class="title">
5579         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_in_Debian_to_locate_packages_with_firmware_and_mime_type_support.html">Using appstream in Debian to locate packages with firmware and mime type support</a>
5580       </div>
5581       <div class="date">
5582          4th February 2016
5583       </div>
5584       <div class="body">
5585         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">appstream system</a>
5586 is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very
5587 convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given
5588 firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it.  This can
5589 be done using apt-file too, but that is for someone else to blog
5590 about. :)</p>
5591
5592 <p>Here is a small recipe to find the package with a given firmware
5593 file, in this example I am looking for ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin, randomly
5594 picked from the set of firmware announced using appstream in Debian
5595 unstable.  In general you would be looking for the firmware requested
5596 by the kernel during kernel module loading.  To find the package
5597 providing the example file, do like this:</p>
5598
5599 <blockquote><pre>
5600 % apt install appstream
5601 [...]
5602 % apt update
5603 [...]
5604 % appstreamcli what-provides firmware:runtime ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin | \
5605   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
5606 firmware-qlogic
5607 %
5608 </pre></blockquote>
5609
5610 <p>See <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">the
5611 appstream wiki</a> page to learn how to embed the package metadata in
5612 a way appstream can use.</p>
5613
5614 <p>This same approach can be used to find any package supporting a
5615 given MIME type.  This is very useful when you get a file you do not
5616 know how to handle.  First find the mime type using <tt>file
5617 --mime-type</tt>, and next look up the package providing support for
5618 it.  Lets say you got an SVG file.  Its MIME type is image/svg+xml,
5619 and you can find all packages handling this type like this:</p>
5620
5621 <blockquote><pre>
5622 % apt install appstream
5623 [...]
5624 % apt update
5625 [...]
5626 % appstreamcli what-provides mimetype image/svg+xml | \
5627   awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
5628 bkchem
5629 phototonic
5630 inkscape
5631 shutter
5632 tetzle
5633 geeqie
5634 xia
5635 pinta
5636 gthumb
5637 karbon
5638 comix
5639 mirage
5640 viewnior
5641 postr
5642 ristretto
5643 kolourpaint4
5644 eog
5645 eom
5646 gimagereader
5647 midori
5648 %
5649 </pre></blockquote>
5650
5651 <p>I believe the MIME types are fetched from the desktop file for
5652 packages providing appstream metadata.</p>
5653
5654       </div>
5655       <div class="tags">
5656
5657
5658         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
5659
5660
5661       </div>
5662     </div>
5663     <div class="padding"></div>
5664
5665     <div class="entry">
5666       <div class="title">
5667         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creepy__visualise_geotagged_social_media_information___nice_free_software.html">Creepy, visualise geotagged social media information - nice free software</a>
5668       </div>
5669       <div class="date">
5670         24th January 2016
5671       </div>
5672       <div class="body">
5673         <p>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
5674 with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
5675 position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
5676 time (like every time a SMS is received or sent).  And if their
5677 computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
5678 mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
5679 also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
5680 during installation).  And when these programs send out information to
5681 central collection points, the location is often included, unless
5682 extra care is taken to not send the location.  The provided
5683 information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
5684 good and bad, depend on your point of view).  What is certain, is that
5685 the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
5686 perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
5687 when they share their whereabouts with private and public
5688 entities.</p>
5689
5690 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-01-24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png"></p>
5691
5692 <p>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
5693 when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing.  It is
5694 unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
5695 officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
5696 unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information.  But the
5697 public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
5698 tool to do so is called
5699 <a href="http://www.geocreepy.com/">Creepy or Cree.py</a>.  I
5700 discovered it when I read
5701 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-7787884.html">an
5702 article about Creepy</a> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
5703 November 2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
5704 The python program was in Debian, but
5705 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy">the version in
5706 Debian</a> was completely broken and practically unmaintained.  I
5707 uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
5708 have time to fix it then.  This Christmas I decided to finally try to
5709 get Creepy operational in Debian.  Now a fixed version is available in
5710 Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
5711 are now included
5712 <a href="https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy">upstream</a>.</p>
5713
5714 <p>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
5715 Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
5716 complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
5717 given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
5718 these services.  Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
5719 least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
5720 days it is impossible.  This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
5721 configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
5722 information to them about your search interests.  This should be taken
5723 into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
5724 about yourself with the services.</p>
5725
5726 <p>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
5727 geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
5728 of Norway.  One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
5729 information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
5730 information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
5731 I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
5732 twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
5733 Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
5734 making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
5735 things.  A similar technique have been
5736 <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl">used
5737 to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine</a>, and it is both a powerful
5738 tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
5739 understand the value of the private information they provide to the
5740 public.</p>
5741
5742 <p>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
5743 it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
5744 least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
5745 python-requests-toolbelt).</p>
5746
5747 <p>(I have uploaded
5748 <a href="https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy">the image to
5749 screenshots.debian.net</a> and licensed it under the same terms as the
5750 Creepy program in Debian.)</p>
5751
5752       </div>
5753       <div class="tags">
5754
5755
5756         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
5757
5758
5759       </div>
5760     </div>
5761     <div class="padding"></div>
5762
5763     <div class="entry">
5764       <div class="title">
5765         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Always_download_Debian_packages_using_Tor___the_simple_recipe.html">Always download Debian packages using Tor - the simple recipe</a>
5766       </div>
5767       <div class="date">
5768         15th January 2016
5769       </div>
5770       <div class="body">
5771         <p>During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum
5772 <a href="https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/331/what-is-to-be-done/">observed
5773 that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to
5774 believe a computer have a given security hole</a> if it download a
5775 security fix from a Debian mirror.  This is a good reason to always
5776 use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those
5777 listening do not know which IP address to attack.  In August, Richard
5778 Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible
5779 to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that
5780 download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and
5781 <a href="http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2015/08/24-Tor-enabled_Debian_mirror/">proposed
5782 to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror</a>.  He
5783 was not the first to propose this, as the
5784 <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/apt-transport-tor">apt-transport-tor</a></tt>
5785 package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt
5786 to use <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a>, but I was not
5787 aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.</p>
5788
5789 <p>Richard discussed the idea with Peter Palfrader, one of the Debian
5790 sysadmins, and he set up a Tor hidden service on one of the central
5791 Debian mirrors using the address vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion, thus making
5792 it possible to download packages directly between two tor nodes,
5793 making sure the network traffic always were encrypted.</p>
5794
5795 <p>Here is a short recipe for enabling this on your machine, by
5796 installing <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> and replacing http and https
5797 urls with tor+http and tor+https, and using the hidden service instead
5798 of the official Debian mirror site.  I recommend installing
5799 <tt>etckeeper</tt> before you start to have a history of the changes
5800 done in /etc/.</p>
5801
5802 <blockquote><pre>
5803 apt install apt-transport-tor
5804 sed -i 's% http://ftp.debian.org/% tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/%' /etc/apt/sources.list
5805 sed -i 's% http% tor+http%' /etc/apt/sources.list
5806 </pre></blockquote>
5807
5808 <p>If you have more sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, run
5809 the sed commands for these too.  The sed command is assuming your are
5810 using the ftp.debian.org Debian mirror.  Adjust the command (or just
5811 edit the file manually) to match your mirror.</p>
5812
5813 <p>This work in Debian Jessie and later.  Note that tools like
5814 <tt>apt-file</tt> only recently started using the apt transport
5815 system, and do not work with these tor+http URLs.  For
5816 <tt>apt-file</tt> you need the version currently in experimental,
5817 which need a recent apt version currently only in unstable.  So if you
5818 need a working <tt>apt-file</tt>, this is not for you.</p>
5819
5820 <p>Another advantage from this change is that your machine will start
5821 using Tor regularly and at fairly random intervals (every time you
5822 update the package lists or upgrade or install a new package), thus
5823 masking other Tor traffic done from the same machine.  Using Tor will
5824 become normal for the machine in question.</p>
5825
5826 <p>On <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox</a>, APT
5827 is set up by default to use <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> when Tor is
5828 enabled.  It would be great if it was the default on any Debian
5829 system.</p>
5830
5831       </div>
5832       <div class="tags">
5833
5834
5835         Tags: <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>.
5836
5837
5838       </div>
5839     </div>
5840     <div class="padding"></div>
5841
5842     <div class="entry">
5843       <div class="title">
5844         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenALPR__find_car_license_plates_in_video_streams___nice_free_software.html">OpenALPR, find car license plates in video streams - nice free software</a>
5845       </div>
5846       <div class="date">
5847         23rd December 2015
5848       </div>
5849       <div class="body">
5850         <p>When I was a kid, we used to collect "car numbers", as we used to
5851 call the car license plate numbers in those days.  I would write the
5852 numbers down in my little book and compare notes with the other kids
5853 to see how many region codes we had seen and if we had seen some
5854 exotic or special region codes and numbers.  It was a fun game to pass
5855 time, as we kids have plenty of it.</p>
5856
5857 <p>A few days I came across
5858 <a href="https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr">the OpenALPR
5859 project</a>, a free software project to automatically discover and
5860 report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the
5861 "car numbers" in a machine readable format.  I've been looking for
5862 such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the
5863 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition">automatic
5864 number plate recognition</a> tool only is available in the hands of
5865 the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to
5866 even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance.  I
5867 discovered the developer
5868 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/747509">wanted to get the tool into
5869 Debian</a>, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to
5870 help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian
5871 archive.</p>
5872
5873 <p>Today we finally managed to get the package into shape and uploaded
5874 it into Debian, where it currently
5875 <a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org//new/openalpr_2.2.1-1.html">waits
5876 in the NEW queue</a> for review by the Debian ftpmasters.</p>
5877
5878 <p>I guess you are wondering why on earth such tool would be useful
5879 for the common folks, ie those not running a large government
5880 surveillance system?  Well, I plan to put it in a computer on my bike
5881 and in my car, tracking the cars nearby and allowing me to be notified
5882 when number plates on my watch list are discovered.  Another use case
5883 was suggested by a friend of mine, who wanted to set it up at his home
5884 to open the car port automatically when it discovered the plate on his
5885 car.  When I mentioned it perhaps was a bit foolhardy to allow anyone
5886 capable of placing his license plate number of a piece of cardboard to
5887 open his car port, men replied that it was always unlocked anyway.  I
5888 guess for such use case it make sense.  I am sure there are other use
5889 cases too, for those with imagination and a vision.</p>
5890
5891 <p>If you want to build your own version of the Debian package, check
5892 out the upstream git source and symlink ./distros/debian to ./debian/
5893 before running "debuild" to build the source.  Or wait a bit until the
5894 package show up in unstable.</p>
5895
5896       </div>
5897       <div class="tags">
5898
5899
5900         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
5901
5902
5903       </div>
5904     </div>
5905     <div class="padding"></div>
5906
5907     <div class="entry">
5908       <div class="title">
5909         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html">Using appstream with isenkram to install hardware related packages in Debian</a>
5910       </div>
5911       <div class="date">
5912         20th December 2015
5913       </div>
5914       <div class="body">
5915         <p>Around three years ago, I created
5916 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the isenkram
5917 system</a> to get a more practical solution in Debian for handing
5918 hardware related packages.  A GUI system in the isenkram package will
5919 present a pop-up dialog when some hardware dongle supported by
5920 relevant packages in Debian is inserted into the machine.  The same
5921 lookup mechanism to detect packages is available as command line
5922 tools in the isenkram-cli package.  In addition to mapping hardware,
5923 it will also map kernel firmware files to packages and make it easy to
5924 install needed firmware packages automatically.  The key for this
5925 system to work is a good way to map hardware to packages, in other
5926 words, allow packages to announce what hardware they will work
5927 with.</p>
5928
5929 <p>I started by providing data files in the isenkram source, and
5930 adding code to download the latest version of these data files at run
5931 time, to ensure every user had the most up to date mapping available.
5932 I also added support for storing the mapping in the Packages file in
5933 the apt repositories, but did not push this approach because while I
5934 was trying to figure out how to best store hardware/package mappings,
5935 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
5936 appstream system</a> was announced.  I got in touch and suggested to
5937 add the hardware mapping into that data set to be able to use
5938 appstream as a data source, and this was accepted at least for the
5939 Debian version of appstream.</p>
5940
5941 <p>A few days ago using appstream in Debian for this became possible,
5942 and today I uploaded a new version 0.20 of isenkram adding support for
5943 appstream as a data source for mapping hardware to packages.  The only
5944 package so far using appstream to announce its hardware support is my
5945 pymissile package.  I got help from Matthias Klumpp with figuring out
5946 how do add the required
5947 <a href="https://appstream.debian.org/html/sid/main/metainfo/pymissile.html">metadata
5948 in pymissile</a>.  I added a file debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml with
5949 this content:</p>
5950
5951 <blockquote><pre>
5952 &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
5953 &lt;component&gt;
5954   &lt;id&gt;pymissile&lt;/id&gt;
5955   &lt;metadata_license&gt;MIT&lt;/metadata_license&gt;
5956   &lt;name&gt;pymissile&lt;/name&gt;
5957   &lt;summary&gt;Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher&lt;/summary&gt;
5958   &lt;description&gt;
5959     &lt;p&gt;
5960       Pymissile provides a curses interface to control an original
5961       Marks and Spencer / Striker USB Missile Launcher, as well as a
5962       motion control script to allow a webcamera to control the
5963       launcher.
5964     &lt;/p&gt;
5965   &lt;/description&gt;
5966   &lt;provides&gt;
5967     &lt;modalias&gt;usb:v1130p0202d*&lt;/modalias&gt;
5968   &lt;/provides&gt;
5969 &lt;/component&gt;
5970 </pre></blockquote>
5971
5972 <p>The key for isenkram is the component/provides/modalias value,
5973 which is a glob style match rule for hardware specific strings
5974 (modalias strings) provided by the Linux kernel.  In this case, it
5975 will map to all USB devices with vendor code 1130 and product code
5976 0202.</p>
5977
5978 <p>Note, it is important that the license of all the metadata files
5979 are compatible to have permissions to aggregate them into archive wide
5980 appstream files.  Matthias suggested to use MIT or BSD licenses for
5981 these files.  A challenge is figuring out a good id for the data, as
5982 it is supposed to be globally unique and shared across distributions
5983 (in other words, best to coordinate with upstream what to use).  But
5984 it can be changed later or, so we went with the package name as
5985 upstream for this project is dormant.</p>
5986
5987 <p>To get the metadata file installed in the correct location for the
5988 mirror update scripts to pick it up and include its content the
5989 appstream data source, the file must be installed in the binary
5990 package under /usr/share/appdata/.  I did this by adding the following
5991 line to debian/pymissile.install:</p>
5992
5993 <blockquote><pre>
5994 debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml usr/share/appdata
5995 </pre></blockquote>
5996
5997 <p>With that in place, the command line tool isenkram-lookup will list
5998 all packages useful on the current computer automatically, and the GUI
5999 pop-up handler will propose to install the package not already
6000 installed if a hardware dongle is inserted into the machine in
6001 question.</p>
6002
6003 <p>Details of the modalias field in appstream is available from the
6004 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a> proposal.</p>
6005
6006 <p>To locate the modalias values of all hardware present in a machine,
6007 try running this command on the command line:</p>
6008
6009 <blockquote><pre>
6010 cat $(find /sys/devices/|grep modalias)
6011 </pre></blockquote>
6012
6013 <p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
6014 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
6015 blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
6016
6017       </div>
6018       <div class="tags">
6019
6020
6021         Tags: <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>.
6022
6023
6024       </div>
6025     </div>
6026     <div class="padding"></div>
6027
6028     <div class="entry">
6029       <div class="title">
6030         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_GNU_General_Public_License_is_not_magic_pixie_dust.html">The GNU General Public License is not magic pixie dust</a>
6031       </div>
6032       <div class="date">
6033         30th November 2015
6034       </div>
6035       <div class="body">
6036         <p>A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled
6037 "<a href="http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2015/11/27/sfc-supporter/">The
6038 GPL is not magic pixie dust</a>" explain the importance of making sure
6039 the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GPL</a> is enforced.
6040 I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:<p>
6041
6042 <blockquote>
6043
6044 <p><a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/"><img src="https://sfconservancy.org/img/supporter-badge.png" width="194" height="90" alt="Become a Software Freedom Conservancy Supporter!" align="right" border="0" /></a></p>
6045
6046 <blockquote>
6047 The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.<br/>
6048
6049 The first step is to choose a
6050 <a href="https://copyleft.org/">copyleft</a> license for your
6051 code.<br/>
6052
6053 The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license,
6054 <b>it must be enforced</b><br/>
6055
6056 and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of
6057 work<br/>
6058
6059 is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.
6060 </blockquote>
6061
6062 <p><small>-- <a href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/">Bradley Kuhn</a>, in
6063 <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in Freedom">FaiF</a>
6064 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode
6065 0x57</a></small></p>
6066
6067 <p>As the Debian Website
6068 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/794116">used</a>
6069 <a href="https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/intro/free.wml?r1=1.24&amp;r2=1.25">to</a>
6070 imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to
6071 the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful
6072 software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or
6073 software products.  Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created
6074 to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but
6075 such licenses are not enough.  With the ongoing adoption of Free
6076 Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's
6077 expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of
6078 ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always.  As Karen
6079 and Bradley explained in <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in
6080 Freedom">FaiF</a>
6081 <a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode 0x57</a>,
6082 copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court
6083 to protect it.  The reality of today's world is that legal
6084 representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming.  With
6085 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/">gpl-violations.org</a> in hiatus
6086 <a href="http://gpl-violations.org/news/20151027-homepage-recovers/">until</a>
6087 some time in 2016, the <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/">Software
6088 Freedom Conservancy</a> (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender
6089 of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations.
6090 In March the SFC supported a
6091 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">lawsuit
6092 by Christoph Hellwig</a> against VMware for refusing to
6093 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html">comply
6094 with the GPL</a> in relation to their use of parts of the Linux
6095 kernel.  Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and
6096 conferences
6097 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">blocked
6098 or cancelled their talks</a>.  As a result they have decided to rely
6099 less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of
6100 individuals who support Free Software and copyleft.  So the SFC has
6101 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/23/2015fundraiser/">launched</a>
6102 a <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">campaign</a> to create
6103 a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by
6104 supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free
6105 Software.</p>
6106
6107 <p>If you support Free Software,
6108 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/26/like-what-I-do/">like</a>
6109 what the SFC do, agree with their
6110 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/principles.html">compliance
6111 principles</a>, are happy about their
6112 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">successes</a> in 2015,
6113 work on a project that is an SFC
6114 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/members/current/">member</a> and or
6115 just want to stand up for copyleft, please join
6116 <a href="https://identi.ca/cwebber/image/JQGPA4qbTyyp3-MY8QpvuA">Christopher
6117 Allan Webber</a>,
6118 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">Carol
6119 Smith</a>,
6120 <a href="http://www.jonobacon.org/2015/11/25/supporting-software-freedom-conservancy/">Jono
6121 Bacon</a>, myself and
6122 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/#supporters">others</a> in
6123 becoming a
6124 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">supporter</a>.  For the
6125 next week your donation will be
6126 <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/27/black-friday/">matched</a>
6127 by an anonymous donor.  Please also consider asking your employer to
6128 match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC.  Don't forget to
6129 spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or
6130 social media accounts.</p>
6131
6132 </blockquote>
6133
6134 <p>I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter
6135 of Software Freedom Conservancy myself.  Perhaps you should be a
6136 supporter too?</p>
6137
6138       </div>
6139       <div class="tags">
6140
6141
6142         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>.
6143
6144
6145       </div>
6146     </div>
6147     <div class="padding"></div>
6148
6149     <div class="entry">
6150       <div class="title">
6151         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html">PGP key transition statement for key EE4E02F9</a>
6152       </div>
6153       <div class="date">
6154         17th November 2015
6155       </div>
6156       <div class="body">
6157         <p>I've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to
6158 set it up properly.  I wanted to generate it offline and have it
6159 available on <a href="http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/#openpgp">a OpenPGP
6160 smart card</a> for daily use, and learning how to do it and finding
6161 time to sit down with an offline machine almost took forever.  But
6162 finally I've been able to complete the process, and have now moved
6163 from my old GPG key to a new GPG key.  See
6164 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-11-17-new-gpg-key-transition.txt">the
6165 full transition statement, signed with both my old and new key</a> for
6166 the details.  This is my new key:</p>
6167
6168 <pre>
6169 pub   3936R/<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/111D6B29EE4E02F9.html">111D6B29EE4E02F9</a> 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-14]
6170       Key fingerprint = 3AC7 B2E3 ACA5 DF87 78F1  D827 111D 6B29 EE4E 02F9
6171 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@hungry.com&gt;
6172 uid                  Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@debian.org&gt;
6173 sub   4096R/87BAFB0E 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
6174 sub   4096R/F91E6DE9 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
6175 sub   4096R/A0439BAB 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
6176 </pre>
6177
6178 <p>The key can be downloaded from the OpenPGP key servers, signed by
6179 my old key.</p>
6180
6181 <p>If you signed my old key
6182 (<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/DB4CCC4B2A30D729.html">DB4CCC4B2A30D729</a>),
6183 I'd very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and
6184 instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if
6185 you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.</p>
6186
6187       </div>
6188       <div class="tags">
6189
6190
6191         Tags: <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>.
6192
6193
6194       </div>
6195     </div>
6196     <div class="padding"></div>
6197
6198     <div class="entry">
6199       <div class="title">
6200         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Pentagon_deciding_the_Norwegian_negotiating_position_on_Internet_governance_.html">Is Pentagon deciding the Norwegian negotiating position on Internet governance?</a>
6201       </div>
6202       <div class="date">
6203          3rd November 2015
6204       </div>
6205       <div class="body">
6206         <p>In Norway, all government offices are required by law to keep a
6207 list of every document or letter arriving and leaving their offices.
6208 Internal notes should also be documented.  The document list (called a mail
6209 journal - "postjournal" in Norwegian) is public information and thanks
6210 to the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (Offentleglova) the mail
6211 journal is available for everyone.  Most offices even publish the mail
6212 journal on their web pages, as PDFs or tables in web pages.  The state-level offices even have a shared web based search service (called
6213 <a href="https://www.oep.no/">Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal -
6214 OEP</a>) to make it possible to search the entries in the list.  Not
6215 all journal entries show up on OEP, and the search service is hard to
6216 use, but OEP does make it easier to find at least some interesting
6217 journal entries .</p>
6218
6219 <p>In 2012 I came across a document in the mail journal for the
6220 Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications on OEP that
6221 piqued my interest.  The title of the document was
6222 "<a href="https://www.oep.no/search/resultSingle.html?journalPostId=4192362">Internet
6223 Governance and how it affects national security</a>" (Norwegian:
6224 "Internet Governance og påvirkning på nasjonal sikkerhet").  The
6225 document date was 2012-05-22, and it was said to be sent from the
6226 "Permanent Mission of Norway to the United Nations".  I asked for a
6227 copy, but my request was rejected with a reference to a legal clause said to authorize them to reject it
6228 (<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20,
6229 letter c</a>) and an explanation that the document was exempt because
6230 of foreign policy interests as it contained information related to the
6231 Norwegian negotiating position, negotiating strategies or similar.  I
6232 was told the information in the document related to the ongoing
6233 negotiation in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).  The
6234 explanation made sense to me in early January 2013, as a ITU
6235 conference in Dubay discussing Internet Governance
6236 (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunication_Union#World_Conference_on_International_Telecommunications_2012_.28WCIT-12.29">World
6237 Conference on International Telecommunications - WCIT-12</a>) had just
6238 ended,
6239 <a href="http://www.digi.no/kommentarer/2012/12/18/tvil-om-usas-rolle-pa-teletoppmote">reportedly
6240 in chaos</a> when USA walked out of the negotiations and 25 countries
6241 including Norway refused to sign the new treaty.  It seemed
6242 reasonable to believe talks were still going on a few weeks later.
6243 Norway was represented at the ITU meeting by two authorities, the
6244 <a href="http://www.nkom.no/">Norwegian Communications Authority</a>
6245 and the <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dep/sd/">Ministry of
6246 Transport and Communications</a>.  This might be the reason the letter
6247 was sent to the ministry.  As I was unable to find the document in the
6248 mail journal of any Norwegian UN mission, I asked the ministry who had
6249 sent the document to the ministry, and was told that it was the Deputy
6250 Permanent Representative with the Permanent Mission of Norway in
6251 Geneva.</p>
6252
6253 <p>Three years later, I was still curious about the content of that
6254 document, and again asked for a copy, believing the negotiation was
6255 over now.  This time
6256 <a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/kopi_av_dokumenter_i_sak_2012914">I
6257 asked both the Ministry of Transport and Communications as the
6258 receiver</a> and
6259 <a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/brev_om_internet_governance_og_p">asked
6260 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva as the sender</a> for a
6261 copy, to see if they both agreed that it should be withheld from the
6262 public.  The ministry upheld its rejection quoting the same law
6263 reference as before, while the permanent mission rejected it quoting a
6264 different clause
6265 (<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20
6266 letter b</a>), claiming that they were required to keep the
6267 content of the document from the public because it contained
6268 information given to Norway with the expressed or implied expectation
6269 that the information should not be made public.  I asked the permanent
6270 mission for an explanation, and was told that the document contained
6271 an account from a meeting held in the Pentagon for a limited group of NATO
6272 nations where the organiser of the meeting did not intend the content
6273 of the meeting to be publicly known.  They explained that giving me a
6274 copy might cause Norway to not get access to similar information in
6275 the future and thus hurt the future foreign interests of Norway.  They
6276 also explained that the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was not
6277 the author of the document, they only got a copy of it, and because of
6278 this had not listed it in their mail journal.</p>
6279
6280 <p>Armed with this
6281 knowledge I asked the Ministry to reconsider and asked who was the
6282 author of the document, now realising that it was not same as the
6283 "sender" according to Ministry of Transport and Communications.  The
6284 ministry upheld its rejection but told me the name of the author of
6285 the document.  According to
6286 <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/unga69_rapport1/id2001204/">a
6287 government report</a> the author was with the Permanent Mission of
6288 Norway in New York a bit more than a year later (2014-09-22), so I
6289 guessed that might be the office responsible for writing and sending
6290 the report initially and
6291 <a href="https://www.mimesbronn.no/request/mote_2012_i_pentagon_om_itu">asked
6292 them for a copy</a> but I was obviously wrong as I was told that the
6293 document was unknown to them and that the author did not work there
6294 when the document was written.  Next, I asked the Permanent Mission of
6295 Norway in Geneva and the Foreign Ministry to reconsider and at least
6296 tell me who sent the document to Deputy Permanent Representative with
6297 the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva.  The Foreign Ministry also
6298 upheld its rejection, but told me that the person sending the document
6299 to Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was the defence attaché with
6300 the Norwegian Embassy in Washington.  I do not know if this is the
6301 same person as the author of the document.</p>
6302
6303 <p>If I understand the situation correctly, someone capable of
6304 inviting selected NATO nations to a meeting in Pentagon organised a
6305 meeting where someone representing the Norwegian defence attaché in
6306 Washington attended, and the account from this meeting is interpreted
6307 by the Ministry of Transport and Communications to expose Norways
6308 negotiating position, negotiating strategies and similar regarding the
6309 ITU negotiations on Internet Governance.  It is truly amazing what can
6310 be derived from mere meta-data.</p>
6311
6312 <p>I wonder which NATO countries besides Norway attended this meeting?
6313 And what exactly was said and done at the meeting?  Anyone know?</p>
6314
6315       </div>
6316       <div class="tags">
6317
6318
6319         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
6320
6321
6322       </div>
6323     </div>
6324     <div class="padding"></div>
6325
6326     <div class="entry">
6327       <div class="title">
6328         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_book___Fri_kultur__by__lessig__a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of__Free_Culture__from_2004.html">New book, "Fri kultur" by @lessig, a Norwegian Bokmål translation of "Free Culture" from 2004</a>
6329       </div>
6330       <div class="date">
6331         31st October 2015
6332       </div>
6333       <div class="body">
6334         <p>People keep asking me where to get the various forms of the book I
6335 published last week, the Norwegian Bokmål edition of Lawrence Lessigs
6336 book <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>.  It was
6337 published on paper via lulu.com, and is also available in PDF, ePub
6338 and MOBI format.  I currently sell the paper edition for self cost
6339 from lulu.com, but might extend the distribution to book stores like
6340 Amazon and Barnes & Noble later.  This will double the price and force
6341 me to make a profit from selling the book.  Anyway, here are links to
6342 get the book in different formats:</p>
6343
6344 <ul>
6345
6346   <li><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22406445.html">Buy
6347     paper edition from lulu.com</a></li>
6348
6349   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf">Download
6350     PDF, size 7.9 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
6351
6352   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub">Download
6353     ePub, size 11 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
6354
6355   <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.mobi">Download
6356     MOBI, size 3.8 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
6357
6358 </ul>
6359
6360 <p>Note that the MOBI version have problems with the table of content,
6361 at least with the viewers I have been able to test.  And the ePub file
6362 have several problems according to
6363 <a href="https://github.com/IDPF/epubcheck">epubcheck</a>, but seem
6364 to display fine in the viewers I have tested.  All the files needed to
6365 create the book in various forms are available from
6366 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">the
6367 github project page</a>.</p>
6368
6369 <p>The project got press coverage from the Norwegian IT news site
6370 digi.no.  Check out the article
6371 "<a href="http://www.digi.no/juss_og_samfunn/2015/10/29/vil-apne-politikernes-oyne-for-creative-commons">Vil
6372 åpne politikernes øyne for Creative Commons</a>".</li>
6373
6374 <p>I've <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">blogged
6375 about the project</a> as it moved along.  The blogs document the translation
6376 progress and insights I had along the way.</p>
6377
6378       </div>
6379       <div class="tags">
6380
6381
6382         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>.
6383
6384
6385       </div>
6386     </div>
6387     <div class="padding"></div>
6388
6389     <div class="entry">
6390       <div class="title">
6391         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Free_Culture__by__lessig___The_background_story_for_Creative_Commons___new_edition_available.html">"Free Culture" by @lessig - The background story for Creative Commons - new edition available</a>
6392       </div>
6393       <div class="date">
6394         23rd October 2015
6395       </div>
6396       <div class="body">
6397         <p><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">Click
6398 here to buy the book</a>.</p>
6399
6400 <p>In 2004, as the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons
6401 movement</a> gained momentum, its creator Lawrence Lessig wrote the
6402 book <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)">Free
6403 Culture</a> to explain the problems with increasing copyright
6404 regulation and suggest some solutions.  I read the book back then and
6405 was very moved by it.  Reading the book inspired me and changed the
6406 way I looked on copyright law, and I would love it if more people
6407 would read it too.</p>
6408
6409 <p>Because of this, I decided in the summer of 2012 to translate it to
6410 Norwegian Bokmål and publish it for those of my friends and family
6411 that prefer to read books in Norwegian.  I translated the book using
6412 docbook and a gettext PO file, and a byproduct of this process is a
6413 new edition of the English original.  I've been in touch with the
6414 author during by work, and he said it was fine with him if I also
6415 published an English version.  So I decided to do so.  Today, I made
6416 this edition
6417 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">available
6418 for sale on Lulu.com</a>, for those interested in a paper book.  This
6419 is the cover:
6420
6421 <p align="center"><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-10-23-free-culture-english-published-cover.png"/></a></p>
6422
6423 <p>The Norwegian Bokmål version will be available for purchase in a
6424 few days.  I also plan to publish a French version in a few weeks or
6425 months, depending on the amount of people with knowledge of French to
6426 join the translation project.  So far there is only one active
6427 person, but the French book is almost completely translated but
6428 need some proof reading.</p>
6429
6430 <p>The book is also available in PDF, ePub and MOBI formats from
6431 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
6432 github project page</a>.  Note the ePub and MOBI versions have some
6433 formatting problems I believe is due to bugs in the docbook tool
6434 dbtoepub (Debian BTS issues
6435 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=795842">#795842</a>
6436 and
6437 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=796871">#796871</a>),
6438 but I have not taken the time to investigate.  I recommend the PDF and
6439 ePub version for now, as they seem to show up fine in the viewers I
6440 have available.</p>
6441
6442 <p>After the translation to Norwegian Bokmål was complete, I was able
6443 to secure some sponsoring from
6444 <a href="http://www.nuugfoundation.no/">the NUUG Foundation</a> to
6445 print the book.  This is the reason their logo is located on the back
6446 cover. I am very grateful for their contribution, and will use it to
6447 give a copy of the Norwegian edition to members of the Norwegian
6448 Parliament and other decision makers here in Norway.</p>
6449
6450       </div>
6451       <div class="tags">
6452
6453
6454         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>.
6455
6456
6457       </div>
6458     </div>
6459     <div class="padding"></div>
6460
6461     <div class="entry">
6462       <div class="title">
6463         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lawrence_Lessig_interviewed_Edward_Snowden_a_year_ago.html">Lawrence Lessig interviewed Edward Snowden a year ago</a>
6464       </div>
6465       <div class="date">
6466         19th October 2015
6467       </div>
6468       <div class="body">
6469         <p>Last year, <a href="https://lessig2016.us/">US president candidate
6470 in the Democratic Party</a> Lawrence interviewed Edward Snowden.  The
6471 one hour interview was
6472 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Sr96TFQQE">published by
6473 Harvard Law School 2014-10-23 on Youtube</a>, and the meeting took
6474 place 2014-10-20.</p>
6475
6476 <p>The questions are very good, and there is lots of useful
6477 information to be learned and very interesting issues to think about
6478 being raised.  Please check it out.</p>
6479
6480 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/o_Sr96TFQQE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
6481
6482 <p>I find it especially interesting to hear again that Snowden did try
6483 to bring up his reservations through the official channels without any
6484 luck.  It is in sharp contrast to the answers made 2013-11-06 by the
6485 Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg to the Norwegian Parliament,
6486 <a href="https://tale.holderdeord.no/speeches/s131106/68">claiming
6487 Snowden is no Whistle-Blower</a> because he should have taken up his
6488 concerns internally and using official channels.  It make me sad
6489 that this is the political leadership we have here in Norway.</p>
6490
6491       </div>
6492       <div class="tags">
6493
6494
6495         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>.
6496
6497
6498       </div>
6499     </div>
6500     <div class="padding"></div>
6501
6502     <div class="entry">
6503       <div class="title">
6504         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Story_of_Aaron_Swartz___Let_us_all_weep_.html">The Story of Aaron Swartz - Let us all weep!</a>
6505       </div>
6506       <div class="date">
6507          8th October 2015
6508       </div>
6509       <div class="body">
6510         <p>The movie "<a href="http://www.takepart.com/internets-own-boy">The
6511 Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz</a>" is both inspiring
6512 and depressing at the same time.  The work of Aaron Swartz has
6513 inspired me in my work, and I am grateful of all the improvements he
6514 was able to initiate or complete.  I wish I am able to do as much good
6515 in my life as he did in his.  Every minute of this 1:45 long movie is
6516 inspiring in documenting how much impact a single person can have on
6517 improving the society and this world.  And it is depressing in
6518 documenting how the law enforcement of USA (and other countries) is
6519 corrupted to a point where they can push a bright kid to his death for
6520 downloading too many scientific articles.  Aaron is dead.  Let us all
6521 weep.</p>
6522
6523 <p>The movie is also available on
6524 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXr-2hwTk58">Youtube</a>.  I
6525 wish there were Norwegian subtitles available, so I could show it to
6526 my parents.</p>
6527
6528       </div>
6529       <div class="tags">
6530
6531
6532         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>.
6533
6534
6535       </div>
6536     </div>
6537     <div class="padding"></div>
6538
6539     <div class="entry">
6540       <div class="title">
6541         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/French_Docbook_PDF_EPUB_MOBI_edition_of_the_Free_Culture_book.html">French Docbook/PDF/EPUB/MOBI edition of the Free Culture book</a>
6542       </div>
6543       <div class="date">
6544          1st October 2015
6545       </div>
6546       <div class="body">
6547         <p>As I wrap up the Norwegian version of
6548 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
6549 Culture</a> book by Lawrence Lessig (still waiting for my final proof
6550 reading copy to arrive in the mail), my great
6551 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a> helper and
6552 developer of the dblatex docbook processor, Benoît Guillon, decided a
6553 to try to create a French version of the book.  He started with the
6554 French translation available from the
6555 <a href="http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre">Wikilivres wiki
6556 pages</a>, and wrote a program to convert it into a PO file, allowing
6557 the translation to be integrated into the po4a based framework I use
6558 to create the Norwegian translation from the English edition.  We meet
6559 on the <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23dblatex">#dblatex IRC
6560 channel</a> to discuss the work.  If you want to help create a French
6561 edition, check out
6562 <a href="https://github.com/marsgui/free-culture-lessig">his git
6563 repository</a> and join us on IRC.  If the French edition look good,
6564 we might publish it as a paper book on lulu.com.  A French version of
6565 the drawings and the cover need to be provided for this to happen.</p>
6566
6567       </div>
6568       <div class="tags">
6569
6570
6571         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>.
6572
6573
6574       </div>
6575     </div>
6576     <div class="padding"></div>
6577
6578     <div class="entry">
6579       <div class="title">
6580         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">The life and death of a laptop battery</a>
6581       </div>
6582       <div class="date">
6583         24th September 2015
6584       </div>
6585       <div class="body">
6586         <p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
6587 But this do not last.  The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
6588 within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
6589 and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
6590 all the time.  Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
6591 about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
6592 more hard facts when the battery started to fail.</p>
6593
6594 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
6595
6596 <p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
6597 battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
6598 by someone else.  I found
6599 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
6600 which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
6601 broken.  I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
6602 write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
6603 from him.  Via
6604 <a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
6605 blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
6606 discovered
6607 <a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
6608 available in Debian.</p>
6609
6610 <p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
6611 battery stats ever since. Now my
6612 /var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around 115,000
6613 measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
6614 when it is unable to charge above 7% of original capacity.  My
6615 collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:</p>
6616
6617 <pre>
6618 #!/bin/sh
6619 # Inspired by
6620 # http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
6621 # See also
6622 # http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2013/01/02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
6623 logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
6624
6625 files="manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
6626     energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status"
6627
6628 if [ ! -e "$logfile" ] ; then
6629     (
6630         printf "timestamp,"
6631         for f in $files; do
6632             printf "%s," $f
6633         done
6634         echo
6635     ) > "$logfile"
6636 fi
6637
6638 log_battery() {
6639     # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
6640     # when several log processes run in parallel.
6641     msg=$(printf "%s," $(date +%s); \
6642         for f in $files; do \
6643             printf "%s," $(cat $f); \
6644         done)
6645     echo "$msg"
6646 }
6647
6648 cd /sys/class/power_supply
6649
6650 for bat in BAT*; do
6651     (cd $bat && log_battery >> "$logfile")
6652 done
6653 </pre>
6654
6655 <p>The script is called when the power management system detect a
6656 change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
6657 and out of hibernation and suspend.  In addition, it collect a value
6658 every 10 minutes.  This make it possible for me know when the battery
6659 is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
6660 The code for the Debian package
6661 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
6662 available on github</a>.</p>
6663
6664 <p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
6665
6666 <pre>
6667 timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
6668 1376591133,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,62800000,62160000,39050000,0,Discharging,
6669 [...]
6670 1443090528,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
6671 1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
6672 </pre>
6673
6674 <p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
6675 over time.  This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
6676 battery.</p>
6677
6678 <p>But why is this happening?  Why are my laptop batteries always
6679 dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
6680 satellites keep working year after year.  If we are to believe
6681 <a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
6682 University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
6683 chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
6684 all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
6685 I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
6686 <a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
6687 the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
6688 100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
6689 like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
6690 story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
6691 Linux too.</p>
6692
6693 <p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
6694 stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
6695 preparation for a longer trip?  I found
6696 <a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
6697 recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
6698 80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
6699 load).</p>
6700
6701 <p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
6702 at the start.  I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
6703 times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
6704 back to design capacity.  And I wonder if the discharge and charge
6705 speed change over time, or if this stay the same.  I did not yet try
6706 to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
6707 level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
6708 those.</p>
6709
6710 <p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
6711 acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
6712 packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
6713 initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
6714 and stop.  I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
6715 and need to be replaced.  The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
6716 specific.</p>
6717
6718       </div>
6719       <div class="tags">
6720
6721
6722         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
6723
6724
6725       </div>
6726     </div>
6727     <div class="padding"></div>
6728
6729     <div class="entry">
6730       <div class="title">
6731         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Book_cover_for_the_Free_Culture_book_finally_done.html">Book cover for the Free Culture book finally done</a>
6732       </div>
6733       <div class="date">
6734          3rd September 2015
6735       </div>
6736       <div class="body">
6737         <p>Creating a good looking book cover proved harder than I expected.
6738 I wanted to create a cover looking similar to the original cover of
6739 the
6740 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
6741 Culture</a> book we are translating to Norwegian, and I wanted it in
6742 vector format for high resolution printing.  But my inkscape knowledge
6743 were not nearly good enough to pull that off.
6744
6745 <p>But thanks to the great inkscape community, I was able to wrap up
6746 the cover yesterday evening.  I asked on the
6747 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23inkscape">#inkscape IRC channel</a>
6748 on Freenode for help and clues, and Marc Jeanmougin (Mc-) volunteered
6749 to try to recreate it based on the PDF of the cover from the HTML
6750 version.  Not only did he create a
6751 <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/copy1.svg ">SVG document with
6752 the original and his vector version side by side</a>, he even provided
6753 an <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/out-1.ogv">instruction
6754 video</a> explaining how he did it</a>.  But the instruction video is
6755 not easy to follow for an untrained inkscape user. The video is a
6756 recording on how he did it, and he is obviously very experienced as
6757 the menu selections are very quick and he mentioned on IRC that he did
6758 use some keyboard shortcuts that can't be seen on the video, but it
6759 give a good idea about the inkscape operations to use to create the
6760 stripes with the embossed copyright sign in the center.</p>
6761
6762 <p>I took his SVG file, copied the vector image and re-sized it to fit
6763 on the cover I was drawing.  I am happy with the end result, and the
6764 current english version look like this:</p>
6765
6766 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-03-free-culture-cover.png" width="70%" align="center"/>
6767
6768 <p>I am not quite sure about the text on the back, but guess it will
6769 do.  I picked three quotes from the official site for the book, and
6770 hope it will work to trigger the interest of potential readers.  The
6771 Norwegian cover will look the same, but with the texts and bar code
6772 replaced with the Norwegian version.</p>
6773
6774 <p>The book is very close to being ready for publication, and I expect
6775 to upload the final draft to Lulu in the next few days and order a
6776 final proof reading copy to verify that everything look like it should
6777 before allowing everyone to order their own copy of Free Culture, in
6778 English or Norwegian Bokmål.  I'm waiting to give the the productive
6779 proof readers a chance to complete their work.</p>
6780
6781       </div>
6782       <div class="tags">
6783
6784
6785         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>.
6786
6787
6788       </div>
6789     </div>
6790     <div class="padding"></div>
6791
6792     <div class="entry">
6793       <div class="title">
6794         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/In_my_hand__a_pocket_book_edition_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_.html">In my hand, a pocket book edition of the Norwegian Free Culture book!</a>
6795       </div>
6796       <div class="date">
6797         19th August 2015
6798       </div>
6799       <div class="body">
6800         <p>Today, finally, my first printed draft edition of the Norwegian
6801 translation of Free Culture I have been working on for the last few
6802 years arrived in the mail.  I had to fake a cover to get the interior
6803 printed, and the exterior of the book look awful, but that is
6804 irrelevant at this point.  I asked for a printed pocket book version
6805 to get an idea about the font sizes and paper format as well as how
6806 good the figures and images look in print, but also to test what the
6807 pocket book version would look like.  After receiving the 500 page
6808 pocket book, it became obvious to me that that pocket book size is too
6809 small for this book.  I believe the book is too thick, and several
6810 tables and figures do not look good in the size they get with that
6811 small page sizes.  I believe I will go with the 5.5x8.5 inch size
6812 instead.  A surprise discovery from the paper version was how bad the
6813 URLs look in print.  They are very hard to read in the colophon page.
6814 The URLs are red in the PDF, but light gray on paper.  I need to
6815 change the color of links somehow to look better.  But there is a
6816 printed book in my hand, and it feels great. :)</p>
6817
6818 <p>Now I only need to fix the cover, wrap up the postscript with the
6819 store behind the book, and collect the last corrections from the proof
6820 readers before the book is ready for proper printing.  Cover artists
6821 willing to work for free and create a Creative Commons licensed vector
6822 file looking similar to the original is most welcome, as my skills as
6823 a graphics designer are mostly missing.</p>
6824
6825       </div>
6826       <div class="tags">
6827
6828
6829         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>.
6830
6831
6832       </div>
6833     </div>
6834     <div class="padding"></div>
6835
6836     <div class="entry">
6837       <div class="title">
6838         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_paper_version_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_heading_my_way.html">First paper version of the Norwegian Free Culture book heading my way</a>
6839       </div>
6840       <div class="date">
6841          9th August 2015
6842       </div>
6843       <div class="body">
6844         <p>Typesetting a book is harder than I hoped.  As the translation is
6845 mostly done, and a volunteer proof reader was going to check the text
6846 on paper, it was time this summer to focus on formatting my translated
6847 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> based version of the
6848 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> book by Lawrence
6849 Lessig.  I've been trying to get both docboox-xsl+fop and dblatex to
6850 give me a good looking PDF, but in the end I went with dblatex, because
6851 its Debian maintainer and upstream developer were responsive and very
6852 helpful in solving my formatting challenges.</p>
6853
6854 <p>Last night, I finally managed to create a PDF that no longer made
6855 <a href="http://www.lulu.com/">Lulu.com</a> complain after uploading,
6856 and I ordered a text version of the book on paper.  It is lacking a
6857 proper book cover and is not tagged with the correct ISBN number, but
6858 should give me an idea what the finished book will look like.</p>
6859
6860 <p>Instead of using Lulu, I did consider printing the book using
6861 <a href="http://www.createspace.com/">CreateSpace</a>, but ended up
6862 using Lulu because it had smaller book size options (CreateSpace seem
6863 to lack pocket book with extended distribution).  I looked for a
6864 similar service in Norway, but have not seen anything so far.  Please
6865 let me know if I am missing out on something here.</p>
6866
6867 <p>But I still struggle to decide the book size.  Should I go for
6868 pocket book (4.25x6.875 inches / 10.8x17.5 cm) with 556 pages, Digest
6869 (5.5x8.5 inches / 14x21.6 cm) with 323 pages or US Trade (6x8 inches /
6870 15.3x22.9 cm) with 280 pages?  Fewer pager give a cheaper book, and a
6871 smaller book is easier to carry around.  The test book I ordered was
6872 pocket book sized, to give me an idea how well that fit in my hand,
6873 but I suspect I will end up using a digest sized book in the end to
6874 bring the prize down further.</p>
6875
6876 <p>My biggest challenge at the moment is making nice cover art.  My
6877 inkscape skills are not yet up to the task of replicating the original
6878 cover in SVG format.  I also need to figure out what to write about
6879 the book on the back (will most likely use the same text as the
6880 description on web based book stores).  I would love help with this,
6881 if you are willing to license the art source and final version using
6882 the same CC license as the book.  My artistic skills are not really up
6883 to the task.</p>
6884
6885 <p>I plan to publish the book in both English and Norwegian and on
6886 paper, in PDF form as well as EPUB and MOBI format.  The current
6887 status can as usual be found on
6888 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
6889 in the archive/ directory.  So far I have spent all time on making the
6890 PDF version look good.  Someone should probably do the same with the
6891 dbtoepub generated e-book.  Help is definitely needed here, as I
6892 expect to run out of steem before I find time to improve the epub
6893 formatting.</p>
6894
6895 <p>Please let me know via github if you find typos in the book or
6896 discover translations that should be improved.  The final proof
6897 reading is being done right now, and I expect to publish the finished
6898 result in a few months.</p>
6899
6900       </div>
6901       <div class="tags">
6902
6903
6904         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>.
6905
6906
6907       </div>
6908     </div>
6909     <div class="padding"></div>
6910
6911     <div class="entry">
6912       <div class="title">
6913         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_DocBook_footnotes_as_endnotes_with_dblatex.html">Typesetting DocBook footnotes as endnotes with dblatex</a>
6914       </div>
6915       <div class="date">
6916         16th July 2015
6917       </div>
6918       <div class="body">
6919         <p>I'm still working on the Norwegian version of the
6920 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture book by Lawrence
6921 Lessig</a>, and is now working on the final typesetting and layout.
6922 One of the features I want to get the structure similar to the
6923 original book is to typeset the footnotes as endnotes in the notes
6924 chapter.  Based on the
6925 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/685063">feedback from the Debian
6926 maintainer and the dblatex developer</a>, I came up with this recipe I
6927 would like to share with you.  The proposal was to create a new LaTeX
6928 class file and add the LaTeX code there, but this is not always
6929 practical, when I want to be able to replace the class using a make
6930 file variable.  So my proposal misuses the latex.begindocument XSL
6931 parameter value, to get a small fragment into the correct location in
6932 the generated LaTeX File.</p>
6933
6934 <p>First, decide where in the DocBook document to place the endnotes,
6935 and add this text there:</p>
6936
6937 <pre>
6938 &lt;?latex \theendnotes ?&gt;
6939 </pre>
6940
6941 <p>Next, create a xsl stylesheet file dblatex-endnotes.xsl to add the
6942 code needed to add the endnote instructions in the preamble of the
6943 generated LaTeX document, with content like this:</p>
6944
6945 <pre>
6946 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
6947 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
6948   &lt;xsl:param name="latex.begindocument"&gt;
6949     &lt;xsl:text&gt;
6950 \usepackage{endnotes}
6951 \let\footnote=\endnote
6952 \def\enoteheading{\mbox{}\par\vskip-\baselineskip }
6953 \begin{document}
6954     &lt;/xsl:text&gt;
6955   &lt;/xsl:param&gt;
6956 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
6957 </pre>
6958
6959 <p>Finally, load this xsl file when running dblatex, for example like
6960 this:</p>
6961
6962 <pre>
6963 dblatex --xsl-user=dblatex-endnotes.xsl freeculture.nb.xml
6964 </pre>
6965
6966 <p>The end result can be seen on github, where
6967 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
6968 book project</a> is located.</p>
6969
6970       </div>
6971       <div class="tags">
6972
6973
6974         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>.
6975
6976
6977       </div>
6978     </div>
6979     <div class="padding"></div>
6980
6981     <div class="entry">
6982       <div class="title">
6983         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MPEG_LA_on__Internet_Broadcast_AVC_Video__licensing_and_non_private_use.html">MPEG LA on "Internet Broadcast AVC Video" licensing and non-private use</a>
6984       </div>
6985       <div class="date">
6986          7th July 2015
6987       </div>
6988       <div class="body">
6989         <p>After asking the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK)
6990 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Hva_gj_r_at_NRK_kan_distribuere_H_264_video_uten_patentavtale_med_MPEG_LA_.html">why
6991 they can broadcast and stream H.264 video without an agreement with
6992 the MPEG LA</a>, I was wiser, but still confused.  So I asked MPEG LA
6993 if their understanding matched that of NRK.  As far as I can tell, it
6994 does not.</p>
6995
6996 <p>I started by asking for more information about the various
6997 licensing classes and what exactly is covered by the "Internet
6998 Broadcast AVC Video" class that NRK pointed me at to explain why NRK
6999 did not need a license for streaming H.264 video:
7000
7001 <p><blockquote>
7002
7003 <p>According to
7004 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/226/n-10-02-02.pdf">a
7005 MPEG LA press release dated 2010-02-02</a>, there is no charge when
7006 using MPEG AVC/H.264 according to the terms of "Internet Broadcast AVC
7007 Video".  I am trying to understand exactly what the terms of "Internet
7008 Broadcast AVC Video" is, and wondered if you could help me.  What
7009 exactly is covered by these terms, and what is not?</p>
7010
7011 <p>The only source of more information I have been able to find is a
7012 PDF named
7013 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avcweb.pdf">AVC
7014 Patent Portfolio License Briefing</a>, which states this about the
7015 fees:</p>
7016
7017 <ul>
7018  <li>Where End User pays for AVC Video
7019   <ul>
7020    <li>Subscription (not limited by title) – 100,000 or fewer
7021      subscribers/yr = no royalty; &gt; 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers/yr =
7022      $25,000; &gt;250,000 to 500,000 subscribers/yr = $50,000; &gt;500,000 to
7023      1M subscribers/yr = $75,000; &gt;1M subscribers/yr = $100,000</li>
7024
7025    <li>Title-by-Title - 12 minutes or less = no royalty; &gt;12 minutes in
7026      length = lower of (a) 2% or (b) $0.02 per title</li>
7027   </ul></li>
7028
7029  <li>Where remuneration is from other sources
7030   <ul>
7031    <li>Free Television - (a) one-time $2,500 per transmission encoder or
7032      (b) annual fee starting at $2,500 for &gt; 100,000 HH rising to
7033      maximum $10,000 for &gt;1,000,000 HH</li>
7034
7035    <li>Internet Broadcast AVC Video (not title-by-title, not subscription)
7036      – no royalty for life of the AVC Patent Portfolio License</li>
7037   </ul></li>
7038 </ul>
7039
7040 <p>Am I correct in assuming that the four categories listed is the
7041 categories used when selecting licensing terms, and that "Internet
7042 Broadcast AVC Video" is the category for things that do not fall into
7043 one of the other three categories?  Can you point me to a good source
7044 explaining what is ment by "title-by-title" and "Free Television" in
7045 the license terms for AVC/H.264?</p>
7046
7047 <p>Will a web service providing H.264 encoded video content in a
7048 "video on demand" fashing similar to Youtube and Vimeo, where no
7049 subscription is required and no payment is required from end users to
7050 get access to the videos, fall under the terms of the "Internet
7051 Broadcast AVC Video", ie no royalty for life of the AVC Patent
7052 Portfolio license?  Does it matter if some users are subscribed to get
7053 access to personalized services?</p>
7054
7055 <p>Note, this request and all answers will be published on the
7056 Internet.</p>
7057 </blockquote></p>
7058
7059 <p>The answer came quickly from Benjamin J. Myers, Licensing Associate
7060 with the MPEG LA:</p>
7061
7062 <p><blockquote>
7063 <p>Thank you for your message and for your interest in MPEG LA.  We
7064 appreciate hearing from you and I will be happy to assist you.</p>
7065
7066 <p>As you are aware, MPEG LA offers our AVC Patent Portfolio License
7067 which provides coverage under patents that are essential for use of
7068 the AVC/H.264 Standard (MPEG-4 Part 10).  Specifically, coverage is
7069 provided for end products and video content that make use of AVC/H.264
7070 technology.  Accordingly, the party offering such end products and
7071 video to End Users concludes the AVC License and is responsible for
7072 paying the applicable royalties.</p>
7073
7074 <p>Regarding Internet Broadcast AVC Video, the AVC License generally
7075 defines such content to be video that is distributed to End Users over
7076 the Internet free-of-charge.  Therefore, if a party offers a service
7077 which allows users to upload AVC/H.264 video to its website, and such
7078 AVC Video is delivered to End Users for free, then such video would
7079 receive coverage under the sublicense for Internet Broadcast AVC
7080 Video, which is not subject to any royalties for the life of the AVC
7081 License.  This would also apply in the scenario where a user creates a
7082 free online account in order to receive a customized offering of free
7083 AVC Video content.  In other words, as long as the End User is given
7084 access to or views AVC Video content at no cost to the End User, then
7085 no royalties would be payable under our AVC License.</p>
7086
7087 <p>On the other hand, if End Users pay for access to AVC Video for a
7088 specific period of time (e.g., one month, one year, etc.), then such
7089 video would constitute Subscription AVC Video.  In cases where AVC
7090 Video is delivered to End Users on a pay-per-view basis, then such
7091 content would constitute Title-by-Title AVC Video.  If a party offers
7092 Subscription or Title-by-Title AVC Video to End Users, then they would
7093 be responsible for paying the applicable royalties you noted below.</p>
7094
7095 <p>Finally, in the case where AVC Video is distributed for free
7096 through an "over-the-air, satellite and/or cable transmission", then
7097 such content would constitute Free Television AVC Video and would be
7098 subject to the applicable royalties.</p>
7099
7100 <p>For your reference, I have attached
7101 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-07-07-mpegla.pdf">a
7102 .pdf copy of the AVC License</a>. You will find the relevant
7103 sublicense information regarding AVC Video in Sections 2.2 through
7104 2.5, and the corresponding royalties in Section 3.1.2 through 3.1.4.
7105 You will also find the definitions of Title-by-Title AVC Video,
7106 Subscription AVC Video, Free Television AVC Video, and Internet
7107 Broadcast AVC Video in Section 1 of the License.  Please note that the
7108 electronic copy is provided for informational purposes only and cannot
7109 be used for execution.</p>
7110
7111 <p>I hope the above information is helpful.  If you have additional
7112 questions or need further assistance with the AVC License, please feel
7113 free to contact me directly.</p>
7114 </blockquote></p>
7115
7116 <p>Having a fresh copy of the license text was useful, and knowing
7117 that the definition of Title-by-Title required payment per title made
7118 me aware that my earlier understanding of that phrase had been wrong.
7119 But I still had a few questions:</p>
7120
7121 <p><blockquote>
7122 <p>I have a small followup question.  Would it be possible for me to get
7123 a license with MPEG LA even if there are no royalties to be paid?  The
7124 reason I ask, is that some video related products have a copyright
7125 clause limiting their use without a license with MPEG LA.  The clauses
7126 typically look similar to this:
7127
7128 <p><blockquote>
7129   This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
7130   the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer to (a) encode
7131   video in compliance with the AVC standard ("AVC video") and/or (b)
7132   decode AVC video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a
7133   personal and non-commercial activity and/or AVC video that was
7134   obtained from a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No
7135   license is granted or shall be implied for any other use. additional
7136   information may be obtained from MPEG LA L.L.C.
7137 </blockquote></p>
7138
7139 <p>It is unclear to me if this clause mean that I need to enter into
7140 an agreement with MPEG LA to use the product in question, even if
7141 there are no royalties to be paid to MPEG LA.  I suspect it will
7142 differ depending on the jurisdiction, and mine is Norway.  What is
7143 MPEG LAs view on this?</p>
7144 </blockquote></p>
7145
7146 <p>According to the answer, MPEG LA believe those using such tools for
7147 non-personal or commercial use need a license with them:</p>
7148
7149 <p><blockquote>
7150
7151 <p>With regard to the Notice to Customers, I would like to begin by
7152 clarifying that the Notice from Section 7.1 of the AVC License
7153 reads:</p>
7154
7155 <p>THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR
7156 THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT
7157 RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC
7158 STANDARD ("AVC VIDEO") AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED
7159 BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM
7160 A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED
7161 OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE
7162 OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM</p>
7163
7164 <p>The Notice to Customers is intended to inform End Users of the
7165 personal usage rights (for example, to watch video content) included
7166 with the product they purchased, and to encourage any party using the
7167 product for commercial purposes to contact MPEG LA in order to become
7168 licensed for such use (for example, when they use an AVC Product to
7169 deliver Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free Television or Internet
7170 Broadcast AVC Video to End Users, or to re-Sell a third party's AVC
7171 Product as their own branded AVC Product).</p>
7172
7173 <p>Therefore, if a party is to be licensed for its use of an AVC
7174 Product to Sell AVC Video on a Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free
7175 Television or Internet Broadcast basis, that party would need to
7176 conclude the AVC License, even in the case where no royalties were
7177 payable under the License.  On the other hand, if that party (either a
7178 Consumer or business customer) simply uses an AVC Product for their
7179 own internal purposes and not for the commercial purposes referenced
7180 above, then such use would be included in the royalty paid for the AVC
7181 Products by the licensed supplier.</p>
7182
7183 <p>Finally, I note that our AVC License provides worldwide coverage in
7184 countries that have AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, including
7185 Norway.</p>
7186
7187 <p>I hope this clarification is helpful.  If I may be of any further
7188 assistance, just let me know.</p>
7189 </blockquote></p>
7190
7191 <p>The mentioning of Norwegian patents made me a bit confused, so I
7192 asked for more information:</p>
7193
7194 <p><blockquote>
7195
7196 <p>But one minor question at the end.  If I understand you correctly,
7197 you state in the quote above that there are patents in the AVC Patent
7198 Portfolio that are valid in Norway.  This make me believe I read the
7199 list available from &lt;URL:
7200 <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx">http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx</a>
7201 &gt; incorrectly, as I believed the "NO" prefix in front of patents
7202 were Norwegian patents, and the only one I could find under Mitsubishi
7203 Electric Corporation expired in 2012.  Which patents are you referring
7204 to that are relevant for Norway?</p>
7205
7206 </blockquote></p>
7207
7208 <p>Again, the quick answer explained how to read the list of patents
7209 in that list:</p>
7210
7211 <p><blockquote>
7212
7213 <p>Your understanding is correct that the last AVC Patent Portfolio
7214 Patent in Norway expired on 21 October 2012.  Therefore, where AVC
7215 Video is both made and Sold in Norway after that date, then no
7216 royalties would be payable for such AVC Video under the AVC License.
7217 With that said, our AVC License provides historic coverage for AVC
7218 Products and AVC Video that may have been manufactured or Sold before
7219 the last Norwegian AVC patent expired.  I would also like to clarify
7220 that coverage is provided for the country of manufacture and the
7221 country of Sale that has active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents.</p>
7222
7223 <p>Therefore, if a party offers AVC Products or AVC Video for Sale in
7224 a country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents (for example,
7225 Sweden, Denmark, Finland, etc.), then that party would still need
7226 coverage under the AVC License even if such products or video are
7227 initially made in a country without active AVC Patent Portfolio
7228 Patents (for example, Norway).  Similarly, a party would need to
7229 conclude the AVC License if they make AVC Products or AVC Video in a
7230 country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, but eventually Sell
7231 such AVC Products or AVC Video in a country without active AVC Patent
7232 Portfolio Patents.</p>
7233 </blockquote></p>
7234
7235 <p>As far as I understand it, MPEG LA believe anyone using Adobe
7236 Premiere and other video related software with a H.264 distribution
7237 license need a license agreement with MPEG LA to use such tools for
7238 anything non-private or commercial, while it is OK to set up a
7239 Youtube-like service as long as no-one pays to get access to the
7240 content.  I still have no clear idea how this applies to Norway, where
7241 none of the patents MPEG LA is licensing are valid.  Will the
7242 copyright terms take precedence or can those terms be ignored because
7243 the patents are not valid in Norway?</p>
7244
7245       </div>
7246       <div class="tags">
7247
7248
7249         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
7250
7251
7252       </div>
7253     </div>
7254     <div class="padding"></div>
7255
7256     <div class="entry">
7257       <div class="title">
7258         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_laptop___some_more_clues_and_ideas_based_on_feedback.html">New laptop - some more clues and ideas based on feedback</a>
7259       </div>
7260       <div class="date">
7261          5th July 2015
7262       </div>
7263       <div class="body">
7264         <p>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
7265 need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback.  I wish to
7266 thank every one of these.  Several pointed me to the possibility of
7267 fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
7268 do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
7269 machine.  But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
7270 with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
7271 for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement.  If I did
7272 not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
7273 using <a href="http://www.francecrans.com/">FrancEcrans</a>, but it
7274 might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.</p>
7275
7276 <p>One tip I got was to use the
7277 <a href="https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb">Skinflint</a> web service to
7278 compare laptop models.  It seem to have more models available than
7279 prisjakt.no.  Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
7280 keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook 840 keyboard is not
7281 very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
7282 keyboards I tested.  Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
7283
7284 <p>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
7285 newest Thinkpad X model.  The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
7286 (which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
7287 Debian Sid/Unstable according to
7288 <a href="http://www.corsac.net/X250/">Corsac.net</a>.  The reports I
7289 got on the keyboard quality are not consistent.  Some say the keyboard
7290 is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
7291 Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
7292 keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
7293 keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
7294 replace it.  I'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
7295 activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230.  I'm
7296 also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
7297 noisy.  In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
7298 Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.</p>
7299
7300 <p>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
7301 <a href="http://pro-star.com">Pro-Star</a>, another was
7302 <a href="http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/">Libreboot</a>.
7303 The latter look very attractive to me.</p>
7304
7305 <p>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback.  It help a lot
7306 as I keep looking for a replacement.</p>
7307
7308 <p>Update 2015-07-06: I was recommended to check out the
7309 <a href="">lapstore.de</a> web shop for used laptops.  They got several
7310 different
7311 <a href="http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/">old
7312 thinkpad X models</a>, and provide one year warranty.</p>
7313
7314       </div>
7315       <div class="tags">
7316
7317
7318         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7319
7320
7321       </div>
7322     </div>
7323     <div class="padding"></div>
7324
7325     <div class="entry">
7326       <div class="title">
7327         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_find_a_new_laptop__as_the_old_one_is_broken_after_only_two_years.html">Time to find a new laptop, as the old one is broken after only two years</a>
7328       </div>
7329       <div class="date">
7330          3rd July 2015
7331       </div>
7332       <div class="body">
7333         <p>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
7334 replacement soon.  The left 5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
7335 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
7336 cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
7337 flickering.</p>
7338
7339 <p>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
7340 still as
7341 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">I
7342 described them in 2013</a>.  The last time I bought a laptop, I had
7343 good help from
7344 <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=353">prisjakt.no</a>
7345 where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
7346 wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually.  Three button mouse
7347 and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
7348 laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook 820 G1 and
7349 G2) lack three mouse buttons).  It is also unclear to me how good the
7350 keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are.  I hope Lenovo have not messed up
7351 the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
7352 deteriorated since X41.</p>
7353
7354 <p>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
7355 seem sensible to me?  Are there better services around to search the
7356 set of available laptops for features?  Please send me an email if you
7357 have suggestions.</p>
7358
7359 <p>Update 2015-07-23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
7360 <a href="http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom">list
7361 of endorsed hardware</a>, which is useful background information.</p>
7362
7363       </div>
7364       <div class="tags">
7365
7366
7367         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7368
7369
7370       </div>
7371     </div>
7372     <div class="padding"></div>
7373
7374     <div class="entry">
7375       <div class="title">
7376         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MakerCon_Nordic_videos_now_available_on_Frikanalen.html">MakerCon Nordic videos now available on Frikanalen</a>
7377       </div>
7378       <div class="date">
7379          2nd July 2015
7380       </div>
7381       <div class="body">
7382         <p>Last oktober I was involved on behalf of
7383 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> with recording the talks at
7384 <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">MakerCon Nordic</a>, a conference for
7385 the Maker movement.  Since then it has been the plan to publish the
7386 recordings on <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, which
7387 finally happened the last few days.  A few talks are missing because
7388 the speakers asked the organizers to not publish them, but most of the
7389 talks are available.  The talks are being broadcasted on RiksTV
7390 channel 50 and using multicast on Uninett, as well as being available
7391 from the Frikanalen web site.  The unedited recordings are
7392 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">available on
7393 Youtube too</a>.</p>
7394
7395 <p>This is the list of talks available at the moment.  Visit the
7396 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/?q=makercon">Frikanalen video
7397 pages</a> to view them.</p>
7398
7399 <ul>
7400
7401   <li>Evolutionary algorithms as a design tool - from art
7402       to robotics (Kyrre Glette)</li>
7403
7404   <li>Make and break (Hans Gerhard Meier)</li>
7405
7406   <li>Making a one year school course for young makers
7407       (Olav Helland)</li>
7408
7409   <li>Innovation Inspiration - IPR Databases as a Source of
7410       Inspiration (Hege Langlo)</li>
7411
7412   <li>Making a toy for makers (Erik Torstensson)</li>
7413
7414   <li>How to make 3D printer electronics (Elias Bakken)</li>
7415
7416   <li>Hovering Clouds: Looking at online tool offerings for Product
7417       Design and 3D Printing (William Kempton)</li>
7418
7419   <li>Travelling maker stories (Øyvind Nydal Dahl)</li>
7420
7421   <li>Making the first Maker Faire in Sweden (Nils Olander)</li>
7422
7423   <li>Breaking the mold: Printing 1000’s of parts (Espen Sivertsen)</li>
7424
7425   <li>Ultimaker — and open source 3D printing (Erik de Bruijn)</li>
7426
7427   <li>Autodesk’s 3D Printing Platform: Sparking innovation (Hilde
7428       Sevens)</li>
7429
7430   <li>How Making is Changing the World – and How You Can Too!
7431       (Jennifer Turliuk)</li>
7432
7433   <li>Open-Source Adventuring: OpenROV, OpenExplorer and the Future of
7434       Connected Exploration (David Lang)</li>
7435
7436   <li>Making in Norway (Haakon Karlsen Jr., Graham Hayward and Jens
7437       Dyvik)</li>
7438
7439   <li>The Impact of the Maker Movement (Mike Senese)</li>
7440
7441 </ul>
7442
7443 <p>Part of the reason this took so long was that the scripts NUUG had
7444 to prepare a recording for publication were five years old and no
7445 longer worked with the current video processing tools (command line
7446 argument changes).  In addition, we needed better audio normalization,
7447 which sent me on a detour to
7448 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html">package
7449 bs1770gain for Debian</a>.  Now this is in place and it became a lot
7450 easier to publish NUUG videos on Frikanalen.</p>
7451
7452       </div>
7453       <div class="tags">
7454
7455
7456         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>.
7457
7458
7459       </div>
7460     </div>
7461     <div class="padding"></div>
7462
7463     <div class="entry">
7464       <div class="title">
7465         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Graphing_the_Norwegian_company_ownership_structure.html">Graphing the Norwegian company ownership structure</a>
7466       </div>
7467       <div class="date">
7468         15th June 2015
7469       </div>
7470       <div class="body">
7471         <p>It is a bit work to figure out the ownership structure of companies
7472 in Norway.  The information is publicly available, but one need to
7473 recursively look up ownership for all owners to figure out the complete
7474 ownership graph of a given set of companies.  To save me the work in
7475 the future, I wrote a script to do this automatically, outputting the
7476 ownership structure using the Graphviz/dotty format.  The data source
7477 is web scraping from <a href="http://www.proff.no/">Proff</a>, because
7478 I failed to find a useful source directly from the official keepers of
7479 the ownership data, <a href="http://www.brreg.no/">Brønnøysundsregistrene</a>.</p>
7480
7481 <p>To get an ownership graph for a set of companies, fetch
7482 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/brreg-norway-ownership-graph">the code from git</a> and run it using the organisation number.  I'm
7483 using the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet as an example here, as its
7484 ownership structure is very simple:</p>
7485
7486 <pre>
7487 % time ./bin/eierskap-dotty 958033540 > dagbladet.dot
7488
7489 real    0m2.841s
7490 user    0m0.184s
7491 sys     0m0.036s
7492 %
7493 </pre>
7494
7495 <p>The script accept several organisation numbers on the command line,
7496 allowing a cluster of companies to be graphed in the same image.  The
7497 resulting dot file for the example above look like this.  The edges
7498 are labeled with the ownership percentage, and the nodes uses the
7499 organisation number as their name and the name as the label:</p>
7500
7501 <pre>
7502 digraph ownership {
7503 rankdir = LR;
7504 "Aller Holding A/s" -> "910119877" [label="100%"]
7505 "910119877" -> "998689015" [label="100%"]
7506 "998689015" -> "958033540" [label="99%"]
7507 "974530600" -> "958033540" [label="1%"]
7508 "958033540" [label="AS DAGBLADET"]
7509 "998689015" [label="Berner Media Holding AS"]
7510 "974530600" [label="Dagbladets Stiftelse"]
7511 "910119877" [label="Aller Media AS"]
7512 }
7513 </pre>
7514
7515 <p>To view the ownership graph, run "<tt>dotty dagbladet.dot</tt>" or
7516 convert it to a PNG using "<tt>dot -T png dagbladet.dot >
7517 dagbladet.png</tt>".  The result can be seen below:</p>
7518
7519 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-06-15-ownership-graphs-norway-dagbladet.png" width="80%">
7520
7521 <p>Note that I suspect the "Aller Holding A/S" entry to be incorrect
7522 data in the official ownership register, as that name is not
7523 registered in the official company register for Norway.  The ownership
7524 register is sensitive to typos and there seem to be no strict checking
7525 of the ownership links.</p>
7526
7527 <p>Let me know if you improve the script or find better data sources.
7528 The code is licensed according to GPL 2 or newer.</p>
7529
7530 <p>Update 2015-06-15: Since the initial post I've been told that
7531 "<a href="http://www.proff.dk/firma/carl-allers-etablissement-aktieselskab/københavn-v/hovedkontorer/13624518-3/">Aller
7532 Holding A/S</a>" is a Danish company, which explain why it did not
7533 have a Norwegian organisation number.  I've also been told that there
7534 is a <a href="http://www.brreg.no/automatiske/webservices/">web
7535 services API available</a> from Brønnøysundsregistrene, for those
7536 willing to accept the terms or pay the price.</p>
7537
7538       </div>
7539       <div class="tags">
7540
7541
7542         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn</a>.
7543
7544
7545       </div>
7546     </div>
7547     <div class="padding"></div>
7548
7549     <div class="entry">
7550       <div class="title">
7551         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html">Measuring and adjusting the loudness of a TV channel using bs1770gain</a>
7552       </div>
7553       <div class="date">
7554         11th June 2015
7555       </div>
7556       <div class="body">
7557         <p>Television loudness is the source of frustration for viewers
7558 everywhere.  Some channels are very load, others are less loud, and
7559 ads tend to shout very high to get the attention of the viewers, and
7560 the viewers do not like this.  This fact is well known to the TV
7561 channels.  See for example the BBC white paper
7562 "<a href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp-pdf-files/WHP202.pdf">Terminology
7563 for loudness and level dBTP, LU, and all that</a>" from 2011 for a
7564 summary of the problem domain.  To better address the need for even
7565 loadness, the TV channels got together several years ago to agree on a
7566 new way to measure loudness in digital files as one step in
7567 standardizing loudness.  From this came the ITU-R standard BS.1770,
7568 "<a href="http://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-BS.1770/en">Algorithms to
7569 measure audio programme loudness and true-peak audio level</a>".</p>
7570
7571 <p>The ITU-R BS.1770 specification describe an algorithm to measure
7572 loadness in LUFS (Loudness Units, referenced to Full Scale). But
7573 having a way to measure is not enough.  To get the same loudness
7574 across TV channels, one also need to decide which value to standardize
7575 on.  For European TV channels, this was done in the EBU Recommondaton
7576 R128, "<a href="https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf">Loudness
7577 normalisation and permitted maximum level of audio signals</a>", which
7578 specifies a recommended level of -23 LUFS.  In Norway, I have been
7579 told that NRK, TV2, MTG and SBS have decided among themselves to
7580 follow the R128 recommondation for playout from 2016-03-01.</p>
7581
7582 <p>There are free software available to measure and adjust the loudness
7583 level using the LUFS.  In Debian, I am aware of a library named
7584 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libebur128">libebur128</a>
7585 able to measure the loudness and since yesterday morning a new binary
7586 named <a href="http://bs1770gain.sourceforge.net">bs1770gain</a>
7587 capable of both measuring and adjusting was uploaded and is waiting
7588 for NEW processing.  I plan to maintain the latter in Debian under the
7589 <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=pkg-multimedia-maintainers%40lists.alioth.debian.org">Debian
7590 multimedia</a> umbrella.</p>
7591
7592 <p>The free software based TV channel I am involved in,
7593 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, plan to follow the
7594 R128 recommondation ourself as soon as we can adjust the software to
7595 do so, and the bs1770gain tool seem like a good fit for that part of
7596 the puzzle to measure loudness on new video uploaded to Frikanalen.
7597 Personally, I plan to use bs1770gain to adjust the loudness of videos
7598 I upload to Frikanalen on behalf of <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
7599 NUUG member organisation</a>.  The program seem to be able to measure
7600 the LUFS value of any media file handled by ffmpeg, but I've only
7601 successfully adjusted the LUFS value of WAV files.  I suspect it
7602 should be able to adjust it for all the formats handled by ffmpeg.</p>
7603
7604       </div>
7605       <div class="tags">
7606
7607
7608         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>.
7609
7610
7611       </div>
7612     </div>
7613     <div class="padding"></div>
7614
7615     <div class="entry">
7616       <div class="title">
7617         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_citizens_now_required_by_law_to_give_their_fingerprint_to_the_police.html">Norwegian citizens now required by law to give their fingerprint to the police</a>
7618       </div>
7619       <div class="date">
7620         10th May 2015
7621       </div>
7622       <div class="body">
7623         <p>5 days ago, the Norwegian Parliament decided, unanimously, that all
7624 citizens of Norway, no matter if they are suspected of something
7625 criminal or not, are
7626 <a href="https://www.holderdeord.no/votes/1430838871e">required to
7627 give fingerprints to the police</a> (vote details from Holder de
7628 ord).  The law make it sound like it will be optional, but in a few
7629 years there will be no option any more.  The ID will be required to
7630 vote, to get a bank account, a bank card, to change address on the
7631 post office, to receive an electronic ID or to get a drivers license
7632 and many other tasks required to function in Norway.  The banks plan
7633 to stop providing their own ID on the bank cards when this new
7634 national ID is introduced, and the national road authorities plan to
7635 change the drivers license to no longer be usable as identity cards.
7636 In effect, to function as a citizen in Norway a national ID card will
7637 be required, and to get it one need to provide the fingerprints to
7638 the police.</p>
7639
7640 <p>In addition to handing the fingerprint to the police (which
7641 promised to not make a copy of the fingerprint image at that point in
7642 time, but say nothing about doing it later), a picture of the
7643 fingerprint will be stored on the RFID chip, along with a picture of
7644 the face and other information about the person.  Some of the
7645 information will be encrypted, but the encryption will be the same
7646 system as currently used in the passports.  The codes to decrypt will
7647 be available to a lot of government offices and their suppliers around
7648 the globe, but for those that do not know anyone in those circles it
7649 is good to know that
7650 <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/nov/17/news.homeaffairs">the
7651 encryption is already broken</a>.  And they
7652 <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/article/2215057/wireless/bad-guys-could-read-rfid-passports-at-217-feet--maybe-a-lot-more.html">can
7653 be read from 70 meters away</a>.  This can be mitigated a bit by
7654 keeping it in a Faraday cage (metal box or metal wire container), but
7655 one will be required to take it out of there often enough to expose
7656 ones private and personal information to a lot of people that have no
7657 business getting access to that information.</p>
7658
7659 <p>The new Norwegian national IDs are a vehicle for identity theft,
7660 and I feel sorry for us all having politicians accepting such invasion
7661 of privacy without any objections.  So are the Norwegian passports,
7662 but it has been possible to function in Norway without those so far.
7663 That option is going away with the passing of the new law.  In this, I
7664 envy the Germans, because for them it is optional how much biometric
7665 information is stored in their national ID.</p>
7666
7667 <p>And if forced collection of fingerprints was not bad enough, the
7668 information collected in the national ID card register can be handed
7669 over to foreign intelligence services and police authorities, "when
7670 extradition is not considered disproportionate".</p>
7671
7672 <p>Update 2015-05-12: For those unable to believe that the Parliament
7673 really could make such decision, I wrote
7674 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Blir_det_virkelig_krav_om_fingeravtrykk_i_nasjonale_ID_kort_.html">a
7675 summary of the sources I have</a> for concluding the way I do
7676 (Norwegian Only, as the sources are all in Norwegian).</p>
7677
7678       </div>
7679       <div class="tags">
7680
7681
7682         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>.
7683
7684
7685       </div>
7686     </div>
7687     <div class="padding"></div>
7688
7689     <div class="entry">
7690       <div class="title">
7691         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_would_it_cost_to_store_all_phone_calls_in_Norway_.html">What would it cost to store all phone calls in Norway?</a>
7692       </div>
7693       <div class="date">
7694          1st May 2015
7695       </div>
7696       <div class="body">
7697         <p>Many years ago, a friend of mine calculated how much it would cost
7698 to store the sound of all phone calls in Norway, and came up with the
7699 cost of around 20 million NOK (2.4 mill EUR) for all the calls in a
7700 year.  I got curious and wondered what the same calculation would look
7701 like today.  To do so one need an idea of how much data storage is
7702 needed for each minute of sound, how many minutes all the calls in
7703 Norway sums up to, and the cost of data storage.</p>
7704
7705 <p>The 2005 numbers are from
7706 <a href="http://www.digi.no/analyser/2005/10/04/vi-prater-stadig-mindre-i-roret">digi.no</a>,
7707 the 2012 numbers are from
7708 <a href="http://www.nkom.no/aktuelt/nyheter/fortsatt-vekst-i-det-norske-ekommarkedet">a
7709 NKOM report</a>, and I got the 2013 numbers after asking NKOM via
7710 email.  I was told the numbers for 2014 will be presented May 20th,
7711 and decided not to wait for those, as I doubt they will be very
7712 different from the numbers from 2013.</p>
7713
7714 <p>The amount of data storage per minute sound depend on the wanted
7715 quality, and for phone calls it is generally believed that 8 Kbit/s is
7716 enough.  See for example a
7717 <a href="http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/voice/voice-quality/7934-bwidth-consume.html#topic1">summary
7718 on voice quality from Cisco</a> for some alternatives.  8 Kbit/s is 60
7719 Kbytes/min, and this can be multiplied with the number of call minutes
7720 to get the storage requirements.</p>
7721
7722 <p>Storage prices varies a lot, depending on speed, backup strategies,
7723 availability requirements etc.  But a simple way to calculate can be
7724 to use the price of a TiB-disk (around 1000 NOK / 120 EUR) and double
7725 it to take space, power and redundancy into account.  It could be much
7726 higher with high speed and good redundancy requirements.</p>
7727
7728 <p>But back to the question, What would it cost to store all phone
7729 calls in Norway?  Not much.  Here is a small table showing the
7730 estimated cost, which is within the budget constraint of most medium
7731 and large organisations:</p>
7732
7733 <table border="1">
7734 <tr><th>Year</th><th>Call minutes</th><th>Size</th><th>Price in NOK / EUR</th></tr>
7735 <tr><td>2005</td><td align="right">24 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.3 PiB</td><td align="right">3 mill / 358 000</td></tr>
7736 <tr><td>2012</td><td align="right">18 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.0 PiB</td><td align="right">2.2 mill / 262 000</td></tr>
7737 <tr><td>2013</td><td align="right">17 000 000 000</td><td align="right">950 TiB</td><td align="right">2.1 mill / 250 000</td></tr>
7738 </table>
7739
7740 <p>This is the cost of buying the storage.  Maintenance need to be
7741 taken into account too, but calculating that is left as an exercise
7742 for the reader.  But it is obvious to me from those numbers that
7743 recording the sound of all phone calls in Norway is not going to be
7744 stopped because it is too expensive.  I wonder if someone already is
7745 collecting the data?</p>
7746
7747       </div>
7748       <div class="tags">
7749
7750
7751         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>.
7752
7753
7754       </div>
7755     </div>
7756     <div class="padding"></div>
7757
7758     <div class="entry">
7759       <div class="title">
7760         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_beta_release.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu beta release</a>
7761       </div>
7762       <div class="date">
7763         26th April 2015
7764       </div>
7765       <div class="body">
7766         <p>I am happy to report that the Debian Edu team sent out
7767 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2015/04/msg00000.html">this
7768 announcement today</a>:</p>
7769
7770 <pre>
7771 the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is pleased to announce the first
7772 *beta* release of Debian Edu "Jessie" 8.0+edu0~b1, which for the first
7773 time is composed entirely of packages from the current Debian stable
7774 release, Debian 8 "Jessie".
7775
7776 (As most reading this will know, Debian "Jessie" hasn't actually been
7777 released by now. The release is still in progress but should finish
7778 later today ;)
7779
7780 We expect to make a final release of Debian Edu "Jessie" in the coming
7781 weeks, timed with the first point release of Debian Jessie. Upgrades
7782 from this beta release of Debian Edu Jessie to the final release will
7783 be possible and encouraged!
7784
7785 Please report feedback to debian-edu@lists.debian.org and/or submit
7786 bugs: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
7787
7788 Debian Edu - sometimes also known as "Skolelinux" - is a complete
7789 operating system for schools, universities and other
7790 organisations. Through its pre- prepared installation profiles
7791 administrators can install servers, workstations and laptops which
7792 will work in harmony on the school network.  With Debian Edu, the
7793 teachers themselves or their technical support staff can roll out a
7794 complete multi-user, multi-machine study environment within hours or
7795 days.
7796
7797 Debian Edu is already in use at several hundred schools all over the
7798 world, particularly in Germany, Spain and Norway. Installations come
7799 with hundreds of applications pre-installed, plus the whole Debian
7800 archive of thousands of compatible packages within easy reach.
7801
7802 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
7803 installation instructions are available, including detailed
7804 instructions in the manual explaining the first steps, such as setting
7805 up a network or adding users.  Please note that the password for the
7806 user your prompted for during installation must have a length of at
7807 least 5 characters!
7808
7809 == Where to download ==
7810
7811 A multi-architecture CD / usbstick image (649 MiB) for network booting
7812 can be downloaded at the following locations:
7813
7814     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso
7815     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso .
7816
7817 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 54a524d16246cddd8d2cfd6ea52f2dd78c47ee0a
7818
7819 Alternatively an extended DVD / usbstick image (4.9 GiB) is also
7820 available, with more software included (saving additional download
7821 time):
7822
7823     http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
7824     rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
7825
7826 The SHA1SUM of this image is: fb1f1504a490c077a48653898f9d6a461cb3c636
7827
7828 Sources are available from the Debian archive, see
7829 http://ftp.debian.org/debian-cd/8.0.0/source/ for some download
7830 options.
7831
7832 == Debian Edu Jessie manual in seven languages ==
7833
7834 Please see https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/ for
7835 the English version of the Debian Edu jessie manual.
7836
7837 This manual has been fully translated to German, French, Italian,
7838 Danish, Dutch and Norwegian Bokmål. A partly translated version exists
7839 for Spanish.  See http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/ for
7840 online version of the translated manual.
7841
7842 More information about Debian 8 "Jessie" itself is provided in the
7843 release notes and the installation manual:
7844 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes
7845 - http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual
7846
7847
7848 == Errata / known problems ==
7849
7850     It takes up to 15 minutes for a changed hostname to be updated via
7851     DHCP (#780461).
7852
7853     The hostname script fails to update LTSP server hostname (#783087).
7854
7855 Workaround: run update-hostname-from-ip on the client to update the
7856 hostname immediately.
7857
7858 Check https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie for a possibly
7859 more current and complete list.
7860
7861 == Some more details about Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~b1 Codename Jessie released 2015-04-25 ==
7862
7863 === Software updates ===
7864
7865 Everything which is new in Debian 8 Jessie, e.g.:
7866
7867  * Linux kernel 3.16.7-ctk9; for the i386 architecture, support for
7868    i486 processors has been dropped; oldest supported ones: i586 (like
7869    Intel Pentium and AMD K5).
7870
7871  * Desktop environments KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11.13, GNOME 3.14,
7872    Xfce 4.12, LXDE 0.5.6
7873    * new optional desktop environment: MATE 1.8
7874    * KDE Plasma Workspaces is installed by default; to choose one of
7875      the others see the manual.
7876  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 41
7877  * LibreOffice 4.3.3
7878  * GOsa 2.7.4
7879  * LTSP 5.5.4
7880  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
7881  * new boot framework: systemd
7882  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.12
7883  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
7884  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
7885  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.1
7886  * golearn 0.9
7887  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
7888  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
7889  * Debian Jessie includes about 43000 packages available for installation.
7890  * More information about Debian 8 Jessie is provided in its release
7891    notes and the installation manual, see the link above.
7892
7893 === Installation changes ===
7894
7895     Installations done via PXE now also install firmware automatically
7896     for the hardware present.
7897
7898 === Fixed bugs ===
7899
7900 A number of bugs have been fixed in this release; the most noticeable
7901 from a user perspective:
7902
7903  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
7904    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
7905    information is corrected (710362)
7906
7907  * shutdown-at-night now shuts the system down if gdm3 is used (775608).
7908
7909 === Sugar desktop removed ===
7910
7911 As the Sugar desktop was removed from Debian Jessie, it is also not
7912 available in Debian Edu jessie.
7913
7914
7915 == About Debian Edu / Skolelinux ==
7916
7917 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on
7918 Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
7919 configured school network. Directly after installation a school server
7920 running all services needed for a school network is set up just
7921 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
7922 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
7923 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
7924 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
7925 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
7926 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
7927 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
7928 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
7929 can choose between KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
7930 environment.
7931
7932 == About Debian ==
7933
7934 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
7935 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
7936 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
7937 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
7938 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
7939 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
7940 operating system.
7941
7942 == Thanks ==
7943
7944 Thanks to everyone making Debian and Debian Edu / Skolelinux happen!
7945 You rock.
7946 </pre>
7947
7948       </div>
7949       <div class="tags">
7950
7951
7952         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
7953
7954
7955       </div>
7956     </div>
7957     <div class="padding"></div>
7958
7959     <div class="entry">
7960       <div class="title">
7961         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Shirish_Agarwal.html">Debian Edu interview: Shirish Agarwal</a>
7962       </div>
7963       <div class="date">
7964         15th April 2015
7965       </div>
7966       <div class="body">
7967         <p>It was a surprise to me to learn that project to create a complete
7968 computer system for schools I've involved in,
7969 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, was
7970 being used in India.  But apparently it is, and I managed to get an
7971 interview with one of the friends of the project there, Shirish
7972 Agarwal.</p>
7973
7974 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
7975
7976 <p>My name is Shirish Agarwal. Based out of the educational and
7977 historical city of Pune, from the western state of Maharashtra, India.
7978 My bread comes from giving training, giving policy tips,
7979 installations on free software to mom and pop shops in different
7980 fields from Desktop publishing to retail shops as well as work with
7981 few software start-ups as well.</p>
7982
7983 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
7984 project?</strong></p>
7985
7986 <p>It started innocently enough. I have been using Debian for a few
7987 years and in one local minidebconf / debutsav I was asked if there was
7988 anything for schools or education. I had worked / played with free
7989 educational softwares such as Gcompris and Stellarium for my many
7990 nieces and nephews so researched and found Debian Edu or Skolelinux as
7991 it was known then.  Since then I have started using the various
7992 education meta-packages provided by the project.</p>
7993
7994 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
7995 Edu?</strong></p>
7996
7997 <p>It's closest I have seen where a package full of educational
7998 software are packed, which are free and open (both literally and
7999 figuratively).  Even if I take the simplest software which is
8000 gcompris, the number of activities therein are amazing. Another one of
8001 the softwares that I have liked for a long time is stellarium. Even
8002 pysycache is cool except for couple of issues I encountered
8003 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781841">#781841</a> and
8004 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781842">#781842</a>.</p>
8005
8006 <p>I prefer software installed on the system over web based solutions,
8007 as a web site can disappear any time but the software on disk has the
8008 possibility of a larger life span.  Of course with both it's more a
8009 question if it has enough users who make it fun or sustainable or both
8010 for the developer per-se.</p>
8011
8012 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
8013 Edu?</strong></p>
8014
8015 <p>I do see that the Debian Edu team seems to be short-handed and I
8016 think more efforts should be made to make it popular and ask and take
8017 help from people and the larger community wherever possible.</p>
8018
8019 <p>I don't see any disadvantage to use Skolelinux apart from the fact
8020 that most apps. are generic which is good or bad how you see it.
8021 However, saying that I do acknowledge the fact that the canvas is
8022 pretty big and there are lot of interesting ideas that could be done
8023 but for reasons not known not done or if done I don't know about them.
8024 Let me share some of the ideas (these are more upstream based but
8025 still) I have had for a long time :</p>
8026
8027 <p>1. Classical maths question of two trains in opposing directions
8028 each running @x kmph/mph at y distance, when they will meet and how
8029 far would each travel and similar questions like these.
8030
8031 <p>The computer is a fantastic system where questions like these can
8032 be drawn, animated and the methodology and answers teased out in
8033 interactive manner. While sites such as the
8034 <a href="http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.two.trains.html">Ask
8035 Dr. Math FAQ on The Two Trains problem</a> (as an example or point of
8036 inspiration) can be used there is lot more that can be done.  I dunno
8037 if there is a free software which does something like this.  The idea
8038 being a blend of objects + animation + interaction which does
8039 this. The whole interaction could be gamified with points or sounds or
8040 colourful celebration whenever the user gets even part of the question
8041 or/and methodology right. That would help reinforce good behaviour.
8042 This understanding could be used to share/showcase everything from how
8043 the first wheel came to be, to evolution to how astronomy started,
8044 psychics and everything in-between.</p>
8045
8046 <p>One specific idea in the train part was having the Linux mascot on
8047 one train and the BSD or GNU mascot on the other train and they
8048 meeting somewhere in-between. Characters from blender movies could
8049 also be used.</p>
8050
8051 <p>2. Loads of crossword-puzzles with reference to subjects: We have
8052 enormous data sets in Wikipedia and Wikitionary.  I don't think it
8053 should be a big job to design crossword puzzles. Using categories and
8054 sub-categories it should be doable to have Q&A single word answers
8055 from the existing data-sets. What would make it easy or hard could be
8056 the length of the word + existence of many or few vowels depending on
8057 the user's input.</p>
8058
8059 <p>3. Jigsaw puzzles - We already have a great software called
8060 palapeli with number of slicers making it pretty interesting. What
8061 needs to be done is to download large number of public domain and
8062 copyleft images, tease and use IPTC tags to categorise them into
8063 nature, history etc.  and let it loose. This could turn to be really
8064 huge collection of images. One source could be taken from
8065 commons.wikimedia.org, others could be huge collection of royalty-free
8066 stock photos. Potential is immense.</p>
8067
8068 <p>Apart from this, free software suffers in two directions, we lag
8069 both in development (of using new features per-se) and maintenance a
8070 lot.  This is more so in educational software as these applications
8071 need to be timely and the opportunity cost of missing deadlines is
8072 immense. If we are able to solve issues of funding for development and
8073 maintenance of such software I don't see any big difficulties. I know
8074 of few start-ups in and around India who would love to develop and
8075 maintain such software if funding issues could be solved.</p>
8076
8077 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
8078
8079 <p>That would be huge list. Some of the softwares are obviously apt,
8080 aptitude, debdelta, leafpad, the shell of course (zsh nowadays),
8081 quassel for IRC. In games I use shisen-sho while card-games are evenly
8082 between kpat and Aiselriot.  In desktops it's a tie between
8083 gnome-flashback and mate.</p>
8084
8085 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
8086 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
8087
8088 <p>I think it should first start with using specific FOSS apps. in
8089 whatever environment they are. If it's MS-Windows or Mac so be it.
8090 Once they are habitual with the apps. and there is buy-in from the
8091 school management then it could be installed anywhere. Most of the
8092 people now understand the concept of a repository because of the
8093 various online stores so it isn't hard to convince on that front.</p>
8094
8095 <p>What is harder is having enough people with technical skills and
8096 passion to service them. If you get buy-in from one or two teachers
8097 then ideas like above could also be asked to be done as a project as
8098 well.</p>
8099
8100 <p>I think where we fall short more than anything is in marketing. For
8101 instance, Debian has this whole range of fonts in its archive but
8102 there isn't even a page where all those different fonts in the La
8103 Ipsum format could be tried out for newcomers.</p>
8104
8105 <p>One of the issues faced constantly in installations is with updates
8106 and upgrades.  People have this myth that each update and upgrade
8107 means the user interface will / has to change. I have seen this
8108 innumerable times.  That perhaps is one of the reasons which browsers
8109 like Iceweasel / Firefox change user interfaces so much, not because
8110 it might be needed or be functional but because people believe that
8111 changed user interfaces are better. This, can easily be pointed with
8112 the user interfaces changed with almost every MS-Windows and Mac OS
8113 releases.</p>
8114
8115 <p>The problems with Debian Edu for deployment are many. The biggest
8116 is the huge gap between what is taught in schools and what Debian Edu
8117 is aimed at.
8118
8119 <p>Me and my friends did teach on week-ends in a government school for
8120 around 2 years, and
8121 <a href="https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/sharings/">gathered
8122 some experience</a> there.  Some of the things we learnt/discovered
8123 there was :</p>
8124
8125 <ol>
8126
8127   <li>Most of the teachers are very territorial about their subjects
8128    and they do not want you to teach anything out of the
8129    portion/syllabus given.</li>
8130
8131   <li>They want any activity on the system in accordance to whatever
8132    is in the syllabus.</li>
8133
8134   <li>There are huge barriers both with the English language and at
8135    times with objects or whatever. An example, let's say in gcompris
8136    you have objects falling down and you have to name them and let's
8137    say the falling object is a hat or a fedora hat, this would not be
8138    as recognizable as say a
8139    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puneri_Pagadi">Puneri
8140    Pagdi</a> so there is need to inject local objects, words wherever
8141    possible. Especially for word-games there are so many hindi words
8142    which have become part of english vocabulary (for instance in
8143    parley), those could be made into a hinglish collection or
8144    something but that is something for upstream to do.</li>
8145
8146 </ol>
8147
8148       </div>
8149       <div class="tags">
8150
8151
8152         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
8153
8154
8155       </div>
8156     </div>
8157     <div class="padding"></div>
8158
8159     <div class="entry">
8160       <div class="title">
8161         <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>
8162       </div>
8163       <div class="date">
8164          7th April 2015
8165       </div>
8166       <div class="body">
8167         <p>I am happy to let you all know that I'm going to the <a
8168 href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/">Open Source Developers'
8169 Conference Nordic 2015</a>!</p>
8170
8171 <p>It take place Friday 8th to Sunday 10th of May in Oslo next to
8172 where I work, and I finally got around to submitting
8173 <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talk/6192">a talk proposal for
8174 it</a> (dead link for most people until the talk is accepted).  As
8175 part of my involvement with the
8176 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group member
8177 association</a> I have been slightly involved in the planning of this
8178 conference for a while now, with a focus on organising a Civic Hacking
8179 Hackathon with our friends
8180 over at <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> and
8181 <a href="http://www.holderdeord.no/">Holder de ord</a>.  This part is
8182 named the 'My Society' track in the program.  There is still space for
8183 more talks and participants.  I hope to see you there.</p>
8184
8185 <p>Check out <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talks">the talks
8186 submitted and accepted so far</a>.</p>
8187
8188       </div>
8189       <div class="tags">
8190
8191
8192         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>.
8193
8194
8195       </div>
8196     </div>
8197     <div class="padding"></div>
8198
8199     <div class="entry">
8200       <div class="title">
8201         <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>
8202       </div>
8203       <div class="date">
8204          4th April 2015
8205       </div>
8206       <div class="body">
8207         <p>During eastern I had some time to continue working on the Norwegian
8208 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
8209 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
8210 At the moment I am proof reading the finished text, looking for typos,
8211 inconsistent wordings and sentences that do not flow as they should.
8212 I'm more than two thirds done with the text, and welcome others to
8213 check the text up to chapter 13.  The current status is available on the
8214 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
8215 project pages.  You can also check out the
8216 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
8217 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
8218 and HTML version available in the
8219 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
8220 directory</a>.</p>
8221
8222 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
8223 you find any.</p>
8224
8225       </div>
8226       <div class="tags">
8227
8228
8229         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>.
8230
8231
8232       </div>
8233     </div>
8234     <div class="padding"></div>
8235
8236     <div class="entry">
8237       <div class="title">
8238         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen__Norwegian_TV_channel_for_technical_topics.html">Frikanalen, Norwegian TV channel for technical topics</a>
8239       </div>
8240       <div class="date">
8241          9th March 2015
8242       </div>
8243       <div class="body">
8244         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a>,
8245 where I am a member, and where people interested in free software,
8246 open standards and UNIX like operating systems like Linux and the BSDs
8247 come together, record our monthly technical presentations on video.
8248 The purpose is to document the talks and spread them to a wider
8249 audience.  For this, the the Norwegian nationwide open channel
8250 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is a useful venue.
8251 Since a few days ago, when I figured out the
8252 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/api/">REST API</a> to program the
8253 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/guide/">channel time schedule</a>,
8254 the channel has been filled with NUUG talks, related recordings and
8255 some Creative Commons licensed TED talks (from archive.org).  I fill
8256 all "leftover bits" on the channel with content from NUUG, which at
8257 the moment is almost 17 of 24 hours every day.</p>
8258
8259 <p>The list of NUUG videos
8260 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/organization/82">uploaded so far</a>
8261 include things like a
8262 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/625090">one hour talk by John
8263 Perry Barlow when he visited Oslo</a>, a presentation of
8264 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624275">Haiku, the BeOS
8265 re-implementation</a>, the
8266 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624493">history of FiksGataMi,
8267 the Norwegian version of FixMyStreet</a>, the good old
8268 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/623566">Warriors of the net
8269 video</A> and many others.</p>
8270
8271 <p>We have a large backlog of NUUG talks not yet uploaded to
8272 Frikanalen, and plan to upload every useful bit to the channel to
8273 spread the word there.  I also hope to find useful recordings from the
8274 Chaos Computer Club and Debian conferences and spread them on the
8275 channel as well.  But this require locating the videos and their meta
8276 information (title, description, license, etc), and preparing the
8277 recordings for broadcast, and I have not yet had the spare time to
8278 focus on this.  Perhaps you want to help.  Please join us on IRC,
8279 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
8280 if you want to help make this happen.</p>
8281
8282 <p>But as I said, already the channel is already almost exclusively
8283 filled with technical topics, and if you want to learn something new
8284 today, check out the <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">Ogg Theora
8285 web stream</a> or use one of the other ways to get access to the
8286 channel.  Unfortunately the Ogg Theora recoding for distribution still
8287 do not properly sync the video and sound.  It is generated by recoding
8288 a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to
8289 Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and we have not been able to find a way that
8290 produces acceptable quality.  Help needed, please get in touch if you
8291 know how to fix it using free software.</p>
8292
8293       </div>
8294       <div class="tags">
8295
8296
8297         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
8298
8299
8300       </div>
8301     </div>
8302     <div class="padding"></div>
8303
8304     <div class="entry">
8305       <div class="title">
8306         <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>
8307       </div>
8308       <div class="date">
8309         28th February 2015
8310       </div>
8311       <div class="body">
8312         <p>Today I was happy to learn that the documentary
8313 <a href="https://citizenfourfilm.com/">Citizenfour</a> by
8314 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Poitras">Laura Poitras</a>
8315 finally will show up in Norway.  According to the magazine
8316 <a href="http://montages.no/">Montages</a>, a deal has finally been
8317 made for
8318 <a href="http://montages.no/nyheter/snowden-dokumentaren-citizenfour-far-norsk-kinodistribusjon/">Cinema
8319 distribution in Norway</a> and the movie will have its premiere soon.
8320 This is great news.  As part of my involvement with
8321 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User Group</a>, me and
8322 a friend have
8323 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_til_Norge_.shtml">tried
8324 to get the movie to Norway</a> ourselves, but obviously
8325 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_endelig_til_Norge_.shtml">we
8326 were too late</a> and Tor Fosse beat us to it.  I am happy he did, as
8327 the movie will make its way to the public and we do not have to make
8328 it happen ourselves.
8329 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwAvd5mvM">The trailer</a>
8330 can be seen on youtube, if you are curious what kind of film this
8331 is.</p>
8332
8333 <p>The whistle blower Edward Snowden really deserve political asylum
8334 here in Norway, but I am afraid he would not be safe.</p>
8335
8336       </div>
8337       <div class="tags">
8338
8339
8340         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>.
8341
8342
8343       </div>
8344     </div>
8345     <div class="padding"></div>
8346
8347     <div class="entry">
8348       <div class="title">
8349         <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>
8350       </div>
8351       <div class="date">
8352         25th February 2015
8353       </div>
8354       <div class="body">
8355         <p>The Norwegian nationwide open channel
8356 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is still going
8357 strong.  It allow everyone to send the video they want on national
8358 television.  It is a TV station administrated completely using a web
8359 browser, running only <ahref="https://github.com/Frikanalen">Free
8360 Software</a>, providing <ahref="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api">a REST
8361 api</a> for administrators and members, and with distribution on the
8362 national DVB-T distribution network RiksTV.  But only between 12:00
8363 and 17:30 Norwegian time.  This has finally changed, after many years
8364 with limited distribution.  A few weeks ago, we set up a Ogg Theora
8365 stream via icecast to allow everyone with Internet access to check out
8366 the channel the rest of the day.  This is presented on
8367 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">the Frikanalen web site now</a>.  And
8368 since a few days ago, the channel is also available
8369 via <a href="https://www.uninett.no/iptv-tilgang">multicast on
8370 UNINETT</a>, available for those using IPTV TVs and set-top boxes in
8371 the Norwegian National Research and Education network.</p>
8372
8373 <p>If you want to see what is on the channel, point your media player
8374 to one of these sources.  The first should work with most players and
8375 browsers, while as far as I know, the multicast UDP stream only work
8376 with VLC.</p>
8377
8378 <ul>
8379   <li><a href="http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv">http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv</a></li>
8380   <li>udp://@224.17.43.129:1234</li>
8381 </ul>
8382
8383 <p>The Ogg Theora / icecast stream is not working well, as the video
8384 and audio is slightly out of sync.  We have not been able to figure
8385 out how to fix it.  It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG
8386 transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to Ogg Theora /
8387 Vorbis, and the result is less then stellar.  If you have ideas how to
8388 fix it, please let us know on frikanalen (at) nuug.no.  We currently
8389 use this with ffmpeg2theora 0.29:</p>
8390
8391 <blockquote><pre>
8392 ./ffmpeg2theora.linux &lt;OBE_gemini_URL.ts&gt; -F 25 -x 720 -y 405 \
8393  --deinterlace --inputfps 25 -c 1 -H 48000 --keyint 8 --buf-delay 100 \
8394  --nosync -V 700 -o - | oggfwd video.nuug.no 8000 &lt;pw&gt; /frikanalen.ogv
8395 </pre></blockquote>
8396
8397 <p>If you get the multicast UDP stream working, please let me know, as
8398 I am curious how far the multicast stream reach.  It do not make it to
8399 my home network, nor any other commercially available network in
8400 Norway that I am aware of.</p>
8401
8402       </div>
8403       <div class="tags">
8404
8405
8406         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
8407
8408
8409       </div>
8410     </div>
8411     <div class="padding"></div>
8412
8413     <div class="entry">
8414       <div class="title">
8415         <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>
8416       </div>
8417       <div class="date">
8418         10th February 2015
8419       </div>
8420       <div class="body">
8421         <p>Aftenposten, one of the largest newspapers in Norway, today report
8422 that
8423 <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/reise/Slik-skannes-kroppen-din-i-fremtidens-sikkerhetskontroll-490666_1.snd">three
8424 of the nude body scanners now is put to use at Gardermoen</a>, the
8425 main airport in Norway.  This way the travelers can have their body
8426 photographed without cloths when visiting Norway.  Of course this
8427 horrible news is presented with a positive spin, stating that "now
8428 travelers can move past the security check point faster and more
8429 efficiently", but fail to mention that the machines in question take
8430 pictures of their nude bodies and store them internally in the
8431 computer, while only presenting sketch figure of the body to the
8432 public.  The article is written in a way that leave the impression
8433 that the new machines do not take these nude pictures and only create
8434 the sketch figures.  In reality the same nude pictures are still
8435 taken, but not presented to everyone.  They are still available for
8436 the owners of the system and the people doing maintenance of the
8437 scanners, as long as they are taken and stored.</p>
8438
8439 <p>Wikipedia have a more on
8440 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_body_scanner">Full body
8441 scanners</a>, including example images and a summary of the
8442 controversy about these scanners.</p>
8443
8444 <p>Personally I will decline to use these machines, as I believe strip
8445 searches of my body is a very intrusive attack on my privacy, and not
8446 something everyone should have to accept to travel.</p>
8447
8448       </div>
8449       <div class="tags">
8450
8451
8452         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>.
8453
8454
8455       </div>
8456     </div>
8457     <div class="padding"></div>
8458
8459     <div class="entry">
8460       <div class="title">
8461         <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>
8462       </div>
8463       <div class="date">
8464          8th February 2015
8465       </div>
8466       <div class="body">
8467         <p>When running a TV station with both broadcast and web stream
8468 distribution, it is useful to know that the stream is working.  As I
8469 am involved in the Norwegian open channel
8470 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> as part of my
8471 activity in the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member
8472 organisation</a>, I wrote a script to use mplayer to connect to a
8473 video stream, pick two images 35 seconds apart and compare them.  If
8474 the images are missing or identical, something is probably wrong with
8475 the stream and an alarm should be triggered.  The script is written as
8476 a Nagios plugin, allowing us to use Nagios to run the check regularly
8477 and sound the alarm when something is wrong.  It is able to detect
8478 both a hanging and a broken video stream.</p>
8479
8480 <p>I just uploaded the code for the script into the
8481 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen/frikanalen/blob/master/nagios-plugin/check_video_stream_images">Frikanalen
8482 git repository</a> on github.  If you run a TV station with web
8483 streaming, perhaps you can find it useful too.</p>
8484
8485 <p>Last year, the Frikanalen public TV station transformed into using
8486 only Linux based free software to administrate, schedule and
8487 distribute the TV content.  The
8488 <a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen">source code for the entire TV
8489 station</a> is available from the Github project page.  Everyone can
8490 use it to send their content on national TV, and we provide both a web
8491 GUI and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api/">a web API</a> to
8492 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/login/?next=/members/video/">add</a>
8493 and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/members/plan/">schedule
8494 content</a>.  And thanks to last weeks developer gathering and
8495 following activity, we now have the schedule
8496 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/xmltv/2015/01/01">available as
8497 XMLTV</a> too.  Still a lot of work left to do, especially with the
8498 process to add videos and with the scheduling, so your contribution is
8499 most welcome.  Perhaps you want to set up your own TV station?</p>
8500
8501 <p>Update 2015-02-25: Got a tip from Uninett about their
8502 <a href="https://scm.uninett.no/maalepaaler/qstream/">qstream
8503 monitoring system</a>, which gather connection time, jitter, packet
8504 loss and burst bandwidth usage.  It look useful to check if UDP
8505 streams are working as they should.</p>
8506
8507       </div>
8508       <div class="tags">
8509
8510
8511         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>.
8512
8513
8514       </div>
8515     </div>
8516     <div class="padding"></div>
8517
8518     <div class="entry">
8519       <div class="title">
8520         <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>
8521       </div>
8522       <div class="date">
8523         12th January 2015
8524       </div>
8525       <div class="body">
8526         <p>A few days ago, the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/">Free Software
8527 Foundation</a> announced a new video
8528 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">explaining
8529 Free software</a> in simple terms.  The video named User Liberation is
8530 3 minutes long, and I recommend showing it to everyone you know as a
8531 way to explain what Free Software is all about.  Unfortunately several
8532 of the people I know do not understand English and Spanish, so it did
8533 not make sense to show it to them.</p>
8534
8535 <p>But today I was told that
8536 <a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">English
8537 subtitles were available</a> and set out to provide Norwegian Bokmål
8538 subtitles based on these.  The result has been sent to FSF and made
8539 available in
8540 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/fsf-video-user-liberation-subtitles">a
8541 git repository</a> provided by Github.  Please let me know if you find
8542 errors or have improvements to the subtitles.</p>
8543
8544 <p>Update 2015-02-03: Since I publised this post, FSF created a
8545 Libreplanet
8546 <a href="http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:FSF/User_Liberation_Video_Translation">project
8547 to track subtitles</A> for the video.</p>
8548
8549       </div>
8550       <div class="tags">
8551
8552
8553         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>.
8554
8555
8556       </div>
8557     </div>
8558     <div class="padding"></div>
8559
8560     <div class="entry">
8561       <div class="title">
8562         <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>
8563       </div>
8564       <div class="date">
8565         30th December 2014
8566       </div>
8567       <div class="body">
8568         <p>I am very happy that we in the
8569 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group (NUUG)</a>,
8570 spearheaded by Marius Halden from NUUG and Matthew Somerville from
8571 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>, finally managed to
8572 upgrade the code base for the Norwegian version of
8573 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org/">FixMyStreet</a>.  This
8574 was the first major update since 2011. The refurbished
8575 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is already live, and
8576 seem to hold up the pressure.  The
8577 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__FiksGataMi_i_oppdatert_og_mobilvennlig_klesdrakt.shtml">press
8578 release and announcement</a> went out this morning.</p>
8579
8580 <p>FixMyStreet is a web platform for allowing the citizens to easily
8581 report problems with public infrastructure to the responsible
8582 authorities.  Think of it as a shared mail client with map support,
8583 allowing everyone to see what already was reported and comment on the
8584 reports in public.</p>
8585
8586       </div>
8587       <div class="tags">
8588
8589
8590         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>.
8591
8592
8593       </div>
8594     </div>
8595     <div class="padding"></div>
8596
8597     <div class="entry">
8598       <div class="title">
8599         <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>
8600       </div>
8601       <div class="date">
8602         19th December 2014
8603       </div>
8604       <div class="body">
8605         <p>So, Sony caved in
8606 (<a href="https://twitter.com/RobLowe/status/545338568512917504">according
8607 to Rob Lowe</a>) and demonstrated that America lost its first cyberwar
8608 (<a href="https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/status/545339074975109122">according
8609 to Newt Gingrich</a>).  It should not surprise anyone, after the
8610 whistle blower Edward Snowden documented that the government of USA
8611 and their allies for many years have done their best to make sure the
8612 technology used by its citizens is filled with security holes allowing
8613 the secret services to spy on its own population.  No one in their
8614 right minds could believe that the ability to snoop on the people all
8615 over the globe could only be used by the personnel authorized to do so
8616 by the president of the United States of America.  If the capabilities
8617 are there, they will be used by friend and foe alike, and now they are
8618 being used to bring Sony on its knees.</p>
8619
8620 <p>I doubt it will a lesson learned, and expect USA to lose its next
8621 cyber war too, given how eager the western intelligence communities
8622 (and probably the non-western too, but it is less in the news) seem to
8623 be to continue its current dragnet surveillance practice.</p>
8624
8625 <p>There is a reason why China and others are trying to move away from
8626 Windows to Linux and other alternatives, and it is not to avoid
8627 sending its hard earned dollars to Cayman Islands (or whatever
8628 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven">tax haven</a>
8629 Microsoft is using these days to collect the majority of its
8630 income. :)</p>
8631
8632       </div>
8633       <div class="tags">
8634
8635
8636         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>.
8637
8638
8639       </div>
8640     </div>
8641     <div class="padding"></div>
8642
8643     <div class="entry">
8644       <div class="title">
8645         <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>
8646       </div>
8647       <div class="date">
8648         22nd November 2014
8649       </div>
8650       <div class="body">
8651         <p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
8652 sysvinit as its boot system by default.  But how can one keep using
8653 sysvinit in Jessie?  It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
8654 courtesy of
8655 <a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
8656 Schubert</a> and
8657 <a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
8658 McVittie</a>.
8659
8660 <p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
8661 keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
8662 <tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
8663 you upgrade:</p>
8664
8665 <p><blockquote><pre>
8666 Package: systemd-sysv
8667 Pin: release o=Debian
8668 Pin-Priority: -1
8669 </pre></blockquote><p>
8670
8671 <p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
8672 installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
8673 solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
8674 systemd as a default boot system.  The end result should be that the
8675 upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
8676
8677 <p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
8678 get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
8679 debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
8680 installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot.  Either by
8681 using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
8682 preseed file used.  First, the kernel command line argument:
8683
8684 <p><blockquote><pre>
8685 preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
8686 </pre></blockquote><p>
8687
8688 <p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
8689
8690 <p><blockquote><pre>
8691 d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
8692 </pre></blockquote><p>
8693
8694 <p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
8695 the sysvinit-core package.</p>
8696
8697 <p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
8698 sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
8699 on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
8700 devices show up during boot.  But on the other hand, the new default
8701 boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
8702 Jessie is released.</p>
8703
8704 <p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
8705 <ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
8706 blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
8707 line.</p>
8708
8709       </div>
8710       <div class="tags">
8711
8712
8713         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>.
8714
8715
8716       </div>
8717     </div>
8718     <div class="padding"></div>
8719
8720     <div class="entry">
8721       <div class="title">
8722         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Debian_package_for_SMTP_via_Tor__aka_SMTorP__using_exim4.html">A Debian package for SMTP via Tor (aka SMTorP) using exim4</a>
8723       </div>
8724       <div class="date">
8725         10th November 2014
8726       </div>
8727       <div class="body">
8728         <p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
8729 without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
8730 democracy.  But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
8731
8732 <p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
8733 surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
8734 the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
8735 is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor.  Such SMTP option would be
8736 a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
8737 between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
8738 to the people peeking on the wire.  I
8739 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
8740 this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
8741 lot of useful feedback and suggestions.  It also became obvious to me
8742 that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
8743 documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
8744 <a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
8745 Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
8746 propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
8747
8748 <p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
8749 providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
8750 looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion.  With such addresses
8751 the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
8752 go to the correct SMTP server.  To do this, one need to configure the
8753 Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
8754 emails for this .onion domain.  To learn more about Exim configuration
8755 in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
8756 set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
8757 set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian.  Getting it to work
8758 were fairly easy, and
8759 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
8760 source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github.  I
8761 plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
8762 useful approach.</p>
8763
8764 <p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
8765 mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
8766 get rid of exim4).  Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
8767 above, build the deb and install it on the machine.  Next, run
8768 <tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
8769 the instructions to get the service up and running.  Restart tor and
8770 exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
8771 this:</p>
8772
8773 <p><blockquote><pre>
8774 torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
8775   --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
8776 </pre></blockquote></p>
8777
8778 <p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor.  Replace the email
8779 address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
8780
8781 <p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
8782 easier and more automatic.  Especially the tor setup need more work.
8783 Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
8784 should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
8785 architecture independent.  It would probably also make the code easier
8786 to review.  The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
8787 exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd.  It would be better if
8788 no daemon and no socket is needed.  I suspect it is possible to get
8789 exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
8790 socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
8791 system.</p>
8792
8793 <p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
8794 <tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
8795 SMTorP. :)</p>
8796
8797       </div>
8798       <div class="tags">
8799
8800
8801         Tags: <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>.
8802
8803
8804       </div>
8805     </div>
8806     <div class="padding"></div>
8807
8808     <div class="entry">
8809       <div class="title">
8810         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_released__alpha0_.html">First Jessie based Debian Edu released (alpha0)</a>
8811       </div>
8812       <div class="date">
8813         27th October 2014
8814       </div>
8815       <div class="body">
8816         <p>I am happy to report that I on behalf of the Debian Edu team just
8817 sent out
8818 <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2014/10/msg00000.html">this
8819 announcement</a>:</p>
8820
8821 <pre>
8822 The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu
8823 Jessie 8.0+edu0~alpha0
8824
8825 Debian Edu is a complete operating system for schools. Through its
8826 various installation profiles you can install servers, workstations
8827 and laptops which will work together on the school network. With
8828 Debian Edu, the teachers themselves or their technical support can
8829 roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within
8830 hours or a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications
8831 pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.
8832
8833 For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
8834 installation instructions are available, including detailed
8835 instructions in the manual[1] explaining the first steps, such as
8836 setting up a network or adding users. Please note that the password
8837 for the user your prompted for during installation must have a length
8838 of at least 5 characters!
8839
8840  [1] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie</a> &gt;
8841
8842 Would you like to give your school's computer a longer life? Are you
8843 tired of sneaker administration, running from computer to computer
8844 reinstalling the operating system? Would you like to administrate all
8845 the computers in your school using only a couple of hours every week?
8846 Check out Debian Edu Jessie!
8847
8848 Skolelinux is used by at least two hundred schools all over the world,
8849 mostly in Germany and Norway.
8850
8851 About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
8852 ===============================
8853
8854 Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux[2], is a Linux distribution based
8855 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
8856 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
8857 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
8858 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
8859 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
8860 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
8861 machines can be installed via the network.  The provided school server
8862 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
8863 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
8864 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
8865 packages[3] and more are available from the Debian archive, and
8866 schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
8867 environment.
8868
8869  [2] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">http://www.skolelinux.org/</a> &gt;
8870  [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;
8871
8872 Full release notes and manual
8873 =============================
8874
8875 Below the download URLs there is a list of some of the new features
8876 and bugfixes of Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie. The full
8877 list is part of the manual. (See the feature list in the manual[4] for
8878 the English version.) For some languages manual translations are
8879 available, see the manual translation overview[5].
8880
8881  [4] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features</a> &gt;
8882  [5] &lt;URL: <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/</a> &gt;
8883
8884 Where to get it
8885 ---------------
8886
8887 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release (624 MiB) you can use
8888
8889  * <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>
8890  * <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>
8891  * rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso .
8892
8893 The SHA1SUM of this image is: 361188818e036ce67280a572f757de82ebfeb095
8894
8895 New features for Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie released 2014-10-27
8896 ===============================================================================
8897
8898
8899 Installation changes
8900 --------------------
8901
8902  * PXE installation now installs firmware automatically for the hardware present.
8903
8904 Software updates
8905 ----------------
8906
8907 Everything which is new in Debian Jessie 8.0, eg:
8908
8909  * Linux kernel 3.16.x
8910  * Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.11.12, GNOME 3.14, Xfce 4.10,
8911    LXDE 0.5.6 and MATE 1.8 (KDE "Plasma" is installed by default; to
8912    choose one of the others see manual.)
8913  * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 38
8914  * !LibreOffice 4.3.3
8915  * GOsa 2.7.4
8916  * LTSP 5.5.4
8917  * CUPS print system 1.7.5
8918  * new boot framework: systemd
8919  * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.07
8920  * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
8921  * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
8922  * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.0
8923  * golearn 0.9
8924  * tuxpaint 0.9.22
8925  * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
8926  * Debian Jessie includes about 42000 packages available for
8927    installation.
8928  * More information about Debian Jessie 8.0 is provided in the release
8929    notes[6] and the installation manual[7].
8930
8931  [6] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes</a> &gt;
8932  [7] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual</a> &gt;
8933
8934 Fixed bugs
8935 ----------
8936
8937  * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
8938    DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
8939    information is corrected (Debian bug #710362)
8940  * and many others.
8941
8942 Documentation and translation updates
8943 -------------------------------------
8944
8945  * The Debian Edu Jessie Manual is fully translated to German, French,
8946    Italian, Danish and Dutch. Partly translated versions exist for
8947    Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
8948
8949 Other changes
8950 -------------
8951
8952  * Due to new Squid settings, powering off or rebooting the main
8953    server takes more time.
8954  * To manage printers localhost:631 has to be used, currently www:631
8955    doesn't work.
8956
8957 Regressions / known problems
8958 ----------------------------
8959
8960  * Installing LTSP chroot fails with a bug related to eatmydata about
8961    exim4-config failing to run its postinst (see Debian bug #765694
8962    and Debian bug #762103).
8963  * Munin collection is not properly configured on clients (Debian bug
8964    #764594).  The fix is available in a newer version of munin-node.
8965  * PXE setup for Main Server and Thin Client Server setup does not
8966    work when installing on a machine without direct Internet access.
8967    Will be fixed when Debian bug #766960 is fixed in Jessie.
8968
8969 See the status page[8] for the complete list.
8970
8971  [8] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie</a> &gt;
8972
8973 How to report bugs
8974 ------------------
8975
8976 &lt;URL: <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a> &gt;
8977
8978 About Debian
8979 ============
8980
8981 The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
8982 free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
8983 the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
8984 volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
8985 maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
8986 huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
8987 operating system.
8988
8989 Contact Information
8990 For further information, please visit the Debian web pages[9] or send
8991 mail to press@debian.org.
8992
8993  [9] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a> &gt;
8994 </pre>
8995
8996       </div>
8997       <div class="tags">
8998
8999
9000         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9001
9002
9003       </div>
9004     </div>
9005     <div class="padding"></div>
9006
9007     <div class="entry">
9008       <div class="title">
9009         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html">I spent last weekend recording MakerCon Nordic</a>
9010       </div>
9011       <div class="date">
9012         23rd October 2014
9013       </div>
9014       <div class="body">
9015         <p>I spent last weekend at <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">Makercon
9016 Nordic</a>, a great conference and workshop for makers in Norway and
9017 the surrounding countries.  I had volunteered on behalf of the
9018 Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG) to video record the talks, and we
9019 had a great and exhausting time recording the entire day, two days in
9020 a row.  There were only two of us, Hans-Petter and me, and we used the
9021 regular video equipment for NUUG, with a
9022 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">dvswitch</a>, a
9023 camera and a VGA to DV convert box, and mixed video and slides
9024 live.</p>
9025
9026 <p>Hans-Petter did the post-processing, consisting of uploading the
9027 around 180 GiB of raw video to Youtube, and the result is
9028 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">now becoming
9029 public</a> on the MakerConNordic account.  The videos have the license
9030 NUUG always use on our recordings, which is
9031 <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/no/">Creative
9032 Commons Navngivelse-Del på samme vilkår 3.0 Norge</a>.  Many great
9033 talks available.  Check it out! :)</p>
9034
9035       </div>
9036       <div class="tags">
9037
9038
9039         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>.
9040
9041
9042       </div>
9043     </div>
9044     <div class="padding"></div>
9045
9046     <div class="entry">
9047       <div class="title">
9048         <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>
9049       </div>
9050       <div class="date">
9051         22nd October 2014
9052       </div>
9053       <div class="body">
9054         <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
9055 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
9056 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
9057 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
9058 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
9059 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
9060 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
9061 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
9062 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
9063 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
9064 lists I recently took over:</p>
9065
9066 <p><blockquote><pre>
9067 % time listadmin xiph
9068 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
9069 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
9070
9071 real    0m1.709s
9072 user    0m0.232s
9073 sys     0m0.012s
9074 %
9075 </pre></blockquote></p>
9076
9077 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
9078 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
9079 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
9080 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
9081 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
9082 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
9083 program.</p>
9084
9085 <p>If you install
9086 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
9087 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
9088 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
9089
9090 <p><blockquote><pre>
9091 username username@example.org
9092 spamlevel 23
9093 default discard
9094 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
9095
9096 password secret
9097 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
9098 mailman-list@lists.example.com
9099
9100 password hidden
9101 other-list@otherserver.example.org
9102 </pre></blockquote></p>
9103
9104 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
9105 learn the details.</p>
9106
9107 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
9108 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
9109 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
9110 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
9111
9112 <p><blockquote><pre>
9113 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
9114 </pre></blockquote></p>
9115
9116 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
9117 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
9118 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
9119 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
9120 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
9121 email.</p>
9122
9123 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
9124 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
9125 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
9126 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
9127 software.</p>
9128
9129 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
9130 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
9131 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
9132
9133 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
9134 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
9135 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
9136 sure why.</p>
9137
9138       </div>
9139       <div class="tags">
9140
9141
9142         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
9143
9144
9145       </div>
9146     </div>
9147     <div class="padding"></div>
9148
9149     <div class="entry">
9150       <div class="title">
9151         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html">Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</a>
9152       </div>
9153       <div class="date">
9154         17th October 2014
9155       </div>
9156       <div class="body">
9157         <p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
9158 problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
9159 And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
9160 Normally something more is needed.  But thanks to
9161 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
9162 package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
9163 to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
9164
9165 <p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
9166 firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
9167 the kernel modules for the hardware).  (It can also install user space
9168 programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
9169 of this story.)</p>
9170
9171 <p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
9172 values are needed.  First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
9173 into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
9174 in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system.  This is done by
9175 preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
9176 isenkram-cli package.  The package name is next passed to debootstrap
9177 for installation.  With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
9178 will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
9179 packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
9180 isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
9181
9182 <p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
9183 most firmware unfortunately is non-free.  This is done by preseeding
9184 the apt-mirror-setup step.  This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
9185 hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
9186
9187 <p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
9188 firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
9189
9190 <p><blockquote><pre>
9191 base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
9192 apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
9193 </pre></blockquote></p>
9194
9195 <p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
9196 both firmware and user space packages when using this method.  It also
9197 do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later.  Installing both
9198 firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
9199 want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
9200 and one for user space programs.  The firmware task is enabled by
9201 default, while the one for user space programs is not.  This split is
9202 implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
9203
9204 <p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
9205 this recipe work for you. :)</p>
9206
9207 <p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work.  First and
9208 foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
9209 files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/.  So the
9210 isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find.  First there
9211 is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
9212
9213 <p><blockquote><pre>
9214 Task: isenkram-packages
9215 Section: hardware
9216 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
9217  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
9218  proposed.
9219 Test-new-install: show show
9220 Relevance: 8
9221 Packages: for-current-hardware
9222
9223 Task: isenkram-firmware
9224 Section: hardware
9225 Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
9226  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
9227  packages are proposed.
9228 Test-new-install: mark show
9229 Relevance: 8
9230 Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
9231 </pre></blockquote></p>
9232
9233 <p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
9234 should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
9235 /usr/lib/tasksel/packages/.  The scripts use other scripts to get a
9236 list of packages to install.  The for-current-hardware-firmware script
9237 look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
9238
9239 <p><blockquote><pre>
9240 #!/bin/sh
9241 #
9242 PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
9243 export PATH
9244 isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
9245 </pre></blockquote></p>
9246
9247 <p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
9248 tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
9249
9250 <p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
9251 installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
9252 --new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
9253 install.</p>
9254
9255 <p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
9256 pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
9257 install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
9258
9259       </div>
9260       <div class="tags">
9261
9262
9263         Tags: <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>.
9264
9265
9266       </div>
9267     </div>
9268     <div class="padding"></div>
9269
9270     <div class="entry">
9271       <div class="title">
9272         <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>
9273       </div>
9274       <div class="date">
9275          4th October 2014
9276       </div>
9277       <div class="body">
9278         <p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen.  Above the
9279 bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
9280 with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
9281 on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
9282
9283 <p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
9284
9285 <p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
9286 about this hidden Linux installation.  It is interesting what
9287 <a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
9288
9289       </div>
9290       <div class="tags">
9291
9292
9293         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
9294
9295
9296       </div>
9297     </div>
9298     <div class="padding"></div>
9299
9300     <div class="entry">
9301       <div class="title">
9302         <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>
9303       </div>
9304       <div class="date">
9305          4th October 2014
9306       </div>
9307       <div class="body">
9308         <p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
9309 got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
9310 developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
9311 This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
9312 Dibb.</p>
9313
9314 <p>I just wrapped up
9315 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
9316 new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
9317 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
9318 download page</a>.  This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
9319 0.17.</p>
9320
9321 <ul>
9322
9323  <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
9324  <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
9325    non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
9326  <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
9327  <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
9328  <li>Fix include orders</li>
9329  <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
9330  <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
9331  <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
9332    the palette size is the same.</li>
9333  <li>Fix array printing.</li>
9334  <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
9335  <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
9336  <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
9337    with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
9338
9339 </ul>
9340
9341 <p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
9342 Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
9343 project the last nine years.  Please check it out. :)</p>
9344
9345       </div>
9346       <div class="tags">
9347
9348
9349         Tags: <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>.
9350
9351
9352       </div>
9353     </div>
9354     <div class="padding"></div>
9355
9356     <div class="entry">
9357       <div class="title">
9358         <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>
9359       </div>
9360       <div class="date">
9361         26th September 2014
9362       </div>
9363       <div class="body">
9364         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
9365 project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
9366 powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
9367 web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
9368 boot of both  clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
9369 Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
9370 to mention here).  We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
9371 the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
9372 freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
9373 future.  The
9374 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
9375 status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
9376 work left.  Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
9377 but it is possible to work around these to get anyway.  Here is a
9378 recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
9379
9380 <p>First, download the test ISO via
9381 <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
9382 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
9383 or rsync (use
9384 ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
9385 The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
9386 12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
9387 install with some tweaking.</p>
9388
9389 <p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
9390 (use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
9391
9392 <p><blockquote><pre>
9393 nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
9394 </pre></blockquote></p>
9395
9396 <p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
9397 optimization.  Return to the installation, select the profile you want
9398 and continue.  Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
9399 due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
9400
9401 <p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
9402 this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be.  All my
9403 test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
9404 your need.</p>
9405
9406 <p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
9407 root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
9408 education-desktop-XXX metapackage.  XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
9409 or mate.  If you want several desktop options, install more than one
9410 metapackage.  Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
9411 graphical login screen.  This workaround should no longer be needed
9412 once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
9413 days.</p>
9414
9415 <p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
9416 tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
9417 update the debian-cd git repository.  The eatmydata, grub and desktop
9418 issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
9419 on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again.  Well the
9420 eatmydata optimization is really just disabled.  The proper fix
9421 require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
9422 provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
9423 The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
9424
9425 <p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
9426 quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
9427 installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
9428
9429       </div>
9430       <div class="tags">
9431
9432
9433         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>.
9434
9435
9436       </div>
9437     </div>
9438     <div class="padding"></div>
9439
9440     <div class="entry">
9441       <div class="title">
9442         <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>
9443       </div>
9444       <div class="date">
9445         25th September 2014
9446       </div>
9447       <div class="body">
9448         <p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
9449 to handle my fairly large DVD collection.  It is a nice command line
9450 tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
9451 etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format.  But lsdvd have not seen
9452 any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
9453 its use with some DVDs.  Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
9454 sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
9455 project, without any reply.  But I use it regularly and would like to
9456 get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
9457 into Debian</a>.  So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
9458 the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
9459 he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
9460 over.  And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
9461
9462 <p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
9463 maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
9464 project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
9465 collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
9466 I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
9467 repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too.  If you got
9468 a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
9469 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
9470 <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
9471 list</a>. :)</p>
9472
9473       </div>
9474       <div class="tags">
9475
9476
9477         Tags: <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>.
9478
9479
9480       </div>
9481     </div>
9482     <div class="padding"></div>
9483
9484     <div class="entry">
9485       <div class="title">
9486         <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>
9487       </div>
9488       <div class="date">
9489         16th September 2014
9490       </div>
9491       <div class="body">
9492         <p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
9493 a lot quicker.  When we install more than 2000 packages in
9494 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
9495 tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
9496 A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
9497 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
9498 much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
9499 responsible for unpacking the binary packages.  Other parts (like code
9500 executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
9501 installation.  All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
9502 me.  If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
9503 to salvage the half installed system.  So the failure sync-ing is
9504 supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
9505 relevant while the installer is running.</p>
9506
9507 <p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
9508 system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
9509 change the code in several packages.  The idea is not new, but I have
9510 not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before.  It
9511 depend on the small and clever package
9512 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
9513 uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
9514 disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
9515 dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly.  Instead of
9516 modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
9517 packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
9518 it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
9519 them with a simple shell wrapper calling
9520 "eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
9521 Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
9522 implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
9523
9524 <p>The effect was stunning.  In my first test it reduced the running
9525 time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
9526 minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
9527 Latitude D505 machine.  I am not quite sure what the optimised time
9528 would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
9529 priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
9530 installation.  As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
9531 along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
9532 installation.  I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
9533 and got these results.  The time measured is the time stamp in
9534 /var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
9535 "pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
9536 yourself.  In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
9537 timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
9538 dialog.</p>
9539
9540 <p><table>
9541
9542 <tr>
9543 <th>Machine/setup</th>
9544 <th>Original tasksel</th>
9545 <th>Optimised tasksel</th>
9546 <th>Reduction</th>
9547 </tr>
9548
9549 <tr>
9550 <td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
9551 <td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
9552 <td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
9553 <td>>20 min 18%</td>
9554 </tr>
9555
9556 <tr>
9557 <td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
9558 <td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
9559 <td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
9560 <td>23 min 40%</td>
9561 </tr>
9562
9563 <tr>
9564 <td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
9565 <td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
9566 <td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
9567 <td>11 min 50%</td>
9568 </tr>
9569
9570 <tr>
9571 <td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
9572 <td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
9573 <td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
9574 <td>2 min 33%</td>
9575 </tr>
9576
9577 <tr>
9578 <td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
9579 <td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
9580 <td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
9581 <td>4 min 21%</td>
9582 </tr>
9583
9584 </table></p>
9585
9586 <p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
9587 time is spent downloading packages.  The connection to the Internet
9588 was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
9589 significant factor in the measurement.  Download typically took a few
9590 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
9591 installed.</p>
9592
9593 <p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
9594 <a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
9595 Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
9596 finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
9597 installation.  I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
9598 post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
9599 eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
9600 Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO.  The
9601 negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
9602 optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i.  If the code is
9603 moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
9604 for the entire installation.</p>
9605
9606 <p>I've implemented this in the
9607 <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
9608 git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
9609 Debian Edu installation.  If you want to test this yourself, you can
9610 create two files in the installer (or in an udeb).  One shell script
9611 need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
9612
9613 <p><blockquote><pre>
9614 #!/bin/sh
9615 set -e
9616 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
9617 info() {
9618     logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
9619 }
9620 error() {
9621     logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
9622 }
9623 override_install() {
9624     apt-install eatmydata || true
9625     if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
9626         for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
9627             file=/usr/bin/$bin
9628             # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
9629             if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
9630                 info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
9631                 printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
9632                     > /target$file.edu
9633                 chmod 755 /target$file.edu
9634                 in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
9635                     --rename --quiet --add $file
9636                 ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
9637             else
9638                 error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
9639             fi
9640         done
9641     else
9642         error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
9643     fi
9644 }
9645
9646 override_install
9647 </pre></blockquote></p>
9648
9649 <p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
9650 /usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
9651
9652 <p><blockquote><pre>
9653 #! /bin/sh -e
9654 . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
9655 error() {
9656     logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
9657 }
9658 remove_install_override() {
9659     for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
9660         file=/usr/bin/$bin
9661         if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
9662             rm /target$file
9663             in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
9664                 --rename --quiet --remove $file
9665             rm /target$file.edu
9666         else
9667             error "Missing divert for $file."
9668         fi
9669     done
9670     sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
9671 }
9672
9673 remove_install_override
9674 </pre></blockquote></p>
9675
9676 <p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
9677 edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
9678 finish-install.d scripts.</p>
9679
9680 <p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
9681 Debian installer too?  I suspect it should, but am not sure the
9682 current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough.  It also
9683 depend on the side effects of the change.  I'm not aware of any, but I
9684 guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
9685 Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
9686 fsync() having effect?  Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
9687 allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
9688 everyone.</p>
9689
9690 <p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
9691 will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
9692 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>.  An updated
9693 eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
9694
9695 <p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
9696 the optimization work again.  And I have discovered that the
9697 dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
9698 simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package.  See
9699 tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
9700
9701 <p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
9702 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
9703 triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
9704 optimization again.  If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
9705 request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
9706
9707       </div>
9708       <div class="tags">
9709
9710
9711         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>.
9712
9713
9714       </div>
9715     </div>
9716     <div class="padding"></div>
9717
9718     <div class="entry">
9719       <div class="title">
9720         <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>
9721       </div>
9722       <div class="date">
9723         10th September 2014
9724       </div>
9725       <div class="body">
9726         <p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
9727 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
9728 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
9729 OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
9730 learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
9731 use when looking for peoples public key.  So far I have used
9732 subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
9733 were misbehaving, but those days are ended.  The servers I have used
9734 up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable.  I hope
9735 those problems are gone now.</p>
9736
9737 <p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
9738 <a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
9739 there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
9740 day to ensure they are well connected and up to date.  It must be
9741 better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
9742
9743 <p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
9744 keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
9745 not seem to be used in Debian.  Perhaps it should?</p>
9746
9747 <p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
9748 line:</p>
9749
9750 <p><blockquote><pre>
9751 keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
9752 </pre></blockquote></p>
9753
9754 <p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
9755 entries in DNS.  Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
9756 user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
9757 keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
9758
9759 <p><blockquote><pre>
9760 % host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
9761 _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
9762 %
9763 </pre></blockquote></p>
9764
9765 <p>Now if only
9766 <a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
9767 HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
9768 very happy.  It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
9769 normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
9770 another key.  Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
9771 download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
9772 key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
9773 This is as far as I can tell not possible today.  Perhaps something
9774 for a future version of the protocol?</p>
9775
9776       </div>
9777       <div class="tags">
9778
9779
9780         Tags: <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>.
9781
9782
9783       </div>
9784     </div>
9785     <div class="padding"></div>
9786
9787     <div class="entry">
9788       <div class="title">
9789         <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>
9790       </div>
9791       <div class="date">
9792         25th August 2014
9793       </div>
9794       <div class="body">
9795         <p>Two years later, I am still not sure if it is legal here in Norway
9796 to use or publish a video in H.264 or MPEG4 format edited by the
9797 commercially licensed video editors, without limiting the use to
9798 create "personal" or "non-commercial" videos or get a license
9799 agreement with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com">MPEG LA</a>.  If one
9800 want to publish and broadcast video in a non-personal or commercial
9801 setting, it might be that those tools can not be used, or that video
9802 format can not be used, without breaking their copyright license.  I
9803 am not sure.
9804 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Trenger_en_avtale_med_MPEG_LA_for___publisere_og_kringkaste_H_264_video_.html">Back
9805 then</a>, I found that the copyright license terms for Adobe Premiere
9806 and Apple Final Cut Pro both specified that one could not use the
9807 program to produce anything else without a patent license from MPEG
9808 LA.  The issue is not limited to those two products, though.  Other
9809 much used products like those from Avid and Sorenson Media have terms
9810 of use are similar to those from Adobe and Apple.  The complicating
9811 factor making me unsure if those terms have effect in Norway or not is
9812 that the patents in question are not valid in Norway, but copyright
9813 licenses are.</p>
9814
9815 <p>These are the terms for Avid Artist Suite, according to their
9816 <a href="http://www.avid.com/US/about-avid/legal-notices/legal-enduserlicense2">published
9817 end user</a>
9818 <a href="http://www.avid.com/static/resources/common/documents/corporate/LICENSE.pdf">license
9819 text</a> (converted to lower case text for easier reading):</p>
9820
9821 <p><blockquote>
9822 <p>18.2. MPEG-4. MPEG-4 technology may be included with the
9823 software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice: </p>
9824
9825 <p>This product is licensed under the MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio
9826 license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer for (i)
9827 encoding video in compliance with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4
9828 video”) and/or (ii) decoding MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a
9829 consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or was
9830 obtained from a video provider licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4
9831 video.  No license is granted or shall be implied for any other
9832 use. Additional information including that relating to promotional,
9833 internal and commercial uses and licensing may be obtained from MPEG
9834 LA, LLC.  See http://www.mpegla.com. This product is licensed under
9835 the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license for encoding in compliance
9836 with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except that an additional license
9837 and payment of royalties are necessary for encoding in connection with
9838 (i) data stored or replicated in physical media which is paid for on a
9839 title by title basis and/or (ii) data which is paid for on a title by
9840 title basis and is transmitted to an end user for permanent storage
9841 and/or use, such additional license may be obtained from MPEG LA,
9842 LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for additional details.</p>
9843
9844 <p>18.3. H.264/AVC. H.264/AVC technology may be included with the
9845 software.  MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:</p>
9846
9847 <p>This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
9848 the personal use of a consumer or other uses in which it does not
9849 receive remuneration to (i) encode video in compliance with the AVC
9850 standard (“AVC video”) and/or (ii) decode AVC video that was encoded
9851 by a consumer engaged in a personal activity and/or was obtained from
9852 a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No license is granted
9853 or shall be implied for any other use. Additional information may be
9854 obtained from MPEG LA, L.L.C. See http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
9855 </blockquote></p>
9856
9857 <p>Note the requirement that the videos created can only be used for
9858 personal or non-commercial purposes.</p>
9859
9860 <p>The Sorenson Media software have
9861 <a href="http://www.sorensonmedia.com/terms/">similar terms</a>:</p>
9862
9863 <p><blockquote>
9864
9865 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4 Video
9866 Decoders and/or Encoders: Any such product is licensed under the
9867 MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio license for the personal and
9868 non-commercial use of a consumer for (i) encoding video in compliance
9869 with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4 video”) and/or (ii) decoding
9870 MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and
9871 non-commercial activity and/or was obtained from a video provider
9872 licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4 video. No license is granted or
9873 shall be implied for any other use. Additional information including
9874 that relating to promotional, internal and commercial uses and
9875 licensing may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See
9876 http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
9877
9878 <p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4
9879 Consumer Recorded Data Encoder, MPEG-4 Systems Internet Data Encoder,
9880 MPEG-4 Mobile Data Encoder, and/or MPEG-4 Unique Use Encoder: Any such
9881 product is licensed under the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license
9882 for encoding in compliance with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except
9883 that an additional license and payment of royalties are necessary for
9884 encoding in connection with (i) data stored or replicated in physical
9885 media which is paid for on a title by title basis and/or (ii) data
9886 which is paid for on a title by title basis and is transmitted to an
9887 end user for permanent storage and/or use. Such additional license may
9888 be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for
9889 additional details.</p>
9890
9891 </blockquote></p>
9892
9893 <p>Some free software like
9894 <a href="https://handbrake.fr/">Handbrake</A> and
9895 <a href="http://ffmpeg.org/">FFMPEG</a> uses GPL/LGPL licenses and do
9896 not have any such terms included, so for those, there is no
9897 requirement to limit the use to personal and non-commercial.</p>
9898
9899       </div>
9900       <div class="tags">
9901
9902
9903         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
9904
9905
9906       </div>
9907     </div>
9908     <div class="padding"></div>
9909
9910     <div class="entry">
9911       <div class="title">
9912         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html">Debian Edu interview: Bernd Zeitzen</a>
9913       </div>
9914       <div class="date">
9915         31st July 2014
9916       </div>
9917       <div class="body">
9918         <p>The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for
9919 schools, <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
9920 Skolelinux</a>, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
9921 involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
9922 from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
9923 the setup.  I managed to interview him this summer.</p>
9924
9925 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
9926
9927 <p>My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I'm married with Hedda, a self
9928 employed physiotherapist.  My former profession is tool maker, but I
9929 haven't worked for 30 years in this job.  30 years ago I started to
9930 support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
9931 administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
9932 Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
9933 Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
9934 works with Windows . :-(</p>
9935
9936 <p>In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
9937 Windows 98, 2000, XP, …, 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX.  Today we are running a
9938 Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of
9939 children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
9940 psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
9941 work with the documentations of our patients.</p>
9942
9943 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
9944 project?</strong></p>
9945
9946 <p>Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
9947 his school (<a href="http://www.gymnasium-harsewinkel.de/">Gymnasium
9948 Harsewinkel</a>).  They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
9949 were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
9950 software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
9951 computer skills in optional lessons.  I'm spending 4-6 hours a week
9952 with this job.</p>
9953
9954 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
9955 Edu?</strong></p>
9956
9957 <p>The independence.</p>
9958
9959 <p>First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
9960 software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
9961 included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.</p>
9962
9963 <p>Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
9964 possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices.  The
9965 servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
9966 working reliable. </p>
9967
9968 <p>We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45
9969 workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
9970 solution for all classrooms.  These machines are all booting from the
9971 terminal server.  In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile
9972 workstations.  Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
9973 machines in their classrooms.  Internet access is realized by a WLAN
9974 router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
9975 dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.</p>
9976
9977 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
9978 Edu?</strong></p>
9979
9980 <p>Teachers and pupils are Windows users.  &lt;Irony on&gt; And Linux
9981 isn't cool. It's software for freaks using the command line. &lt;Irony
9982 off&gt; They don't realize the stability of the system. </p>
9983
9984 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
9985
9986 <p>Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Samba,
9987 Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, … and Skolelinux / Debian Edu)</p>
9988
9989 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
9990 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
9991
9992 <p>In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
9993 which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
9994 teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
9995 Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
9996 Office. They don't know about the possibility to use Free Software
9997 instead.  Another problem are the publisher of school books.  They
9998 develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.</p>
9999
10000       </div>
10001       <div class="tags">
10002
10003
10004         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
10005
10006
10007       </div>
10008     </div>
10009     <div class="padding"></div>
10010
10011     <div class="entry">
10012       <div class="title">
10013         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
10014       </div>
10015       <div class="date">
10016         23rd July 2014
10017       </div>
10018       <div class="body">
10019         <p>This summer I finally had time to continue working on the Norwegian
10020 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
10021 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
10022 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with todays copyright
10023 law.  Yesterday, I finally completed translated the book text.  There
10024 are still some foot/end notes left to translate, the colophon page
10025 need to be rewritten, and a few words and phrases still need to be
10026 translated, but the Norwegian text is ready for the first proof
10027 reading. :) More spell checking is needed, and several illustrations
10028 need to be cleaned up.  The work stopped up because I had to give
10029 priority to other projects the last year, and the progress graph of
10030 the translation show this very well:</p>
10031
10032 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
10033
10034 <p>If you want to read the result, check out the
10035 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
10036 project pages and the
10037 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
10038 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
10039 and HTML version available in the
10040 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
10041 directory</a>.</p>
10042
10043 <p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
10044 you find any.</p>
10045
10046       </div>
10047       <div class="tags">
10048
10049
10050         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>.
10051
10052
10053       </div>
10054     </div>
10055     <div class="padding"></div>
10056
10057     <div class="entry">
10058       <div class="title">
10059         <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>
10060       </div>
10061       <div class="date">
10062         17th June 2014
10063       </div>
10064       <div class="body">
10065         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
10066 project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
10067 administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
10068 and maintaining a Debian Edu installation.  This text is about how the
10069 text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
10070
10071 <p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
10072 language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
10073 But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
10074 information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
10075 in sync.  And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
10076 documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
10077 contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
10078 edit the documentation using a web browser.  We also want it to be
10079 easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
10080 help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
10081 tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
10082 goals.</p>
10083
10084 <p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
10085 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
10086 wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English.  It consist of one
10087 front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
10088 for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
10089 chapters together into one large web page (aka
10090 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
10091 AllInOne page</a>).  The AllInOne page is the one used for further
10092 processing and translations.  Thanks to the fact that the
10093 <a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
10094 wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
10095 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
10096 the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
10097 page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
10098 manual.  This process also download images and transform image
10099 references to use the locally downloaded images.  The generated
10100 Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
10101 using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
10102 result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
10103 a handfull of images.  The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
10104 and epub versions of the English manual.  This is the basic step of
10105 our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
10106 epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
10107 are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
10108
10109 <p>But English documentation is not enough for us.  We want translated
10110 documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
10111 track the English original.  For this we use the
10112 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
10113 which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
10114 translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
10115 translation tools used by those translating free software.  The pot
10116 file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
10117 files), which the translations update with the native language
10118 translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
10119 original.  The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
10120 and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
10121 create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
10122 debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml).  This translated (or partly
10123 translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
10124 then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
10125 of the documentation.</p>
10126
10127 <p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files.  We
10128 recommend using
10129 <a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
10130 while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
10131 <a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
10132 <a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>.  All we care about
10133 is where the .po file end up, in our git repository.  Updated
10134 translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
10135 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
10136 against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
10137
10138 <p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
10139 they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
10140 formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
10141 this regard).  For this we transform the original PNG images to the
10142 needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
10143 translated images by storing translated versions in
10144 images/$LANGUAGECODE/.  I am a bit unsure about the details here.  The
10145 package maintainers know more.</p>
10146
10147 <p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
10148 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
10149 of the documentation packages on the web</a>.  See for example the
10150 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
10151 PDF version</a> or the
10152 <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
10153 HTML version</a>.  We do not yet build the epub version by default,
10154 but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
10155
10156 <p>To learn more, check out
10157 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
10158 debian-edu-doc package</a>,
10159 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
10160 manual on the wiki</a> and
10161 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
10162 translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
10163
10164       </div>
10165       <div class="tags">
10166
10167
10168         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>.
10169
10170
10171       </div>
10172     </div>
10173     <div class="padding"></div>
10174
10175     <div class="entry">
10176       <div class="title">
10177         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_car_computer_solution_.html">Free software car computer solution?</a>
10178       </div>
10179       <div class="date">
10180         29th May 2014
10181       </div>
10182       <div class="body">
10183         <p>Dear lazyweb.  I'm planning to set up a small Raspberry Pi computer
10184 in my car, connected to
10185 <a href="http://www.dx.com/p/400a-4-0-tft-lcd-digital-monitor-for-vehicle-parking-reverse-camera-1440x272-12v-dc-57776">a
10186 small screen</a> next to the rear mirror.  I plan to hook it up with a
10187 GPS and a USB wifi card too.  The idea is to get my own
10188 "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carputer">Carputer</a>".  But I
10189 wonder if someone already created a good free software solution for
10190 such car computer.</p>
10191
10192 <p>This is my current wish list for such system:</p>
10193
10194 <ul>
10195
10196  <li>Work on Raspberry Pi.</li>
10197
10198  <li>Show current speed limit based on location, and warn if going too
10199    fast (for example using color codes yellow and red on the screen,
10200    or make a sound).  This could be done either using either data from
10201    <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">Openstreetmap</a> or OCR
10202    info gathered from a dashboard camera.</li>
10203
10204  <li>Track automatic toll road passes and their cost, show total spent
10205    and make it possible to calculate toll costs for planned
10206    route.</li>
10207
10208  <li>Collect GPX tracks for use with OpenStreetMap.</li>
10209
10210  <li>Automatically detect and use any wireless connection to connect
10211    to home server.  Try IP over DNS
10212    (<a href="http://dev.kryo.se/iodine/">iodine</a>) or ICMP
10213    (<a href="http://code.gerade.org/hans/">Hans</a>) if direct
10214    connection do not work.</li>
10215
10216  <li>Set up mesh network to talk to other cars with the same system,
10217    or some standard car mesh protocol.</li>
10218
10219  <li>Warn when approaching speed cameras and speed camera ranges
10220    (speed calculated between two cameras).</li>
10221
10222  <li>Suport dashboard/front facing camera to discover speed limits and
10223    run OCR to track registration number of passing cars.</li>
10224
10225 </ul>
10226
10227 <p>If you know of any free software car computer system supporting
10228 some or all of these features, please let me know.</p>
10229
10230       </div>
10231       <div class="tags">
10232
10233
10234         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
10235
10236
10237       </div>
10238     </div>
10239     <div class="padding"></div>
10240
10241     <div class="entry">
10242       <div class="title">
10243         <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>
10244       </div>
10245       <div class="date">
10246         29th April 2014
10247       </div>
10248       <div class="body">
10249         <p>I've been following <a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">the Gnash
10250 project</a> for quite a while now.  It is a free software
10251 implementation of Adobe Flash, both a standalone player and a browser
10252 plugin.  Gnash implement support for the AVM1 format (and not the
10253 newer AVM2 format - see
10254 <a href="http://lightspark.github.io/">Lightspark</a> for that one),
10255 allowing several flash based sites to work.  Thanks to the friendly
10256 developers at Youtube, it also work with Youtube videos, because the
10257 Javascript code at Youtube detect Gnash and serve a AVM1 player to
10258 those users. :) Would be great if someone found time to implement AVM2
10259 support, but it has not happened yet.  If you install both Lightspark
10260 and Gnash, Lightspark will invoke Gnash if it find a AVM1 flash file,
10261 so you can get both handled as free software.  Unfortunately,
10262 Lightspark so far only implement a small subset of AVM2, and many
10263 sites do not work yet.</p>
10264
10265 <p>A few months ago, I started looking at
10266 <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/">Coverity</a>, the static source
10267 checker used to find heaps and heaps of bugs in free software (thanks
10268 to the donation of a scanning service to free software projects by the
10269 company developing this non-free code checker), and Gnash was one of
10270 the projects I decided to check out.  Coverity is able to find lock
10271 errors, memory errors, dead code and more.  A few days ago they even
10272 extended it to also be able to find the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.
10273 There are heaps of checks being done on the instrumented code, and the
10274 amount of bogus warnings is quite low compared to the other static
10275 code checkers I have tested over the years.</p>
10276
10277 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I've been working with the other Gnash
10278 developers squashing bugs discovered by Coverity.  I was quite happy
10279 today when I checked the current status and saw that of the 777 issues
10280 detected so far, 374 are marked as fixed.  This make me confident that
10281 the next Gnash release will be more stable and more dependable than
10282 the previous one.  Most of the reported issues were and are in the
10283 test suite, but it also found a few in the rest of the code.</p>
10284
10285 <p>If you want to help out, you find us on
10286 <a href="https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev">the
10287 gnash-dev mailing list</a> and on
10288 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#gnash">the #gnash channel on
10289 irc.freenode.net IRC server</a>.</p>
10290
10291       </div>
10292       <div class="tags">
10293
10294
10295         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>.
10296
10297
10298       </div>
10299     </div>
10300     <div class="padding"></div>
10301
10302     <div class="entry">
10303       <div class="title">
10304         <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>
10305       </div>
10306       <div class="date">
10307         23rd April 2014
10308       </div>
10309       <div class="body">
10310         <p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
10311 related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
10312 So I implemented one, using
10313 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
10314 package</a>.  To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
10315 run tasksel as user root.  You should be presented with a new option,
10316 "Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)".  When you
10317 select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
10318 the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
10319
10320 <p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
10321 description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
10322 packages to install.  The first part is in
10323 <tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
10324 this:</p>
10325
10326 <p><blockquote><pre>
10327 Task: isenkram
10328 Section: hardware
10329 Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
10330  Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
10331  proposed.
10332 Test-new-install: mark show
10333 Relevance: 8
10334 Packages: for-current-hardware
10335 </pre></blockquote></p>
10336
10337 <p>The second part is in
10338 <tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
10339 this:</p>
10340
10341 <p><blockquote><pre>
10342 #!/bin/sh
10343 #
10344 (
10345     isenkram-lookup
10346     isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
10347 ) | sort -u
10348 </pre></blockquote></p>
10349
10350 <p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
10351 trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
10352 have installed on our machines.  I've not been able to find a way to
10353 get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
10354 before doing the installation.  So if you are curious or careful,
10355 check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
10356
10357 <p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
10358 fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
10359 /usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
10360 database (using the Modaliases header).  The APT package database
10361 parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
10362 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
10363 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>).  The cause is in
10364 the python-apt code (bug
10365 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
10366 workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
10367 reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
10368 around 2 MiB per hardware detection.  It should make the desktop
10369 daemon a lot more useful.  The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
10370 unstable today.</p>
10371
10372 <p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
10373 Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
10374 use the AppStream data source for this.  A proposal for getting proper
10375 AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
10376 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
10377 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
10378 project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation.  I
10379 look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
10380 start using the information when it is ready.</p>
10381
10382 <p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
10383 add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
10384 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
10385 package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
10386 package.  See also
10387 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
10388 blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation.  I expect
10389 the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
10390 moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
10391
10392       </div>
10393       <div class="tags">
10394
10395
10396         Tags: <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>.
10397
10398
10399       </div>
10400     </div>
10401     <div class="padding"></div>
10402
10403     <div class="entry">
10404       <div class="title">
10405         <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>
10406       </div>
10407       <div class="date">
10408         15th April 2014
10409       </div>
10410       <div class="body">
10411         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
10412 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
10413 it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
10414 at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
10415 encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It is still going strong, and
10416 today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
10417
10418 <p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
10419 created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable.  It was
10420 the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
10421 during build and on the first boot.  Now all one need to get going is
10422 the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
10423 Debian.  And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
10424 build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
10425
10426 <p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
10427 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
10428 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
10429 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
10430 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
10431 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
10432 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
10433 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>.  There
10434 are plans to integrate more packages into the setup.  User
10435 documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki.  Please
10436 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
10437 the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
10438
10439 <p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
10440 setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
10441 become root:</p>
10442
10443 <p><pre>
10444 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
10445   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
10446   u-boot-tools
10447 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
10448   freedom-maker
10449 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
10450 </pre></p>
10451
10452 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
10453 devices.  See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
10454 details on the build.  If you do not want all three images, trim the
10455 make line.  Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
10456 virtualbox specific.  It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
10457 vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment.  You might need
10458 the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
10459 include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
10460
10461 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
10462 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
10463 the preseed values:</p>
10464
10465 <p><pre>
10466 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
10467 </pre></p>
10468
10469 <p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
10470 it still work.</p>
10471
10472 <p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
10473 systemd as the boot system.  It will become the default for Linux in
10474 Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox.  I did
10475 a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
10476 during boot when using systemd.  I suspect there are other problems
10477 too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
10478 be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
10479
10480 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
10481 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
10482 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
10483 irc.debian.org)</a> and
10484 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
10485 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
10486
10487       </div>
10488       <div class="tags">
10489
10490
10491         Tags: <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>.
10492
10493
10494       </div>
10495     </div>
10496     <div class="padding"></div>
10497
10498     <div class="entry">
10499       <div class="title">
10500         <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>
10501       </div>
10502       <div class="date">
10503          9th April 2014
10504       </div>
10505       <div class="body">
10506         <p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
10507 solution for use at home.  My requirements are simple, it must be
10508 cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
10509 keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
10510 One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
10511 storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
10512 writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
10513 service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space.  On top
10514 of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
10515 lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage.  But
10516 I never found time to implement such system.  But the last few weeks I
10517 have looked at a system called
10518 <a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
10519 mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
10520
10521 <p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
10522 handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
10523 Google Drive or OpenStack API.  There are heaps of such storage
10524 providers.  S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
10525 combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server.  S3QL
10526 include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
10527 and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
10528 a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
10529 while the content is stored in the cloud as well.  This allow me to
10530 have a backup that should survive fire.  The file system can not be
10531 shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
10532 mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
10533 access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
10534
10535 <p>It is simple to use.  I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
10536 package is included already.  So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
10537 install s3ql</tt>.  Next, pick a storage provider.  I ended up picking
10538 Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
10539 <a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
10540 to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
10541 in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
10542 data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
10543 in Iceland.  Another nice recipe is available from the article
10544 <a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
10545 Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
10546 Admin magazine.  When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
10547 the API key needed to connect to the storage API.  With Greencloud,
10548 the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
10549 account.</p>
10550
10551 <p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
10552 system.  First, create a new bucket in the cloud.  This bucket is the
10553 file system storage area.  I picked a bucket name reflecting the
10554 machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
10555 I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below.  In addition, one need
10556 the API login and password, and a locally created password.  Store it
10557 all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
10558
10559 <p><blockquote><pre>
10560 [s3c]
10561 storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
10562 backend-login: API-login
10563 backend-password: API-password
10564 fs-passphrase: local-password
10565 </pre></blockquote></p>
10566
10567 <p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
10568 but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
10569 Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
10570 details and password to create it:</p>
10571
10572 <p><blockquote><pre>
10573 # mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
10574 # mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
10575   --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
10576 Enter backend login:
10577 Enter backend password:
10578 Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
10579 the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
10580 Enter encryption password:
10581 Confirm encryption password:
10582 Generating random encryption key...
10583 Creating metadata tables...
10584 Dumping metadata...
10585 ..objects..
10586 ..blocks..
10587 ..inodes..
10588 ..inode_blocks..
10589 ..symlink_targets..
10590 ..names..
10591 ..contents..
10592 ..ext_attributes..
10593 Compressing and uploading metadata...
10594 Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
10595 # </pre></blockquote></p>
10596
10597 <p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
10598
10599 <p><blockquote><pre>
10600 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
10601   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
10602 Using 4 upload threads.
10603 Downloading and decompressing metadata...
10604 Reading metadata...
10605 ..objects..
10606 ..blocks..
10607 ..inodes..
10608 ..inode_blocks..
10609 ..symlink_targets..
10610 ..names..
10611 ..contents..
10612 ..ext_attributes..
10613 Mounting filesystem...
10614 # df -h /s3ql
10615 Filesystem                              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
10616 s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name  1.0T     0  1.0T   0% /s3ql
10617 #
10618 </pre></blockquote></p>
10619
10620 <p>The file system is now ready for use.  I use rsync to store my
10621 backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
10622 mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
10623 running rsync.  To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
10624 command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
10625 instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
10626
10627 <p><blockquote><pre>
10628 # umount.s3ql /s3ql
10629 #
10630 </pre></blockquote></p>
10631
10632 <p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
10633 correct any problems detected.  This can be used if the local server
10634 crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
10635 mounted" flag.  This is what it look like when processing a working
10636 file system:</p>
10637
10638 <p><blockquote><pre>
10639 # fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
10640 Using cached metadata.
10641 File system seems clean, checking anyway.
10642 Checking DB integrity...
10643 Creating temporary extra indices...
10644 Checking lost+found...
10645 Checking cached objects...
10646 Checking names (refcounts)...
10647 Checking contents (names)...
10648 Checking contents (inodes)...
10649 Checking contents (parent inodes)...
10650 Checking objects (reference counts)...
10651 Checking objects (backend)...
10652 ..processed 5000 objects so far..
10653 ..processed 10000 objects so far..
10654 ..processed 15000 objects so far..
10655 Checking objects (sizes)...
10656 Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
10657 Checking blocks (refcounts)...
10658 Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
10659 Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
10660 Checking inodes (refcounts)...
10661 Checking inodes (sizes)...
10662 Checking extended attributes (names)...
10663 Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
10664 Checking symlinks (inodes)...
10665 Checking directory reachability...
10666 Checking unix conventions...
10667 Checking referential integrity...
10668 Dropping temporary indices...
10669 Backing up old metadata...
10670 Dumping metadata...
10671 ..objects..
10672 ..blocks..
10673 ..inodes..
10674 ..inode_blocks..
10675 ..symlink_targets..
10676 ..names..
10677 ..contents..
10678 ..ext_attributes..
10679 Compressing and uploading metadata...
10680 Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
10681 #
10682 </pre></blockquote></p>
10683
10684 <p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
10685 quick, about the same speed as local file access.  Uploading large
10686 amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
10687 house.  Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
10688 which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
10689 Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
10690 Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>.  So for me, the bottleneck is my
10691 network, not the file system code.  I do not know what a good cache
10692 size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
10693 working set.</p>
10694
10695 <p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
10696 time.  If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
10697 busy:</p>
10698
10699 <p><blockquote><pre>
10700 # mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
10701   --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
10702 Using 8 upload threads.
10703 Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
10704 #
10705 </pre></blockquote></p>
10706
10707 <p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
10708 metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default.  To ensure the
10709 file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
10710 file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
10711 s3qlctrl:
10712
10713 <p><blockquote><pre>
10714 # s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
10715 # s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
10716 #
10717 </pre></blockquote></p>
10718
10719 <p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
10720 cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
10721 storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
10722 a report:</p>
10723
10724 <p><blockquote><pre>
10725 # s3qlstat /s3ql
10726 Directory entries:    9141
10727 Inodes:               9143
10728 Data blocks:          8851
10729 Total data size:      22049.38 MB
10730 After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
10731 After compression:    21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
10732 Database size:        2.39 MB (uncompressed)
10733 (some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
10734 #
10735 </pre></blockquote></p>
10736
10737 <p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
10738 storage.  I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
10739 <a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
10740 <a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
10741 <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
10742 <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
10743 <a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>.  The latter even
10744 accept payment in Bitcoin.  Pick one that suit your need.  Some of
10745 them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
10746 quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
10747 best.</p>
10748
10749 <p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
10750 and posters discussing the S3QL file system.  There are several, which
10751 told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
10752 science community and increased my confidence in using it.  One nice
10753 poster is titled
10754 "<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
10755 Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
10756 Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
10757 Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
10758 and Pamela Smith.  Please  have a look.</p>
10759
10760 <p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
10761 check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
10762 a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
10763 it come to locking and umask handling etc).  Running
10764 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
10765 test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
10766 no error was found.  So the file system can be used for home
10767 directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
10768
10769 <p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
10770 work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
10771 <a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
10772 provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client.  It have
10773 a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
10774 access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
10775 only read from it.</p>
10776
10777 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
10778 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
10779 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
10780
10781       </div>
10782       <div class="tags">
10783
10784
10785         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
10786
10787
10788       </div>
10789     </div>
10790     <div class="padding"></div>
10791
10792     <div class="entry">
10793       <div class="title">
10794         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ReactOS_Windows_clone___nice_free_software.html">ReactOS Windows clone - nice free software</a>
10795       </div>
10796       <div class="date">
10797          1st April 2014
10798       </div>
10799       <div class="body">
10800         <p>Microsoft have announced that Windows XP reaches its end of life
10801 2014-04-08, in 7 days.  But there are heaps of machines still running
10802 Windows XP, and depending on Windows XP to run their applications, and
10803 upgrading will be expensive, both when it comes to money and when it
10804 comes to the amount of effort needed to migrate from Windows XP to a
10805 new operating system.  Some obvious options (buy new a Windows
10806 machine, buy a MacOSX machine, install Linux on the existing machine)
10807 are already well known and covered elsewhere.  Most of them involve
10808 leaving the user applications installed on Windows XP behind and
10809 trying out replacements or updated versions. In this blog post I want
10810 to mention one strange bird that allow people to keep the hardware and
10811 the existing Windows XP applications and run them on a free software
10812 operating system that is Windows XP compatible.</p>
10813
10814 <p><a href="http://www.reactos.org/">ReactOS</a> is a free software
10815 operating system (GNU GPL licensed) working on providing a operating
10816 system that is binary compatible with Windows, able to run windows
10817 programs directly and to use Windows drivers for hardware directly.
10818 The project goal is for Windows user to keep their existing machines,
10819 drivers and software, and gain the advantages from user a operating
10820 system without usage limitations caused by non-free licensing.  It is
10821 a Windows clone running directly on the hardware, so quite different
10822 from the approach taken by <a href="http://www.winehq.org/">the Wine
10823 project</a>, which make it possible to run Windows binaries on
10824 Linux.</p>
10825
10826 <p>The ReactOS project share code with the Wine project, so most
10827 shared libraries available on Windows are already implemented already.
10828 There is also a software manager like the one we are used to on Linux,
10829 allowing the user to install free software applications with a simple
10830 click directly from the Internet.  Check out the
10831 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/screenshots">screen shots on the
10832 project web site</a> for an idea what it look like (it looks just like
10833 Windows before metro).</p>
10834
10835 <p>I do not use ReactOS myself, preferring Linux and Unix like
10836 operating systems.  I've tested it, and it work fine in a virt-manager
10837 virtual machine.  The browser, minesweeper, notepad etc is working
10838 fine as far as I can tell.  Unfortunately, my main test application
10839 is the software included on a CD with the Lego Mindstorms NXT, which
10840 seem to install just fine from CD but fail to leave any binaries on
10841 the disk after the installation.  So no luck with that test software.
10842 No idea why, but hope someone else figure out and fix the problem.
10843 I've tried the ReactOS Live ISO on a physical machine, and it seemed
10844 to work just fine.  If you like Windows and want to keep running your
10845 old Windows binaries, check it out by
10846 <a href="http://www.reactos.org/download">downloading</a> the
10847 installation CD, the live CD or the preinstalled virtual machine
10848 image.</p>
10849
10850       </div>
10851       <div class="tags">
10852
10853
10854         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos</a>.
10855
10856
10857       </div>
10858     </div>
10859     <div class="padding"></div>
10860
10861     <div class="entry">
10862       <div class="title">
10863         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Roger_Marsal.html">Debian Edu interview: Roger Marsal</a>
10864       </div>
10865       <div class="date">
10866         30th March 2014
10867       </div>
10868       <div class="body">
10869         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
10870 keep gaining new users.  Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC,
10871 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>, with a
10872 wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great
10873 contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background.</p>
10874
10875 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
10876
10877 <p>My name is Roger Marsal, I'm 27 years old (1986 generation) and I
10878 live in Barcelona, Spain. I've got a strong business background and I
10879 work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent.  Additionally,
10880 I've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the
10881 last development phase of a new social networking concept.</p>
10882
10883 <p>I'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years
10884 ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability
10885 and as a necessary step to gain expertise.</p>
10886
10887 <p>In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I
10888 can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux
10889 hunger.</p>
10890
10891 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
10892 project?</strong></p>
10893
10894 <p>I discovered the <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP</a> advantages
10895 with "Ubuntu 12.04 alternate install" and after a year of use I
10896 started looking for an alternative.  Even though I highly value and
10897 respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to
10898 change to a more robust and stable alternative.  As far as I was using
10899 Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install
10900 Debian and configure an LTSP server myself.  Surprised, I discovered
10901 that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent,
10902 and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and
10903 running.  I just loved it.</p>
10904
10905 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10906 Edu?</strong></p>
10907
10908 <p>I found a main advantage in that, once you know "the tips and
10909 tricks", a new installation just works out of the box. It's the most
10910 complete alternative I've found to create an LTSP network. All the
10911 other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to
10912 be made of steel.</p>
10913
10914 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
10915 Edu?</strong></p>
10916
10917 <p>I found two main disadvantages.</p>
10918
10919 <p>I'm not an expert but I've got notions and I had to spent a considerable
10920 amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I'm quite
10921 stubborn and I just worked until I did but I'm sure many people with few
10922 resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched
10923 or dropped.</p>
10924
10925 <p>It's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved
10926 this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets
10927 more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can
10928 discourage many people too.</p>
10929
10930 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
10931
10932 <p>I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and
10933 Virtualbox.</p>
10934
10935
10936 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
10937 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
10938
10939 <p>I don't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free
10940 attribute in both "freedom" and "no price" meanings is what will
10941 really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of
10942 the <a href="http://www.r-project.org/">"R" statistical language</a>; a
10943 few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people.
10944 Today it's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many
10945 different level of studies.  I believe free and open software will
10946 increasingly gain popularity, but I'm sure schools will be one of the
10947 first scenarios where this will happen.</p>
10948
10949       </div>
10950       <div class="tags">
10951
10952
10953         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
10954
10955
10956       </div>
10957     </div>
10958     <div class="padding"></div>
10959
10960     <div class="entry">
10961       <div class="title">
10962         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html">Public Trusted Timestamping services for everyone</a>
10963       </div>
10964       <div class="date">
10965         25th March 2014
10966       </div>
10967       <div class="body">
10968         <p>Did you ever need to store logs or other files in a way that would
10969 allow it to be used as evidence in court, and needed a way to
10970 demonstrate without reasonable doubt that the file had not been
10971 changed since it was created?  Or, did you ever need to document that
10972 a given document was received at some point in time, like some
10973 archived document or the answer to an exam, and not changed after it
10974 was received?  The problem in these settings is to remove the need to
10975 trust yourself and your computers, while still being able to prove
10976 that a file is the same as it was at some given time in the past.</p>
10977
10978 <p>A solution to these problems is to have a trusted third party
10979 "stamp" the document and verify that at some given time the document
10980 looked a given way.  Such
10981 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notarius">notarius</a> service
10982 have been around for thousands of years, and its digital equivalent is
10983 called a
10984 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
10985 timestamping service</a>.  <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">The Internet
10986 Engineering Task Force</a> standardised how such service could work a
10987 few years ago as <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC
10988 3161</a>.  The mechanism is simple.  Create a hash of the file in
10989 question, send it to a trusted third party which add a time stamp to
10990 the hash and sign the result with its private key, and send back the
10991 signed hash + timestamp.  Both email, FTP and HTTP can be used to
10992 request such signature, depending on what is provided by the service
10993 used. Anyone with the document and the signature can then verify that
10994 the document matches the signature by creating their own hash and
10995 checking the signature using the trusted third party public key.
10996 There are several commercial services around providing such
10997 timestamping.  A quick search for
10998 "<a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rfc+3161+service">rfc 3161
10999 service</a>" pointed me to at least
11000 <a href="https://www.digistamp.com/technical/how-a-digital-time-stamp-works/">DigiStamp</a>,
11001 <a href="http://www.quovadisglobal.co.uk/CertificateServices/SigningServices/TimeStamp.aspx">Quo
11002 Vadis</a>,
11003 <a href="https://www.globalsign.com/timestamp-service/">Global Sign</a>
11004 and <a href="http://www.globaltrustfinder.com/TSADefault.aspx">Global
11005 Trust Finder</a>.  The system work as long as the private key of the
11006 trusted third party is not compromised.</p>
11007
11008 <p>But as far as I can tell, there are very few public trusted
11009 timestamp services available for everyone.  I've been looking for one
11010 for a while now. But yesterday I found one over at
11011 <a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">Deutches
11012 Forschungsnetz</a> mentioned in
11013 <a href="http://www.d-mueller.de/blog/dealing-with-trusted-timestamps-in-php-rfc-3161/">a
11014 blog by David Müller</a>.  I then found
11015 <a href="http://www.rz.uni-greifswald.de/support/dfn-pki-zertifikate/zeitstempeldienst.html">a
11016 good recipe on how to use the service</a> over at the University of
11017 Greifswald.</p>
11018
11019 <p><a href="http://www.openssl.org/">The OpenSSL library</a> contain
11020 both server and tools to use and set up your own signing service.  See
11021 the ts(1SSL), tsget(1SSL) manual pages for more details.  The
11022 following shell script demonstrate how to extract a signed timestamp
11023 for any file on the disk in a Debian environment:</p>
11024
11025 <p><blockquote><pre>
11026 #!/bin/sh
11027 set -e
11028 url="http://zeitstempel.dfn.de"
11029 caurl="https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt"
11030 reqfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsq)
11031 resfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsr)
11032 cafile=chain.txt
11033 if [ ! -f $cafile ] ; then
11034     wget -O $cafile "$caurl"
11035 fi
11036 openssl ts -query -data "$1" -cert | tee "$reqfile" \
11037     | /usr/lib/ssl/misc/tsget -h "$url" -o "$resfile"
11038 openssl ts -reply -in "$resfile" -text 1>&2
11039 openssl ts -verify -data "$1" -in "$resfile" -CAfile "$cafile" 1>&2
11040 base64 < "$resfile"
11041 rm "$reqfile" "$resfile"
11042 </pre></blockquote></p>
11043
11044 <p>The argument to the script is the file to timestamp, and the output
11045 is a base64 encoded version of the signature to STDOUT and details
11046 about the signature to STDERR.  Note that due to
11047 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=742553">a bug
11048 in the tsget script</a>, you might need to modify the included script
11049 and remove the last line.  Or just write your own HTTP uploader using
11050 curl. :) Now you too can prove and verify that files have not been
11051 changed.</p>
11052
11053 <p>But the Internet need more public trusted timestamp services.
11054 Perhaps something for <a href="http://www.uninett.no/">Uninett</a> or
11055 my work place the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
11056 to set up?</p>
11057
11058       </div>
11059       <div class="tags">
11060
11061
11062         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>.
11063
11064
11065       </div>
11066     </div>
11067     <div class="padding"></div>
11068
11069     <div class="entry">
11070       <div class="title">
11071         <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>
11072       </div>
11073       <div class="date">
11074         21st March 2014
11075       </div>
11076       <div class="body">
11077         <p>Keeping your DVD collection safe from scratches and curious
11078 children fingers while still having it available when you want to see a
11079 movie is not straight forward.  My preferred method at the moment is
11080 to store a full copy of the ISO on a hard drive, and use VLC, Popcorn
11081 Hour or other useful players to view the resulting file.  This way the
11082 subtitles and bonus material are still available and using the ISO is
11083 just like inserting the original DVD record in the DVD player.</p>
11084
11085 <p>Earlier I used dd for taking security copies, but it do not handle
11086 DVDs giving read errors (which are quite a few of them).  I've also
11087 tried using
11088 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">dvdbackup
11089 and genisoimage</a>, but these days I use the marvellous python library
11090 and program
11091 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">python-dvdvideo</a>
11092 written by Bastian Blank.  It is
11093 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/python-dvdvideo.html">in Debian
11094 already</a> and the binary package name is python3-dvdvideo. Instead
11095 of trying to read every block from the DVD, it parses the file
11096 structure and figure out which block on the DVD is actually in used,
11097 and only read those blocks from the DVD.  This work surprisingly well,
11098 and I have been able to almost backup my entire DVD collection using
11099 this method.</p>
11100
11101 <p>So far, python-dvdvideo have failed on between 10 and
11102 20 DVDs, which is a small fraction of my collection.  The most common
11103 problem is
11104 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=720831">DVDs
11105 using UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 characters</a>, which according to
11106 Bastian is against the DVD specification (and seem to cause some
11107 players to fail too).  A rarer problem is what seem to be inconsistent
11108 DVD structures, as the python library
11109 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=723079">claim
11110 there is a overlap between objects</a>.  An equally rare problem claim
11111 <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=741878">some
11112 value is out of range</a>.  No idea what is going on there.  I wish I
11113 knew enough about the DVD format to fix these, to ensure my movie
11114 collection will stay with me in the future.</p>
11115
11116 <p>So, if you need to keep your DVDs safe, back them up using
11117 python-dvdvideo. :)</p>
11118
11119       </div>
11120       <div class="tags">
11121
11122
11123         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
11124
11125
11126       </div>
11127     </div>
11128     <div class="padding"></div>
11129
11130     <div class="entry">
11131       <div class="title">
11132         <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>
11133       </div>
11134       <div class="date">
11135         14th March 2014
11136       </div>
11137       <div class="body">
11138         <p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
11139 project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
11140 making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
11141 communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
11142 friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes.  It has been
11143 going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
11144 release (0.2).</p>
11145
11146 <p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
11147 new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
11148 Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
11149 system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
11150 file.  The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
11151 where most of the needed packages used are already present.  Only one,
11152 the freedombox-setup package, is missing.  To try to build your own
11153 boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
11154 and build using
11155 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
11156 with a user with sudo access to become root:
11157
11158 <pre>
11159 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
11160   freedom-maker
11161 sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
11162   mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
11163   u-boot-tools
11164 make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
11165 </pre>
11166
11167 <p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
11168 devices.  See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
11169 want all three images, trim the make line.  But note that thanks to <a
11170 href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
11171 vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
11172 kpartx call.</p>
11173
11174 <p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
11175 method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
11176 the preseed values:</p>
11177
11178 <pre>
11179 url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
11180 </pre>
11181
11182 <p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
11183 recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
11184 currently hang while setting up APT sources.  Killing the
11185 '<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
11186 installation will get the installation going.  This affect all
11187 installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
11188
11189 <p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
11190 us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
11191 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
11192 irc.debian.org)</a> and
11193 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
11194 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
11195
11196       </div>
11197       <div class="tags">
11198
11199
11200         Tags: <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>.
11201
11202
11203       </div>
11204     </div>
11205     <div class="padding"></div>
11206
11207     <div class="entry">
11208       <div class="title">
11209         <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>
11210       </div>
11211       <div class="date">
11212         12th March 2014
11213       </div>
11214       <div class="body">
11215         <p>On larger sites, it is useful to use a dedicated storage server for
11216 storing user home directories and data.  The design for handling this
11217 in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, is
11218 to update the automount rules in LDAP and let the automount daemon on
11219 the clients take care of the rest.  I was reminded about the need to
11220 document this better when one of the customers of
11221 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a>, where I am
11222 on the board of directors, asked about how to do this.  The steps to
11223 get this working are the following:</p>
11224
11225 <p><ol>
11226
11227 <li>Add new storage server in DNS.  I use nas-server.intern as the
11228 example host here.</li>
11229
11230 <li>Add automoun LDAP information about this server in LDAP, to allow
11231 all clients to automatically mount it on reqeust.</li>
11232
11233 <li>Add the relevant entries in tjener.intern:/etc/fstab, because
11234 tjener.intern do not use automount to avoid mounting loops.</li>
11235
11236 </ol></p>
11237
11238 <p>DNS entries are added in GOsa², and not described here.  Follow the
11239 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/GettingStarted">instructions
11240 in the manual</a> (Machine Management with GOsa² in section Getting
11241 started).</p>
11242
11243 <p>Ensure that the NFS export points on the server are exported to the
11244 relevant subnets or machines:</p>
11245
11246 <p><blockquote><pre>
11247 root@tjener:~# showmount -e nas-server
11248 Export list for nas-server:
11249 /storage         10.0.0.0/8
11250 root@tjener:~#
11251 </pre></blockquote></p>
11252
11253 <p>Here everything on the backbone network is granted access to the
11254 /storage export.  With NFSv3 it is slightly better to limit it to
11255 netgroup membership or single IP addresses to have some limits on the
11256 NFS access.</p>
11257
11258 <p>The next step is to update LDAP.  This can not be done using GOsa²,
11259 because it lack a module for automount.  Instead, use ldapvi and add
11260 the required LDAP objects using an editor.</p>
11261
11262 <p><blockquote><pre>
11263 ldapvi --ldap-conf -ZD '(cn=admin)' -b ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11264 </pre></blockquote></p>
11265
11266 <p>When the editor show up, add the following LDAP objects at the
11267 bottom of the document.  The "/&" part in the last LDAP object is a
11268 wild card matching everything the nas-server exports, removing the
11269 need to list individual mount points in LDAP.</p>
11270
11271 <p><blockquote><pre>
11272 add cn=nas-server,ou=auto.skole,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11273 objectClass: automount
11274 cn: nas-server
11275 automountInformation: -fstype=autofs --timeout=60 ldap:ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11276
11277 add ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11278 objectClass: top
11279 objectClass: automountMap
11280 ou: auto.nas-server
11281
11282 add cn=/,ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
11283 objectClass: automount
11284 cn: /
11285 automountInformation: -fstype=nfs,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,rw,intr,hard,nodev,nosuid,noatime nas-server.intern:/&
11286 </pre></blockquote></p>
11287
11288 <p>The last step to remember is to mount the relevant mount points in
11289 tjener.intern by adding them to /etc/fstab, creating the mount
11290 directories using mkdir and running "mount -a" to mount them.</p>
11291
11292 <p>When this is done, your users should be able to access the files on
11293 the storage server directly by just visiting the
11294 /tjener/nas-server/storage/ directory using any application on any
11295 workstation, LTSP client or LTSP server.</p>
11296
11297       </div>
11298       <div class="tags">
11299
11300
11301         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
11302
11303
11304       </div>
11305     </div>
11306     <div class="padding"></div>
11307
11308     <div class="entry">
11309       <div class="title">
11310         <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>
11311       </div>
11312       <div class="date">
11313         22nd February 2014
11314       </div>
11315       <div class="body">
11316         <p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
11317 innetgr tools, because I needed them in
11318 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>.  I called the project
11319 ng-utils, and it has served me well.  I placed the project under the
11320 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
11321 repository.  But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
11322 not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
11323 proper home since then.</p>
11324
11325 <p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
11326 fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
11327 a proper source control system.  I applied for a project on
11328 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
11329 to follow up on it.  Until today. :)</p>
11330
11331 <p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
11332 now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
11333 history of the project.  I published all release tarballs and imported
11334 them into the git repository.  As the project is really stable and not
11335 expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
11336 release and call it 1.0.  Visit the new project home on
11337 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
11338 if you want to check it out.  The new version is also uploaded into
11339 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
11340
11341       </div>
11342       <div class="tags">
11343
11344
11345         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
11346
11347
11348       </div>
11349     </div>
11350     <div class="padding"></div>
11351
11352     <div class="entry">
11353       <div class="title">
11354         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html">Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</a>
11355       </div>
11356       <div class="date">
11357          3rd February 2014
11358       </div>
11359       <div class="body">
11360         <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
11361 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
11362 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
11363 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
11364 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
11365 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
11366 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
11367 <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>,
11368 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
11369
11370 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
11371 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
11372 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
11373 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
11374 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
11375 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
11376
11377 <p><blockquote><pre>
11378 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
11379 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
11380 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
11381 dhclient /dev/eth0
11382 </pre></blockquote></p>
11383
11384 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
11385 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
11386 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
11387
11388 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
11389 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
11390 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
11391 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
11392 side.</p>
11393
11394 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
11395 stuff:</p>
11396
11397 <p><blockquote><pre>
11398 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
11399 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
11400 EOF
11401 apt-get update
11402 apt-get dist-upgrade
11403 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
11404     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
11405 update-alternatives --config runsystem
11406 </pre></blockquote></p>
11407
11408 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
11409 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
11410 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
11411 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
11412 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
11413 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
11414 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
11415 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
11416 ssh instead.
11417
11418 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
11419 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
11420 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
11421 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
11422 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
11423 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
11424
11425 <p><blockquote><pre>
11426 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
11427 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
11428 EOF
11429 </pre></blockquote></p>
11430
11431 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
11432 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
11433 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
11434 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
11435
11436 <p><blockquote><pre>
11437 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
11438 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
11439 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
11440 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
11441 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
11442 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
11443 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
11444 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
11445 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
11446 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
11447 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
11448 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
11449 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
11450 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
11451 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
11452 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
11453 #
11454 </pre></blockquote></p>
11455
11456 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
11457 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
11458 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
11459 command line stuff.<p>
11460
11461       </div>
11462       <div class="tags">
11463
11464
11465         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>.
11466
11467
11468       </div>
11469     </div>
11470     <div class="padding"></div>
11471
11472     <div class="entry">
11473       <div class="title">
11474         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_fist_full_of_non_anonymous_Bitcoins.html">A fist full of non-anonymous Bitcoins</a>
11475       </div>
11476       <div class="date">
11477         29th January 2014
11478       </div>
11479       <div class="body">
11480         <p>Bitcoin is a incredible use of peer to peer communication and
11481 encryption, allowing direct and immediate money transfer without any
11482 central control.  It is sometimes claimed to be ideal for illegal
11483 activity, which I believe is quite a long way from the truth.  At least
11484 I would not conduct illegal money transfers using a system where the
11485 details of every transaction are kept forever.  This point is
11486 investigated in
11487 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">USENIX ;login:</a>
11488 from December 2013, in the article
11489 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/03_meiklejohn-online.pdf">A
11490 Fistful of Bitcoins - Characterizing Payments Among Men with No
11491 Names</a>" by Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole,Grant Jordan, Kirill
11492 Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage.  They
11493 analyse the transaction log in the Bitcoin system, using it to find
11494 addresses belong to individuals and organisations and follow the flow
11495 of money from both Bitcoin theft and trades on Silk Road to where the
11496 money end up.  This is how they wrap up their article:</p>
11497
11498 <p><blockquote>
11499 <p>"To demonstrate the usefulness of this type of analysis, we turned
11500 our attention to criminal activity. In the Bitcoin economy, criminal
11501 activity can appear in a number of forms, such as dealing drugs on
11502 Silk Road or simply stealing someone else’s bitcoins. We followed the
11503 flow of bitcoins out of Silk Road (in particular, from one notorious
11504 address) and from a number of highly publicized thefts to see whether
11505 we could track the bitcoins to known services. Although some of the
11506 thieves attempted to use sophisticated mixing techniques (or possibly
11507 mix services) to obscure the flow of bitcoins, for the most part
11508 tracking the bitcoins was quite straightforward, and we ultimately saw
11509 large quantities of bitcoins flow to a variety of exchanges directly
11510 from the point of theft (or the withdrawal from Silk Road).</p>
11511
11512 <p>As acknowledged above, following stolen bitcoins to the point at
11513 which they are deposited into an exchange does not in itself identify
11514 the thief; however, it does enable further de-anonymization in the
11515 case in which certain agencies can determine (through, for example,
11516 subpoena power) the real-world owner of the account into which the
11517 stolen bitcoins were deposited.  Because such exchanges seem to serve
11518 as chokepoints into and out of the Bitcoin economy (i.e., there are
11519 few alternative ways to cash out), we conclude that using Bitcoin for
11520 money laundering or other illicit purposes does not (at least at
11521 present) seem to be particularly attractive."</p>
11522 </blockquote><p>
11523
11524 <p>These researches are not the first to analyse the Bitcoin
11525 transaction log.  The 2011 paper
11526 "<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524">An Analysis of Anonymity in
11527 the Bitcoin System</A>" by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan is
11528 summarized like this:</p>
11529
11530 <p><blockquote>
11531 "Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a
11532 complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by
11533 public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will
11534 attempt to construct the one-to-many mapping between users and
11535 public-keys and associate information external to the system with the
11536 users. Bitcoin tries to prevent this attack by storing the mapping of
11537 a user to his or her public-keys on that user's node only and by
11538 allowing each user to generate as many public-keys as required. In
11539 this chapter we consider the topological structure of two networks
11540 derived from Bitcoin's public transaction history. We show that the
11541 two networks have a non-trivial topological structure, provide
11542 complementary views of the Bitcoin system and have implications for
11543 anonymity. We combine these structures with external information and
11544 techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate
11545 an alleged theft of Bitcoins, which, at the time of the theft, had a
11546 market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars."
11547 </blockquote></p>
11548
11549 <p>I hope these references can help kill the urban myth that Bitcoin
11550 is anonymous.  It isn't really a good fit for illegal activites.  Use
11551 cash if you need to stay anonymous, at least until regular DNA
11552 sampling of notes and coins become the norm. :)</p>
11553
11554 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
11555 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
11556 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
11557
11558       </div>
11559       <div class="tags">
11560
11561
11562         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>.
11563
11564
11565       </div>
11566     </div>
11567     <div class="padding"></div>
11568
11569     <div class="entry">
11570       <div class="title">
11571         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html">New chrpath release 0.16</a>
11572       </div>
11573       <div class="date">
11574         14th January 2014
11575       </div>
11576       <div class="body">
11577         <p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
11578 find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
11579 analysis.  It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
11580 useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
11581 the source.  The company behind it provide
11582 <a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
11583 a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
11584 already checked.  A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
11585 the Coverity system, and discovered that the
11586 <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
11587 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
11588 projects I am involved with was already registered.  But these are
11589 fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
11590 check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
11591 checking of the chrpath project</a>.  It was
11592 added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects.  Six of
11593 these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
11594 error.  Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
11595 of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
11596 is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
11597 the future end up in a library.  Having fixed all defects and added
11598 <a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
11599 mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
11600 publish a new release.  These are the release notes:</p>
11601
11602 <p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
11603
11604 <ul>
11605
11606   <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
11607   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
11608   <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
11609
11610 </ul>
11611
11612 <p>You can
11613 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
11614 new version 0.16 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
11615 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
11616 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
11617 include a test suite check.</p>
11618
11619       </div>
11620       <div class="tags">
11621
11622
11623         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>.
11624
11625
11626       </div>
11627     </div>
11628     <div class="padding"></div>
11629
11630     <div class="entry">
11631       <div class="title">
11632         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html">Debian Edu interview: Dominik George</a>
11633       </div>
11634       <div class="date">
11635         25th December 2013
11636       </div>
11637       <div class="body">
11638         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
11639 project</a> consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
11640 was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
11641 up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
11642 successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School.  Say hello
11643 to <a href="https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Natureshadow">Dominik
11644 George</a>.</p>
11645
11646 <!-- http://www.dominik-george.de/images/foto.jpg -->
11647
11648 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
11649
11650 <p>I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
11651 life with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a
11652 student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
11653 Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
11654 voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
11655 a bit vacant right now however.</p>
11656
11657 <p>I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
11658 (public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
11659 around 2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
11660 it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
11661 network of that school together with a team of very interested and
11662 talented students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to
11663 learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
11664 to help building another school's informational education concept from
11665 scratch.</p>
11666
11667 <p>That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids
11668 and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
11669 ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.</p>
11670
11671 <p>When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
11672 and cycling.</p>
11673
11674 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
11675 project?</strong></p>
11676
11677 <p>I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
11678 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">FrOSCon</a> and visited the project
11679 booth. I think I wasn't too interested back then because I used to
11680 have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
11681 own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
11682 "out-of-the-box" solution ;).</p>
11683
11684 <p>The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
11685 <a href="http://www.openrheinruhr.de">OpenRheinRuhr</a> 2011 when the
11686 BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
11687 really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
11688 ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
11689 a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
11690 guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
11691 small demonstration, but there wasn't any real feedback and the guys
11692 seemed rather uninterested.</p>
11693
11694 <p>After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
11695 mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
11696 reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
11697 basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!</p>
11698
11699 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
11700 Edu?</strong></p>
11701
11702 <p>The most important advantage seems to be that it "just
11703 works". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
11704 in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
11705 without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
11706 from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't
11707 have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
11708 and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
11709 server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
11710 notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
11711 and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
11712 it. I could use 8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
11713 tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that's enough to say
11714 that it rocks!</p>
11715
11716 <p>Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no
11717 politician will ever permit a setup described as "Debian, an universal
11718 operating system, with some really cool educational tools" while they
11719 will be jsut fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
11720 school network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
11721 this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
11722 too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).</p>
11723
11724 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
11725 Edu?</strong></p>
11726
11727 <p>I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
11728 answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
11729 other words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I
11730 can list a few points about that:</p>
11731
11732 <ul>
11733
11734  <li>always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
11735  <li>be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
11736  <li>be helpful at being helpful ;)
11737
11738 </ul>
11739
11740 <p>I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!</p>
11741
11742 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
11743
11744 <p>First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
11745 all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
11746 year.</p>
11747
11748 <p>I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
11749 run text tools. I use
11750 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm">mksh</a> as shell,
11751 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/jupp.htm">jupp</a> as very advanced
11752 text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
11753 based full-featured student management software with the two),
11754 <a href="http://mcabber.com/">mcabber</a> for XMPP and
11755 <a href="http://www.irssi.org/">irssi</a> for IRC. For that overly
11756 coloured world called the WWW, I use
11757 <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/">Iceweasel
11758 (Firefox)</a>. Oh, and <a href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a> for
11759 e-mail.</p>
11760
11761 <p>However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
11762 are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
11763 least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
11764 kids. One of these things is <a href="http://jappix.org/">Jappix</a>,
11765 which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
11766 Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
11767 Facebook now ;).</p>
11768
11769 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
11770 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
11771
11772 <p>Well, that's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
11773 side is what I have experienced.</p>
11774
11775 <p>I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
11776 that won't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
11777 grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
11778 to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
11779 see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
11780 students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
11781 desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
11782 they jsut refused to use it because "Linux sucks". It is something
11783 that makes the council of our city spend around 600000 € to buy
11784 software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
11785 networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
11786 not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
11787 already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
11788 if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
11789 that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
11790 plain criminal.</p>
11791
11792 <p>That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
11793 method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
11794 founded an association named
11795 <a href="https://www.teckids.org">Teckids</a> here in Germany that does
11796 just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
11797 area of free and open source software, for example the
11798 <a href="http://kids.froscon.org">FrogLabs</a>, which share staff with
11799 Teckids and are the youth programme of
11800 <a href="http://www.froscon.org">the Free and Open Source Software
11801 Conference (FrOSCon)</a>. We do a lot more than most other conferences
11802 - this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
11803 aged 10 to 16. It was a huge success, with approx. 30 kids taking part
11804 and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
11805 of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.</p>
11806
11807 <p>Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
11808 the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
11809 their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
11810 Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
11811 clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
11812 it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
11813 who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
11814 We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
11815 open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
11816 software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
11817 group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
11818 Skolelinux in the future ;)!</p>
11819
11820 <p>So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren't for the world
11821 being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
11822 that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
11823 but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.</p>
11824
11825 <!--
11826
11827 >  * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
11828
11829 That's probably the hardest question of them all, as I do not know the
11830 community. However, I would be willing to do the following:
11831
11832  <li>Run an interview with a German headteacher who is very open to
11833    free software, and also prefers it, but cannot really use it because
11834    of the decision makers above;
11835  <li>Run interviews with some kids, both with and without previous
11836    knowledge about free software
11837
11838 If that is wanted, just let me know ;).
11839
11840 -->
11841
11842       </div>
11843       <div class="tags">
11844
11845
11846         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
11847
11848
11849       </div>
11850     </div>
11851     <div class="padding"></div>
11852
11853     <div class="entry">
11854       <div class="title">
11855         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html">Debian Edu interview: Klaus Knopper</a>
11856       </div>
11857       <div class="date">
11858          6th December 2013
11859       </div>
11860       <div class="body">
11861         <p>It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview,
11862 but the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
11863 Skolelinux</a> community is still going strong, and yesterday we even
11864 had a new school administrator show up on
11865 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a> to share
11866 his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school.  This
11867 time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of
11868 Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in
11869 Germany a few years ago.</p>
11870
11871 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
11872
11873 <p>I am Klaus Knopper.  I have a master degree in electrical
11874 engineering, and is currently professor in information management at
11875 the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and
11876 freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.</p>
11877
11878 <p>All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart
11879 from teaching, I'm also conducting some more or less experimental
11880 projects like the <a href="http://www.knoppix.org">Knoppix GNU/Linux live
11881 system</a> (Debian-based like Skolelinux),
11882 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html">ADRIANE</a>
11883 (a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and
11884 <a href="http://www.knopper.net/linbo/index-en.html">LINBO</a>
11885 (Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair
11886 system supporting various operating systems).</p>
11887
11888 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
11889 project?</strong></p>
11890
11891 <p>The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German
11892 coordinator for Skolelinux.  We were looking for an all-in-one open
11893 source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt
11894 introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.</p>
11895
11896 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
11897 Edu?</strong></p>
11898
11899 <ul>
11900   <li>Quick installation,</li>
11901   <li>works (almost) out of the box,</li>
11902   <li>contains many useful software packages for teaching and learning,</li>
11903   <li>is a purely community-based distro and not controlled by a
11904     single company,</li>
11905   <li>has a large number of supporters and teachers who share their
11906     experience and problem solutions.</li>
11907 </ul>
11908
11909 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
11910 Edu?</strong></p>
11911
11912 <ul>
11913   <li>Skolelinux is - as we had to learn - not easily upgradable to
11914   the next version.  Opposed to its genuine Debian base, upgrading to
11915   a new version means a full new installation from scratch to get it
11916   working again reliably.
11917
11918   <li>Skolelinux is based on Debian/stable, and therefore always a
11919   little outdated in terms of program versions compared to Edubuntu or
11920   similar educational Linux distros, which rather use Debian/testing
11921   as their base.
11922
11923   <li>Skolelinux has some very self-opinionated and stubborn default
11924   configuration which in my opinion adds unnecessary complexity and is
11925   not always suitable for a schools needs, the preset network
11926   configuration is actually a core definition feature of Skolelinux
11927   and not easy to change, so schools sometimes have to change their
11928   network configuration to make it "Skolelinux-compatible".
11929
11930   <li>Some proposed extensions, which were made available as
11931   contribution, like secure examination mode and lecture material
11932   distribution and collection, were not accepted into the mainline
11933   Skolelinux development and are now not easy to maintain in the
11934   future because of Skolelinux somewhat undeterministic update
11935   schemes.</li>
11936
11937   <li>Skolelinux has only a very tiny number of base developers
11938   compared to Debian.</li>
11939
11940 </ul>
11941
11942 <p>For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now
11943 rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until
11944 Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes
11945 upgradeable without reinstallation.</p>
11946
11947 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
11948
11949 <p>GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and
11950 programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence,
11951 occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various
11952 programming languages for teaching.</p>
11953
11954 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
11955 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
11956
11957 <p>Strong arguments are</p>
11958
11959 <ul>
11960
11961   <li>Knowledge is free, and so should be methods and tools for
11962     teaching and learning.</li>
11963
11964   <li>Students can learn with and use the same software at school, at
11965     home, and at their working place without running into license or
11966     conversion problems.</li>
11967
11968   <li>Closed source or proprietary software hides knowledge rather
11969     than exposing it, and proprietary software vendors try to bind
11970     customers to certain products.  But teachers need to teach
11971     science, not products.</li>
11972
11973   <li>If you have everything you for daily work as open source, what
11974     would you need proprietary software for?</li>
11975
11976 </ul>
11977
11978       </div>
11979       <div class="tags">
11980
11981
11982         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
11983
11984
11985       </div>
11986     </div>
11987     <div class="padding"></div>
11988
11989     <div class="entry">
11990       <div class="title">
11991         <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>
11992       </div>
11993       <div class="date">
11994         30th November 2013
11995       </div>
11996       <div class="body">
11997         <p>If you want the ability to electronically communicate directly with
11998 your neighbors and friends using a network controlled by your peers in
11999 stead of centrally controlled by a few corporations, or would like to
12000 experiment with interesting network technology, the
12001 <a href="http://www.dugnadsnett.no/">Dugnasnett for alle i Oslo</a>
12002 might be project for you.  39 mesh nodes are currently being planned,
12003 in the freshly started initiative from NUUG and Hackeriet to create a
12004 wireless community network.  The work is inspired by
12005 <a href="http://freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a>,
12006 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan
12007 Network</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet">Roofnet</a>
12008 and other successful mesh networks around the globe.  Two days ago we
12009 held a workshop to try to get people started on setting up their own
12010 mesh node, and there we decided to create a new mailing list
12011 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/dugnadsnett">dugnadsnett
12012 (at) nuug.no</a> and IRC channel
12013 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#dugnadsnett.no">#dugnadsnett.no</a> to
12014 coordinate the work.  See also the NUUG blog post
12015 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/E_postliste_og_IRC_kanal_for_Dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">announcing
12016 the mailing list and IRC channel</a>.</p>
12017
12018       </div>
12019       <div class="tags">
12020
12021
12022         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>.
12023
12024
12025       </div>
12026     </div>
12027     <div class="padding"></div>
12028
12029     <div class="entry">
12030       <div class="title">
12031         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html">New chrpath release 0.15</a>
12032       </div>
12033       <div class="date">
12034         24th November 2013
12035       </div>
12036       <div class="body">
12037         <p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
12038 development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
12039 acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
12040 the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
12041 compiled ELF programs.  The update was triggered by the persistence of
12042 Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
12043 support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
12044 is working on.  I checked the
12045 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
12046 <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
12047 <a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
12048 packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
12049 OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
12050 These are the release notes:</p>
12051
12052 <p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
12053
12054 <ul>
12055
12056   <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
12057    with newer architectures.  Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
12058    up.</li>
12059
12060   <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
12061
12062   <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
12063    Matthias Klose.</li>
12064
12065   <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
12066    Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
12067
12068   <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
12069    .dynamic is a NULL terminated string.  Based on patch found in
12070    Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
12071
12072 </ul>
12073
12074 <p>You can
12075 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
12076 new version 0.15 from alioth</a>.  Please let us know via the Alioth
12077 project if something is wrong with the new release.  The test suite
12078 did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
12079 include a testsuite check.</p>
12080
12081       </div>
12082       <div class="tags">
12083
12084
12085         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>.
12086
12087
12088       </div>
12089     </div>
12090     <div class="padding"></div>
12091
12092     <div class="entry">
12093       <div class="title">
12094         <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>
12095       </div>
12096       <div class="date">
12097         21st November 2013
12098       </div>
12099       <div class="body">
12100         <p>Drones, flying robots, are getting more and more popular.  The most
12101 know ones are the killer drones used by some government to murder
12102 people they do not like without giving them the chance of a fair
12103 trial, but the technology have many good uses too, from mapping and
12104 forest maintenance to photography and search and rescue.  I am sure it
12105 is just a question of time before "bad drones" are in the hands of
12106 private enterprises and not only state criminals but petty criminals
12107 too.  The drone technology is very useful and very dangerous.  To have
12108 some control over the use of drones, I agree with Daniel Suarez in his
12109 TED talk
12110 "<a href="https://archive.org/details/DanielSuarez_2013G">The kill
12111 decision shouldn't belong to a robot</a>", where he suggested this
12112 little gem to keep the good while limiting the bad use of drones:</p>
12113
12114 <blockquote>
12115
12116 <p>Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed
12117 I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement
12118 through public spaces. We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on
12119 aircraft. This is no different. And every citizen should be able to
12120 download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous
12121 vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and
12122 historically. And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones
12123 to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their
12124 own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their
12125 presence. And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic
12126 drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility.</p>
12127
12128 <p>But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. It
12129 would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles
12130 and drones while still preserving our open, civil society.</p>
12131
12132 </blockquote>
12133
12134 <p>The key is that <em>every citizen</em> should be able to read the
12135 radio beacons sent from the drones in the area, to be able to check
12136 both the government and others use of drones.  For such control to be
12137 effective, everyone must be able to do it.  What should such beacon
12138 contain?  At least formal owner, purpose, contact information and GPS
12139 location.  Probably also the origin and target position of the current
12140 flight.  And perhaps some registration number to be able to look up
12141 the drone in a central database tracking their movement.  Robots
12142 should not have privacy.  It is people who need privacy.</p>
12143
12144       </div>
12145       <div class="tags">
12146
12147
12148         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>.
12149
12150
12151       </div>
12152     </div>
12153     <div class="padding"></div>
12154
12155     <div class="entry">
12156       <div class="title">
12157         <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>
12158       </div>
12159       <div class="date">
12160         13th November 2013
12161       </div>
12162       <div class="body">
12163         <p>Today NUUG and Hackeriet announced
12164 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Bli_med___bygge_dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">our
12165 plans to join forces and create a wireless community network in
12166 Oslo</a>.  The workshop to help people get started will take place
12167 Thursday 2013-11-28, but we already are collecting the geolocation of
12168 people joining forces to make this happen.  We have
12169 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/oslo-nodes.geojson">9
12170 locations plotted on the map</a>, but we will need more before we have
12171 a connected mesh spread across Oslo.  If this sound interesting to
12172 you, please join us at the workshop.  If you are too impatient to wait
12173 15 days, please join us on the IRC channel
12174 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
12175 right away. :)</p>
12176
12177       </div>
12178       <div class="tags">
12179
12180
12181         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>.
12182
12183
12184       </div>
12185     </div>
12186     <div class="padding"></div>
12187
12188     <div class="entry">
12189       <div class="title">
12190         <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>
12191       </div>
12192       <div class="date">
12193         10th November 2013
12194       </div>
12195       <div class="body">
12196         <p>Continuing my research into mesh networking, I was recommended to
12197 use TP-Link 3040 and 3600 access points as mesh nodes, and the pair I
12198 bought arrived on Friday.  Here are my notes on how to set up the
12199 MR3040 as a mesh node using
12200 <a href="http://www.openwrt.org/">OpenWrt</a>.</p>
12201
12202 <p>I started by following the instructions on the OpenWRT wiki for
12203 <a href="http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3040">TL-MR3040</a>,
12204 and downloaded
12205 <a href="http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin">the
12206 recommended firmware image</a>
12207 (openwrt-ar71xx-generic-tl-mr3040-v2-squashfs-factory.bin) and
12208 uploaded it into the original web interface.  The flashing went fine,
12209 and the machine was available via telnet on the ethernet port.  After
12210 logging in and setting the root password, ssh was available and I
12211 could start to set it up as a batman-adv mesh node.</p>
12212
12213 <p>I started off by reading the instructions from
12214 <a href="http://wirelessafrica.meraka.org.za/wiki/index.php?title=Antoine's_Research">Wireless
12215 Africa</a>, which had quite a lot of useful information, but
12216 eventually I followed the recipe from the Open Mesh wiki for
12217 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Batman-adv-openwrt-config">using
12218 batman-adv on OpenWrt</a>.  A small snag was the fact that the
12219 <tt>opkg install kmod-batman-adv</tt> command did not work as it
12220 should.  The batman-adv kernel module would fail to load because its
12221 dependency crc16 was not already loaded.  I
12222 <a href="https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/14452">reported the bug</a> to
12223 the openwrt project and hope it will be fixed soon.  But the problem
12224 only seem to affect initial testing of batman-adv, as configuration
12225 seem to work when booting from scratch.</p>
12226
12227 <p>The setup is done using files in /etc/config/.  I did not bridge
12228 the Ethernet and mesh interfaces this time, to be able to hook up the
12229 box on my local network and log into it for configuration updates.
12230 The following files were changed and look like this after modifying
12231 them:</p>
12232
12233 <p><tt>/etc/config/network</tt></p>
12234
12235 <pre>
12236
12237 config interface 'loopback'
12238         option ifname 'lo'
12239         option proto 'static'
12240         option ipaddr '127.0.0.1'
12241         option netmask '255.0.0.0'
12242
12243 config globals 'globals'
12244         option ula_prefix 'fdbf:4c12:3fed::/48'
12245
12246 config interface 'lan'
12247         option ifname 'eth0'
12248         option type 'bridge'
12249         option proto 'dhcp'
12250         option ipaddr '192.168.1.1'
12251         option netmask '255.255.255.0'
12252         option hostname 'tl-mr3040'
12253         option ip6assign '60'
12254
12255 config interface 'mesh'
12256         option ifname 'adhoc0'
12257         option mtu '1528'
12258         option proto 'batadv'
12259         option mesh 'bat0'
12260 </pre>
12261
12262 <p><tt>/etc/config/wireless</tt></p>
12263 <pre>
12264
12265 config wifi-device 'radio0'
12266         option type 'mac80211'
12267         option channel '11'
12268         option hwmode '11ng'
12269         option path 'platform/ar933x_wmac'
12270         option htmode 'HT20'
12271         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-20'
12272         list ht_capab 'SHORT-GI-40'
12273         list ht_capab 'RX-STBC1'
12274         list ht_capab 'DSSS_CCK-40'
12275         option disabled '0'
12276
12277 config wifi-iface 'wmesh'
12278         option device 'radio0'
12279         option ifname 'adhoc0'
12280         option network 'mesh'
12281         option encryption 'none'
12282         option mode 'adhoc'
12283         option bssid '02:BA:00:00:00:01'
12284         option ssid 'meshfx@hackeriet'
12285 </pre>
12286 <p><tt>/etc/config/batman-adv</tt></p>
12287 <pre>
12288
12289 config 'mesh' 'bat0'
12290         option interfaces 'adhoc0'
12291         option 'aggregated_ogms'
12292         option 'ap_isolation'
12293         option 'bonding'
12294         option 'fragmentation'
12295         option 'gw_bandwidth'
12296         option 'gw_mode'
12297         option 'gw_sel_class'
12298         option 'log_level'
12299         option 'orig_interval'
12300         option 'vis_mode'
12301         option 'bridge_loop_avoidance'
12302         option 'distributed_arp_table'
12303         option 'network_coding'
12304         option 'hop_penalty'
12305
12306 # yet another batX instance
12307 # config 'mesh' 'bat5'
12308 #       option 'interfaces' 'second_mesh'
12309 </pre>
12310
12311 <p>The mesh node is now operational.  I have yet to test its range,
12312 but I hope it is good.  I have not yet tested the TP-Link 3600 box
12313 still wrapped up in plastic.</p>
12314
12315       </div>
12316       <div class="tags">
12317
12318
12319         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>.
12320
12321
12322       </div>
12323     </div>
12324     <div class="padding"></div>
12325
12326     <div class="entry">
12327       <div class="title">
12328         <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>
12329       </div>
12330       <div class="date">
12331          2nd November 2013
12332       </div>
12333       <div class="body">
12334         <p>If one of the points of switching to a new init system in Debian is
12335 <a href="http://thomas.goirand.fr/blog/?p=147">to get rid of huge
12336 init.d scripts</a>, I doubt we need to switch away from sysvinit and
12337 init.d scripts at all.  Here is an example init.d script, ie a rewrite
12338 of /etc/init.d/rsyslog:</p>
12339
12340 <p><pre>
12341 #!/lib/init/init-d-script
12342 ### BEGIN INIT INFO
12343 # Provides:          rsyslog
12344 # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $time
12345 # Required-Stop:     umountnfs $time
12346 # X-Stop-After:      sendsigs
12347 # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
12348 # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
12349 # Short-Description: enhanced syslogd
12350 # Description:       Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd.
12351 #                    It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be
12352 #                    used as a drop-in replacement.
12353 ### END INIT INFO
12354 DESC="enhanced syslogd"
12355 DAEMON=/usr/sbin/rsyslogd
12356 </pre></p>
12357
12358 <p>Pretty minimalistic to me... For the record, the original sysv-rc
12359 script was 137 lines, and the above is just 15 lines, most of it meta
12360 info/comments.</p>
12361
12362 <p>How to do this, you ask?  Well, one create a new script
12363 /lib/init/init-d-script looking something like this:
12364
12365 <p><pre>
12366 #!/bin/sh
12367
12368 # Define LSB log_* functions.
12369 # Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.2-14) to ensure that this file is present
12370 # and status_of_proc is working.
12371 . /lib/lsb/init-functions
12372
12373 #
12374 # Function that starts the daemon/service
12375
12376 #
12377 do_start()
12378 {
12379         # Return
12380         #   0 if daemon has been started
12381         #   1 if daemon was already running
12382         #   2 if daemon could not be started
12383         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
12384                 || return 1
12385         start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
12386                 $DAEMON_ARGS \
12387                 || return 2
12388         # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
12389         # to handle requests from services started subsequently which depend
12390         # on this one.  As a last resort, sleep for some time.
12391 }
12392
12393 #
12394 # Function that stops the daemon/service
12395 #
12396 do_stop()
12397 {
12398         # Return
12399         #   0 if daemon has been stopped
12400         #   1 if daemon was already stopped
12401         #   2 if daemon could not be stopped
12402         #   other if a failure occurred
12403         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
12404         RETVAL="$?"
12405         [ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
12406         # Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
12407         # and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
12408         # If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
12409         # that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
12410         # needed by services started subsequently.  A last resort is to
12411         # sleep for some time.
12412         start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
12413         [ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
12414         # Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
12415         rm -f $PIDFILE
12416         return "$RETVAL"
12417 }
12418
12419 #
12420 # Function that sends a SIGHUP to the daemon/service
12421 #
12422 do_reload() {
12423         #
12424         # If the daemon can reload its configuration without
12425         # restarting (for example, when it is sent a SIGHUP),
12426         # then implement that here.
12427         #
12428         start-stop-daemon --stop --signal 1 --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --name $NAME
12429         return 0
12430 }
12431
12432 SCRIPTNAME=$1
12433 scriptbasename="$(basename $1)"
12434 echo "SN: $scriptbasename"
12435 if [ "$scriptbasename" != "init-d-library" ] ; then
12436     script="$1"
12437     shift
12438     . $script
12439 else
12440     exit 0
12441 fi
12442
12443 NAME=$(basename $DAEMON)
12444 PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
12445
12446 # Exit if the package is not installed
12447 #[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
12448
12449 # Read configuration variable file if it is present
12450 [ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] && . /etc/default/$NAME
12451
12452 # Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
12453 . /lib/init/vars.sh
12454
12455 case "$1" in
12456   start)
12457         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
12458         do_start
12459         case "$?" in
12460                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
12461                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
12462         esac
12463         ;;
12464   stop)
12465         [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
12466         do_stop
12467         case "$?" in
12468                 0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
12469                 2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
12470         esac
12471         ;;
12472   status)
12473         status_of_proc "$DAEMON" "$NAME" && exit 0 || exit $?
12474         ;;
12475   #reload|force-reload)
12476         #
12477         # If do_reload() is not implemented then leave this commented out
12478         # and leave 'force-reload' as an alias for 'restart'.
12479         #
12480         #log_daemon_msg "Reloading $DESC" "$NAME"
12481         #do_reload
12482         #log_end_msg $?
12483         #;;
12484   restart|force-reload)
12485         #
12486         # If the "reload" option is implemented then remove the
12487         # 'force-reload' alias
12488         #
12489         log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
12490         do_stop
12491         case "$?" in
12492           0|1)
12493                 do_start
12494                 case "$?" in
12495                         0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
12496                         1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
12497                         *) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
12498                 esac
12499                 ;;
12500           *)
12501                 # Failed to stop
12502                 log_end_msg 1
12503                 ;;
12504         esac
12505         ;;
12506   *)
12507         echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|status|restart|force-reload}" >&2
12508         exit 3
12509         ;;
12510 esac
12511
12512 :
12513 </pre></p>
12514
12515 <p>It is based on /etc/init.d/skeleton, and could be improved quite a
12516 lot.  I did not really polish the approach, so it might not always
12517 work out of the box, but you get the idea.  I did not try very hard to
12518 optimize it nor make it more robust either.</p>
12519
12520 <p>A better argument for switching init system in Debian than reducing
12521 the size of init scripts (which is a good thing to do anyway), is to
12522 get boot system that is able to handle the kernel events sensibly and
12523 robustly, and do not depend on the boot to run sequentially.  The boot
12524 and the kernel have not behaved sequentially in years.</p>
12525
12526       </div>
12527       <div class="tags">
12528
12529
12530         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>.
12531
12532
12533       </div>
12534     </div>
12535     <div class="padding"></div>
12536
12537     <div class="entry">
12538       <div class="title">
12539         <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>
12540       </div>
12541       <div class="date">
12542          1st November 2013
12543       </div>
12544       <div class="body">
12545         <p><a href="http://www.spice-space.org/">The SPICE protocol</a> for
12546 remote display access is the preferred solution with oVirt and RedHat
12547 Enterprise Virtualization, and I was sad to discover the other day
12548 that the browser plugin needed to use these systems seamlessly was
12549 missing in Debian.  The <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/668284">request
12550 for a package</a> was from 2012-04-10 with no progress since
12551 2013-04-01, so I decided to wrap up a package based on the great work
12552 from Cajus Pollmeier and put it in a collab-maint maintained git
12553 repository to get a package I could use.  I would very much like
12554 others to help me maintain the package (or just take over, I do not
12555 mind), but as no-one had volunteered so far, I just uploaded it to
12556 NEW.  I hope it will be available in Debian in a few days.</p>
12557
12558 <p>The source is now available from
12559 <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>
12560
12561       </div>
12562       <div class="tags">
12563
12564
12565         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
12566
12567
12568       </div>
12569     </div>
12570     <div class="padding"></div>
12571
12572     <div class="entry">
12573       <div class="title">
12574         <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>
12575       </div>
12576       <div class="date">
12577         27th October 2013
12578       </div>
12579       <div class="body">
12580         <p>The
12581 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vmdebootstrap.html">vmdebootstrap</a>
12582 program is a a very nice system to create virtual machine images.  It
12583 create a image file, add a partition table, mount it and run
12584 debootstrap in the mounted directory to create a Debian system on a
12585 stick.  Yesterday, I decided to try to teach it how to make images for
12586 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi">Raspberry Pi</a>, as part
12587 of a plan to simplify the build system for
12588 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the FreedomBox
12589 project</a>.  The FreedomBox project already uses vmdebootstrap for
12590 the virtualbox images, but its current build system made multistrap
12591 based system for Dreamplug images, and it is lacking support for
12592 Raspberry Pi.</p>
12593
12594 <p>Armed with the knowledge on how to build "foreign" (aka non-native
12595 architecture) chroots for Raspberry Pi, I dived into the vmdebootstrap
12596 code and adjusted it to be able to build armel images on my amd64
12597 Debian laptop.  I ended up giving vmdebootstrap five new options,
12598 allowing me to replicate the image creation process I use to make
12599 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html">Debian
12600 Jessie based mesh node images for the Raspberry Pi</a>.  First, the
12601 <tt>--foreign /path/to/binfm_handler</tt> option tell vmdebootstrap to
12602 call debootstrap with --foreign and to copy the handler into the
12603 generated chroot before running the second stage.  This allow
12604 vmdebootstrap to create armel images on an amd64 host.  Next I added
12605 two new options <tt>--bootsize size</tt> and <tt>--boottype
12606 fstype</tt> to teach it to create a separate /boot/ partition with the
12607 given file system type, allowing me to create an image with a vfat
12608 partition for the /boot/ stuff.  I also added a <tt>--variant
12609 variant</tt> option to allow me to create smaller images without the
12610 Debian base system packages installed.  Finally, I added an option
12611 <tt>--no-extlinux</tt> to tell vmdebootstrap to not install extlinux
12612 as a boot loader.  It is not needed on the Raspberry Pi and probably
12613 most other non-x86 architectures.  The changes were accepted by the
12614 upstream author of vmdebootstrap yesterday and today, and is now
12615 available from
12616 <a href="http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/vmdebootstrap/">the
12617 upstream project page</a>.</p>
12618
12619 <p>To use it to build a Raspberry Pi image using Debian Jessie, first
12620 create a small script (the customize script) to add the non-free
12621 binary blob needed to boot the Raspberry Pi and the APT source
12622 list:</p>
12623
12624 <p><pre>
12625 #!/bin/sh
12626 set -e # Exit on first error
12627 rootdir="$1"
12628 cd "$rootdir"
12629 cat &lt;&lt;EOF > etc/apt/sources.list
12630 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
12631 EOF
12632 # Install non-free binary blob needed to boot Raspberry Pi.  This
12633 # install a kernel somewhere too.
12634 wget https://raw.github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/master/rpi-update \
12635     -O $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
12636 chmod a+x $rootdir/usr/bin/rpi-update
12637 mkdir -p $rootdir/lib/modules
12638 touch $rootdir/boot/start.elf
12639 chroot $rootdir rpi-update
12640 </pre></p>
12641
12642 <p>Next, fetch the latest vmdebootstrap script and call it like this
12643 to build the image:</p>
12644
12645 <pre>
12646 sudo ./vmdebootstrap \
12647     --variant minbase \
12648     --arch armel \
12649     --distribution jessie \
12650     --mirror http://http.debian.net/debian \
12651     --image test.img \
12652     --size 600M \
12653     --bootsize 64M \
12654     --boottype vfat \
12655     --log-level debug \
12656     --verbose \
12657     --no-kernel \
12658     --no-extlinux \
12659     --root-password raspberry \
12660     --hostname raspberrypi \
12661     --foreign /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static \
12662     --customize `pwd`/customize \
12663     --package netbase \
12664     --package git-core \
12665     --package binutils \
12666     --package ca-certificates \
12667     --package wget \
12668     --package kmod
12669 </pre></p>
12670
12671 <p>The list of packages being installed are the ones needed by
12672 rpi-update to make the image bootable on the Raspberry Pi, with the
12673 exception of netbase, which is needed by debootstrap to find
12674 /etc/hosts with the minbase variant.  I really wish there was a way to
12675 set up an Raspberry Pi using only packages in the Debian archive, but
12676 that is not possible as far as I know, because it boots from the GPU
12677 using a non-free binary blob.</p>
12678
12679 <p>The build host need debootstrap, kpartx and qemu-user-static and
12680 probably a few others installed.  I have not checked the complete
12681 build dependency list.</p>
12682
12683 <p>The resulting image will not use the hardware floating point unit
12684 on the Raspberry PI, because the armel architecture in Debian is not
12685 optimized for that use.  So the images created will be a bit slower
12686 than <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/">Raspbian</a> based images.</p>
12687
12688       </div>
12689       <div class="tags">
12690
12691
12692         Tags: <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>.
12693
12694
12695       </div>
12696     </div>
12697     <div class="padding"></div>
12698
12699     <div class="entry">
12700       <div class="title">
12701         <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>
12702       </div>
12703       <div class="date">
12704         21st October 2013
12705       </div>
12706       <div class="body">
12707         <p>The last few days I have been experimenting with
12708 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki">the
12709 batman-adv mesh technology</a>.  I want to gain some experience to see
12710 if it will fit <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the
12711 Freedombox project</a>, and together with my neighbors try to build a
12712 mesh network around the park where I live.  Batman-adv is a layer 2
12713 mesh system ("ethernet" in other words), where the mesh network appear
12714 as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch.</p>
12715
12716 <p>My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying
12717 around, but I've been unable to get them working with batman-adv.  So
12718 instead, I started playing with a
12719 <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org/">Raspberry Pi</a>, and tried to
12720 get it working as a mesh node.  My idea is to use it to create a mesh
12721 node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to
12722 the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh
12723 network.  This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys
12724 WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow
12725 non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh.  This in turn is useful for
12726 Android phones using <a href="http://servalproject.org/">the Serval
12727 Project</a> voip client, allowing every one around the playground to
12728 phone and message each other for free.  The reason is that Android
12729 phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from
12730 the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted.  But if
12731 they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to
12732 every client on the local network.</p>
12733
12734 <p>To get this working, I've created a debian package
12735 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node">meshfx-node</a>
12736 and a script
12737 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/build-rpi-mesh-node">build-rpi-mesh-node</a>
12738 to create the Raspberry Pi boot image.  I'm using Debian Jessie (and
12739 not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available.
12740 Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot
12741 image to get it booting, but I'll ignore that for now.  Also, as
12742 Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry
12743 Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit.  I hope
12744 the routing performance isn't affected by the lack of hardware FPU
12745 support.</p>
12746
12747 <p>To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user
12748 after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:</p>
12749
12750 <p><pre>
12751 % wget -O build-rpi-mesh-node \
12752     https://raw.github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
12753 % sudo bash -x ./build-rpi-mesh-node > build.log 2>&1
12754 % dd if=/root/rpi/rpi_basic_jessie_$(date +%Y%m%d).img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M
12755 %
12756 </pre></p>
12757
12758 <p>Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB
12759 wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node.  At least it does for
12760 me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the
12761 ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in
12762 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">an
12763 earlier blog post about this mesh testing</a>.</p>
12764
12765 <p>The mesh node was not horribly expensive either.  I bought
12766 everything over the counter in shops nearby.  If I had ordered online
12767 from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:</p>
12768
12769 <p><table>
12770
12771 <tr><th>Supplier</th><th>Model</th><th>NOK</th></tr>
12772 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi model B</td><td>349.90</td></tr>
12773 <tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi type B case</td><td>99.90</td></tr>
12774 <tr><td>Lefdal</td><td>Jensen Air:Link 25150</td><td>295.-</td></tr>
12775 <tr><td>Clas Ohlson</td><td>Kingston 16 GB SD card</td><td>199.-</td></tr>
12776 <tr><td>Total cost</td><td></td><td>943.80</td></tr>
12777
12778 </table></p>
12779
12780 <p>Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement
12781 connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the 1th
12782 floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one
12783 play-node I use to develop the image building script.  And some times
12784 I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it.  I look forward
12785 to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give,
12786 and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)</p>
12787
12788       </div>
12789       <div class="tags">
12790
12791
12792         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>.
12793
12794
12795       </div>
12796     </div>
12797     <div class="padding"></div>
12798
12799     <div class="entry">
12800       <div class="title">
12801         <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>
12802       </div>
12803       <div class="date">
12804         19th October 2013
12805       </div>
12806       <div class="body">
12807         <p>Back in 2010, I created a Perl library to talk to
12808 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spykee">the Spykee robot</a>
12809 (with two belts, wifi, USB and Linux) and made it available from my
12810 web page.  Today I concluded that it should move to a site that is
12811 easier to use to cooperate with others, and moved it to github.  If
12812 you got a Spykee robot, you might want to check out
12813 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/libspykee-perl">the
12814 libspykee-perl github repository</a>.</p>
12815
12816       </div>
12817       <div class="tags">
12818
12819
12820         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>.
12821
12822
12823       </div>
12824     </div>
12825     <div class="padding"></div>
12826
12827     <div class="entry">
12828       <div class="title">
12829         <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>
12830       </div>
12831       <div class="date">
12832         15th October 2013
12833       </div>
12834       <div class="body">
12835         <p>The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
12836 wider attention.  I recommend signing and donating to each one of
12837 these. :)</p>
12838
12839 <p>Via <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2013/18/">Debian
12840 Project News for 2013-10-14</a> I came across the Outreach Program for
12841 Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
12842 more women involved in free software.  One debian sponsor has offered
12843 to match <a href="http://debian.ch/opw2013">any donation done to Debian
12844 earmarked</a> for this initiative.  I donated a few minutes ago, and
12845 hope you will to. :)</p>
12846
12847 <p>And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
12848 create <a href="https://supporters.eff.org/donate/nsa-videos">video
12849 documentaries about the excessive spying</a> on every Internet user that
12850 take place these days, and their need to fund the work.  I've already
12851 donated.  Are you next?</p>
12852
12853 <p>For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
12854 Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
12855 statement under the heading
12856 <a href="http://saih.no/Bloggers_United/">Bloggers United for Open
12857 Access</a> for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
12858 Norwegian government.  So far 499 signatures.  I hope you will sign it
12859 too.</p>
12860
12861       </div>
12862       <div class="tags">
12863
12864
12865         Tags: <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>.
12866
12867
12868       </div>
12869     </div>
12870     <div class="padding"></div>
12871
12872     <div class="entry">
12873       <div class="title">
12874         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">Oslo community mesh network - with NUUG and Hackeriet at Hausmania</a>
12875       </div>
12876       <div class="date">
12877         11th October 2013
12878       </div>
12879       <div class="body">
12880         <p>Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
12881 networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
12882 areas, depending on the radio technology used.  Normal wifi equipment
12883 can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
12884 successful examples like
12885 <a href="http://www.freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a> and
12886 <a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network</a>
12887 (see
12888 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece">wikipedia
12889 for a large list</a>) around the globe.  To give you an idea how it
12890 work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
12891 can be seen from their
12892 <a href="http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html">dynamically
12893 updated node graph and map</a>, where one can see how the mesh nodes
12894 automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
12895 There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
12896 and that is the main topic of this blog post.</p>
12897
12898 <p>I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
12899 to do it as part of my involvement with the <a
12900 href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member organisation</a> community, and
12901 my recent involvement in
12902 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the Freedombox project</a>
12903 finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
12904 Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
12905 when possible, given that most communication between people are
12906 between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
12907 communication patterns).  It also allow people to communicate without
12908 any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
12909 private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
12910 important over the years.</p>
12911
12912 <p>So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
12913 working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
12914 <a href="http://hackeriet.no/">Hackeriet</a> at Husmania.  They seem to
12915 have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
12916 <a href="http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page">the Oslo
12917 Freifunk project</a>, but that effort is now dead and the people
12918 behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
12919 <a href="http://meshfx.org/trac">meshfx</a>.  Unfortunately the wiki
12920 site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
12921 reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to
12922 the new project.  A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
12923 from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks.  I
12924 came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
12925 speakers about this talk (from
12926 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Kd7CLkhSY">youtube</a>):</p>
12927
12928 <p><iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
12929
12930 <p>I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
12931 There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
12932 figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but
12933 given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
12934 is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
12935 completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
12936 batman-adv for now.  It sure help me to  know that the very cool
12937 <a href="http://www.servalproject.org/">Serval project in Australia</a>
12938 is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
12939 organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
12940 less industrialized communities.  Check out this cool video presenting
12941 that project (from
12942 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30qNfzJCQOA">youtube</a>):</p>
12943
12944 <p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/30qNfzJCQOA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
12945
12946 <p>According to the wikipedia page on
12947 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network">Wireless
12948 mesh network</a> there are around 70 competing schemes for routing
12949 packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
12950 B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
12951 based community mesh networks.</p>
12952
12953 <p>The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer 2
12954 (as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
12955 network.  One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
12956 vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
12957 computer.  The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
12958 least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up.  A
12959 <a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide">good
12960 introduction</a> is available from the Open Mesh project.  These are
12961 the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:</p>
12962
12963 <p><table>
12964 <tr><th>Setting</th><th>Value</th></tr>
12965 <tr><td>Protocol / kernel module</td><td>batman-adv</td></tr>
12966 <tr><td>ESSID</td><td>meshfx@hackeriet</td></tr>
12967 <td>Channel / Frequency</td><td>11 / 2462</td></tr>
12968 <td>Cell ID</td><td>02:BA:00:00:00:01</td>
12969 </table></p>
12970
12971 <p>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
12972 in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers.  (See a nice post from
12973 VillageTelco about
12974 "<a href="http://tiebing.blogspot.no/2009/12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html">Information
12975 about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!</a>
12976 for details.)  When these settings are activated and you have some
12977 other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
12978 network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
12979 any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)</p>
12980
12981 <p>My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
12982 but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
12983 firmware supporting batman-adv.  If anyone know how to use that old
12984 wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.</p>
12985
12986 <p>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
12987 us on IRC, either channel
12988 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace">#oslohackerspace</a>
12989 or <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug">#nuug</a> on
12990 irc.freenode.net.</p>
12991
12992 <p>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
12993 research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
12994 and Innovation called
12995 <a href="http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-2008.pdf">The
12996 reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks</a> and elsewhere
12997 learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
12998 Grünerløkka in Oslo.  So mesh networks are also interesting for
12999 commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
13000 to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
13001 know have closed down the experiment.  Perhaps Telenor or others would
13002 be interested in a cooperation?</p>
13003
13004 <p><strong>Update 2013-10-12</strong>: I was just
13005 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2013-October/005900.html">told
13006 by the Serval project developers</a> that they no longer use
13007 batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
13008 mesh system.</p>
13009
13010       </div>
13011       <div class="tags">
13012
13013
13014         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>.
13015
13016
13017       </div>
13018     </div>
13019     <div class="padding"></div>
13020
13021     <div class="entry">
13022       <div class="title">
13023         <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>
13024       </div>
13025       <div class="date">
13026          8th October 2013
13027       </div>
13028       <div class="body">
13029         <p>The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
13030 Salvador had published a
13031 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GgpdqgLFc">video on
13032 Youtube</a> showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu /
13033 Skolelinux profile.  This is the profile intended for use at home or
13034 on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network
13035 services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc,
13036 in other word a single user machine).  The result is 11 minutes long,
13037 and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked).
13038 Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium
13039 showing the <a href="http://www.zygotebody.com/">Zygote Body 3D model
13040 of the human body</a>, but I guess he did not know about those or find
13041 other programs more interesting. :) And the video do not show the
13042 advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian
13043 Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of
13044 computers without hard drives by installing one central
13045 <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP server</a>.</p>
13046
13047 <p>Anyway, check out the video, embedded below and linked to above:</p>
13048
13049 <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/w-GgpdqgLFc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
13050
13051 <p>Are there other nice videos demonstrating Skolelinux?  Please let
13052 me know. :)</p>
13053
13054       </div>
13055       <div class="tags">
13056
13057
13058         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
13059
13060
13061       </div>
13062     </div>
13063     <div class="padding"></div>
13064
13065     <div class="entry">
13066       <div class="title">
13067         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Finally__Debian_Edu_Wheezy_is_released_today_.html">Finally, Debian Edu Wheezy is released today!</a>
13068       </div>
13069       <div class="date">
13070         29th September 2013
13071       </div>
13072       <div class="body">
13073         <p>A few hours ago, the announcement for the first stable release of
13074 Debian Edu Wheezy went out from the Debian publicity team.  The
13075 complete announcement text can be found at
13076 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130928">the Debian News
13077 section</a>, translated to several languages.  Please check it out.</p>
13078
13079 <p>There is one minor known problem that we will fix very soon.  One
13080 can not install a amd64 Thin Client Server using PXE, as the /var/
13081 partition is too small.  A workaround is to extend the partition (use
13082 lvresize + resize2fs in tty 2 while installing).</p>
13083
13084       </div>
13085       <div class="tags">
13086
13087
13088         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13089
13090
13091       </div>
13092     </div>
13093     <div class="padding"></div>
13094
13095     <div class="entry">
13096       <div class="title">
13097         <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>
13098       </div>
13099       <div class="date">
13100         27th September 2013
13101       </div>
13102       <div class="body">
13103         <p>The <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox
13104 project</a> have been going on for a while, and have presented the
13105 vision, ideas and solution several places.  Here is a little
13106 collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.</p>
13107
13108 <ul>
13109
13110 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvUz5taxvA">FreedomBox -
13111 2,5 minute marketing film</a> (Youtube)</li>
13112
13113 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzW25QTVWsE">Eben Moglen
13114 discusses the Freedombox on CBS news 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
13115
13116 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae8SZbxfE0g">Eben Moglen -
13117 Freedom in the Cloud - Software Freedom, Privacy and and Security for
13118 Web 2.0 and Cloud computing at ISOC-NY Public Meeting 2010</a>
13119 (Youtube)</li>
13120
13121 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE">Fosdem 2011
13122 Keynote by Eben Moglen presenting the Freedombox</a> (Youtube)</li>
13123
13124 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDDUyJSQ9s">Presentation of
13125 the Freedombox by James Vasile at Elevate in Gratz 2011</a> (Youtube)</li>
13126
13127 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTmnk27g9s"> Freedombox -
13128 Discovery, Identity, and Trust by Nick Daly at Freedombox Hackfest New
13129 York City in 2012</a> (Youtube)</li>
13130
13131 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbSB4Ba7Ck">Introduction
13132 to the Freedombox at Freedombox Hackfest New York City in 2012</a>
13133 (Youtube)</li>
13134
13135 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-P2Jaeg0aQ">Freedom, Out
13136 of the Box! by Bdale Garbee at linux.conf.au Ballarat, 2012</a> (Youtube) </li>
13137
13138 <li><a href="https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/freedombox/">Freedombox
13139 1.0 by Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee at Fosdem 2013</a> (FOSDEM) </li>
13140
13141 <li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1LpYX2zVYg">What is the
13142 FreedomBox today by Bdale Garbee at Debconf13 in Vaumarcus
13143 2013</a> (Youtube)</li>
13144
13145 </ul>
13146
13147 <p>A larger list is available from
13148 <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TalksAndPresentations">the
13149 Freedombox Wiki</a>.</p>
13150
13151 <p>On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
13152 Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
13153 Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
13154 a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
13155 The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
13156 pending in NEW.  The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
13157 metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload.  Join
13158 us on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC
13159 (#freedombox on irc.debian.org)</a> and
13160 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
13161 mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
13162
13163       </div>
13164       <div class="tags">
13165
13166
13167         Tags: <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>.
13168
13169
13170       </div>
13171     </div>
13172     <div class="padding"></div>
13173
13174     <div class="entry">
13175       <div class="title">
13176         <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>
13177       </div>
13178       <div class="date">
13179         16th September 2013
13180       </div>
13181       <div class="body">
13182         <p>The third wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
13183 today.  This is the release announcement from Holger Levsen:</p>
13184
13185 <blockquote>
13186 <p>Hi,</p>
13187
13188 <p>it is my pleasure to announce the third beta release (beta 2 for
13189 short) of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
13190 Skolelinux</a> based on Debian Wheezy!</p>
13191
13192 <p>Please test these images extensivly, if no new problems are found
13193 we plan to do this final Debian Edu Wheezy release this coming
13194 weekend.  We are not aware of any major problems or blockers in beta2,
13195 if you find something, please notify us immediately!</p>
13196
13197 <p>(More about the remaining steps for the Edu Wheezy release in
13198 another mail to the edu list tonight or tomorrow...)</p>
13199
13200 <p>Noteworthy changes and software updates for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b2
13201 compared to beta1:</p>
13202
13203 <ul>
13204
13205 <li>The KDE proxy setup has been adjusted to use the provided wpad.dat. This
13206 also gets Chromium to use this proxy.</li>
13207 <li>Install kdepim-groupware with KDE desktops to make sure korganizer
13208 understand ical/dav sources.</li>
13209 <li>Increased default maximum size of /var/spool/squid and /skole/backup on the
13210 main server.</li>
13211 <li>A source DVD image containing all source packages is now available as well.</li>
13212 <li>Updates for chromium (29.0.1547.57-1~deb7u1), imagemagick
13213 (6.7.7.10-5+deb7u2), php5 (5.4.4-14+deb7u4), libmodplug
13214 (0.8.8.4-3+deb7u1+git20130828), tiff (4.0.2-6+deb7u2), linux-image
13215 (3.2.0-4-486_3.2.46-1+deb7u1).</li>
13216
13217 </ul>
13218
13219 <p>Where to get it:</p>
13220
13221 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
13222
13223 <ul>
13224 <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>
13225 <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>
13226 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-CD.iso .</li>
13227 </ul>
13228
13229 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is:  3a1c89f4666df80eebcd46c5bf5fedb866f9472f</p>
13230
13231 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use
13232 <ul>
13233 <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>
13234 <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>
13235 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-USB.iso .</li>
13236 </ul>
13237
13238 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 702d1718548f401c74bfa6df9f032cc3ee16597e</p>
13239
13240 <p>The Source DVD image has the filename
13241 debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-source-DVD.iso and the SHA1SUM
13242 089eed8b3f962db47aae1f6a9685e9bb2fa30ca5 and is available the same way
13243 as the other isos.</p>
13244
13245 <p>How to report bugs</p>
13246
13247 <p>For information how to report bugs please see
13248 <br><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
13249
13250
13251 <p>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</p>
13252
13253 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
13254 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
13255 configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
13256 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
13257 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
13258 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
13259 initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
13260 machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
13261 provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
13262 centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
13263 services.  The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
13264 packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
13265 can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
13266
13267 <p>This is the seventh test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
13268 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
13269 Squeeze release.</p>
13270
13271 <p>Notes for upgrades from Alpha Prereleases</p>
13272
13273 <p>Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
13274 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
13275 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
13276 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
13277 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (2)
13278 Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin
13279 password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one
13280 (backup copy!). In both cases all users need to change their password
13281 to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home
13282 directory.</p>
13283
13284
13285 <p>cheers,
13286 <br>        Holger</p>
13287 </blockquote>
13288
13289       </div>
13290       <div class="tags">
13291
13292
13293         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13294
13295
13296       </div>
13297     </div>
13298     <div class="padding"></div>
13299
13300     <div class="entry">
13301       <div class="title">
13302         <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>
13303       </div>
13304       <div class="date">
13305         10th September 2013
13306       </div>
13307       <div class="body">
13308         <p>I was introduced to the
13309 <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/">Freedombox project</a>
13310 in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
13311 of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
13312 within the legal protection of their own homes.  The idea is to give
13313 people back the power over their network and machines, and return
13314 Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.  Instead of
13315 depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
13316 control over their own basic infrastructure.</p>
13317
13318 <p>I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
13319 taken priority.  But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
13320 and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
13321 communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
13322 actually started working on the project a while back.</p>
13323
13324 <p>The <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/freedombox/">initial
13325 Debian initiative</a> based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
13326 create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
13327 up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
13328 communication.  The initial deployment platform have been the
13329 <a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx">Dreamplug</a>,
13330 which is a piece of hardware I do not own.  So to be able to test what
13331 the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
13332 it on some hardware I do have access to.  I have rewritten the
13333 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedom-maker">freedom-maker</a>
13334 image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
13335 setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
13336 set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
13337 the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
13338 missing in Debian).</p>
13339
13340 <p>The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
13341 scripts
13342 (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>),
13343 and a administrative web interface
13344 (<a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/Plinth">plinth</a> + exmachina +
13345 withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
13346 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>
13347 (freedombox-privoxy).  There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
13348 client (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/jwchat">jwchat</a>)
13349 trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
13350 (<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/ejabberd">ejabberd</a>).  The
13351 web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
13352 services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc.  Not much of
13353 this is really working yet, see
13354 <a href="https://github.com/NickDaly/freedombox-todos/blob/master/TODO">the
13355 project TODO</a> for links to GIT repositories.  Most of the code is
13356 on github at the moment.  The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
13357 box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
13358 users.  I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
13359 know there are several branches spread around github and other places
13360 with lots of half baked features.</p>
13361
13362 <p>Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
13363 following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
13364 at.</p>
13365
13366 <p><strong>Debian Wheezy amd64</strong></p>
13367
13368 <ol>
13369
13370 <li>Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.</li>
13371 <li>Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.</li>
13372 <li><p>Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
13373 to the Debian installer:<p>
13374 <pre>url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat</a></pre></li>
13375
13376 <li>Answer the few language/region/password questions and pick disk to
13377 install on.</li>
13378
13379 <li>When the installation is finished and the machine have rebooted a
13380 few times, your Freedombox is ready for testing.</li>
13381
13382 </ol>
13383
13384 <p><strong>Raspberry Pi Raspbian</strong></p>
13385
13386 <ol>
13387
13388 <li>Fetch a Raspbian SD card image, create SD card.</li>
13389 <li>Boot from SD card, extend file system to fill the card completely.</li>
13390 <li><p>Log in and add this to /etc/sources.list:</p>
13391 <pre>
13392 deb <a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox</a> wheezy main
13393 </pre></li>
13394 <li><p>Run this as root:</p>
13395 <pre>
13396 wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc | \
13397    apt-key add -
13398 apt-get update
13399 apt-get install freedombox-setup
13400 /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
13401 </pre></li>
13402 <li>Reboot into your freshly created Freedombox.</li>
13403
13404 </ol>
13405
13406 <p>You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
13407 freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
13408 the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
13409 in my APT repository.  But do not let this stop you.  It is only a
13410 short "<tt>apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy</tt>" away. :)</p>
13411
13412 <p>Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
13413 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
13414 off the DHCP server by running "<tt>update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
13415 disable</tt>" as root.</p>
13416
13417 <p>Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
13418 problems.  We gather on the IRC channel
13419 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">#freedombox</a> on
13420 irc.debian.org and the
13421 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">project
13422 mailing list</a>.</p>
13423
13424 <p>Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
13425 <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/</tt> to see the state of the plint
13426 welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
13427 get past it), and next visit <tt>http://your-host-name:8001/help/</tt>
13428 to look at the rest of plinth.  The default user is 'admin' and the
13429 default password is 'secret'.</p>
13430
13431       </div>
13432       <div class="tags">
13433
13434
13435         Tags: <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>.
13436
13437
13438       </div>
13439     </div>
13440     <div class="padding"></div>
13441
13442     <div class="entry">
13443       <div class="title">
13444         <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>
13445       </div>
13446       <div class="date">
13447         22nd August 2013
13448       </div>
13449       <div class="body">
13450         <p>The second wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
13451 today, slightly delayed because of some bugs in the initial Windows
13452 integration fixes .  This is the release announcement:</p>
13453
13454 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b1 released 2013-08-22</strong></p>
13455
13456 <p>These are the release notes for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
13457 7.1+edu0~b1, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
13458
13459 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
13460
13461 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
13462 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
13463 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
13464 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
13465 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
13466 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
13467 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
13468 the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be
13469 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
13470 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
13471 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
13472 desktop contains
13473 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
13474 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
13475 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
13476 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
13477
13478 <p>This is the sixth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically this
13479 is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze
13480 release.</p>
13481
13482 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
13483 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
13484 release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
13485 deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
13486 gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined
13487 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/08/msg00127.html">on
13488 the mailing list</a>. (2) Accept the new version of gosa.conf and
13489 replace both contained admin password placeholders with the password
13490 hashes found in the old one (backup copy!). In both cases every user
13491 need to change their their password to make sure a password is set for
13492 CIFS access to their home directory.</p>
13493
13494 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
13495
13496 <ul>
13497
13498 <li>Added ssh askpass packages to default installation, to ensure ssh
13499     work also without a attached tty.</li>
13500 <li>Add the command-not-found package to the default installation to
13501     make it easier to figure out where to find missing command line
13502     tools. Please note, that the command 'update-command-not-found'
13503     has to be run as root to actually make it useful (internet access
13504     required).</li>
13505
13506 </ul>
13507
13508 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
13509
13510 <ul>
13511
13512 <li>Adjusted the USB stick ISO image build to include every tool
13513 needed for desktop=xfce installations.</li>
13514 <li>Adjust thin-client-server task to work when installing from USB
13515 stick ISO image.</li>
13516 <li>Made new grub artwork (changed png from indexed to RGB format).</li>
13517 <li>Minor cleanup in the CUPS setup.</li>
13518 <li>Make sure that bootstrapping of the Samba domain really happens
13519     during installation of the main server and adjust SID handling to
13520     cope with this.</li>
13521 <li>Make Samba passwords changeable (again) via GOsa².</li>
13522 <li>Fix generation of LM and NT password hashes via GOsa² to avoid
13523     empty password hashes.</li>
13524 <li>Adapted Samba machine domain joining to latest change in the
13525     smbldap-tools Perl package, fixing bugs blocking Windows machines
13526     from joining the Samba domain.</li>
13527
13528 </ul>
13529
13530 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
13531
13532 <ul>
13533
13534 <li>KDE fails to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
13535     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
13536 <li>Chromium also fails to use the proxy when using the KDE desktop
13537     (using the KDE configuration).</li>
13538
13539 </ul>
13540
13541 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
13542
13543 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
13544
13545 <ul>
13546
13547 <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>
13548
13549 <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>
13550
13551 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-CD.iso .</li>
13552
13553 </ul>
13554
13555 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 1e357f80b55e703523f2254adde6d78b
13556 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 7157f9be5fd27c7694d713c6ecfed61c3edda3b2</p>
13557
13558 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
13559
13560 <ul>
13561
13562 <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>
13563 <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>
13564 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b1-USB.iso .</li>
13565
13566 </ul>
13567
13568 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 7a8408ead59cf7e3cef25afb6e91590b
13569 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: f1817c031f02790d5edb3bfa0dcf8451088ad119</p>
13570
13571
13572 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
13573
13574 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
13575
13576       </div>
13577       <div class="tags">
13578
13579
13580         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13581
13582
13583       </div>
13584     </div>
13585     <div class="padding"></div>
13586
13587     <div class="entry">
13588       <div class="title">
13589         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/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>
13590       </div>
13591       <div class="date">
13592         18th August 2013
13593       </div>
13594       <div class="body">
13595         <p>Earlier, I reported about
13596 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_fix_a_Thinkpad_X230_with_a_broken_180_GB_SSD_disk.html">my
13597 problems using an Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB disk</a>.  Friday I was
13598 told by IBM that the original disk should be thrown away.  And as
13599 there no longer was a problem if I bricked the firmware, I decided
13600 today to try to install Intel firmware to replace the Lenovo firmware
13601 currently on the disk.</p>
13602
13603 <p>I searched the Intel site for firmware, and found
13604 <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>
13605 (aka Intel SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware Update Tool) which
13606 according to the site should contain the latest firmware for SSD
13607 disks.  I inserted the broken disk in one of my spare laptops and
13608 booted the ISO from a USB stick.  The disk was recognized, but the
13609 program claimed the newest firmware already were installed and refused
13610 to insert any Intel firmware.  So no change, and the disk is still
13611 unable to handle write load. :( I guess the only way to get them
13612 working would be if Lenovo releases new firmware.  No idea how likely
13613 that is.  Anyway, just blogging about this test for completeness.  I
13614 got a working Samsung disk, and see no point in spending more time on
13615 the broken disks.</p>
13616
13617       </div>
13618       <div class="tags">
13619
13620
13621         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13622
13623
13624       </div>
13625     </div>
13626     <div class="padding"></div>
13627
13628     <div class="entry">
13629       <div class="title">
13630         <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>
13631       </div>
13632       <div class="date">
13633          2nd August 2013
13634       </div>
13635       <div class="body">
13636         <p>It has been a while since my last update.  Since last summer, I
13637 have worked on a Norwegian
13638 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
13639 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
13640 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright
13641 law.  Yesterday, I finally broken the 90% mark, when counting the
13642 number of strings to translate.  Due to real life constraints, I have
13643 not had time to work on it since March, but when the summer broke out,
13644 I found time to work on it again.  Still lots of work left, but the
13645 first draft is nearing completion.  I created a graph to show the
13646 progress of the translation:</p>
13647
13648 <p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
13649
13650 <p>When the first draft is done, the translated text need to be
13651 proof read, and the remaining formatting problems with images and SVG
13652 drawings need to be fixed.  There are probably also some index entries
13653 missing that need to be added.  This can be done by comparing the
13654 index entries listed in the SiSU version of the book, or comparing the
13655 English docbook version with the paper version.  Last, the colophon
13656 page with ISBN numbers etc need to be wrapped up before the release is
13657 done.  I should also figure out how to get correct Norwegian sorting
13658 of the index pages.  All docbook tools I have tried so far (xmlto,
13659 docbook-xsl, dblatex) get the order of symbols and the special
13660 Norwegian letters ÆØÅ wrong.</p>
13661
13662 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
13663 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
13664 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
13665 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
13666 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
13667 around?  There are also some legal terms that are unfamiliar to me.
13668 If you want to help, please get in touch with me, and check out the
13669 project files currently available from
13670 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
13671
13672 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
13673 the updated
13674 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
13675 and
13676 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
13677 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
13678 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
13679 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
13680
13681       </div>
13682       <div class="tags">
13683
13684
13685         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>.
13686
13687
13688       </div>
13689     </div>
13690     <div class="padding"></div>
13691
13692     <div class="entry">
13693       <div class="title">
13694         <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>
13695       </div>
13696       <div class="date">
13697         27th July 2013
13698       </div>
13699       <div class="body">
13700         <p>The first wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
13701 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
13702
13703 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b0 released
13704 2013-07-27</strong></p>
13705
13706 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
13707 7.1+edu0~b0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
13708
13709 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
13710
13711 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
13712 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
13713 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
13714 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
13715 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
13716 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
13717 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
13718 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
13719 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
13720 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
13721 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
13722 desktop contains
13723 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
13724 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
13725 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
13726 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
13727
13728 <p>This is the fifth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
13729 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
13730 Squeeze release.</p>
13731
13732 <p>ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
13733 versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
13734 release.</p>
13735
13736 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
13737
13738 <ul>
13739
13740 <li>Switched roaming workstation profiles from wicd to network-manager
13741    for network configuration, as wicd didn't work any more.</li>
13742 <li>Changed version numbers of patched gosa and libpam-mklocaluser
13743    packages to make sure our locally patched versions will be replaced
13744    by the official packages when they are released from Debian. Those
13745    installing alpha version need to reinstall or manually downgrade gosa
13746    and libpam-mklocaluser.</li>
13747 <li>Added bluetooth tools to the default desktop (bluedevil, blueman).</li>
13748 <li>Added tools for sharing the desktop on KDE (krdc, krfb).</li>
13749 <li>Added valgrind to the default installation for easier debugging of
13750    crash bugs.</li>
13751
13752 </ul>
13753
13754 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
13755
13756 <ul>
13757
13758 <li>Fixed artwork package to work with gnome, no longer break
13759    desktop=gnome installations.</li>
13760 <li>Adjusted installer to now work when forced to use a proxy with the
13761    netinst CD.</li>
13762 <li>Fixed code detecting and setting/loading hardware specific
13763    setup/firmware to work more robust out of the box.</li>
13764 <li>Adjusted Kerberos setup to detect realm and server settings at
13765    install time instead of dynamically at run time. This avoid a crash
13766    with krb5-auth-dialog on diskless workstations without a DNS name.</li>
13767 <li>Worked around misfeature in network-manager not calling the dhclient
13768    exit hooks, causing automatic proxy configuration and automatic host
13769    name setting at run time to work again.</li>
13770 <li>Fixed feature setting the default Iceweasel start page from URL
13771    fetched from LDAP, to allow schools to set the global default by
13772    updating the dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no LDAP object.</li>
13773 <li>Changed default host name on all networked machines to be unique
13774    (generated from MAC or reverse DNS) after boot.</li>
13775 <li>Adjusted partition sizes to make sure they are big enough.</li>
13776
13777 </ul>
13778
13779 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
13780
13781 <ul>
13782
13783 <li>Grub is missing the new artwork.</li>
13784 <li>KDE fail to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
13785     not use the http proxy as it should.</li>
13786 <li>Chromium also fail to use the proxy.</li>
13787
13788 </ul>
13789
13790 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
13791
13792 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
13793
13794 <ul>
13795
13796 <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>
13797
13798 <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>
13799
13800 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-CD.iso .</li>
13801
13802 </ul>
13803
13804 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 55d5de9765b6dccd5d9ec33cf1a07109
13805 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 996a1d9517740e4d627d100de2d12b23dd545a3f</p>
13806
13807 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
13808
13809 <ul>
13810
13811 <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>
13812 <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>
13813 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b0-USB.iso .</li>
13814
13815 </ul>
13816
13817 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: d8f0818c51a78d357de794066f289f69
13818 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 49185ca354e8d0543240423746924f76a6cee733</p>
13819
13820
13821 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
13822
13823 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
13824
13825       </div>
13826       <div class="tags">
13827
13828
13829         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13830
13831
13832       </div>
13833     </div>
13834     <div class="padding"></div>
13835
13836     <div class="entry">
13837       <div class="title">
13838         <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>
13839       </div>
13840       <div class="date">
13841         17th July 2013
13842       </div>
13843       <div class="body">
13844         <p>Today I switched to
13845 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">my
13846 new laptop</a>.  I've previously written about the problems I had with
13847 my new Thinkpad X230, which was delivered with an
13848 <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
13849 GB Intel SSD disk with Lenovo firmware</a> that did not handle
13850 sustained writes.  My hardware supplier have been very forthcoming in
13851 trying to find a solution, and after first trying with another
13852 identical 180 GB disks they decided to send me a 256 GB Samsung SSD
13853 disk instead to fix it once and for all.  The Samsung disk survived
13854 the installation of Debian with encrypted disks (filling the disk with
13855 random data during installation killed the first two), and I thus
13856 decided to trust it with my data.  I have installed it as a Debian Edu
13857 Wheezy roaming workstation hooked up with my Debian Edu Squeeze main
13858 server at home using Kerberos and LDAP, and will use it as my work
13859 station from now on.</p>
13860
13861 <p>As this is a solid state disk with no moving parts, I believe the
13862 Debian Wheezy default installation need to be tuned a bit to increase
13863 performance and increase life time of the disk.  The Linux kernel and
13864 user space applications do not yet adjust automatically to such
13865 environment.  To make it easier for my self, I created a draft Debian
13866 package <tt>ssd-setup</tt> to handle this tuning.  The
13867 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/ssd-setup.git">source
13868 for the ssd-setup package</a> is available from collab-maint, and it
13869 is set up to adjust the setup of the machine by just installing the
13870 package.  If there is any non-SSD disk in the machine, the package
13871 will refuse to install, as I did not try to write any logic to sort
13872 file systems in SSD and non-SSD file systems.</p>
13873
13874 <p>I consider the package a draft, as I am a bit unsure how to best
13875 set up Debian Wheezy with an SSD.  It is adjusted to my use case,
13876 where I set up the machine with one large encrypted partition (in
13877 addition to /boot), put LVM on top of this and set up partitions on
13878 top of this again.  See the README file in the package source for the
13879 references I used to pick the settings.  At the moment these
13880 parameters are tuned:</p>
13881
13882 <ul>
13883
13884 <li>Set up cryptsetup to pass TRIM commands to the physical disk
13885     (adding discard to /etc/crypttab)</li>
13886
13887 <li>Set up LVM to pass on TRIM commands to the underlying device (in
13888     this case a cryptsetup partition) by changing issue_discards from
13889     0 to 1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.</li>
13890
13891 <li>Set relatime as a file system option for ext3 and ext4 file
13892     systems.</li>
13893
13894 <li>Tell swap to use TRIM commands by adding 'discard' to
13895     /etc/fstab.</li>
13896
13897 <li>Change I/O scheduler from cfq to deadline using a udev rule.</li>
13898
13899 <li>Run fstrim on every ext3 and ext4 file system every night (from
13900     cron.daily).</li>
13901
13902 <li>Adjust sysctl values vm.swappiness to 1 and vm.vfs_cache_pressure
13903     to 50 to reduce the kernel eagerness to swap out processes.</li>
13904
13905 </ul>
13906
13907 <p>During installation, I cancelled the part where the installer fill
13908 the disk with random data, as this would kill the SSD performance for
13909 little gain.  My goal with the encrypted file system is to ensure
13910 those stealing my laptop end up with a brick and not a working
13911 computer.  I have no hope in keeping the really resourceful people
13912 from getting the data on the disk (see
13913 <a href="http://xkcd.com/538/">XKCD #538</a> for an explanation why).
13914 Thus I concluded that adding the discard option to crypttab is the
13915 right thing to do.</p>
13916
13917 <p>I considered using the noop I/O scheduler, as several recommended
13918 it for SSD, but others recommended deadline and a benchmark I found
13919 indicated that deadline might be better for interactive use.</p>
13920
13921 <p>I also considered using the 'discard' file system option for ext3
13922 and ext4, but read that it would give a performance hit ever time a
13923 file is removed, and thought it best to that that slowdown once a day
13924 instead of during my work.</p>
13925
13926 <p>My package do not set up tmpfs on /var/run, /var/lock and /tmp, as
13927 this is already done by Debian Edu.</p>
13928
13929 <p>I have not yet started on the user space tuning.  I expect
13930 iceweasel need some tuning, and perhaps other applications too, but
13931 have not yet had time to investigate those parts.</p>
13932
13933 <p>The package should work on Ubuntu too, but I have not yet tested it
13934 there.</p>
13935
13936 <p>As for the answer to the question in the title of this blog post,
13937 as far as I know, the only solution I know about is to replace the
13938 disk.  It might be possible to flash it with Intel firmware instead of
13939 the Lenovo firmware.  But I have not tried and did not want to do so
13940 without approval from Lenovo as I wanted to keep the warranty on the
13941 disk until a solution was found and they wanted the broken disks
13942 back.</p>
13943
13944       </div>
13945       <div class="tags">
13946
13947
13948         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
13949
13950
13951       </div>
13952     </div>
13953     <div class="padding"></div>
13954
13955     <div class="entry">
13956       <div class="title">
13957         <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>
13958       </div>
13959       <div class="date">
13960         10th July 2013
13961       </div>
13962       <div class="body">
13963         <p>A few days ago, I wrote about
13964 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Thinkpad_is_dead__long_live_the_Thinkpad_X230_.html">the
13965 problems I experienced with my new X230 and its SSD disk</a>, which
13966 was dying during installation because it is unable to cope with
13967 sustained write.  My supplier is in contact with
13968 <a href="http://www.lenovo.com/">Lenovo</a>, and they wanted to send a
13969 replacement disk to try to fix the problem.  They decided to send an
13970 identical model, so my hopes for a permanent fix was slim.</p>
13971
13972 <p>Anyway, today I got the replacement disk and tried to install
13973 Debian Edu Wheezy with encrypted disk on it.  The new disk have the
13974 same firmware version as the original.  This time my hope raised
13975 slightly as the installation progressed, as the original disk used to
13976 die after 4-7% of the disk was written to, while this time it kept
13977 going past 10%, 20%, 40% and even past 50%.  But around 60%, the disk
13978 died again and I was back on square one.  I still do not have a new
13979 laptop with a disk I can trust.  I can not live with a disk that might
13980 lock up when I download a new
13981 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ISO or
13982 other large files.  I look forward to hearing from my supplier with
13983 the next proposal from Lenovo.</p>
13984
13985 <p>The original disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
13986 11S0C38722Z1ZNME35X1TR, ISN: CVCV321407HB180EGN, SA: G57560302, FW:
13987 LF1i, 29MAY2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
13988 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40002756C4, Model:
13989 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
13990 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
13991
13992 <p>The replacement disk is marked Intel SSD 520 Series 180 GB,
13993 11S0C38722Z1ZNDE34N0L0, ISN: CVCV315306RK180EGN, SA: G57560-302, FW:
13994 LF1i, 22APR2013, PBA: G39779-300, LBA 351,651,888, LI P/N: 0C38722,
13995 Pb-free 2LI, LC P/N: 16-200366, WWN: 55CD2E40000AB69E, Model:
13996 SSDSC2BW180A3L 2.5" 6Gb/s SATA SSD 180G 5V 1A, ASM P/N 0C38732, FRU
13997 P/N 45N8295, P0C38732.</p>
13998
13999 <p>The only difference is in the first number (serial number?), ISN,
14000 SA, date and WNPP values.  Mentioning all the details here in case
14001 someone is able to use the information to find a way to identify the
14002 failing disk among working ones (if any such working disk actually
14003 exist).</p>
14004
14005       </div>
14006       <div class="tags">
14007
14008
14009         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14010
14011
14012       </div>
14013     </div>
14014     <div class="padding"></div>
14015
14016     <div class="entry">
14017       <div class="title">
14018         <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>
14019       </div>
14020       <div class="date">
14021          9th July 2013
14022       </div>
14023       <div class="body">
14024         <p>The upcoming Saturday, 2013-07-13, we are organising a combined
14025 Debian Edu developer gathering and Debian and Ubuntu bug squashing
14026 party in Oslo.  It is organised by <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
14027 member assosiation NUUG</a> and
14028 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
14029 project</a> together with <a href="http://bitraf.no/">the hack space
14030 Bitraf</a>.</p>
14031
14032 <p>It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening.  Everyone is
14033 welcome, and there is no fee to participate.  There is on the other
14034 hand limited space, and only room for 30 people.  Please put your name
14035 on <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2013/07/13/no/Oslo">the event
14036 wiki page</a> if you plan to join us.</p>
14037
14038       </div>
14039       <div class="tags">
14040
14041
14042         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>.
14043
14044
14045       </div>
14046     </div>
14047     <div class="padding"></div>
14048
14049     <div class="entry">
14050       <div class="title">
14051         <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>
14052       </div>
14053       <div class="date">
14054          5th July 2013
14055       </div>
14056       <div class="body">
14057         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
14058 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">replacement
14059 for my trusty old Thinkpad X41</a>.  Unfortunately I did not have much
14060 time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
14061 will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived.  I
14062 ended up picking a
14063 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad X230</a>
14064 with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
14065 a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly.  But my
14066 second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful.  More
14067 on that below.</p>
14068
14069 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
14070 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
14071 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
14072 feature at <a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
14073 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
14074 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
14075 to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
14076 disks from my search parameters.  I also asked around among friends to
14077 get their impression on keyboards and robustness.</p>
14078
14079 <p>So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
14080 X41.  I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
14081 significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
14082 hand a lot more to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly
14083 good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
14084 I will get used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
14085 needed a new laptop now. :)</p>
14086
14087 <p>Turning off the touch pad was simple.  All it took was a quick
14088 visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.</p>
14089
14090 <p>But there is a fatal problem with the laptop.  The 180 GB SSD disk
14091 lock up during load.  And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
14092 with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
14093 I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
14094 reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
14095 default in Ubuntu).  And the bug with is already known.  It was
14096 reported to Debian as <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/691427">BTS
14097 report #691427 2012-10-25</a> (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
14098 Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD).  It is also reported to the Linux
14099 kernel developers as
14100 <a href="https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51861">Kernel bugzilla
14101 report #51861 2012-12-20</a> (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
14102 (SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
14103 Lenovo forums, both for
14104 <a href="http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T430s-Intel-SSD-520-180GB-issue/m-p/1070549">T430
14105 2012-11-10</a> and for
14106 <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
14107 03-20-2013</a>.  The problem do not only affect installation.  The
14108 reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
14109 on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
14110 problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
14111 There is even a
14112 <a href="https://git.efficios.com/?p=test-ssd.git">small C program
14113 available</a> that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
14114 minutes by writing to a file.</p>
14115
14116 <p>I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
14117 contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
14118 requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
14119 firmware.  Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
14120 Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i).  I
14121 hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
14122 fixed. :)</p>
14123
14124       </div>
14125       <div class="tags">
14126
14127
14128         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14129
14130
14131       </div>
14132     </div>
14133     <div class="padding"></div>
14134
14135     <div class="entry">
14136       <div class="title">
14137         <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>
14138       </div>
14139       <div class="date">
14140          4th July 2013
14141       </div>
14142       <div class="body">
14143         <p>Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a replacement for my
14144 trusty old Thinkpad X41.  Unfortunately I did not have much time to
14145 spend on it, but today the replacement finally arrived.  I ended up
14146 picking a <a href="http://www.linlap.com/lenovo_thinkpad_x230">Thinkpad
14147 X230</a> with SSD disk (NZDAJMN).  I first test installed Debian Edu
14148 Wheezy as a roaming workstation, and it worked flawlessly.  As I write
14149 this, it is installing what I hope will be a more final installation,
14150 with a encrypted hard drive to ensure any dope head stealing it end up
14151 with an expencive door stop.</p>
14152
14153 <p>I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
14154 important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
14155 listed in the feature list.  But I did get good help from the search
14156 feature at <ahref="http://www.prisjakt.no/">Prisjakt</a>, which
14157 allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
14158 requirements.  A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks, so I had
14159 to drop number of disks from my search parameters.</p>
14160
14161 <p>I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is significantly
14162 wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my hand a lot more
14163 to reach the edges.  But the key response is fairly good and the
14164 individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope I will get
14165 used to it.  My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really needed a
14166 new laptop now. :)</p>
14167
14168 <p>I look forward to figuring out how to turn off the touch pad.</p>
14169
14170       </div>
14171       <div class="tags">
14172
14173
14174         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14175
14176
14177       </div>
14178     </div>
14179     <div class="padding"></div>
14180
14181     <div class="entry">
14182       <div class="title">
14183         <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>
14184       </div>
14185       <div class="date">
14186          3rd July 2013
14187       </div>
14188       <div class="body">
14189         <p>The fourth wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
14190 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
14191
14192 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~alpha3 released
14193 2013-07-03</strong></p>
14194
14195 <p>These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
14196 7.1+edu0~alpha3, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
14197
14198 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
14199
14200 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
14201 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
14202 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
14203 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
14204 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
14205 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
14206 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
14207 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
14208 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
14209 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
14210 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
14211 desktop contains
14212 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
14213 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
14214 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
14215 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
14216
14217 <p>This is the fourth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
14218 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
14219 Squeeze release.</p>
14220
14221 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
14222 <ul>
14223   <li>Dropped ispell dictionaries from our default installation.</li>
14224   <li>Dropped menu-xdg from the KDE desktop option, to drop the Debian
14225     submenu.  It was not included with Gnome, LXDE or Xfce, so this
14226     brings KDE in line with the others.</li>
14227   <li>Dropped xdrawchem, xjig and xsok from our default installation as
14228     they don't have a desktop menu entry and thus won't show up in the
14229     menu now that menu-xdg was removed.</li>
14230   <li>Removed the killer system to kill left behind processes on
14231     multi-user machines, as it was no longer able to understand when a
14232     X display was in use and killed the processes of the active users
14233     too.</li>
14234   <li>Dropped the golearn (from goplay) package as the debtags in wheezy
14235     are too few to make the package useful.</li>
14236 </ul>
14237 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
14238 <ul>
14239   <li>Updated artwork matching http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Joy
14240   <li>Multi-arch i386/amd64 USB stick ISO available.</li>
14241   <li>Got rid of ispell/wordlist related debconf questions that showed
14242     up for some language options.</li>
14243   <li>Switched to using http.debian.net as APT source by default.</li>
14244   <li>Fixed proxy configuration on Main Server installations.</li>
14245   <li>Changed LTSP setup to ask dpkg to use force-unsafe-io the same way
14246     d-i is doing it.</li>
14247   <li>Made sure root and user passwords were not left behind in the
14248     debconf database after installation on Main Server installations.</li>
14249   <li>Made Roaming Workstation dynamic setup more robust and added draft
14250     script setup-ad-client to hook a Roaming Workstation up to a
14251     Active Directory server instead of a Debian Edu Main Server.</li>
14252   <li>Update system to install needed firmware packages during
14253     installation, to work properly in Wheezy.</li>
14254   <li>Update system to handle hardware quirks (debian-edu-hwsetup).</li>
14255   <li>Corrected PXE installation setup to properly pass selected desktop
14256     and keymap settings to PXE installation clients.</li>
14257   <li>LTSP diskless workstations use sshfs by default, allowing them to
14258     work without adding them to DNS and NIS netgroups for NFS access.</li>
14259 </ul>
14260 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
14261 <ul>
14262   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
14263     available yet (698840).</li>
14264   <li>Artwork not enabled for all desktops.</li>
14265 </ul>
14266 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
14267
14268 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
14269 <ul>
14270   <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>
14271   <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>
14272   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-CD.iso .</li>
14273 </ul>
14274
14275 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 2b161a99d2a848c376d8d04e3854e30c
14276 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 498922e9c508c0a7ee9dbe1dfe5bf830d779c3c8</p>
14277
14278 <p>To download the multiarch USB stick ISO release you can use</p>
14279 <ul>
14280   <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>
14281   <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>
14282   <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.1+edu0~a3-USB.iso .</li>
14283 </ul>
14284
14285 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 25e808e403a4c15dbef1d13c37d572ac
14286 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 15ecfc93eb6b4f453b7eb0bc04b6a279262d9721</p>
14287
14288 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
14289
14290 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
14291
14292       </div>
14293       <div class="tags">
14294
14295
14296         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14297
14298
14299       </div>
14300     </div>
14301     <div class="padding"></div>
14302
14303     <div class="entry">
14304       <div class="title">
14305         <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>
14306       </div>
14307       <div class="date">
14308         25th June 2013
14309       </div>
14310       <div class="body">
14311         <p>It annoys me when the computer fail to do automatically what it is
14312 perfectly capable of, and I have to do it manually to get things
14313 working.  One such task is to find out what firmware packages are
14314 needed to get the hardware on my computer working.  Most often this
14315 affect the wifi card, but some times it even affect the RAID
14316 controller or the ethernet card.  Today I pushed version 0.4 of the
14317 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram package</a>
14318 including a new script isenkram-autoinstall-firmware handling the
14319 process of asking all the loaded kernel modules what firmware files
14320 they want, find debian packages providing these files and install the
14321 debian packages.  Here is a test run on my laptop:</p>
14322
14323 <p><pre>
14324 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
14325 info: kernel drivers requested extra firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw ipw2200-ibss.fw ipw2200-sniffer.fw
14326 info: fetching http://http.debian.net/debian/dists/squeeze/Contents-i386.gz
14327 info: locating packages with the requested firmware files
14328 info: Updating APT sources after adding non-free APT source
14329 info: trying to install firmware-ipw2x00
14330 firmware-ipw2x00
14331 firmware-ipw2x00
14332 Preconfiguring packages ...
14333 Selecting previously deselected package firmware-ipw2x00.
14334 (Reading database ... 259727 files and directories currently installed.)
14335 Unpacking firmware-ipw2x00 (from .../firmware-ipw2x00_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb) ...
14336 Setting up firmware-ipw2x00 (0.28+squeeze1) ...
14337 #
14338 </pre></p>
14339
14340 <p>When all the requested firmware is present, a simple message is
14341 printed instead:</p>
14342
14343 <p><pre>
14344 # isenkram-autoinstall-firmware
14345 info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
14346 #
14347 </pre></p>
14348
14349 <p>It could use some polish, but it is already working well and saving
14350 me some time when setting up new machines. :)</p>
14351
14352 <p>So, how does it work?  It look at the set of currently loaded
14353 kernel modules, and look up each one of them using modinfo, to find
14354 the firmware files listed in the module meta-information.  Next, it
14355 download the Contents file from a nearby APT mirror, and search for
14356 the firmware files in this file to locate the package with the
14357 requested firmware file.  If the package is in the non-free section, a
14358 non-free APT source is added and the package is installed using
14359 <tt>apt-get install</tt>.  The end result is a slightly better working
14360 machine.</p>
14361
14362 <p>I hope someone find time to implement a more polished version of
14363 this script as part of the hw-detect debian-installer module, to
14364 finally fix <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">BTS report
14365 #655507</a>.  There really is no need to insert USB sticks with
14366 firmware during a PXE install when the packages already are available
14367 from the nearby Debian mirror.</p>
14368
14369       </div>
14370       <div class="tags">
14371
14372
14373         Tags: <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>.
14374
14375
14376       </div>
14377     </div>
14378     <div class="padding"></div>
14379
14380     <div class="entry">
14381       <div class="title">
14382         <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>
14383       </div>
14384       <div class="date">
14385         22nd June 2013
14386       </div>
14387       <div class="body">
14388         <p>In the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
14389 Skolelinux</a> project, we include a post-installation test suite,
14390 which check that services are running, working, and return the
14391 expected results.  It runs automatically just after the first boot on
14392 test installations (using test ISOs), but not on production
14393 installations (using non-test ISOs).  It test that the LDAP service is
14394 operating, Kerberos is responding, DNS is replying, file systems are
14395 online resizable, etc, etc.  And it check that the PXE service is
14396 configured, which is the topic of this post.</p>
14397
14398 <p>The last week I've fixed the DVD and USB stick ISOs for our Debian
14399 Edu Wheezy release.  These ISOs are supposed to be able to install a
14400 complete system without any Internet connection, but for that to
14401 happen all the needed packages need to be on them.  Thanks to our test
14402 suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
14403 cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
14404 When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
14405 using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
14406 working packages to get it working.  And the packages changed name
14407 from debian-installer-6.0-netboot-$arch to
14408 debian-installer-7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
14409 packages during installation.  Without our test suite, I suspect we
14410 would never have discovered this before release.  Now it is fixed
14411 right after we got the ISOs operational.</p>
14412
14413 <p>Another by-product of the test suite is that we can ask system
14414 administrators with problems getting Debian Edu to work, to run the
14415 test suite using <tt>/usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install</tt> and see if
14416 any errors are detected.  This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
14417 the problem.</p>
14418
14419 <p>If you want to help us help kids learn how to share and create,
14420 please join us on
14421 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
14422 irc.debian.org</a> and the
14423 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@</a> mailing
14424 list.</p>
14425
14426       </div>
14427       <div class="tags">
14428
14429
14430         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14431
14432
14433       </div>
14434     </div>
14435     <div class="padding"></div>
14436
14437     <div class="entry">
14438       <div class="title">
14439         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Victor_Ni_u.html">Debian Edu interview: Victor Nițu</a>
14440       </div>
14441       <div class="date">
14442         17th June 2013
14443       </div>
14444       <div class="body">
14445         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
14446 Skolelinux</a> distribution have users and contributors all around the
14447 globe.  And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
14448 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">our IRC channel
14449 #debian-edu</a> and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
14450 worked.  We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
14451 help us with translations.  And today I managed to get an interview
14452 with him, to learn more about him.</p>
14453
14454 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
14455
14456 <p>I'm a 25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
14457 which is also my country of origin. Back in 2009, at a New Year's Eve
14458 party, I had a very nice <strike>beer</strike> discussion with a
14459 friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
14460 country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
14461 community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
14462 began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
14463 constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
14464 field.</p>
14465
14466 <p>A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
14467 provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
14468 activities. For the last 13 months, I have been the Technical Director
14469 of <a href="http://ceata.org/">Fundația Ceata</a>, which is a free
14470 software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
14471 the only one we have in our country.</p>
14472
14473 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
14474 project?</strong></p>
14475
14476 <p>The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
14477 even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
14478 it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
14479 educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
14480 love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
14481 technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
14482 ways to contribute.</p>
14483
14484 <p>My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
14485 configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
14486 haven't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
14487 areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
14488 software in my country is pretty low, I'll be happy to be the first
14489 one around here advocating for the project's adoption in educational
14490 environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
14491 for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
14492 from now on, time will tell what I'll be doing next, but I think I
14493 have a pretty consistent starting point.</p>
14494
14495 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
14496 Edu?</strong></p>
14497
14498 <p>Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
14499 maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
14500 took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
14501 Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
14502 time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
14503 with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
14504 out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
14505 it comes to managing a school's network, for example.</p>
14506
14507 <p>Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
14508 availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
14509 scenarios is something I can't wait to experiment "into the wild" (I
14510 only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
14511 lot more I haven't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
14512 project.</p>
14513
14514 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
14515 Edu?</strong></p>
14516
14517 <p>As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
14518 disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
14519 project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
14520 a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story.  I'd like to see
14521 Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
14522 ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
14523 lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
14524 opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project's dynamics. Not
14525 to mention it's a very fun blend to work on!</p>
14526
14527 <p>Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
14528 with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
14529 to all blends and derivatives, but it's an issue we can all work
14530 on.</p>
14531
14532 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
14533
14534 <p>I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
14535 daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
14536 am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
14537 Enlightenment project a lot!),
14538 <a href="http://www.claws-mail.org/‎">Claws Mail</a> due to its ease of
14539 use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
14540 <a href="https://launchpad.net/redshift">Redshift</a>, which helps me
14541 get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
14542 stuff in this bag, but I'll need a blog on my own for doing this!</p>
14543
14544 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
14545 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
14546
14547 <p>Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
14548 now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
14549 that:</p>
14550
14551 <ul>
14552
14553 <li>schools would like to get rid of proprietary software</li>
14554
14555 <li>students will love the openness of the system, and will want to
14556     experiment with it - maybe we need to harvest the native curiosity
14557     of teenagers more?</li>
14558
14559 <li>there is no "right one" when it comes to strategies, but it would
14560     be useful to have some success stories published somewhere, so
14561     other can get some inspiration from them (I know I'd promote
14562     them!)</li>
14563
14564 <li>more active promotion - talks, conferences, even small school
14565     lectures can do magical things if they encounter at least one
14566     person interested. Who knows who that person might be? ;-)</li>
14567
14568 </ul>
14569
14570 <p>I also see some problems in getting Skolelinux into schools; for
14571 example, in our country we have a great deal of corruption issues, so
14572 it might be hard(er) to fight against proprietary solutions. Also,
14573 people who relied on commercial software for all their lives, would be
14574 very hard to convert against their will.</p>
14575
14576       </div>
14577       <div class="tags">
14578
14579
14580         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
14581
14582
14583       </div>
14584     </div>
14585     <div class="padding"></div>
14586
14587     <div class="entry">
14588       <div class="title">
14589         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Jonathan_Carter.html">Debian Edu interview: Jonathan Carter</a>
14590       </div>
14591       <div class="date">
14592         12th June 2013
14593       </div>
14594       <div class="body">
14595         <p>There is a certain cross-over between the
14596 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
14597 project</a> and <a href="http://www.edubuntu.org/">the Edubuntu
14598 project</a>, and for example the LTSP packages in Debian are a joint
14599 effort between the projects.  One person with a foot in both camps is
14600 Jonathan Carter, which I am now happy to present to you.</p>
14601
14602 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
14603
14604 <p>I'm a South-African free software geek who lives in Cape Town. My
14605 days vary quite a bit since I'm involved in too many things. As I'm
14606 getting older I'm learning how to focus a bit more :)</p>
14607
14608 <p>I'm also an Edubuntu contributor and I love when there are
14609 opportunities for the Edubuntu and Debian Edu projects to benefit from
14610 each other.</p>
14611
14612 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
14613 project?</strong></p>
14614
14615 <p>I've been somewhat familiar with the project before, but I think my
14616 first direct exposure to the project was when I met Petter
14617 [Reinholdtsen] and Knut [Yrvin] at the Edubuntu summit in 2005 in
14618 London. They provided great feedback that helped the bootstrapping of
14619 Edubuntu. Back then Edubuntu (and even Ubuntu) was still very new and
14620 it was great getting input from people who have been around longer. I
14621 was also still very excitable and said yes to everything and to this
14622 day I have a big todo list backlog that I'm catching up with. I think
14623 over the years the relationship between Edubuntu and Debian-Edu has
14624 been gradually improving, although I think there's a lot that we could
14625 still improve on in terms of working together on packages. I'm sure
14626 we'll get there one day.</p>
14627
14628 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
14629 Edu?</strong></p>
14630
14631 <p>Debian itself already has so many advantages. I could go on about
14632 it for pages, but in essence I love that it's a very honest project
14633 that puts its users first with no hidden agendas and also produces
14634 very high quality work.</p>
14635
14636 <p>I think the advantage of Debian Edu is that it makes many common
14637 set-up tasks simpler so that administrators can get up and running
14638 with a lot less effort and frustration. At the same time I think it
14639 helps to standardise installations in schools so that it's easier for
14640 community members and commercial suppliers to support.</p>
14641
14642 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
14643 Edu?</strong></p>
14644
14645 <p>I had to re-type this one a few times because I'm trying to
14646 separate "disadvantages" from "areas that need improvement" (which is
14647 what I originally rambled on about)</p>
14648
14649 <p>The biggest disadvantage I can think of is lack of manpower. The
14650 project could do so much more if there were more good contributors. I
14651 think some of the problems are external too. Free software and free
14652 content in education is a no-brainer but it takes some time to catch
14653 on. When you've been working with the same proprietary eco-system for
14654 years and have gotten used to it, it can be hard to adjust to some
14655 concepts in the free software world. It would be nice if there were
14656 more Debian Edu consultants across the world. I'd love to be one
14657 myself but I'm already so over-committed that it's just not possible
14658 currently.</p>
14659
14660 <p>I think the best short-term solution to that large-scale problem is
14661 for schools to be pro-active and share their experiences and grow
14662 their skills in-house. I'm often saddened to see how much money
14663 educational institutions spend on 3rd party solutions that they don't
14664 have access to after the service has ended and they could've gotten so
14665 much more value otherwise by being more self-sustainable and
14666 autonomous.</p>
14667
14668 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
14669
14670 <p>My main laptop dual-boots between Debian and Windows 7. I was
14671 Windows free for years but started dual-booting again last year for
14672 some games which help me focus and relax (Starcraft II in
14673 particular). Gaming support on Linux is improving in leaps and bounds
14674 so I suppose I'll soon be able to regain that disk space :)</p>
14675
14676 <p>Besides that I rely on Icedove, Chromium, Terminator, Byobu, irssi,
14677 git, Tomboy, KVM, VLC and LibreOffice. Recently I've been torn on
14678 which desktop environment I like and I'm taking some refuge in Xfce
14679 while I figure that out. I like tools that keep things simple. I enjoy
14680 Python and shell scripting. I went to an Arduino workshop recently and
14681 it was awesome seeing how easy and simple the IDE software was to get
14682 up and running in Debian compared to the users running Windows and OS
14683 X.</p>
14684
14685 <p>I also use mc which some people frown upon slightly. I got used to
14686 using Norton Commander in the early 90's and it stuck (I think the
14687 people who sneer at it is just jealous that they don't know how to use
14688 it :p)
14689
14690 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
14691 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
14692
14693 <p>I think trying to force it is unproductive. I also think that in
14694 many cases it's appropriate for schools to use non-free systems and I
14695 don't think that there's any particular moral or ethical problem with
14696 that.</p>
14697
14698 <p>I do think though that free software can already solve so so many
14699 problems in educational institutions and it's just a shame not taking
14700 advantage of that.</p>
14701
14702 <p>I also think that some curricula need serious review. For example,
14703 some areas of the world rely heavily on very specific versions of MS
14704 Office, teaching students to parrot menu items instead of learning the
14705 general concepts. I think that's very unproductive because firstly, MS
14706 Office's interface changes drastically every few years and on top of
14707 that it also locks in a generation to a product that might not be the
14708 best solution for them.</p>
14709
14710 <p>To answer your question, I believe that the right strategy is to
14711 educate and inform, giving someone the information they require to
14712 make a decision that would work for them.</p>
14713
14714       </div>
14715       <div class="tags">
14716
14717
14718         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
14719
14720
14721       </div>
14722     </div>
14723     <div class="padding"></div>
14724
14725     <div class="entry">
14726       <div class="title">
14727         <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>
14728       </div>
14729       <div class="date">
14730         11th June 2013
14731       </div>
14732       <div class="body">
14733         <p>When installing RedHat, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu on some machines,
14734 the screen just turn black when Linux boot, either during installation
14735 or on first boot from the hard disk.  I've seen it once in a while the
14736 last few years, but only recently understood the cause.  I've seen it
14737 on HP laptops, and on my latest acquaintance the Packard Bell laptop.
14738 The reason seem to be in the wiring of some laptops.  The system to
14739 control the screen background light is inverted, so when Linux try to
14740 turn the brightness fully on, it end up turning it off instead.  I do
14741 not know which Linux drivers are affected, but this post is about the
14742 i915 driver used by the
14743 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
14744 EasyNote LV</a>, Thinkpad X40 and many other laptops.</p>
14745
14746 <p>The problem can be worked around two ways.  Either by adding
14747 i915.invert_brightness=1 as a kernel option, or by adding a file in
14748 /etc/modprobe.d/ to tell modprobe to add the invert_brightness=1
14749 option when it load the i915 kernel module.  On Debian and Ubuntu, it
14750 can be done by running these commands as root:</p>
14751
14752 <pre>
14753 echo options i915 invert_brightness=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
14754 update-initramfs -u -k all
14755 </pre>
14756
14757 <p>Since March 2012 there is
14758 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=4dca20efb1a9c2efefc28ad2867e5d6c3f5e1955">a
14759 mechanism in the Linux kernel</a> to tell the i915 driver which
14760 hardware have this problem, and get the driver to invert the
14761 brightness setting automatically.  To use it, one need to add a row in
14762 <a href="http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c">the
14763 intel_quirks array</a> in the driver source
14764 <tt>drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c</tt> (look for "<tt>static
14765 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks</tt>"), specifying the PCI device
14766 number (vendor number 8086 is assumed) and subdevice vendor and device
14767 number.</p>
14768
14769 <p>My Packard Bell EasyNote LV got this output from <tt>lspci
14770 -vvnn</tt> for the video card in question:</p>
14771
14772 <p><pre>
14773 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation \
14774     3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0156] \
14775     (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
14776  Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0688]
14777  Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- \
14778     ParErr- Stepping- SE RR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
14779  Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- \
14780     <TAbort- <MAbort->SERR- <PERR- INTx-
14781  Latency: 0
14782  Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 42
14783  Region 0: Memory at c2000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
14784  Region 2: Memory at b0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
14785  Region 4: I/O ports at 4000 [size=64]
14786  Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled]
14787  Capabilities: <access denied>
14788  Kernel driver in use: i915
14789 </pre></p>
14790
14791 <p>The resulting intel_quirks entry would then look like this:</p>
14792
14793 <p><pre>
14794 struct intel_quirk intel_quirks[] = {
14795        ...
14796         /* Packard Bell EasyNote LV11HC needs invert brightness quirk */
14797         { 0x0156, 0x1025, 0x0688, quirk_invert_brightness },
14798        ...
14799 }
14800 </pre></p>
14801
14802 <p>According to the kernel module instructions (as seen using
14803 <tt>modinfo i915</tt>), information about hardware needing the
14804 invert_brightness flag should be sent to the
14805 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel">dri-devel
14806 (at) lists.freedesktop.org</a> mailing list to reach the kernel
14807 developers.  But my email about the laptop sent 2013-06-03 have not
14808 yet shown up in
14809 <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2013-June/thread.html">the
14810 web archive for the mailing list</a>, so I suspect they do not accept
14811 emails from non-subscribers.  Because of this, I sent my patch also to
14812 the Debian bug tracking system instead as
14813 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/710938">BTS report #710938</a>, to make
14814 sure the patch is not lost.</p>
14815
14816 <p>Unfortunately, it is not enough to fix the kernel to get Laptops
14817 with this problem working properly with Linux.  If you use Gnome, your
14818 worries should be over at this point.  But if you use KDE, there is
14819 something in KDE ignoring the invert_brightness setting and turning on
14820 the screen during login.  I've reported it to Debian as
14821 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/711237">BTS report #711237</a>, and
14822 have no idea yet how to figure out exactly what subsystem is doing
14823 this.  Perhaps you can help?  Perhaps you know what the Gnome
14824 developers did to handle this, and this can give a clue to the KDE
14825 developers?  Or you know where in KDE the screen brightness is changed
14826 during login?  If so, please update the BTS report (or get in touch if
14827 you do not know how to update BTS).</p>
14828
14829 <p>Update 2013-07-19: The correct fix for this machine seem to be
14830 acpi_backlight=vendor, to disable ACPI backlight support completely,
14831 as the ACPI information on the machine is trash and it is better to
14832 leave it to the intel video driver to control the screen
14833 backlight.</p>
14834
14835       </div>
14836       <div class="tags">
14837
14838
14839         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14840
14841
14842       </div>
14843     </div>
14844     <div class="padding"></div>
14845
14846     <div class="entry">
14847       <div class="title">
14848         <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>
14849       </div>
14850       <div class="date">
14851         10th June 2013
14852       </div>
14853       <div class="body">
14854         <p>The third wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
14855 today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
14856
14857 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha2 released
14858 2013-06-10</strong></p>
14859
14860 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
14861 alpha2, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
14862
14863 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
14864
14865 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
14866 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
14867 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
14868 network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
14869 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
14870 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
14871 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
14872 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
14873 installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
14874 database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
14875 directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
14876 desktop contains
14877 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">more
14878 than 60 educational software packages</a> and more are available from
14879 the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
14880 and Xfce desktop environment.</p>
14881
14882 <p>This is the third test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
14883 this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
14884 Squeeze release.</p>
14885
14886 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
14887
14888 <ul>
14889
14890 <li>Iceweasel was updated from 10 to 17. (DSA 2699-1)
14891 <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).
14892 <li>Switched xrdp on thin client servers to use tightvncserver instead of xvnc4.
14893 <li>Now install software oscilloscope xoscope by default.
14894 <li>Now install music tools gtick, lingot and pianobooster by default.
14895
14896 </ul>
14897
14898 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
14899
14900 <ul>
14901
14902 <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.
14903 <li>Updated translation of the installation.
14904 <li>New Romanian translation.
14905 <li>Fix security problem causing root and first user password to no longer show up in /var/cache/debconf/templates.dat.
14906 <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).
14907 <li>Made roaming workstation setup more robust in non-Debian Edu environments.
14908 <li>New script debian-edu-bless to transform a Debian installation to a Debian Edu profile.
14909 <li>Adjust Iceweasel setup to improve performance when $HOME is on NFS.
14910 <li>More testsuite tests.
14911 <li>Make automatic proxy configuration more robust.
14912 <li>Adjust GOsa² GUI configuration.
14913
14914 <li>Update thin client and diskless workstation setup to work with
14915 LTSP in Wheezy.</li>
14916
14917 <li>Diskless workstations now run out of the box -- no need to set
14918 them up with GOsa².</li>
14919
14920 <li>Update IMAP server setup. </li>
14921
14922 <li>Fix login into Skolelinux Backup Tool (Closed in
14923 slbackup-php/0.4.4-1: #700257: slbackup-php: Fails to submit correctly
14924 entered password). </li>
14925
14926 </ul>
14927
14928 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
14929
14930 <ul>
14931
14932 <li>DVD binary and source images are not yet ready.</li>
14933
14934 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
14935 available yet (Open in gosa/2.7.4-4: #698840: gosa-plugin-ldapmanager:
14936 missing import feature).</li>
14937
14938 <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others). </li>
14939
14940 <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons (Closed: #502192: menu-xdg: invents
14941 own icon names instead of using existing). This will remain
14942 unfixed.</li>
14943
14944 </ul>
14945
14946 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
14947
14948 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
14949
14950 <ul>
14951
14952 <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>
14953
14954 <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>
14955
14956 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/debian-edu-7.0+edu0~a2-CD.iso .</li>
14957
14958 </ul>
14959
14960 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 27bbcace407743382f3c42c08dbe8178
14961 <br>The SHA1SUM of this image is: e35f7d7908566cd3075375b3721fa10ee420d419</p>
14962
14963 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
14964
14965 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a>
14966
14967       </div>
14968       <div class="tags">
14969
14970
14971         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
14972
14973
14974       </div>
14975     </div>
14976     <div class="padding"></div>
14977
14978     <div class="entry">
14979       <div class="title">
14980         <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>
14981       </div>
14982       <div class="date">
14983          5th June 2013
14984       </div>
14985       <div class="body">
14986         <p>Here is a call for help from the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project.
14987 We have two problems blocking the release of the Wheezy version we
14988 hope to get released soon.  The two problems require some with PHP
14989 skills, and we seem to lack anyone with both time and PHP skills in
14990 the project:
14991
14992 <ol>
14993
14994 <li>It is impossible to log into the slbackup web interface
14995   (slbackup-php) using the root user and password.  This is
14996   <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">BTS report #700257</a>.
14997   This used to work, but stopped working some time since Squeeze.
14998   Perhaps some obsolete PHP feature was used?</li>
14999
15000 <li>It is not possible to "mass import" user lists in Gosa, neither
15001   using ldif nor using CSV files.  The feature was disabled after a
15002   major rewrite of Gosa, and need to be ported to the new system.
15003   This is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">BTS report
15004   #698840</a>.</li>
15005
15006 </ol>
15007
15008 <p>If you can help us, please join us on IRC
15009 (<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu on
15010 irc.debian.org</a>) and provide patches via the BTS.</p>
15011
15012       </div>
15013       <div class="tags">
15014
15015
15016         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15017
15018
15019       </div>
15020     </div>
15021     <div class="padding"></div>
15022
15023     <div class="entry">
15024       <div class="title">
15025         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__C_dric_Boutillier.html">Debian Edu interview: Cédric Boutillier</a>
15026       </div>
15027       <div class="date">
15028          4th June 2013
15029       </div>
15030       <div class="body">
15031         <p>It has been a while since my last English
15032 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
15033 interview last November.  But the developers and translators are still
15034 pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this
15035 time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators
15036 in the project, Cédric Boutillier.</p>
15037
15038 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
15039
15040 <p>I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
15041 professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
15042 mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
15043 probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.</p>
15044
15045 <p>I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
15046 and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
15047 packaging, publicity and translation.</p>
15048
15049 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
15050 project?</strong></p>
15051
15052 <p>I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
15053 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Manuals">the
15054 Debian Edu manual</a> for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
15055 then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
15056 manual.
15057
15058 <p>I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
15059 virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
15060 shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
15061 how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.</p>
15062
15063 <p>What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
15064 ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
15065 by <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa²</a>.  What pleased
15066 me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
15067 there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages,
15068 to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
15069 artistic skills with music (<a href="http://ardour.org/">Ardour</a>,
15070 <a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a>) and
15071 movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
15072 <a href="http://linuxstopmotion.sourceforge.net/">Stopmotion</a>).</p>
15073
15074 <p>I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
15075 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>.
15076 Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this
15077 beautiful project.</p>
15078
15079 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
15080 Edu?</strong></p>
15081
15082 <p>For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
15083 community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
15084 fact that it provides a solution ready to use.</p>
15085
15086 <p>I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
15087 distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
15088 of educational free software.</p>
15089
15090 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
15091 Edu?</strong></p>
15092
15093 <p>Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
15094 project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
15095 not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
15096 solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
15097 is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.</p>
15098
15099 <p>One can find support from a company by looking at
15100 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Help/ProfessionalHelp">the
15101 wiki dokumentation</a>, where some countries already have a number of
15102 companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
15103 Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
15104 for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
15105 consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
15106 support for Debian Edu as well.</p>
15107
15108 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
15109
15110 <p>I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
15111 most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
15112 scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice.  I am
15113 also using the mathematical software
15114 <a href="http://www.scilab.org/en/scilab/about‎">Scilab</a> and
15115 <a href="http://www.sagemath.org/index.html‎">Sage</a> (built from
15116 source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).
15117
15118 <p><strong>Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
15119 using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
15120 statistics?</strong></p>
15121
15122 <p>I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our
15123 university, we use both <a href="http://www.r-project.org/‎">R</a> and
15124 Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
15125 geometry, there are nice programs:</p>
15126
15127 <ul>
15128
15129 <li><a href="http://www.drgeo.eu/">drgeo</a> and
15130 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/kig‎">kig</a> to do
15131 constructions in planar geometry
15132
15133 <li><a href="http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/software/download/kali.html">kali</a>
15134 to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze
15135 groups), although the interface looks a bit old.</li>
15136
15137 </ul>
15138
15139 <p>I like also
15140 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/cantor">cantor</a>, which
15141 provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage,
15142 <a href="http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Octave‎">Octave</a>, etc...</p>
15143
15144 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
15145 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
15146
15147 <p>My suggestions would be to</p>
15148
15149 <ul>
15150
15151 <li>advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.</li>
15152
15153 <li>communicate about the quality of free software projects, using
15154     well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and
15155     OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.</li>
15156
15157 <li>advertise the living and strong community around the project.</li>
15158
15159 <li>show that it is not more difficult to use than any other
15160     system.</li>
15161
15162 </ul>
15163
15164       </div>
15165       <div class="tags">
15166
15167
15168         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
15169
15170
15171       </div>
15172     </div>
15173     <div class="padding"></div>
15174
15175     <div class="entry">
15176       <div class="title">
15177         <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>
15178       </div>
15179       <div class="date">
15180          1st June 2013
15181       </div>
15182       <div class="body">
15183         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
15184 Skolelinux</a>, there are quite a lot of educational software.
15185 Created to help teachers teach, and pupils learn.  We have tried to
15186 tag them all using debtags use::learning and role::program, and using
15187 the debtags I was happy to be able to create a collage of the
15188 educational software packages installed by default, sorted by the
15189 debtag field.  Here it is.  Click on a image to learn more about the
15190 program.</p>
15191
15192 <!-- 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 -->
15193
15194 <p><strong>field::arts</strong></p>
15195 <p>
15196 <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>
15197 <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>
15198 <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>
15199 <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>
15200 <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>
15201 <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>
15202 <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>
15203 <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>
15204 <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>
15205 <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>
15206 <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>
15207 <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>
15208 <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>
15209 <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>
15210 </p>
15211
15212 <p><strong>field::astronomy</strong></p>
15213 <p>
15214 <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>
15215 <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>
15216 <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>
15217 <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>
15218 <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>
15219 <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>
15220 </p>
15221
15222 <p><strong>field::biology:structural</strong></p>
15223 <p>
15224 <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>
15225 </p>
15226
15227 <p><strong>field::chemistry</strong></p>
15228 <p>
15229 <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>
15230 <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>
15231 <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>
15232 <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>
15233 <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>
15234 <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>
15235 <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>
15236 <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>
15237 <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>
15238 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=viewmol'>[viewmol]</a>
15239 <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>
15240 </p>
15241
15242 <p><strong>field::electronics</strong></p>
15243 <p>
15244 <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>
15245 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=gpsim'>[gpsim]</a>
15246 </p>
15247
15248 <p><strong>field::geography</strong></p>
15249 <p>
15250 <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>
15251 <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>
15252 <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>
15253 </p>
15254
15255 <p><strong>field::linguistics</strong></p>
15256 <p>
15257 <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>
15258 <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>
15259 <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>
15260 <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>
15261 <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>
15262 </p>
15263
15264 <p><strong>field::mathematics</strong></p>
15265 <p>
15266 <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>
15267 <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>
15268 <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>
15269 <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>
15270 <a href='http://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all&keywords=geomview'>[geomview]</a>
15271 <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>
15272 <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>
15273 <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>
15274 <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>
15275 <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>
15276 <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>
15277 <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>
15278 <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>
15279 <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>
15280 <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>
15281 <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>
15282 <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>
15283 </p>
15284
15285 <p><strong>field::physics</strong></p>
15286 <p>
15287 <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>
15288 <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>
15289 </p>
15290
15291 <p><strong>field::TODO</strong></p>
15292 <p>
15293 <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>
15294 <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>
15295 <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>
15296 <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>
15297 <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>
15298 <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>
15299 <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>
15300 <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>
15301 <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>
15302 <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>
15303 </p>
15304
15305 <p>In total, 61 applications.  3 of them lacked screen shots on
15306 <a href="http://screenshot.debian.net">screenshot.debian.net</a>.  If
15307 you know of some packages we should install by default, please let us
15308 know on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu
15309 on irc.debian.org</a>, or our
15310 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">mailing list
15311 debian-edu@</a>.</p>
15312
15313       </div>
15314       <div class="tags">
15315
15316
15317         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15318
15319
15320       </div>
15321     </div>
15322     <div class="padding"></div>
15323
15324     <div class="entry">
15325       <div class="title">
15326         <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>
15327       </div>
15328       <div class="date">
15329         27th May 2013
15330       </div>
15331       <div class="body">
15332         <p>Two days ago, I asked
15333 <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
15334 I could install Linux on a Packard Bell EasyNote LV computer
15335 preinstalled with Windows 8</a>.  I found a solution, but am horrified
15336 with the obstacles put in the way of Linux users on a laptop with UEFI
15337 and Windows 8.</p>
15338
15339 <p>I never found out if the cause of my problems were the use of UEFI
15340 secure booting or fast boot.  I suspect fast boot was the problem,
15341 causing the firmware to boot directly from HD without considering any
15342 key presses and alternative devices, but do not know UEFI settings
15343 enough to tell.</p>
15344
15345 <p>There is no way to install Linux on the machine in question without
15346 opening the box and disconnecting the hard drive!  This is as far as I
15347 can tell, the only way to get access to the firmware setup menu
15348 without accepting the Windows 8 license agreement.  I am told (and
15349 found description on how to) that it is possible to configure the
15350 firmware setup once booted into Windows 8.  But as I believe the terms
15351 of that agreement are completely unacceptable, accepting the license
15352 was never an alternative.  I do not enter agreements I do not intend
15353 to follow.</p>
15354
15355 <p>I feared I had to return the laptops and ask for a refund, and
15356 waste many hours on this, but luckily there was a way to get it to
15357 work.  But I would not recommend it to anyone planning to run Linux on
15358 it, and I have become sceptical to Windows 8 certified laptops.  Is
15359 this the way Linux will be forced out of the market place, by making
15360 it close to impossible for "normal" users to install Linux without
15361 accepting the Microsoft Windows license terms?  Or at least not
15362 without risking to loose the warranty?</p>
15363
15364 <p>I've updated the
15365 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Linux Laptop
15366 wiki page for Packard Bell EasyNote LV</a>, to ensure the next person
15367 do not have to struggle as much as I did to get Linux into the
15368 machine.</p>
15369
15370 <p>Thanks to Bob Rosbag, Florian Weimer, Philipp Kern, Ben Hutching,
15371 Michael Tokarev and others for feedback and ideas.</p>
15372
15373       </div>
15374       <div class="tags">
15375
15376
15377         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15378
15379
15380       </div>
15381     </div>
15382     <div class="padding"></div>
15383
15384     <div class="entry">
15385       <div class="title">
15386         <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>
15387       </div>
15388       <div class="date">
15389         25th May 2013
15390       </div>
15391       <div class="body">
15392         <p>I've run into quite a problem the last few days.  I bought three
15393 new laptops for my parents and a few others.  I bought Packard Bell
15394 Easynote LV to run Kubuntu on and use as their home computer.  But I
15395 am completely unable to figure out how to install Linux on it.  The
15396 computer is preinstalled with Windows 8, and I suspect it uses UEFI
15397 instead of a BIOS to boot.</p>
15398
15399 <p>The problem is that I am unable to get it to PXE boot, and unable
15400 to get it to boot the Linux installer from my USB stick.  I have yet
15401 to try the DVD install, and still hope it will work.  when I turn on
15402 the computer, there is no information on what buttons to press to get
15403 the normal boot menu.  I expect to get some boot menu to select PXE or
15404 USB stick booting.  When booting, it first ask for the language to
15405 use, then for some regional settings, and finally if I will accept the
15406 Windows 8 terms of use.  As these terms are completely unacceptable to
15407 me, I have no other choice but to turn off the computer and try again
15408 to get it to boot the Linux installer.</p>
15409
15410 <p>I have gathered my findings so far on a Linlap page about the
15411 <a href="http://www.linlap.com/packard_bell_easynote_lv">Packard Bell
15412 EasyNote LV</a> model.  If you have any idea how to get Linux
15413 installed on this machine, please get in touch or update that wiki
15414 page.  If I can't find a way to install Linux, I will have to return
15415 the laptop to the seller and find another machine for my parents.</p>
15416
15417 <p>I wonder, is this the way Linux will be forced out of the market
15418 using UEFI and "secure boot" by making it impossible to install Linux
15419 on new Laptops?</p>
15420
15421       </div>
15422       <div class="tags">
15423
15424
15425         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15426
15427
15428       </div>
15429     </div>
15430     <div class="padding"></div>
15431
15432     <div class="entry">
15433       <div class="title">
15434         <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>
15435       </div>
15436       <div class="date">
15437         17th May 2013
15438       </div>
15439       <div class="body">
15440         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is
15441 an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools.  It
15442 contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
15443 pupils in the primary schools.  It provide both the central server,
15444 network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
15445 educational software.  The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
15446 2001-07-02.  If you want to support the project, which is in need for
15447 cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
15448 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">please
15449 donate some money</a>.
15450
15451 <p>A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
15452 lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
15453 Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation.  It isn't very
15454 hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
15455 the Debian Edu installer.</p>
15456
15457 <p>The script,
15458 <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/>
15459 in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
15460 transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
15461 into a Debian Edu Workstation:</p>
15462
15463 <ol>
15464
15465 <li>Add skolelinux related APT sources.</li>
15466 <li>Create /etc/debian-edu/config with the wanted configuration.</li>
15467 <li>Install debian-edu-install to load preseeding values and pull in
15468     our configuration.</li>
15469 <li>Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
15470     /etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
15471     according to the profile specified in the config above,
15472     overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.</li>
15473 <li>Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
15474     that could not be done using preseeding.</li>
15475 <li>Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.</li>
15476
15477 </ol>
15478
15479 <p>There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
15480 replicated like this.  Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
15481 So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
15482 the needed packages.</p>
15483
15484 <p>The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
15485 setting up <a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org">Raspberry Pi</a> as a
15486 Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
15487 <a href="http://www.raspbian.org/FrontPage‎">Raspbian</a> installation and
15488 transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
15489 Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).</p>
15490
15491 <p>The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
15492 If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
15493 PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:</p>
15494
15495 <p><pre>
15496 PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
15497 DESKTOP="lxde"
15498 </pre></p>
15499
15500 <p>The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
15501 the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
15502 virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
15503 boot.</p>
15504
15505       </div>
15506       <div class="tags">
15507
15508
15509         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>.
15510
15511
15512       </div>
15513     </div>
15514     <div class="padding"></div>
15515
15516     <div class="entry">
15517       <div class="title">
15518         <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>
15519       </div>
15520       <div class="date">
15521         14th May 2013
15522       </div>
15523       <div class="body">
15524         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
15525 project</a> is making great progress and made its second Wheezy based
15526 release today.  This is the release announcement:</p>
15527
15528 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha1 released
15529 2013-05-14</strong></p>
15530
15531 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
15532 alpha1, based on <a href="http://www.debian.org">Debian</a> with
15533 codename "Wheezy".</p>
15534
15535 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
15536
15537 <p>Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
15538 on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
15539 configured school network. Immediatly after installation a school
15540 server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
15541 waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
15542 Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
15543 initial installation of the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all
15544 other machines can be installed via the network.</p>
15545
15546 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
15547 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
15548 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
15549
15550 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
15551 <ul>
15552   <li>Install freemind (0.9.0) by default, and stop installing vym by
15553     default.</li>
15554   <li>Install chromium (26.0.1410.43) by default.</li>
15555   <li>Install goplay (0.5-1.1) to make golearn available by default.</li>
15556   <li>Updated support for Japanese input methods, now based on
15557     ibus-anthy.</li>
15558 </ul>
15559
15560 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
15561 <ul>
15562
15563   <li>Switched default file system from ext3 to ext4 for speed and
15564     reliability improvements.</li>
15565   <li>Got rid of unwanted winbind daemon and PAM setup activated because
15566     of <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706434">706434</a>.</li>
15567   <li>Extended and improved the testsuite tests to detect more possible
15568     problems.</li>
15569   <li>Corrected proxy handling to not set http_proxy to a bogus
15570     direct:// URL.</li>
15571   <li>Corrected proxy setup for diskless workstations.</li>
15572   <li>Corrected PXE setup to use our updated udebs during installation.</li>
15573   <li>Made installation handling of low entropy level more robust.</li>
15574   <li>Create larger partitions for Roaming workstations and Thin client
15575     servers, to make room for all the software installed.</li>
15576   <li>Fix bug in Roaming workstation PAM setup, making it impossible to
15577     log in (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/706753">706753</a>).</li>
15578 </ul>
15579
15580 <p><strong>Known issues</strong></p>
15581 <ul>
15582
15583   <li>IP resolution for the local hostname give useless IPv6 address
15584     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/705900">705900</a>).  Only install
15585     libnss-myhostname on roaming workstations until it is fixed.</li>
15586   <li>DVD images are not yet ready.</li>
15587   <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv)
15588     available yet (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698840">698840</a>).</li>
15589   <li>Missing artwork for the KDE desktop (and probably a few others).</li>
15590   <li>KDE Debian submenu lacks icons.</li>
15591   <li>LXDE menu lacks entry for changing GOsa password
15592     (website). Installing gosa-desktop will be an option.</li>
15593   <li>Backup configuration via web interface is impossible due to
15594     password submission problem
15595     (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/700257">700257</a>).</li>
15596
15597 </ul>
15598
15599 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
15600
15601 <p>To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use</p>
15602 <ul>
15603
15604   <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>
15605   <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>
15606   <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>
15607
15608 </ul>
15609
15610 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: 685ed76c1aa8e44b12d3fde21faf450b</p>
15611
15612 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 6c874de157024da13e115bab29c068080a11ec4c</p>
15613
15614 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
15615
15616 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
15617
15618       </div>
15619       <div class="tags">
15620
15621
15622         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15623
15624
15625       </div>
15626     </div>
15627     <div class="padding"></div>
15628
15629     <div class="entry">
15630       <div class="title">
15631         <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>
15632       </div>
15633       <div class="date">
15634         11th May 2013
15635       </div>
15636       <div class="body">
15637         <P>In January,
15638 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">I
15639 announced a</a> new <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">IRC
15640 channel #debian-lego</a>, for those of us in the Debian and Linux
15641 community interested in <a href="http://www.lego.com/">LEGO</a>, the
15642 marvellous construction system from Denmark.  We also created
15643 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">a wiki page</a> to have
15644 a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes.  And several
15645 people showed up to help.  I was very happy to see the effect of my
15646 call.  Since the small start, we have a debtags tag
15647 <a href="http://debtags.debian.net/search/bytag?wl=hardware::hobby:lego">hardware::hobby:lego</a>
15648 tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to
15649 LEGO and <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/">Mindstorms</a>:</p>
15650
15651 <p><table>
15652 <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>
15653 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/leocad">leocad</a></td><td>virtual brick CAD software</td></tr>
15654 <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>
15655 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/lnpd">lnpd</a></td><td>daemon for LNP communication with BrickOS</td></tr>
15656 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nbc">nbc</a></td><td>compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks</td></tr>
15657 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/nqc">nqc</a></td><td>Not Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX</td></tr>
15658 <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>
15659 <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>
15660 <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>
15661 <tr><td><a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/t2n">t2n</a></td><td>simple command-line tool for Lego NXT</td></tr>
15662 </table></p>
15663
15664 <p>Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are
15665 currently available in Jessie/testing.  leocad is so far only
15666 available in experimental.</p>
15667
15668 <p>If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help
15669 adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux
15670 for LEGO designers.</p>
15671
15672       </div>
15673       <div class="tags">
15674
15675
15676         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
15677
15678
15679       </div>
15680     </div>
15681     <div class="padding"></div>
15682
15683     <div class="entry">
15684       <div class="title">
15685         <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>
15686       </div>
15687       <div class="date">
15688          5th May 2013
15689       </div>
15690       <div class="body">
15691         <p>When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
15692 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130504">release announcement
15693 for Debian Wheezy</a> was waiting in my mail box.  This is a great
15694 Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
15695 soon.</p>
15696
15697 <p>The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
15698 in particular make me very happy to see included.  The
15699 <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a> program, made famous by
15700 the <a href="http://www.code.org/">Teach kids code</a> movement, is
15701 included for the first time.  Alongside similar programs like
15702 <a href="http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/">kturtle</a> and
15703 <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art">turtleart</a>,
15704 it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
15705 and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
15706 computer.  Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
15707 Edu.</a>
15708
15709 <p>And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
15710 Edu/Skolelinux release too.  The
15711 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2013/04/msg00132.html">first
15712 alpha release</a> went out last week, and the next should soon
15713 follow.<p>
15714
15715       </div>
15716       <div class="tags">
15717
15718
15719         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>.
15720
15721
15722       </div>
15723     </div>
15724     <div class="padding"></div>
15725
15726     <div class="entry">
15727       <div class="title">
15728         <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>
15729       </div>
15730       <div class="date">
15731         26th April 2013
15732       </div>
15733       <div class="body">
15734         <p>The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is still going strong and made
15735 its first Wheezy based release today.  This is the release
15736 announcement:</p>
15737
15738 <p><strong>New features for Debian Edu ~7.0.0 alpha0 released
15739 2013-04-26</strong></p>
15740
15741 <p>This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux ~7.0.0
15742 edu alpha0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".</p>
15743
15744 <p><strong>About Debian Edu and Skolelinux</strong></p>
15745
15746 <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu, also known as
15747 Skolelinux</a>, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
15748 out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
15749 network. Immediatly after installation a school server running all
15750 services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
15751 and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
15752 environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
15753 the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
15754 installed via the network.</p>
15755
15756 <p>This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
15757 not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
15758 version compared to the Squeeze release.</p>
15759
15760 <p><strong>Software updates</strong></p>
15761
15762 <ul>
15763 <li>Everything which is new in Debian Wheezy, eg:
15764   <ul>
15765      <li>Linux kernel 3.2.x</li>
15766      <li>Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.8.4, GNOME 3.4, and LXDE 4
15767          (KDE is installed by default; to choose GNOME or LXDE: see
15768          manual.)</li>
15769      <li>Web browser Iceweasel 10 ESR</li>
15770      <li>LibreOffice 3.5.4</li>
15771      <li>LTSP 5.4.2</li>
15772      <li>GOsa 2.7.4</li>
15773      <li>CUPS print system 1.5.3</li>
15774      <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 12.01</li>
15775      <li>Music creator Rosegarden 12.04</li>
15776      <li>Image editor Gimp 2.8.2</li>
15777      <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.1</li>
15778      <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.11.3</li>
15779      <li>Scratch visual programming environment 1.4.0.6</li>
15780      <li>New version of debian-installer from Debian Wheezy, see
15781          <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/installmanual">installation
15782          manual</a> for more details.</li>
15783      <li>Debian Wheezy includes about 37000 packages available for
15784          installation.</li>
15785      <li>More information about Debian Wheezy 7.0 is provided in the
15786          <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>
15787   </ul></li>
15788 </ul>
15789
15790 <p><strong>Documentation</strong></p>
15791 <ul>
15792 <li>The (<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy">English</a>) Debian Edu Wheezy Manual is fully translated to
15793     German, French, Italian and Danish. Partly translated versions exist
15794     for Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.</li>
15795 </ul>
15796
15797 <p><Strong>LDAP related changes</strong></p>
15798 <ul>
15799 <li>Slight changes to some objects and acls to have more types to
15800     choose from when adding systems in GOsa. Now systems can be of type
15801     server, workstation, printer, terminal or netdevice.</li>
15802 </ul>
15803
15804 <p><strong>Other changes</strong></p>
15805 <ul>
15806 <li>LTSP clients start as diskless workstation / thin client can be
15807     configured via command line argument -- or individually adding an
15808     entry in lts.conf or LDAP.<li>
15809 <li>GOsa gui: Now some options that seemed to be available, but are non
15810     functional, are greyed out (or are not clickable). Some tabs are
15811     completely hidden to the end user, others even to the GOsa admin.</li>
15812 </ul>
15813
15814 <p><strong>Regressions</strong></p>
15815 <ul>
15816 <li>No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv) available
15817     yet.</li>
15818 </ul>
15819
15820 <p><strong>No updated artwork</strong></p>
15821
15822 <ul>
15823 <li>Updated artwork which is visible during installation, in the login
15824     screen and as desktop wallpaper is still missing or the same as we
15825     had for our Squeeze based release.</li>
15826 </ul>
15827
15828 <p><strong>Where to get it</strong></p>
15829
15830 To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use
15831 <ul>
15832 <li><a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
15833 <li><a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</a></li>
15834 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/</li>
15835 </ul>
15836
15837 <p>The MD5SUM of this image is: c5e773ddafdaa4f48c409c682f598b6c</p>
15838
15839 <p>The SHA1SUM of this image is: 25934fabb9b7d20235499a0a51f08ce6c54215f2</p>
15840
15841 <p><strong>How to report bugs</strong></p>
15842
15843 <p><a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a></p>
15844
15845       </div>
15846       <div class="tags">
15847
15848
15849         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15850
15851
15852       </div>
15853     </div>
15854     <div class="padding"></div>
15855
15856     <div class="entry">
15857       <div class="title">
15858         <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>
15859       </div>
15860       <div class="date">
15861         16th April 2013
15862       </div>
15863       <div class="body">
15864         <p>This years first <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux /
15865 Debian Edu</a> developer gathering take place the coming weekend in Trondheim.
15866 Details about the gathering can be found
15867 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2013-04-19-21-Trondheim">on
15868 the FRiSK wiki</a>.  The dates are 19-21th of April 2013, and online
15869 participation for those unable to make it in person is very welcome,
15870 and I plan to participate online myself as I could not leave Oslo this
15871 weekend.</p>
15872
15873 <p>The focus of the gathering is to work on the web pages and project
15874 infrastructure, and to continue the work on the Wheezy based Debian
15875 Edu release.</p>
15876
15877 <p>See you on <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-edu">IRC, #debian-edu on irc.debian.org,</a> then?</p>
15878
15879       </div>
15880       <div class="tags">
15881
15882
15883         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15884
15885
15886       </div>
15887     </div>
15888     <div class="padding"></div>
15889
15890     <div class="entry">
15891       <div class="title">
15892         <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>
15893       </div>
15894       <div class="date">
15895          3rd April 2013
15896       </div>
15897       <div class="body">
15898         <p>Today the <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">Isenkram
15899 package</a> finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW
15900 for many months.  I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite
15901 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive.</p>
15902
15903 <p>Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to
15904 install to work with a pluggable hardware device.  The suggestion pop
15905 up when the device is plugged in.  For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT
15906 is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program
15907 the NXT controller.  Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to
15908 BTS. :)</p>
15909
15910       </div>
15911       <div class="tags">
15912
15913
15914         Tags: <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>.
15915
15916
15917       </div>
15918     </div>
15919     <div class="padding"></div>
15920
15921     <div class="entry">
15922       <div class="title">
15923         <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>
15924       </div>
15925       <div class="date">
15926         26th March 2013
15927       </div>
15928       <div class="body">
15929         <p>Would you like to help the environment and save money at the same
15930 time, without much sacrifice?  A small step could be to change the
15931 font you use when printing.</p>
15932
15933 <p>Three years ago,
15934 <a href="http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/04/last-year-printer-comparison-website/">Ars
15935 Technica</a> reported how the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
15936 changed their default front from
15937 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial">Arial</a> to
15938 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Gothic">Century
15939 Gothic</a> to save money.  The Century Gothic font uses 30% less toner
15940 than Arial to print the same text.  In other word, you could cut your
15941 toner costs by 30% (or actually, increase your toner supply life time
15942 by more than 30%), by simply changing the default font used in your
15943 prints.</p>
15944
15945 <p>But it is not quite obvious how much one will save by switching.
15946 The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay said it used $100,000 per year
15947 on ink and toner cartridges, according to
15948 <a href="http://www.twincities.com/ci_14833097">a report from
15949 TwinCities.com</a>, and expected to save between $5,000 and $10,000
15950 per year by asking staff and students to use a different font.  Not
15951 all PDFs and documents are created internally, and those from external
15952 sources will most likely still use a different font.  Also, the
15953 Century Gothic font is slightly wider than Arial, and thus might use
15954 more sheets of paper to print the same text, so the total saving
15955 depend on the documents printed.</p>
15956
15957 <p>But it is definitely something to consider, if you want to reduce
15958 the amount of trash, decrease the amount of toner used in the world,
15959 and save some money in the process.</p>
15960
15961 <p>Update 2013-04-10: If you want to know how much ink/toner could be
15962 saved when switching between fonts, Inkfarm got a
15963 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/What-the-Font">service to calculate the
15964 difference between font pairs</a>.  They also
15965 <a href="http://www.inkfarm.com/Recommended-Ink-Saving-Fonts---">recommend
15966 which fonts to use</a> to save ink.  Check it out. :) While updating
15967 this blog post, I also came across a blog post from InkCloners,
15968 <a href="http://inkcloners.com/blog/ink-cartridges/change-fonts-to-save-ink-costs/">listing
15969 the fonts they recommend</a>, with Centory Gothic at the top.</p>
15970
15971       </div>
15972       <div class="tags">
15973
15974
15975         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
15976
15977
15978       </div>
15979     </div>
15980     <div class="padding"></div>
15981
15982     <div class="entry">
15983       <div class="title">
15984         <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>
15985       </div>
15986       <div class="date">
15987         24th March 2013
15988       </div>
15989       <div class="body">
15990         <p>A few days ago, during a discussion in
15991 <a href="http://www.efn.no/">EFN</a> about interesting books to read
15992 about copyright and the data retention directive, a suggestion to read
15993 the 1968 short story Kodémus by
15994 <a href="http://web2.gyldendal.no/toraage/">Tore Åge Bringsværd</a>
15995 came up.  The text was only available in old paper books, and thus not
15996 easily available for current and future generations.  Some of the
15997 people participating in the discussion contacted the author, and
15998 reported back 2013-03-19 that the author was OK with releasing the
15999 short story using a <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org/">Creative
16000 Commons</a> license.  The text was quickly scanned and OCR-ed, and we
16001 were ready to start on the editing and typesetting.</p>
16002
16003 <p>As I already had some experience formatting text in my project to
16004 provide a Norwegian version of the Free Culture book by Lawrence
16005 Lessig, I chipped in and set up a
16006 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">DocBook</a> processing framework to
16007 generate PDF, HTML and EPUB version of the short story.  The tools to
16008 transform DocBook to different formats are already in my Linux
16009 distribution of choice, <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>, so
16010 all I had to do was to use the
16011 <a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a>,
16012 <a href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/epub/README">dbtoepub</a>
16013 and <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/xmlto/">xmlto</a> tools to do the
16014 conversion.  After a few days, we decided to replace dblatex with
16015 xsltproc/fop (aka
16016 <a href="http://wiki.docbook.org/DocBookXslStylesheets">docbook-xsl</a>),
16017 to get the copyright information to show up in the PDF and to get a
16018 nicer &lt;variablelist&gt; typesetting, but that is just a minor
16019 technical detail.</p>
16020
16021 <p>There were a few challenges, of course.  We want to typeset the
16022 short story to look like the original, and that require fairly good
16023 control over the layout.  The original short story have three
16024 parts/scenes separated by a single horizontally centred star (*), and
16025 the paragraphs do not contain only flowing text, but dialogs and text
16026 that started on a new line in the middle of the paragraph.</p>
16027
16028 <p>I initially solved the first challenge by using a paragraph with a
16029 single star in it, ie &lt;para&gt;*&lt;/para&gt;, but it made sure a
16030 placeholder indicated where the scene shifted.  This did not look too
16031 good without the centring.  The next approach was to create a new
16032 preprocessor directive &lt;?newscene?&gt;, mapping to "&lt;hr/&gt;"
16033 for HTML and "&lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;&lt;fo:leader
16034 leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;&lt;/fo:block&gt;"
16035 for FO/PDF output (did not try to implement this in dblatex, as we had
16036 switched at this time).  The HTML XSL file looked like this:</p>
16037
16038 <p><blockquote><pre>
16039 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
16040 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
16041   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
16042     &lt;hr/&gt;
16043   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
16044 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
16045 </pre></blockquote></p>
16046
16047 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
16048
16049 <p><blockquote><pre>
16050 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
16051 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
16052   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('newscene')"&gt;
16053     &lt;fo:block text-align="center"&gt;
16054       &lt;fo:leader leader-pattern="rule" rule-thickness="0.5pt"/&gt;
16055     &lt;/fo:block&gt;
16056   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
16057 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
16058 </pre></blockquote></p>
16059
16060 <p>Finally, I came across the &lt;bridgehead&gt; tag, which seem to be
16061 a good fit for the task at hand, and I replaced &lt;?newscene?&gt;
16062 with &lt;bridgehead&gt;*&lt;/bridgehead&gt;.  It isn't centred, but we
16063 can fix it with some XSL rule if the current visual layout isn't
16064 enough.</p>
16065
16066 <p>I did not find a good DocBook compliant way to solve the
16067 linebreak/paragraph challenge, so I ended up creating a new processor
16068 directive &lt;?linebreak?&gt;, mapping to &lt;br/&gt; in HTML, and
16069 &lt;fo:block/&gt; in FO/PDF.  I suspect there are better ways to do
16070 this, and welcome ideas and patches on github.  The HTML XSL file now
16071 look like this:</p>
16072
16073 <p><blockquote><pre>
16074 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
16075 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
16076   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
16077     &lt;br/&gt;
16078   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
16079 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
16080 </pre></blockquote></p>
16081
16082 <p>And the FO/PDF XSL file looked like this:</p>
16083
16084 <p><blockquote><pre>
16085 &lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
16086 &lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'
16087   xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"&gt;
16088   &lt;xsl:template match="processing-instruction('linebreak)"&gt;
16089     &lt;fo:block/&gt;
16090   &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
16091 &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
16092 </pre></blockquote></p>
16093
16094 <p>One unsolved challenge is our wish to expose different ISBN numbers
16095 per publication format, while keeping all of them in some conditional
16096 structure in the DocBook source.  No idea how to do this, so we ended
16097 up listing all the ISBN numbers next to their format in the colophon
16098 page.</p>
16099
16100 <p>If you want to check out the finished result, check out the
16101 <a href="https://github.com/sickel/kodemus">source repository at
16102 github</a>
16103 (<a href="https://github.com/EFN/kodemus">future/new/official
16104 repository</a>).  We expect it to be ready and announced in a few
16105 days.</p>
16106
16107       </div>
16108       <div class="tags">
16109
16110
16111         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>.
16112
16113
16114       </div>
16115     </div>
16116     <div class="padding"></div>
16117
16118     <div class="entry">
16119       <div class="title">
16120         <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>
16121       </div>
16122       <div class="date">
16123         17th March 2013
16124       </div>
16125       <div class="body">
16126         <p>Via
16127 <a href="https://twitter.com/pcwizz/status/313044373262716930">twitter</a>
16128 I just discovered that <a href="http://pcwizz.net/">Pcwizz</a> have
16129 done a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPzTZ61Pcuc">video
16130 review</a> on Youtube of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
16131 / Debian Edu</a> version 6.  He installed the standalone profile and
16132 the video show a walk-through of of the menu content, demonstration of
16133 a few programs and his view of our distribution.</p>
16134
16135 <p>There is also some really nice quotes (transcribed by me, might
16136 have heard wrong).  While looking thought the Graphics menu:</p>
16137
16138 <blockquote>
16139 "Basically everything you ever need in a school environment."
16140 </blockquote>
16141
16142 <p>And as a general evaluation of the entire distribution:</p>
16143
16144 <blockquote>
16145 "So, yeah, a bit bloated.  It kept all the Debian stuff in there, just
16146 to keep it nice and GNU.  So, I do not want to go on about it, but
16147 lets give it 7 out of 10.  I am not going to use it.  That is because
16148 I am not deploying a school network.  There may be some mythical
16149 feature to help you deploy Skolelinux on a school network."
16150 </blockquote>
16151
16152 <p>To bad he did not test the server profile, and discovered the PXE
16153 installation option.  It make it possible to install only the main
16154 server from CD, and the rest of the machines via the net, and might be
16155 considered the mythical feature he talk about. :)</p>
16156
16157 <p>While looking through the menus, there is also this funny comment
16158 about the part of the K menu generated from the Debian menu subsystem:
16159
16160 <blockquote>
16161 "[The K menu] have a special Debian section for software that no-one
16162 is going to look at, because it contain lots of junky stuff that you
16163 actually don't need in the education distribution, but have just been
16164 included because it isn't stripped out for some reason."
16165 </blockquote>
16166
16167 <p>I guess it is yet another argument for merging the Debian menu and
16168 Gnome/KDE desktop menu entries into
16169 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/DebianMenuUsingDesktopEntries">one
16170 consistent menu system</a> instead of two incomplete and partly
16171 inconsistent menu systems.</p>
16172
16173 <p>The entire video is available below for those accepting iframe
16174 embedding:</p>
16175
16176 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wPzTZ61Pcuc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
16177
16178       </div>
16179       <div class="tags">
16180
16181
16182         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
16183
16184
16185       </div>
16186     </div>
16187     <div class="padding"></div>
16188
16189     <div class="entry">
16190       <div class="title">
16191         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_update_released.html">First Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze update released</a>
16192       </div>
16193       <div class="date">
16194          8th March 2013
16195       </div>
16196       <div class="body">
16197         <p>Last Sunday, 2013-03-03,, Holger Levsen announced the first update
16198 of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
16199 based on Debian Squeeze.  This is the first update since
16200 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
16201 initial release 2012-03-11</a>.  This is the
16202 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2013/03/msg00000.html">release
16203 announcement email from Holger</a>:</p>
16204
16205 <blockquote><p>Hi,</p>
16206
16207 <p>it's my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of Debian
16208 Edu 6.0.7+r1 ("Debian Edu Squeeze").</p>
16209
16210 <p>Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 is an incremental update to Debian Edu
16211 6.0.4+r0, containing all the changes between Debian 6.0.4 and 6.0.7 as
16212 well Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements. See below (in this
16213 mail) for the full list of (edu) changes.  Please see
16214 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311">http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311</a>
16215 for more information on "Debian Edu Squeeze".</p>
16216
16217 <p>Images are available for download at
16218 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/</a></p>
16219
16220 <p>md5sums:
16221 <br>1fe79eb4f0f9ae1c58fc318e26cc1e2e  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
16222 <br>a6ddd924a8bd9a1b5ca122e8fe1c34ec  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
16223 <br>ac6c72cd7925ccec51bfbf58e2a7c69c  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
16224
16225 <p>sha1sums:
16226 <br>a4b58233b672a99c7df8dc24fb6de3327654a5c3  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-CD.iso
16227 <br>9b524915e0ff2aa793f13d93123e5bd2bab2dbaa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-DVD.iso
16228 <br>43997614893fc5e9e59ad6ce066b05d07fd836fa  debian-edu-6.0.7+r1-source-DVD.iso</p>
16229
16230 <p>These images are suitable for amd64+i386.</p>
16231
16232 <p>Changes for Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 Codename "Squeeze", released
16233 2013-03-03:</p>
16234
16235 <ul>
16236   <li>sitesummary was updated from 0.1.3 to 0.1.8
16237   <ul>
16238         <li>Make Nagios configuration more robust and efficient</li>
16239         <li>Comply with 3.X kernel</li>
16240   </ul></li>
16241   <li>debian-edu-doc from 1.4~20120310~6.0.4+r0 to 1.4~20130228~6.0.7+r1
16242   <ul>
16243         <li>Minor updates from the wiki</li>
16244         <li>Danish translation now complete</li>
16245   </ul></li>
16246   <li>debian-edu-config from 1.453 to 1.455
16247      <ul>
16248         <li>Fix /etc/hosts for LTSP diskless workstations. Closes: #699880</li>
16249         <li>Make ltsp_local_mount script work for multiple devices.</li>
16250         <li>Correct Kerberos user policy: don't expire password after 2 days.
16251                 Closes: #664596</li>
16252         <li>Handle '#' characters in the root or first users password.
16253                 Closes: #664976</li>
16254         <li>Fixes for gosa-sync:
16255            <ul>
16256                 <li>Don't fail if password contains "</li>
16257                 <li>Don't disclose new password string in syslog</li>
16258            </ul></li>
16259         <li>Fixes for gosa-create:
16260            <ul>
16261                 <li>Invalidate libnss cache before applying changes</li>
16262                 <li>Multiple failures during mass user import into GOsa²</li>
16263                 <li>gosa-netgroups plugin: don't erase entries of attribute type
16264                          "memberNisNetgroup". Closes: #687256</li>
16265                 <li>First user now uses the same Kerberos policy as all other users</li>
16266            </ul></li>
16267         <li>Add Danish web page</li>
16268     </ul>
16269   <li>debian-edu-install from 1.528 to 1.530
16270     <ul>
16271         <li>Improve preseeding support and documentation</li>
16272     </ul></li>
16273 </ul>
16274
16275 <p>End-user documentation in English is available at
16276 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/</a>
16277 - translations to French, Italian, Danish and German are available in
16278 the debian-edu-doc package. (Other languages could use your help!)</p>
16279
16280 <p>If you want to contribute to Debian Edu, please join our
16281 mailinglist
16282 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/">debian-edu@lists.debian.org</a>!
16283 </p></blockquote>
16284
16285 <p>I am very happy to see the fruits of a year of hard work. :)</p>
16286
16287       </div>
16288       <div class="tags">
16289
16290
16291         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16292
16293
16294       </div>
16295     </div>
16296     <div class="padding"></div>
16297
16298     <div class="entry">
16299       <div class="title">
16300         <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>
16301       </div>
16302       <div class="date">
16303          3rd March 2013
16304       </div>
16305       <div class="body">
16306         <p>Do you want to set up your own TV station, schedule videos and
16307 broadcast them on the air?  Using free software?  With video on demand
16308 support using
16309 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
16310 open standards</a>?  Included a web based video stream as well?  And
16311 administrate it all in your web browser from anywhere in the world?  A
16312 few years now the Norwegian public access TV-channel
16313 <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> have been building a
16314 system to do just this.  The source code for the solution is licensed
16315 using the GNU LGPL, and
16316 <a href="http://github.com/Frikanalen">available from github</a>.</p>
16317
16318 <p>The idea is simple.  You upload a video file over the web, and
16319 attach meta information to the file.  You select a time slot in the
16320 program schedule, and when the time come it is played on the air and
16321 in the web stream.  It is also made available in a video on demand
16322 solution for anyone to see it also outside its scheduled time.  All
16323 you need to run a TV station - using your web browser.</p>
16324
16325 <p>There are several parts to this web based solution.  I'll mention
16326 the three most important ones.  The first part is the database of
16327 videos and the schedule.  This is written in Django and include a REST
16328 API.  The current database is SQLite, but the plan is to migrate it to
16329 PostgreSQL.  At the moment this system can be tested on
16330 <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/">beta.frikanalen.tv</a>.  The
16331 second part is the video playout, taking the schedule information from
16332 the database and providing a video stream to broadcast.  This is done
16333 using <a href="http://www.casparcg.com/">CasparCG from SVT</a> and
16334 <a href="http://www.mltframework.org/">Media Lovin' Toolkit</a>.  Video
16335 signal distribution is handled using
16336 <a href="http://www.ob-encoder.com/">Open Broadcast Encoder</a>.  The
16337 third part is the converter, handling the transformation of uploaded
16338 video files to a format useful for broadcasting, streaming and video
16339 on demand.  It is still very much work in progress, so it is not yet
16340 decided what it will end up using.  Note that the source of the latter
16341 two parts are not yet pushed to github.  The lead author want to clean
16342 them up a bit more first.</p>
16343
16344 <p>The development is coordinated on the
16345 <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23frikanalen">#frikanalen IRC
16346 channel</a> (irc.freenode.net), and discussed on
16347 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/frikanalen">the
16348 frikanalen mailing list</a>. The lead developer is Benjamin Bruheim
16349 (phed on IRC).  Anyone is welcome to participate in the
16350 development.</p>
16351
16352       </div>
16353       <div class="tags">
16354
16355
16356         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>.
16357
16358
16359       </div>
16360     </div>
16361     <div class="padding"></div>
16362
16363     <div class="entry">
16364       <div class="title">
16365         <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>
16366       </div>
16367       <div class="date">
16368         27th February 2013
16369       </div>
16370       <div class="body">
16371         <p>Dr. <a href="http://www.stallman.org/">Richard Stallman</a>,
16372 founder of <a href="http://www.fsf.org/">Free Software Foundation</a>,
16373 is giving <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">a
16374 talk in Oslo March 1st 2013 17:00 to 19:00</a>.  The event is public
16375 and organised by <a href="">Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG)</a>
16376 (where I am the chair of the board) and
16377 <a href="http://www.friprog.no/">The Norwegian Open Source Competence
16378 Center</a>.  The title of the talk is «The Free Software Movement and
16379 GNU», with this description:
16380
16381 <p><blockquote>
16382 The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users' freedom to
16383 cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software Movement
16384 developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the
16385 kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms possible.
16386 </blockquote></p>
16387
16388 <p>The meeting is open for everyone.  Due to space limitations, the
16389 doors opens for NUUG members at 16:15, and everyone else at 16:45.  I
16390 am really curious how many will show up.  See
16391 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20130301-rms/">the event
16392 page</a> for the location details.</p>
16393
16394       </div>
16395       <div class="tags">
16396
16397
16398         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>.
16399
16400
16401       </div>
16402     </div>
16403     <div class="padding"></div>
16404
16405     <div class="entry">
16406       <div class="title">
16407         <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>
16408       </div>
16409       <div class="date">
16410         15th February 2013
16411       </div>
16412       <div class="body">
16413         <p>If you, like me, want an updated a map for your Garmin GPS, there is
16414 now a great source of free maps available from
16415 <a href="http://www.frikart.no/garmin/index.html">Frikart</a>.  To
16416 download a map, just click on the country you are interested in, and
16417 download the map type you want.  There are 8 different maps available,
16418 using different colours and data selection.  Pick one of Roadmap, Topo
16419 Summer, Topo Winter, Roadmap II, Topo Summer II, Topo Winter II,
16420 "Trails - overlay map" and "Cross country - overlay map" (see the web
16421 page for descriptions).</p>
16422
16423 <p>The maps are updated weekly, so if you find something wrong in the
16424 map you can just edit the
16425 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> map source
16426 (anyone can contribute) and fetch a fixed map a week later. :)</p>
16427
16428       </div>
16429       <div class="tags">
16430
16431
16432         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>.
16433
16434
16435       </div>
16436     </div>
16437     <div class="padding"></div>
16438
16439     <div class="entry">
16440       <div class="title">
16441         <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>
16442       </div>
16443       <div class="date">
16444         12th February 2013
16445       </div>
16446       <div class="body">
16447         <p>Here in Norway, electronic invoices are spreading, and the
16448 <a href="http://www.anskaffelser.no/e-handel/faktura">solution promoted
16449 by the Norwegian government</a> require that invoices are sent through
16450 one of the approved facilitators, and it is not possible to send
16451 electronic invoices without an agreement with one of these
16452 facilitators.  This seem like a needless limitation to be able to
16453 transfer invoice information between buyers and sellers.  My preferred
16454 solution would be to just transfer the invoice information directly
16455 between seller and buyer, for example using SMTP, or some HTTP based
16456 protocol like REST or SOAP.  But this might also be overkill, as the
16457 "electronic" information can be transferred using paper invoices too,
16458 using a simple bar code.  My bar code encoding of choice would be QR
16459 codes, as this encoding can be read by any smart phone out there.  The
16460 content of the code could be anything, but I would go with
16461 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard">the vCard format</a>, as
16462 it too is supported by a lot of computer equipment these days.</p>
16463
16464 <p>The vCard format support extentions, and the invoice specific
16465 information can be included using such extentions.  For example an
16466 invoice from SLX Debian Labs (picked because we
16467 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">ask
16468 for donations to the Debian Edu project</a> and thus have bank account
16469 information publicly available) for NOK 1000.00 could have these extra
16470 fields:</p>
16471
16472 <p><pre>
16473 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
16474 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
16475 X-INVOICE-KID:123412341234
16476 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
16477 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
16478 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
16479 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
16480 </pre></p>
16481
16482 <p>The X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER field was proposed in a stackoverflow
16483 answer regarding
16484 <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10045664/storing-bank-account-in-vcard-file">how
16485 to put bank account information into a vCard</a>.  For payments in
16486 Norway, either X-INVOICE-KID (payment ID) or X-INVOICE-MSG could be
16487 used to pass on information to the seller when paying the invoice.</p>
16488
16489 <p>The complete vCard could look like this:</p>
16490
16491 <p><pre>
16492 BEGIN:VCARD
16493 VERSION:2.1
16494 ORG:SLX Debian Labs Foundation
16495 ADR;WORK:;;Gunnar Schjelderups vei 29D;OSLO;;0485;Norway
16496 URL;WORK:http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/
16497 EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:sdl-styret@rt.nuug.no
16498 REV:20130212T095000Z
16499 X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
16500 X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
16501 X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
16502 X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
16503 X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
16504 X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
16505 END:VCARD
16506 </pre></p>
16507
16508 <p>The resulting QR code created using
16509 <a href="http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/">qrencode</a> would look
16510 like this, and should be readable (and thus checkable) by any smart
16511 phone, or for example the <a href="http://zbar.sourceforge.net/">zbar
16512 bar code reader</a> and feed right into the approval and accounting
16513 system.</p>
16514
16515 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-12-qr-invoice.png"></p>
16516
16517 <p>The extension fields will most likely not show up in any normal
16518 vCard reader, so those parts would have to go directly into a system
16519 handling invoices.  I am a bit unsure how vCards without name parts
16520 are handled, but a simple test indicate that this work just fine.</p>
16521
16522 <p><strong>Update 2013-02-12 11:30</strong>: Added KID to the proposal
16523 based on feedback from Sturle Sunde.</p>
16524
16525       </div>
16526       <div class="tags">
16527
16528
16529         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>.
16530
16531
16532       </div>
16533     </div>
16534     <div class="padding"></div>
16535
16536     <div class="entry">
16537       <div class="title">
16538         <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>
16539       </div>
16540       <div class="date">
16541         10th February 2013
16542       </div>
16543       <div class="body">
16544         <p><img align="left" style="margin-right:25px;" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-10-morning-light.jpeg"></p>
16545
16546 <p>With kids in the house, one challenge is getting them to sleep
16547 during the night and wake up when it is morning.  I mean, when I
16548 believe it is morning, and not two hours earlier.  In our household we
16549 have decided that 07:00 is the turning point, but getting the kids to
16550 sleep until 07:00 is a small challenge every day.  They have adapted
16551 quite well, and rarely wake up at 05:00 any more, but some times wake
16552 up at times like 05:50, 06:15, 06:30 or 06:45, and it is hard to put
16553 the awake one to bed again without disturbing and waking the rest.
16554 And I understand perfectly well that they fail to sleep until 07:00
16555 some times, as there is no way for them to know if it is before or
16556 after the magic moment without coming and asking us parents.</p>
16557
16558 <p>But yesterday I came up with a method to solve this problem.  It
16559 involve home automation.  A few years ago I bought a
16560 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick">Tellstick</a> and RF
16561 switches at the local <a href="http://www.clasohlson.com/">Clas
16562 Ohlson</a> shop, allowing me to control lights and other electrical
16563 gadgets using my Linux server.  When I moved from the old flat to a
16564 small house, I put away all this equipment as most of the lighting in
16565 the house was not using wall sockets and thus not easy to connect to
16566 the gadgets I had.  But recently I bought a
16567 <a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick_net">Tellstick
16568 Net</a> to be able to read sensor input as well as control power
16569 sockets.  I want to control ovens in the basement to avoid the pipes
16570 to freeze, and monitor the humidity to detect flooding.  The default
16571 setup for Tellstick Net is to be controlled by the vendor web service,
16572 which to me is a security problem, but it is also possible to build
16573 ones own
16574 <a href="http://developer.telldus.com/blog/2012/03/02/help-us-develop-local-access-using-tellstick-net-build-your-own-firmware">firmware
16575 with local access</A> instead of being controlled by a Swedish
16576 company, thanks to the release of the GPL licensed firmware source
16577 code.  I plan to get that running before I let it control anything
16578 important.  But while working on this, one idea to make it easier for
16579 the kids came to me yesterday.  We can set up a night light controlled
16580 by the computer, and turn it automatically on at 07:00.  The kids can
16581 then check the light in the morning to know if they are supposed to
16582 get up or not.  They joined me in setting everything up, and I
16583 repeated the concept several times before bed times to make sure they
16584 remembered to check the light before getting up in the morning.</p>
16585
16586 <p>We tested it this morning, and all the kids stayed in bed until
16587 after 07:00, and every one of them commented on the fact that the
16588 "morning light" was turned on and signalled that the morning had
16589 arrived.  So this look like a success, and I am excited to see how
16590 this develops the next few days. :) I really hope this can allow us
16591 all to sleep a bit longer in the morning.</p>
16592
16593 <p>A nice advantage of this setup is that we can remote control when
16594 to tell the kids to get up.  We do not have to wait until 07:00, and
16595 can also delay it if we want to.</p>
16596
16597       </div>
16598       <div class="tags">
16599
16600
16601         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16602
16603
16604       </div>
16605     </div>
16606     <div class="padding"></div>
16607
16608     <div class="entry">
16609       <div class="title">
16610         <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>
16611       </div>
16612       <div class="date">
16613          2nd February 2013
16614       </div>
16615       <div class="body">
16616         <p>My
16617 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">last
16618 bitcoin related blog post</a> mentioned that the new
16619 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin package</a> for
16620 Debian was waiting in NEW.  It was accepted by the Debian ftp-masters
16621 2013-01-19, and have been available in unstable since then.  It was
16622 automatically copied to Ubuntu, and is available in their Raring
16623 version too.</p>
16624
16625 <p>But there is a strange problem with the build that block this new
16626 version from being available on the i386 and kfreebsd-i386
16627 architectures.  For some strange reason, the autobuilders in Debian
16628 for these architectures fail to run the test suite on these
16629 architectures (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/672524">BTS #672524</a>).
16630 We are so far unable to reproduce it when building it manually, and
16631 no-one have been able to propose a fix.  If you got an idea what is
16632 failing, please let us know via the BTS.</p>
16633
16634 <p>One feature that is annoying me with of the bitcoin client, because
16635 I often run low on disk space, is the fact that the client will exit
16636 if it run short on space (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/696715">BTS
16637 #696715</a>).  So make sure you have enough disk space when you run
16638 it. :)</p>
16639
16640 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
16641 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
16642 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
16643
16644       </div>
16645       <div class="tags">
16646
16647
16648         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>.
16649
16650
16651       </div>
16652     </div>
16653     <div class="padding"></div>
16654
16655     <div class="entry">
16656       <div class="title">
16657         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">Welcome to the world, Isenkram!</a>
16658       </div>
16659       <div class="date">
16660         22nd January 2013
16661       </div>
16662       <div class="body">
16663         <p>Yesterday, I
16664 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_prototype_ready_making_hardware_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">asked
16665 for testers</a> for my prototype for making Debian better at handling
16666 pluggable hardware devices, which I
16667 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">set
16668 out to create</a> earlier this month.  Several valuable testers showed
16669 up, and caused me to really want to to open up the development to more
16670 people.  But before I did this, I want to come up with a sensible name
16671 for this project.  Today I finally decided on a new name, and I have
16672 renamed the project from hw-support-handler to this new name.  In the
16673 process, I moved the source to git and made it available as a
16674 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/isenkram.git">collab-maint</a>
16675 repository in Debian.  The new name?  It is <strong>Isenkram</strong>.
16676 To fetch and build the latest version of the source, use</p>
16677
16678 <pre>
16679 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/isenkram.git
16680 cd isenkram && git-buildpackage -us -uc
16681 </pre>
16682
16683 <p>I have not yet adjusted all files to use the new name yet.  If you
16684 want to hack on the source or improve the package, please go ahead.
16685 But please talk to me first on IRC or via email before you do major
16686 changes, to make sure we do not step on each others toes. :)</p>
16687
16688 <p>If you wonder what 'isenkram' is, it is a Norwegian word for iron
16689 stuff, typically meaning tools, nails, screws, etc.  Typical hardware
16690 stuff, in other words.  I've been told it is the Norwegian variant of
16691 the German word eisenkram, for those that are familiar with that
16692 word.</p>
16693
16694 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-26</strong>: Added -us -us to build
16695 instructions, to avoid confusing people with an error from the signing
16696 process.</p>
16697
16698 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-27</strong>: Switch to HTTP URL for the git
16699 clone argument to avoid the need for authentication.</p>
16700
16701       </div>
16702       <div class="tags">
16703
16704
16705         Tags: <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>.
16706
16707
16708       </div>
16709     </div>
16710     <div class="padding"></div>
16711
16712     <div class="entry">
16713       <div class="title">
16714         <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>
16715       </div>
16716       <div class="date">
16717         21st January 2013
16718       </div>
16719       <div class="body">
16720         <p>Early this month I set out to try to
16721 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">improve
16722 the Debian support for pluggable hardware devices</a>.  Now my
16723 prototype is working, and it is ready for a larger audience.  To test
16724 it, fetch the
16725 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">source
16726 from the Debian Edu subversion repository</a>, build and install the
16727 package.  You might have to log out and in again activate the
16728 autostart script.</p>
16729
16730 <p>The design is simple:</p>
16731
16732 <ul>
16733
16734 <li>Add desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ causing a program
16735 hw-support-handlerd to start when the user log in.</li>
16736
16737 <li>This program listen for kernel events about new hardware (directly
16738 from the kernel like udev does), not using HAL dbus events as I
16739 initially did.</li>
16740
16741 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware modalias in
16742 the APT database, a database
16743 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=markup">available
16744 via HTTP</a> and a database available as part of the package.</li>
16745
16746 <li>If a package is mapped to the hardware in question, the package
16747 isn't installed yet and this is the first time the hardware was
16748 plugged in, show a desktop notification suggesting to install the
16749 package or packages.</li>
16750
16751 <li>If the user click on the 'install package now' button, ask
16752 aptdaemon via the PackageKit API to install the requrired package.</li>
16753
16754 <li>aptdaemon ask for root password or sudo password, and install the
16755 package while showing progress information in a window.</li>
16756
16757 </ul>
16758
16759 <p>I still need to come up with a better name for the system.  Here
16760 are some screen shots showing the prototype in action.  First the
16761 notification, then the password request, and finally the request to
16762 approve all the dependencies.  Sorry for the Norwegian Bokmål GUI.</p>
16763
16764 <p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-1-notification.png">
16765 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-2-password.png">
16766 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-3-dependencies.png">
16767 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-4-installing.png">
16768 <br><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-21-hw-support-5-installing-details.png" width="70%"></p>
16769
16770 <p>The prototype still need to be improved with longer timeouts, but
16771 is already useful.  The database of hardware to package mappings also
16772 need more work.  It is currently compatible with the Ubuntu way of
16773 storing such information in the package control file, but could be
16774 changed to use other formats instead or in addition to the current
16775 method.  I've dropped the use of discover for this mapping, as the
16776 modalias approach is more flexible and easier to use on Linux as long
16777 as the Linux kernel expose its modalias strings directly.</p>
16778
16779 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-21 16:50</strong>: Due to popular demand,
16780 here is the command required to check out and build the source: Use
16781 '<tt>svn checkout
16782 svn://svn.debian.org/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/; cd
16783 hw-support-handler; debuild</tt>'.  If you lack debuild, install the
16784 devscripts package.</p>
16785
16786 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-23 12:00</strong>: The project is now
16787 renamed to Isenkram and the source moved from the Debian Edu
16788 subversion repository to a Debian collab-maint git repository.  See
16789 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Welcome_to_the_world__Isenkram_.html">build
16790 instructions</a> for details.</p>
16791
16792       </div>
16793       <div class="tags">
16794
16795
16796         Tags: <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>.
16797
16798
16799       </div>
16800     </div>
16801     <div class="padding"></div>
16802
16803     <div class="entry">
16804       <div class="title">
16805         <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>
16806       </div>
16807       <div class="date">
16808         19th January 2013
16809       </div>
16810       <div class="body">
16811         <p>This Christmas my trusty old laptop died.  It died quietly and
16812 suddenly in bed.  With a quiet whimper, it went completely quiet and
16813 black.  The power button was no longer able to turn it on.  It was a
16814 IBM Thinkpad X41, and the best laptop I ever had.  Better than both
16815 Thinkpads X30, X31, X40, X60, X61 and X61S.  Far better than the
16816 Compaq I had before that.  Now I need to find a replacement.  To keep
16817 going during Christmas, I moved the one year old SSD disk to my old
16818 X40 where it fitted (only one I had left that could use it), but it is
16819 not a durable solution.
16820
16821 <p>My laptop needs are fairly modest.  This is my wishlist from when I
16822 got a new one more than 10 years ago.  It still holds true.:)</p>
16823
16824 <ul>
16825
16826 <li>Lightweight (around 1 kg) and small volume (preferably smaller
16827   than A4).</li>
16828 <li>Robust, it will be in my backpack every day.</li>
16829 <li>Three button mouse and a mouse pin instead of touch pad.</li>
16830 <li>Long battery life time.  Preferable a week.</li>
16831 <li>Internal WIFI network card.</li>
16832 <li>Internal Twisted Pair network card.</li>
16833 <li>Some USB slots (2-3 is plenty)</li>
16834 <li>Good keyboard - similar to the Thinkpad.</li>
16835 <li>Video resolution at least 1024x768, with size around 12" (A4 paper
16836 size).</li>
16837 <li>Hardware supported by Debian Stable, ie the default kernel and
16838   X.org packages.</li>
16839 <li>Quiet, preferably fan free (or at least not using the fan most of
16840   the time).
16841
16842 </ul>
16843
16844 <p>You will notice that there are no RAM and CPU requirements in the
16845 list.  The reason is simply that the specifications on laptops the
16846 last 10-15 years have been sufficient for my needs, and I have to look
16847 at other features to choose my laptop.  But are there still made as
16848 robust laptops as my X41?  The Thinkpad X60/X61 proved to be less
16849 robust, and Thinkpads seem to be heading in the wrong direction since
16850 Lenovo took over.  But I've been told that X220 and X1 Carbon might
16851 still be useful.</p>
16852
16853 <p>Perhaps I should rethink my needs, and look for a pad with an
16854 external keyboard?  I'll have to check the
16855 <a href="http://www.linux-laptop.net/">Linux Laptops site</a> for
16856 well-supported laptops, or perhaps just buy one preinstalled from one
16857 of the vendors listed on the <a href="http://linuxpreloaded.com/">Linux
16858 Pre-loaded site</a>.</p>
16859
16860       </div>
16861       <div class="tags">
16862
16863
16864         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16865
16866
16867       </div>
16868     </div>
16869     <div class="padding"></div>
16870
16871     <div class="entry">
16872       <div class="title">
16873         <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>
16874       </div>
16875       <div class="date">
16876         18th January 2013
16877       </div>
16878       <div class="body">
16879         <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
16880 install to get support for a given MIME type.  Thanks to
16881 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
16882 done by Ubuntu</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
16883 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
16884 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
16885 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:</p>
16886
16887 <pre>
16888 #!/usr/bin/python
16889 import sys
16890 import apt
16891 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
16892     cache = apt.Cache()
16893     cache.open(None)
16894     thepkgs = []
16895     for pkg in cache:
16896         version = pkg.candidate
16897         if version is None:
16898             version = pkg.installed
16899         if version is None:
16900             continue
16901         record = version.record
16902         if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
16903             continue
16904         mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
16905         for t in mime_types:
16906             t = t.rstrip().strip()
16907             if t == mimetype:
16908                 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
16909     return thepkgs
16910 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
16911 if 1 < len(sys.argv):
16912     mimetype = sys.argv[1]
16913 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
16914 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
16915     print "  %s" %pkg
16916 </pre>
16917
16918 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:</p>
16919
16920 <pre>
16921 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
16922 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
16923   gecko-mediaplayer
16924 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
16925 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
16926   browser-plugin-gnash
16927 %
16928 </pre>
16929
16930 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
16931 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
16932 packages.  It would be great if Debian supported such feature too.  Is
16933 anyone working on adding it?</p>
16934
16935 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-18 14:20</strong>: The Debian BTS
16936 request for icweasel support for this feature is
16937 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#484010</a> from 2008 (and
16938 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#698426</a> from today).  Lack
16939 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
16940 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.</p>
16941
16942       </div>
16943       <div class="tags">
16944
16945
16946         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
16947
16948
16949       </div>
16950     </div>
16951     <div class="padding"></div>
16952
16953     <div class="entry">
16954       <div class="title">
16955         <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>
16956       </div>
16957       <div class="date">
16958         16th January 2013
16959       </div>
16960       <div class="body">
16961         <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-11
16962 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive</a>, is a
16963 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
16964 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
16965 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing.  With such
16966 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
16967 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
16968 downloaded by the browser.</p>
16969
16970 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
16971 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
16972 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there.  The result
16973 can be found on the
16974 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
16975 site</a>.  Using the collected information, it become possible to
16976 answer the question in the title.  Here are the 20 most supported MIME
16977 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
16978 The complete list is available from the link above.</p>
16979
16980 <p><strong>Debian Stable:</strong></p>
16981
16982 <pre>
16983   count MIME type
16984   ----- -----------------------
16985      32 text/plain
16986      30 audio/mpeg
16987      29 image/png
16988      28 image/jpeg
16989      27 application/ogg
16990      26 audio/x-mp3
16991      25 image/tiff
16992      25 image/gif
16993      22 image/bmp
16994      22 audio/x-wav
16995      20 audio/x-flac
16996      19 audio/x-mpegurl
16997      18 video/x-ms-asf
16998      18 audio/x-musepack
16999      18 audio/x-mpeg
17000      18 application/x-ogg
17001      17 video/mpeg
17002      17 audio/x-scpls
17003      17 audio/ogg
17004      16 video/x-ms-wmv
17005 </pre>
17006
17007 <p><strong>Debian Testing:</strong></p>
17008
17009 <pre>
17010   count MIME type
17011   ----- -----------------------
17012      33 text/plain
17013      32 image/png
17014      32 image/jpeg
17015      29 audio/mpeg
17016      27 image/gif
17017      26 image/tiff
17018      26 application/ogg
17019      25 audio/x-mp3
17020      22 image/bmp
17021      21 audio/x-wav
17022      19 audio/x-mpegurl
17023      19 audio/x-mpeg
17024      18 video/mpeg
17025      18 audio/x-scpls
17026      18 audio/x-flac
17027      18 application/x-ogg
17028      17 video/x-ms-asf
17029      17 text/html
17030      17 audio/x-musepack
17031      16 image/x-xbitmap
17032 </pre>
17033
17034 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:</strong></p>
17035
17036 <pre>
17037   count MIME type
17038   ----- -----------------------
17039      31 text/plain
17040      31 image/png
17041      31 image/jpeg
17042      29 audio/mpeg
17043      28 application/ogg
17044      27 image/gif
17045      26 image/tiff
17046      26 audio/x-mp3
17047      23 audio/x-wav
17048      22 image/bmp
17049      21 audio/x-flac
17050      20 audio/x-mpegurl
17051      19 audio/x-mpeg
17052      18 video/x-ms-asf
17053      18 video/mpeg
17054      18 audio/x-scpls
17055      18 application/x-ogg
17056      17 audio/x-musepack
17057      16 video/x-ms-wmv
17058      16 video/x-msvideo
17059 </pre>
17060
17061 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
17062 information mentioned in DEP-11.  I have not yet had time to look at
17063 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
17064 issues.</p>
17065
17066 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-16 13:35</strong>: Updated numbers after
17067 discovering a typo in my script.</p>
17068
17069       </div>
17070       <div class="tags">
17071
17072
17073         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17074
17075
17076       </div>
17077     </div>
17078     <div class="padding"></div>
17079
17080     <div class="entry">
17081       <div class="title">
17082         <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>
17083       </div>
17084       <div class="date">
17085         15th January 2013
17086       </div>
17087       <div class="body">
17088         <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
17089 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
17090 values provided by the Linux kernel</a> following my hope for
17091 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
17092 dongle support in Debian</a>.  Using this knowledge, I have tested how
17093 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
17094 to hardware.  This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
17095 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
17096 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
17097 packages.</p>
17098
17099 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
17100 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
17101 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
17102 modalias.</p>
17103
17104 <p><blockquote>
17105 Package: package-name
17106 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)</p>
17107 </blockquote></p>
17108
17109 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
17110 for a given modalias value using this file.</p>
17111
17112 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
17113 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class 0E01):</p>
17114
17115 <p><blockquote>
17116 Package: cheese
17117 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)</p>
17118 </blockquote></p>
17119
17120 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
17121 CardBus bridge (bus class 0607) PCI device is present:</p>
17122
17123 <p><blockquote>
17124 Package: pcmciautils
17125 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
17126 </blockquote></p>
17127
17128 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
17129 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs 04D8:F8DA:</p>
17130
17131 <p><blockquote>
17132 Package: colorhug-client
17133 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)</p>
17134 </blockquote></p>
17135
17136 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
17137 file in the Debian archive.  Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
17138 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.</p>
17139
17140 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
17141 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
17142 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
17143 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
17144 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information.  I've
17145 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
17146 is working as it should with my prototype.  It even made it to Ubuntu
17147 Raring.</p>
17148
17149 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
17150 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
17151 implementation of the lookup code.  The idea is to create files for
17152 each modalias and let the shell do the matching.  Please check out and
17153 try the
17154 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup</a>
17155 shell script.  It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
17156 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
17157 repository where I currently work on my prototype.</p>
17158
17159 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
17160 install yubikey-personalization:</p>
17161
17162 <p><blockquote>
17163 % ./hw-support-lookup
17164 <br>yubikey-personalization
17165 <br>%
17166 </blockquote></p>
17167
17168 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
17169 propose to install the pcmciautils package:</p>
17170
17171 <p><blockquote>
17172 % ./hw-support-lookup
17173 <br>pcmciautils
17174 <br>%
17175 </blockquote></p>
17176
17177 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
17178 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
17179 database</a>, please tell me about it.</p>
17180
17181 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
17182 packages and hardware.  One source would be to look at packages with
17183 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
17184 extract their modalias information.  Another would be to look at
17185 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
17186 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
17187 generate a modalias matching rule.  I have not tested any of these to
17188 see if it work.</p>
17189
17190 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
17191 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
17192 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
17193 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
17194
17195       </div>
17196       <div class="tags">
17197
17198
17199         Tags: <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>.
17200
17201
17202       </div>
17203     </div>
17204     <div class="padding"></div>
17205
17206     <div class="entry">
17207       <div class="title">
17208         <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>
17209       </div>
17210       <div class="date">
17211         14th January 2013
17212       </div>
17213       <div class="body">
17214         <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
17215 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
17216 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
17217 to document the details.  Here are my findings so far, also available
17218 in
17219 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
17220 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>:
17221
17222 <p><strong>Modalias decoded</strong></p>
17223
17224 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
17225 values stands for.  It is in part based on information from
17226 &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias</a> &gt;,
17227 &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;,
17228 &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
17229 &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;.
17230
17231 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
17232 this shell script:</p>
17233
17234 <pre>
17235 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u
17236 </pre>
17237
17238 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
17239 using modinfo:</p>
17240
17241 <pre>
17242 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
17243 alias:          serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
17244 alias:          serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
17245 %
17246 </pre>
17247
17248 <p><strong>PCI subtype</strong></p>
17249
17250 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this.  This is an Intel Host
17251 Bridge memory controller:</p>
17252
17253 <p><blockquote>
17254 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
17255 </blockquote></p>
17256
17257 <p>This represent these values:</p>
17258
17259 <pre>
17260  v   00008086  (vendor)
17261  d   00002770  (device)
17262  sv  00001028  (subvendor)
17263  sd  000001AD  (subdevice)
17264  bc  06        (bus class)
17265  sc  00        (bus subclass)
17266  i   00        (interface)
17267 </pre>
17268
17269 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
17270 -n' as 8086:2770.  The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
17271 0600.  The 0600 class is a host bridge.  Other useful bus values are
17272 0300 (VGA compatible card) and 0200 (Ethernet controller).</p>
17273
17274 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
17275 means.</p>
17276
17277 <p><strong>USB subtype</strong></p>
17278
17279 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this.  This is an internal
17280 USB hub in a laptop:</p>
17281
17282 <p><blockquote>
17283 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
17284 </blockquote></p>
17285
17286 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:</p>
17287
17288 <pre>
17289  v    1D6B  (device vendor)
17290  p    0001  (device product)
17291  d    0206  (bcddevice)
17292  dc     09  (device class)
17293  dsc    00  (device subclass)
17294  dp     00  (device protocol)
17295  ic     09  (interface class)
17296  isc    00  (interface subclass)
17297  ip     00  (interface protocol)
17298 </pre>
17299
17300 <p>The 0900 device class/subclass means hub.  Some times the relevant
17301 class is in the interface class section.  For a simple USB web camera,
17302 these alias entries show up:</p>
17303
17304 <p><blockquote>
17305 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
17306 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
17307 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
17308 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
17309 </blockquote></p>
17310
17311 <p>Interface class 0E01 is video control, 0E02 is video streaming (aka
17312 camera), 0101 is audio control device and 0102 is audio streaming (aka
17313 microphone).  Thus this is a camera with microphone included.</p>
17314
17315 <p><strong>ACPI subtype</strong></p>
17316
17317 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff.  This is an IR
17318 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:</p>
17319
17320 <p><blockquote>
17321 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
17322 </blockquote></p>
17323
17324 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.</p>
17325
17326 <p><strong>DMI subtype</strong></p>
17327
17328 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
17329 and model.  This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
17330 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:</p>
17331
17332 <p><blockquote>
17333 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(1.66):bd06/15/2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
17334 </blockquote></p>
17335
17336 <p>The values present are</p>
17337
17338 <pre>
17339  bvn  IBM            (BIOS vendor)
17340  bvr  1UETB6WW(1.66) (BIOS version)
17341  bd   06/15/2005     (BIOS date)
17342  svn  IBM            (system vendor)
17343  pn   2371H4G        (product name)
17344  pvr  ThinkPadX40    (product version)
17345  rvn  IBM            (board vendor)
17346  rn   2371H4G        (board name)
17347  rvr  NotAvailable   (board version)
17348  cvn  IBM            (chassis vendor)
17349  ct   10             (chassis type)
17350  cvr  NotAvailable   (chassis version)
17351 </pre>
17352
17353 <p>The chassis type 10 is Notebook.  Other interesting values can be
17354 found in the dmidecode source:</p>
17355
17356 <pre>
17357   3 Desktop
17358   4 Low Profile Desktop
17359   5 Pizza Box
17360   6 Mini Tower
17361   7 Tower
17362   8 Portable
17363   9 Laptop
17364  10 Notebook
17365  11 Hand Held
17366  12 Docking Station
17367  13 All In One
17368  14 Sub Notebook
17369  15 Space-saving
17370  16 Lunch Box
17371  17 Main Server Chassis
17372  18 Expansion Chassis
17373  19 Sub Chassis
17374  20 Bus Expansion Chassis
17375  21 Peripheral Chassis
17376  22 RAID Chassis
17377  23 Rack Mount Chassis
17378  24 Sealed-case PC
17379  25 Multi-system
17380  26 CompactPCI
17381  27 AdvancedTCA
17382  28 Blade
17383  29 Blade Enclosing
17384 </pre>
17385
17386 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
17387 table.  For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
17388 claim it is a desktop.</p>
17389
17390 <p><strong>SerIO subtype</strong></p>
17391
17392 <p>This type is used for PS/2 mouse plugs.  One example is from my
17393 test machine:</p>
17394
17395 <p><blockquote>
17396 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
17397 </blockquote></p>
17398
17399 <p>The values present are</p>
17400
17401 <pre>
17402   ty  01  (type)
17403   pr  00  (prototype)
17404   id  00  (id)
17405   ex  00  (extra)
17406 </pre>
17407
17408 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver.  I am not sure what
17409 the valid values are.</p>
17410
17411 <p><strong>Other subtypes</strong></p>
17412
17413 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
17414 file2alias.c.  There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
17415 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
17416 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
17417 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro.  I did not spend time documenting all of
17418 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
17419 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.</p>
17420
17421 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values</strong></p>
17422
17423 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
17424 one can use the following shell script:</p>
17425
17426 <pre>
17427   for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -0 cat | sort -u); do \
17428     echo "$id" ; \
17429     /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/  /' ; \
17430   done
17431 </pre>
17432
17433 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
17434 list is very long on my test machine):</p>
17435
17436 <pre>
17437   acpi:ACPI0003:
17438     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
17439   acpi:device:
17440   FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
17441   acpi:IBM0068:
17442     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
17443     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
17444     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
17445     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
17446   acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
17447     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
17448     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
17449     insmod /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
17450   [...]
17451 </pre>
17452
17453 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
17454 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
17455 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
17456 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel</a>.</p>
17457
17458 <p><strong>Update 2013-01-15:</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
17459 "find ... -print0 | xargs -0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
17460 in /sys/ with space in them.</p>
17461
17462       </div>
17463       <div class="tags">
17464
17465
17466         Tags: <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>.
17467
17468
17469       </div>
17470     </div>
17471     <div class="padding"></div>
17472
17473     <div class="entry">
17474       <div class="title">
17475         <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>
17476       </div>
17477       <div class="date">
17478         10th January 2013
17479       </div>
17480       <div class="body">
17481         <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
17482 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
17483 Launcher and updated the Debian package
17484 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile</a> to make
17485 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in.  I
17486 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
17487 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
17488 plug in his rocket launcher.  In the process I moved the source to a
17489 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
17490 contribute.  <a href="http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream</a>
17491 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
17492 years of relative silence.  The new git repository is not listed in
17493 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
17494 bit more before I upload the new version.  If you want to check out
17495 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
17496 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
17497 view</a> or use "<tt>git clone
17498 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git</tt>".</p>
17499
17500       </div>
17501       <div class="tags">
17502
17503
17504         Tags: <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>.
17505
17506
17507       </div>
17508     </div>
17509     <div class="padding"></div>
17510
17511     <div class="entry">
17512       <div class="title">
17513         <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>
17514       </div>
17515       <div class="date">
17516          9th January 2013
17517       </div>
17518       <div class="body">
17519         <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
17520 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
17521 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
17522 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
17523 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
17524 machine.  Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
17525 Linux distribution.  When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
17526 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
17527 I need to talk to it.  When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
17528 yubikey-personalization package.  The information required to do this
17529 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
17530
17531 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
17532 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg01206.html">use
17533 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>.  The idea is fairly
17534 simple:
17535
17536 <ul>
17537
17538 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
17539   starting when a user log in.</li>
17540
17541 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
17542   hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
17543
17544 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
17545   database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
17546   packages.</li>
17547
17548 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
17549   package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
17550
17551 </ul>
17552
17553 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
17554 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
17555 discover database to find packages and
17556 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/">PackageKit</a> to install
17557 packages.</p>
17558
17559 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
17560 draft package is now checked into
17561 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
17562 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>.  In the process, I updated the
17563 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html">discover-data</a>
17564 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
17565 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
17566 2.2013.01.09 to unstable.  I also discovered that the current
17567 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html">discover</a>
17568 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
17569 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present.  I ported it to use
17570 libusb as a fall back option to get it working.  The fixed package
17571 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
17572 because of the freeze).</p>
17573
17574 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
17575 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
17576 inserted):</p>
17577
17578 <p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-01-09-hw-autoinstall.png"></p>
17579
17580 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
17581 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
17582 program(s)" button should to be implemented.</p>
17583
17584 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
17585 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
17586 from hardware to Debian packages.  Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
17587 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
17588 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
17589 reportbug if it isn't.  Or, if you know of a better way to provide
17590 such mapping, please let me know.</p>
17591
17592 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
17593 should be considered before it is ready for production use.  Is dbus
17594 the correct way to detect new hardware?  At the moment I look for HAL
17595 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
17596 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop.  Are there better events to use?
17597 How should the user be notified?  Is the desktop notification
17598 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
17599 popup instead?  How should packages be installed?  When should they
17600 not be installed?</p>
17601
17602 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
17603 please send me an email. :)</p>
17604
17605       </div>
17606       <div class="tags">
17607
17608
17609         Tags: <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>.
17610
17611
17612       </div>
17613     </div>
17614     <div class="padding"></div>
17615
17616     <div class="entry">
17617       <div class="title">
17618         <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>
17619       </div>
17620       <div class="date">
17621          2nd January 2013
17622       </div>
17623       <div class="body">
17624         <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
17625 <a href="http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
17626 NXT</a>.  My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
17627 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
17628 already in Debian Squeeze.  If Debian support for LEGO is something
17629 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
17630 <a href="irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego</a> (server
17631 irc.debian.org).  There is a lot that could be done to improve the
17632 Debian support for LEGO designers.  For example both CAD software
17633 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)</p>
17634
17635 <p>Update 2012-01-03: A
17636 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page</a>
17637 including links to Lego related packages is now available.</p>
17638
17639       </div>
17640       <div class="tags">
17641
17642
17643         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot</a>.
17644
17645
17646       </div>
17647     </div>
17648     <div class="padding"></div>
17649
17650     <div class="entry">
17651       <div class="title">
17652         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Christmas_present_for_Skolelinux___Debian_Edu.html">A Christmas present for Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
17653       </div>
17654       <div class="date">
17655         28th December 2012
17656       </div>
17657       <div class="body">
17658         <p>I was happy to discover a few days ago that the
17659 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a>
17660 project also this year received a Christmas present from Another
17661 Agency in Trondheim.  NOK 1000,- showed up on our donation account
17662 December 24th.  I want to express our thanks for this very welcome
17663 present.  As the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is very short on
17664 funding these days, and thus lack the money to do regular developer
17665 gatherings, this donation was most welcome.  One developer gathering
17666 cost around NOK 15&nbsp;000,-, so we need quite a lot more to keep the
17667 development pace we want.  Thus, I hope their example this year is
17668 followed by many others. :)</p>
17669
17670 <p>The public list of donors can be found on
17671 <a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">the
17672 donation page</a> for the project, which also contain instructions if
17673 you want to donate to the project.</p>
17674
17675       </div>
17676       <div class="tags">
17677
17678
17679         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
17680
17681
17682       </div>
17683     </div>
17684     <div class="padding"></div>
17685
17686     <div class="entry">
17687       <div class="title">
17688         <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>
17689       </div>
17690       <div class="date">
17691         25th December 2012
17692       </div>
17693       <div class="body">
17694         <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
17695 year!  I hope next year will prove to be a good year.</p>
17696
17697 <p><a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a>, the digital
17698 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
17699 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
17700 experiment.  And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
17701 <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> is about to improve a bit.
17702 The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
17703 package</a> (version 0.7.2-2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
17704 in <a href="http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue</A>
17705 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
17706 name.</p>
17707
17708 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
17709 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
17710 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:</p>
17711
17712 <blockquote><pre>
17713 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
17714 cd bitcoin
17715 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
17716 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
17717 </pre></blockquote>
17718
17719 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well.  The
17720 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
17721 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment.  Note that the
17722 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
17723 around 5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment.  Make sure your
17724 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
17725 all the blocks.  The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
17726 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
17727 not be able to get all the features out of the client.</p>
17728
17729 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
17730 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
17731 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
17732
17733       </div>
17734       <div class="tags">
17735
17736
17737         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>.
17738
17739
17740       </div>
17741     </div>
17742     <div class="padding"></div>
17743
17744     <div class="entry">
17745       <div class="title">
17746         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</a>
17747       </div>
17748       <div class="date">
17749         21st December 2012
17750       </div>
17751       <div class="body">
17752         <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
17753 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
17754 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
17755 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
17756 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
17757 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
17758 is now maintained by a
17759 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
17760 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
17761 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
17762 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
17763 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
17764 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
17765 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
17766 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
17767 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
17768 Corallo in a
17769 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
17770 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
17771 Debian package.</p>
17772
17773 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
17774 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
17775 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
17776 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
17777 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
17778 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
17779 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
17780 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
17781 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
17782 new version to unstable.
17783
17784 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
17785 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
17786 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
17787 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
17788 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
17789 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
17790 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
17791 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
17792 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
17793 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
17794 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
17795 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
17796 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
17797 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
17798 have not tested them.</p>
17799
17800 <p>My
17801 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
17802 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
17803 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
17804 years ago, as can be
17805 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
17806 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
17807 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
17808 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
17809 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
17810 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
17811 the same address as last time,
17812 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
17813
17814       </div>
17815       <div class="tags">
17816
17817
17818         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>.
17819
17820
17821       </div>
17822     </div>
17823     <div class="padding"></div>
17824
17825     <div class="entry">
17826       <div class="title">
17827         <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>
17828       </div>
17829       <div class="date">
17830         18th December 2012
17831       </div>
17832       <div class="body">
17833         <p>A few days ago I came across
17834 <a href="http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/hledger/">a blog post from Joey
17835 Hess</a> describing <a href="http://ledger-cli.org/">ledger</a> and
17836 hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting.  I found it
17837 interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
17838 accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
17839 the different web based systems we use.  I find it hard to find what I
17840 look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
17841 the systems.  Ledger seem different.  The accounting data is kept in
17842 text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
17843
17844 are at least <a href="https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Ports">five
17845 different implementations</a> able to read the format.  An example
17846 entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
17847 generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:</p>
17848
17849 <blockquote><pre>
17850 2004-05-27 Book Store
17851       Expenses:Books                 $20.00
17852       Liabilities:Visa
17853 </pre></blockquote>
17854
17855 <p>The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
17856 look for others using it.  I found blog posts from
17857 <a href="http://blog.spang.cc/posts/hledger_rocks_my_world/">Christine
17858 Spang</a>,
17859 <a href="http://bugsplat.info/2010-05-23-keeping-finances-with-ledger.html">Pete
17860 Keen</a>,
17861 <a href="http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2010/11/06/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/">Andrew
17862 Cantino</a> and
17863 <a href="http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/2012/11/29/command-line-double-entry-accounting/">Ronald
17864 Ip</a> describing how they use it, as well as a post from
17865 <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ledger-cli/r0oWjwbQ9Bo">Bradley
17866 M. Kuhn</a> at the Software Freedom Conservancy.  All seemed like good
17867 recommendations fitting my need.</p>
17868
17869 <p>The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/ledger.html">ledger</a>
17870 package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
17871 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/haskell-hledger.html">hledger</a>
17872 package only is available in Debian Sid.  As I use Squeeze, ledger
17873 seemed the best choice to get started.</p>
17874
17875 <p>To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
17876 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/tools/lodo2ledger">web scraper</a> for
17877 <a href="http://www.lodo.no/">LODO</a>, the accounting system used by
17878 the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> association, and started to
17879 play with the data set.  I'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
17880 am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
17881 using the "<tt>ledger balance</tt>" command.  But I will have to
17882 gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
17883 for the organisations I am involved in.</p>
17884
17885       </div>
17886       <div class="tags">
17887
17888
17889         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
17890
17891
17892       </div>
17893     </div>
17894     <div class="padding"></div>
17895
17896     <div class="entry">
17897       <div class="title">
17898         <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>
17899       </div>
17900       <div class="date">
17901          6th December 2012
17902       </div>
17903       <div class="body">
17904         <p>Where I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of
17905 Oslo</a>, we use the
17906 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/cerebrum/">Cerebrum user
17907 administration system</a> to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
17908 I've known since the system was written that the server is providing
17909 an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC">XML-RPC</a> API, but
17910 I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we
17911 always use the bofh command line client at work.  Until today.  I want
17912 to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up
17913 virtual machines.  Here are a few notes on how to use it with
17914 Python.</p>
17915
17916 <p>I started by looking at the source of the Java
17917 <a href="http://cerebrum.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/cerebrum/trunk/cerebrum/clients/jbofh/">bofh
17918 client</a>, to figure out how it connected to the API server.  I also
17919 googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
17920 <a href="http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XML-RPC-HOWTO/xmlrpc-howto-python.html">a
17921 simple example in</a> the XML-RPC howto.</p>
17922
17923 <p>This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
17924 commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
17925 user currently logged in:</p>
17926
17927 <blockquote><pre>
17928 #!/usr/bin/env python
17929 import getpass
17930 import xmlrpclib
17931 server_url = 'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:8000';
17932 username = getpass.getuser()
17933 password = getpass.getpass()
17934 server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
17935 #print server.get_commands(sessionid)
17936 sessionid = server.login(username, password)
17937 print server.run_command(sessionid, "user_info", username)
17938 result = server.logout(sessionid)
17939 print result
17940 </pre></blockquote>
17941
17942 <p>Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
17943 and DHCP updates I wanted to do.</p>
17944
17945       </div>
17946       <div class="tags">
17947
17948
17949         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>.
17950
17951
17952       </div>
17953     </div>
17954     <div class="padding"></div>
17955
17956     <div class="entry">
17957       <div class="title">
17958         <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>
17959       </div>
17960       <div class="date">
17961         17th November 2012
17962       </div>
17963       <div class="body">
17964         <p>While working on a
17965 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Norwegian
17966 translation of the Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig</a> (76% done),
17967 which cover the problems with todays copyright law and how it stifles
17968 creativity, one idea occurred to me.  The idea is to get the tax
17969 office to help make more works enter the public domain and also help
17970 make it easier to clear rights for using copyrighted works.</p>
17971
17972 <p>I mentioned this idea briefly during Yesterdays
17973 <a href="http://www.farmann.no/2012/11/14/john-perry-barlow-in-oslo-friday-nov-16
17974 -15-30-19-00/">presentation
17975 by John Perry Barlow</a>, and concluded that it was best to put it
17976 in writing for a wider audience.  The idea is not really based on the
17977 argument that copyrighted works are "intellectual property", as the
17978 core requirement is that copyrighted work have value for the copyright
17979 holder and the tax office like to collect their share from any value
17980 controlled by the citizens in a country.  I'm sharing the idea here to
17981 let others consider it and perhaps shoot it down with a fresh set of
17982 arguments.</p>
17983
17984 <p>Most valuables are taxed by the government.  At least here in
17985 Norway, the amount of money you have, the value of our land property,
17986 the value of your house, the value of your car, the value of our
17987 stocks and other valuables are all added together.  If the tax value
17988 of these values exceed your debt, you have to pay the tax office some
17989 taxes for these values.  And copyrighted work have value.  It have
17990 value for the rights holder, who can earn money selling access to the
17991 work.  But it is not included in the tax calculations?  Why not?</p>
17992
17993 <p>If the government want to tax copyrighted works, it would want to
17994 maintain a database of all the copyrighted works and who are the
17995 rights holders for a given works, to be able to associate the works
17996 value to the right citizen or company for tax purposes.  If such
17997 database exist, it will become a lot easier to find out who to talk to
17998 for clearing permissions to use a copyrighted work, which is a very
17999 hard operation with todays copyright law.  To ensure that copyright
18000 holders keep the database up-to-date, it would have to become a
18001 requirement to be able to collect money for granting access to
18002 copyrighted works that the work is listed in the database with the
18003 correct right holder.</p>
18004
18005 <p>If copyright causes copyright holders to have to pay more taxes,
18006 they will have a small incentive to "disown" their copyright, and let
18007 the work enter the public domain. For works with several right holders
18008 one of the right holders could state (and get it registered in the
18009 database) that she do not need to be consulted when clearing rights to
18010 use the work in question and thus will not get any income from that
18011 work.  Stating this would have to be impossible to revert and stop the
18012 tax office from adding the value of that work to the given citizens
18013 tax calculation.  I assume the copyright law would stay the same,
18014 allowing creators to pick a license of their choosing, and also
18015 allowing them to put their work directly in the public domain.  The
18016 existence of such database will make it even easier to clear rights,
18017 and if the right holders listed in the database is taxed, this system
18018 would increase the amount of works that enter the public domain.</p>
18019
18020 <p>The effect would be that the tax office help to make it easier to
18021 get rights to use the works that have not yet entered the public
18022 domain and help to get more work into the public domain.</p>
18023
18024 <p>Why have such taxing not happened yet?  I am sure the tax office
18025 would like to tax copyrighted work values if they could.</p>
18026
18027       </div>
18028       <div class="tags">
18029
18030
18031         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>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>.
18032
18033
18034       </div>
18035     </div>
18036     <div class="padding"></div>
18037
18038     <div class="entry">
18039       <div class="title">
18040         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html">Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß</a>
18041       </div>
18042       <div class="date">
18043         14th November 2012
18044       </div>
18045       <div class="body">
18046         <p>Here is another interview with one of the people in the <a
18047 href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
18048 community.  I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
18049 if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
18050 After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
18051 the people behind the German
18052 "<a href="http://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/">IT-Zukunft Schule</a>"
18053 project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview.  Give a warm
18054 welcome to Angela Fuß. :)</p>
18055
18056 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
18057
18058 <p>I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
18059 Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my
18060 two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.
18061
18062 <p>At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
18063 the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
18064 Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
18065 growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
18066 system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-).  We are also
18067 in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.</p>
18068
18069 <p>In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
18070 nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there.  Besides
18071 that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
18072 working in our own school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" in North
18073 Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
18074 relationship management and the communication processes in the
18075 project.</p>
18076
18077 <p>Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
18078 and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
18079 and a yoga teacher.</p>
18080
18081 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
18082 project?</strong></p>
18083
18084 <p>I fell in love with Mike ;-).</p>
18085
18086 <p>Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
18087 Free Software.  At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
18088 founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
18089 their IT environment.  Often when Mike came home from working at the
18090 newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
18091 several points where the communication with the schools head or the
18092 teachers did not work.  So we were clear that he would not work for
18093 one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
18094 between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
18095 parents.</p>
18096
18097 <p>Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
18098 started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
18099 schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
18100 Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
18101 networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
18102 Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
18103 Germany.</p>
18104
18105 <p>For information about our school project you can read
18106 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">the
18107 interview with Mike Gabriel</a>.</p>
18108
18109 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
18110 Edu?</strong></p>
18111
18112 <p>First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
18113 answer comes rather from a social point of view.</p>
18114
18115 <p>The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
18116 and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
18117 background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
18118 and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
18119 something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
18120 ;-). This is of course a user experience.  What I also get as a big
18121 advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
18122 works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
18123 teachers, parents...</p>
18124
18125 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
18126 Edu?</strong></p>
18127
18128 <p>I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
18129 Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
18130
18131 <p>What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
18132 the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
18133 marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
18134 schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
18135 I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
18136
18137 <p>Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
18138 do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
18139 democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
18140 and helpful.  I am also missing some kind of contact between the
18141 Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
18142 level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
18143 different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
18144
18145 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
18146
18147 <p>On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
18148 on.  As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
18149 LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
18150 my N900 running with Maemo.</p>
18151
18152 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
18153 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
18154
18155 <p>I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft
18156 Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
18157 schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
18158 that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
18159 strategy has three crucial pillars:</p>
18160
18161 <ul>
18162
18163 <li>We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
18164 concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
18165 kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.</li>
18166
18167 <li>Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
18168 are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
18169 beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
18170 they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
18171 they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
18172 needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
18173 we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.</li>
18174
18175 <li>Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
18176 co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
18177 contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
18178 offer to become more and more independent from us.</li>
18179
18180 </ul>
18181
18182       </div>
18183       <div class="tags">
18184
18185
18186         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
18187
18188
18189       </div>
18190     </div>
18191     <div class="padding"></div>
18192
18193     <div class="entry">
18194       <div class="title">
18195         <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>
18196       </div>
18197       <div class="date">
18198          4th November 2012
18199       </div>
18200       <div class="body">
18201         <p>Slashdot just ran a story about the European Central Bank (ECB)
18202 <a href="http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/virtualcurrencyschemes201210en.pdf">releasing
18203 a report (PDF)</a> about virtual currencies and
18204 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>.  It is interesting to
18205 see how a member of the bitcoin community
18206 <a href="http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/10/30/the-ecb-report-on-bitcoin-and-virtual-currencies.html">receive
18207 the report</a>.  As for the future, I suspect the central banks and
18208 the governments will outlaw bitcoin if it gain any popularity, to avoid
18209 competition.  My thoughts go to the
18210 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wörgl">Wörgl experiment</a> with
18211 negative inflation on cash which was such a success that it was
18212 terminated by the Austrian National Bank in 1933.  A successful
18213 alternative would be a threat to the current money system and gain
18214 powerful forces to work against it.</p>
18215
18216 <p>While checking out the current status of bitcoin, I also discovered
18217 that the community already seem to have
18218 <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/27/3271637/bitcoin-savings-trust-pyramid-scheme-shuts-down">experienced
18219 its first pyramid game / Ponzi scheme</a>.  Not very surprising, given
18220 how members of "small" communities tend to trust each other.  I guess
18221 enterprising crocks will try again and again, as they do anywhere
18222 wealth is available.</p>
18223
18224       </div>
18225       <div class="tags">
18226
18227
18228         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>.
18229
18230
18231       </div>
18232     </div>
18233     <div class="padding"></div>
18234
18235     <div class="entry">
18236       <div class="title">
18237         <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>
18238       </div>
18239       <div class="date">
18240         26th October 2012
18241       </div>
18242       <div class="body">
18243         <p>I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
18244 looking after the computers, mostly on the unix side, but in general
18245 all over the place.  I am also a member (and currently leader) of
18246 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG association</a>, which in turn
18247 make me a member of <a href="http://www.usenix.org/">USENIX</a>.  NUUG
18248 is an member organisation for us in Norway interested in free
18249 software, open standards and unix like operating systems, and USENIX
18250 is a US based member organisation with similar targets.  And thanks to
18251 these memberships, I get all issues of the great USENIX magazine
18252 <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">;login:</a> in the
18253 mail several times a year.  The magazine is great, and I read most of
18254 it every time.</p>
18255
18256 <p>In the last issue of the USENIX magazine ;login:, there is an
18257 article by <a href="http://www.skendric.com/">Stuart Kendrick</a> from
18258 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center titled
18259 "<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/october-2012-volume-37-number-5/what-takes-us-down">What
18260 Takes Us Down</a>" (longer version also
18261 <a href="http://www.skendric.com/problem/incident-analysis/2012-06-30/What-Takes-Us-Down.pdf">available
18262 from his own site</a>), where he report what he found when he
18263 processed the outage reports (both planned and unplanned) from the
18264 last twelve years and classified them according to cause, time of day,
18265 etc etc.  The article is a good read to get some empirical data on
18266 what kind of problems affect a data centre, but what really inspired
18267 me was the kind of reporting they had put in place since 2000.<p>
18268
18269 <p>The centre set up a mailing list, and started to send fairly
18270 standardised messages to this list when a outage was planned or when
18271 it already occurred, to announce the plan and get feedback on the
18272 assumtions on scope and user impact.  Here is the two example from the
18273 article: First the unplanned outage:
18274
18275 <blockquote><pre>
18276 Subject:     Exchange 2003 Cluster Issues
18277 Severity:    Critical (Unplanned)
18278 Start:       Monday, May 7, 2012, 11:58
18279 End:         Monday, May 7, 2012, 12:38
18280 Duration:    40 minutes
18281 Scope:       Exchange 2003
18282 Description: The HTTPS service on the Exchange cluster crashed, triggering
18283              a cluster failover.
18284
18285 User Impact: During this period, all Exchange users were unable to
18286              access e-mail. Zimbra users were unaffected.
18287 Technician:  [xxx]
18288 </pre></blockquote>
18289
18290 Next the planned outage:
18291
18292 <blockquote><pre>
18293 Subject:     H Building Switch Upgrades
18294 Severity:    Major (Planned)
18295 Start:       Saturday, June 16, 2012, 06:00
18296 End:         Saturday, June 16, 2012, 16:00
18297 Duration:    10 hours
18298 Scope:       H2 Transport
18299 Description: Currently, Catalyst 4006s provide 10/100 Ethernet to end-
18300              stations. We will replace these with newer Catalyst
18301              4510s.
18302 User Impact: All users on H2 will be isolated from the network during
18303              this work. Afterward, they will have gigabit
18304              connectivity.
18305 Technician:  [xxx]
18306 </pre></blockquote>
18307
18308 <p>He notes in his article that the date formats and other fields have
18309 been a bit too free form to make it easy to automatically process them
18310 into a database for further analysis, and I would have used ISO 8601
18311 dates myself to make it easier to process (in other words I would ask
18312 people to write '2012-06-16 06:00 +0000' instead of the start time
18313 format listed above).  There are also other issues with the format
18314 that could be improved, read the article for the details.</p>
18315
18316 <p>I find the idea of standardising outage messages seem to be such a
18317 good idea that I would like to get it implemented here at the
18318 university too.  We do register
18319 <a href="http://www.uio.no/tjenester/it/aktuelt/planlagte-tjenesteavbrudd/">planned
18320 changes and outages in a calendar</a>, and report the to a mailing
18321 list, but we do not do so in a structured format and there is not a
18322 report to the same location for unplanned outages.  Perhaps something
18323 for other sites to consider too?</p>
18324
18325       </div>
18326       <div class="tags">
18327
18328
18329         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>.
18330
18331
18332       </div>
18333     </div>
18334     <div class="padding"></div>
18335
18336     <div class="entry">
18337       <div class="title">
18338         <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>
18339       </div>
18340       <div class="date">
18341         22nd October 2012
18342       </div>
18343       <div class="body">
18344         <p>A blog post from Martin Bekkelund today tell the story of
18345 <a href="http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/">how
18346 Amazon erased the books from a customer's kindle, locked the account
18347 and refuse to tell the customer why</a>.  If a real book store did
18348 this to a customer, it would be called breaking into private property
18349 and theft.  The story has spread around the net today.  A bit more
18350 background information is available in Norwegian from
18351 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904658/hun-ble-kastet-ut-av-amazon">digi.no</a>.
18352 It is no surprise that digital restriction mechanisms (DRM) are used
18353 this way, as it has been warned about such abuse since DRM was
18354 introduced many years back.  And Amazon proved in 2009 that it was
18355 willing to
18356 <a href="http://boingboing.net/2009/07/20/amazons-orwellian-de.html">
18357 break into customers equipment and remove the books</a> people had
18358 bought, when it removed the book 1984 by George Orwell from all the
18359 customers who had bought it.  From the official comments, it even
18360 sounded like
18361 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html">Amazon
18362 would never do that again</a>.  And here we are, three years
18363 later.</p>
18364
18365 <p>And thought this action is
18366 <a href="http://www.itavisen.no/904648/forbrukerraadet-helt-haarreisende">against
18367 Norwegian regulations and law</a>, it is according to the terms of use
18368 as written by Amazon, and it is hard to hold Amazon accountable to
18369 Norwegian laws.  It is just yet another example of unacceptable terms
18370 of use on the web, and how they are used to remove customer
18371 rights.</p>
18372
18373 <p>Luckily for electronic books, there are alternatives without
18374 unacceptable terms.  For example
18375 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about 40,000
18376 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a> (1,652
18377 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The Internet
18378 Archive</a> (3,641,797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which
18379 can read by anyone and shared with anyone.</p>
18380
18381 <p>Update 2012-10-23: This story broke in the morning on Monday. In
18382 the evening after the story had spread all across the Internet, Amazon
18383 restored the account of the user, as reported by
18384 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904675/helomvending-fra-amazon">digi.no</a>
18385 and <a href="http://nrk.no/kultur-og-underholdning/1.8368487">NRK</a>.
18386 Apparently public pressure work.  The story from Martin have seen
18387 several twitter messages per minute the last 24 hours, which is quite
18388 a lot, and is still drawing a lot of attention.  But even when the
18389 account is restored, the fundamental problem still exist.  I recommend
18390 reading two opinions from
18391 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm">Simon
18392 Phipps</a> and
18393 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/10/is-amazon-playing-fair/index.htm">Glen
18394 Moody</a> if you want to learn more about the fundamentals and more
18395 details about the original story.</p>
18396
18397       </div>
18398       <div class="tags">
18399
18400
18401         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>.
18402
18403
18404       </div>
18405     </div>
18406     <div class="padding"></div>
18407
18408     <div class="entry">
18409       <div class="title">
18410         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_fight_for_freedom_and_privacy.html">The fight for freedom and privacy</a>
18411       </div>
18412       <div class="date">
18413         18th October 2012
18414       </div>
18415       <div class="body">
18416         <p>Civil liberties and privacy in the western world are going down the
18417 drain, and it is hard to fight against it.  I try to do my best, but
18418 time is limited.  I hope you do your best too.  A few years ago I came
18419 across a marvellous drawing by
18420 <a href="http://www.claybennett.com/about.html">Clay Bennett</a>
18421 visualising some of what is going on.
18422
18423 <p><a href="http://www.claybennett.com/pages/security_fence.html">
18424 <img src="http://www.claybennett.com/images/archivetoons/security_fence.jpg"></a></p>
18425
18426 <blockquote>
18427 «They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
18428 safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.» - Benjamin Franklin
18429 </blockquote>
18430
18431 <p>Do you feel safe at the airport?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when
18432 you see a surveillance camera?  I do not.  Do you feel safe when you
18433 leave electronic traces of your behaviour and opinions?  I do not.  I
18434 just remember <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon">the
18435 Panopticon</a>, and can not help to think that we are slowly
18436 transforming our society to a huge Panopticon on our own.</p>
18437
18438       </div>
18439       <div class="tags">
18440
18441
18442         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>.
18443
18444
18445       </div>
18446     </div>
18447     <div class="padding"></div>
18448
18449     <div class="entry">
18450       <div class="title">
18451         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ColonHelp_produser_sue_WordPress_to_silence_critic.html">ColonHelp produser sue WordPress to silence critic</a>
18452       </div>
18453       <div class="date">
18454         12th October 2012
18455       </div>
18456       <div class="body">
18457         <p>Thanks to a blog post by
18458 <a href="http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.no/2012/10/a-shitstorm-is-comming.html">Eddy
18459 Petrișor</a>, I became aware of yet another "alternative medicine"
18460 company using legal intimidation tactics to scare off critics.
18461 According to the originating blog post about the detox "cure"
18462 <a href="http://insulaindoielii.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/colon-help-sues-wordpress/">ColonHelp
18463 and its producers Zenyth Pharmaceuticals actions</a>, the producer
18464 sues Wordpress to get rid of the critical information.  To check if
18465 the story was for real, I contacted Automattic, the company behind
18466 wordpress.com, and they reply was "We can confirm that Zenyth is
18467 seeking a court order against WordPress / Automattic.  However, we
18468 don't believe the Terms of Service have been violated in this
18469 matter".</p>
18470
18471 <p>The story seem to be simply that a blogger checked the scientific
18472 foundation for a popular health product in Rumania, ColonHelp, and
18473 reported that there was no reason at all to believe it improved the
18474 health of its users.  This caused the company behind the product,
18475 Zenyth Pharmaceuticals, to use legal intimidation to try to silence
18476 the critic, instead of presenting its views and scientific foundation
18477 to argue its side.</p>
18478
18479 <p>This is the usual story, and the Zenyth Pharmaceuticals company
18480 deserve everyone to know how it failed to act properly.  Lets hope the
18481 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect">Streisand
18482 effect</a> can make it rethink its strategy.</p>
18483
18484 <p>What is the harm, you might think.  I suggest you take a look at
18485 <a href="http://www.whatstheharm.net/detoxification.html">a list of
18486 victims of detoxification</a>.</p>
18487
18488       </div>
18489       <div class="tags">
18490
18491
18492         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>.
18493
18494
18495       </div>
18496     </div>
18497     <div class="padding"></div>
18498
18499     <div class="entry">
18500       <div class="title">
18501         <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>
18502       </div>
18503       <div class="date">
18504          3rd October 2012
18505       </div>
18506       <div class="body">
18507         <p>I just read the blog post from Tim Retout
18508 <a href="http://retout.co.uk/blog/2012/10/02/the-library-challenge">about
18509 the computer science book collection available in his local
18510 library</a>, and just wanted to share my comment on his theory about
18511 computer books becoming obsolete so soon.  That is part of the reason
18512 why the selection is so sad in almost any local library (it is in mine
18513 too), but I believe the major contributing factor is that the people
18514 buying books to the library have no way to know a good and future
18515 computer classic from trash.  And they need to know which one will
18516 become a classic in the future, as they would normally buy one of the
18517 recently published books.</p>
18518
18519 <p>During my university years, I worked for a while at the university
18520 library, and even there the person in charge of buying computer
18521 related books (and in fact any natural science related book), did not
18522 know enough about computers to make a good educated guess.  Once, just
18523 before Christmas, they had some leftover money on the book budget and
18524 I was asked if I could pick out a lot of computer books in the
18525 university book store, for the library to buy for their collection.  I
18526 had a great time picking all the books I dreamt of buying and reading,
18527 and the books I knew were classics (like most of the
18528 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Richard_Stevens">Stevens
18529 collection</a>).  I picked several of the generic O'Reilly books (ie
18530 documenting protocols, formats and systems, not specific versions of
18531 products) and stayed away from the 'teach yourself X in N days' class.
18532 I had a great time, and probably picked out more than a hundred books
18533 for the library that evening.</p>
18534
18535 <p>The sad fact is that there is no way a overworked librarian is
18536 going to know that for example
18537 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming">The
18538 Practice of Programming</a> is a must-have in any computer library,
18539 and they will most of the time end up picking the wrong books to buy.
18540 Perhaps you can help your local library make better choices by giving
18541 the suggestions for books to get?  I know they would love to hear from
18542 you, even if their budget might block them from getting your favourite
18543 book right away.</p>
18544
18545       </div>
18546       <div class="tags">
18547
18548
18549         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
18550
18551
18552       </div>
18553     </div>
18554     <div class="padding"></div>
18555
18556     <div class="entry">
18557       <div class="title">
18558         <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>
18559       </div>
18560       <div class="date">
18561         23rd September 2012
18562       </div>
18563       <div class="body">
18564         <p>Since this summer, I have worked in my spare time on a Norwegian <a
18565 href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book <a
18566 href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
18567 The reason is that this book is a great primer on what problems exist
18568 in the current copyright laws, and I want it to be available also for
18569 those that are reluctant do read an English book.
18570
18571 When I started, I
18572 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
18573 for volunteers</a> to help me, but too few have volunteered so far,
18574 and progress is a bit slow.  Anyway, today I broken the 70 percent
18575 mark for the first rough translation.  At the moment, less than 700
18576 strings (paragraphs, index terms, titles) are left to translate.  With
18577 my current progress of 10-20 strings per day, it will take a while to
18578 complete the translation.  This graph show the updated progress:</p>
18579
18580 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
18581
18582 <p>Progress have slowed down lately due to family and work
18583 commitments.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out
18584 the project files currently available from
18585 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
18586
18587 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
18588 the updated
18589 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
18590 and
18591 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
18592 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
18593 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
18594 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
18595
18596       </div>
18597       <div class="tags">
18598
18599
18600         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>.
18601
18602
18603       </div>
18604     </div>
18605     <div class="padding"></div>
18606
18607     <div class="entry">
18608       <div class="title">
18609         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html">Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda</a>
18610       </div>
18611       <div class="date">
18612         17th September 2012
18613       </div>
18614       <div class="body">
18615         <p>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
18616 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
18617 community, I finally found time to wrap up another.  This time it is
18618 Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
18619 this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
18620 administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
18621 conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.</p>
18622
18623 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
18624
18625 <p>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
18626 in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
18627 university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
18628 Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
18629 IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
18630 got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
18631 labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
18632 the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
18633 training is anyway very important</p>
18634
18635 <p>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
18636 <a href="http://www.spse.ch/">SPSE school</a> (secondary) is a very
18637 special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
18638 all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
18639 recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
18640
18641 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
18642 project?</strong></p>
18643
18644 <p>Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
18645 already several years ago. But since the system was still not
18646 Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
18647 use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
18648 next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
18649 hole.</p>
18650
18651 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18652 Edu?</strong></p>
18653
18654 <p>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
18655 very generous for help and hints.  Chat help is crucial, together with
18656 the mailing list.  Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
18657 engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
18658 and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
18659 can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
18660 platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
18661 head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
18662 hassle.</p>
18663
18664 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
18665 Edu?</strong></p>
18666
18667 <p>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
18668 flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
18669 there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
18670 need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
18671 devices that have specific software packages for another specific
18672 distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
18673 Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
18674 and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)</p>
18675
18676 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
18677
18678 <p>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
18679 mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
18680 combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
18681 <a href="http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html">Perceus</a>
18682 has the same...</p>
18683
18684 <p>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
18685 only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
18686 something breaks.  Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
18687 statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.</p>
18688
18689 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
18690 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
18691
18692 <P>I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
18693 cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
18694 just because they are normally not open to change.</p>
18695
18696 <p>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
18697 to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
18698 don't.</p>
18699
18700 <p>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
18701 laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
18702 we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
18703 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
18704 reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
18705 repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
18706 Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.</p>
18707
18708       </div>
18709       <div class="tags">
18710
18711
18712         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
18713
18714
18715       </div>
18716     </div>
18717     <div class="padding"></div>
18718
18719     <div class="entry">
18720       <div class="title">
18721         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_activity_to_standardise_video_codec.html">IETF activity to standardise video codec</a>
18722       </div>
18723       <div class="date">
18724         15th September 2012
18725       </div>
18726       <div class="body">
18727         <p>After the
18728 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">Opus
18729 codec made</a> it into <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> as
18730 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716</a>, I had a look
18731 to see if there is any activity in IETF to standardise a video codec
18732 too, and I was happy to discover that there is some activity in this
18733 area.  A non-"working group" mailing list
18734 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/video-codec">video-codec</a>
18735 was
18736 <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
18737 formal working group should be formed.</p>
18738
18739 <p>I look forward to see how this plays out.  There is already
18740 <a href="http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/video-codec/current/msg00003.html">an
18741 email from someone</a> in the MPEG group at ISO asking people to
18742 participate in the ISO group.  Given how ISO failed with OOXML and given
18743 that it so far (as far as I can remember) only have produced
18744 multimedia formats requiring royalty payments, I suspect
18745 joining the ISO group would be a complete waste of time, but I am not
18746 involved in any codec work and my opinion will not matter much.</p>
18747
18748 <p>If one of my readers is involved with codec work, I hope she will
18749 join this work to standardise a royalty free video codec within
18750 IETF.</p>
18751
18752       </div>
18753       <div class="tags">
18754
18755
18756         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>.
18757
18758
18759       </div>
18760     </div>
18761     <div class="padding"></div>
18762
18763     <div class="entry">
18764       <div class="title">
18765         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IETF_standardize_its_first_multimedia_codec__Opus.html">IETF standardize its first multimedia codec: Opus</a>
18766       </div>
18767       <div class="date">
18768         12th September 2012
18769       </div>
18770       <div class="body">
18771         <p>Yesterday, <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> announced the
18772 publication of of
18773 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716">RFC 6716, the Definition
18774 of the Opus Audio Codec</a>, a low latency, variable bandwidth, codec
18775 intended for both VoIP, film and music.  This is the first time, as
18776 far as I know, that IETF have standardized a multimedia codec.  In
18777 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3533">RFC 3533</a>, IETF
18778 standardized the OGG container format, and it has proven to be a great
18779 royalty free container for audio, video and movies.  I hope IETF will
18780 continue to standardize more royalty free codeces, after ISO and MPEG
18781 have proven incapable of securing everyone equal rights to publish
18782 multimedia content on the Internet.</p>
18783
18784 <p>IETF require two interoperating independent implementations to
18785 ratify a standard, and have so far ensured to only standardize royalty
18786 free specifications.  Both are key factors to allow everyone (rich and
18787 poor), to compete on equal terms on the Internet.</p>
18788
18789 <p>Visit the <a href="http://opus-codec.org/">Opus project page</a> if
18790 you want to learn more about the solution.</p>
18791
18792       </div>
18793       <div class="tags">
18794
18795
18796         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>.
18797
18798
18799       </div>
18800     </div>
18801     <div class="padding"></div>
18802
18803     <div class="entry">
18804       <div class="title">
18805         <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>
18806       </div>
18807       <div class="date">
18808          7th September 2012
18809       </div>
18810       <div class="body">
18811         <p>As I
18812 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
18813 this summer</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
18814 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
18815 <a href="https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
18816 repository for the project</a>.</p>
18817
18818 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
18819 to the HTML version.  To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
18820 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
18821 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.</p>
18822
18823 <p>Want to sing?  You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
18824 PostScript formats at
18825 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
18826 Science Songbook</a>.</p>
18827
18828       </div>
18829       <div class="tags">
18830
18831
18832         Tags: <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>.
18833
18834
18835       </div>
18836     </div>
18837     <div class="padding"></div>
18838
18839     <div class="entry">
18840       <div class="title">
18841         <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>
18842       </div>
18843       <div class="date">
18844         23rd August 2012
18845       </div>
18846       <div class="body">
18847         <p>I came across a great comment from Simon Phipps today, about how
18848 <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/how-microsoft-was-forced-open-office-200233">Microsoft
18849 have been forced to open Office</a>, and it made me remember and
18850 revisit the great site
18851 <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">officeshots</a> which allow you
18852 to check out how different programs present the ODF file format.  I
18853 recommend both to those of my readers interested in ODF. :)</p>
18854
18855       </div>
18856       <div class="tags">
18857
18858
18859         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>.
18860
18861
18862       </div>
18863     </div>
18864     <div class="padding"></div>
18865
18866     <div class="entry">
18867       <div class="title">
18868         <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>
18869       </div>
18870       <div class="date">
18871         17th August 2012
18872       </div>
18873       <div class="body">
18874         <p>In my spare time, I currently work on a Norwegian
18875 <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
18876 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
18877 to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law
18878 I can give to my parents and others that are reluctant to read an
18879 English book.  It is a marvellous set of examples on how the ever
18880 expanding copyright regulations hurt culture and society.  When the
18881 translation is done, I hope to find funding to print and ship a copy
18882 to all the members of the Norwegian parliament, before they sit down
18883 to debate the latest revisions to the Norwegian copyright law.  This
18884 summer I
18885 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">called
18886 for volunteers</a> to help me, and I have been able to secure the
18887 valuable contribution from at least one other Norwegian.</p>
18888
18889 <p>Two days ago, we finally broke the 50% mark.  Then more than 50% of
18890 the number of strings to translate (normally paragraphs, but also
18891 titles and index entries are also counted).  All parts from the
18892 beginning up to and including chapter four is translated.  So is
18893 chapters six, seven and the conclusion.  I created a graph to show the
18894 progress:</p>
18895
18896 <img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png">
18897
18898 <p>The number of strings to translate increase as I insert the index
18899 entries into the docbook.  They were missing with the docbook version
18900 I initially started with.  There are still quite a few index entries
18901 missing, but everyone starting with A, B, O, Z and Y are done.  I
18902 currently focus on completing the index entries, to get a complete
18903 english version of the docbook source.</p>
18904
18905 <p>There is still need for translators and people with docbook
18906 knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle
18907 with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft
18908 translation and proof reading.  And I would like the figures to be
18909 redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them.  Any SVG master
18910 around?  I am sure there are some legal terms that are unfamiliar to
18911 me.  If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out the
18912 project files currently available from <a
18913 href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
18914
18915 <p>If you are curious what the translated book currently look like,
18916 the updated
18917 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>
18918 and
18919 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
18920 are published on github.  The HTML version is published as well, but
18921 github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I
18922 saw no point in linking to that version.</p>
18923
18924       </div>
18925       <div class="tags">
18926
18927
18928         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>.
18929
18930
18931       </div>
18932     </div>
18933     <div class="padding"></div>
18934
18935     <div class="entry">
18936       <div class="title">
18937         <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>
18938       </div>
18939       <div class="date">
18940         10th August 2012
18941       </div>
18942       <div class="body">
18943         <p>In <a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> one can specify
18944 the language used at the top, and the processing pipeline will use
18945 this information to pick the correct translations for 'chapter', 'see
18946 also', 'index' etc.  And for most languages used with docbook, I guess
18947 this work just fine.  For example a German user can start the document
18948 with &lt;book lang="de"&gt;, and the document will show up with the
18949 correct content with any of the docbook processors.  This is not the
18950 case for the language
18951 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Culture_in_Norwegian___5_chapters_done__74_percent_left_to_do.html">I
18952 am working with at the moment</a>, Norwegian Bokmål.</p>
18953
18954 <p>For a while, I was confused about which language code to use,
18955 because I was unable to find any language code that would work across
18956 all tools.  I am currently testing dblatex, xmlto, docbook-xsl, and
18957 dbtoepub, and they do not handle Norwegian Bokmål the same way.  Some
18958 of them do not handle it at all.</p>
18959
18960 <p>A bit of background information is probably needed to understand
18961 this mess.  Norwegian is not one, but two written variants.  The
18962 variants are Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål.  There are three
18963 two letter language codes associated with these languages, Norwegian
18964 is 'no', Norwegian Nynorsk is 'nn' and Norwegian Bokmål is 'nb'.
18965 Historically the 'no' language code was used for Norwegian Bokmål, but
18966 many years ago this was found to be å bad idea, and the recommendation
18967 is to use the most specific language code instead, to avoid confusion.
18968 In the transition period it is a good idea to make sure 'no' was an
18969 alias for 'nb'.</p>
18970
18971 <p>Back to docbook processing tools in Debian.  The dblatex tool only
18972 understand 'nn'.  There are translations for 'no', but not 'nb' (BTS
18973 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/684391">#684391</a>), but due to a bug
18974 (BTS <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">#682936</a>) the 'no'
18975 language code is not recognised.  The docbook-xsl tool chain only
18976 recognise 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The xmlto tool only recognise
18977 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'.  The end result that there is no language
18978 code I can use to get the docbook file working with all of these tools
18979 at the same time. :(</p>
18980
18981 <p>The correct solution is to use &lt;book lang="nb"&gt;, but it will
18982 take time before that will work with all the free software docbook
18983 processors. :(</p>
18984
18985 <p>Oh, the joy of well integrated tools. :/</p>
18986
18987       </div>
18988       <div class="tags">
18989
18990
18991         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>.
18992
18993
18994       </div>
18995     </div>
18996     <div class="padding"></div>
18997
18998     <div class="entry">
18999       <div class="title">
19000         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Best_way_to_create_a_docbook_book_.html">Best way to create a docbook book?</a>
19001       </div>
19002       <div class="date">
19003         31st July 2012
19004       </div>
19005       <div class="body">
19006         <p>I tried to send this text to the
19007 <a href="https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/">docbook-apps
19008 mailing list at lists.oasis-open.org</a>, but it only accept messages
19009 from subscribers and rejected my post, and I completely lack the
19010 bandwidth required to subscribe to another mailing list, so instead I
19011 try to post my message here and hope my blog readers can help me
19012 out.</p>
19013
19014 <p>I am quite new to docbook processing, and am climbing a steep
19015 learning curve at the moment.</p>
19016
19017 <p>To give you some background, I am working on a Norwegian
19018 translation of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, and I use
19019 docbook to handle the process.  The files to build the book are
19020 available from
19021 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.
19022 The book got around 400 pages with parts, images, footnotes, tables,
19023 index entries etc, which has proven to be a challenge for the free
19024 software docbook processors.  My build platform is Debian GNU/Linux
19025 Squeeze.</p>
19026
19027 <p>I want to build PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book, and have
19028 tried different tool chains to do the conversion from docbook to these
19029 formats.  I am currently focusing on the PDF version, and have a few
19030 problems.</p>
19031
19032 <ul>
19033
19034 <li>Using dblatex, the &lt;part&gt; handling is not the way I want to,
19035    as &lt;/part&gt; do not really end the &lt;part&gt;. (See
19036    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683166">BTS report #683166</a>), the
19037    xetex backend (needed to process UTF-8) give incorrect hyphens in
19038    index references spanning several pages (See
19039    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682901">BTS report #682901</a>), and
19040    I am unable to get the norwegian template texts (See
19041    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/682936">BTS report #682936</a>).</li>
19042
19043 <li>Using straight xmlto fail with some latex error (See
19044    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683163">BTS report
19045    #683163</a>).</li>
19046
19047 <li>Using xmlto with the fop backend fail to handle images (do not
19048    show up in the PDF), fail to handle a long footnote (overlap
19049    footnote and text body, see
19050    <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/683197">BTS report #683197</a>), and
19051    fail to create a correct index (some lack page ref, and the page
19052    refs listed are not right).</li>
19053
19054 <li>Using xmlto with the dblatex backend behave like dblatex.</li>
19055
19056 <li>Using docbook-xls with xsltproc + fop have the same footnote and
19057    index problems the xmlto + fop processing.</li>
19058
19059 </ul>
19060
19061 <p>So I wonder, what would be the best way to create the PDF version
19062 of this book?  Are some of the bugs found above solved in new or
19063 experimental versions of some docbook tool chain?</p>
19064
19065 <p>What about HTML and EPUB versions?</p>
19066
19067       </div>
19068       <div class="tags">
19069
19070
19071         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>.
19072
19073
19074       </div>
19075     </div>
19076     <div class="padding"></div>
19077
19078     <div class="entry">
19079       <div class="title">
19080         <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>
19081       </div>
19082       <div class="date">
19083         21st July 2012
19084       </div>
19085       <div class="body">
19086         <p>I reported earlier that I am working on
19087 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">a
19088 norwegian version</a> of the book
19089 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
19090 Progress is good, and yesterday I got a major contribution from Anders
19091 Hagen Jarmund completing chapter six.  The source files as well as a
19092 PDF and EPUB version of this book are available from
19093 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
19094
19095 <p>I am happy to report that the draft for the first two chapters
19096 (preface, introduction) is complete, and three other chapters are also
19097 completely translated.  This completes 26 percent of the number of
19098 strings (equivalent to paragraphs) in the book, and there is thus 74
19099 percent left to translate.  A graph of the progress is present at the
19100 bottom of the github project page.  There is still room for more
19101 contributors.  Get in touch or send github pull requests with fixes if
19102 you got time and are willing to help make this book make it to
19103 print. :)</p>
19104
19105 <p>The book translation framework could also be a good basis for other
19106 translations, if you want the book to be available in your
19107 language.</p>
19108
19109       </div>
19110       <div class="tags">
19111
19112
19113         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>.
19114
19115
19116       </div>
19117     </div>
19118     <div class="padding"></div>
19119
19120     <div class="entry">
19121       <div class="title">
19122         <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>
19123       </div>
19124       <div class="date">
19125         16th July 2012
19126       </div>
19127       <div class="body">
19128         <p>I am currently working on a
19129 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnad_for___sende_norsk_versjon_av_Free_Culture_til_stortingets_representanter_.html">project
19130 to translate</a> the book
19131 <a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig
19132 to Norwegian.  And the source we base our translation on is the
19133 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook">docbook</a> version, to
19134 allow us to use po4a and .po files to handle the translation, and for
19135 this to work well the docbook source document need to be properly
19136 tagged.  The source files of this project is available from
19137 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>.</p>
19138
19139 <p>The problem is that the docbook source have flaws, and we have
19140 no-one involved in the project that is a docbook expert.  Is there a
19141 docbook expert somewhere that is interested in helping us create a
19142 well tagged docbook version of the book, and adjust our build process
19143 for the PDF, EPUB and HTML version of the book?  This will provide a
19144 well tagged English version (our source document), and make it a lot
19145 easier for us to create a good Norwegian version.  If you can and want
19146 to help, please get in touch with me or fork the github project and
19147 send pull requests with fixes. :)</p>
19148
19149       </div>
19150       <div class="tags">
19151
19152
19153         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>.
19154
19155
19156       </div>
19157     </div>
19158     <div class="padding"></div>
19159
19160     <div class="entry">
19161       <div class="title">
19162         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__George_Bredberg.html">Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg</a>
19163       </div>
19164       <div class="date">
19165          9th July 2012
19166       </div>
19167       <div class="body">
19168         <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
19169 Skolelinux</a> project have users all over the globe, but until
19170 recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
19171 country Sweden.  This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
19172 this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
19173 to adjust and scale the just released
19174 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
19175 Wheezy</a> setup to his liking.  He granted me an interview, and I am
19176 happy to share his answers with you here.</p>
19177
19178 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
19179
19180 <p>I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
19181 the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
19182 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
19183 "folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups.  In
19184 Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
19185 in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
19186 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
19187 perspective when working with IT.</p>
19188
19189 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
19190 project?</strong></p>
19191
19192 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
19193 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
19194 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
19195 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
19196 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
19197 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
19198
19199 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19200 Edu?</strong></p>
19201
19202 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
19203 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
19204 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
19205 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
19206 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
19207 well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
19208 when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
19209 showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
19210 mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
19211 same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
19212 setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
19213 workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
19214 thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
19215 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
19216 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
19217 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
19218 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
19219 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time.  Our
19220 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
19221 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
19222 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
19223 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
19224 quicker to update.
19225
19226 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19227 Edu?</strong></p>
19228
19229 <p>Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
19230 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
19231 year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
19232 sound from working with them.  It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
19233 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
19234 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.</p>
19235
19236 <p>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
19237 install time.  In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
19238 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
19239 That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
19240 Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
19241 to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
19242 support for single-sign on.  That will make the transition to free
19243 software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
19244 need.  No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
19245 some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
19246 run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes.  We run a journalist
19247 education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
19248 by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association).  Our
19249 education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
19250 are done.  This is important if you want to get a job.</p>
19251
19252 <p>Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
19253 magazines.  We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
19254 market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
19255 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
19256 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
19257 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
19258 edit and compile a newspaper.  But politically at our school we are not
19259 there yet.  And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.</p>
19260
19261 <p>We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
19262 the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
19263 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
19264 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
19265 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
19266 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
19267 studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
19268 want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise.  Those
19269 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
19270 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
19271 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
19272 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
19273 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
19274 sound file.</p>
19275
19276 <p>So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
19277 will try.  The problem is the students have certain expectations when
19278 they start an education towards a profession.  So the programs has to
19279 look and feel professional.  Good thing with radio, there are many
19280 programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
19281 as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
19282 program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
19283 learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
19284 the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.</p>
19285
19286 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
19287
19288 <p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days.  I use almost
19289 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
19290 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
19291 )</p>
19292
19293 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
19294 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
19295
19296 <p>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
19297 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
19298 it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
19299 flawlessly.  The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
19300 will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
19301 students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
19302 clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
19303 idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
19304 the administration.  It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
19305 open source, if the principal has to run Windows.  It also creates a
19306 problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
19307 will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
19308 support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
19309 desktop is essential.  At least at our school, where we have mixed
19310 level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
19311
19312 <p>Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
19313 useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
19314 article <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/481607/">Radio station
19315 management with Airtime</a>,
19316 <a href="http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/">Airtime</a> which
19317 claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
19318 <a href="http://www.rivendellaudio.org/">Rivendell</a> which claim to
19319 be complete radio broadcast automation solution.  All of them seem
19320 useful to the aspiring radio producer.</p>
19321
19322       </div>
19323       <div class="tags">
19324
19325
19326         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
19327
19328
19329       </div>
19330     </div>
19331     <div class="padding"></div>
19332
19333     <div class="entry">
19334       <div class="title">
19335         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_do_schools_waste_money_on_IT_.html">Why do schools waste money on IT?</a>
19336       </div>
19337       <div class="date">
19338          8th July 2012
19339       </div>
19340       <div class="body">
19341         <p>In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
19342 of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
19343 in schools and municipalities.  We provide what the happy users of
19344 Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
19345 alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution.  I
19346 was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
19347 Steinberg in his blog post
19348 "<a href="http://www.mysociety.org/2012/06/19/can-you-recognize-the-million-pound-chair/">Can
19349 you recognize the million pound chair?</a>".  Read it and weep for the
19350 spending of your tax money.</p>
19351
19352 <p>Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
19353 projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
19354 causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
19355 to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
19356 public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
19357 purchases.</p>
19358
19359       </div>
19360       <div class="tags">
19361
19362
19363         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
19364
19365
19366       </div>
19367     </div>
19368     <div class="padding"></div>
19369
19370     <div class="entry">
19371       <div class="title">
19372         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Timetabling_Software___nice_free_software.html">Free Timetabling Software - nice free software</a>
19373       </div>
19374       <div class="date">
19375          7th July 2012
19376       </div>
19377       <div class="body">
19378         <p>Included in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
19379 Skolelinux</a> is a large collection of end user and school specific
19380 software.  It is one of the packages not installed by default but
19381 provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
19382 is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
19383 information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
19384 the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
19385 receive.  The software is
19386
19387 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/">named FET</a>, and it provide a
19388 graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
19389 result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
19390 both teachers and students.  It is available both for
19391 <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/download.html">Linux, MacOSX and
19392 Windows</a>.</p>
19393
19394 <p>This is <a href="http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/features.html">the
19395 feature list</a>, liftet from the project web site:</p>
19396
19397 <p><ul>
19398
19399   <li>FET is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later.
19400     You can freely use, copy, modify and redistribute it </li>
19401
19402   <li>Localized to en_US (US English, default), ar (Arabic), ca
19403     (Catalan), da (Danish), de (German), el (Greek), es (Spanish), fa
19404     (Persian), fr (French), gl (Galician), he (Hebrew), hu
19405     (Hungarian), id (Indonesian), it (Italian), lt (Lithuanian), mk
19406     (Macedonian), ms (Malay), nl (Dutch), pl (Polish), pt_BR
19407     (Brazilian Portuguese), ro (Romanian), ru (Russian), si (Sinhala),
19408     sk (Slovak), sr (Serbian), tr (Turkish), uk (Ukrainian), uz
19409     (Uzbek) and vi (Vietnamese) (incompletely for some languages)
19410     </li>
19411
19412   <li>Fully automatic generation algorithm, allowing also
19413     semi-automatic or manual allocation</li>
19414
19415   <li>Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
19416     GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports </li>
19417
19418   <li>Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
19419     with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)</li>
19420
19421   <li>Import/export from CSV format</li>
19422
19423   <li>The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
19424     formats </li>
19425
19426   <li>Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
19427     and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
19428     non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
19429     (as separate sets)</li>
19430
19431   <li>Each constraint has a weight percentage, from 0.0% to 100.0%
19432     (but some special constraints are allowed to have only 100% weight
19433     percentage)</li>
19434
19435   <li>Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
19436     demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
19437     memory):
19438     <ul>
19439       <li>Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day: 60</li>
19440       <li>Maximum number of working days per week: 35</li>
19441       <li>Maximum total number of teachers: 6000</li>
19442       <li>Maximum total number of sets of students: 30000</li>
19443       <li>Maximum total number of subjects: 6000</li>
19444       <li>Virtually unlimited number of activity tags</li>
19445       <li>Maximum number of activities: 30000</li>
19446       <li>Maximum number of rooms: 6000</li>
19447       <li>Maximum number of buildings: 6000</li>
19448       <li>Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
19449           students sets for each activity.  (it is possible
19450           also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
19451           activity)</li>
19452       <li>Virtually unlimited number of time constraints</li>
19453       <li>Virtually unlimited number of space constraints</li>
19454     </ul></li>
19455
19456   <li>A large and flexible palette of time constraints:
19457     <ul>
19458       <li>Break periods</li>
19459       <li>For teacher(s):
19460         <ul>
19461           <li>Not available periods</li>
19462           <li>Max/min days per week</li>
19463           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
19464           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
19465           <li>Min hours daily</li>
19466           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
19467
19468           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
19469             days per week</li>
19470         </ul></li>
19471       <li>For students (sets):
19472         <ul>
19473           <li>Not available periods</li>
19474           <li>Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)</li>
19475           <li>Max gaps per day/week</li>
19476           <li>Max hours daily/continuously</li>
19477           <li>Min hours daily</li>
19478           <li>Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag</li>
19479
19480           <li>Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
19481             days per week</li>
19482         </ul></li>
19483       <li>For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:
19484         <ul>
19485           <li>A single preferred starting time</li>
19486           <li>A set of preferred starting times</li>
19487           <li>A set of preferred time slots</li>
19488           <li>Min/max days between them</li>
19489           <li>End(s) students day</li>
19490           <li>Same starting time/day/hour</li>
19491           <li>Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
19492             flexible constraint, useful in many situations)</li>
19493           <li>Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for 2 or 3 (sub)activities)</li>
19494           <li>Not overlapping</li>
19495           <li>Max simultaneous in selected time slots</li>
19496           <li>Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities</li>
19497         </ul></li>
19498     </ul></li>
19499
19500   <li>A large and flexible palette of space constraints:
19501     <ul>
19502       <li>Room not available periods</li>
19503       <li>For teacher(s):
19504         <ul>
19505           <li>Home room(s)</li>
19506           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
19507           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
19508         </ul>
19509       </li>
19510
19511       <li>For students (sets):
19512         <ul>
19513           <li>Home room(s)</li>
19514           <li>Max building changes per day/week</li>
19515           <li>Min gaps between building changes</li>
19516         </ul>
19517       </li>
19518       <li>Preferred room(s):
19519         <ul>
19520           <li>For a subject</li>
19521           <li>For an activity tag</li>
19522           <li>For a subject and an activity tag</li>
19523           <li>Individually for a (sub)activity</li>
19524         </ul>
19525       </li>
19526
19527       <li>For a set of activities:
19528         <ul>
19529           <li>Occupy a maximum number of different rooms</li>
19530         </ul>
19531       </li>
19532     </ul>
19533   </li>
19534 </ul></p>
19535
19536 <p>I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
19537 planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it.  If you
19538 need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
19539 manually, check it out.
19540
19541 A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
19542 <a href="http://marvelsoft.co.in/wp/2012/03/generate-timetable-for-state-cbse-icse-igcse-schools-free/">a
19543 blog post from MarvelSoft</a>.  If you find FET useful, please provide
19544 a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
19545 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu#Howtos">Debian Edu HowTo
19546 section</a>.</p>
19547
19548       </div>
19549       <div class="tags">
19550
19551
19552         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software</a>.
19553
19554
19555       </div>
19556     </div>
19557     <div class="padding"></div>
19558
19559     <div class="entry">
19560       <div class="title">
19561         <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>
19562       </div>
19563       <div class="date">
19564          3rd July 2012
19565       </div>
19566       <div class="body">
19567         <p>In the NUUG <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a>
19568 project (Norwegian version of
19569 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> from
19570 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>), we have discovered
19571 a problem with the municipalities using
19572 <a href="http://www.zimbra.com/">Zimbra</a>.  When FiksGataMi send a
19573 problem report to the government, the email From: address is set to
19574 the address of the person reporting the problem, while envelope sender
19575 is set to the FiksGataMi contact address.  The intention is to make
19576 sure the municipality send any replies to the person reporting the
19577 problem, while any email delivery problems are sent to us in NUUG.
19578 This work well in most cases, but not for Karmøy municipality using
19579 Zimbra.  Karmøy is using the vacation message function in Zimbra to
19580 send an automatic reply to report that the message has been received,
19581 and this message is sent to the envelope sender and not the address in
19582 the From: header.</p>
19583
19584 <p>This causes the automatic message from Karmøy to go to NUUGs
19585 request-tracker instance instead of to the person reporting the
19586 problem.  We can not really change the envelope sender address, as
19587 this would make it impossible for us to discover when there are
19588 problems with the MTAs receiving problem reports.  We have been in
19589 contact with the people at Karmøy municipality, and they are willing
19590 to adjust Zimbra if something can be changed there to get a better
19591 behaviour.</p>
19592
19593 <p>The default behaviour of Zimbra is as far as I can tell according
19594 to the specification in RFC 3834, which recommend that vacation
19595 messages are sent to the envelope sender and not to the From: address.
19596 But I wonder if it is possible to adjust or configure Zimbra to behave
19597 differently.  Anyone know?  Please let us know at
19598 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
19599 (at) nuug.no</a>.</p>
19600
19601       </div>
19602       <div class="tags">
19603
19604
19605         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>.
19606
19607
19608       </div>
19609     </div>
19610     <div class="padding"></div>
19611
19612     <div class="entry">
19613       <div class="title">
19614         <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>
19615       </div>
19616       <div class="date">
19617         26th June 2012
19618       </div>
19619       <div class="body">
19620         <p>I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
19621 another interview with the people behind
19622 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
19623 This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
19624 helpers from Spain.  His effort was the reason we added support for
19625 several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
19626 Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
19627 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
19628 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
19629
19630 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
19631
19632 <p>I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
19633 ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
19634 ICT in schools</p>
19635
19636 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
19637 project?</strong></p>
19638
19639 <p>At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
19640 project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
19641 similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
19642 I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.</p>
19643
19644 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19645 Edu?</strong></p>
19646
19647 <p>A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
19648 really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
19649 concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
19650 been used everyday inside Debian Edu.</p>
19651
19652 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
19653 Edu?</strong></p>
19654
19655 <p>Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
19656 economical and technical resources in the different countries don't
19657 allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
19658 approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
19659 lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
19660 technologies in school.</p>
19661
19662 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
19663
19664 <p>Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
19665 between Iceweasel, <a href="http://www.geany.org/">Geany</a> and
19666 <a href="http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator">Terminator</a>.</p>
19667
19668 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
19669 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
19670
19671 <p>I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
19672 different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
19673 environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
19674 laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.</p>
19675
19676 <p>Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
19677 not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
19678 universities. So different strategies are needed.</p>
19679
19680 <p>But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
19681 we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
19682 our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
19683 multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
19684 more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
19685 using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in
19686 the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
19687 them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
19688 working there.</p>
19689
19690       </div>
19691       <div class="tags">
19692
19693
19694         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
19695
19696
19697       </div>
19698     </div>
19699     <div class="padding"></div>
19700
19701     <div class="entry">
19702       <div class="title">
19703         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
19704       </div>
19705       <div class="date">
19706         24th June 2012
19707       </div>
19708       <div class="body">
19709         <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
19710 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
19711 collecting computer related songs for use at parties.  The original
19712 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
19713 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
19714 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format.  I have
19715 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
19716 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
19717 help me extend and update the book.  If anyone is volunteering to help
19718 me with this, send me an email.  Also let me know if there are songs
19719 missing in my book.</p>
19720
19721 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
19722 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
19723 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
19724 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
19725 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going).  Want to sing?  Check
19726 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
19727 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
19728
19729       </div>
19730       <div class="tags">
19731
19732
19733         Tags: <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>.
19734
19735
19736       </div>
19737     </div>
19738     <div class="padding"></div>
19739
19740     <div class="entry">
19741       <div class="title">
19742         <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>
19743       </div>
19744       <div class="date">
19745         11th June 2012
19746       </div>
19747       <div class="body">
19748         <p>During my work on
19749 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.nb.html">Debian Edu
19750 based on Squeeze</a>, I came across some issues that should be
19751 addressed in the Wheezy release.  I finally found time to wrap up my
19752 notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
19753 explanation.</p>
19754
19755 <p><ul>
19756
19757 <li>We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
19758 changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
19759 with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
19760 system depend on tasksel tasks in
19761 /usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
19762 installation.</li>
19763
19764 <li>Enable Kerberos login for more services.  Now with the Kerberos
19765 foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
19766 services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions.  We should
19767 at least try to enable it for these services:
19768 <ul>
19769
19770   <li>CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
19771     quotas.</li>
19772   <li>Nagios for admins checking the system status.</li>
19773   <li>GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.</li>
19774   <li>LDAP for admins updating LDAP.</li>
19775   <li>Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.</li>
19776   <li>ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.</li>
19777
19778 </ul></li>
19779
19780 <li>When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
19781 authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
19782 use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
19783 is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind</li>
19784
19785 <li>Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install.  The split made
19786 sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
19787 inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.</li>
19788
19789 <li>Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
19790 touching the disk if the disk is too small.  This is
19791 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/653305">BTS report #653305</a> and the
19792 d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
19793 it and upload.  After this is done we need to adjust
19794 debian-edu-install to use this new hook.</li>
19795
19796 <li>Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
19797 time config).  LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
19798 packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
19799 in Wheezy.
19800
19801 <li>Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
19802 the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
19803 up KDE login on slow networks.</li>
19804
19805 <li>Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
19806 change on first login.  This is useful when handing out password on
19807 paper, to make sure only the user know the password.  This require
19808 fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.</li>
19809
19810 <li>Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
19811 The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
19812 familiar with GUIs.  This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
19813 have it available where the admin will be looking for it..</li>
19814
19815 <li>We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
19816 actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses).  None of the
19817 Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.</li>
19818
19819 <li>We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
19820 using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
19821 packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.</li>
19822
19823 <li>We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
19824 when changing password using the Kerberos protocol.  The hook was
19825 requested in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/588968">BTS report
19826 #588968</a> and is now available in Wheezy.  We might need to write a
19827 MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.</li>
19828
19829 <li>We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.
19830 <ul>
19831
19832 <li>reduce the number of chemistry visualisers</li>
19833 <li>consider dropping xpaint</li>
19834 <li>and probably more?</li>
19835 </ul></li>
19836
19837 <li>Some hardware need external firmware to work properly.  This is
19838 mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
19839 examples too.  For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
19840 firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
19841 some GUI to do this.  Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
19842 could consider using their packages.  At the moment we have some
19843 command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
19844 for the LTSP chroot).</li>
19845
19846
19847 <li>In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options.  We
19848 should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
19849 install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
19850 use.</li>
19851
19852 <li>The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
19853 interesting educational packages.  We should work on the package
19854 tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
19855 packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
19856 new applications with a simple mouse click.</li>
19857
19858 <li>The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
19859 with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
19860 be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
19861 filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled.  We should
19862 implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
19863 instead of the "it is documented" method of today.</li>
19864
19865 <li>A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
19866 "take over" the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
19867 There are at least three implementations,
19868 <a href="italc.sourceforge.net/">italc</a>,
19869 <a href="http://www.itais.net/help/en/">controlaula</a> og
19870 <a href="http://www.epoptes.org/">epoptes</a> and we should pick one of
19871 them and make it trivial to set it up in a school.  The challenges is
19872 how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
19873 and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
19874 given room.</li>
19875
19876 <li>Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
19877 should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
19878 the Debian Edu network.  Not quite sure how.  Perhaps we should
19879 provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
19880 them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
19881 configuration and data with the central server.  This should be
19882 investigated.</li>
19883
19884 </ul></p>
19885
19886 <p>I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
19887 version.</p>
19888
19889       </div>
19890       <div class="tags">
19891
19892
19893         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
19894
19895
19896       </div>
19897     </div>
19898     <div class="padding"></div>
19899
19900     <div class="entry">
19901       <div class="title">
19902         <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>
19903       </div>
19904       <div class="date">
19905          9th June 2012
19906       </div>
19907       <div class="body">
19908         <p>Slashdot got a story about Intel planning a
19909 <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
19910 with face recognition</a> to recognise the viewer, and it occurred to
19911 me that it would be more interesting to turn it around, and do face
19912 recognition on the TV image itself.  It could let the viewer know who
19913 is present on the screen, and perhaps look up their credibility,
19914 company affiliation, previous appearances etc for the viewer to better
19915 evaluate what is being said and done.  That would be a feature I would
19916 be willing to pay for.</p>
19917
19918 <p>I would not be willing to pay for a TV that point a camera on my
19919 household, like the big brother feature apparently proposed by Intel.
19920 It is the telescreen idea fetched straight out of the book
19921 <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt">1984 by George
19922 Orwell</a>.</p>
19923
19924       </div>
19925       <div class="tags">
19926
19927
19928         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>.
19929
19930
19931       </div>
19932     </div>
19933     <div class="padding"></div>
19934
19935     <div class="entry">
19936       <div class="title">
19937         <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>
19938       </div>
19939       <div class="date">
19940          6th June 2012
19941       </div>
19942       <div class="body">
19943         <p>A few days ago
19944 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">I
19945 reported how to get</a> the support status out of Dell using an
19946 unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was
19947 <a href="http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2012-February/045959.html">discovered
19948 by Daniel De Marco in february</a>.  Combined with my web scraping
19949 code for HP, Dell and IBM
19950 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">from
19951 2009</a>, I got inspired and wrote
19952 <a href="https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/computer-hardware-support-status/">a
19953 web service</a> based on Scraperwiki to make it easy to look up the
19954 support status and get a machine readable result back.</p>
19955
19956 <p>This is what it look like at the moment when asking for the JSON
19957 output:
19958
19959 <blockquote><pre>
19960 % 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>
19961 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": ""})
19962 %
19963 </pre></blockquote>
19964
19965 <p>It currently support Dell and HP, and I am hoping for help to add
19966 support for other vendors.  The python source is available on
19967 Scraperwiki and I welcome help with adding more features.</p>
19968
19969       </div>
19970       <div class="tags">
19971
19972
19973         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>.
19974
19975
19976       </div>
19977     </div>
19978     <div class="padding"></div>
19979
19980     <div class="entry">
19981       <div class="title">
19982         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel</a>
19983       </div>
19984       <div class="date">
19985          2nd June 2012
19986       </div>
19987       <div class="body">
19988         <p>Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
19989 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
19990 mailing list.  He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
19991 thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
19992 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
19993 Squeeze</a> version.</p>
19994
19995 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
19996
19997 <p>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
19998 Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
19999 (Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
20000 by Angela).</p>
20001
20002 <p>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
20003 and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
20004 touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
20005 the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
20006 becoming an osteopath.</p>
20007
20008 <p>Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
20009 have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
20010 introducing free software into schools. The project's name is
20011 "IT-Zukunft Schule" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
20012 skills with communication skills.</p>
20013
20014 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20015 project?</strong></p>
20016
20017 <p>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
20018 "IT-Zukunft Schule" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
20019 reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
20020 people said.  From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
20021 distributions that target being used for school networks.</p>
20022
20023 <p>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
20024 commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
20025 Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
20026 went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
20027 and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
20028 Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
20029 got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
20030 attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
20031 the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.</p>
20032
20033 <p>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
20034 people.  People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
20035 protection experts, other IT professionals.</p>
20036
20037 <p>We came to two conclusions:</p>
20038
20039 <p>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
20040 bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
20041 by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
20042 whereas most of each school's requirements could mapped by a standard
20043 IT solution.  The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
20044 customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
20045 possible.  In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
20046 standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
20047 degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
20048 locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
20049 point.</p>
20050
20051 <p>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
20052 all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
20053 for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
20054 has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
20055 of people into using IT and teaching with IT. "IT-Zukunft Schule"
20056 tries to provide an approach for this.</p>
20057
20058 <p>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
20059 defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
20060 Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school's IT
20061 equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
20062 teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
20063 spare time.</p>
20064
20065 <p>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
20066 networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
20067 here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
20068 teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
20069 non-existent until 2010/2011.</p>
20070
20071 <p>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
20072 class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
20073 avoidance do exist.</p>
20074
20075 <p>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
20076 social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
20077 for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
20078 several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
20079 they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
20080 at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
20081 and probably a gain for all.</p>
20082
20083 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20084 Edu?</strong></p>
20085
20086 <p>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
20087 any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
20088 the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
20089 workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
20090 project communication, honest communication within the group of
20091 developers, etc.</p>
20092
20093 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20094 Edu?</strong></p>
20095
20096 <p>Every coin has two sides:</p>
20097
20098 <p>Technically: <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/311188">BTS issue
20099 #311188</a>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
20100 client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
20101 should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
20102 about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
20103 several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
20104 contribute).</p>
20105
20106 <p>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
20107 find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
20108 Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
20109 promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
20110 there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
20111 these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
20112 all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
20113 meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
20114 there being rather disconnected from the development department of
20115 Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
20116
20117 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
20118
20119 <p>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.</p>
20120
20121 <p>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
20122 serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
20123 more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.</p>
20124
20125 <p>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
20126 development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
20127 PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
20128 is being integrated in Ubuntu's software center.</p>
20129
20130 <p>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
20131 as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
20132 I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
20133 the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
20134 whiteboard.</p>
20135
20136 <p>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.</p>
20137
20138 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20139 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
20140
20141 <p>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
20142 enrol people.</p>
20143
20144       </div>
20145       <div class="tags">
20146
20147
20148         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
20149
20150
20151       </div>
20152     </div>
20153     <div class="padding"></div>
20154
20155     <div class="entry">
20156       <div class="title">
20157         <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>
20158       </div>
20159       <div class="date">
20160          1st June 2012
20161       </div>
20162       <div class="body">
20163         <p>A few years ago I wrote
20164 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">how
20165 to extract support status</a> for your Dell and HP servers.  Recently
20166 I have learned from colleges here at the
20167 <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> that Dell have
20168 made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service.  Given
20169 the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
20170 readable information about the support status.  This perl code
20171 demonstrate how to do it:</p>
20172
20173 <p><pre>
20174 use strict;
20175 use warnings;
20176 use SOAP::Lite;
20177 use Data::Dumper;
20178 my $GUID = '11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111';
20179 my $App = 'test';
20180 my $servicetag = $ARGV[0] or die "Please supply a servicetag. $!\n";
20181 my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
20182 my $s = SOAP::Lite
20183     -> uri('http://support.dell.com/WebServices/')
20184     -> on_action( sub { join '', @_ } )
20185     -> proxy('http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx')
20186     ;
20187 my $a = $s->GetAssetInformation(
20188     SOAP::Data->name('guid')->value($GUID)->type(''),
20189     SOAP::Data->name('applicationName')->value($App)->type(''),
20190     SOAP::Data->name('serviceTags')->value($servicetag)->type(''),
20191 );
20192 print Dumper($a -> result) ;
20193 </pre></p>
20194
20195 <p>The output can look like this:</p>
20196
20197 <p><pre>
20198 $VAR1 = {
20199           'Asset' => {
20200                      'Entitlements' => {
20201                                        'EntitlementData' => [
20202                                                             {
20203                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
20204                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
20205                                                               'Provider' => '',
20206                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
20207                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
20208                                                             },
20209                                                             {
20210                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
20211                                                               'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
20212                                                               'Provider' => '',
20213                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
20214                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
20215                                                             },
20216                                                             {
20217                                                               'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
20218                                                               'EndDate' => '2007-07-29T00:00:00',
20219                                                               'Provider' => '',
20220                                                               'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
20221                                                               'DaysLeft' => '0'
20222                                                             }
20223                                                           ]
20224                                      },
20225                      'AssetHeaderData' => {
20226                                           'SystemModel' => 'GX620',
20227                                           'ServiceTag' => '8DSGD2J',
20228                                           'SystemShipDate' => '2006-07-29T19:00:00-05:00',
20229                                           'Buid' => '2323',
20230                                           'Region' => 'Europe',
20231                                           'SystemID' => 'PLX_GX620',
20232                                           'SystemType' => 'OptiPlex'
20233                                         }
20234                    }
20235         };
20236 </pre></p>
20237
20238 <p>I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
20239 service outside the
20240 <a href="http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation">inline
20241 documentation</a>, and according to
20242 <a href="http://iboyd.net/index.php/2012/02/14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/">one
20243 comment</a> it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
20244 scraping HTML pages. :)</p>
20245
20246 <p>Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service.  If
20247 you know of one, drop me an email. :)</p>
20248
20249       </div>
20250       <div class="tags">
20251
20252
20253         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>.
20254
20255
20256       </div>
20257     </div>
20258     <div class="padding"></div>
20259
20260     <div class="entry">
20261       <div class="title">
20262         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_monitor_calibration_using_ColorHug.html">First monitor calibration using ColorHug</a>
20263       </div>
20264       <div class="date">
20265         31st May 2012
20266       </div>
20267       <div class="body">
20268         <p>A few days ago my color calibration gadget
20269 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">ColorHug</a> arrived in the
20270 mail, and I've had a few days to test it.  As all my machines are
20271 running Debian Squeeze, where
20272 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">the
20273 calibration software</a> is missing (it is present in Wheezy and Sid),
20274 I ran the calibration using the Fedora based live CD.  This worked
20275 just fine.  So far I have only done the quick calibration.  It was
20276 slow enough for me, so I will leave the more extensive calibration for
20277 another day.</p>
20278
20279 <p>After calibration, I get a
20280 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile">ICC color
20281 profile</a> file that can be passed to programs understanding such
20282 tools.  KDE do not seem to understand it out of the box, so I searched
20283 for command line tools to use to load the color profile into X.
20284 xcalib was the first one I found, and it seem to work fine for single
20285 monitor setups.  But for my video player, a laptop with a flat screen
20286 attached, it was unable to load the color profile for the correct
20287 monitor.  After searching a bit, I
20288 <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347896">discovered</a>
20289 that the dispwin tool from the argyll package would do what I wanted,
20290 and a simple</p>
20291
20292 <p><pre>
20293 dispwin -d 1 profile.icc
20294 </pre></p>
20295
20296 <p>later I had the color profile loaded for the correct monitor.  The
20297 result was a bit more pink than I expected.  I guess I picked the
20298 wrong monitor type for the "led" monitor I got, but the result is good
20299 enough for now.</p>
20300
20301       </div>
20302       <div class="tags">
20303
20304
20305         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
20306
20307
20308       </div>
20309     </div>
20310     <div class="padding"></div>
20311
20312     <div class="entry">
20313       <div class="title">
20314         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Ralf_Gesellensetter.html">Debian Edu interview: Ralf Gesellensetter</a>
20315       </div>
20316       <div class="date">
20317         27th May 2012
20318       </div>
20319       <div class="body">
20320         <p>In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the
20321 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
20322 mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
20323 up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils.  His name was Ralf
20324 Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
20325 since then, helping to make sure the
20326 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
20327 Squeeze</a> release became as good as it is..</p>
20328
20329 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
20330
20331 <p>I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
20332 Mathematics, and Computer Science ("Informatik"). During the past 12
20333 years (since 2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
20334 also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
20335 O- or A-level ("Abitur").  For quite as long, I've been taking care of
20336 our computer network.</p>
20337
20338 <p>Now, in my early 40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
20339 spare time together with my wife, our son (3 years) and our daughter
20340 (4 months).</p>
20341
20342 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20343 project?</strong></p>
20344
20345 <p>We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
20346 my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
20347 very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
20348 ("Best Newcomer Distribution", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
20349 to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt, 2005 (IIRC). Few
20350 months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
20351 (Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others.  For more
20352 than 7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
20353 our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
20354 approximately 50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
20355 locally installed Skolelinux image.  As a consequence, I joined quite
20356 a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
20357 (Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
20358 one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.</p>
20359
20360 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20361 Edu?</strong></p>
20362
20363 <p>Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
20364 project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
20365 the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
20366 computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
20367 free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
20368 up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
20369 labs).  Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
20370 administration costs tend towards zero.</p>
20371
20372 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20373 Edu?</strong></p>
20374
20375 <p>While Debian's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
20376 might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
20377 budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
20378 supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
20379 office packages or desktop environments.  These schools have the
20380 option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
20381 capacity to do so.  Another issue is that Debian release cycles
20382 include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
20383 power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
20384 within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
20385 the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
20386 i.e. harder to understand for novices.</p>
20387
20388 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
20389
20390 <p>LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
20391 KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
20392 PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)</p>
20393
20394 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20395 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
20396
20397 <p><ol>
20398
20399 <li>Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
20400 people really "own" their hardware, to make them understand the
20401 difference between proprietary software products, and free software
20402 developing.</li>
20403
20404 <li>Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany's public schools
20405 there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
20406 licenses), so schools won't benefit from any savings here. This
20407 privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
20408 share among German Skolelinux schools.</li>
20409
20410 <li>Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
20411 trained. In many cases, teachers' software customs are respected by
20412 decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.</li>
20413
20414 <li>Don't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
20415 free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
20416 general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
20417 shared world wide (school books e.g.).</li>
20418
20419 <li>Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
20420 office suites is much above 20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don't
20421 need to know the "ribbon menu" in order to get employed.</li>
20422
20423 <li>Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.</li>
20424
20425 <li>Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
20426 for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
20427 Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials.  And
20428 keep sending documents in ODF formats.</li>
20429
20430 </ol></p>
20431
20432       </div>
20433       <div class="tags">
20434
20435
20436         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
20437
20438
20439       </div>
20440     </div>
20441     <div class="padding"></div>
20442
20443     <div class="entry">
20444       <div class="title">
20445         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html">The cost of ODF and OOXML</a>
20446       </div>
20447       <div class="date">
20448         26th May 2012
20449       </div>
20450       <div class="body">
20451         <p>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
20452 claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
20453 government.  I just sent him an email to let him know that his
20454 assumption are most likely wrong.  Sharing it here in case some of my
20455 blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.</p>
20456
20457 <p><blockquote> <p>Hi.  I just noted your
20458 <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>
20459 comment:</p>
20460
20461 <p><blockquote>"They're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
20462 with the help of Google Translate I can't find any figures about the
20463 savings of "moving to a flexible two standard" as claimed by the
20464 Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let's take
20465 it, and the £500 million figure for the UK, on trust."
20466 </blockquote></p>
20467
20468 <p>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated.  I believe it is
20469 the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around 2007,
20470 and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
20471 at the content.  In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
20472 will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
20473 existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
20474 formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
20475 ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
20476 10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver.  In
20477 reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
20478 receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
20479 would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not 20 minutes
20480 of wasted effort.</p>
20481
20482 <p>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
20483 transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending 10
20484 minutes converting to ODF. :)</p>
20485
20486 <p>See
20487 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12_vl02.php</a>
20488 and
20489 <a href="http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php">http://hannemyr.com/no/ms12.php</a>
20490 for background information.  Norwegian only, sorry. :)</p>
20491 </blockquote></p>
20492
20493       </div>
20494       <div class="tags">
20495
20496
20497         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>.
20498
20499
20500       </div>
20501     </div>
20502     <div class="padding"></div>
20503
20504     <div class="entry">
20505       <div class="title">
20506         <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>
20507       </div>
20508       <div class="date">
20509         18th May 2012
20510       </div>
20511       <div class="body">
20512         <p>In january, I
20513 <a href="http://blog.cihar.com/archives/2012/01/17/colorhug-has-arrived/">discovered
20514 the ColorHug</a>, a USB dongle from
20515 <a href="http://www.hughski.com/index.html">Hughski</a> to calibrate
20516 the color on a computer screen.  The software required is
20517 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/colorhug-client.html">included
20518 in Debian</a>, and I decided back then to preorder from the next
20519 batch.  Yesterday I finally heard back from them, and got the
20520 opportunity to order.  Today I ordered mine, and eagerly await the
20521 delivery.  I hope it arrive next week, as I got a confirmation that it
20522 should go in the mail on monday. :)</p>
20523
20524 <p>If you want to ensure the colors on the screen match the intended
20525 colors, I suggest you check out this cheap tool with free software
20526 drivers. :)</p>
20527
20528       </div>
20529       <div class="tags">
20530
20531
20532         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
20533
20534
20535       </div>
20536     </div>
20537     <div class="padding"></div>
20538
20539     <div class="entry">
20540       <div class="title">
20541         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__J_rgen_Leibner.html">Debian Edu interview: Jürgen Leibner</a>
20542       </div>
20543       <div class="date">
20544         13th May 2012
20545       </div>
20546       <div class="body">
20547         <p>It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
20548 publish another interview with the people behind
20549 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>.
20550 This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
20551 years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
20552 details get right before release.
20553
20554 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
20555
20556 <p>My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
20557 Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany.  I worked nearly 20 years as
20558 certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
20559 international company for machinery and equipment.  Since 2011 I'm a
20560 certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
20561 documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer.  From April this year
20562 I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
20563 manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.</p>
20564
20565 <p>My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
20566 it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
20567 home since 2006.</p>
20568
20569 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20570 project?</strong></p>
20571
20572 <p>Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
20573 daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
20574 middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
20575 him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
20576 asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
20577 computers in use. I answered: "Yes".</p>
20578
20579 <p>Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
20580 running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
20581 gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
20582 network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
20583 and with a lot of fun.  About one year later the school was connected
20584 to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
20585 building.  That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
20586 Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
20587 being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
20588 costs for things like licence and software.  So I searched for a
20589 school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
20590 people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
20591 prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school.  I
20592 managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
20593 the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
20594 Bielefeld in December of 2006.</p>
20595
20596 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20597 Edu?</strong></p>
20598
20599 <p>When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
20600 for me as today.</p>
20601
20602 <p>In the past there were advantages like:</p>
20603
20604 <p><ul>
20605
20606 <li>I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
20607 they had little money to spent for computers and software.</li>
20608
20609 <li>It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
20610 cost.</li>
20611
20612 <li>It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
20613 schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
20614 clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
20615 infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
20616 server</li>
20617
20618 <li>I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
20619 school.</li>
20620
20621 </ul></p>
20622
20623 <p>Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
20624 came up in this way:</p>
20625
20626 <p><ul>
20627
20628 <li>Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
20629 now.</li>
20630
20631 <li>They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
20632 have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
20633 because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.</li>
20634
20635 <li>With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
20636 management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
20637 interfaces used in the past.</li>
20638
20639 <li>It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
20640 different needs.</li>
20641
20642 <li>The documentation is usable and gets better every day.</li>
20643
20644 <li>More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
20645 world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
20646 is sharing knowledge and minds.</li>
20647
20648 <li>Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
20649 solved today by Debian Edu. </li>
20650
20651 </ul></p>
20652
20653 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20654 Edu?</strong></p>
20655
20656 <p><ul>
20657
20658 <li>There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
20659 their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
20660 whole municipality areas.</li>
20661
20662 <li>Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
20663 enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
20664 politicians.</li>
20665
20666 <li>Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.</li>
20667
20668 </ul></p>
20669
20670 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
20671
20672 <p>I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
20673 computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
20674 use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
20675 KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
20676 need from the KDE environment.  On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
20677 screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.</p>
20678
20679 <p>My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
20680 and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
20681 rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
20682 with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
20683 and the whole family.  I probably forgot something.</p>
20684
20685 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20686 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
20687
20688 <p>I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
20689 Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
20690 countries and areas all over the world.</p>
20691
20692       </div>
20693       <div class="tags">
20694
20695
20696         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
20697
20698
20699       </div>
20700     </div>
20701     <div class="padding"></div>
20702
20703     <div class="entry">
20704       <div class="title">
20705         <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>
20706       </div>
20707       <div class="date">
20708         30th April 2012
20709       </div>
20710       <div class="body">
20711         <p><!-- IMG_5869.JPG -->
20712 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/panasonic-er-1611.jpeg"></p>
20713
20714 <p>I normally cut my hair short, and my tool of choice has been a
20715 common hair/beard cutter, bought in a electrical shop here in Norway.
20716 But the last ones have not really been up to the task.  My last
20717 cutter, some model from Braun, could only cut a few of my hairs at the
20718 time, and cutting my head took forever.  And the one before that did
20719 not work very well either.  We have looked for something better for a
20720 while, but it was not until I ended up visiting a hairdresser that we
20721 discovered that there are indeed better tools available.  But these
20722 are not marketed and sold to "regular consumers".  The hair saloons
20723 can get them through their suppliers, but their suppliers only sell
20724 companies.  The models they sell, are very different from the ones
20725 available from Elkjøp and Lefdal.  The main difference is their
20726 efficiency.  It would cut my hair in 5 minutes, instead of the 30-40
20727 minutes required by my impotent Braun.  The hairdresser I visited had
20728 a Panasonic ER160, which unfortunately is no longer available from the
20729 producer.  But I found it had a successor, the Panasonic ER1611.</p>
20730
20731 <p>The next step was to find somewhere to buy it.  This was not
20732 straight forward.  The list of suppliers I got from the hairdresser
20733 did not want to sell anything to me.  But searching for the model on
20734 the web we found a supplier in Norway willing to sell it to us for
20735 around NOK 4000,-.  This was a bit much.  We kept searching and
20736 finally found a Danish supplier
20737 <a href="http://nicehair.dk/panasonic-er-1611-professionel-hartrimmer.html">selling
20738 it for around NOK 1800,-</a>.  We ordered one, and it arrived a few
20739 days ago.</p>
20740
20741 <p>The instructions said it had to charge for 8 hours when we started
20742 to use it, so we left it charging over night.  Normally it will only
20743 need one hour to charge.  The following evening we successfully tested
20744 it, and I can warmly recommend it to anyone looking for a real hair
20745 cutter.  The ones we have used until now have been hair cutter
20746 toys.</p>
20747
20748       </div>
20749       <div class="tags">
20750
20751
20752         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
20753
20754
20755       </div>
20756     </div>
20757     <div class="padding"></div>
20758
20759     <div class="entry">
20760       <div class="title">
20761         <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>
20762       </div>
20763       <div class="date">
20764         26th April 2012
20765       </div>
20766       <div class="body">
20767         <p>In <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article243690.ece">an
20768 article today</a> published by Computerworld Norway, the photographer
20769 <a href="http://www.urke.com/eirik/">Eirik Helland Urke</a> reports
20770 that the video editor application included with
20771 <a href="http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-one-x/#specs">HTC One
20772 X</a> have some quite surprising terms of use.  The article is mostly
20773 based on the twitter message from mister Urke, stating:
20774
20775 <p><blockquote>
20776 "<a href="http://twitter.com/urke/status/194062269724897280">Drøy
20777 brukeravtale: HTC kan bruke MINE redigerte videoer kommersielt. Selv
20778 kan jeg KUN bruke dem privat.</a>"
20779 </blockquote></p>
20780
20781 <p>I quickly translated it to this English message:</p>
20782
20783 <p><blockquote>
20784 "Arrogant user agreement: HTC can use MY edited videos
20785 commercially.  Although I can ONLY use them privately."
20786 </blockquote></p>
20787
20788 <p>I've been unable to find the text of the license term myself, but
20789 suspect it is a variation of the MPEG-LA terms I
20790 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Terms_of_use_for_video_produced_by_a_Canon_IXUS_130_digital_camera.html">discovered
20791 with my Canon IXUS 130</a>.  The HTC One X specification specifies that
20792 the recording format of the phone is .amr for audio and .mp3 for
20793 video.  AMR is
20794 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec#Licensing_and_patent_issues">Adaptive
20795 Multi-Rate audio codec</a> with patents which according to the
20796 Wikipedia article require an license agreement with
20797 <a href="http://www.voiceage.com/">VoiceAge</a>.  MP4 is
20798 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing">MPEG4 with
20799 H.264</a>, which according to Wikipedia require a licence agreement
20800 with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com/">MPEG-LA</a>.</p>
20801
20802 <p>I know why I prefer
20803 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and open
20804 standards</a> also for video.</p>
20805
20806       </div>
20807       <div class="tags">
20808
20809
20810         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
20811
20812
20813       </div>
20814     </div>
20815     <div class="padding"></div>
20816
20817     <div class="entry">
20818       <div class="title">
20819         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAND_terms___non_reasonable_and_discriminatory.html">RAND terms - non-reasonable and discriminatory</a>
20820       </div>
20821       <div class="date">
20822         19th April 2012
20823       </div>
20824       <div class="body">
20825         <p>Here in Norway, the
20826 <a href="http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/fad.html?id=339"> Ministry of
20827 Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs</a> is behind
20828 a <a href="http://standard.difi.no/forvaltningsstandarder">directory of
20829 standards</a> that are recommended or mandatory for use by the
20830 government.  When the directory was created, the people behind it made
20831 an effort to ensure that everyone would be able to implement the
20832 standards and compete on equal terms to supply software and solutions
20833 to the government.  Free software and non-free software could compete
20834 on the same level.</p>
20835
20836 <p>But recently, some standards with RAND
20837 (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing">Reasonable
20838 And Non-Discriminatory</a>) terms have made their way into the
20839 directory.  And while this might not sound too bad, the fact is that
20840 standard specifications with RAND terms often block free software from
20841 implementing them.  The reasonable part of RAND mean that the cost per
20842 user/unit is low,and the non-discriminatory part mean that everyone
20843 willing to pay will get a license.  Both sound great in theory.  In
20844 practice, to get such license one need to be able to count users, and
20845 be able to pay a small amount of money per unit or user.  By
20846 definition, users of free software do not need to register their use.
20847 So counting users or units is not possible for free software projects.
20848 And given that people will use the software without handing any money
20849 to the author, it is not really economically possible for a free
20850 software author to pay a small amount of money to license the rights
20851 to implement a standard when the income available is zero.  The result
20852 in these situations is that free software are locked out from
20853 implementing standards with RAND terms.</p>
20854
20855 <p>Because of this, when I see someone claiming the terms of a
20856 standard is reasonable and non-discriminatory, all I can think of is
20857 how this really is non-reasonable and discriminatory.  Because free
20858 software developers are working in a global market, it does not really
20859 help to know that software patents are not supposed to be enforceable
20860 in Norway.  The patent regimes in other countries affect us even here.
20861 I really hope the people behind the standard directory will pay more
20862 attention to these issues in the future.</p>
20863
20864 <p>You can find more on the issues with RAND, FRAND and RAND-Z terms
20865 from Simon Phipps
20866 (<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/11/rand-not-so-reasonable/">RAND:
20867 Not So Reasonable?</a>).</p>
20868
20869 <p>Update 2012-04-21: Just came across a
20870 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/of-microsoft-netscape-patents-and-open-standards/index.htm">blog
20871 post from Glyn Moody</a> over at Computer World UK warning about the
20872 same issue, and urging people to speak out to the UK government.  I
20873 can only urge Norwegian users to do the same for
20874 <a href="http://www.standard.difi.no/hoyring/hoyring-om-nye-anbefalte-it-standarder">the
20875 hearing taking place at the moment</a> (respond before 2012-04-27).
20876 It proposes to require video conferencing standards including
20877 specifications with RAND terms.</p>
20878
20879       </div>
20880       <div class="tags">
20881
20882
20883         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>.
20884
20885
20886       </div>
20887     </div>
20888     <div class="padding"></div>
20889
20890     <div class="entry">
20891       <div class="title">
20892         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Andreas_Mundt.html">Debian Edu interview: Andreas Mundt</a>
20893       </div>
20894       <div class="date">
20895         15th April 2012
20896       </div>
20897       <div class="body">
20898         <p>Behind <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
20899 Skolelinux</a> there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
20900 setting together all the pieces.  This time I present to you Andreas
20901 Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
20902 years.  He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
20903 up in the recently released
20904 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
20905 Edu Squeeze</a> version.</p>
20906
20907 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
20908
20909 <p>My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany.  After
20910 studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
20911 Quantum Optics.  After that I worked some years in an optics company.
20912 Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
20913 teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school.  I teach math, physics,
20914 information technology and science/technology.</p>
20915
20916 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
20917 project?</strong></p>
20918
20919 <p>Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
20920 project because of my interest in education and Debian.  Within the
20921 qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
20922 contributing.</p>
20923
20924 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20925 Edu?</strong></p>
20926
20927 <p>The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
20928 out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
20929 Debian Project!</p>
20930
20931 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
20932 Edu?</strong></p>
20933
20934 <p>As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
20935 downside, too.  In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
20936 setup, if you need or want that.  Further more, it is not easily
20937 possible to upgrade the system to a new release.  It takes much too
20938 long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
20939 because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
20940 rather small and often busy elsewhere.</p>
20941
20942 <p>The <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN">Debian LAN</a>
20943 project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.</p>
20944
20945 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
20946
20947 <p>I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
20948 on all my machines.  For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
20949 mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing.  At school I
20950 have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.</p>
20951
20952 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
20953 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
20954
20955 <p>One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
20956 Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
20957 politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader".  The school
20958 administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
20959 Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats.  Even
20960 free browsers do not work for the school administration.  Publishers
20961 of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.</p>
20962
20963 <p>To change this, political work is very important.  Parts of the
20964 political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
20965 However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free'
20966 the system.  There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and
20967 "Free/Open Standards".  I am not sure if all the involved parties have
20968 a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
20969 fraction takes them seriously.  However it might slowly make free
20970 software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.</p>
20971
20972       </div>
20973       <div class="tags">
20974
20975
20976         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
20977
20978
20979       </div>
20980     </div>
20981     <div class="padding"></div>
20982
20983     <div class="entry">
20984       <div class="title">
20985         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Justin_B__Rye.html">Debian Edu interview: Justin B. Rye</a>
20986       </div>
20987       <div class="date">
20988          8th April 2012
20989       </div>
20990       <div class="body">
20991         <p>It take all kind of contributions to create a Linux distribution
20992 like <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>,
20993 and this time I lend the ear to Justin B. Rye, who is listed as a big
20994 contributor to the
20995 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">Debian
20996 Edu Squeeze release manual</a>.
20997
20998 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
20999
21000 <p>I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
21001 occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.</p>
21002
21003 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
21004 project?</strong></p>
21005
21006 <p>I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user!  The only
21007 reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
21008 around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
21009 they'd like a native English speaker to proofread...  So I did a sweep
21010 through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
21011 "localisation".</p>
21012
21013 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21014 Edu?</strong></p>
21015
21016 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21017 Edu?</strong></p>
21018
21019 <p>These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it!  In fact I
21020 had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the
21021 education system.</p>
21022
21023 <p>I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
21024 as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
21025 everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
21026 money on the latest hardware.</p>
21027
21028 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
21029
21030 <p>I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
21031 software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
21032 words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).</p>
21033
21034 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
21035 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
21036
21037 <p>Well, I don't know.  I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning
21038 with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
21039 you would hardly need a strategy.</p>
21040
21041       </div>
21042       <div class="tags">
21043
21044
21045         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
21046
21047
21048       </div>
21049     </div>
21050     <div class="padding"></div>
21051
21052     <div class="entry">
21053       <div class="title">
21054         <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>
21055       </div>
21056       <div class="date">
21057          6th April 2012
21058       </div>
21059       <div class="body">
21060         <p>Recently I have spent time with
21061 <a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a> on speeding
21062 up a <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
21063 Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
21064 process I discovered something very surprising.  The reason the KDE
21065 menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
21066 due to the way KDE find application icons.  I discovered that showing
21067 the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
21068 passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server.  Most of these were
21069
21070 NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response.  Because the
21071 ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
21072 ms, the menus would be very slow.  Looking at the strace of kicker in
21073 Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
21074 the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
21075 non-existing files.  KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
21076 one icon file.  In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
21077 around 230 access(2) calls.</p>
21078
21079 <p>The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
21080 directories, and the list of possible directories is large.  In
21081 (almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
21082 and .xpm.  The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
21083 mounted.  Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
21084 requests.  I am not the first one to discover this.  I found a
21085 <a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211416">KDE bug report
21086 from 2009</a> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.</p>
21087
21088 <p>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
21089 kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
21090 used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
21091 for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
21092 icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/.  Finally, I add symlinks to
21093 these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
21094 for them.  This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
21095 one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
21096 almost instantaneous.  I'm not quite sure where to make the package
21097 publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.</p>
21098
21099 <p>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
21100 and icon handling, but also the login process.  Not quite sure how to
21101 speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
21102 that is not really an option at the moment.</p>
21103
21104 <p>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
21105 (at) lists.debian.org.</p>
21106
21107 <p>Update 2015-08-04: The
21108 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-edu/upstream/kde-icon-cache.git/">source
21109 of the scripts and associated Debian package</a> is available from the
21110 Debian Edu github repository.</p>
21111
21112       </div>
21113       <div class="tags">
21114
21115
21116         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21117
21118
21119       </div>
21120     </div>
21121     <div class="padding"></div>
21122
21123     <div class="entry">
21124       <div class="title">
21125         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_in_the_Linux_Weekly_News.html">Debian Edu in the Linux Weekly News</a>
21126       </div>
21127       <div class="date">
21128          5th April 2012
21129       </div>
21130       <div class="body">
21131         <p>About two weeks ago, I was interviewed via email about
21132 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a> by
21133 Bruce Byfield in Linux Weekly News.  The result was made public for
21134 non-subscribers today.  I am pleased to see liked our Linux solution
21135 for schools.  Check out his article
21136 <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/488805/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux: A
21137 distribution for education</a> if you want to learn more.</p>
21138
21139       </div>
21140       <div class="tags">
21141
21142
21143         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21144
21145
21146       </div>
21147     </div>
21148     <div class="padding"></div>
21149
21150     <div class="entry">
21151       <div class="title">
21152         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Wolfgang_Schweer.html">Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer</a>
21153       </div>
21154       <div class="date">
21155          1st April 2012
21156       </div>
21157       <div class="body">
21158         <p>Germany is a core area for the
21159 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
21160 user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
21161 Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.
21162
21163 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
21164
21165 <p>I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
21166 Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
21167 "<a href="http://www.westfalenkolleg-dortmund.de/">Westfalen-Kolleg
21168 Dortmund</a>", a second chance school.  Here, young adults is given
21169 the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
21170 examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This
21171 second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
21172 or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.</p>
21173
21174 <p>Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
21175 blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other
21176 information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been
21177 teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my
21178 school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at
21179 the end of April this year.</p>
21180
21181 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
21182 project?</strong></p>
21183
21184 <p>The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
21185 attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
21186 Project).  At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
21187 using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
21188 2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
21189 clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
21190 reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
21191 Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
21192 two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
21193 known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
21194 Skolelinux.</p>
21195
21196 <p>Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
21197 better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
21198 clients.  The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
21199 was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
21200 and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
21201 the admin teachers.</p>
21202
21203 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21204 Edu?</strong></p>
21205
21206 <p>It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
21207 Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
21208 So it was a perfect choice.</p>
21209
21210 <p>Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's
21211 possible to point teachers and students to programs like
21212 OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp.  It's of
21213 high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
21214 a school and to choose where to get support for this.</p>
21215
21216 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21217 Edu?</strong></p>
21218
21219 <p>Nothing yet.</p>
21220
21221 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
21222
21223 <p>At home (Debian Sid with Gnome Desktop): Iceweasel, LibreOffice,
21224 Mutt, Gedit, Document Viewer, Midnight Commander, flpsed (PDF
21225 Annotator).  At school (Skolelinux Lenny): Iceweasel, Gedit,
21226 LibreOffice.</p>
21227
21228 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
21229 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
21230
21231 <p>Some time ago I thought it was enough to tell people about it. But
21232 that doesn't seem to work quite well. Now I concentrate on those more
21233 interested and hope to get multiplicators that way.</p>
21234
21235       </div>
21236       <div class="tags">
21237
21238
21239         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
21240
21241
21242       </div>
21243     </div>
21244     <div class="padding"></div>
21245
21246     <div class="entry">
21247       <div class="title">
21248         <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>
21249       </div>
21250       <div class="date">
21251         25th March 2012
21252       </div>
21253       <div class="body">
21254         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
21255
21256 <p>The same Debian Edu developer that did the last screen cast I
21257 published, Wolfgang Schweer, has created a new screen cast showing how
21258 to set up Kmail in Debian Edu Squeze to authenticate using Kerberos,
21259 allowing users to check their local email account without providing
21260 any password. The video is embedded here in quarter size,
21261 and also available from <a href="https://vimeo.com/38601767">vimeo</a>
21262 and download as a
21263 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg
21264 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
21265
21266 <p><video id="kmail-kerberos-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
21267   <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"' />
21268     <p>Download video as
21269       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-03-14-Debian-Edu_Configure_Kmail_for_internal_usage.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
21270 </video></p>
21271
21272       </div>
21273       <div class="tags">
21274
21275
21276         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21277
21278
21279       </div>
21280     </div>
21281     <div class="padding"></div>
21282
21283     <div class="entry">
21284       <div class="title">
21285         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__John_Ingleby.html">Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby</a>
21286       </div>
21287       <div class="date">
21288         19th March 2012
21289       </div>
21290       <div class="body">
21291         <p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
21292 users are spread all across the globe.  The second inteview after
21293 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">the
21294 Squeeze release</a> was publised is with John Ingleby, a teacher and
21295 long time Linux user in United Kingdom.</p>
21296
21297 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
21298
21299 <p>I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
21300 Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
21301 author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
21302 contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
21303 encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
21304 years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
21305 weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
21306 installations.</p>
21307
21308 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
21309 project?</strong></p>
21310
21311 <p>Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
21312 London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
21313 just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
21314 along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
21315 mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
21316 well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
21317 have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
21318 LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
21319 these things we decided to try it.</p>
21320
21321 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21322 Edu?</strong></p>
21323
21324 <p>By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
21325 from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
21326 goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
21327 would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
21328 low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
21329 that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
21330 Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
21331 proprietary software everywhere.</p>
21332
21333 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21334 Edu?</strong></p>
21335
21336 <p>As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
21337 how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
21338 various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
21339 English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
21340 users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!</p>
21341
21342 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
21343
21344 <p>Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
21345 OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
21346 desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
21347 use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
21348 that counts...)</p>
21349
21350 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
21351 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
21352
21353 <p>That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
21354 and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
21355 the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
21356 applications".  However, schools today are experiencing budget
21357 constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
21358 XP.  At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
21359 iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
21360 longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
21361 realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
21362 putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
21363 first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.</p>
21364
21365 <p>I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
21366 free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
21367 Edu users in this country has to be part of it.</p>
21368
21369       </div>
21370       <div class="tags">
21371
21372
21373         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
21374
21375
21376       </div>
21377     </div>
21378     <div class="padding"></div>
21379
21380     <div class="entry">
21381       <div class="title">
21382         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Writing_and_translating_documentation_in_Debian_Edu.html">Writing and translating documentation in Debian Edu</a>
21383       </div>
21384       <div class="date">
21385         16th March 2012
21386       </div>
21387       <div class="body">
21388         <p>Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
21389 it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
21390 translated versions in sync.  To do this we have come up with what we
21391 believe is a very efficient work flow.</p>
21392
21393 <ol>
21394
21395 <li>The documentation is written in a
21396 <a href="http://moinmo.in">moinmoin wiki</a> (see for example
21397 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze">the
21398 Squeeze release manual</a>) with support for exporting the content as
21399 docbook XML.</li>
21400
21401 <li>This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
21402 .pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
21403 with the translated text.</li>
21404
21405 <li>The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
21406 which part of the original wiki document is new or changed.  They can
21407 use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
21408 the translation.  There is even a system in place to handle translated
21409 images.</li>
21410
21411 <li>The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
21412 XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.</li>
21413
21414 <li>The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
21415 create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.</li>
21416
21417 </ol>
21418
21419 <p>This setup work very well, but have a few issues.  The biggest
21420 issue is that <a href="http://moinmo.in/DocBook">the docbook support
21421 we use in moinmoin</a> is not actively maintained.  The docbook
21422 support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
21423 make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.</p>
21424
21425 <p>If you want to have a look at our setup, it is all there in the
21426 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc">debian-edu-doc
21427 package</a>.</p>
21428
21429       </div>
21430       <div class="tags">
21431
21432
21433         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21434
21435
21436       </div>
21437     </div>
21438     <div class="padding"></div>
21439
21440     <div class="entry">
21441       <div class="title">
21442         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_Squeeze_is_out_.html">Skolelinux / Debian Edu Squeeze is out!</a>
21443       </div>
21444       <div class="date">
21445         11th March 2012
21446       </div>
21447       <div class="body">
21448         <p>This weekend we finally published the first stable release of
21449 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> based
21450 on Debian/Squeeze.  The full announcement is
21451 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00001.html">available</a>
21452 from the project announcement list.  Now is a good time to test if it
21453 you have not done so already.</p>
21454
21455 <p>I plan to present the new version at
21456 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20120313-skolelinux/">a NUUG
21457 meeting</a> on tuesday.  I look forward to seeing you there if you are
21458 in Oslo, Norway.</p>
21459
21460       </div>
21461       <div class="tags">
21462
21463
21464         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21465
21466
21467       </div>
21468     </div>
21469     <div class="padding"></div>
21470
21471     <div class="entry">
21472       <div class="title">
21473         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Nigel_Barker.html">Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker</a>
21474       </div>
21475       <div class="date">
21476          9th March 2012
21477       </div>
21478       <div class="body">
21479         <p>Inspired by <a href="http://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/interview/">the
21480 interview series</a> conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
21481 interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
21482 community.  This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
21483 more international audience.</p>
21484
21485 <p>While <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and
21486 Skolelinux</a> originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
21487 Europe, there are users all around the globe.  One of those far away
21488 from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
21489 and contributor.  It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
21490 work out of the box in Japan.  I got him to answer a few questions,
21491 and am happy to share the response with you. :)
21492
21493
21494 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
21495
21496 <p>My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
21497 and we have three lovely children, aged 15, 14 and 4(!) I am the IT
21498 Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
21499 teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
21500 Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
21501 I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
21502 primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
21503 so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
21504 also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
21505 to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
21506 appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.</p>
21507
21508 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
21509 project?</strong></p>
21510
21511 <p>In around 2004 or 5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
21512 server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
21513 samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
21514 Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn't really improve my setup. I
21515 did various desperate searches for things like "school Linux server"
21516 and ended up in a document called "Drift" something or other. Reading
21517 there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
21518 problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
21519 previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
21520 Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
21521 downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
21522 Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
21523 my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.</p>
21524
21525 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21526 Edu?</strong></p>
21527
21528 <p>For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
21529 workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
21530 ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
21531 designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
21532 doesn't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
21533 school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
21534 Japan.</p>
21535
21536 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
21537 Edu?</strong></p>
21538
21539 <p>The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
21540 have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
21541 make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
21542 who don't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
21543 important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
21544 instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
21545 default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
21546 kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
21547 Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is.  A
21548 second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
21549 customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
21550 multiplies. For example, backup wasn't working properly in Lenny. It
21551 took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
21552 I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
21553 help.</p>
21554
21555 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
21556
21557 <p>Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
21558 studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
21559 (customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
21560 still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
21561 house, that's very useful for the family photos and music.  At school
21562 the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
21563 have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
21564 day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
21565 installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS.  We also
21566 have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
21567 and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.</p>
21568
21569 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
21570 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
21571
21572 <p>Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
21573 and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
21574 popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
21575 to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
21576 file formats and Word than they did 5 years ago.  The Edu aspect is
21577 also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
21578 Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu?  But of course the main attraction is
21579 budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
21580 compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
21581 is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
21582 are not impressed when their USB drive doesn't work, or their browser
21583 doesn't play flash, for example.</p>
21584
21585       </div>
21586       <div class="tags">
21587
21588
21589         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
21590
21591
21592       </div>
21593     </div>
21594     <div class="padding"></div>
21595
21596     <div class="entry">
21597       <div class="title">
21598         <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>
21599       </div>
21600       <div class="date">
21601          7th March 2012
21602       </div>
21603       <div class="body">
21604         <!-- Video HTML based on http://www.diveintohtml5.net/video.html -->
21605
21606 <p>One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a
21607 screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on
21608 Debian Edu Squeeze.  The video is embedded here in quarter size, and
21609 also available from <a href="http://vimeo.com/37675399">vimeo</a> and
21610 download as a
21611 <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg
21612 Theora</a> file.  Check it out below.</p>
21613
21614 <p><video id="gosa-mass-user-create-movie" width="256" height="184" preload controls>
21615   <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"' />
21616     <p>Download video as
21617       <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux/press/screencasts/2012-02-29-debian_edu_mass_create_user_accounts.ogv">Ogg</a>.</p>
21618 </video></p>
21619
21620       </div>
21621       <div class="tags">
21622
21623
21624         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21625
21626
21627       </div>
21628     </div>
21629     <div class="padding"></div>
21630
21631     <div class="entry">
21632       <div class="title">
21633         <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>
21634       </div>
21635       <div class="date">
21636          4th March 2012
21637       </div>
21638       <div class="body">
21639         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the third release
21640 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
21641 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
21642 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/03/msg00000.html">available</a>
21643 from the project announcement list.  Check it out if you
21644 need a software solution for your school.</p>
21645
21646       </div>
21647       <div class="tags">
21648
21649
21650         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21651
21652
21653       </div>
21654     </div>
21655     <div class="padding"></div>
21656
21657     <div class="entry">
21658       <div class="title">
21659         <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>
21660       </div>
21661       <div class="date">
21662          3rd March 2012
21663       </div>
21664       <div class="body">
21665         <p>Many years ago, the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
21666 / Debian Edu project</a> initiated a student project to create a tool
21667 for making stop motion movies.  The proposal came from a teacher
21668 needing such tool on Skolelinux.  The project, called "stopmotion",
21669 was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a
21670 national aware with this great project.  The project was initiated and
21671 mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bjørn Erik Nilsen
21672 and Fredrik Berg Kjølstad.  They got in touch with people at Aardman
21673 Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like
21674 such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by
21675 animators around the globe.  But as is usual after studying, both got
21676 jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the
21677 project, and it has been lingering for a few years now.  Until last
21678 year...</p>
21679
21680 <p>Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the
21681 project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new
21682 name,
21683 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxstopmotion/">linuxstopmotion</a>.
21684 The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using
21685 Internet search engines (try to search for 'stopmotion' to see what I
21686 mean). I've been following
21687 <a href="https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxstopmotion-community">the
21688 mailing list</a> and the improvement already in place and planned for
21689 the future is encouraging.  If you want to make stop motion movies.
21690 Check it out. :)</p>
21691
21692       </div>
21693       <div class="tags">
21694
21695
21696         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
21697
21698
21699       </div>
21700     </div>
21701     <div class="padding"></div>
21702
21703     <div class="entry">
21704       <div class="title">
21705         <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>
21706       </div>
21707       <div class="date">
21708         27th February 2012
21709       </div>
21710       <div class="body">
21711         <p>This weekend we wrapped up and published the second release
21712 candidate for <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
21713 Skolelinux</a> based on Squeeze.  The full announcement did for some
21714 reason not make it the project announcement list, but is
21715 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/02/msg00015.html">available</a>
21716 from the Debian development announcement list.  Check it out if you
21717 need a software solution for your school.</p>
21718
21719       </div>
21720       <div class="tags">
21721
21722
21723         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21724
21725
21726       </div>
21727     </div>
21728     <div class="padding"></div>
21729
21730     <div class="entry">
21731       <div class="title">
21732         <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>
21733       </div>
21734       <div class="date">
21735         19th February 2012
21736       </div>
21737       <div class="body">
21738         <p>One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
21739 wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
21740 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
21741 on Squeeze.  The full announcement is
21742 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00001.html">available</a>
21743 on the project announcement list.  Check it out if you need a software
21744 solution for your school.</p>
21745
21746       </div>
21747       <div class="tags">
21748
21749
21750         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21751
21752
21753       </div>
21754     </div>
21755     <div class="padding"></div>
21756
21757     <div class="entry">
21758       <div class="title">
21759         <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>
21760       </div>
21761       <div class="date">
21762         14th February 2012
21763       </div>
21764       <div class="body">
21765         <p>Once in a while my home server have disk problems.  Thanks to Linux
21766 Software RAID, I have not lost data yet (but
21767 <a href="http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/34532">I was
21768 close</a> this summer :).  But once a disk is starting to behave
21769 funny, a practical problem present itself.  How to get from the Linux
21770 device name (like /dev/sdd) to something that can be used to identify
21771 the disk when the computer is turned off?  In my case I have SATA
21772 disks with a unique ID printed on the label.  All I need is a way to
21773 figure out how to query the disk to get the ID out.</p>
21774
21775 <p>After fumbling a bit, I
21776 <a href="http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-getting-scsi-ide-harddisk-information/">found
21777 that hdparm -I</a> will report the disk serial number, which is
21778 printed on the disk label.  The following (almost) one-liner can be
21779 used to look up the ID of all the failed disks:</p>
21780
21781 <blockquote><pre>
21782 for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep '(F)'|tr ' ' "\n"|grep '(F)'|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u);
21783 do
21784     printf "Failed disk $d: "
21785     hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep 'Serial Num'
21786 done
21787 </blockquote></pre>
21788
21789 <p>Putting it here to make sure I do not have to search for it the
21790 next time, and in case other find it useful.</p>
21791
21792 <p>At the moment I have two failing disk. :(</p>
21793
21794 <blockquote><pre>
21795 Failed disk sdd1:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
21796 Failed disk sdd2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1860823
21797 Failed disk sde2:       Serial Number:      WD-WCASJ1840589
21798 </blockquote></pre>
21799
21800 <p>The last time I had failing disks, I added the serial number on
21801 labels I printed and stuck on the short sides of each disk, to be able
21802 to figure out which disk to take out of the box without having to
21803 remove each disk to look at the physical vendor label.  The vendor
21804 label is at the top of the disk, which is hidden when the disks are
21805 mounted inside my box.</p>
21806
21807 <p>I really wish the check_linux_raid Nagios plugin for checking Linux
21808 Software RAID in the
21809 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nagios-plugins.html">nagios-plugins-standard</a>
21810 debian package would look up this value automatically, as it would
21811 make the plugin a lot more useful when my disks fail.  At the moment
21812 it only report a failure when there are no more spares left (it really
21813 should warn as soon as a disk is failing), and it do not tell me which
21814 disk(s) is failing when the RAID is running short on disks.</p>
21815
21816       </div>
21817       <div class="tags">
21818
21819
21820         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>.
21821
21822
21823       </div>
21824     </div>
21825     <div class="padding"></div>
21826
21827     <div class="entry">
21828       <div class="title">
21829         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_proxy_configuration_with_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html">Automatic proxy configuration with Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
21830       </div>
21831       <div class="date">
21832         13th February 2012
21833       </div>
21834       <div class="body">
21835         <p>New in the Squeeze version of
21836 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> is the
21837 ability for clients to automatically configure their proxy settings
21838 based on their environment.  We want all systems on the client to use
21839 the WPAD based proxy definition fetched from <tt>http://wpad/wpad.dat</tt>, to
21840 allow sites to control the proxy setting from a central place and make
21841 sure clients do not have hard coded proxy settings.  The schools can
21842 change the global proxy setting by editing
21843 <tt>tjener:/etc/debian-edu/www/wpad.dat</tt> and the change propagate
21844 to all Debian Edu clients in the network.</p>
21845
21846 <p>The problem is that some systems do not understand the WPAD system.
21847 In other words, how do one get from a WPAD file like this (this is a
21848 simple one, they can run arbitrary code):</p>
21849
21850 <blockquote><pre>
21851 function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
21852 {
21853    if (!isResolvable(host) ||
21854        isPlainHostName(host) ||
21855        dnsDomainIs(host, ".intern"))
21856       return "DIRECT";
21857    else
21858       return "PROXY webcache:3128; DIRECT";
21859 }
21860 </pre></blockquote>
21861
21862 <p>to a proxy setting in the process environment looking like this:</p>
21863
21864 <blockquote><pre>
21865 http_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
21866 ftp_proxy=http://webcache:3128/
21867 </pre></blockquote>
21868
21869 <p>To do this conversion I developed a perl script that will execute
21870 the javascript fragment in the WPAD file and return the proxy that
21871 would be used for
21872 <tt><a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a></tt>,
21873 and insert this extracted proxy URL in <tt>/etc/environment</tt> and
21874 <tt>/etc/apt/apt.conf</tt>.  The perl script wpad-extract work just
21875 fine in Squeeze, but in Wheezy the library it need to run the
21876 javascript code is <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/631045">no longer
21877 able to build</a> because the C library it depended on is now a C++
21878 library.  I hope someone find a solution to that problem before Wheezy
21879 is frozen.  An alternative would be for us to rewrite wpad-extract to
21880 use some other javascript library currently working in Wheezy, but no
21881 known alternative is known at the moment.</p>
21882
21883 <p>This automatic proxy system allow the roaming workstation (aka
21884 laptop) setup in Debian Edu/Squeeze to use the proxy when the laptop
21885 is connected to the backbone network in a Debian Edu setup, and to
21886 automatically use any proxy present and announced using the WPAD
21887 feature when it is connected to other networks.  And if no proxy is
21888 announced, direct connections will be used instead.</p>
21889
21890 <p>Silently using a proxy announced on the network might be a privacy
21891 or security problem.  But those controlling DHCP and DNS on a network
21892 could just as easily set up a transparent proxy, and force all HTTP
21893 and FTP connections to use a proxy anyway, so I consider that
21894 distinction to be academic.  If you are afraid of using the wrong
21895 proxy, you should avoid connecting to the network in question in the
21896 first place.  In Debian Edu, the proxy setup is updated using dhcp and
21897 ifupdown hooks, to make sure the configuration is updated every time
21898 the network setup changes.</p>
21899
21900 <p>The WPAD system is documented in a
21901 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-01">IETF
21902 draft</a> and a
21903 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol">Wikipedia
21904 page</a> for those that want to learn more.</p>
21905
21906       </div>
21907       <div class="tags">
21908
21909
21910         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21911
21912
21913       </div>
21914     </div>
21915     <div class="padding"></div>
21916
21917     <div class="entry">
21918       <div class="title">
21919         <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>
21920       </div>
21921       <div class="date">
21922          5th February 2012
21923       </div>
21924       <div class="body">
21925         <p>Since the Lenny version of
21926 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, a
21927 feature to save power have been included.  It is as simple as it is
21928 practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again
21929 in the morning.  This is done using the
21930 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/shutdown-at-night.html">shutdown-at-night</a> Debian package.</p>
21931
21932 <p>To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to
21933 the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts.  For Debian Edu, this is done in
21934 LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check
21935 every hour from 16:00 until 06:00 to see if the machine is unused, and
21936 shut it down if it is.  If the hardware in question is supported by
21937 the
21938 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvram-wakeup.html">nvram-wakeup</a>
21939 package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around 07:00 +-
21940 10 minutes.  If this isn't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to
21941 try to turn on the client.  The wake-on-lan option is only documented
21942 and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.</p>
21943
21944 <p>It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can
21945 blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like
21946 the common setup for a classroom.  The nvram-wakeup method only work
21947 for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock.  I've seen old
21948 machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were
21949 starting from 0 (or was it 1990?) every boot.  If you have one of
21950 those, you have to turn on the computer manually.</p>
21951
21952 <p>The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can
21953 also be used outside the Debian Edu environment.  For those without a
21954 central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file
21955 <tt>/etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night</tt> to enable it.
21956 Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?</p>
21957
21958       </div>
21959       <div class="tags">
21960
21961
21962         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
21963
21964
21965       </div>
21966     </div>
21967     <div class="padding"></div>
21968
21969     <div class="entry">
21970       <div class="title">
21971         <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>
21972       </div>
21973       <div class="date">
21974          4th February 2012
21975       </div>
21976       <div class="body">
21977         <p>I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and
21978 publish the third beta version of
21979 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
21980 on Squeeze.  If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with
21981 out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and
21982 installing new machines, check it out.  If you need a software
21983 solution for your school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
21984 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00000.html">available</a>
21985 on the project announcement list.</p>
21986
21987 <p>I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since
21988 beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):</p>
21989
21990 <ul>
21991
21992 <li>It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from
21993   10.0.0.0/8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after
21994   the installation.</li>
21995
21996 <li>Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main
21997   Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.</li>
21998
21999 <li>The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all
22000   disabled queues are restarted every hour.  This should cut down on
22001   the amount of manual administration needed for printers.</li>
22002
22003 <li>The set of initial users have been changed.  Now a personal user
22004   for the local system administrator is created during installation
22005   instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users,
22006   and this user is granted administrative privileges using group
22007   membership.  This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep
22008   up to date on the system.</li>
22009
22010 </ul>
22011
22012 <p>The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my
22013 private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home.  I will use it look
22014 for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the
22015 final Squeeze release is published.</p>
22016
22017 <p>Next weekend the project organise a
22018 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00001.html">developer
22019 gathering</a> in Oslo.  We will continue the work on the Squeeze
22020 version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version.  Perhaps I
22021 will see you there?</p>
22022
22023       </div>
22024       <div class="tags">
22025
22026
22027         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
22028
22029
22030       </div>
22031     </div>
22032     <div class="padding"></div>
22033
22034     <div class="entry">
22035       <div class="title">
22036         <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>
22037       </div>
22038       <div class="date">
22039         27th January 2012
22040       </div>
22041       <div class="body">
22042         <p>With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
22043 This is the sad fact of todays computers.  In the next version of
22044 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
22045 on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
22046 firmware blobs easier to handle.  The common use case I run into is a
22047 laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
22048 work, but there are other use cases as well.</p>
22049
22050 <p>First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
22051 with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
22052 included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
22053 during installation.  This take care firmware for network devices used
22054 by the installer when installing from from local media.  But for
22055 example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
22056 not taken care of by this.</p>
22057
22058 <p>For non-network devices, we provide the script
22059 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware</tt> which
22060 search through the <tt>dmesg</tt> output for drivers requesting extra
22061 firmware.  The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
22062 file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
22063 the requested firmware file(s) is installed.  I have proposed to do
22064 something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
22065 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/655507">#655507</a>), to allow PXE
22066 installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better.  Run the
22067 script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
22068 firmware packages.</p>
22069
22070 <p>Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
22071 because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
22072 working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
22073 included to be able to install at all.  To fill the PXE installation
22074 initrd with extra firmware, the
22075 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware</tt> script is
22076 provided.  Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
22077 PXE initrd with firmware packages.</p>
22078
22079 <p>Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
22080 network cards working.  For this,
22081 <tt>/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware</tt> is
22082 provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs.  It is used
22083 the same way as the other firmware related tools.</p>
22084
22085 <p>At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation.  We
22086 do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
22087 non-free software, and it is their choice.</p>
22088
22089 <p>We plan to release beta3 this weekend.  You might want to give it a
22090 try.</p>
22091
22092       </div>
22093       <div class="tags">
22094
22095
22096         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
22097
22098
22099       </div>
22100     </div>
22101     <div class="padding"></div>
22102
22103     <div class="entry">
22104       <div class="title">
22105         <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>
22106       </div>
22107       <div class="date">
22108         25th January 2012
22109       </div>
22110       <div class="body">
22111         <p>The next version of <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu
22112 / Skolelinux</a> will include a new tool
22113 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp</tt>, which can be used to quickly set up all
22114 the computers in a school without much manual labour.  Here is a short
22115 summary on how to use it to set up a new school.</p>
22116
22117 <p>First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
22118 central server in the network.  Next, PXE boot all the client machines
22119 as thin clients and wait 5 minutes after the last client booted to
22120 allow the clients to report their existence to the central server.  When
22121 this is done, log on to the central server and run
22122 <tt>sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a</tt> in the <tt>konsole</tt> to use the
22123 collected information to generate system objects in LDAP.  The output
22124 will look similar to this:</p>
22125
22126 <p><blockquote><pre>
22127 % sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
22128 info: Updating machine tjener.intern [10.0.2.2] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:05.
22129 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.
22130
22131 Enter password if you want to activate these changes, and ^c to abort.
22132
22133 Connecting to LDAP as cn=admin,ou=ldap-access,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
22134 enter password: *******
22135 %
22136 </pre></blockquote></p>
22137
22138 <p>After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
22139 root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
22140 populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
22141 automatically generated names.  The final step to set up the school is
22142 then to log into <a href="https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/">GOsa</a>,
22143 the web based user, group and system administration system to change
22144 system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
22145 enable DHCP and DNS for the systems.  All clients that should be used
22146 as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
22147 group.  After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
22148 and get their assigned names and group based configuration
22149 automatically.</p>
22150
22151 <p>We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
22152 enabled this weekend.  You might want to give it a try.</p>
22153
22154 <p>Update 2012-01-28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
22155 hosts, one need to add the option -a.  I forgot to mention this in my
22156 original text, and have added it to the text now.</p>
22157
22158       </div>
22159       <div class="tags">
22160
22161
22162         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
22163
22164
22165       </div>
22166     </div>
22167     <div class="padding"></div>
22168
22169     <div class="entry">
22170       <div class="title">
22171         <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>
22172       </div>
22173       <div class="date">
22174         10th January 2012
22175       </div>
22176       <div class="body">
22177         <p>In the Squeeze version of
22178 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> soon
22179 to be released, users of the system will get their default browser
22180 start page set from LDAP, allowing the system administrator to point
22181 all users to the school web page by updating one setting in LDAP.  In
22182 addition to setting the default start page when a machine boots, users
22183 are shown the same page as a welcome page when they log in for the
22184 first time.</p>
22185
22186 <p>The LDAP object dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no have an attribute
22187 labeledURI with "http://www/ LDAP for Debian Edu/Skolelinux" as the
22188 default content.  By changing this value to another URL, all users get
22189 to see the page behind this new URL.</p>
22190
22191 <p>An easy way to update it is by using the ldapvi tool.  It can be
22192 called as "<tt>ldapvi -ZD '(cn=admin)'</tt>' to update LDAP with the
22193 new setting.</p>
22194
22195 <p>We have written the code to adjust the default start page and show
22196 the welcome page, and I wonder if there is an easier way to do this
22197 from within Iceweasel instead.</p>
22198
22199       </div>
22200       <div class="tags">
22201
22202
22203         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
22204
22205
22206       </div>
22207     </div>
22208     <div class="padding"></div>
22209
22210     <div class="entry">
22211       <div class="title">
22212         <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>
22213       </div>
22214       <div class="date">
22215          7th January 2012
22216       </div>
22217       <div class="body">
22218         <p>I am happy to announce that today we managed to wrap up and publish
22219 the second beta version of
22220 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>.  If
22221 you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE
22222 configuration for running diskless machines and installing new
22223 machines, check it out.  If you need a software solution for your
22224 school, check it out too.  The full announcement is
22225 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/01/msg00000.html">available</a>
22226 on the project announcement list.</p>
22227
22228       </div>
22229       <div class="tags">
22230
22231
22232         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
22233
22234
22235       </div>
22236     </div>
22237     <div class="padding"></div>
22238
22239     <div class="entry">
22240       <div class="title">
22241         <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>
22242       </div>
22243       <div class="date">
22244          3rd January 2012
22245       </div>
22246       <div class="body">
22247         <p>During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of
22248 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> ready
22249 for release.  The initial problem I looked at was particularly
22250 interesting.</p>
22251
22252 <P>The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it
22253 post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find
22254 the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I
22255 integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from
22256 scratch.  I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors,
22257 remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and
22258 wrap up its tasks.</p>
22259
22260 <p>Eventually the cause was found.  The kernel was simply running out
22261 of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more.
22262 Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries
22263 to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but
22264 because I was typing.</P>
22265
22266 <p>The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at
22267 the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking
22268 /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the
22269 installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do 'find /' to
22270 generate some disk IO.  Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is
22271 one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to
22272 generate entropy.</p>
22273
22274 <p>The fix is in
22275 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Squeeze/Installation">beta1
22276 of the Debian Edu/Squeeze</a> version, and we
22277 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu">welcome more testers and
22278 developers</a>.  We plan to release beta2 this weekend.</p>
22279
22280       </div>
22281       <div class="tags">
22282
22283
22284         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
22285
22286
22287       </div>
22288     </div>
22289     <div class="padding"></div>
22290
22291     <div class="entry">
22292       <div class="title">
22293         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
22294       </div>
22295       <div class="date">
22296         21st November 2011
22297       </div>
22298       <div class="body">
22299         <p>At work we have heaps of servers.  I believe the total count is
22300 around 1000 at the moment.  To be able to get help from the vendors
22301 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
22302 up to date.  If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
22303 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
22304 firmware is upgraded.  So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
22305 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
22306 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
22307 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
22308 the tools to do so.</p>
22309
22310 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
22311 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got.  Most of
22312 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
22313 so far.  This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
22314
22315 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
22316 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
22317 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
22318 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
22319 site I can find it.  Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
22320 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
22321 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
22322 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
22323
22324 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
22325 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
22326 servers at a site?  Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
22327
22328 <p><pre>
22329 #!/usr/bin/perl
22330 use strict;
22331 use warnings;
22332 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
22333 BEGIN {
22334     # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
22335     my %rhelmodules = (
22336         'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
22337         );
22338     for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
22339         eval "use $module;";
22340         if ($@) {
22341             my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
22342             system("yum install -y $pkg");
22343             eval "use $module;";
22344         }
22345     }
22346 }
22347 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
22348
22349 upgrade_dell();
22350
22351 exit 0;
22352
22353 sub run_firmware_script {
22354     my ($opts, $script) = @_;
22355     unless ($script) {
22356         print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
22357         exit 1
22358     }
22359     print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
22360
22361     if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
22362         print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
22363     } else {
22364         print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
22365     }
22366 }
22367
22368 sub run_firmware_scripts {
22369     my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
22370     # Run firmware packages
22371     for my $dir (@dirs) {
22372         print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
22373         opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
22374         while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
22375             next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
22376             run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
22377         }
22378         closedir $dh;
22379     }
22380 }
22381
22382 sub download {
22383     my $url = shift;
22384     print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
22385     system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
22386 }
22387
22388 sub upgrade_dell {
22389     my @dirs;
22390     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
22391     chomp $product;
22392
22393     if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
22394
22395         # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
22396         system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
22397
22398         my $tmpdir = tempdir(
22399             CLEANUP => 1
22400             );
22401         chdir($tmpdir);
22402         fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
22403         system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
22404         my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
22405         # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
22406         my $fwopts = "-q";
22407         if (@paths) {
22408             for my $url (@paths) {
22409                 fetch_dell_fw($url);
22410             }
22411             run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
22412         } else {
22413             print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
22414             print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
22415         }
22416         chdir('/');
22417     } else {
22418         print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
22419         print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
22420     }
22421 }
22422
22423 sub fetch_dell_fw {
22424     my $path = shift;
22425     my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
22426     download($url);
22427 }
22428
22429 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
22430 # firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
22431 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
22432 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
22433     my $filename = shift;
22434
22435     my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
22436     chomp $product;
22437     my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
22438
22439     print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
22440
22441     my $xml = XMLin($filename);
22442     my @paths;
22443     for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
22444         my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
22445         my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
22446         my $oscode;
22447         if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
22448             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
22449         } else {
22450             $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
22451         }
22452         if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
22453         {
22454             @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
22455         }
22456     }
22457     for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
22458         my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
22459
22460         # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
22461         next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
22462
22463         my $cpath = $component->{path};
22464         for my $path (@paths) {
22465             if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
22466                 push(@paths, $cpath);
22467             }
22468         }
22469     }
22470     return @paths;
22471 }
22472 </pre>
22473
22474 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
22475 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking.  Anyone know a
22476 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers?  At the
22477 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
22478 outdated.</p>
22479
22480       </div>
22481       <div class="tags">
22482
22483
22484         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
22485
22486
22487       </div>
22488     </div>
22489     <div class="padding"></div>
22490
22491     <div class="entry">
22492       <div class="title">
22493         <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>
22494       </div>
22495       <div class="date">
22496          7th October 2011
22497       </div>
22498       <div class="body">
22499         <p>Here in Norway the public libraries are debating with the
22500 publishing houses how to handle electronic books.  Surprisingly, the
22501 libraries seem to be willing to accept digital restriction mechanisms
22502 (DRM) on books and renting e-books with artificial scarcity from the
22503 publishing houses.  Time limited renting (2-3 years) is one proposed
22504 model, and only allowing X borrowers for each book is another.
22505 Personally I find it amazing that libraries are even considering such
22506 models.</p>
22507
22508 <p>Anyway, while reading <a href="http://boklaben.no/?p=220">part of
22509 this debate</a>, it occurred to me that someone should present a more
22510 sensible approach to the libraries, to allow its borrowers to get used
22511 to a better model.  The idea is simple:</p>
22512
22513 <p>Create a computer system for the libraries, either in the form of a
22514 Live DVD or a installable distribution, that provide a simple kiosk
22515 solution to hand out free e-books.  As a start, the books distributed
22516 by <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about
22517 36,000 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a>
22518 (1149 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The
22519 Internet Archive</a> (3,033,748 books) could be included, but any book
22520 where the copyright has expired or with a free licence could be
22521 distributed.</p>
22522
22523 <p>The computer system would make it easy to:</p>
22524
22525 <ul>
22526
22527 <li>Copy e-books into a USB stick, reading tablets, cell phones and
22528   other relevant equipment.</li>
22529
22530 <li>Show the books for reading on the the screen in the library.</li>
22531
22532 </ul>
22533
22534 <p>In addition to such kiosk solution, there should probably be a web
22535 site as well to allow people easy access to these books without
22536 visiting the library.  The site would be the distribution point for
22537 the kiosk systems, which would connect regularly to fetch any new
22538 books available.</p>
22539
22540 <p>Are there anyone working on a system like this?  I guess it would
22541 fit any library in the world, and not just the Norwegian public
22542 libraries. :)</p>
22543
22544       </div>
22545       <div class="tags">
22546
22547
22548         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>.
22549
22550
22551       </div>
22552     </div>
22553     <div class="padding"></div>
22554
22555     <div class="entry">
22556       <div class="title">
22557         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">Ripping problematic DVDs using dvdbackup and genisoimage</a>
22558       </div>
22559       <div class="date">
22560         17th September 2011
22561       </div>
22562       <div class="body">
22563         <p>For convenience, I want to store copies of all my DVDs on my file
22564 server.  It allow me to save shelf space flat while still having my
22565 movie collection easily available.  It also make it possible to let
22566 the kids see their favourite DVDs without wearing the physical copies
22567 down.  I prefer to store the DVDs as ISOs to keep the DVD menu and
22568 subtitle options intact.  It also ensure that the entire film is one
22569 file on the disk.  As this is for personal use, the ripping is
22570 perfectly legal here in Norway.</p>
22571
22572 <p>Normally I rip the DVDs using dd like this:</p>
22573
22574 <blockquote><pre>
22575 #!/bin/sh
22576 # apt-get install lsdvd
22577 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
22578 dd if=/dev/dvd of=/storage/dvds/$title.iso bs=1M
22579 </pre></blockquote>
22580
22581 <p>But some DVDs give a input/output error when I read it, and I have
22582 been looking for a better alternative.  I have no idea why this I/O
22583 error occur, but suspect my DVD drive, the Linux kernel driver or
22584 something fishy with the DVDs in question.  Or perhaps all three.</p>
22585
22586 <p>Anyway, I believe I found a solution today using dvdbackup and
22587 genisoimage.  This script gave me a working ISO for a problematic
22588 movie by first extracting the DVD file system and then re-packing it
22589 back as an ISO.
22590
22591 <blockquote><pre>
22592 #!/bin/sh
22593 # apt-get install lsdvd dvdbackup genisoimage
22594 set -e
22595 tmpdir=/storage/dvds/
22596 title=$(lsdvd 2>/dev/null|awk '/Disc Title: / {print $3}')
22597 dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M -o $tmpdir -n$title
22598 genisoimage -dvd-video -o $tmpdir/$title.iso $tmpdir/$title
22599 rm -rf $tmpdir/$title
22600 </pre></blockquote>
22601
22602 <p>Anyone know of a better way available in Debian/Squeeze?</p>
22603
22604 <p>Update 2011-09-18: I got a tip from Konstantin Khomoutov about the
22605 readom program from the wodim package.  It is specially written to
22606 read optical media, and is called like this: <tt>readom dev=/dev/dvd
22607 f=image.iso</tt>.  It got 6 GB along with the problematic Cars DVD
22608 before it failed, and failed right away with a Timmy Time DVD.</p>
22609
22610 <p>Next, I got a tip from Bastian Blank about
22611 <a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">his
22612 program python-dvdvideo</a>, which seem to be just what I am looking
22613 for.  Tested it with my problematic Timmy Time DVD, and it succeeded
22614 creating a ISO image.  The git source built and installed just fine in
22615 Squeeze, so I guess this will be my tool of choice in the future.</p>
22616
22617       </div>
22618       <div class="tags">
22619
22620
22621         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>.
22622
22623
22624       </div>
22625     </div>
22626     <div class="padding"></div>
22627
22628     <div class="entry">
22629       <div class="title">
22630         <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>
22631       </div>
22632       <div class="date">
22633          4th August 2011
22634       </div>
22635       <div class="body">
22636         <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
22637 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
22638 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
22639 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
22640 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
22641 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
22642 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>.  I only have time to address one
22643 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
22644 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
22645
22646 <p><blockquote>
22647 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
22648 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
22649 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
22650 </blockquote></p>
22651
22652 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
22653 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same.  I am not surprised he
22654 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
22655 thing to believe.  But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
22656 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
22657 mode.  I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
22658 hard to explain.</p>
22659
22660 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
22661 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>".  This means the only thing that is
22662 executed in single user mode is sulogin.  Single user mode is a boot
22663 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
22664 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
22665 enters the single user state.  When switching to runlevel 1, the state
22666 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
22667 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
22668 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
22669 1.  It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
22670 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
22671 mode).</p>
22672
22673 <p>This summary might make it clearer.  When booting for the first
22674 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
22675 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  When booting into
22676 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
22677 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>".  A problem show up when
22678 trying to continue after visiting single user mode.  Not all services
22679 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
22680 unpredicatble state.  This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
22681 after visiting single user mode.</p>
22682
22683 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
22684 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/.  When switching from say runlevel 2
22685 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
22686 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
22687 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
22688 2-5.  I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
22689 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
22690 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
22691
22692 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
22693 and discovered this problem a few years ago.  I suspect it originates
22694 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
22695
22696       </div>
22697       <div class="tags">
22698
22699
22700         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>.
22701
22702
22703       </div>
22704     </div>
22705     <div class="padding"></div>
22706
22707     <div class="entry">
22708       <div class="title">
22709         <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>
22710       </div>
22711       <div class="date">
22712         30th July 2011
22713       </div>
22714       <div class="body">
22715         <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
22716 are started from /etc/rcS.d/.  In fact, there is a bite more of them
22717 than make sense, and this causes a few problems.  What kind of
22718 problems, you might ask.  There are at least two problems.  The first
22719 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
22720 runlevel 1.  One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
22721 the expected state.  The other is that single user boot will sometimes
22722 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
22723 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
22724 machine from a problem in that subsystem.  A minor additional point is
22725 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
22726 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
22727 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
22728
22729 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/.  In short, only the
22730 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
22731 presented during a single user boot should go there.  Everything else
22732 should go into the numeric runlevels.  This means things like
22733 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
22734 the numeric runlevels.  Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
22735 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
22736 out.  Do your package have one of them?  Please help us make single
22737 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
22738
22739 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
22740 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
22741 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
22742 is presented.</p>
22743
22744 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound.  To keep
22745 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
22746 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
22747 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
22748 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
22749 moved first.  This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
22750 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
22751 the system state correct.  This will require some coordination when it
22752 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
22753 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
22754 on them.  Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
22755 package, while others are still left to do.  I wish I had time to work
22756 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
22757 find time to push this forward.</p>
22758
22759       </div>
22760       <div class="tags">
22761
22762
22763         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>.
22764
22765
22766       </div>
22767     </div>
22768     <div class="padding"></div>
22769
22770     <div class="entry">
22771       <div class="title">
22772         <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>
22773       </div>
22774       <div class="date">
22775         29th July 2011
22776       </div>
22777       <div class="body">
22778         <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
22779 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
22780 desktop to be useful for more people.  The use case for this is my
22781 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
22782 issues.</p>
22783
22784 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
22785 implement.  After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
22786 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
22787
22788 <ol>
22789
22790 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
22791 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
22792 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
22793 tool to handle it.  I have no problem guiding both of my parents
22794 through the process over the phone.  If a kernel reboot is required,
22795 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool.  Last
22796 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
22797 Debian.</li>
22798
22799 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
22800 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
22801 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
22802 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
22803 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
22804 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
22805 Packages file in the APT archive).  If one or more packages are found,
22806 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
22807 type.  If the package require the user to accept some non-free
22808 license, this is explained to the user.  The entire process make it
22809 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
22810 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
22811 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
22812
22813 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
22814 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
22815 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
22816 should search for a package that would add support for it.  This
22817 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264.  The selection
22818 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
22819 plugin handling.  This is as far as I know implemented using a
22820 gstreamer hook.  The end result is that the user easily get access to
22821 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
22822 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
22823
22824 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
22825 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
22826 start emacs to show it.  If I remember correctly, when doing the same
22827 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser.  At least I
22828 know Opera will show text files within the browser.  I much prefer the
22829 latter behaviour.</li>
22830
22831 </ol>
22832
22833 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
22834 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
22835 it do not matter much.</p>
22836
22837 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
22838 Debian release.  It would require the coordinated effort of several
22839 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
22840
22841       </div>
22842       <div class="tags">
22843
22844
22845         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
22846
22847
22848       </div>
22849     </div>
22850     <div class="padding"></div>
22851
22852     <div class="entry">
22853       <div class="title">
22854         <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>
22855       </div>
22856       <div class="date">
22857         26th July 2011
22858       </div>
22859       <div class="body">
22860         <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
22861 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
22862 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
22863 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
22864 security support for a few years.</p>
22865
22866 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
22867 that are missing in Debian at the moment.  It would be great if these
22868 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
22869 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
22870 in their own country using only Debian packages.  The list of modules
22871 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
22872 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
22873 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
22874 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
22875 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
22876 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
22877 easier in the future.</p>
22878
22879 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
22880 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
22881 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package.  But this leave me
22882 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
22883 do not have time for.</p>
22884
22885       </div>
22886       <div class="tags">
22887
22888
22889         Tags: <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>.
22890
22891
22892       </div>
22893     </div>
22894     <div class="padding"></div>
22895
22896     <div class="entry">
22897       <div class="title">
22898         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_Software_vs__proprietary_softare___.html">Free Software vs. proprietary softare...</a>
22899       </div>
22900       <div class="date">
22901         20th June 2011
22902       </div>
22903       <div class="body">
22904         <p>Reading
22905 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/06/20/open-source-vs-closed-source-eulas/">the
22906 thingiverse blog</a>, I came across two highlights of interesting
22907 parts of the
22908 <a href="http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Autodesk_EULA">Autodesk</a>
22909 and
22910 <a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/06/things-you-cant-do-with-the-microsoft-kinect-sdk.html">Microsoft
22911 Kinect</a> End User License Agreements (EULAs), which illustrates
22912 quite well why I stay away from software with EULAs.  Whenever I take
22913 the time to read their content, the terms are simply unacceptable.</p>
22914
22915       </div>
22916       <div class="tags">
22917
22918
22919         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>.
22920
22921
22922       </div>
22923     </div>
22924     <div class="padding"></div>
22925
22926     <div class="entry">
22927       <div class="title">
22928         <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>
22929       </div>
22930       <div class="date">
22931         30th April 2011
22932       </div>
22933       <div class="body">
22934         <p>Today, the first draft implementation of an
22935 <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> for the Norwegian
22936 service <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> started to
22937 work.  It is only available on the developer server for now, and I
22938 have not tested it using any existing Open311 client (I lack the
22939 platforms needed to run the clients I have found so far), but it is
22940 able to query the database and extract a list of open and closed
22941 requests within a given category and reported to a given municipality.
22942 I believe that is a good start to create a useful service for those
22943 that want to do data mining on the requests submitted so far.</p>
22944
22945 <p>Where is it?  Visit
22946 <a href="http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/">http://fiksgatami-dev.nuug.no/open311.cgi/v2/</a>
22947 to have a look.  Please send feedback to the
22948 <a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/fiksgatami">fiksgatami
22949 (at) nuug.no</a> mailing list.</p>
22950
22951       </div>
22952       <div class="tags">
22953
22954
22955         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>.
22956
22957
22958       </div>
22959     </div>
22960     <div class="padding"></div>
22961
22962     <div class="entry">
22963       <div class="title">
22964         <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>
22965       </div>
22966       <div class="date">
22967         29th April 2011
22968       </div>
22969       <div class="body">
22970         <p>The last few days I have spent some time trying to add support for
22971 the <a href="http://www.open311.org/">Open311 API</a> in the
22972 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">Norwegian FixMyStreet service</a>.
22973 Earlier I believed Open311 would be a useful API to use to submit
22974 reports to the municipalities, but when I noticed that the
22975 <a href="http://fixmystreet.org.nz/">New Zealand version</a> of
22976 FixMyStreet had implemented Open311 on the server side, it occurred to
22977 me that this was a nice way to allow the public, press and
22978 municipalities to do data mining directly in the FixMyStreet service.
22979 Thus I went to work implementing the Open311 specification for
22980 FixMyStreet.  The implementation is not yet ready, but I am starting
22981 to get a draft limping along.  In the process, I have discovered a few
22982 issues with the Open311 specification.</p>
22983
22984 <p>One obvious missing feature is the lack of natural language
22985 handling in the specification.  The specification seem to assume all
22986 reports will be written in English, and do not provide a way for the
22987 receiving end to specify which languages are understood there.  To be
22988 able to use the same client and submit to several Open311 receivers,
22989 it would be useful to know which language to use when writing reports.
22990 I believe the specification should be extended to allow the receivers
22991 of problem reports to specify which language they accept, and the
22992 submitter to specify which language the report is written in.
22993 Language of a text can also be automatically guessed using statistical
22994 methods, but for multi-lingual persons like myself, it is useful to
22995 know which language to use when writing a problem report.  I suspect
22996 some lang=nb,nn kind of attribute would solve it.</p>
22997
22998 <p>A key part of the Open311 API is the list of services provided,
22999 which is similar to the categories used by FixMyStreet.  One issue I
23000 run into is the need to specify both name and unique identifier for
23001 each category.  The specification do not state that the identifier
23002 should be numeric, but all example implementations have used numbers
23003 here.  In FixMyStreet, there is no number associated with each
23004 category.  As the specification do not forbid it, I will use the name
23005 as the unique identifier for now and see how open311 clients handle
23006 it.</p>
23007
23008 <p>The report format in open311 and the report format in FixMyStreet
23009 differ in a key part.  FixMyStreet have a title and a description,
23010 while Open311 only have a description and lack the title.  I'm not
23011 quite sure how to best handle this yet.  When asking for a FixMyStreet
23012 report in Open311 format, I just merge title an description into the
23013 open311 description, but this is not going to work if the open311 API
23014 should be used for submitting new reports to FixMyStreet.</p>
23015
23016 <p>The search feature in Open311 is missing a way to ask for problems
23017 near a geographic location.  I believe this is important if one is to
23018 use Open311 as the query language for mobile units.  The specification
23019 should be extended to handle this, probably using some new lat=, lon=
23020 and range= options.</p>
23021
23022 <p>The final challenge I see is that the FixMyStreet code handle
23023 several administrations in one interface, while the Open311 API seem
23024 to assume only one administration.  For FixMyStreet, this mean a
23025 report can be sent to several administrations, and the categories
23026 available depend on the location of the problem.  Not quite sure how
23027 to best handle this.  I've noticed
23028 <a href="http://seeclickfix.com/open311/">SeeClickFix</a> added
23029 latitude and longitude options to the services request, but it do not
23030 solve the problem of what to return when no location is specified.
23031 Will have to investigate this a bit more.</p>
23032
23033 <p>My distaste for web forums have kept me from bringing these issues
23034 up with the open311 developer group.  I really wish they had a email
23035 list available via <a href="http://www.gmane.org/">Gmane</a> to use for
23036 discussions instead of only
23037 <a href="http://lists.open311.org/groups/discuss">a forum<a/>.  Oh,
23038 well.  That will probably resolve itself, one way or another.  I've
23039 also tried visiting the IRC channel #open311 on FreeNode, but no-one
23040 seem to reply to my questions there.  This make me wonder if I just
23041 fail to understand how the open311 community work.  It sure do not
23042 work like the free software project communities I am used to.</p>
23043
23044       </div>
23045       <div class="tags">
23046
23047
23048         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>.
23049
23050
23051       </div>
23052     </div>
23053     <div class="padding"></div>
23054
23055     <div class="entry">
23056       <div class="title">
23057         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_enteres_Google_Summer_of_Code_2011.html">Gnash enteres Google Summer of Code 2011</a>
23058       </div>
23059       <div class="date">
23060          6th April 2011
23061       </div>
23062       <div class="body">
23063         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is still
23064 the most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation.
23065 A few days ago the project
23066 <a href="http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash-dev/2011-04/msg00011.html">announced</a>
23067 that it will participate in Google Summer of Code.  I hope many
23068 students apply, and that some of them succeed in getting AVM2 support
23069 into Gnash.</p>
23070
23071       </div>
23072       <div class="tags">
23073
23074
23075         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>.
23076
23077
23078       </div>
23079     </div>
23080     <div class="padding"></div>
23081
23082     <div class="entry">
23083       <div class="title">
23084         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html">A Norwegian FixMyStreet have kept me busy the last few weeks</a>
23085       </div>
23086       <div class="date">
23087          3rd April 2011
23088       </div>
23089       <div class="body">
23090         <p>Here is a small update for my English readers.  Most of my blog
23091 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
23092 update in English.</p>
23093
23094 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
23095 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
23096 of the British service
23097 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
23098 and it has been running for a month now.  The entire project has been
23099 organised by me and two others.  Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
23100 to fund the development work.  In January I drafted a contract with
23101 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
23102 and in February the development took place.  Most of it involved
23103 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
23104 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
23105 running in any country by now.  The Norwegian
23106 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
23107 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
23108 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
23109 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
23110
23111 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
23112 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th.  The system is
23113 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
23114 problem reports in a few weeks.  Soon we hope to announce the Android
23115 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
23116 public infrastructure.</p>
23117
23118 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
23119 such service?</p>
23120
23121       </div>
23122       <div class="tags">
23123
23124
23125         Tags: <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>.
23126
23127
23128       </div>
23129     </div>
23130     <div class="padding"></div>
23131
23132     <div class="entry">
23133       <div class="title">
23134         <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>
23135       </div>
23136       <div class="date">
23137         28th January 2011
23138       </div>
23139       <div class="body">
23140         <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
23141 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo.  My idea is that
23142 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
23143 available on the Internet, and check our locally
23144 maintained/distributed software against this information.  It should
23145 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten.  The
23146 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
23147 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
23148 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
23149 out which security holes were present in our free software
23150 collection.</p>
23151
23152 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
23153 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
23154 consistent way across data sources.  I considered several ways to do
23155 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
23156 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
23157 existing naming scheme.  And it seem like I am not the first one to
23158 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
23159 solution.  Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
23160 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
23161 software, hardware and other platform components.  The CPE ids are
23162 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
23163 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
23164 issues for any CPE name.  With this in place, all I need to do is to
23165 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
23166 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
23167 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
23168
23169 <p>To give you an example.  The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
23170 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip.  If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
23171 check out, one could look up
23172 <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
23173 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
23174 The most recent one is
23175 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
23176 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
23177 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
23178
23179 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
23180 for offline processing of issues.  Using this dump, I've written a
23181 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
23182 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs.  One give it CPEs
23183 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
23184 security issues out.</p>
23185
23186 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
23187 information need to be high.  For that to happen, I believe as many as
23188 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database.  I notice
23189 RHEL is providing
23190 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
23191 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
23192 information.  I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
23193
23194 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
23195 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
23196 the CVE database in NVD.  The result look fairly good, but there are
23197 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
23198 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
23199 Debian believe are affected by a CVE).  Hope to find time to improve
23200 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
23201 someone maintaining it.  So far my three emails with questions and
23202 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
23203 established soon.</p>
23204
23205 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
23206 mapping.  It would be useful to know which packages in for example
23207 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
23208 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
23209 for their packages.</p>
23210
23211       </div>
23212       <div class="tags">
23213
23214
23215         Tags: <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>.
23216
23217
23218       </div>
23219     </div>
23220     <div class="padding"></div>
23221
23222     <div class="entry">
23223       <div class="title">
23224         <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>
23225       </div>
23226       <div class="date">
23227         23rd January 2011
23228       </div>
23229       <div class="body">
23230         <p>In the
23231 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
23232 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
23233 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
23234 information.  One part of this script that I find very useful when
23235 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
23236 to the PCI device it claims.  It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
23237 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with.  To see
23238 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
23239 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>.  The relevant output on
23240 one of my machines like this:</p>
23241
23242 <pre>
23243 loaded modules:
23244 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
23245 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
23246 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
23247 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
23248 10de:03ec pata_amd
23249 10de:03f6 sata_nv
23250 1022:1103 k8temp
23251 109e:036e bttv
23252 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
23253 11ab:4364 sky2
23254 </pre>
23255
23256 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
23257 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
23258
23259 <pre>
23260 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
23261     echo loaded pci modules:
23262     (
23263         cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
23264         for address in * ; do
23265             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
23266                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
23267                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
23268                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
23269                     id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
23270                     echo "$id $module"
23271                 fi
23272             fi
23273         done
23274     )
23275     echo
23276 fi
23277 </pre>
23278
23279 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
23280 mappings:</p>
23281
23282 <pre>
23283 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
23284     echo loaded usb modules:
23285     (
23286         cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
23287         for address in * ; do
23288             if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
23289                 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
23290                 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
23291                     address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
23292                     id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
23293                     if [ "$id" ] ; then
23294                         echo "$id $module"
23295                     fi
23296                 fi
23297             fi
23298         done
23299     )
23300     echo
23301 fi
23302 </pre>
23303
23304 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
23305 well.</p>
23306
23307       </div>
23308       <div class="tags">
23309
23310
23311         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
23312
23313
23314       </div>
23315     </div>
23316     <div class="padding"></div>
23317
23318     <div class="entry">
23319       <div class="title">
23320         <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>
23321       </div>
23322       <div class="date">
23323         16th January 2011
23324       </div>
23325       <div class="body">
23326         <p>The video format struggle on the web continues, and the three
23327 contenders seem to be Ogg Theora, H.264 and WebM.  Most video sites
23328 seem to use H.264, while others use Ogg Theora.  Interestingly enough,
23329 the comments I see give me the feeling that a lot of people believe
23330 H.264 is the most supported video format in browsers, but according to
23331 the Wikipedia article on
23332 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">HTML5 video</a>,
23333 this is not true.  Check out the nice table of supprted formats in
23334 different browsers there.  The format supported by most browsers is
23335 Ogg Theora, supported by released versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google
23336 Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, Origyn Web Browser and
23337 BOLT browser, while not supported by Internet Explorer nor Safari.
23338 The runner up is WebM supported by released versions of Google Chrome
23339 Chromium Opera and Origyn Web Browser, and test versions of Mozilla
23340 Firefox.  H.264 is supported by released versions of Safari, Origyn
23341 Web Browser and BOLT browser, and the test version of Internet
23342 Explorer.  Those wanting Ogg Theora support in Internet Explorer and
23343 Safari can install plugins to get it.</p>
23344
23345 <p>To me, the simple conclusion from this is that to reach most users
23346 without any extra software installed, one uses Ogg Theora with the
23347 HTML5 video tag.   Of course to reach all those without a browser
23348 handling HTML5, one need fallback mechanisms.  In
23349 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a>, we provide first fallback to a
23350 plugin capable of playing MPEG1 video, and those without such support
23351 we have a second fallback to the Cortado java applet playing Ogg
23352 Theora.  This seem to work quite well, as can be seen in an <a
23353 href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20110111-semantic-web/">example
23354 from last week</a>.</p>
23355
23356 <p>The reason Ogg Theora is the most supported format, and H.264 is
23357 the least supported is simple.  Implementing and using H.264
23358 require royalty payment to MPEG-LA, and the terms of use from MPEG-LA
23359 are incompatible with free software licensing.  If you believed H.264
23360 was without royalties and license terms, check out
23361 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
23362 Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps.</p>
23363
23364 <p>A incomplete list of sites providing video in Ogg Theora is
23365 available from
23366 <a href="http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/List_of_Theora_videos">the
23367 Xiph.org wiki</a>, if you want to have a look.  I'm not aware of a
23368 similar list for WebM nor H.264.</p>
23369
23370 <p>Update 2011-01-16 09:40: A question from Tollef on IRC made me
23371 realise that I failed to make it clear enough this text is about the
23372 &lt;video&gt; tag support in browsers and not the video support
23373 provided by external plugins like the Flash plugins.</p>
23374
23375       </div>
23376       <div class="tags">
23377
23378
23379         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
23380
23381
23382       </div>
23383     </div>
23384     <div class="padding"></div>
23385
23386     <div class="entry">
23387       <div class="title">
23388         <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>
23389       </div>
23390       <div class="date">
23391         12th January 2011
23392       </div>
23393       <div class="body">
23394         <p>Today I discovered
23395 <a href="http://www.digi.no/860070/google-dropper-h264-stotten-i-chrome">via
23396 digi.no</a> that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
23397 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html">yesterday
23398 announced</a> plans to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt; in
23399 the browser.  The argument used is that H.264 is not a "completely
23400 open" codec technology.  If you believe H.264 was free for everyone
23401 to use, I recommend having a look at the essay
23402 "<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
23403 Free That Matters</a>".  It is not free of cost for creators of video
23404 tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the
23405 terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from
23406 licensing the patents needed for H.264.  Some background information
23407 on the Google announcement is available from
23408 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24243/Google_To_Drop_H264_Support_from_Chrome">OSnews</a>.
23409 A good read. :)</p>
23410
23411 <p>Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to
23412 promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on
23413 the Internet.  This can only be done by publishing using free and open
23414 standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support
23415 for these free and open standards.  At the moment there seem to be two
23416 camps in the web browser world when it come to video support.  Some
23417 browsers support H.264, and others support
23418 <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg Theora</a> and
23419 <a href="http://www.webmproject.org/">WebM</a>
23420 (<a href="http://www.diracvideo.org/">Dirac</a> is not really an option
23421 yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet
23422 and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for
23423 H.264 to not reach all potential viewers.
23424 Wikipedia keep <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">an
23425 updated summary</a> of the current browser support.</p>
23426
23427 <p>Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
23428 promoting H.264, and John Gruber
23429 <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/simple_questions">presents
23430 the mind set</a> of these people quite well.  His rhetorical questions
23431 provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
23432 <a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24245/10_Questions_for_John_Gruber_Regarding_H_264_WebM">presenting
23433 the issues with H.264</a>. Both are worth a read.</p>
23434
23435 <p>Some argue that if Google is dropping H.264 because it isn't free,
23436 they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin.  This
23437 argument was covered by Simon Phipps in
23438 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/01/google-and-h264---far-from-hypocritical/index.htm">todays
23439 blog post</a>, which I find to put the issue in context.  To me it
23440 make perfect sense to drop native H.264 support for HTML5 in the
23441 browser while still allowing plugins.</p>
23442
23443 <p>I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest,
23444 is that all the users and promoters of H.264 suddenly get an uneasy
23445 feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse.  A lot of TV
23446 broadcasters have been moving to H.264 the last few years, and a lot
23447 of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they
23448 could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web
23449 publishing.  Suddenly this belief is shaken.</p>
23450
23451 <p>An interesting question is why Google is doing this.  While the
23452 presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only
23453 present the argument if the change make sense from a business
23454 perspective.  One reason might be that they are currently negotiating
23455 with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the
23456 feeling that dropping H.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and
23457 Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google.
23458 Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having
23459 to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a
23460 video format not requiring royalties at all.  A third reason might be
23461 that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the
23462 Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome.
23463 I guess time will tell.</p>
23464
23465 <p>Update 2011-01-15: The Google Chrome team provided
23466 <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html">more
23467 background and information on the move</a> it a blog post yesterday.</p>
23468
23469       </div>
23470       <div class="tags">
23471
23472
23473         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
23474
23475
23476       </div>
23477     </div>
23478     <div class="padding"></div>
23479
23480     <div class="entry">
23481       <div class="title">
23482         <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>
23483       </div>
23484       <div class="date">
23485         30th December 2010
23486       </div>
23487       <div class="body">
23488         <p>After trying to
23489 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Ogg_Theora_a_free_and_open_standard_.html">compare
23490 Ogg Theora</a> to
23491 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the Digistan
23492 definition</a> of a free and open standard, I concluded that this need
23493 to be done for more standards and started on a framework for doing
23494 this.  As a start, I want to get the status for all the standards in
23495 the Norwegian reference directory, which include UTF-8, HTML, PDF, ODF,
23496 JPEG, PNG, SVG and others.  But to be able to complete this in a
23497 reasonable time frame, I will need help.</p>
23498
23499 <p>If you want to help out with this work, please visit
23500 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/standard/digistan-analyse">the
23501 wiki pages I have set up for this</a>, and let me know that you want
23502 to help out.  The IRC channel #nuug on irc.freenode.net is a good
23503 place to coordinate this for now, as it is the IRC channel for the
23504 NUUG association where I have created the framework (I am the leader
23505 of the Norwegian Unix User Group).</p>
23506
23507 <p>The framework is still forming, and a lot is left to do.  Do not be
23508 scared by the sketchy form of the current pages. :)</p>
23509
23510       </div>
23511       <div class="tags">
23512
23513
23514         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>.
23515
23516
23517       </div>
23518     </div>
23519     <div class="padding"></div>
23520
23521     <div class="entry">
23522       <div class="title">
23523         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_many_definitions_of_a_open_standard.html">The many definitions of a open standard</a>
23524       </div>
23525       <div class="date">
23526         27th December 2010
23527       </div>
23528       <div class="body">
23529         <p>One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of
23530 "<a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">Free and
23531 Open Standard</a>" is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of
23532 the term has been decided by Digistan.  The term "Open Standard" has
23533 become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking
23534 about standards.  One end up discussing which definition is the best
23535 one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of
23536 de-facto standards and proprietary solutions.</p>
23537
23538 <p>But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open
23539 standards, here are a few that I know about.  This list is not
23540 complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a
23541 complete survey.  More definitions are available on the
23542 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard">wikipedia
23543 page</a>.</p>
23544
23545 <p>First off is my favourite, the definition from the European
23546 Interoperability Framework version 1.0.  Really sad to notice that BSA
23547 and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version 2.0 of the
23548 framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with
23549 their own people.  Anyway, the definition is still available and it
23550 include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a
23551 specification on equal terms.</p>
23552
23553 <blockquote>
23554
23555 <p>The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification
23556 and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an
23557 open standard:</p>
23558
23559 <ul>
23560
23561 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
23562 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
23563 open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties
23564 (consensus or majority decision etc.).</li>
23565
23566 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
23567 document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be
23568 permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a
23569 nominal fee.</li>
23570
23571 <li>The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of
23572 (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-
23573 free basis.</li>
23574
23575 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
23576
23577 </ul>
23578 </blockquote>
23579
23580 <p>Another one originates from my friends over at
23581 <a href="http://www.dkuug.dk/">DKUUG</a>, who coined and gathered
23582 support for <a href="http://www.aaben-standard.dk/">this
23583 definition</a> in 2004.  It even made it into the Danish parlament as
23584 <a href="http://www.ft.dk/dokumenter/tingdok.aspx?/samling/20051/beslutningsforslag/B103/som_fremsat.htm">their
23585 definition of a open standard</a>.  Another from a different part of
23586 the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.</p>
23587
23588 <blockquote>
23589
23590 <p>En åben standard opfylder følgende krav:</p>
23591
23592 <ol>
23593
23594 <li>Veldokumenteret med den fuldstændige specifikation offentligt
23595 tilgængelig.</li>
23596
23597 <li>Frit implementerbar uden økonomiske, politiske eller juridiske
23598 begrænsninger på implementation og anvendelse.</li>
23599
23600 <li>Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et åbent forum (en såkaldt
23601 "standardiseringsorganisation") via en åben proces.</li>
23602
23603 </ol>
23604
23605 </blockquote>
23606
23607 <p>Then there is <a href="http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/def.html">the
23608 definition</a> from Free Software Foundation Europe.</p>
23609
23610 <blockquote>
23611
23612 <p>An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is</p>
23613
23614 <ol>
23615
23616 <li>subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a
23617 manner equally available to all parties;</li>
23618
23619 <li>without any components or extensions that have dependencies on
23620 formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open
23621 Standard themselves;</li>
23622
23623 <li>free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by
23624 any party or in any business model;</li>
23625
23626 <li>managed and further developed independently of any single vendor
23627 in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third
23628 parties;</li>
23629
23630 <li>available in multiple complete implementations by competing
23631 vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all
23632 parties.</li>
23633
23634 </ol>
23635
23636 </blockquote>
23637
23638 <p>A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created
23639 its
23640 <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/dennisding/resource/Open%20Standard%20Definition.pdf">Open
23641 Standards Checklist</a> with a fairly detailed description.</p>
23642
23643 <blockquote>
23644 <p>Creation and Management of an Open Standard
23645
23646 <ul>
23647
23648 <li>Its development and management process must be collaborative and
23649   democratic:
23650
23651          <ul>
23652
23653          <li>Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to
23654             participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria
23655             imposed by the organization under which it is developed
23656             and managed.</li>
23657
23658          <li>The processes must be documented and, through a known
23659             method, can be changed through input from all
23660             participants.</li>
23661
23662          <li>The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for
23663             the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.</li>
23664
23665          <li>Development and management should strive for consensus,
23666             and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.</li>
23667
23668          <li>The standard specification must be open to extensive
23669             public review at least once in its life-cycle, with
23670             comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.</li>
23671
23672          </ul>
23673
23674 </li>
23675
23676 </ul>
23677
23678 <p>Use and Licensing of an Open Standard</p>
23679 <ul>
23680
23681 <li>The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation,
23682   and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing
23683   implementations to the interface described in the standard without
23684   undue or restrictive constraints.  Interfaces include APIs,
23685   protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.</li>
23686
23687 <li> The standard must not contain any proprietary "hooks" that create
23688   a technical or economic barriers</li>
23689
23690 <li>Faithful implementations of the standard must
23691   interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer
23692   program to communicate and exchange information with other computer
23693   programs and mutually to use the information which has been
23694   exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange
23695   file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or
23696   conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other
23697   computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are
23698   intended to function.</li>
23699
23700 <li>It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the
23701   standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it
23702   must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.</li>
23703
23704 <li>It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or
23705   fees; also known as "royalty free"), worldwide, non-exclusive and
23706   perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and
23707   sell products based on the standard.  The only exceptions are
23708   terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms
23709   outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished
23710   patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is
23711   only for the exact scope of the standard in question.
23712
23713       <ul>
23714
23715       <li> May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of
23716         licensees' patent claims essential to practice that standard
23717         (also known as a reciprocity clause)</li>
23718
23719       <li> May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor
23720         or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims
23721         essential to practice that standard (also known as a
23722         "defensive suspension" clause)</li>
23723
23724       <li> The same licensing terms are available to every potential
23725         licensor</li>
23726
23727       </ul>
23728 </li>
23729
23730 <li>The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude
23731   implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms
23732   or restricted licensing terms</li>
23733
23734 </ul>
23735
23736 </blockquote>
23737
23738 <p>It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that
23739 there are so many of them.  As you can see, the same holds true for
23740 open standard definitions.  Most of the definitions have a lot in
23741 common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open
23742 standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it
23743 possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real
23744 competition to downplay the significance of open standards.  I hope we
23745 can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open
23746 Standards.</p>
23747
23748       </div>
23749       <div class="tags">
23750
23751
23752         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>.
23753
23754
23755       </div>
23756     </div>
23757     <div class="padding"></div>
23758
23759     <div class="entry">
23760       <div class="title">
23761         <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>
23762       </div>
23763       <div class="date">
23764         25th December 2010
23765       </div>
23766       <div class="body">
23767         <p><a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">The
23768 Digistan definition</a> of a free and open standard reads like this:</p>
23769
23770 <blockquote>
23771
23772 <p>The Digital Standards Organization defines free and open standard
23773 as follows:</p>
23774
23775 <ol>
23776
23777 <li>A free and open standard is immune to vendor capture at all stages
23778 in its life-cycle. Immunity from vendor capture makes it possible to
23779 freely use, improve upon, trust, and extend a standard over time.</li>
23780
23781 <li>The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit
23782 organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an
23783 open decision-making procedure available to all interested
23784 parties.</li>
23785
23786 <li>The standard has been published and the standard specification
23787 document is available freely. It must be permissible to all to copy,
23788 distribute, and use it freely.</li>
23789
23790 <li>The patents possibly present on (parts of) the standard are made
23791 irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.</li>
23792
23793 <li>There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.</li>
23794
23795 </ol>
23796
23797 <p>The economic outcome of a free and open standard, which can be
23798 measured, is that it enables perfect competition between suppliers of
23799 products based on the standard.</p>
23800 </blockquote>
23801
23802 <p>For a while now I have tried to figure out of Ogg Theora is a free
23803 and open standard according to this definition.  Here is a short
23804 writeup of what I have been able to gather so far.  I brought up the
23805 topic on the Xiph advocacy mailing list
23806 <a href="http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/advocacy/2009-July/001632.html">in
23807 July 2009</a>, for those that want to see some background information.
23808 According to Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves and Monty Montgomery on that list
23809 the Ogg Theora specification fulfils the Digistan definition.</p>
23810
23811 <p><strong>Free from vendor capture?</strong></p>
23812
23813 <p>As far as I can see, there is no single vendor that can control the
23814 Ogg Theora specification.  It can be argued that the
23815 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/">Xiph foundation</A> is such vendor, but
23816 given that it is a non-profit foundation with the expressed goal
23817 making free and open protocols and standards available, it is not
23818 obvious that this is a real risk.  One issue with the Xiph
23819 foundation is that its inner working (as in board member list, or who
23820 control the foundation) are not easily available on the web.  I've
23821 been unable to find out who is in the foundation board, and have not
23822 seen any accounting information documenting how money is handled nor
23823 where is is spent in the foundation.  It is thus not obvious for an
23824 external observer who control The Xiph foundation, and for all I know
23825 it is possible for a single vendor to take control over the
23826 specification.  But it seem unlikely.</p>
23827
23828 <p><strong>Maintained by open not-for-profit organisation?</strong></p>
23829
23830 <p>Assuming that the Xiph foundation is the organisation its web pages
23831 claim it to be, this point is fulfilled.  If Xiph foundation is
23832 controlled by a single vendor, it isn't, but I have not found any
23833 documentation indicating this.</p>
23834
23835 <p>According to
23836 <a href="http://media.hiof.no/diverse/fad/rapport_4.pdf">a report</a>
23837 prepared by Audun Vaaler og Børre Ludvigsen for the Norwegian
23838 government, the Xiph foundation is a non-commercial organisation and
23839 the development process is open, transparent and non-Discrimatory.
23840 Until proven otherwise, I believe it make most sense to believe the
23841 report is correct.</p>
23842
23843 <p><strong>Specification freely available?</strong></p>
23844
23845 <p>The specification for the <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/">Ogg
23846 container format</a> and both the
23847 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/">Vorbis</a> and
23848 <a href="http://theora.org/doc/">Theora</a> codeces are available on
23849 the web.  This are the terms in the Vorbis and Theora specification:
23850
23851 <blockquote>
23852
23853 Anyone may freely use and distribute the Ogg and [Vorbis/Theora]
23854 specifications, whether in private, public, or corporate
23855 capacity. However, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the Ogg project reserve
23856 the right to set the Ogg [Vorbis/Theora] specification and certify
23857 specification compliance.
23858
23859 </blockquote>
23860
23861 <p>The Ogg container format is specified in IETF
23862 <a href="http://www.xiph.org/ogg/doc/rfc3533.txt">RFC 3533</a>, and
23863 this is the term:<p>
23864
23865 <blockquote>
23866
23867 <p>This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
23868 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
23869 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
23870 distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
23871 provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
23872 included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
23873 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
23874 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
23875 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
23876 Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
23877 in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to
23878 translate it into languages other than English.</p>
23879
23880 <p>The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
23881 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.</p>
23882 </blockquote>
23883
23884 <p>All these terms seem to allow unlimited distribution and use, an
23885 this term seem to be fulfilled.  There might be a problem with the
23886 missing permission to distribute modified versions of the text, and
23887 thus reuse it in other specifications.  Not quite sure if that is a
23888 requirement for the Digistan definition.</p>
23889
23890 <p><strong>Royalty-free?</strong></p>
23891
23892 <p>There are no known patent claims requiring royalties for the Ogg
23893 Theora format.
23894 <a href="http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=65782">MPEG-LA</a>
23895 and
23896 <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/237238/Steve-Jobs-Hints-At-Theora-Lawsuit">Steve
23897 Jobs</a> in Apple claim to know about some patent claims (submarine
23898 patents) against the Theora format, but no-one else seem to believe
23899 them.  Both Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation have looked into
23900 this and decided to implement Ogg Theora support in their browsers
23901 without paying any royalties.  For now the claims from MPEG-LA and
23902 Steve Jobs seem more like FUD to scare people to use the H.264 codec
23903 than any real problem with Ogg Theora.</p>
23904
23905 <p><strong>No constraints on re-use?</strong></p>
23906
23907 <p>I am not aware of any constraints on re-use.</p>
23908
23909 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
23910
23911 <p>3 of 5 requirements seem obviously fulfilled, and the remaining 2
23912 depend on the governing structure of the Xiph foundation.  Given the
23913 background report used by the Norwegian government, I believe it is
23914 safe to assume the last two requirements are fulfilled too, but it
23915 would be nice if the Xiph foundation web site made it easier to verify
23916 this.</p>
23917
23918 <p>It would be nice to see other analysis of other specifications to
23919 see if they are free and open standards.</p>
23920
23921       </div>
23922       <div class="tags">
23923
23924
23925         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>.
23926
23927
23928       </div>
23929     </div>
23930     <div class="padding"></div>
23931
23932     <div class="entry">
23933       <div class="title">
23934         <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>
23935       </div>
23936       <div class="date">
23937         25th December 2010
23938       </div>
23939       <div class="body">
23940         <p>A few days ago
23941 <a href="http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article189879.ece">an
23942 article</a> in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version
23943 2.0 of
23944 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Interoperability_Framework">European
23945 Interoperability Framework</a> has been successfully lobbied by the
23946 proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software.
23947 Nothing very surprising there, given
23948 <a href="http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/29/2115235/Open-Source-Open-Standards-Under-Attack-In-Europe">earlier
23949 reports</a> on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in
23950 this work.  But I find this very sad.   The definition of
23951 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/dokumenter/standard-presse-def-200506.txt">an
23952 open standard from version 1</a> was very good, and something I
23953 believe should be used also in the future, alongside
23954 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">the
23955 definition from Digistan</A>.  Version 2 have removed the open
23956 standard definition from its content.</p>
23957
23958 <p>Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar
23959 Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply
23960 to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software
23961 in the public sector in Peru.  As the text was not available from a
23962 few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from
23963 <a href="http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/articles/en/reponseperou/villanueva_to_ms.html">my
23964 source</a> to ensure it is available also in the future.  Some
23965 background information about that story is available in
23966 <a href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6099">an article</a> from
23967 Linux Journal in 2002.</p>
23968
23969 <blockquote>
23970 <p>Lima, 8th of April, 2002<br>
23971 To: Señor JUAN ALBERTO GONZÁLEZ<br>
23972 General Manager of Microsoft Perú</p>
23973
23974 <p>Dear Sir:</p>
23975
23976 <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>
23977
23978 <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>
23979
23980 <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>
23981
23982 <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>
23983
23984 <p>
23985 <ul>
23986 <li>Free access to public information by the citizen. </li>
23987 <li>Permanence of public data. </li>
23988 <li>Security of the State and citizens.</li>
23989 </ul>
23990 </p>
23991
23992 <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>
23993
23994 <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>
23995
23996 <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>
23997
23998 <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>
23999
24000 <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>
24001
24002
24003 <p>From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:<br>
24004 <li>the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software</li>
24005 <li>the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software</li>
24006 <li>the law does not specify which concrete software to use</li>
24007 <li>the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought</li>
24008 <li>the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.</li>
24009
24010 </p>
24011
24012 <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>
24013
24014 <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>
24015
24016 <p>As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail:</p>
24017
24018 <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>
24019
24020 <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>
24021
24022 <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>
24023
24024 <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>
24025
24026 <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>
24027
24028 <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>
24029
24030 <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>
24031
24032 <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>
24033
24034 <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>
24035
24036 <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>
24037
24038 <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>
24039
24040 <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>
24041
24042 <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>
24043
24044 <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>
24045
24046 <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>
24047
24048 <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>
24049
24050 <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>
24051
24052 <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>
24053
24054 <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>
24055
24056 <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>
24057
24058 <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>
24059
24060 <p>On security:</p>
24061
24062 <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>
24063
24064 <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>
24065
24066 <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>
24067
24068 <p>In respect of the guarantee:</p>
24069
24070 <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>
24071
24072 <p>On Intellectual Property:</p>
24073
24074 <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>
24075
24076 <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>
24077
24078 <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>
24079
24080 <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>
24081
24082 <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>
24083
24084 <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>
24085
24086 <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>
24087
24088 <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>
24089
24090 <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>
24091
24092 <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>
24093
24094 <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>
24095
24096 <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>
24097
24098 <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>
24099
24100 <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>
24101
24102 <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>
24103
24104 <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>
24105
24106 <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>
24107
24108 <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>
24109
24110 <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>
24111
24112 <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>
24113
24114 <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>
24115
24116 <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>
24117
24118 <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>
24119
24120 <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>
24121
24122 <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>
24123
24124 <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>
24125
24126 <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>
24127
24128 <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>
24129
24130 <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>
24131
24132 <p>Cordially,<br>
24133 DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NUÑEZ<br>
24134 Congressman of the Republic of Perú.</p>
24135 </blockquote>
24136
24137       </div>
24138       <div class="tags">
24139
24140
24141         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>.
24142
24143
24144       </div>
24145     </div>
24146     <div class="padding"></div>
24147
24148     <div class="entry">
24149       <div class="title">
24150         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_still_going_strong.html">Officeshots still going strong</a>
24151       </div>
24152       <div class="date">
24153         25th December 2010
24154       </div>
24155       <div class="body">
24156         <p>Half a year ago I
24157 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">wrote
24158 a bit</a> about <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>,
24159 a web service to allow anyone to test how ODF documents are handled by
24160 the different programs reading and writing the ODF format.</p>
24161
24162 <p>I just had a look at the service, and it seem to be going strong.
24163 Very interesting to see the results reported in the gallery, how
24164 different Office implementations handle different ODF features.  Sad
24165 to see that KOffice was not doing it very well, and happy to see that
24166 LibreOffice has been tested already (but sadly not listed as a option
24167 for OfficeShots users yet).  I am glad to see that the ODF community
24168 got such a great test tool available.</p>
24169
24170       </div>
24171       <div class="tags">
24172
24173
24174         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>.
24175
24176
24177       </div>
24178     </div>
24179     <div class="padding"></div>
24180
24181     <div class="entry">
24182       <div class="title">
24183         <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>
24184       </div>
24185       <div class="date">
24186         22nd December 2010
24187       </div>
24188       <div class="body">
24189         <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
24190 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
24191 batch of computers will work with Linux.  Every year for the last few
24192 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
24193 computers, and this year HP won the bid.  Two different desktops and
24194 five different laptops are on the list this year.  We in the UNIX
24195 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
24196 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
24197 university.</p>
24198
24199 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
24200 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well.  To test, I PXE
24201 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
24202 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware.  When
24203 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
24204 on.  If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
24205 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
24206 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
24207
24208 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post.  Here is the simple tests
24209 I perform on a new model.</p>
24210
24211 <ul>
24212
24213 <li>Is PXE installation working?  I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
24214 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment.  If I feel like it, I also test with
24215 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
24216
24217 <li>Is X.org working?  If the graphical login screen show up after
24218 installation, X.org is working.</li>
24219
24220 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working?  Running glxgears (in
24221 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
24222 reported by the program.</li>
24223
24224 <li>Is sound working?  With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
24225 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful.  If there
24226 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
24227 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound.  I
24228 normally test this by playing
24229 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
24230 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
24231
24232 <li>Is the USB subsystem working?  I test this by plugging in a USB
24233 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
24234
24235 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working?  I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
24236 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
24237
24238 <li>Is any built in camera working?  Test using cheese, and see if a
24239 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
24240
24241 <li>Is bluetooth working?  Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
24242 any bluetooth devices are discovered.  In my office, I normally see a
24243 few.</li>
24244
24245 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working.  I have
24246 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
24247 notice this.</li>
24248
24249 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working?  I'm testing if the
24250 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
24251 resume.</li>
24252
24253 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
24254 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
24255 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc?  The set of buttons differ from
24256 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
24257 not.</li>
24258
24259 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
24260 acceleration sensors etc.  I rarely test these, as I do not know how
24261 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
24262 existence.</li>
24263
24264 </ul>
24265
24266 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
24267 for the HP machines I am testing.  I'm not done yet, so I will report
24268 the test results later.  For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
24269 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
24270 and audio fail on RHEL6.  Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p.  As you
24271 can see, I have most machines left to test.  One interesting
24272 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
24273 RHEL6 with glxgears.  No idea why.</p>
24274
24275       </div>
24276       <div class="tags">
24277
24278
24279         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>.
24280
24281
24282       </div>
24283     </div>
24284     <div class="padding"></div>
24285
24286     <div class="entry">
24287       <div class="title">
24288         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
24289       </div>
24290       <div class="date">
24291         11th December 2010
24292       </div>
24293       <div class="body">
24294         <p>As I continue to explore
24295 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
24296 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
24297 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
24298
24299 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
24300 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
24301 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
24302 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
24303 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
24304 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
24305 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
24306 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
24307 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
24308 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
24309 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
24310 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
24311 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
24312 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
24313 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
24314 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
24315 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
24316 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
24317 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
24318 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
24319
24320 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
24321 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
24322 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
24323 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
24324 If the Skolelinux foundation
24325 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
24326 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
24327 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
24328 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
24329 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
24330 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
24331 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
24332 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
24333
24334 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
24335 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
24336 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
24337 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
24338 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
24339 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
24340 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
24341 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
24342 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
24343 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
24344 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
24345 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
24346 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
24347 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
24348 currencies.</p>
24349
24350 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
24351 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
24352 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
24353 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
24354 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
24355 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
24356 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
24357 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
24358 BitCoins.  Check out
24359 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
24360 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
24361 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
24362 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
24363 yet.</p>
24364
24365 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
24366 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
24367 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
24368 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
24369 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
24370
24371       </div>
24372       <div class="tags">
24373
24374
24375         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>.
24376
24377
24378       </div>
24379     </div>
24380     <div class="padding"></div>
24381
24382     <div class="entry">
24383       <div class="title">
24384         <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>
24385       </div>
24386       <div class="date">
24387         10th December 2010
24388       </div>
24389       <div class="body">
24390         <p>With this weeks lawless
24391 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
24392 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
24393 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
24394 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
24395 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
24396 A blog post from
24397 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
24398 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
24399 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
24400 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
24401 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
24402 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
24403 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
24404
24405 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
24406 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
24407 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
24408 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
24409 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
24410 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
24411 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
24412 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
24413 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
24414 Debian</a> soon.</p>
24415
24416 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
24417 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
24418 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
24419 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
24420 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
24421 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
24422 you can even get
24423 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
24424 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
24425 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
24426 on the current exchange rates.</p>
24427
24428 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
24429 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
24430 donations to the address
24431 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
24432
24433       </div>
24434       <div class="tags">
24435
24436
24437         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>.
24438
24439
24440       </div>
24441     </div>
24442     <div class="padding"></div>
24443
24444     <div class="entry">
24445       <div class="title">
24446         <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>
24447       </div>
24448       <div class="date">
24449          9th December 2010
24450       </div>
24451       <div class="body">
24452         <p>A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot
24453 student assosiation <a href="http://www.robotica.no/">Robotica
24454 Osloensis</a> at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to
24455 get their own 3D printer.  They wanted to learn from me based on my
24456 work in the area.  After having a short lunch meeting with them, I
24457 offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete
24458 the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon.  I look
24459 forward to see how this goes.  This monday their volunteer driver
24460 picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the
24461 last exam is over so they can start work on getting the 3D printer
24462 operational.</p>
24463
24464 <p>The robotic group have already build several robots on their own,
24465 and seem capable of getting the reprap operational.  I really look
24466 forward to being able to print all the cool 3D designs published on
24467 <a href="http://www.thingiverse.com/">Thingiverse</a>.  I even got
24468 some 3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at
24469 the computer science department at the university demonstrated their
24470 very cool 3D scanner.</p>
24471
24472       </div>
24473       <div class="tags">
24474
24475
24476         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>.
24477
24478
24479       </div>
24480     </div>
24481     <div class="padding"></div>
24482
24483     <div class="entry">
24484       <div class="title">
24485         <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>
24486       </div>
24487       <div class="date">
24488         29th November 2010
24489       </div>
24490       <div class="body">
24491         <p>On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
24492 <a href="http://www.friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2010-12-03-05-Oslo">development
24493 gathering</a> in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway.  I
24494 really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
24495 Squeeze release.  The gathering is open for everyone interested in
24496 learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
24497
24498 <p>On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
24499 organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
24500 will hold its
24501 <a href="http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Genfors/2010">General Assembly
24502 for 2010</a>.  Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388
24503 people registered as members.  Last year 32 members cast their vote in
24504 the memberdb based election system.  I hope more people find time to
24505 vote this year.</p>
24506
24507       </div>
24508       <div class="tags">
24509
24510
24511         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
24512
24513
24514       </div>
24515     </div>
24516     <div class="padding"></div>
24517
24518     <div class="entry">
24519       <div class="title">
24520         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
24521       </div>
24522       <div class="date">
24523         27th November 2010
24524       </div>
24525       <div class="body">
24526         <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
24527 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
24528 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
24529 to play a video file or stream.  Only if VLC fail will I drag out
24530 gmplayer to see if it can do better.  The reason is mostly the failure
24531 model and trust.  When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
24532 reporting the problem.  When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
24533 just hangs.  The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
24534
24535 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
24536 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
24537 Edu/Skolelinux</a>.  The reason is simple.  We need a good browser
24538 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
24539 not very good.  For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
24540 is no way for the user to pause the video.  Also, when I
24541 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
24542 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
24543 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked.  If
24544 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
24545 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
24546
24547 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
24548 annoying.  The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
24549 keyboard shortcuts.  When the player is in full screen mode, its
24550 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
24551 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode.  I
24552 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
24553 window mode.  Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
24554 the current video.  It is very nice when playing short videos from the
24555 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
24556 what is going on.</p>
24557
24558       </div>
24559       <div class="tags">
24560
24561
24562         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>.
24563
24564
24565       </div>
24566     </div>
24567     <div class="padding"></div>
24568
24569     <div class="entry">
24570       <div class="title">
24571         <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>
24572       </div>
24573       <div class="date">
24574         22nd November 2010
24575       </div>
24576       <div class="body">
24577         <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
24578 upgrade testing of the
24579 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
24580 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
24581 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
24582 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
24583
24584 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
24585
24586 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
24587
24588 <blockquote><p>
24589   apache2.2-bin
24590   aptdaemon
24591   baobab
24592   binfmt-support
24593   browser-plugin-gnash
24594   cheese-common
24595   cli-common
24596   cups-pk-helper
24597   dmz-cursor-theme
24598   empathy
24599   empathy-common
24600   freedesktop-sound-theme
24601   freeglut3
24602   gconf-defaults-service
24603   gdm-themes
24604   gedit-plugins
24605   geoclue
24606   geoclue-hostip
24607   geoclue-localnet
24608   geoclue-manual
24609   geoclue-yahoo
24610   gnash
24611   gnash-common
24612   gnome
24613   gnome-backgrounds
24614   gnome-cards-data
24615   gnome-codec-install
24616   gnome-core
24617   gnome-desktop-environment
24618   gnome-disk-utility
24619   gnome-screenshot
24620   gnome-search-tool
24621   gnome-session-canberra
24622   gnome-system-log
24623   gnome-themes-extras
24624   gnome-themes-more
24625   gnome-user-share
24626   gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
24627   gstreamer0.10-tools
24628   gtk2-engines
24629   gtk2-engines-pixbuf
24630   gtk2-engines-smooth
24631   hamster-applet
24632   libapache2-mod-dnssd
24633   libapr1
24634   libaprutil1
24635   libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
24636   libaprutil1-ldap
24637   libart2.0-cil
24638   libboost-date-time1.42.0
24639   libboost-python1.42.0
24640   libboost-thread1.42.0
24641   libchamplain-0.4-0
24642   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
24643   libcheese-gtk18
24644   libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
24645   libcryptui0
24646   libdiscid0
24647   libelf1
24648   libepc-1.0-2
24649   libepc-common
24650   libepc-ui-1.0-2
24651   libfreerdp-plugins-standard
24652   libfreerdp0
24653   libgconf2.0-cil
24654   libgdata-common
24655   libgdata7
24656   libgdu-gtk0
24657   libgee2
24658   libgeoclue0
24659   libgexiv2-0
24660   libgif4
24661   libglade2.0-cil
24662   libglib2.0-cil
24663   libgmime2.4-cil
24664   libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
24665   libgnome2.24-cil
24666   libgnomepanel2.24-cil
24667   libgpod-common
24668   libgpod4
24669   libgtk2.0-cil
24670   libgtkglext1
24671   libgtksourceview2.0-common
24672   libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
24673   libmono-addins0.2-cil
24674   libmono-cairo2.0-cil
24675   libmono-corlib2.0-cil
24676   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
24677   libmono-posix2.0-cil
24678   libmono-security2.0-cil
24679   libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
24680   libmono-system2.0-cil
24681   libmtp8
24682   libmusicbrainz3-6
24683   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
24684   libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
24685   libopal3.6.8
24686   libpolkit-gtk-1-0
24687   libpt2.6.7
24688   libpython2.6
24689   librpm1
24690   librpmio1
24691   libsdl1.2debian
24692   libsrtp0
24693   libssh-4
24694   libtelepathy-farsight0
24695   libtelepathy-glib0
24696   libtidy-0.99-0
24697   media-player-info
24698   mesa-utils
24699   mono-2.0-gac
24700   mono-gac
24701   mono-runtime
24702   nautilus-sendto
24703   nautilus-sendto-empathy
24704   p7zip-full
24705   pkg-config
24706   python-aptdaemon
24707   python-aptdaemon-gtk
24708   python-axiom
24709   python-beautifulsoup
24710   python-bugbuddy
24711   python-clientform
24712   python-coherence
24713   python-configobj
24714   python-crypto
24715   python-cupshelpers
24716   python-elementtree
24717   python-epsilon
24718   python-evolution
24719   python-feedparser
24720   python-gdata
24721   python-gdbm
24722   python-gst0.10
24723   python-gtkglext1
24724   python-gtksourceview2
24725   python-httplib2
24726   python-louie
24727   python-mako
24728   python-markupsafe
24729   python-mechanize
24730   python-nevow
24731   python-notify
24732   python-opengl
24733   python-openssl
24734   python-pam
24735   python-pkg-resources
24736   python-pyasn1
24737   python-pysqlite2
24738   python-rdflib
24739   python-serial
24740   python-tagpy
24741   python-twisted-bin
24742   python-twisted-conch
24743   python-twisted-core
24744   python-twisted-web
24745   python-utidylib
24746   python-webkit
24747   python-xdg
24748   python-zope.interface
24749   remmina
24750   remmina-plugin-data
24751   remmina-plugin-rdp
24752   remmina-plugin-vnc
24753   rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
24754   rhythmbox-plugins
24755   rpm-common
24756   rpm2cpio
24757   seahorse-plugins
24758   shotwell
24759   software-center
24760   system-config-printer-udev
24761   telepathy-gabble
24762   telepathy-mission-control-5
24763   telepathy-salut
24764   tomboy
24765   totem
24766   totem-coherence
24767   totem-mozilla
24768   totem-plugins
24769   transmission-common
24770   xdg-user-dirs
24771   xdg-user-dirs-gtk
24772   xserver-xephyr
24773 </p></blockquote>
24774
24775 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
24776
24777 <blockquote><p>
24778   cheese
24779   ekiga
24780   eog
24781   epiphany-extensions
24782   evolution-exchange
24783   fast-user-switch-applet
24784   file-roller
24785   gcalctool
24786   gconf-editor
24787   gdm
24788   gedit
24789   gedit-common
24790   gnome-games
24791   gnome-games-data
24792   gnome-nettool
24793   gnome-system-tools
24794   gnome-themes
24795   gnuchess
24796   gucharmap
24797   guile-1.8-libs
24798   libavahi-ui0
24799   libdmx1
24800   libgalago3
24801   libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
24802   libgtksourceview2.0-0
24803   liblircclient0
24804   libsdl1.2debian-alsa
24805   libspeexdsp1
24806   libsvga1
24807   rhythmbox
24808   seahorse
24809   sound-juicer
24810   system-config-printer
24811   totem-common
24812   transmission-gtk
24813   vinagre
24814   vino
24815 </p></blockquote>
24816
24817 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
24818
24819 <blockquote><p>
24820   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
24821 </p></blockquote>
24822
24823 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
24824
24825 <blockquote><p>
24826 [nothing]
24827 </p></blockquote>
24828
24829 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
24830
24831 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
24832
24833 <blockquote><p>
24834   ksmserver
24835 </p></blockquote>
24836
24837 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
24838
24839 <blockquote><p>
24840   kwin
24841   network-manager-kde
24842 </p></blockquote>
24843
24844 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
24845
24846 <blockquote><p>
24847   arts
24848   dolphin
24849   freespacenotifier
24850   google-gadgets-gst
24851   google-gadgets-xul
24852   kappfinder
24853   kcalc
24854   kcharselect
24855   kde-core
24856   kde-plasma-desktop
24857   kde-standard
24858   kde-window-manager
24859   kdeartwork
24860   kdeartwork-emoticons
24861   kdeartwork-style
24862   kdeartwork-theme-icon
24863   kdebase
24864   kdebase-apps
24865   kdebase-workspace
24866   kdebase-workspace-bin
24867   kdebase-workspace-data
24868   kdeeject
24869   kdelibs
24870   kdeplasma-addons
24871   kdeutils
24872   kdewallpapers
24873   kdf
24874   kfloppy
24875   kgpg
24876   khelpcenter4
24877   kinfocenter
24878   konq-plugins-l10n
24879   konqueror-nsplugins
24880   kscreensaver
24881   kscreensaver-xsavers
24882   ktimer
24883   kwrite
24884   libgle3
24885   libkde4-ruby1.8
24886   libkonq5
24887   libkonq5-templates
24888   libnetpbm10
24889   libplasma-ruby
24890   libplasma-ruby1.8
24891   libqt4-ruby1.8
24892   marble-data
24893   marble-plugins
24894   netpbm
24895   nuvola-icon-theme
24896   plasma-dataengines-workspace
24897   plasma-desktop
24898   plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
24899   plasma-runners-addons
24900   plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
24901   plasma-scriptengine-python
24902   plasma-scriptengine-qedje
24903   plasma-scriptengine-ruby
24904   plasma-scriptengine-webkit
24905   plasma-scriptengines
24906   plasma-wallpapers-addons
24907   plasma-widget-folderview
24908   plasma-widget-networkmanagement
24909   ruby
24910   sweeper
24911   update-notifier-kde
24912   xscreensaver-data-extra
24913   xscreensaver-gl
24914   xscreensaver-gl-extra
24915   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
24916 </p></blockquote>
24917
24918 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
24919
24920 <blockquote><p>
24921   ark
24922   google-gadgets-common
24923   google-gadgets-qt
24924   htdig
24925   kate
24926   kdebase-bin
24927   kdebase-data
24928   kdepasswd
24929   kfind
24930   klipper
24931   konq-plugins
24932   konqueror
24933   ksysguard
24934   ksysguardd
24935   libarchive1
24936   libcln6
24937   libeet1
24938   libeina-svn-06
24939   libggadget-1.0-0b
24940   libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
24941   libgps19
24942   libkdecorations4
24943   libkephal4
24944   libkonq4
24945   libkonqsidebarplugin4a
24946   libkscreensaver5
24947   libksgrd4
24948   libksignalplotter4
24949   libkunitconversion4
24950   libkwineffects1a
24951   libmarblewidget4
24952   libntrack-qt4-1
24953   libntrack0
24954   libplasma-geolocation-interface4
24955   libplasmaclock4a
24956   libplasmagenericshell4
24957   libprocesscore4a
24958   libprocessui4a
24959   libqalculate5
24960   libqedje0a
24961   libqtruby4shared2
24962   libqzion0a
24963   libruby1.8
24964   libscim8c2a
24965   libsmokekdecore4-3
24966   libsmokekdeui4-3
24967   libsmokekfile3
24968   libsmokekhtml3
24969   libsmokekio3
24970   libsmokeknewstuff2-3
24971   libsmokeknewstuff3-3
24972   libsmokekparts3
24973   libsmokektexteditor3
24974   libsmokekutils3
24975   libsmokenepomuk3
24976   libsmokephonon3
24977   libsmokeplasma3
24978   libsmokeqtcore4-3
24979   libsmokeqtdbus4-3
24980   libsmokeqtgui4-3
24981   libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
24982   libsmokeqtopengl4-3
24983   libsmokeqtscript4-3
24984   libsmokeqtsql4-3
24985   libsmokeqtsvg4-3
24986   libsmokeqttest4-3
24987   libsmokeqtuitools4-3
24988   libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
24989   libsmokeqtxml4-3
24990   libsmokesolid3
24991   libsmokesoprano3
24992   libtaskmanager4a
24993   libtidy-0.99-0
24994   libweather-ion4a
24995   libxklavier16
24996   libxxf86misc1
24997   okteta
24998   oxygencursors
24999   plasma-dataengines-addons
25000   plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
25001   plasma-widget-lancelot
25002   plasma-widgets-addons
25003   plasma-widgets-workspace
25004   polkit-kde-1
25005   ruby1.8
25006   systemsettings
25007   update-notifier-common
25008 </p></blockquote>
25009
25010 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
25011 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
25012 differences.  I have no idea what packages should be installed after
25013 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
25014
25015       </div>
25016       <div class="tags">
25017
25018
25019         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>.
25020
25021
25022       </div>
25023     </div>
25024     <div class="padding"></div>
25025
25026     <div class="entry">
25027       <div class="title">
25028         <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>
25029       </div>
25030       <div class="date">
25031         22nd November 2010
25032       </div>
25033       <div class="body">
25034         <p>Most of the computers in use by the
25035 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
25036 are virtual machines.  And they have been Xen machines running on a
25037 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
25038 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine.  This was a
25039 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
25040 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
25041 know is not supported by KVM.  So to migrate, we had to convert
25042 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
25043
25044 <p>I found
25045 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
25046 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
25047 migration.  It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
25048 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
25049 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data.  I NFS mounted the
25050 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
25051
25052 <pre>
25053 #!/bin/sh
25054
25055 # Based on
25056 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
25057
25058 set -e
25059 set -x
25060
25061 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
25062     echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
25063     exit 1
25064 else
25065     host="$1"
25066 fi
25067
25068 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
25069     echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
25070     exit 1
25071 fi
25072
25073 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs.  not sure why.
25074 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
25075 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
25076 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
25077
25078 img=$host.img
25079 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
25080 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
25081
25082 parted $img mklabel msdos
25083 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
25084 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
25085 parted $img set 1 boot on
25086
25087 modprobe dm-mod
25088 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
25089 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
25090
25091 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
25092 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
25093 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
25094
25095 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
25096 losetup -d /dev/loop0
25097 </pre>
25098
25099 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
25100 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
25101
25102 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
25103 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
25104 set up grub to boot from the disk image.  After this, the KVM machines
25105 seem to work just fine.</p>
25106
25107       </div>
25108       <div class="tags">
25109
25110
25111         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>.
25112
25113
25114       </div>
25115     </div>
25116     <div class="padding"></div>
25117
25118     <div class="entry">
25119       <div class="title">
25120         <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>
25121       </div>
25122       <div class="date">
25123         20th November 2010
25124       </div>
25125       <div class="body">
25126         <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
25127 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
25128 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
25129 status.  Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
25130
25131 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
25132 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
25133 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
25134
25135 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
25136
25137 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
25138
25139 <blockquote><p>
25140   apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
25141   browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
25142   dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
25143   freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
25144   gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
25145   geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
25146   gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
25147   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
25148   gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
25149   gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
25150   gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
25151   gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
25152   gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
25153   libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
25154   libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
25155   libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
25156   libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
25157   libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
25158   libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
25159   libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
25160   libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
25161   libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
25162   libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
25163   libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
25164   libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
25165   libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
25166   libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
25167   libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
25168   libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
25169   libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
25170   libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
25171   libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
25172   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
25173   libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
25174   libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
25175   libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
25176   mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
25177   nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
25178   openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
25179   python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
25180   python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
25181   python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
25182   python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
25183   python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
25184   python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
25185   python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
25186   python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
25187   python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
25188   python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
25189   python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
25190   python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
25191   python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
25192   remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
25193   rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
25194   software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
25195   telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
25196   totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
25197   transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
25198   zip
25199 </p></blockquote>
25200
25201 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
25202
25203 <blockquote><p>
25204   arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
25205   epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
25206   fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
25207   gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
25208   gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
25209   gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
25210   guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
25211   libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
25212   libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
25213   libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
25214   libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
25215   libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
25216   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
25217   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
25218   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
25219   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
25220   libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
25221   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
25222   libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
25223   libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
25224   libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
25225   libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
25226   libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
25227   libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
25228   libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
25229   libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
25230   libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
25231   sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
25232   totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
25233 </p></blockquote>
25234
25235 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
25236
25237 <blockquote><p>
25238   gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
25239 </p></blockquote>
25240
25241 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
25242
25243 <blockquote><p>
25244 [nothing]
25245 </p></blockquote>
25246
25247 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
25248
25249 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
25250
25251 <blockquote><p>
25252   autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
25253   edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
25254   ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
25255   gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
25256   kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
25257   kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
25258   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
25259   kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
25260   kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
25261   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
25262   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
25263   kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
25264   killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
25265   kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
25266   ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
25267   libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
25268   libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
25269   libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
25270   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
25271   libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
25272   libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
25273   libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
25274   libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
25275   libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
25276   lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
25277   openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
25278   parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
25279   pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
25280   speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
25281   ttf-sazanami-gothic
25282 </p></blockquote>
25283
25284 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
25285
25286 <blockquote><p>
25287   amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
25288   dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
25289   kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
25290   kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
25291   keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
25292   kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
25293   kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
25294   klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
25295   kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
25296   kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
25297   kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
25298   ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
25299   ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
25300   kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
25301   kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
25302   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
25303   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
25304   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
25305   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
25306   libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
25307   libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
25308   libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
25309   libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
25310   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
25311   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
25312   libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
25313   libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
25314   libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
25315   libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
25316   libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
25317   mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
25318   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
25319   ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
25320 </p></blockquote>
25321
25322 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
25323
25324 <blockquote><p>
25325   dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
25326   kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
25327   kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
25328   kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
25329   netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
25330   xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
25331   xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
25332 </p></blockquote>
25333
25334 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
25335
25336 <blockquote><p>
25337   kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
25338 </p></blockquote>
25339
25340       </div>
25341       <div class="tags">
25342
25343
25344         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>.
25345
25346
25347       </div>
25348     </div>
25349     <div class="padding"></div>
25350
25351     <div class="entry">
25352       <div class="title">
25353         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
25354       </div>
25355       <div class="date">
25356         20th November 2010
25357       </div>
25358       <div class="body">
25359         <p>Answering
25360 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
25361 call from the Gnash project</a> for
25362 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
25363 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
25364 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
25365 Debian/Squeeze.  I hope this can help the developers in getting new
25366 releases out more often.</p>
25367
25368 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
25369 I have considered setting up a <a
25370 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
25371 machine as well.  I have also considered using the kfreebsd
25372 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
25373 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video.  Because of this, I
25374 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
25375 kfreebsd.  Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
25376 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
25377 screen at random locations).  Have not gotten very far with the
25378 testing.  Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
25379 fatal problem.  Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
25380 useful as a file server for NUUG.  Will try to find time to set up a
25381 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
25382
25383       </div>
25384       <div class="tags">
25385
25386
25387         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>.
25388
25389
25390       </div>
25391     </div>
25392     <div class="padding"></div>
25393
25394     <div class="entry">
25395       <div class="title">
25396         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
25397       </div>
25398       <div class="date">
25399          9th November 2010
25400       </div>
25401       <div class="body">
25402         <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
25403
25404 <p>3D printing is just great.  I just came across this Debian logo in
25405 3D linked in from
25406 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
25407 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
25408
25409       </div>
25410       <div class="tags">
25411
25412
25413         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>.
25414
25415
25416       </div>
25417     </div>
25418     <div class="padding"></div>
25419
25420     <div class="entry">
25421       <div class="title">
25422         <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>
25423       </div>
25424       <div class="date">
25425          7th November 2010
25426       </div>
25427       <div class="body">
25428         <p>Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
25429 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> DVD, which is
25430 supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
25431 needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard.  Even
25432 schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
25433 working using this DVD.</p>
25434
25435 <p>The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
25436 installing recommended packages by default.  We want the same set of
25437 packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
25438 that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD.  I created
25439 a patch for debian-cd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/601203">BTS
25440 report #601203</a> to do this, and since this change was applied to
25441 the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.</p>
25442
25443 <p>A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
25444 the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
25445 those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
25446 Debian archive.</p>
25447
25448 <p>Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
25449 were using most space.  A few large packages are well know;
25450 openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont.  But I also
25451 discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB.
25452 The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
25453 when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were
25454 the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
25455 I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
25456 our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
25457 documentation.  Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
25458 which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
25459 free X driver should work.</p>
25460
25461 <p>With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
25462 desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
25463 DVD more useful again.</p>
25464
25465       </div>
25466       <div class="tags">
25467
25468
25469         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
25470
25471
25472       </div>
25473     </div>
25474     <div class="padding"></div>
25475
25476     <div class="entry">
25477       <div class="title">
25478         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
25479       </div>
25480       <div class="date">
25481         24th October 2010
25482       </div>
25483       <div class="body">
25484         <p>Some updates.</p>
25485
25486 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
25487 raise money for the project is going well.  The lower limit of 10
25488 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
25489 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
25490 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
25491 :)</p>
25492
25493 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
25494 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
25495 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
25496 It is called
25497 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
25498 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
25499 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
25500 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
25501 libglib2.0-dev.  Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
25502 solvable.  I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
25503
25504 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
25505 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
25506 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
25507 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
25508 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
25509 release.  Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
25510 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
25511 client servers and diskless workstations.  A nice touch added
25512 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
25513 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
25514
25515       </div>
25516       <div class="tags">
25517
25518
25519         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
25520
25521
25522       </div>
25523     </div>
25524     <div class="padding"></div>
25525
25526     <div class="entry">
25527       <div class="title">
25528         <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>
25529       </div>
25530       <div class="date">
25531         19th October 2010
25532       </div>
25533       <div class="body">
25534         <p><a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">The Gnash project</a> is the
25535 most promising solution for a Free Software Flash implementation. It
25536 has done great so far, but there is still far to go, and recently its
25537 funding has dried up.  I believe AVM2 support in Gnash is vital to the
25538 continued progress of the project, as more and more sites show up with
25539 AVM2 flash files.</p>
25540
25541 <p>To try to get funding for developing such support, I have started
25542 <a href="http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">a pledge</a> with the
25543 following text:</P>
25544
25545 <p><blockquote>
25546
25547   <p>"I will pay 100$ to the Gnash project to develop AVM2 support but
25548   only if 10 other people will do the same."</p>
25549
25550   <p>- Petter Reinholdtsen, free software developer</p>
25551
25552   <p>Deadline to sign up by: 24th December 2010</p>
25553
25554   <p>The Gnash project need to get support for the new Flash file
25555   format AVM2 to work with a lot of sites using Flash on the
25556   web. Gnash already work with a lot of Flash sites using the old AVM1
25557   format, but more and more sites are using the AVM2 format these
25558   days. The project web page is available from
25559   http://www.getgnash.org/ . Gnash is a free software implementation
25560   of Adobe Flash, allowing those of us that do not accept the terms of
25561   the Adobe Flash license to get access to Flash sites.</p>
25562
25563   <p>The project need funding to get developers to put aside enough
25564   time to develop the AVM2 support, and this pledge is my way to try
25565   to get this to happen.</p>
25566
25567   <p>The project accept donations via the OpenMediaNow foundation,
25568   <a href="http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32">http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32</a> .</p>
25569
25570 </blockquote></p>
25571
25572 <p>I hope you will support this effort too.  I hope more than 10
25573 people will participate to make this happen.  The more money the
25574 project gets, the more features it can develop using these funds.
25575 :)</p>
25576
25577       </div>
25578       <div class="tags">
25579
25580
25581         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>.
25582
25583
25584       </div>
25585     </div>
25586     <div class="padding"></div>
25587
25588     <div class="entry">
25589       <div class="title">
25590         <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>
25591       </div>
25592       <div class="date">
25593          9th October 2010
25594       </div>
25595       <div class="body">
25596         <p>This summer I got the chance to buy cheap Spykee robots, and since
25597 then I have worked on getting Linux software in place to control them.
25598 The firmware for the robot is available from the producer, and using
25599 that source it was trivial to figure out the protocol specification.
25600 I've started on a perl library to control it, and made some demo
25601 programs using this perl library to allow one to control the
25602 robots.</p>
25603
25604 <p>The library is quite functional already, and capable of controlling
25605 the driving, fetching video, uploading MP3s and play them.  There are
25606 a few less important features too.</p>
25607
25608 <p>Since a few weeks ago, I ran out of time to spend on this project,
25609 but I never got around to releasing the current source.  I decided
25610 today that it was time to do something about it, and uploaded the
25611 source to my Debian package store at people.skolelinux.org.</p>
25612
25613 <p>Because it was simpler for me, I made a Debian package and
25614 published the source and deb.  If you got a spykee robot, grab the
25615 source or binary package:</p>
25616
25617 <p><ul>
25618 <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>
25619 <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>
25620 <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>
25621 </ul></p>
25622
25623 <p>If you are interested in helping out with developing this library,
25624 please let me know.</p>
25625
25626       </div>
25627       <div class="tags">
25628
25629
25630         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>.
25631
25632
25633       </div>
25634     </div>
25635     <div class="padding"></div>
25636
25637     <div class="entry">
25638       <div class="title">
25639         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Links_for_2010_10_03.html">Links for 2010-10-03</a>
25640       </div>
25641       <div class="date">
25642          3rd October 2010
25643       </div>
25644       <div class="body">
25645         <p><ul>
25646
25647 <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
25648 is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly</a></li>
25649
25650 <li>Scanner looking under clothes
25651 <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/10/03/nyheter/utenriks/reise/overvakingskamera/flyplasser/13667192/">has
25652 already been misused at Heathrow</a>.</li>
25653
25654 <li><a href="http://wiki.softwarelivre.org/Landell">Landell
25655 Webcasting</a> - interesting alternative for
25656 <ahref="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">DVSwitch</a> with
25657 simple setup.
25658
25659 </ul></p>
25660
25661       </div>
25662       <div class="tags">
25663
25664
25665         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>.
25666
25667
25668       </div>
25669     </div>
25670     <div class="padding"></div>
25671
25672     <div class="entry">
25673       <div class="title">
25674         <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>
25675       </div>
25676       <div class="date">
25677          9th September 2010
25678       </div>
25679       <div class="body">
25680         <p>A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital
25681 camera, a Canon IXUS 130.  It was instructive and very disturbing to
25682 be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to
25683 specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera.
25684 Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras
25685 are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway.  What is the
25686 problem, you might ask?  It is software patents, MPEG-4, H.264 and the
25687 MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences
25688 without asking for permissions that is at risk.
25689
25690 <p>On page 27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is
25691 written:</p>
25692
25693 <blockquote>
25694 <p>This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard
25695 and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding
25696 MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and
25697 non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the
25698 AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video.</p>
25699
25700 <p>No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4
25701 standard.</p>
25702 </blockquote>
25703
25704 <p>In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology
25705 (MPEG-4/H.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and
25706 non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations
25707 holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.</p>
25708
25709 <p>This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to
25710 read
25711 "<a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA">Why
25712 Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the
25713 MPEG-LA</a>" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and
25714 "<a href="http://webmink.com/2010/09/03/h-264-and-foss/">H.264 Is Not
25715 The Sort Of Free That Matters</a>" by Simon Phipps to learn more about
25716 the issue.  The solution is to support the
25717 <a href="http://www.digistan.org/open-standard:definition">free and
25718 open standards</a> for video, like <a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg
25719 Theora</a>, and avoid MPEG-4 and H.264 if you can.</p>
25720
25721       </div>
25722       <div class="tags">
25723
25724
25725         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
25726
25727
25728       </div>
25729     </div>
25730     <div class="padding"></div>
25731
25732     <div class="entry">
25733       <div class="title">
25734         <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>
25735       </div>
25736       <div class="date">
25737          4th September 2010
25738       </div>
25739       <div class="body">
25740         <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
25741 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
25742 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian.  The sixth
25743 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla.  This is a clear indication that
25744 working flash is important for Debian users.  Around 10 percent of the
25745 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
25746 installed.</p>
25747
25748 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
25749 («<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
25750 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
25751 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
25752 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
25753 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash.  A lot of educational
25754 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
25755 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
25756 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
25757
25758 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
25759 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
25760 everything you told him but could work fairly well.  This was a
25761 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
25762 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
25763 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
25764 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
25765 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
25766 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
25767 pages they want to visit.</p>
25768
25769 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
25770 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
25771 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
25772 Video to working out of the box.  For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
25773 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
25774 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
25775 unstable.  The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
25776 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
25777 release team have not had time to reply to it yet.  I hope they agree
25778 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
25779 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
25780
25781       </div>
25782       <div class="tags">
25783
25784
25785         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>.
25786
25787
25788       </div>
25789     </div>
25790     <div class="padding"></div>
25791
25792     <div class="entry">
25793       <div class="title">
25794         <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>
25795       </div>
25796       <div class="date">
25797          1st September 2010
25798       </div>
25799       <div class="body">
25800         <p>This evening I made my first Perl GUI application.  The last few
25801 days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently
25802 aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought
25803 that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least.
25804 It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to
25805 allow me to drive the robot around.  I picked PerlQt as I have had
25806 positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes
25807 browsing the web for examples.  Using Qt Designer seemed like a short
25808 cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and
25809 compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from
25810 libqt-perl.  Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and
25811 drive around.</p>
25812
25813 <p>The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for
25814 controlling the robot.  Here is an small example on how to use it:</p>
25815
25816 <p><pre>
25817 use Spykee;
25818 Spykee::discover(sub {$robot{$_[0]} = $_[1]});
25819 my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
25820 my $spykee = Spykee->new();
25821 $spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
25822 $spykee->left();
25823 sleep 2;
25824 $spykee->right();
25825 sleep 2;
25826 $spykee->forward();
25827 sleep 2;
25828 $spykee->back();
25829 sleep 2;
25830 $spykee->stop();
25831 </pre></p>
25832
25833 <p>Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could
25834 peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to
25835 implement the protocol used by the robot.  I've implemented several of
25836 the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera
25837 support to make it possible to control the robot from remote.  First I
25838 want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring
25839 the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot
25840 without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux,
25841 so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing
25842 going. :).</p>
25843
25844 <p>Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out
25845 where to make it available first.  I will add a link to
25846 <a href="http://wiki.nuug.no/grupper/robot/">the NUUG wiki</a> for
25847 those that want to check back later to find it.</p>
25848
25849       </div>
25850       <div class="tags">
25851
25852
25853         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>.
25854
25855
25856       </div>
25857     </div>
25858     <div class="padding"></div>
25859
25860     <div class="entry">
25861       <div class="title">
25862         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_hard_link_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken hard link handling with sshfs</a>
25863       </div>
25864       <div class="date">
25865         30th August 2010
25866       </div>
25867       <div class="body">
25868         <p>Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
25869 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">previous
25870 post about sshfs</a>.  He reported another problem with sshfs.  It
25871 fail to handle hard links properly.  A simple way to spot this is to
25872 look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree.  These should have
25873 a link count >1, but on sshfs the count is 1.  I just tested to see
25874 what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:</p>
25875
25876 <pre>
25877 % ln foo bar
25878 ln: creating hard link `bar' => `foo': Function not implemented
25879 %
25880 </pre>
25881
25882 <p>I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
25883 system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
25884 avoid surprised unix programs.  Not as useful as working file locking
25885 and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
25886 nevertheless. :)</p>
25887
25888 <p>The latest version of the file system test code is available via
25889 git from
25890 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a></p>
25891
25892       </div>
25893       <div class="tags">
25894
25895
25896         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
25897
25898
25899       </div>
25900     </div>
25901     <div class="padding"></div>
25902
25903     <div class="entry">
25904       <div class="title">
25905         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">Broken umask handling with sshfs</a>
25906       </div>
25907       <div class="date">
25908         26th August 2010
25909       </div>
25910       <div class="body">
25911         <p>My file system sematics program
25912 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">presented
25913 a few days ago</a> is very useful to verify that a file system can
25914 work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit.  I'm
25915 looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
25916 University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs.  My friend
25917 Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
25918 Edu, but stopped because of problems.  I asked today what the problems
25919 where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
25920 Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
25921 script:</p>
25922
25923 <pre>
25924 mode_t touch_get_mode(const char *name, mode_t mode) {
25925   mode_t retval = 0;
25926   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, mode);
25927   if (-1 != fd) {
25928     unlink(name);
25929     struct stat statbuf;
25930     if (-1 != fstat(fd, &statbuf)) {
25931       retval = statbuf.st_mode & 0x1ff;
25932     }
25933     close(fd);
25934   }
25935   return retval;
25936 }
25937
25938 /* Try to detect problem discovered using sshfs */
25939 int test_umask(void) {
25940   printf("info: testing umask effect on file creation\n");
25941
25942   mode_t orig_umask = umask(000);
25943   mode_t newmode;
25944   if (0666 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
25945     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 000\n",
25946            newmode);
25947   }
25948   umask(007);
25949   if (0660 != (newmode = touch_get_mode("foobar", 0666))) {
25950     printf("  error: Wrong file mode %o when creating using mode 666 and umask 007\n",
25951            newmode);
25952   }
25953
25954   umask (orig_umask);
25955   return 0;
25956 }
25957
25958 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
25959   [...]
25960   test_umask();
25961   return 0;
25962 }
25963 </pre>
25964
25965 <p>Sure enough.  On NFS to a netapp, I get this result:</p>
25966
25967 <pre>
25968 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
25969 info: testing symlink creation
25970 info: testing subdirectory creation
25971 info: testing fcntl locking
25972   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
25973   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
25974   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
25975   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
25976   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
25977   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
25978 info: testing umask effect on file creation
25979 </pre>
25980
25981 <p>When mounting the same directory using sshfs, I get this
25982 result:</p>
25983
25984 <pre>
25985 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
25986 info: testing symlink creation
25987 info: testing subdirectory creation
25988 info: testing fcntl locking
25989   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
25990   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
25991   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
25992   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
25993   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
25994   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
25995 info: testing umask effect on file creation
25996   error: Wrong file mode 644 when creating using mode 666 and umask 000
25997   error: Wrong file mode 640 when creating using mode 666 and umask 007
25998 </pre>
25999
26000 <p>So, I can conclude that sshfs is better than smb to a Netapp or a
26001 Windows server, but not good enough to be used as a home
26002 directory.</p>
26003
26004 <p>Update 2010-08-26: Reported the issue in
26005 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/594498">BTS report #594498</a></p>
26006
26007 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
26008 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
26009 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
26010
26011       </div>
26012       <div class="tags">
26013
26014
26015         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
26016
26017
26018       </div>
26019     </div>
26020     <div class="padding"></div>
26021
26022     <div class="entry">
26023       <div class="title">
26024         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Rob_Weir__How_to_Crush_Dissent.html">Rob Weir: How to Crush Dissent</a>
26025       </div>
26026       <div class="date">
26027         15th August 2010
26028       </div>
26029       <div class="body">
26030         <p>I found the notes from Rob Weir on
26031 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/VGb23-kta8c/how-to-crush-dissent.html">how
26032 to crush dissent</a> matching my own thoughts on the matter quite
26033 well.  Highly recommended for those wondering which road our society
26034 should go down.  In my view we have been heading the wrong way for a
26035 long time.</p>
26036
26037       </div>
26038       <div class="tags">
26039
26040
26041         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>.
26042
26043
26044       </div>
26045     </div>
26046     <div class="padding"></div>
26047
26048     <div class="entry">
26049       <div class="title">
26050         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_hardcoded_config_on_Debian_Edu_clients.html">No hardcoded config on Debian Edu clients</a>
26051       </div>
26052       <div class="date">
26053          9th August 2010
26054       </div>
26055       <div class="body">
26056         <p>As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
26057 Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
26058 configuration settings on the clients.  I believe the work to be
26059 mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
26060 generated configuration.</p>
26061
26062 <p>What is the point, you might ask?  The point is to allow a Debian
26063 Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
26064 without any manual configuration.</p>
26065
26066 <p>This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
26067 the University of Oslo using PXE.  With the PXE installation, I am
26068 asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
26069 layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
26070 accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
26071 popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret).  After answering
26072 these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
26073 after around 50 minutes it is done.  I press enter to finish the
26074 installation, and the machine reboots into KDE.  When the machine is
26075 ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
26076 username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
26077 been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
26078 same username and password to the KDE 4.4 desktop.  At no point during
26079 this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
26080 required configuration was dynamically detected using information
26081 fetched via DHCP and DNS.  The roaming workstation is now ready for
26082 use.</p>
26083
26084 <p>How was this done, you might wonder?  First of all, here is the
26085 list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
26086 working properly out of the box:</p>
26087
26088 <ul>
26089 <li>IP address/netmask and DNS server.</li>
26090 <li>Web proxy URL.</li>
26091 <li>LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).</li>
26092 <li>Kerberos server for PAM password checking.</li>
26093 <li>SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)</li>
26094 <li>Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)</li>
26095 <li>Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)</li>
26096 </ul>
26097
26098 <p>(Hm, did I forget anything?  Let me knew if I did.)</p>
26099
26100 <p>The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
26101 machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
26102 administrators to track their machines.  Since yesterday, everything
26103 but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
26104 and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.</p>
26105
26106 <p>The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
26107 When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
26108 http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
26109 configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
26110 /etc/apt/apt.conf.  I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
26111 hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
26112 it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
26113 proxy present on the new network when it moves around.</p>
26114
26115 <p>The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
26116 configuration are generated using DNS information at boot.  First the
26117 installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain.  If
26118 not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead.  If an
26119 LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
26120 attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
26121 determine which LDAP base to use for NSS.  If there are several
26122 namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
26123 LDAP subtree is used as the base.  If defaultNamingContext is missing,
26124 the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
26125 object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
26126 such an object is used as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
26127 search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
26128 for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record.  I've been unable to find a way to
26129 look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
26130 current DNS domain is used.</p>
26131
26132 <p>For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
26133 for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
26134 found.  This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
26135 Oslo.  A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
26136 server, but have not been implemented yet.  I decided to fetch and
26137 save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
26138 different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
26139 log in nor the passwords required to log in.  Usernames and passwords
26140 will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
26141 network, and will not change as the laptop move around.  For a
26142 non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
26143 supposed to stay in place it should not matter much.  Perhaps we
26144 should switch those to use sssd too?</p>
26145
26146 <p>The user's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
26147 located when the user logs in for the first time.  The LDAP server is
26148 consulted to look for the user's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
26149 attribute is used if found.  If it isn't found, the home directory
26150 path fetched from NSS is used instead.  Assuming the path is of the
26151 form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
26152 DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
26153 smb://server.domain/username.  This algorithm works for both Debian
26154 edu and the University of Oslo.  Perhaps there are better attributes
26155 to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
26156 do for now. :)</p>
26157
26158 <p>This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
26159 into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
26160 more flexible than before.  I suspect it will also work for thin
26161 client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
26162 existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
26163 yet.</p>
26164
26165 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
26166 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
26167
26168 <p>Update 2010-08-09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
26169 detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
26170 before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name.  Will have to
26171 implement it for Debian Edu. :)</p>
26172
26173       </div>
26174       <div class="tags">
26175
26176
26177         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
26178
26179
26180       </div>
26181     </div>
26182     <div class="padding"></div>
26183
26184     <div class="entry">
26185       <div class="title">
26186         <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>
26187       </div>
26188       <div class="date">
26189          8th August 2010
26190       </div>
26191       <div class="body">
26192         <p>A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
26193 Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
26194 Edu/Skolelinux machines.  This was thought to be no problem, as the
26195 access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
26196 knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
26197 mount home directories without any problems.  But, after months of
26198 struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.</p>
26199
26200 <p>The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
26201 directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
26202 work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
26203 underlying file system is a unix file system.  When using a Windows
26204 file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
26205 and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
26206 want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.</p>
26207
26208 <p>As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
26209 with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
26210 OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
26211 it should.  If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
26212 help you find your way out again.  This is the fs-test.c source:</p>
26213
26214 <pre>
26215 /*
26216  * Some tests to check the file system sematics.  Used to verify that
26217  * CIFS from a windows server do not work properly as a linux home
26218  * directory.
26219  * License: GPL v2 or later
26220  *
26221  * needs libsqlite3-dev and build-essential installed
26222  * compile with: gcc -Wall -lsqlite3 -DTEST_SQLITE fs-test.c -o fs-test
26223 */
26224
26225 #define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS 64
26226 #define _LARGEFILE_SOURCE 1
26227 #define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE 1
26228
26229 #define _GNU_SOURCE /* for asprintf() */
26230
26231 #include &lt;errno.h>
26232 #include &lt;fcntl.h>
26233 #include &lt;stdio.h>
26234 #include &lt;string.h>
26235 #include &lt;stdlib.h>
26236 #include &lt;sys/file.h>
26237 #include &lt;sys/stat.h>
26238 #include &lt;sys/types.h>
26239 #include &lt;unistd.h>
26240
26241 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
26242 /*
26243  * Test sqlite open, as done by gcompris require the libsqlite3-dev
26244  * package and linking with -lsqlite3.  A more low level test is
26245  * below.
26246  * See also &lt;URL: http://www.sqlite.org./faq.html#q5 >.
26247  */
26248 #include &lt;sqlite3.h>
26249 #define CREATE_TABLE_USERS                                              \
26250   "CREATE TABLE users (user_id INT UNIQUE, login TEXT, lastname TEXT, firstname TEXT, birthdate TEXT, class_id INT ); "
26251 int test_sqlite_open(void) {
26252   char *zErrMsg;
26253   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
26254   sqlite3 *db=NULL;
26255   unlink(name);
26256   int rc = sqlite3_open(name, &db);
26257   if( rc ){
26258     printf("error: sqlite open of %s failed: %s\n", name, sqlite3_errmsg(db));
26259     sqlite3_close(db);
26260     return -1;
26261   }
26262
26263   /* create tables */
26264   rc = sqlite3_exec(db,CREATE_TABLE_USERS, NULL,  0, &zErrMsg);
26265   if( rc != SQLITE_OK ){
26266     printf("error: sqlite table create failed: %s\n", zErrMsg);
26267     sqlite3_close(db);
26268     return -1;
26269   }
26270   printf("info: sqlite worked\n");
26271   sqlite3_close(db);
26272   return 0;
26273 }
26274 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
26275
26276 /*
26277  * Demonstrate locking issue found in gcompris using sqlite3.  This
26278  * work with ext3, but not with cifs server on Windows 2003.  This is
26279  * done in the sqlite3 library.
26280  * See also
26281  * &lt;URL:http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2001-08/msg00854.html> and the
26282  * POSIX specification
26283  * &lt;URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fcntl.html>.
26284  */
26285 int test_gcompris_locking(void) {
26286   struct flock fl;
26287   char *name = "testsqlite.db";
26288   unlink(name);
26289   int fd = open(name, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0644);
26290   printf("info: testing fcntl locking\n");
26291
26292   fl.l_whence = SEEK_SET;
26293   fl.l_pid    = getpid();
26294   printf("  Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
26295   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
26296   fl.l_len    = 1;
26297   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
26298   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
26299
26300   printf("  Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
26301   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
26302   fl.l_len    = 510;
26303   fl.l_type   = F_RDLCK;
26304   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
26305
26306   printf("  Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824");
26307   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
26308   fl.l_len    = 1;
26309   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
26310   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
26311
26312   printf("  Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824");
26313   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
26314   fl.l_len    = 1;
26315   fl.l_type   = F_WRLCK;
26316   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
26317
26318   printf("  Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826");
26319   fl.l_start  = 1073741826;
26320   fl.l_len    = 510;
26321   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
26322
26323   printf("  Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824");
26324   fl.l_start  = 1073741824;
26325   fl.l_len    = 2;
26326   fl.l_type   = F_UNLCK;
26327   if (0 != fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &fl) ) printf(" - error!\n"); else printf("\n");
26328
26329   close(fd);
26330   return 0;
26331 }
26332
26333 /*
26334  * Test if permissions of freshly created directories allow entries
26335  * below them.  This was a problem with OpenOffice.org and gcompris.
26336  * Mounting with option 'sync' seem to solve this problem while
26337  * slowing down file operations.
26338  */
26339 int test_subdirectory_creation(void) {
26340 #define LEVELS 5
26341   char *path = strdup("test");
26342   char *dirs[LEVELS];
26343   int level;
26344   printf("info: testing subdirectory creation\n");
26345   for (level = 0; level &lt; LEVELS; level++) {
26346     char *newpath = NULL;
26347     if (-1 == mkdir(path, 0777)) {
26348       printf("  error: Unable to create directory '%s': %s\n",
26349              path, strerror(errno));
26350       break;
26351     }
26352     asprintf(&newpath, "%s/%s", path, "test");
26353     free(path);
26354     path = newpath;
26355   }
26356   return 0;
26357 }
26358
26359 /*
26360  * Test if symlinks can be created.  This was a problem detected with
26361  * KDE.
26362  */
26363 int test_symlinks(void) {
26364   printf("info: testing symlink creation\n");
26365   unlink("symlink");
26366   if (-1 == symlink("file", "symlink"))
26367     printf("  error: Unable to create symlink\n");
26368   return 0;
26369 }
26370
26371 int main(int argc, char **argv) {
26372   printf("Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system\n");
26373   test_symlinks();
26374   test_subdirectory_creation();
26375 #ifdef TEST_SQLITE
26376   test_sqlite_open();
26377 #endif /* TEST_SQLITE */
26378   test_gcompris_locking();
26379   return 0;
26380 }
26381 </pre>
26382
26383 <p>When everything is working, it should print something like
26384 this:</p>
26385
26386 <pre>
26387 Testing POSIX/Unix sematics on file system
26388 info: testing symlink creation
26389 info: testing subdirectory creation
26390 info: sqlite worked
26391 info: testing fcntl locking
26392   Read-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
26393   Read-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
26394   Unlocking 1 byte from 1073741824
26395   Write-locking 1 byte from 1073741824
26396   Write-locking 510 byte from 1073741826
26397   Unlocking 2 byte from 1073741824
26398 </pre>
26399
26400 <p>I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
26401 of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
26402 read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
26403 the read-only lock (while Windows do not).  Another was a bug in the
26404 CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
26405 meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
26406 OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
26407 not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.</p>
26408
26409 <p>Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
26410 it. :)</p>
26411
26412 <p>Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
26413 script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
26414 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a>.</p>
26415
26416       </div>
26417       <div class="tags">
26418
26419
26420         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
26421
26422
26423       </div>
26424     </div>
26425     <div class="padding"></div>
26426
26427     <div class="entry">
26428       <div class="title">
26429         <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>
26430       </div>
26431       <div class="date">
26432          7th August 2010
26433       </div>
26434       <div class="body">
26435         <p>A few days ago, I
26436 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_roaming_workstation___at_the_university_of_Oslo.html">tried
26437 to install</a> a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
26438 while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
26439 noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
26440 university infrastructure.  It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
26441 that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
26442 connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
26443 itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
26444 around it.  Now I am a huge step further along that road.</p>
26445
26446 <p>With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
26447 workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
26448 university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
26449 servers for Kerberos authentication.  All this without any
26450 configuration at all during installation.  My users home directory got
26451 a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
26452 In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured.  In addition to
26453 this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
26454 proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
26455 /etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf.  Iceweasel and KDE is
26456 configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
26457 a proxy when at the university network.  If the machine is moved to a
26458 network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
26459 gave it a IP address.</p>
26460
26461 <p>The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
26462 entry ldap.$domain.  If this do not exist, it look for the
26463 _ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
26464 server.  Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
26465 namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
26466 pick the first one as the LDAP base.  For Kerberos, a similar
26467 algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
26468 uppercase version of $domain.</p>
26469
26470 <p>So, what is not working, you might ask.  SMB mounting my home
26471 directory do not work.  No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
26472 Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
26473 the cause.  These are not properly configured during installation, and
26474 had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
26475 but SMB mounting still do not work. :(</p>
26476
26477 <p>With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
26478 roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
26479 connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
26480 authentication.  It should also work out of the box in a Active
26481 Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
26482 with UID and GID values.</p>
26483
26484 <p>If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
26485 Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
26486
26487       </div>
26488       <div class="tags">
26489
26490
26491         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
26492
26493
26494       </div>
26495     </div>
26496     <div class="padding"></div>
26497
26498     <div class="entry">
26499       <div class="title">
26500         <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>
26501       </div>
26502       <div class="date">
26503          3rd August 2010
26504       </div>
26505       <div class="body">
26506         <p>The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
26507 similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
26508 University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
26509 hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
26510 infrastructure.  In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
26511 Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
26512 servers.</p>
26513
26514 <p>I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
26515 changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
26516 /etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
26517 (/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
26518 Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
26519 for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
26520 coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
26521 .uio.no.</p>
26522
26523 <p>This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
26524 Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
26525 workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
26526 so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
26527 only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
26528 university servers.</p>
26529
26530 <p>My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
26531 fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
26532 allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
26533 setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
26534 the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
26535 uses.</p>
26536
26537       </div>
26538       <div class="tags">
26539
26540
26541         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
26542
26543
26544       </div>
26545     </div>
26546     <div class="padding"></div>
26547
26548     <div class="entry">
26549       <div class="title">
26550         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
26551       </div>
26552       <div class="date">
26553         27th July 2010
26554       </div>
26555       <div class="body">
26556         <p>I discovered this while doing
26557 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
26558 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>.  A few packages
26559 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
26560 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
26561 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
26562
26563 <p>An example is from todays
26564 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
26565 of KDE using aptitude</a>.  In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
26566 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade.  The cause is simple.  If a
26567 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
26568 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
26569 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
26570 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
26571
26572 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
26573
26574 <blockquote><pre>
26575 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
26576  perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
26577   Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
26578 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
26579  dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
26580 </pre></blockquote>
26581
26582 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
26583 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
26584 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
26585 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
26586 failures.  Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
26587 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
26588 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
26589 of dependency loops.</p>
26590
26591 <p>Thanks to
26592 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
26593 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
26594 dependencies
26595 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
26596 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
26597
26598 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
26599 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
26600 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
26601 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
26602 dependency.  Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
26603 it.</p>
26604
26605       </div>
26606       <div class="tags">
26607
26608
26609         Tags: <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>.
26610
26611
26612       </div>
26613     </div>
26614     <div class="padding"></div>
26615
26616     <div class="entry">
26617       <div class="title">
26618         <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>
26619       </div>
26620       <div class="date">
26621         27th July 2010
26622       </div>
26623       <div class="body">
26624         <p>I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
26625 with the next Debian Edu release.  Not nearly done, but one major step
26626 completed.</p>
26627
26628 <blockquote>
26629 <p>This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
26630 release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
26631 install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
26632 of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
26633 user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
26634 longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
26635 Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
26636 language of choice, please let us know too.</p>
26637
26638 <p>In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
26639 artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
26640 and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.</p>
26641
26642 <p>The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
26643 work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
26644 much.</p>
26645
26646 <p>Changes compared to the lenny based version</p>
26647
26648 <ul>
26649 <li>Everything from Debian Squeeze
26650 <ul>
26651   <li>Desktop environment KDE 4.4 => the new KDE desktop in
26652          combination with some new artwork
26653   <li>Web browser Iceweasel 3.5
26654   <li>OpenOffice.org 3.2
26655   <li>Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3
26656   <li>Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2
26657   <li>Image editor Gimp 2.6.10
26658   <li>Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0
26659   <li>Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4
26660   <li>3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)
26661   <li>Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)
26662 </ul></li>
26663 <li>Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
26664     Enabled for:
26665 <ul>
26666   <li>PAM
26667   <li>LDAP
26668   <li>IMAP
26669   <li>SMTP (sender verification)
26670 </ul>
26671 </li>
26672 <li>New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.</li>
26673 <li>Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
26674     fetched from LDAP.</li>
26675 <li>New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.</li>
26676 <li>General cleanup (not finished)</li>
26677 </ul>
26678 <p>The following features are not working as they should</p>
26679
26680 <ul>
26681 <li>No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
26682     scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
26683     for testing.</li>
26684 <li>DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
26685     and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
26686     clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.</li>
26687 <li>The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.</li>
26688 <li>The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.</li>
26689 <li>The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.</li>
26690 <li>Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
26691     netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.</li>
26692 <li>The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
26693     some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
26694     jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.</li>
26695 <li>Some packages lack translations. See
26696     http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
26697     and help out with translations.</li>
26698 </ul>
26699
26700 <p>To download this multiarch netinstall release you can use</p>
26701
26702 <ul>
26703 <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>
26704 <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>
26705 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
26706 </ul>
26707 <p>To download this multiarch dvd release you can use</p>
26708
26709 <ul>
26710 <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>
26711 <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>
26712 <li>rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/squeeze-alpha/debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
26713 </ul>
26714
26715 <p>There is no source DVD available yet. It will be prepared when we
26716 get closer to the final release.</p>
26717
26718 <p>The MD5SUM of these images are</p>
26719
26720 <ul>
26721 <li>3dbf45d59f42a53518b6e3c9ec3b5eb6 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
26722 <li>22f2cbfce281d1c6e478be452638675d debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
26723 </ul>
26724
26725 <p>The SHA1SUM of these images are</p>
26726 <ul>
26727 <li>c53d1b69b40cf37cd27aefaf33f6f6a3821bedf0 debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-CD.iso</li>
26728 <li>2ec29d7db676d59d32197b05c277ffe16348376c debian-edu-6.0.0+edua0-DVD.iso</li>
26729 </ul>
26730 <p>How to report bugs:
26731 http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugsInBugzilla</p>
26732
26733 <p>Please direct replies to debian-edu@lists.debian.org</p>
26734 </blockquote>
26735
26736       </div>
26737       <div class="tags">
26738
26739
26740         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
26741
26742
26743       </div>
26744     </div>
26745     <div class="padding"></div>
26746
26747     <div class="entry">
26748       <div class="title">
26749         <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>
26750       </div>
26751       <div class="date">
26752         25th July 2010
26753       </div>
26754       <div class="body">
26755         <p>The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
26756 been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
26757 Edu/Skolelinux into shape.  This future version will use Kerberos for
26758 authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
26759 getting rid of password questions one at the time.</p>
26760
26761 <p>It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
26762 directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
26763 network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
26764 to gain access to the users home directory on the file server.  This
26765 shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
26766 SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
26767 package.  I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.</p>
26768
26769 <p>Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
26770 to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
26771 password when mounting the SMB volume.  A simple click on the shortcut
26772 in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
26773 up. :)</p>
26774
26775 <p>One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
26776 Debian Edu.  We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
26777 also Samba.  Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.</p>
26778
26779 <p>We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
26780 to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
26781 sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
26782 the release.  It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
26783 it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
26784 time for a alpha0 release today.  As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
26785 still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
26786 release another day.</p>
26787
26788 <p>If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
26789 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
26790
26791       </div>
26792       <div class="tags">
26793
26794
26795         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
26796
26797
26798       </div>
26799     </div>
26800     <div class="padding"></div>
26801
26802     <div class="entry">
26803       <div class="title">
26804         <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>
26805       </div>
26806       <div class="date">
26807         18th July 2010
26808       </div>
26809       <div class="body">
26810         <p>Thanks to
26811 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Opengeodata/~3/wUTCzDZk3lc/project-of-the-week-which-way-home">todays
26812 opengeodata blog entry</a>, I just discovered that the
26813 OpenStreetmap.org site have gotten
26814 <a href="http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT">support
26815 for calculating routes</a>.  The support is still experimental and
26816 only available from the development server, until more experience is
26817 gathered on the user interface and any scalability issues.</p>
26818
26819 <p>Earlier, the routing I knew about using the OpenStreetmap.org data
26820 was provided by <a href="http://maps.cloudmade.com/">Cloudmade</a>,
26821 but having it on the main page is required to make everyone aware of
26822 the issue.  I've had people reject Openstreetmap.org as a viable
26823 alternative for them because the front page lacked routing support,
26824 and I hope their needs will be catered for when routing show up on the
26825 www.openstreetmap.org front page.</p>
26826
26827       </div>
26828       <div class="tags">
26829
26830
26831         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>.
26832
26833
26834       </div>
26835     </div>
26836     <div class="padding"></div>
26837
26838     <div class="entry">
26839       <div class="title">
26840         <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>
26841       </div>
26842       <div class="date">
26843         17th July 2010
26844       </div>
26845       <div class="body">
26846         <p>This is a
26847 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
26848 on my
26849 <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
26850 work</a> on
26851 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
26852 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
26853
26854 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
26855 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
26856 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server.  The two
26857 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
26858
26859 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
26860 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
26861 on a Debian Edu main-server.  Here is a summary.
26862
26863 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
26864
26865 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
26866 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
26867 the web.
26868
26869 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
26870 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
26871 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
26872 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
26873 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
26874 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
26875
26876 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
26877 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
26878 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
26879 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
26880 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
26881 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry.  For
26882 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
26883 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
26884 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
26885 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
26886 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
26887 spfrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entries it is looking for
26888 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
26889 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
26890 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  The equivalent
26891 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
26892
26893 <blockquote><pre>
26894 ldapsearch -h ldap \
26895   -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
26896   -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
26897   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
26898   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
26899   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
26900   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
26901
26902 ldapsearch -h ldap \
26903   -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
26904   -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
26905   dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
26906   hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
26907   srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
26908 </pre></blockquote>
26909
26910 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
26911 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
26912 example LDAP objects used there.  In addition to these objects, the
26913 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26914 also exist.</p>
26915
26916 <blockquote><pre>
26917 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26918 objectclass: top
26919 objectclass: dnsdomain
26920 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
26921 dc: tjener
26922 arecord: 10.0.2.2
26923 associateddomain: tjener.intern
26924
26925 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
26926 objectclass: top
26927 objectclass: dnsdomain2
26928 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
26929 dc: 2
26930 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
26931 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
26932 </pre></blockquote>
26933
26934 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently.  When looking for
26935 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
26936 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
26937 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
26938 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
26939 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
26940 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp.  For reverse entires it also do a
26941 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
26942 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
26943 modifytimestamp.  In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
26944 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
26945 instead.</p>
26946
26947 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
26948 like this:</p>
26949
26950 <blockquote><pre>
26951 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
26952   '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
26953   cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
26954   rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
26955   nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
26956   rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
26957
26958 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
26959   '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
26960 </pre></blockquote>
26961
26962 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
26963 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
26964 reverse lookups.</p>
26965
26966 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
26967 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
26968 need to generate a DNS reply.  This make it able to work with any
26969 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
26970
26971 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
26972 dnsdomain2 schemas.  The latter is used for reverse entries like
26973 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
26974
26975 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
26976 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
26977 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain).  The use
26978 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
26979 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
26980
26981 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
26982 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
26983 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
26984 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
26985 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
26986
26987 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
26988 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
26989 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
26990 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
26991 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
26992 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
26993
26994 <blockquote><pre>
26995 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
26996     SUP top
26997     AUXILIARY
26998     MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
26999           DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
27000           TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
27001           NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
27002           A6Record $ DNAMERecord
27003     ))
27004 </pre></blockquote>
27005
27006 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
27007 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
27008 all the attributes PowerDNS wants.  I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
27009 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
27010 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
27011 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
27012
27013 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
27014
27015 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
27016 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want.  This
27017 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
27018 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
27019 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
27020
27021 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
27022 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
27023 stored.  These are the relevant entries from
27024 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
27025
27026 <blockquote><pre>
27027 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
27028 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
27029 </pre></blockquote>
27030
27031 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
27032 configuration it need.  The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
27033 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))".  The
27034 search result is this entry:</p>
27035
27036 <blockquote><pre>
27037 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
27038 cn: dhcp
27039 objectClass: top
27040 objectClass: dhcpServer
27041 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
27042 </pre></blockquote>
27043
27044 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
27045 subtree with DHCP configuration.  The DHCP configuration subtree base
27046 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
27047 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
27048 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
27049 The search result is this entry:</p>
27050
27051 <blockquote><pre>
27052 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
27053 cn: DHCP Config
27054 objectClass: top
27055 objectClass: dhcpService
27056 objectClass: dhcpOptions
27057 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
27058 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
27059 dhcpStatements: authoritative
27060 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
27061 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
27062 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
27063 </pre></blockquote>
27064
27065 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time.  When
27066 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
27067 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
27068 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
27069 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost.  These provide options
27070 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc.  Leaving out the
27071 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
27072 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
27073 related computer objects.</p>
27074
27075 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
27076 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
27077 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
27078 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
27079 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter.  This is what a host object look
27080 like:</p>
27081
27082 <blockquote><pre>
27083 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
27084 cn: hostname
27085 objectClass: top
27086 objectClass: dhcpHost
27087 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
27088 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
27089 </pre></blockquote>
27090
27091 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
27092 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
27093 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure.  On the
27094 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
27095 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries.  The latter should make
27096 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
27097 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
27098 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
27099 structural object class.
27100
27101 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
27102
27103 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
27104 to which LDAP schemas to use.  While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
27105 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
27106 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
27107 in the configuration.</p>
27108
27109 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
27110 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
27111 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
27112 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
27113 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
27114 structure.</p>
27115
27116 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
27117 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
27118
27119 <blockquote><pre>
27120 ou=services
27121   cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
27122     cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
27123     cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
27124       cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
27125         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
27126     cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
27127       cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
27128         cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
27129     ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
27130       cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
27131 </pre></blockquote>
27132
27133 <P>This is not tested yet.  If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
27134 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
27135 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
27136 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
27137
27138 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
27139 like this:</p>
27140
27141 <blockquote><pre>
27142 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
27143 dc: hostname
27144 objectClass: top
27145 objectClass: dhcpHost
27146 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
27147 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
27148 associateddomain: hostname.intern
27149 arecord: 10.11.12.13
27150 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
27151 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
27152 </pre></blockquote>
27153
27154 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
27155 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
27156 auxiliary object class.</p>
27157
27158       </div>
27159       <div class="tags">
27160
27161
27162         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>.
27163
27164
27165       </div>
27166     </div>
27167     <div class="padding"></div>
27168
27169     <div class="entry">
27170       <div class="title">
27171         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
27172       </div>
27173       <div class="date">
27174         14th July 2010
27175       </div>
27176       <div class="body">
27177         <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
27178 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
27179 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
27180 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
27181 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
27182
27183 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
27184 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
27185
27186 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
27187 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry.  If
27188 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
27189 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
27190 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
27191 to a slave DNS server.</p>
27192
27193 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
27194 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
27195 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
27196 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
27197 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup.  It
27198 seem to work.</p>
27199
27200 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
27201 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
27202 an earlier email.  The combined LDAP object will look something like
27203 this:</p>
27204
27205 <blockquote><pre>
27206   dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
27207   cn: hostname
27208   objectClass: dhcphost
27209   objectclass: domainrelatedobject
27210   objectclass: dnsdomainaux
27211   associateddomain: hostname.intern
27212   arecord: 10.11.12.13
27213   dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
27214   dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
27215   ldapconfigsound: Y
27216 </pre></blockquote>
27217
27218 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
27219 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
27220 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress.  LTSP will use
27221 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
27222
27223 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
27224 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
27225 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
27226 that.  If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
27227 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
27228 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
27229 content.  I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
27230 might be a good place to put it.</p>
27231
27232 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
27233 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
27234
27235       </div>
27236       <div class="tags">
27237
27238
27239         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>.
27240
27241
27242       </div>
27243     </div>
27244     <div class="padding"></div>
27245
27246     <div class="entry">
27247       <div class="title">
27248         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
27249       </div>
27250       <div class="date">
27251         11th July 2010
27252       </div>
27253       <div class="body">
27254         <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
27255 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
27256 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
27257 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
27258
27259 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
27260 to get configuration from LDAP.  The idea is to look up the MAC
27261 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
27262 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
27263 LTSP clients.</p>
27264
27265 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
27266 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
27267 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
27268
27269 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
27270 this approach.  A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
27271 need to be written.  Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
27272
27273 <blockquote><pre>
27274 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
27275 #
27276 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
27277 #
27278 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
27279 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
27280 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
27281 #
27282 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
27283 # existence of attribute names.
27284 #
27285 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
27286 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
27287 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
27288 #
27289 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
27290 # configuration settings.  Something like this should work:
27291 #
27292 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
27293 #     SUP top
27294 #     AUXILIARY
27295 #     MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
27296
27297 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
27298 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
27299     LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
27300     for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
27301         filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
27302         ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
27303             grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
27304             # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
27305             attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
27306             # bass value on to clients
27307             eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
27308         done
27309     done
27310 fi
27311 </pre></blockquote>
27312
27313 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
27314 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
27315 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
27316 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
27317 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
27318
27319 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
27320 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
27321
27322 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
27323 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
27324 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
27325 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>.  I found its
27326 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
27327 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
27328
27329       </div>
27330       <div class="tags">
27331
27332
27333         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>.
27334
27335
27336       </div>
27337     </div>
27338     <div class="padding"></div>
27339
27340     <div class="entry">
27341       <div class="title">
27342         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
27343       </div>
27344       <div class="date">
27345          9th July 2010
27346       </div>
27347       <div class="body">
27348         <p>Since
27349 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
27350 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
27351 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma.  The java application
27352 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
27353 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
27354 authenticate using Kerberos.  I have only tested the Kerberos
27355 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
27356 LDAP with my test user yet.  It is
27357 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
27358 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment.  The only problem I
27359 have with it is how it handle errors.  If something go wrong, its
27360 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
27361 and remove the failing query.  Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
27362
27363       </div>
27364       <div class="tags">
27365
27366
27367         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>.
27368
27369
27370       </div>
27371     </div>
27372     <div class="padding"></div>
27373
27374     <div class="entry">
27375       <div class="title">
27376         <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>
27377       </div>
27378       <div class="date">
27379          3rd July 2010
27380       </div>
27381       <div class="body">
27382         <p>Here is a short update on my <a
27383 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
27384 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>.  Here is a summary of the
27385 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude.  I'm
27386 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
27387 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
27388 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
27389 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
27390
27391 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
27392 complete list of the installed packages.  Based on this I see these
27393 differences when I did a test run today.  As usual, I do not really
27394 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
27395 publish the difference.</p>
27396
27397 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
27398
27399 <blockquote><p>
27400   at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
27401   libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
27402   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
27403   libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
27404   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
27405   libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
27406   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
27407   python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
27408 </p></blockquote>
27409
27410 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
27411
27412 <blockquote><p>
27413   bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
27414   gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
27415   libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
27416   libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
27417   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
27418   libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
27419   libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
27420   libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
27421   libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
27422   libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
27423   libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
27424   libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
27425   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
27426   libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
27427   libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
27428   libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
27429   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
27430   libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
27431   libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
27432   mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
27433 </p></blockquote>
27434
27435 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
27436
27437 <blockquote><p>
27438   gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
27439   python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
27440   xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
27441   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
27442   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
27443   xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
27444   xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
27445   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
27446   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
27447   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
27448   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
27449   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
27450   xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
27451   xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
27452   xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
27453   xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
27454   xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
27455   xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
27456   xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
27457   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
27458   xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
27459 </p></blockquote>
27460
27461 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
27462
27463 <blockquote><p>
27464   deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
27465   xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
27466   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
27467 </p></blockquote>
27468
27469 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
27470 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
27471 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
27472 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
27473 the difference somewhat.
27474
27475       </div>
27476       <div class="tags">
27477
27478
27479         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>.
27480
27481
27482       </div>
27483     </div>
27484     <div class="padding"></div>
27485
27486     <div class="entry">
27487       <div class="title">
27488         <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>
27489       </div>
27490       <div class="date">
27491          1st July 2010
27492       </div>
27493       <div class="body">
27494         <p>For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
27495 a bit troubling.  Laptops are typically used also when not connected
27496 to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
27497 unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
27498 This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
27499 and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
27500 in Debian.  Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
27501 It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
27502 setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.</p>
27503
27504 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nscd + libpam-ccreds + libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
27505
27506 This is the traditional method with a twist.  The password caching is
27507 provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on
27508 Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd.  The directory
27509 lookup and password checking is done using LDAP.  If one want to use
27510 Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
27511 replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal.  If one is happy having a
27512 local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
27513 pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
27514 using libpam-mklocaluser.  A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
27515 pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
27516 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/568577">bug #568577</a> is in the
27517 archive.  Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
27518 directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
27519 prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/.  This
27520 is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.</p>
27521
27522 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured</p>
27523
27524 <blockquote><pre>
27525 libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser
27526 </pre></blockquote>
27527
27528 <p>The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
27529 one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site.  Make sure the
27530 PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
27531 sent in clear text to the LDAP server.  I've been unable to get TLS
27532 certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
27533 LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
27534 is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
27535 on how to get this working.</p>
27536
27537 <p>Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
27538 caching until <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">bug #485282</a>
27539 is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
27540 currently in /etc/nscd.conf.  The changes are in the fields
27541 reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
27542 instructions I found in the
27543 <a href="http://www.flyn.org/laptopldap/">LDAP for Mobile Laptops</a>
27544 instructions by Flyn Computing.</p>
27545
27546 <blockquote><pre>
27547         debug-level             0
27548         reload-count            unlimited
27549         paranoia                no
27550
27551         enable-cache            passwd          yes
27552         positive-time-to-live   passwd          2592000
27553         negative-time-to-live   passwd          20
27554         suggested-size          passwd          211
27555         check-files             passwd          yes
27556         persistent              passwd          yes
27557         shared                  passwd          yes
27558         max-db-size             passwd          33554432
27559         auto-propagate          passwd          yes
27560
27561         enable-cache            group           yes
27562         positive-time-to-live   group           2592000
27563         negative-time-to-live   group           20
27564         suggested-size          group           211
27565         check-files             group           yes
27566         persistent              group           yes
27567         shared                  group           yes
27568         max-db-size             group           33554432
27569         auto-propagate          group           yes
27570
27571         enable-cache            hosts           no
27572         positive-time-to-live   hosts           2592000
27573         negative-time-to-live   hosts           20
27574         suggested-size          hosts           211
27575         check-files             hosts           yes
27576         persistent              hosts           yes
27577         shared                  hosts           yes
27578         max-db-size             hosts           33554432
27579
27580         enable-cache            services        yes
27581         positive-time-to-live   services        2592000
27582         negative-time-to-live   services        20
27583         suggested-size          services        211
27584         check-files             services        yes
27585         persistent              services        yes
27586         shared                  services        yes
27587         max-db-size             services        33554432
27588 </pre></blockquote>
27589
27590 <p>While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
27591 automatically like the one provided in
27592 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/496915">bug #496915</a>, the file
27593 content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
27594 directory service on the machine.  /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
27595 look like this:</p>
27596
27597 <blockquote><pre>
27598 passwd:         files ldap
27599 group:          files ldap
27600 shadow:         files ldap
27601 hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
27602 networks:       files
27603 protocols:      files
27604 services:       files
27605 ethers:         files
27606 rpc:            files
27607 netgroup:       files ldap
27608 </pre></blockquote>
27609
27610 <p>The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
27611 shadow and netgroup.</p>
27612
27613 <p>With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
27614 in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
27615 directory created and have the password as well as user and group
27616 attributes cached.
27617
27618 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + nss-updatedb + libpam-ccreds +
27619   libpam-mklocaluser/pam_mkhomedir</h2>
27620
27621 <p>Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
27622 problems doing proper caching, I've seen suggestions and recipes to
27623 use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
27624 LDAP database is available.  I have not tested such setup, because I
27625 discovered sssd.</p>
27626
27627 <h2>LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser</h2>
27628
27629 <p>A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
27630 mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
27631 <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/">sssd</a> package from Redhat.
27632 It is part of the <a href="http://www.freeipa.org/">FreeIPA</A> project
27633 to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
27634 machines.  The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
27635 information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
27636 libpam-ccreds.  It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS.  Version
27637 1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
27638 in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010.  Because the
27639 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd package</a>
27640 was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
27641 version 1.2 is now in testing.
27642
27643 <p>These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
27644 roaming setup I want</p>
27645
27646 <blockquote><pre>
27647 libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser
27648 </pre></blockquote>
27649
27650 The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
27651 <tt>/etc/sssd/sssd.conf</tt>.
27652
27653 <blockquote><pre>
27654 [sssd]
27655 config_file_version = 2
27656 reconnection_retries = 3
27657 sbus_timeout = 30
27658 services = nss, pam
27659 domains = INTERN
27660
27661 [nss]
27662 filter_groups = root
27663 filter_users = root
27664 reconnection_retries = 3
27665
27666 [pam]
27667 reconnection_retries = 3
27668
27669 [domain/INTERN]
27670 enumerate = false
27671 cache_credentials = true
27672
27673 id_provider = ldap
27674 auth_provider = ldap
27675 chpass_provider = ldap
27676
27677 ldap_uri = ldap://ldap
27678 ldap_search_base = dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
27679 ldap_tls_reqcert = never
27680 ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
27681 </pre></blockquote>
27682
27683 <p>I got the same problem here with certificate checking.  Had to set
27684 "ldap_tls_reqcert = never" to get it working.</p>
27685
27686 <p>With the libnss-sss package in testing at the moment, the
27687 nsswitch.conf file is update automatically, so there is no need to
27688 modify it manually.</p>
27689
27690 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
27691 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
27692
27693       </div>
27694       <div class="tags">
27695
27696
27697         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
27698
27699
27700       </div>
27701     </div>
27702     <div class="padding"></div>
27703
27704     <div class="entry">
27705       <div class="title">
27706         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
27707       </div>
27708       <div class="date">
27709         28th June 2010
27710       </div>
27711       <div class="body">
27712         <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
27713 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
27714 tool to browse the LDAP tree.  The only one I was able to find in
27715 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
27716 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
27717 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
27718 populated by default in Skolelinux.  Thanks to it, I have been able to
27719 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
27720 objects.  It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze.  If you
27721 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
27722
27723 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
27724 the BTS yet.  There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
27725 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
27726 Debian submenu in KDE.  I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
27727 released.</p>
27728
27729 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet.  I would
27730 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
27731 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet.  So in the mean time, I use
27732 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
27733
27734 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
27735 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
27736
27737 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
27738 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
27739 useful GUI alternative.  It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
27740 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze.  Unless that
27741 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
27742
27743       </div>
27744       <div class="tags">
27745
27746
27747         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>.
27748
27749
27750       </div>
27751     </div>
27752     <div class="padding"></div>
27753
27754     <div class="entry">
27755       <div class="title">
27756         <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>
27757       </div>
27758       <div class="date">
27759         24th June 2010
27760       </div>
27761       <div class="body">
27762         <p>A while back, I
27763 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
27764 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
27765 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
27766 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
27767
27768 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
27769 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
27770 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
27771 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
27772
27773 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
27774 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
27775 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
27776 Debian Edu.</p>
27777
27778 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
27779 the
27780 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
27781 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
27782 available today from IETF.</p>
27783
27784 <pre>
27785 --- dhcp.schema    (revision 65192)
27786 +++ dhcp.schema    (working copy)
27787 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
27788  objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
27789         NAME 'dhcpHost'
27790         DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
27791 -       SUP top
27792 +       SUP top AUXILIARY
27793         MUST cn
27794         MAY  (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
27795         X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
27796 </pre>
27797
27798 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
27799 Edu/Squeeze.  We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
27800 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
27801
27802 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
27803 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
27804
27805       </div>
27806       <div class="tags">
27807
27808
27809         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>.
27810
27811
27812       </div>
27813     </div>
27814     <div class="padding"></div>
27815
27816     <div class="entry">
27817       <div class="title">
27818         <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>
27819       </div>
27820       <div class="date">
27821         16th June 2010
27822       </div>
27823       <div class="body">
27824         <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
27825 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run.  Until now,
27826 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
27827 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
27828 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
27829 this:
27830
27831 <blockquote><pre>
27832 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
27833 tasksel --new-install
27834 </pre></blockquote>
27835
27836 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
27837 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
27838 any output what so ever.
27839
27840 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
27841 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
27842 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
27843 happen.  Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
27844 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
27845 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run.  I ended up using
27846 code like this:
27847
27848 <blockquote><pre>
27849 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
27850 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
27851 $cmd
27852 </pre></blockquote>
27853
27854 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
27855 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
27856 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
27857 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
27858 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
27859 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
27860 installation.</p>
27861
27862 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
27863 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
27864 like this.</p>
27865
27866       </div>
27867       <div class="tags">
27868
27869
27870         Tags: <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>.
27871
27872
27873       </div>
27874     </div>
27875     <div class="padding"></div>
27876
27877     <div class="entry">
27878       <div class="title">
27879         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Officeshots_taking_shape.html">Officeshots taking shape</a>
27880       </div>
27881       <div class="date">
27882         13th June 2010
27883       </div>
27884       <div class="body">
27885         <p>For those of us caring about document exchange and
27886 interoperability, <a href="http://www.officeshots.org/">OfficeShots</a>
27887 is a great service.  It is to ODF documents what
27888 <a href="http://browsershots.org/">BrowserShots</a> is for web
27889 pages.</p>
27890
27891 <p>A while back, I was contacted by Knut Yrvin at the part of Nokia
27892 that used to be Trolltech, who wanted to help the OfficeShots project
27893 and wondered if the University of Oslo where I work would be
27894 interested in supporting the project.  I helped him to navigate his
27895 request to the right people at work, and his request was answered with
27896 a spot in the machine room with power and network connected, and Knut
27897 arranged funding for a machine to fill the spot.  The machine is
27898 administrated by the OfficeShots people, so I do not have daily
27899 contact with its progress, and thus from time to time check back to
27900 see how the project is doing.</p>
27901
27902 <p>Today I had a look, and was happy to see that the Dell box in our
27903 machine room now is the host for several virtual machines running as
27904 OfficeShots factories, and the project is able to render ODF documents
27905 in 17 different document processing implementation on Linux and
27906 Windows.  This is great.</p>
27907
27908       </div>
27909       <div class="tags">
27910
27911
27912         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>.
27913
27914
27915       </div>
27916     </div>
27917     <div class="padding"></div>
27918
27919     <div class="entry">
27920       <div class="title">
27921         <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>
27922       </div>
27923       <div class="date">
27924         13th June 2010
27925       </div>
27926       <div class="body">
27927         <p>My
27928 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
27929 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
27930 finally made the upgrade logs available from
27931 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
27932 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
27933 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting.  This time
27934 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
27935
27936 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
27937 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze.  The
27938 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
27939 xserver-xorg-video* drivers.  Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
27940 sure why.  When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
27941 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
27942 longer needed.  Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
27943 I do not know.  Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
27944
27945 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
27946 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
27947 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
27948 too surprising.</p>
27949
27950 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
27951 and avoided, and perhaps others as well.  Here are the complete list
27952 of planned removals.  The complete logs is available from the URL
27953 above.  Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
27954 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
27955 conffile questions.  No idea why.  I worked around it by using
27956 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
27957 continue.</p>
27958
27959 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
27960 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
27961   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
27962   iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
27963   libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
27964   nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
27965   serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
27966   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
27967   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
27968   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
27969   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
27970   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
27971   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
27972   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
27973   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
27974   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
27975   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
27976   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
27977   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
27978   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
27979   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
27980   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
27981   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
27982   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
27983   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
27984   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
27985   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
27986   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
27987   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
27988   xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
27989
27990 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
27991
27992 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
27993   djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
27994   gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
27995   gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
27996   libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
27997   libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
27998   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
27999   libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
28000   libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
28001   libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
28002   libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
28003   libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
28004   libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
28005   libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
28006   libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
28007   libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
28008   libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
28009   libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
28010   libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
28011   libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
28012   libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
28013   libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
28014   libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
28015   libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
28016   openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
28017   python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
28018   python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
28019   python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
28020   swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
28021   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
28022   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
28023   zip</p>
28024
28025 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
28026
28027 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
28028   kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
28029   kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
28030   kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
28031   kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
28032   libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
28033   xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
28034   xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
28035   xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
28036   xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
28037   xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
28038   xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
28039   xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
28040   xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
28041   xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
28042   xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
28043   xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
28044   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
28045   xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
28046   xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
28047   xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
28048   xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
28049   xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
28050   xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
28051   xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
28052   xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
28053   xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
28054   xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
28055
28056 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
28057 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
28058   djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
28059   ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
28060   kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
28061   kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
28062   kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
28063   kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
28064   kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
28065   kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
28066   kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
28067   kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
28068   klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
28069   kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
28070   krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
28071   ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
28072   kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
28073   kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
28074   libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
28075   libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
28076   libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
28077   libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
28078   libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
28079   libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
28080   libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
28081   libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
28082   libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
28083   libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
28084   libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
28085   libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
28086   libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
28087   libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
28088   openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
28089   superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
28090   texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
28091   xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
28092   xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
28093   xulrunner-1.9</p>
28094
28095
28096       </div>
28097       <div class="tags">
28098
28099
28100         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>.
28101
28102
28103       </div>
28104     </div>
28105     <div class="padding"></div>
28106
28107     <div class="entry">
28108       <div class="title">
28109         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
28110       </div>
28111       <div class="date">
28112         11th June 2010
28113       </div>
28114       <div class="body">
28115         <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
28116 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly.  A few bugs
28117 have been discovered and reported in the process
28118 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
28119 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
28120 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
28121 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
28122 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
28123
28124 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
28125 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
28126 it.  To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
28127 script is inserted.  To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
28128 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
28129 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
28130
28131 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
28132 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
28133 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
28134 is created.  The bug report
28135 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
28136 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
28137 to make sure the upgrade go well.  Testing on virtual and real
28138 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
28139 do the trick in such settings anyway.  This is a
28140 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
28141 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
28142 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
28143 working with old kernels or something like that.  I really wish the
28144 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
28145 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
28146 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
28147 Debian Squeeze.</p>
28148
28149 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades.  This test
28150 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
28151 trick:</p>
28152
28153 <blockquote><pre>
28154 #!/bin/sh
28155 set -ex
28156
28157 if [ "$1" ] ; then
28158     desktop=$1
28159 else
28160     desktop=gnome
28161 fi
28162
28163 from=lenny
28164 to=squeeze
28165
28166 exec &lt; /dev/null
28167 unset LANG
28168 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
28169 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
28170 fuser -mv .
28171 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
28172 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
28173 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
28174 #!/bin/sh
28175 exit 101
28176 EOF
28177 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
28178 exit_cleanup() {
28179     umount $tmpdir/proc
28180 }
28181 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
28182 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
28183 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
28184
28185 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
28186
28187 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
28188 # to return the correct answers.
28189 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
28190     chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
28191
28192 # Include the desktop and laptop task
28193 for test in desktop laptop ; do
28194     echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
28195 #!/bin/sh
28196 exit 2
28197 EOF
28198     chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
28199 done
28200
28201 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
28202 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
28203 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
28204 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
28205
28206 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
28207 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
28208 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
28209 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
28210 fuser -mv
28211 </pre></blockquote>
28212
28213 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
28214 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
28215 differently so far.  I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
28216 regularly and post the result on the web.  The Gnome upgrade currently
28217 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
28218 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
28219
28220 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
28221 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
28222 post, so I will refrain from trying.  I can report that for Gnome,
28223 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
28224 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
28225 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
28226 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
28227
28228 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
28229 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
28230 booting without a hitch.  Was unsure if there were still bugs with
28231 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
28232 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
28233 packages.</p>
28234
28235       </div>
28236       <div class="tags">
28237
28238
28239         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>.
28240
28241
28242       </div>
28243     </div>
28244     <div class="padding"></div>
28245
28246     <div class="entry">
28247       <div class="title">
28248         <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>
28249       </div>
28250       <div class="date">
28251          6th June 2010
28252       </div>
28253       <div class="body">
28254         <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
28255 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
28256 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd.  The packages with such
28257 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
28258 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart.  Because of
28259 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
28260 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
28261
28262 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
28263 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
28264 COLUMNS):</p>
28265
28266 <blockquote><pre>
28267 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
28268 previous=N
28269 PREVLEVEL=
28270 RUNLEVEL=
28271 runlevel=S
28272 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
28273 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
28274 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
28275 </pre></blockquote>
28276
28277 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
28278 script.</p>
28279
28280 <blockquote><pre>
28281 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
28282 previous=N
28283 PREVLEVEL=N
28284 RUNLEVEL=S
28285 runlevel=S
28286 </pre></blockquote>
28287
28288 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
28289 sysvinit are not set by upstart.  Not sure if it is intentional or not
28290 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
28291
28292 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
28293 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
28294 choice.</p>
28295
28296       </div>
28297       <div class="tags">
28298
28299
28300         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>.
28301
28302
28303       </div>
28304     </div>
28305     <div class="padding"></div>
28306
28307     <div class="entry">
28308       <div class="title">
28309         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
28310       </div>
28311       <div class="date">
28312          6th June 2010
28313       </div>
28314       <div class="body">
28315         <p>Via the
28316 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
28317 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
28318 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
28319 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages).  I recommend it for everyone
28320 following the standards wars of today.</p>
28321
28322       </div>
28323       <div class="tags">
28324
28325
28326         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>.
28327
28328
28329       </div>
28330     </div>
28331     <div class="padding"></div>
28332
28333     <div class="entry">
28334       <div class="title">
28335         <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>
28336       </div>
28337       <div class="date">
28338          3rd June 2010
28339       </div>
28340       <div class="body">
28341         <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
28342 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
28343 information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
28344 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
28345 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
28346
28347 <blockquote><pre>
28348 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
28349   vendor                    count
28350   Dell Computer Corporation     1
28351     PowerEdge 1750              1
28352   IBM                           1
28353     eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
28354   Intel                         2
28355   [no-dmi-info]                 3
28356 maintainer:~#
28357 </pre></blockquote>
28358
28359 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
28360 provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
28361 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
28362 machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
28363 option to list the individual machines.</p>
28364
28365 <p>A larger list is
28366 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
28367 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
28368 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
28369 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
28370 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
28371 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
28372 collector.</p>
28373
28374       </div>
28375       <div class="tags">
28376
28377
28378         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>.
28379
28380
28381       </div>
28382     </div>
28383     <div class="padding"></div>
28384
28385     <div class="entry">
28386       <div class="title">
28387         <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>
28388       </div>
28389       <div class="date">
28390          1st June 2010
28391       </div>
28392       <div class="body">
28393         <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
28394 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled.  The
28395 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
28396 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
28397 wait.</p>
28398
28399 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
28400 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
28401 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
28402 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
28403 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
28404 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
28405
28406 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
28407 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
28408 distribution work out of the box for these users.  The nvidia driver
28409 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
28410 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
28411 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
28412 distribution that work for them.  I have no idea what the solution is,
28413 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
28414
28415 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
28416
28417       </div>
28418       <div class="tags">
28419
28420
28421         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>.
28422
28423
28424       </div>
28425     </div>
28426     <div class="padding"></div>
28427
28428     <div class="entry">
28429       <div class="title">
28430         <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>
28431       </div>
28432       <div class="date">
28433         27th May 2010
28434       </div>
28435       <div class="body">
28436         <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
28437 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
28438 issues are known and should be solved:
28439
28440 <p><ul>
28441
28442 <li>The wicd package seen to
28443 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
28444 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
28445 parallel booting is enabled.  No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
28446 seem to be on the case.</li>
28447
28448 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
28449 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
28450 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect.  The
28451 maintainer is on the case.</li>
28452
28453 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
28454 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
28455 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
28456 sysv-rc.  One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
28457 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
28458 sysv-rc more robust.  Will investigate some more and probably upload a
28459 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
28460 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
28461
28462 </ul></p>
28463
28464 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
28465 solvable before Squeeze is released.  In addition to these there are
28466 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
28467 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
28468
28469 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
28470 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
28471 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
28472 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
28473
28474 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
28475
28476       </div>
28477       <div class="tags">
28478
28479
28480         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>.
28481
28482
28483       </div>
28484     </div>
28485     <div class="padding"></div>
28486
28487     <div class="entry">
28488       <div class="title">
28489         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
28490       </div>
28491       <div class="date">
28492         22nd May 2010
28493       </div>
28494       <div class="body">
28495         <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
28496 found time today to return to the project.  Having to spend less time
28497 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
28498 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
28499
28500 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu.  We
28501 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
28502 get disk and network controllers working.  Without having these
28503 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
28504 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
28505 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
28506 an external medium is a support pain.  Initially, I expected it to be
28507 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
28508 debian-installer to find and use them.  This proved to be wrong.
28509 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
28510 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
28511 /cdrom/firmware/).  This also proved to not work, and at this point I
28512 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
28513 going to work.</p>
28514
28515 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
28516 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
28517 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
28518 packages.  It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
28519 "external" media devices.  Today I changed it to also look in the
28520 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
28521 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu.  I also changed it to
28522 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
28523 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
28524 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
28525 Edu.</p>
28526
28527 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
28528 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
28529 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
28530 run these before activating the firmware during installation.  The
28531 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
28532 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
28533
28534 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
28535 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
28536
28537       </div>
28538       <div class="tags">
28539
28540
28541         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>.
28542
28543
28544       </div>
28545     </div>
28546     <div class="padding"></div>
28547
28548     <div class="entry">
28549       <div class="title">
28550         <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>
28551       </div>
28552       <div class="date">
28553         19th May 2010
28554       </div>
28555       <div class="body">
28556         <p>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
28557 Edu finally entered the Debian archive.  Today, the new
28558 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html">libpam-mklocaluser</a>
28559 package was accepted.  Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
28560 into unstable.  The
28561 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html">pam-python</a>
28562 package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
28563 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd</a> package
28564 passed NEW on Monday.  In addition, the
28565 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
28566 package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
28567 hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.</p>
28568
28569 <p>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
28570 roaming laptops.  The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
28571 nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
28572 which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
28573 for nscd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">BTS report
28574 #485282</a> is implemented.  The alternative setup is to use sssd with
28575 libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
28576 care of the caching of passwords and group information.</p>
28577
28578 <p>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
28579 at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
28580 problem with the server certificate.  I plan to update the Debian
28581 package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
28582 find time to make sure the next release will include both the
28583 Debian/Ubuntu specific patches.  Upstream is friendly and responsive,
28584 and I am sure we will find a good solution.</p>
28585
28586 <p>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
28587 LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
28588 when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
28589 cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
28590 memberhips and other relevant LDAP information.  The
28591 libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
28592 directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
28593 be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used.  To avoid confusion
28594 with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
28595 to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
28596 on the home directory servers.</p>
28597
28598 <p>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
28599 message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
28600 is created.  Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
28601 message.  The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
28602 a bug in gdm.  Have not investigated if there is some other message
28603 type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.</p>
28604
28605 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
28606 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
28607
28608       </div>
28609       <div class="tags">
28610
28611
28612         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
28613
28614
28615       </div>
28616     </div>
28617     <div class="padding"></div>
28618
28619     <div class="entry">
28620       <div class="title">
28621         <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>
28622       </div>
28623       <div class="date">
28624         14th May 2010
28625       </div>
28626       <div class="body">
28627         <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
28628 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
28629 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
28630 expected, if I am to believe the
28631 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
28632 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
28633 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
28634 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen.  If serious problems are
28635 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
28636 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
28637 version.</p>
28638
28639 More information about
28640 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
28641 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki.  It is
28642 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
28643 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
28644
28645 <blockquote><pre>
28646 CONCURRENCY=none
28647 </pre></blockquote>
28648
28649 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
28650 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
28651 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
28652 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
28653
28654       </div>
28655       <div class="tags">
28656
28657
28658         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>.
28659
28660
28661       </div>
28662     </div>
28663     <div class="padding"></div>
28664
28665     <div class="entry">
28666       <div class="title">
28667         <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>
28668       </div>
28669       <div class="date">
28670         14th May 2010
28671       </div>
28672       <div class="body">
28673         <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
28674 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
28675 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
28676 network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
28677 central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
28678 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
28679 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
28680 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
28681
28682 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
28683 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
28684 this on the collector host:</p>
28685
28686 <blockquote><pre>
28687 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
28688 </pre></blockquote>
28689
28690 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
28691 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
28692
28693 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
28694 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
28695 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
28696 tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
28697 written yet.</p>
28698
28699       </div>
28700       <div class="tags">
28701
28702
28703         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>.
28704
28705
28706       </div>
28707     </div>
28708     <div class="padding"></div>
28709
28710     <div class="entry">
28711       <div class="title">
28712         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
28713       </div>
28714       <div class="date">
28715         13th May 2010
28716       </div>
28717       <div class="body">
28718         <p>The last few days a new boot system called
28719 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
28720 has been
28721 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
28722
28723 to the free software world.  I have not yet had time to play around
28724 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
28725 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
28726 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
28727 based boot system.  Tollef is
28728 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
28729 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work.  I
28730 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
28731 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
28732 at the moment do not.</p>
28733
28734 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
28735 platform support.  It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
28736 some new kernel features enabled to function properly.  This means
28737 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
28738 system.  Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
28739 way forward.</p>
28740
28741 <p>In the mean time, based on the
28742 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
28743 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
28744 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
28745 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
28746 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies.  A
28747 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
28748 already in experimental.  If all go well, Squeeze will be released
28749 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
28750
28751       </div>
28752       <div class="tags">
28753
28754
28755         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>.
28756
28757
28758       </div>
28759     </div>
28760     <div class="padding"></div>
28761
28762     <div class="entry">
28763       <div class="title">
28764         <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>
28765       </div>
28766       <div class="date">
28767          6th May 2010
28768       </div>
28769       <div class="body">
28770         <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
28771 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
28772 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies.  If you want
28773 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
28774 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
28775 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
28776 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
28777
28778 <blockquote><pre>
28779 CONCURRENCY=makefile
28780 </pre></blockquote>
28781
28782 <p>That is it.  It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
28783 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
28784 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
28785 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts.  Startpar is configured
28786 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
28787 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
28788 make this happen.</p>
28789
28790 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result.  If some services
28791 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
28792 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
28793 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies).  Report bugs and get
28794 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
28795
28796 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
28797 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct.  I
28798 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
28799 fix the remaining issues.</p>
28800
28801 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
28802 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
28803 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
28804 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
28805
28806       </div>
28807       <div class="tags">
28808
28809
28810         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>.
28811
28812
28813       </div>
28814     </div>
28815     <div class="padding"></div>
28816
28817     <div class="entry">
28818       <div class="title">
28819         <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>
28820       </div>
28821       <div class="date">
28822          2nd May 2010
28823       </div>
28824       <div class="body">
28825         <p>One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
28826 create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
28827 change the password on the first login attempt.</p>
28828
28829 <p>I'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
28830 Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account.  The account
28831 and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
28832 unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
28833 passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.</p>
28834
28835 <p>A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
28836 settings in /etc/shadow:</p>
28837
28838 <blockquote><pre>
28839 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
28840 Last password change                                    : May 02, 2010
28841 Password expires                                        : never
28842 Password inactive                                       : never
28843 Account expires                                         : never
28844 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
28845 Maximum number of days between password change          : 99999
28846 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
28847 root@tjener:~#
28848 </pre></blockquote>
28849
28850 <p>The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
28851 account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
28852 lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
28853 to the difference in days between that date and today.  To make it
28854 simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
28855 avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).</p>
28856
28857 <p>After using these commands to set it up, it seem to work as
28858 intended:</p>
28859
28860 <blockquote><pre>
28861 root@tjener:~# chage -d 1 test; chage -M 10950 test
28862 root@tjener:~# chage -l test
28863 Last password change                                    : Jan 02, 1970
28864 Password expires                                        : never
28865 Password inactive                                       : never
28866 Account expires                                         : never
28867 Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
28868 Maximum number of days between password change          : 10950
28869 Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7
28870 root@tjener:~#
28871 </pre></blockquote>
28872
28873 <p>So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
28874 Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
28875 user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).</p>
28876
28877 <p>Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
28878 sure only the user itself have the account password?</p>
28879
28880 <p>If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
28881 Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
28882
28883 <p>Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
28884 shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
28885 last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
28886 on the first login.  This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
28887 I did not notice this in my initial testing.  I have tested it on
28888 Squeeze, and '<tt>chage -d 0 username</tt>' do work there.  I have not
28889 tested it on Lenny yet.</p>
28890
28891 <p>Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
28892 equivalent command to expire a password is '<tt>passwd -e
28893 username</tt>', which insert zero into the date of the last password
28894 change.</p>
28895
28896       </div>
28897       <div class="tags">
28898
28899
28900         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
28901
28902
28903       </div>
28904     </div>
28905     <div class="padding"></div>
28906
28907     <div class="entry">
28908       <div class="title">
28909         <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>
28910       </div>
28911       <div class="date">
28912         28th April 2010
28913       </div>
28914       <div class="body">
28915         <p>For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
28916 Debian Edu.  The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
28917 handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
28918 and go.</p>
28919
28920 <p>Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
28921 Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
28922 example called Roaming Workstations.  Here are my thought on this.
28923 The setup would consist of the following:</p>
28924
28925 <ul>
28926
28927  <li>During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
28928    the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
28929    the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
28930    server.  This allow the user to work also when offline.  The
28931    central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
28932    request, for example mounted via CIFS.  It could be mounted
28933    automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
28934    and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
28935    hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
28936    request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
28937    can be used to access it when needed.  Perhaps it is enough to use
28938    the fish protocol in KDE?</li>
28939
28940  <li>Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
28941    authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
28942    to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
28943    to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server.  This can be done using
28944    <a href="http://www.padl.com/OSS/pam_ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
28945    or the Fedora developed
28946    <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SSSD">System
28947    Security Services Daemon</a> packages.</li>
28948
28949  <li>File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
28950    using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
28951    directory, using unison.</li>
28952
28953  <li>Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
28954    their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
28955    the box with CUPS.  For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
28956    system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
28957    implemented.</li>
28958
28959  <li>For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
28960    sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.</li>
28961
28962  <li>It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
28963    cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
28964    local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.</li>
28965
28966 </ul>
28967
28968 <p>I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
28969 the moment.  If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
28970 in time for the Squeeze release to freeze.  Some of the pieces need
28971 tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
28972 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566718">#566718</a>) and nslcd (or
28973 perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
28974 its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
28975 when disconnected from the net.  If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
28976 to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.</p>
28977
28978 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
28979 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
28980
28981       </div>
28982       <div class="tags">
28983
28984
28985         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
28986
28987
28988       </div>
28989     </div>
28990     <div class="padding"></div>
28991
28992     <div class="entry">
28993       <div class="title">
28994         <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>
28995       </div>
28996       <div class="date">
28997         19th April 2010
28998       </div>
28999       <div class="body">
29000         <p>The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a
29001 thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics
29002 touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the
29003 conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The
29004 book titled "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,
29005 Copyright, and the Future of the Future" is available with few
29006 restrictions on the web, for example from
29007 <a href="http://craphound.com/content/">his own site</a>. I read the
29008 epub-version from
29009 <a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2883">feedbooks</a> using
29010 <a href="http://www.fbreader.org/">fbreader</a> and my N810. I
29011 strongly recommend this book.</p>
29012
29013       </div>
29014       <div class="tags">
29015
29016
29017         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>.
29018
29019
29020       </div>
29021     </div>
29022     <div class="padding"></div>
29023
29024     <div class="entry">
29025       <div class="title">
29026         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kerberos_for_Debian_Edu_Squeeze_.html">Kerberos for Debian Edu/Squeeze?</a>
29027       </div>
29028       <div class="date">
29029         14th April 2010
29030       </div>
29031       <div class="body">
29032         <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20100413-kerberos/">Yesterdays
29033 NUUG presentation</a> about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
29034 about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux.  Setting up a
29035 Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
29036 place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
29037 have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
29038 directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
29039 not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
29040 users and cryptographic keys instead.</p>
29041
29042 <p>A challenge will be integration and administration.  Is there a
29043 Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
29044 administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups?  With it, the
29045 school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
29046 files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.</p>
29047
29048 <p>A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
29049 pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together.  Anyone know?</p>
29050
29051 <p>Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
29052 Nagios.  I have no idea how much work that will be to implement.  We
29053 would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
29054 shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
29055 to work properly.</p>
29056
29057 <p>I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
29058 skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
29059 configuration and integration.  A natural starting point would be
29060 setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
29061 rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
29062 time.</p>
29063
29064 <p>If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
29065 I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
29066 presentation, and start using Kerberos at home.  The video show show
29067 up in a few days.</p>
29068
29069       </div>
29070       <div class="tags">
29071
29072
29073         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
29074
29075
29076       </div>
29077     </div>
29078     <div class="padding"></div>
29079
29080     <div class="entry">
29081       <div class="title">
29082         <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>
29083       </div>
29084       <div class="date">
29085          6th March 2010
29086       </div>
29087       <div class="body">
29088         <p>6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
29089 in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
29090 when the user log out.  A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
29091 package in 2004 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/230422">#230422</a>),
29092 and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
29093 Today, this finally paid off.</p>
29094
29095 <p>The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
29096 repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
29097 been updated to use this framework.  Next on my agenda is to make sure
29098 kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.</p>
29099
29100 <p>In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
29101 user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
29102 after a user.  With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
29103 a generic way that work with all display managers using this
29104 framework.  My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
29105 similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.<p>
29106
29107       </div>
29108       <div class="tags">
29109
29110
29111         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
29112
29113
29114       </div>
29115     </div>
29116     <div class="padding"></div>
29117
29118     <div class="entry">
29119       <div class="title">
29120         <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>
29121       </div>
29122       <div class="date">
29123         11th February 2010
29124       </div>
29125       <div class="body">
29126         <p>On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
29127 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> was finally
29128 shipped.  This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
29129 pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up.  Work on the first
29130 point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
29131 month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
29132 and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.</p>
29133
29134 <p>Perhaps it even is time for some partying?</p>
29135
29136 <p>After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
29137 next major release, based on Squeeze.  We will try to get as many of
29138 the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
29139 and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.</p>
29140
29141       </div>
29142       <div class="tags">
29143
29144
29145         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
29146
29147
29148       </div>
29149     </div>
29150     <div class="padding"></div>
29151
29152     <div class="entry">
29153       <div class="title">
29154         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html">Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration</a>
29155       </div>
29156       <div class="date">
29157         27th January 2010
29158       </div>
29159       <div class="body">
29160         <p>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
29161 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
29162 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
29163 Nagios.  The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
29164 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
29165 further.</p>
29166
29167 <p>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
29168 configured as a Munin and Nagios server.  In addition, it is
29169 configured to be a server for the
29170 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">SiteSummary
29171 system</a> I have written for use in Debian Edu.  The SiteSummary
29172 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
29173 work.  In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
29174 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
29175 computer submitting information to this collector.  This allow for
29176 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
29177 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
29178 packages got etc.  This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
29179 and Nagios configuration.</p>
29180
29181 <p>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
29182 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
29183 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
29184 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.</p>
29185
29186 <p>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
29187 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
29188 services detected).  In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
29189 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
29190 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
29191 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
29192 the machine.</p>
29193
29194 <p>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
29195 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
29196 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
29197 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.</p>
29198
29199 <p>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
29200 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP.  The system
29201 administrator need to run "<tt>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
29202 nagiosadmin</tt>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
29203 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages.  After that,
29204 everything is taken care of.</p>
29205
29206       </div>
29207       <div class="tags">
29208
29209
29210         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">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>.
29211
29212
29213       </div>
29214     </div>
29215     <div class="padding"></div>
29216
29217     <div class="entry">
29218       <div class="title">
29219         <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>
29220       </div>
29221       <div class="date">
29222         12th August 2009
29223       </div>
29224       <div class="body">
29225         <p>Just for fun, I did a search right now on Google for a few file ODF
29226 and MS Office based formats (not to be mistaken for ISO or ECMA
29227 OOXML), to get an idea of their relative usage.  I searched using
29228 'filetype:odt' and equvalent terms, and got these results:</P>
29229
29230 <table>
29231 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
29232 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:282000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
29233 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:75600</td> <td>pptx:183000</td></tr>
29234 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:145000</td></tr>
29235 </table>
29236
29237 <p>Next, I added a 'site:no' limit to get the numbers for Norway, and
29238 got these numbers:</p>
29239
29240 <table>
29241 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
29242 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480 </td> <td>docx:4460</td></tr>
29243 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:299   </td> <td>pptx:741</td></tr>
29244 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:187       </td> <td>xlsx:372</td></tr>
29245 </table>
29246
29247 <p>I wonder how these numbers change over time.</p>
29248
29249 <p>I am aware of Google returning different results and numbers based
29250 on where the search is done, so I guess these numbers will differ if
29251 they are conduced in another country.  Because of this, I did the same
29252 search from a machine in California, USA, a few minutes after the
29253 search done from a machine here in Norway.</p>
29254
29255
29256 <table>
29257 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
29258 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:129000</td> <td>docx:308000</td></tr>
29259 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:44200</td> <td>pptx:93900</td></tr>
29260 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:26500     </td> <td>xlsx:82400</td></tr>
29261 </table>
29262
29263 <p>And with 'site:no':
29264
29265 <table>
29266 <tr><th>Type</th><th>ODF</th><th>MS Office</th></tr>
29267 <tr><td>Tekst</td> <td>odt:2480</td> <td>docx:3410</td></tr>
29268 <tr><td>Presentasjon</td> <td>odp:175</td> <td>pptx:604</td></tr>
29269 <tr><td>Regneark</td> <td>ods:186       </td> <td>xlsx:296</td></tr>
29270 </table>
29271
29272 <p>Interesting difference, not sure what to conclude from these
29273 numbers.</p>
29274
29275       </div>
29276       <div class="tags">
29277
29278
29279         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>.
29280
29281
29282       </div>
29283     </div>
29284     <div class="padding"></div>
29285
29286     <div class="entry">
29287       <div class="title">
29288         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ISO_still_hope_to_fix_OOXML.html">ISO still hope to fix OOXML</a>
29289       </div>
29290       <div class="date">
29291          8th August 2009
29292       </div>
29293       <div class="body">
29294         <p>According to <a
29295 href="http://twerner.blogspot.com/2009/08/defects-of-office-open-xml.html">a
29296 blog post from Torsten Werner</a>, the current defect report for ISO
29297 29500 (ISO OOXML) is 809 pages.  His interesting point is that the
29298 defect report is 71 pages more than the full ODF 1.1 specification.
29299 Personally I find it more interesting that ISO still believe ISO OOXML
29300 can be fixed in ISO.  Personally, I believe it is broken beyon repair,
29301 and I completely lack any trust in ISO for being able to get anywhere
29302 close to solving the problems.  I was part of the Norwegian committee
29303 involved in the OOXML fast track process, and was not impressed with
29304 Standard Norway and ISO in how they handled it.</p>
29305
29306 <p>These days I focus on ODF instead, which seem like a specification
29307 with the future ahead of it.  We are working in NUUG to organise a ODF
29308 seminar this autumn.</p>
29309
29310       </div>
29311       <div class="tags">
29312
29313
29314         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>.
29315
29316
29317       </div>
29318     </div>
29319     <div class="padding"></div>
29320
29321     <div class="entry">
29322       <div class="title">
29323         <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>
29324       </div>
29325       <div class="date">
29326         27th July 2009
29327       </div>
29328       <div class="body">
29329         <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
29330 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
29331 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing.  This
29332 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
29333 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
29334 installation.  Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
29335 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
29336
29337 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
29338 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
29339 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
29340
29341       </div>
29342       <div class="tags">
29343
29344
29345         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>.
29346
29347
29348       </div>
29349     </div>
29350     <div class="padding"></div>
29351
29352     <div class="entry">
29353       <div class="title">
29354         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
29355       </div>
29356       <div class="date">
29357         22nd July 2009
29358       </div>
29359       <div class="body">
29360         <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
29361 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
29362 take over the package and become the new upstream.  The number of
29363 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
29364 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
29365 the package up to date.</p>
29366
29367 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
29368 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman.  About 10 days ago, I made
29369 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
29370 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
29371 distributions.  We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
29372 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge.  Since the
29373 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
29374 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
29375 development there.  The project is registered and currently waiting
29376 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
29377 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
29378 working on the future release.</p>
29379
29380 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
29381 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
29382
29383       </div>
29384       <div class="tags">
29385
29386
29387         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>.
29388
29389
29390       </div>
29391     </div>
29392     <div class="padding"></div>
29393
29394     <div class="entry">
29395       <div class="title">
29396         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
29397       </div>
29398       <div class="date">
29399         24th June 2009
29400       </div>
29401       <div class="body">
29402         <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
29403 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
29404 could find more ways to speed up the boot system.  This was an Ubuntu
29405 funded
29406 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
29407 gathering</a>. It was quite productive.  We also discussed the future
29408 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
29409 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
29410 asynchronous and event base.  The Ubuntu approach using udev and
29411 upstart might be a good way forward.  Time will show.</p>
29412
29413 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
29414 process in Debian.  All of these should be applied to get a quick
29415 boot:</p>
29416
29417 <ul>
29418
29419 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
29420
29421 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
29422    clock is in UTC.</li>
29423
29424 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
29425    <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
29426    based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
29427
29428 </ul>
29429
29430 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
29431 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
29432 Villegas</a>.
29433
29434 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
29435 unstable yesterday.  When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
29436 from the boot sequence.  It depend on very correct dependency
29437 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
29438 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
29439 using this.</p>
29440
29441 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
29442 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
29443 startup speed as well.  Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
29444 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
29445 possible to run a of them in the same process.  A quick way to test
29446 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
29447 insserv'.  Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
29448
29449       </div>
29450       <div class="tags">
29451
29452
29453         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>.
29454
29455
29456       </div>
29457     </div>
29458     <div class="padding"></div>
29459
29460     <div class="entry">
29461       <div class="title">
29462         <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>
29463       </div>
29464       <div class="date">
29465          2nd May 2009
29466       </div>
29467       <div class="body">
29468         <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
29469 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
29470 do not yet know them.</p>
29471
29472 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
29473 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
29474 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
29475 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
29476 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
29477 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
29478 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
29479 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
29480 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
29481 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
29482 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
29483
29484 <p>The second one is
29485 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
29486 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
29487 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
29488 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
29489 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
29490 and the company behind it is running
29491 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
29492 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
29493 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
29494 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
29495 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
29496 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
29497 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
29498 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
29499
29500 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
29501 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
29502 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
29503 surrounded by today.</p>
29504
29505       </div>
29506       <div class="tags">
29507
29508
29509         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
29510
29511
29512       </div>
29513     </div>
29514     <div class="padding"></div>
29515
29516     <div class="entry">
29517       <div class="title">
29518         <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>
29519       </div>
29520       <div class="date">
29521         28th April 2009
29522       </div>
29523       <div class="body">
29524         <p>Julien Blache
29525 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
29526 patch is better than a useless patch</a>.  I completely disagree, as a
29527 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
29528 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
29529 time on fixing it.  No patch do not provide any of these positive
29530 properties.</p>
29531
29532       </div>
29533       <div class="tags">
29534
29535
29536         Tags: <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>.
29537
29538
29539       </div>
29540     </div>
29541     <div class="padding"></div>
29542
29543     <div class="entry">
29544       <div class="title">
29545         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Recording_video_from_cron_using_VLC.html">Recording video from cron using VLC</a>
29546       </div>
29547       <div class="date">
29548          5th April 2009
29549       </div>
29550       <div class="body">
29551         <p>One think I have wanted to figure out for a along time is how to
29552 run vlc from cron to do recording of video streams on the net.  The
29553 task is trivial with mplayer, but I do not really trust the security
29554 of mplayer (it crashes too often on strange input), and thus prefer
29555 vlc.  I finally found a way to do it today.  I spent an hour or so
29556 searching the web for recipes and reading the documentation.  The
29557 hardest part was to get rid of the GUI window, but after finding the
29558 dummy interface, the command line finally presented itself:</p>
29559
29560 <blockquote><pre>URL=http://www.ping.uio.no/video/rms-oslo_2009.ogg
29561 SAVEFILE=rms.ogg
29562 DISPLAY= vlc -q $URL \
29563   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
29564   --intf=dummy</pre></blockquote>
29565
29566 <p>The command stream the URL and store it in the SAVEFILE by
29567 duplicating the output stream to "nodisplay" and the file, using the
29568 dummy interface.  The dummy interface and the nodisplay output make
29569 sure no X interface is needed.</p>
29570
29571 <p>The cron job then need to start this job with the appropriate URL
29572 and file name to save, sleep for the duration wanted, and then kill
29573 the vlc process with SIGTERM.  Here is a complete script
29574 <tt>vlc-record</tt> to use from <tt>at</tt> or <tt>cron</tt>:</p>
29575
29576 <blockquote><pre>#!/bin/sh
29577 set -e
29578 URL="$1"
29579 SAVEFILE="$2"
29580 DURATION="$3"
29581 DISPLAY= vlc -q "$URL" \
29582   --sout="#duplicate{dst=std{access=file,url='$SAVEFILE'},dst=nodisplay}" \
29583   --intf=dummy < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 &
29584 pid=$!
29585 sleep $DURATION
29586 kill $pid
29587 wait $pid</pre></blockquote>
29588
29589       </div>
29590       <div class="tags">
29591
29592
29593         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>.
29594
29595
29596       </div>
29597     </div>
29598     <div class="padding"></div>
29599
29600     <div class="entry">
29601       <div class="title">
29602         <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>
29603       </div>
29604       <div class="date">
29605         30th March 2009
29606       </div>
29607       <div class="body">
29608         <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
29609 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
29610 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
29611 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
29612 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
29613 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
29614 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
29615 application.</p>
29616
29617 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
29618 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
29619 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
29620 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
29621 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
29622 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
29623 blocked from doing so.</p>
29624
29625 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
29626 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
29627 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
29628 requirements change.</p>
29629
29630 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
29631 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
29632 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
29633
29634       </div>
29635       <div class="tags">
29636
29637
29638         Tags: <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>.
29639
29640
29641       </div>
29642     </div>
29643     <div class="padding"></div>
29644
29645     <div class="entry">
29646       <div class="title">
29647         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
29648       </div>
29649       <div class="date">
29650         29th March 2009
29651       </div>
29652       <div class="body">
29653         <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
29654 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering.  I got a bit done tuning the
29655 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
29656 implementation avahi.  It look like it could be useful for us.  Almost
29657 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
29658 get to know the Skolelinux system.  Walter Bender, involved in the
29659 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
29660 also helped me improve my OLPC installation.  He also showed me that
29661 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
29662 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian.  As a
29663 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu.  We also
29664 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
29665 proved to be too hard for us.  The application seem to need more work
29666 before it is ready for me.  I look forward to getting home and relax
29667 now. :)</p>
29668
29669       </div>
29670       <div class="tags">
29671
29672
29673         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>.
29674
29675
29676       </div>
29677     </div>
29678     <div class="padding"></div>
29679
29680     <div class="entry">
29681       <div class="title">
29682         <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>
29683       </div>
29684       <div class="date">
29685         29th March 2009
29686       </div>
29687       <div class="body">
29688         <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
29689 optimal.  There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
29690 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
29691 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory.  The RFC
29692 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
29693 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
29694
29695 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
29696 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
29697 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
29698 and LTSP configuration in LDAP.  These objects have a lot in common,
29699 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
29700 object per entity.  For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
29701 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
29702 DNS information and another with DHCP information.  The schemas
29703 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
29704 object.  In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
29705 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
29706 It just do not scale.  I believe it is time for a few RFC
29707 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
29708
29709 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
29710 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
29711 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
29712 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
29713
29714 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
29715 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
29716
29717 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
29718 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up.  Time to start a
29719 new IETF work group?</p>
29720
29721       </div>
29722       <div class="tags">
29723
29724
29725         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>.
29726
29727
29728       </div>
29729     </div>
29730     <div class="padding"></div>
29731
29732     <div class="entry">
29733       <div class="title">
29734         <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>
29735       </div>
29736       <div class="date">
29737         28th February 2009
29738       </div>
29739       <div class="body">
29740         <p>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
29741 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
29742 contract expire for each server.  We have a machine (and service)
29743 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
29744 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
29745 each machine.  To make it easier for us to track support contract
29746 status, I've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
29747 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
29748 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
29749 machines.  I extended a perl script already being used to import
29750 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
29751 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
29752 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
29753 for the relevant machines.  This make the support status information
29754 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
29755 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
29756 The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
29757 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
29758 them.  27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
29759 using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
29760 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
29761 services.  After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
29762 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
29763 them break down.  When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
29764 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
29765 machine.</p>
29766
29767 <p>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
29768 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
29769 Werner Forsbring.  The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
29770 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
29771 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code.  I know the HTML
29772 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
29773 introduce more dependencies.  This is the current incarnation:</p>
29774
29775 <pre>
29776 use LWP::Simple;
29777 use POSIX;
29778 use WWW::Mechanize;
29779 use Date::Parse;
29780 [...]
29781 sub get_support_info {
29782     my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
29783     my $str;
29784
29785     if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
29786         # fetch website from Dell support
29787         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";
29788         my $webpage = get($url);
29789         return undef unless ($webpage);
29790
29791         my $daysleft = -1;
29792         my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
29793         foreach my $line (@lines) {
29794             next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
29795             $line =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
29796             $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;
29797
29798             my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
29799             @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
29800             my $lastend = "";
29801             while ($f[3] eq "DELL") {
29802                 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];
29803
29804                 my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
29805                                             localtime(str2time($startstr)));
29806                 my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
29807                                           localtime(str2time($endstr)));
29808                 $str .= "$type $start -> $end ";
29809                 @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
29810                 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
29811             }
29812             my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
29813             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
29814                 if ($lastend lt $today);
29815         }
29816     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
29817         my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
29818         my $url =
29819             'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do';
29820         $mech->get($url);
29821         my $fields = {
29822             'BODServiceID' => 'NA',
29823             'RegisteredPurchaseDate' => '',
29824             'country' => 'NO',
29825             'productNumber' => $productnumber,
29826             'serialNumber1' => $serial,
29827         };
29828         $mech->submit_form( form_number => 2,
29829                             fields      => $fields );
29830         # Next step is screen scraping
29831         my $content = $mech->content();
29832
29833         $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
29834         $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
29835         $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
29836         $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
29837
29838         my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
29839
29840         while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
29841             my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
29842                 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
29843             $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
29844             my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
29845                                         localtime(str2time($startstr)));
29846             my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
29847                                       localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
29848
29849             $str .= "$type ($status) $start -> $end ";
29850
29851             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
29852                 if ($end lt $today);
29853         }
29854     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
29855         # This code ignore extended support contracts.
29856         my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
29857         if ($producttype &amp;&amp; $serial) {
29858             my $content =
29859                 get("http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;brandind=5000008&amp;Submit=Submit&amp;type=$producttype&amp;serial=$serial");
29860             if ($content) {
29861                 $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
29862                 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
29863                 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
29864                 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
29865
29866                 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
29867                 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
29868
29869                 $str .= "($status) -> $end ";
29870
29871                 my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
29872                 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
29873                     if ($end lt $today);
29874             }
29875         }
29876     }
29877     return $str;
29878 }
29879 </pre>
29880
29881 <p>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
29882 serial numbers.  The information passed in as arguments are fetched
29883 from dmidecode.</p>
29884
29885 <pre>
29886 print get_support_info("hp.host", "HP ProLiant BL460c G1", "1234567890"
29887                        "447707-B21");
29888 print get_support_info("dell.host", "Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950", "1234567");
29889 print get_support_info("ibm.host", "IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-",
29890                        "1234567");
29891 </pre>
29892
29893 <p>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
29894 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)</p>
29895
29896 <p>Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
29897 contracts, so it is useless in that case.  The original Dell code do
29898 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
29899 do so.</p>
29900
29901       </div>
29902       <div class="tags">
29903
29904
29905         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>.
29906
29907
29908       </div>
29909     </div>
29910     <div class="padding"></div>
29911
29912     <div class="entry">
29913       <div class="title">
29914         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html">Using bar codes at a computing center</a>
29915       </div>
29916       <div class="date">
29917         20th February 2009
29918       </div>
29919       <div class="body">
29920         <p>At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
29921 in our computing center.  This give us a challenge in tracking the
29922 location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
29923 removed.  Some times the location register is not updated when a
29924 computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
29925 the "missing" computer.</p>
29926
29927 <p>In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
29928 <a href="http://www.libdmtx.org/">libdmtx</a> to write and read bar
29929 code blocks as defined in the
29930 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix">The Data Matrix
29931 Standard</a>.  This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
29932 digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
29933 codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture.  The bar code standard
29934 allow up to 2 KiB to be written in the tag.  There is another project
29935 with <a href="http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/">a bar code
29936 writer written in postscript</a> capable of creating such bar codes,
29937 but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
29938 codes.</p>
29939
29940 <p>It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
29941 machines in our computing center.  If both racks and computers are
29942 tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
29943 computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
29944 If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
29945 locations, and can detect movements and removals.</p>
29946
29947 <p>I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
29948 random rack and tagged all the machines with their names.  Next, I
29949 took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
29950 these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read.  This worked
29951 fairly well.  If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
29952 side, all tags in the image could be read.  Because of limited space
29953 between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
29954 rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
29955 about half the rack.  I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
29956 to 60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.</p>
29957
29958 <p>My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
29959 at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
29960 easier automatic tracking of computers.</p>
29961
29962       </div>
29963       <div class="tags">
29964
29965
29966         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>.
29967
29968
29969       </div>
29970     </div>
29971     <div class="padding"></div>
29972
29973     <div class="entry">
29974       <div class="title">
29975         <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>
29976       </div>
29977       <div class="date">
29978         17th January 2009
29979       </div>
29980       <div class="body">
29981         <p>As part of the work we do in <a href="http://www.nuug.no">NUUG</a>
29982 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
29983 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording.  Putting a
29984 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
29985 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy.  I hope this
29986 will become easier when the &lt;video&gt; tag is implemented in all
29987 browsers, but I am not sure.  We provide the recordings in several
29988 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
29989 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
29990 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
29991 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
29992 &lt;video&gt; tag, the &lt;object&gt; tag, the &lt;embed&gt; tag and
29993 the &lt;applet&gt; tag.  All of these take a lot of options, and
29994 finding the best options is a major challenge.</p>
29995
29996 <p>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from <a
29997 href="http://labs.opera.com">labs.opera.com</a>, to see how it handled
29998 a &lt;video&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
29999 I was not very impressed.  The browser start by fetching a picture
30000 from the video stream.  Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
30001 definitely very early in the recording.  So far, so good. Next,
30002 instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
30003 of it, but do not start to play the video.  This mean I have to wait
30004 for several minutes for the downloading to finish.  When the download
30005 is done, the playing of the video do not start!  Waiting for the
30006 download, but I do not get to see the video?  Some testing later, I
30007 discover that I have to add the controls="true" attribute to be able
30008 to get a play button to pres to start the video.  Adding
30009 autoplay="true" did not help.  I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
30010 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
30011 &lt;video&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
30012 playing when the download is done.</p>
30013
30014 <p>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
30015 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/">available
30016 from the nuug site</a>.  Will have to test it with the new Firefox
30017 too.</p>
30018
30019 <p>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature.  I was unable
30020 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
30021 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video.  I
30022 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)</p>
30023
30024       </div>
30025       <div class="tags">
30026
30027
30028         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
30029
30030
30031       </div>
30032     </div>
30033     <div class="padding"></div>
30034
30035     <div class="entry">
30036       <div class="title">
30037         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html">Software video mixer on a USB stick</a>
30038       </div>
30039       <div class="date">
30040         28th December 2008
30041       </div>
30042       <div class="body">
30043         <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> is
30044 recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
30045 worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
30046 directly with the video stream.  For this, we use the
30047 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/">dvswitch</a> package from
30048 the Debian video team.  As this require quite one computer per video
30049 source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
30050 borrow laptops.  And to avoid having to install extra software on
30051 these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
30052 bootable USB stick.  The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
30053 source, sink and mixer applications and
30054 <a href="http://www.kinodv.org/">dvgrab</a>.  To allow this setup to
30055 work without any configuration, I've patched dvswitch to use
30056 <a href="http://www.avahi.org/">avahi</a> to connect the various parts
30057 together.  And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
30058 upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
30059 with USB sources.  We have not yet tested this setup in a production
30060 setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
30061 video mixer in a very short time frame.  We will need it for
30062 <a href="http://www.goopen.no/">Go Open 2009</a>.</p>
30063
30064 <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz">The
30065 USB image</a> is for a 1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
30066 larger stick as well.</p>
30067
30068       </div>
30069       <div class="tags">
30070
30071
30072         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>.
30073
30074
30075       </div>
30076     </div>
30077     <div class="padding"></div>
30078
30079     <div class="entry">
30080       <div class="title">
30081         <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>
30082       </div>
30083       <div class="date">
30084          7th December 2008
30085       </div>
30086       <div class="body">
30087         <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
30088 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
30089 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
30090 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
30091 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
30092 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
30093 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
30094 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
30095
30096 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
30097 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
30098 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
30099 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
30100 of these cards.</p>
30101
30102       </div>
30103       <div class="tags">
30104
30105
30106         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>.
30107
30108
30109       </div>
30110     </div>
30111     <div class="padding"></div>
30112
30113     <div class="entry">
30114       <div class="title">
30115         <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>
30116       </div>
30117       <div class="date">
30118         25th November 2008
30119       </div>
30120       <div class="body">
30121         <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
30122 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
30123 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
30124 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
30125 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
30126 notes are available on
30127 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
30128 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
30129 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
30130 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
30131 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
30132 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
30133 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
30134 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
30135 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
30136
30137 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
30138 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
30139
30140       </div>
30141       <div class="tags">
30142
30143
30144         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>.
30145
30146
30147       </div>
30148     </div>
30149     <div class="padding"></div>
30150
30151     <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>
30152     <div id="sidebar">
30153
30154
30155
30156 <h2>Archive</h2>
30157 <ul>
30158
30159 <li>2018
30160 <ul>
30161
30162 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/01/">January (1)</a></li>
30163
30164 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/02/">February (5)</a></li>
30165
30166 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2018/03/">March (4)</a></li>
30167
30168 </ul></li>
30169
30170 <li>2017
30171 <ul>
30172
30173 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/01/">January (4)</a></li>
30174
30175 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/02/">February (3)</a></li>
30176
30177 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/03/">March (5)</a></li>
30178
30179 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/04/">April (2)</a></li>
30180
30181 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/06/">June (5)</a></li>
30182
30183 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/07/">July (1)</a></li>
30184
30185 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/08/">August (1)</a></li>
30186
30187 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/09/">September (3)</a></li>
30188
30189 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/10/">October (5)</a></li>
30190
30191 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/11/">November (3)</a></li>
30192
30193 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2017/12/">December (4)</a></li>
30194
30195 </ul></li>
30196
30197 <li>2016
30198 <ul>
30199
30200 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/01/">January (3)</a></li>
30201
30202 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/02/">February (2)</a></li>
30203
30204 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/03/">March (3)</a></li>
30205
30206 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/04/">April (8)</a></li>
30207
30208 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/05/">May (8)</a></li>
30209
30210 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/06/">June (2)</a></li>
30211
30212 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/07/">July (2)</a></li>
30213
30214 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/08/">August (5)</a></li>
30215
30216 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/09/">September (2)</a></li>
30217
30218 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/10/">October (3)</a></li>
30219
30220 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/11/">November (8)</a></li>
30221
30222 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2016/12/">December (5)</a></li>
30223
30224 </ul></li>
30225
30226 <li>2015
30227 <ul>
30228
30229 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/01/">January (7)</a></li>
30230
30231 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/02/">February (6)</a></li>
30232
30233 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/03/">March (1)</a></li>
30234
30235 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/04/">April (4)</a></li>
30236
30237 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/05/">May (3)</a></li>
30238
30239 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/06/">June (4)</a></li>
30240
30241 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/07/">July (6)</a></li>
30242
30243 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/08/">August (2)</a></li>
30244
30245 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/09/">September (2)</a></li>
30246
30247 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/10/">October (9)</a></li>
30248
30249 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/11/">November (6)</a></li>
30250
30251 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2015/12/">December (3)</a></li>
30252
30253 </ul></li>
30254
30255 <li>2014
30256 <ul>
30257
30258 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/01/">January (2)</a></li>
30259
30260 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/02/">February (3)</a></li>
30261
30262 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/03/">March (8)</a></li>
30263
30264 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/04/">April (7)</a></li>
30265
30266 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/05/">May (1)</a></li>
30267
30268 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/06/">June (2)</a></li>
30269
30270 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/07/">July (2)</a></li>
30271
30272 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/08/">August (2)</a></li>
30273
30274 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/09/">September (5)</a></li>
30275
30276 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/10/">October (6)</a></li>
30277
30278 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/11/">November (3)</a></li>
30279
30280 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2014/12/">December (5)</a></li>
30281
30282 </ul></li>
30283
30284 <li>2013
30285 <ul>
30286
30287 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/01/">January (11)</a></li>
30288
30289 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/02/">February (9)</a></li>
30290
30291 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/03/">March (9)</a></li>
30292
30293 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/04/">April (6)</a></li>
30294
30295 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/05/">May (9)</a></li>
30296
30297 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/06/">June (10)</a></li>
30298
30299 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/07/">July (7)</a></li>
30300
30301 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/08/">August (3)</a></li>
30302
30303 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/09/">September (5)</a></li>
30304
30305 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/10/">October (7)</a></li>
30306
30307 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/11/">November (9)</a></li>
30308
30309 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2013/12/">December (3)</a></li>
30310
30311 </ul></li>
30312
30313 <li>2012
30314 <ul>
30315
30316 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
30317
30318 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
30319
30320 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
30321
30322 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
30323
30324 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
30325
30326 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
30327
30328 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
30329
30330 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (6)</a></li>
30331
30332 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/09/">September (9)</a></li>
30333
30334 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/10/">October (17)</a></li>
30335
30336 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/11/">November (10)</a></li>
30337
30338 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/12/">December (7)</a></li>
30339
30340 </ul></li>
30341
30342 <li>2011
30343 <ul>
30344
30345 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
30346
30347 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
30348
30349 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
30350
30351 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
30352
30353 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
30354
30355 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
30356
30357 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
30358
30359 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
30360
30361 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
30362
30363 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
30364
30365 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
30366
30367 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
30368
30369 </ul></li>
30370
30371 <li>2010
30372 <ul>
30373
30374 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
30375
30376 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
30377
30378 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
30379
30380 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
30381
30382 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
30383
30384 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
30385
30386 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
30387
30388 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
30389
30390 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
30391
30392 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
30393
30394 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
30395
30396 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
30397
30398 </ul></li>
30399
30400 <li>2009
30401 <ul>
30402
30403 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
30404
30405 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
30406
30407 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
30408
30409 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
30410
30411 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
30412
30413 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
30414
30415 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
30416
30417 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
30418
30419 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
30420
30421 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
30422
30423 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
30424
30425 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
30426
30427 </ul></li>
30428
30429 <li>2008
30430 <ul>
30431
30432 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
30433
30434 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
30435
30436 </ul></li>
30437
30438 </ul>
30439
30440
30441
30442 <h2>Tags</h2>
30443 <ul>
30444
30445  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (16)</a></li>
30446
30447  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
30448
30449  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
30450
30451  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (4)</a></li>
30452
30453  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (9)</a></li>
30454
30455  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (17)</a></li>
30456
30457  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
30458
30459  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/chrpath">chrpath (2)</a></li>
30460
30461  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (156)</a></li>
30462
30463  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (158)</a></li>
30464
30465  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian-handbook">debian-handbook (4)</a></li>
30466
30467  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (10)</a></li>
30468
30469  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/dld">dld (17)</a></li>
30470
30471  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (25)</a></li>
30472
30473  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
30474
30475  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (371)</a></li>
30476
30477  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (23)</a></li>
30478
30479  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (13)</a></li>
30480
30481  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (32)</a></li>
30482
30483  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox (9)</a></li>
30484
30485  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (18)</a></li>
30486
30487  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/h264">h264 (20)</a></li>
30488
30489  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (42)</a></li>
30490
30491  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram">isenkram (15)</a></li>
30492
30493  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (20)</a></li>
30494
30495  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (9)</a></li>
30496
30497  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lego">lego (4)</a></li>
30498
30499  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (8)</a></li>
30500
30501  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lsdvd">lsdvd (2)</a></li>
30502
30503  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
30504
30505  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/mesh network">mesh network (8)</a></li>
30506
30507  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (39)</a></li>
30508
30509  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nice free software">nice free software (9)</a></li>
30510
30511  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (296)</a></li>
30512
30513  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (190)</a></li>
30514
30515  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (33)</a></li>
30516
30517  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
30518
30519  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (71)</a></li>
30520
30521  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (106)</a></li>
30522
30523  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (2)</a></li>
30524
30525  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reactos">reactos (1)</a></li>
30526
30527  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
30528
30529  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (3)</a></li>
30530
30531  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (10)</a></li>
30532
30533  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
30534
30535  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (6)</a></li>
30536
30537  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
30538
30539  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (53)</a></li>
30540
30541  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
30542
30543  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (5)</a></li>
30544
30545  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (55)</a></li>
30546
30547  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (6)</a></li>
30548
30549  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (12)</a></li>
30550
30551  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (54)</a></li>
30552
30553  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (4)</a></li>
30554
30555  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/usenix">usenix (2)</a></li>
30556
30557  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (9)</a></li>
30558
30559  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri (11)</a></li>
30560
30561  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (62)</a></li>
30562
30563  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (4)</a></li>
30564
30565  <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (40)</a></li>
30566
30567 </ul>
30568
30569
30570     </div>
30571     <p style="text-align: right">
30572  Created by <a href="http://steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle">Chronicle v4.6</a>
30573 </p>
30574
30575   </body>
30576 </html>